Solar eclipses happen rarely enough, and frequently enough, to act as milestones in my life: I can review what happened since the previous one, and make a plan for the next one.

They are some of the most magnificent natural phenomena, much more interesting than what's expected.

The only other one that I got to see in perfect conditions was in my home town, Isfahan in 1999. I hope this one is perfectly clear again, and I have some resolutions for the next one.

Imagine your car would only let you drive on road approved by the manufacturer, obviously, for your safety. But then they would approve roads only if 30% of anything you paid for in that road would go to the car company.

Sounds stupid? Well phone manufacturer taking 30% of everything is exactly that to me.

It turned out EF had a stage named "view generation" which verified that data would round-trip, meaning if it goes into the DB and comes back, would stay the same. Run time was exponential on the number of tables and complexity of models.

People used tricks to work around it, which was basically caching the "generated view" in a file, which could speed up the production startup, not as easy in DEV environment, our programmers still needed to wait 2 minutes after each compile.

I started looking into it, and it turned out that Microsoft had open sourced EF a short time ago (long after we had started the project).

While profiling, view generation took much longer, 450s, as it was a CPU-heavy process. There was a function excluded from release builds by a `[Conditional('DEBUG')]` attribute, and when I removed the call to it, the time went down to 64 seconds, 63 of which was in a very simple function. A LINQ statement in there could be re-written to make it 120ms.

I ended up contributing it to EF core, being acknowledged in their blog post, and we ended up using our own release build of EF libraries until the fix made it to the public release.

Had they not open sourced EF, it could turn into an existential threat to the project.

I asked AI about some side information about it, but I'm sure some HN folks have much more interesting things to share

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49142363

Points: 4

# Comments: 2

Should I give up years of joy and sense of community and belonging for the fear that someday my workplace friends will betray me? And then years more of suffering in my next workplace?

A strategy that minimizes risk rarely maximizes reward.

1- "Though shall not" limit their social life to their colleagues (or any single group that can disappear with a divorce, change of jobs, or hobby, maybe because of an incident).

2- "Though shall not" blindly help people with the hope of being helped in return. Help with generosity, but know the limits: don't sacrifice yourself, and certainly, don't count on people returning the favor as your main plan. It's incredible how much happier we can be just by helping people, if we fire and forget, rather than cling onto.

3- Do not define yourself with your job, your success in there, or with your colleagues' approvals. This is extremely hard, yet extremely important. Diversify what defines you. Be able to mentally afford being bad at some of them. Don't let any of them define who you are. This lets you act with true confidence (not insecurity disguised as overconfidence), which is extremely pleasant for yourself and others.

I hope I can get this out soon

Why would some adults find kids sexually attractive? Is it abusive/aggressive behavior manifesting itself in sexuality? Or is it sexuality channeled in the wrong direction? If it's the second, is it out of desperation, and would happen less if the culture makes it easier for them to satisfy their needs with adults, or would it happen regardless? On the victim's side, are the shy and less social ones more in danger, or the socially active ones? From my social scientist friends I hear a lot that most child sexual abuse is domestic. What are measures that a society can take to prevent these, without turning the society into a surveillance state, which will ultimately harm everyone more, including the children? What can be done to make sure children speak up, so that such behavior is dealt with at the beginning (and maybe while the more terrible things have not happened yet), and not turn into a multi-year childhood trauma?

What are signs (and early signs) on the abuser's side and the child's side? How to deal with these signs?

While on statistics, I wonder, are there reliable statistics about child abuse of different types? Studying correlations with other social metrics, like sex education, liberal/conservative, policies regarding prostitution, and others can provide support for/against decisions.

Not that I hope these will impact people's and governments' choices, but I want to challenge my intuitions.

An acquaintance of mine was buying many and not wearing most, as she did not attend that many social occasions. Still, she kept buying.

Eventually, she had to face the actual problem in her life that bothered her. She ended up dealing with it, terribly.

I was excited when seeing things that are wonderfully realistic, but just as a sign of how far we have gone in computer graphics.

Being able to dig deeper is important, but what's more important is to have an intuitive understanding of many many things: psychology, economy, finance, physics, art, etc. It's important to know the limits of your familiarity with any of these. For instance, my understanding of the fundamental practices in Accounting is really good (I've led a budget aggregation software for a huge conglomerate), but details is bad (tax rules for each industry, etc).

When I needed to create a software for optimizing stone cutting, I needed to know enough from computer vision, computational geometry, and optimization to know that our solution is feasible, task team members to learn what they need to do, and get into implementation, debugging and optimizing with them when needed.

After that, I still can't write code in computational geometry that handles all corner cases.

It's really good if we know everything with infinite precision, but for a programmer it's not efficient. We need to know where to stop.