I think the general problem with "No code" as you describe it is that if you want to only offer the lego building blocks then you can't support corner cases. If you want to eliminate all of the corner cases you often times end up creating something as complicated as code but without the nice tooling or information density.
Readit Newssamangan commented on Ask HN: Is “No Code” the future of web/app dev? · Posted by u/zaksingh
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samangan commented on It’s a Great Age for Jazz, but Don’t Call It Golden nytimes.com/2018/12/25/op... · Posted by u/daegloe
To shine a different light here in these comments, I think the recent resurgence of jazz is interesting and very special. A lot of different forces combined to make this happen, the most obvious being the trend of popular music towards hip hop and people discovering their roots. But I think the resurrection of vinyl had a large role to play here as well. Vinyl has blown up in the past few years and many young people are quickly realizing that some of the best recorded/mastered LPs were classic Jazz and Soul albums from the past century. This is a gateway drug into modern Jazz and also blends nicely with music nerds interested in obscure samples from their favorite modern artists. Also, I dont see the point in being pedantic about genre labels, but hey, its hacker news.
samangan commented on Amazon Sends 1,700 Alexa Voice Recordings to a Random Person threatpost.com/amazon-170... · Posted by u/0xmohit
Does Amazon keep the raw recordings for GDPR compliance reasons?
It seems to me keeping them just creates liability? (Yes data analysis for targeting and such would be valuable, but those can be done with, say transcripts instead of the raw recordings)
The actual recordings are the most valuable data for modeling purposes so I actually assume they try to store it to improve the system
"a Master Inventor with over 40 issued and pending patents"
and you don't list or go into detail about a single one?.. That's just being vague with an attempt to deceive.
Maybe the creator should actually list what successful, useful products they have made in the past - what they learned from those experiences rather than just 'oh i met some woman who wrote some book.'
I wouldn't have even considered the authors race and gender except its the only part of their identity they seem to put on the page (aside from having 40 issued and pending patents.) It's sad that this is what their main way of convincing me of their aptitude is.
This website (iFundWomen) is also inherently sexist. If there was an iFundMen, I will bet you $100 that it would get so much shit.
Did you read the about page of the website? "Despite these amazing gains, women still only receive 2-6% of venture capital funding"
I feel like that makes it pretty clear why this website is normal and why "iFundMen" would be odd. This stuff is really not as complex as people are making it out to be. Also, ifundwomen != ionlyfundwomen.
samangan commented on Dark Motives and Elective Use of Brainteaser Interview Questions onlinelibrary.wiley.com/d... · Posted by u/33degrees
I had one of these brainteaser questions in an interview once, and I liked my mathematician friend’s answer to it the best.
Q: Given infinite setup time and infinite money, how would you fill the inside of a 747 with ping pong balls as quickly as possible?
A: Define the inside of the plane as the exterior. Now, by definition, all ping pong balls are inside the plane. QED.
Infinite setup time: In the vacuum of space, as t -> infinity, eventually random quantum fluctuations will spontaneously create a 747 full of ping pong balls.
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Harvard (and some other schools) used to apply similar subjective criteria to limit the number of Jewish students.
Since there is no real legal definition of race, applicants who might be disadvantaged by this policy are free to select whichever answer on the "What is your race?" question they want. If the system is unfair, there's nothing immoral about gaming it.
Almost all the ivy leagues have in person interviews... Also are people supposed to fake their names?
samangan commented on Why So Many Top Hackers Hail from Russia krebsonsecurity.com/2017/... · Posted by u/snowy
I think the question we should really be asking ourselves is why so many valuable tech companies hail from the US, specifically the bay area. Having grown up in the Bay Area, there weren't any more special focus on mathematics / computer science in school, in fact we were encouraged to pursue whatever we wanted to pursue. If we felt like we were bad at math, we weren't forced into it, we should only pursue math if we really liked it. Most of my friends never made it past pre-calc, yet top tech talent from Russia come to the US, and end up working at wall street / silicon valley. Sergey Brin comes to mind. I don't think we should really focus on improving our mathematician/hacker pipeline, we should make sure we're cultivating a culture of freedom where people can explore and pursue different fields of academics, and make sure there's no barrier to talent working for us.
The origins of Silicon Valley being a technological hub go back all the way to WWII and the economy of the early computer industry. So, I feel the USA being an economic and military superpower is a pretty easy explanation for why 'Silicon Valley' exists in the bay area today and not somewhere else. Obviously, there have been many years and many technological revolutions since those early days but there are pretty clear trails of people, and money leading all the way back.
As far as trying to answer why so many other countries consistently beat America in math and technology I think a small answer can be gleaned from your statement: "we were encouraged to pursue whatever we wanted to pursue." That is not all that common in many countries and cultures in the world. I think a lot of it has to do with economic or political desperation. I have worked with people who learned how to code because they didn't even have running water in their village in India and programming was a way out. Or more relevant to this story, they lived in a Russian town and got a PhD in engineering so they could come to America and be an engineer. These types of stories are very, very common in the Bay Area. Looking at the education systems is helpful, but I think you need a real driving force to get most people motivated to learn difficult things.
samangan commented on Ask HN: What's the most simple thing you struggle to understand in programming? · Posted by u/betimd
Testing. I'm a very experienced programmer, and I have written plenty of unit tests -- but I've never worked in a place with a good testing culture and I've always struggled to develop a high level mentality of how and why I should be testing my software. When should I write a test for something and what is the best way to go about it? Does my code have to be more 'test friendly'? TDD seems very appealing to me as a way to outline my software before I 'dive in' but its hard for me to rationalize spending the extra time on building out the testing framework.
I don't follow TDD strictly, but I still think testing is important. I mostly see tests as help for future programmers (which includes the original authors), kind of like documentation. It's a rigid description of how the system should operate and therefore is usually helpful for refactoring or extending old code. I also don't doubt that many people go years without seeing utility in writing lots of tests. From my experience there's a lot of factors that go into how many tests you write before getting diminishing returns. Some off the top of my head: static v dynamically compiled lang, functional v procedural lang, age of project, etc.