So far I'm within spitting distance of the winning entries without using any unsafe code or bit twiddling tricks or custom JVMs or anything like that, and having all the concerns nicely separated and modularized.

Excited to share soon!

For example, managing the context window has become less of a problem with increased context windows in newer models and tools like the auto-resummarization / context window refresh in claude code make it so that you might be just fine without doing anything yourself.

All this to say that the idea that you're left significantly behind if you aren't training yourself on this feels bogus (I say this as a person who /does/ use these tools daily). It should take any programmer not more than a few hours to learn these skills from scratch, with the help of a doc, meaning any employee you hire should be able to pick these up no problem. I'm not sure it makes sense as a hiring filter. Perhaps in the future this will change. But right now these tools are built more like user friendly appliances - more like a cellphone or a toaster than a technology to wrap your head around, like a compiler or a database.

There are other similar lightweight encoding schemes like RLE and delta and frame of reference encoding which all are good for different data distributions.

Now, product groups for which data is most frequently and easily available is the 4-digit level, which is quite broad. If you look at the code 3002 in the HS classification system (of which there are many versions but we'll ignore that for now), you'll find a category, succinctly named:

> "Human blood; animal blood prepared for therapeutic, prophylactic or diagnostic uses; antisera, other blood fractions and immunological products, whether or not modified or obtained by means of biotechnological processes; vaccines, toxins, cultures of micro-organisms (excluding yeasts) and similar products; cell cultures, whether or not modified:"

https://hts.usitc.gov/search?query=3002

People new to trade data, especially programmers, with some hubris, tend to think this is way too long a category name to fit in a title or dropbox, so they chop it at the semicolon and call it good, resulting in "Human Blood" or similar. Better data sources tend to shorten these based on the real world percentage of the subcategories, e.g. see here "Serums and vaccines":

https://atlas.hks.harvard.edu/explore/treemap?exporter=count...

If you search for 3002 (Serums and Vaccines) in the US's exports in 2023 you'll see the figure 1.58%:

https://atlas.hks.harvard.edu/explore/treemap?exporter=count...

Which seems to me to be how they arrived at that incorrect number - some other website showing comtrade / us trade data with bad category names.

Lesson here: classification systems are hard.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43811656

Points: 4

# Comments: 0

Had to reread that a few times to make sure

It costs even more to be reckless today.

Re: "whitey on the moon" - I'm not sure the space program would be my first target there but I think it makes a more poetic contrast and forces people to pay attention by targeting a beloved cultural narrative. Cyberpunk - by my reckoning a bit later - has been preaching a very similar message of massive inequality in the presence of incredible technology and wealth disparity and power concentration. And yet that doesn't draw the same ire. I guess in that case it's easier to dismiss the core message because robot limbs and cool neon lights are too much of a distraction.

https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/suits-articles-of-int...

Especially for a first time in all of humanity type of mission, half a century ago, which yielded brand new data on faraway objects we'd never had, and considering it's still going and reporting data, it's arguably a bargain basement price for such a thing.

I think this is the way.

Also quite similarly soon after VB, learned C# so I could make mods for RunUO, which was a reverse engineered server implementation for Ultima Online that people would run free game servers with. At that point I was pretty hooked, and tried making things like dragon eggs that would hatch over time and evolve and such. There's something about other people being able to experience your code in a virtual world and also the creative aspect that makes it somehow addicting.

I think there's probably some lesson in there about microsoft misunderstanding the strength of VB as a RAD tool for mom and pop shops and non-software firms who have a single tinkerer, rather than an Enterprise Language. It died a slow death in favor of C# at that point. Embrace, extend, extinguish, perhaps.

I'm the guy with the enthusiastic thread earlier on in this post. I'd love to sit down and chat with you for an hour on zoom and hear all about those times, which we could then we could post the video on here - I think people would appreciate.

I have absolutely zero experience in interviewing people, nor do I have a media channel of any kind, but I promise I'd do my best to ask interesting questions. If that sounds interesting, shoot me an email (you can find it in my profile).

But I'm not sure it was anything particular about the environment per se. Like, visual basic was written to do business software, truly the most boring thing imaginable. I think it's more about being left to your own devices with something that intrigues you for hours on end without an adult trying to control or direct what you're doing. Maybe. I'm not sure :-)

https://ia902300.us.archive.org/view_archive.php?archive=/4/...

I found a copy of "Write Your Own Adventure Programs" (1983 - Usborne: https://colorcomputerarchive.com/repo/Documents/Books/Write%...) as a kid in my primary school's bookshelf. I remember the code was written in BASIC and my family didn't really own a computer back then.

Fast forward a few years later I saw this "Visual Basic" thing and thought it would be similar ... it was, but only sort of. I had no book to learn from at first so I remember clicking through every single menu and button available to see what it did. Then I remember using our dialup to download every possible 3rd party VB form control and throwing them in a Form to see what they did. I don't know why I found this entertaining enough to keep doing it.

Eventually by copy pasting and changing stuff I was able to write some basic "homework helper" programs: calculate the area of a circle and stuff like that. Soon after I tried to look up tutorials which taught me basic win32 programming to do things like have an icon in the status area next to the clock, and then hiding my window to run in the background and make annoying sounds so I could build a silly little prank program to install on my friend's computers which was fun but often would fail because they were missing some .dll file which wouldn't fit on the same floppy.

It could be frustrating at times but also I feel so blessed to have lucked myself into learning programming this way and my parents pretty much just letting me do whatever I wanted to this expensive device that probably was not a small thing for us to afford at the time.

Even tutorials felt more fun at the time, it'd be "hypnoMan37's windows registry tutorial!!! HEyyeyeyy Guuyzs :-)))) gzgzgz to my irc channel #blabla on EFNet! so first you call RegistryCreateNewKey32(...." because god knows I did not have an MSDN CD either.

Learning via a code camp feels way more efficient but also so much more dry in comparison. I wonder if there isn't a substantial cost to boring the newbies to death.

Brilliant observation that never occurred to me. Around that age being allowed to sit with and listen in on adults having normal adult conversations - being one of them - felt special.

Also this is not too dissimilar to how adult life that surrounds every child is to a child. You're sort of used to living in a world that has workings beyond your comprehension and just going along with it. I didn't get what exactly was going on but I did understand /something/ was.

I'm listening to a review of The Great Mouse Detective (1986) which has a similar ethos, as did other content targeting young people from that era. Also I recall picking up books as a kid that were certainly not meant for children and adults back then didn't even blink, and I think it stoked my curiosity and interests and pushed the boundaries of my understanding, as well as prepared me for growing up. I don't think I ended up being a worse person or being traumatized in any way. Part of me wonders if kids' content being much more sanitized these days is a mistake.

> The elevator pitch behind this performance difference is > straightforward: column-stores are more I/O efficient for read-only > queries since they only have to read from disk (or from memory) > those attributes accessed by a query.

> This simplistic view leads to the assumption that one can ob- > tain the performance benefits of a column-store using a row-store: > either by vertically partitioning the schema, or by indexing every column so that columns can be accessed independently. In this pa- > per, we demonstrate that this assumption is false.

https://faculty.cc.gatech.edu/~jarulraj/courses/4420-s19/pap...