Hacker News: theplague42

New comment by theplague42 in "The necessity of Nussbaum"

theplague42 — Fri, 07 Mar 2025 19:01:36 +0000

Libertarians and mentally speed-running the invention of the nation-state: an iconic duo.

New comment by theplague42 in "Elon Musk sues Sam Altman, Greg Brockman, and OpenAI [pdf]"

theplague42 — Fri, 01 Mar 2024 18:31:28 +0000

The individuals will get taxed on capital gains afaik. We could also tax unrealized gains (just like we do gains on property)!

New comment by theplague42 in "Prices and wages in Medieval England (2014)"

theplague42 — Tue, 11 Jan 2022 17:35:43 +0000

IIRC these concepts are more relevant in a service-based economy.

In the Middle Ages, _land_ was the primary source of economic value. Fewer people means more land per person, therefore more wealth per person.

New comment by theplague42 in "What Is Dbt and Why Are Companies Using It?"

theplague42 — Fri, 03 Dec 2021 04:41:30 +0000

What makes left joins perform poorly in Snowflake?

New comment by theplague42 in "What Is Dbt and Why Are Companies Using It?"

theplague42 — Fri, 03 Dec 2021 01:09:41 +0000

Well part of the benefit is rapid development; it's mind-boggling how quickly someone can stand up a dbt project and begin to iterate on transforms. Using Python/SQL/JSON (at small/medium) scales keeps the data stack consistent and lowers the barrier to entry. No reason to prematurely optimize when your bottleneck is the modeling and not the actual data volume.

New comment by theplague42 in "What Is Dbt and Why Are Companies Using It?"

theplague42 — Fri, 03 Dec 2021 01:05:47 +0000

dbt and ELT in general are such a game-changer for allowing rapid iteration on business logic by data analysts; the feedback loop feels much more like "normal" software engineering compared to legacy systems.

New comment by theplague42 in "Cloud Infrastructure as SQL"

theplague42 — Thu, 16 Sep 2021 18:38:16 +0000

When will an ORM be available?

Still not sure whether this is serious or not, but it's not really infrastructure as SQL, it's infrastructure as database records which is stateful and defeats the point.

New comment by theplague42 in "Cloud Infrastructure as SQL"

theplague42 — Thu, 16 Sep 2021 18:29:38 +0000

It's using an implied cross join so each image is deployed onto a t2.micro

New comment by theplague42 in "GoDaddy is cutting off Texas Right to Life’s abortion ‘whistleblowing’ website"

theplague42 — Sat, 04 Sep 2021 18:27:04 +0000

IMO if you have to lie, you've already ceded the moral high ground.

New comment by theplague42 in "Warning Signals for Collapse of The Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation"

theplague42 — Fri, 06 Aug 2021 14:07:33 +0000

tl;dr just ignore it?

New comment by theplague42 in "OpenAI Announces Funding for Startups"

theplague42 — Wed, 26 May 2021 20:55:55 +0000

Nobody uses HN because it's an amazing piece of software.

New comment by theplague42 in "Ask HN: What passive income investments exist to supplement your salary?"

theplague42 — Mon, 10 May 2021 16:58:28 +0000

I think that's his point; that 5% returns aren't actually that great.

New comment by theplague42 in "Ask HN: What passive income investments exist to supplement your salary?"

theplague42 — Mon, 10 May 2021 16:54:07 +0000

The rate of return on investments is proportional to the risk and/or effort necessary to make it work. Contracting out the management of things like condos, vending machines, etc. destroy the vast majority of any gross profit. Investing in a large-cap, high-dividend mutual fund (Vanguard, etc.) will generate reasonable returns with 0 effort on your part. Just cash out your dividends rather than re-invest.

New comment by theplague42 in "Building a full-text search engine in 150 lines of Python code"

theplague42 — Thu, 25 Mar 2021 19:19:47 +0000

Because it's easier for the average developer to follow Python code? This is a tutorial/demo, not a library.

New comment by theplague42 in "“User engagement” is code for “addiction”"

theplague42 — Thu, 04 Mar 2021 21:02:02 +0000

Literally any analyst or data science job related to growth or user engagement on social media.

https://research.fb.com/category/data-science/

New comment by theplague42 in "Show HN: Compare prices that US hospitals charge patients, insurance companies"

theplague42 — Mon, 18 Jan 2021 16:55:53 +0000

It's probably bad data. 7k vs 13k is reasonable, but nobody is removing tonsils for $300.

New comment by theplague42 in "The platforms have acted, raising hard questions about technology and democracy"

theplague42 — Wed, 13 Jan 2021 23:50:43 +0000

Was the editor fired because of a "dissenting opinion" or because Cotton was effectively calling for martial law against protestors?

The NYTimes op-ed section has plenty of dissenting opinions and/or conservatives... just not ones calling for violence.

New comment by theplague42 in "Why are boys academically underperforming? [audio]"

theplague42 — Thu, 31 Dec 2020 17:07:54 +0000

Sure, here

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-37254851

Not really sure what you're implying

New comment by theplague42 in "I prepared for a decade to graduate in CS in three months"

theplague42 — Fri, 18 Dec 2020 17:23:11 +0000

I do not think that "240k in debt" (he clarifies it was 140k in another comment) actually means owing 240k more than your total assets.

As far as the median net worth, that's just someone most of the way through paying off their mortgage...

New comment by theplague42 in "I prepared for a decade to graduate in CS in three months"

theplague42 — Fri, 18 Dec 2020 17:16:53 +0000

Or student debt; a doctor going 200k into debt for med school probably isn't exactly in dire financial straits.