n-e-w | 4 years ago | on: Ask HN: What made your business take off that you wish you'd done much earlier?
n-e-w's comments
n-e-w | 4 years ago | on: Building an Intelligent Emacs
I tell you what -- you've inspired me to start a blog and write about this! Will post here when I get it up and rolling.
n-e-w | 4 years ago | on: Building an Intelligent Emacs
As other comments note, TRAMP is the way to go for remote work. I’m able to do everything on a remote / AWS / GCP box that I would do locally. If you’re into Deep Learning / data science you can also run Jupyter Notebooks in EIN with, say, a GCP Vertex / AI platform backend (though EIN isn’t 100% reliable for every production use case).
emacs is most certainly an acquired taste but, like most acquired tastes, is cherished by those who persist and come to love its flexibility, extensibility and power.
I’m one of those people.
No matter what else I try — and I still really enjoy using VSC as a backup — nothing else comes close to my particular set of workflows (mainly data science / deep learning / AI research across Python, C++, R, TeX). Throw in the power of org, beamer, pdf tools, journaling, email, rss, web browsing — you name it — all in one place…I really never need to leave it.
Persist with it. It’s worth the payoff.
n-e-w | 4 years ago | on: ASML reports fire at its Berlin factory
Their statement is that it's too early to assess damage -- but it's enough they need to take a few days to assess the damage itself and impact on production. Also enough that it hit the share price. So, clearly not trivial.
"At this point it is too early to make any statement on the damage or whether the incident will have any impact on the output plan for this year. It will take a few days to conduct a thorough investigation and make a full assessment. "
https://www.asml.com/en/news/press-releases/2022/fire-incide...
n-e-w | 4 years ago | on: ASML reports fire at its Berlin factory
Not that weird:
"Since the US-China trade and technology confrontation spilled into public view in 2017, most of the attention has centered on trade conflict and the US campaign against Huawei, China's 5G leader and its most important global technology company. But recent US actions involving semiconductors present a more fundamental problem for China. Efforts to cut off the supply of cutting-edge semiconductors to Huawei and to encourage the construction of advanced chip factories on US soil have drawn the semiconductor industry into the US-China technology cold war, raising the stakes in the countries' trade and technology conflict." [1]
[1] https://www.eurasiagroup.net/live-post/geopolitics-semicondu...
n-e-w | 4 years ago | on: ASML reports fire at its Berlin factory
As a single source supplier for the global semiconductor supply chain this is concerning.
Is impacting the semi supply chain the hot, new weapon of the US-China tech cold war?
n-e-w | 4 years ago | on: Scientists have created the darkness measure, D score, for how dark you are
Likewise. I am definitely on the Light Side of the Force and have done well. While I would say it cost me earlier in my career, the reputation and quality benefits that have accrued through life were more than worth the early struggle. I just really do try to do /good/ to people as it's broadly defined on a "typical" issue.
n-e-w | 4 years ago | on: Testing the strength of different wood species
I respect all wood
n-e-w | 4 years ago | on: Ask HN: Is it even worth reading news outside of HN?
The principal problem (alongside @knaik94) is correlation / orthogonality of news and, to a lesser extent, sources and world-view.
You want a diverse news feed. If you subscribe to, say, the Financial Times, Wall Street Journal, Bloomberg and Reuters they will, almost certainly, cover pretty much the same stories in much the same, safe way. You get correlation of story, worldview and topic. You didn't need to subscribe to all of them. Just one would have covered 99 percent of what you were looking for. I used to read the FT out of that bunch for one gem of orthogonality -- Lucy Kellaway. Sadly, she is long gone.
HN solves part of this problem by crowd-curating a diverse range of sources but there will still be a high correlation of topics (and likely bias / worldview, too).
Long story short, news filtering is a dimensionality reduction and optimisation problem across tensors of different "characteristics; Maybe you really like an echo chamber. Perhaps you really like to get all sides of the story. Maybe you want just news on sports from journalists who hate your team.
That's a tough problem.
But the easiest path is to realise that, by default, almost all news sources are correlated -- so just pick the one you like best and ditch all the others. I promise you won't notice. After that, work on realising, as Taleb has pointed out, that "to be cured of reading news, spend a month reading only news from one year ago". You'll learn pretty quick that outside of reporting facts, opinion is usually junk. Treat it as entertainment.
n-e-w | 4 years ago | on: Launching Version 13.0 of Wolfram Language and Mathematica
I've enjoyed developing in the language professionally for many years. Truly, few things allow as rapid prototyping with such efficacy for so few lines across so many domains in a unified interface. There are some brilliantly innovative things across the language and, once you really get into the weeds of how to write efficient functional code, some of the things you can do are incredible.
Two things, though. Firstly, they are very stubborn on condoning a community to coalesce around the language other than through 'official' Wolfram channels. This comes from the big man himself, no doubt. As much as they want to drive adoption by coming up with (what they think are) "cool" sounding initiatives, they will never get devs to break from their core workflows and tools to do things the Wolfram way. There is no first-class support for daily-driver editing (vscode, emacs etc etc) for large-scale projects (other than an ancient eclipse package). Brenton Bostick at Wolfram has done some truly first class work in closing this gap though.
Secondly, this is the first major release that is a bit 'ho-hum' for a while. And it's reflective of the fact that whatever Stephen's pet interests are at a particular point in time will get attention in a release. For example, V11 was huge on Machine Learning and AI...now it barely gets a mention or extra development. Because SW is so focused on his Physics Project, this will likley be the case for a while.
To anyone thinking about using the language -- dive in. It's brilliant and expressive and fun. It's satisfying. You can do cool stuff. It just becomes very difficult when you want to scale it.
Anyone from WRI reading this: please, please, please let the community develop organically and support the toolchain everyone has wanted for so long. Or don't. But you need us more than we need you. Oh, and simplify the product line -- what a nightmare for newcomers to navigate. :-)
n-e-w | 4 years ago | on: A deep dive into an NSO zero-click iMessage exploit: Remote Code Execution
You have to hand it to NSO on this one. They might be evil but they sure aren't stupid.
They (loosely) created a virtual machine out of a (very) abstract vuln in the JBIG2 library to create their own logical Turing machine / computer that they then built their own simple architecture for...and then could allow for the computation of any arbitrary function within arbitrary memory. Brilliant; bravo. I salute the ingenuity of this one.
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Now, on with the first two.
"Hiring the best you can afford" doesn't mean hiring the best brand (Skadden. PwC etc). Find the person with the best technical expertise relevant to what you're pursuing. They're often stars from those shops who've gone out on their own -- just like you did.
Why? Don't you want to spend your money on a star engineer or great marketing?
No. Because you're in this game to win. And winning these days (whether going for an exit or, you know, an actual profitable business) needs you to have at least the following:
(1) Not make (or, more likely, not know how to avoid) stupid mistakes or ill-advised moves legally. (2) Not screw up the administration of your business
Even if you do everything else right, errors in either 1 or 2 can prove fatal. Like, literally, you will lose everything.
Good lawyers are like good soldiers these days. You don't go to war without soldiers. And you don't do modern business without the best legal help you can get. Even in the most advantageous, optimistic, friendly scenario, run it by an attorney who knows their stuff. First. During. Last. Or wander onto the battlefield with people who outgun you. You've been warned.
Next: good business administrators are worth their weight in gold. It is a distinct skill and some people really are called to love and be good at book-keeping, accounting, cash flows etc. Do not screw yourself on taxes, audits, book-keeping, invoices slipping through cracks, agreements not being fulfilled or anything in the "admin of business" that keeps you from staying laser focused on you do well -- which is not business admin.
Finally -- remember, business is business. Repeat it to yourself early and often. Business is business. The VC who seemed really friendly and just "gets you"? Business is business. That particular contract term that just doesn't sit right with you -- but the person on the other side keeps telling you not to worry about it? Business is business. Your cofounder is your best friend but now they're not pulling their quota? Business is business. This isn't being machiavellian. It's that everyone will be applying it to you.
Ultimately, good lawyers and good business administrators will ensure that you remember "business is business". Don't leave things to chance. Don't trust. Don't be emotional . Business is business and if you're not controlling your agenda, someone will be controlling it for you.
There's enough sh*t in business you can't control. At least stay in control of what you can.