Viewing profile — jkaptur

Putting cynicism aside (there's plenty of that here already): there is a theory that people invest in index funds because they don't want to pick individual stocks. They want expos…

When you say you support "all Excel formulas", which version of Excel do you mean? I assume you don't support CALL and REGISTER... https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/excel/using-t…

The other thing to keep in mind is that if you have a policy of considering 98% to be "close enough", then it only takes 35 of those decisions to remove over half the population. A…

I’m not an expert here, but it sounds like you’re forcing a first-order logic problem into a propositional logic box. A “native” first-order logic solver like Z3 might be something…

> I personally don’t know any colleagues who were good engineers just because they wrote code faster. However, the best engineers I know are usually among the quickest to open an e…

It's interesting to contrast "Measure. Don't tune for speed until you've measured" with Jeff Dean's "Latency Numbers Every Programmer Should Know" [0]. Dean is saying (implicitly) …

Canonical essay on this sort of technique: https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2005/05/11/making-wrong-code-...

To be fair, many of those films do not portray human drivers in the best light.

(I'm not an expert. I'd love to be corrected by someone who actually knows.) Floating-point arithmetic is not associative. (A+B)+C does not necessarily equal A+(B+C), but you can g…

https://www.jkaptur.com - I have some plans to add more content, but who doesn't? :)

There are two extremes here: first, the "architects" that this article rails against. Yes, it's frustrating when a highly-paid non-expert swoops in to offer unhelpful or impossible…

Another point is that the world is always changing. If you work slowly, you are at much greater risk of having an end result that isn't useful anymore. (Like the author, of course,…

I think that there are three relevant artifacts: the code, the specification, and the proof. I agree with the author that if you have the code (and, with an LLM, you do) and a spec…

"Couples often flake together. This changes the probability distribution of attendees considerably" It's interesting to consider the full correlation matrix! Groups of friends may …

I've heard this called "A Duck" https://blog.codinghorror.com/new-programming-jargon/#:~:tex...

PowerPoint actually fine - bad communication possible in any medium - pptx in NASA even today! - issue is managers/SMEs communication differences - issues with technical papers - l…

"... if all knowledge were stored in a structured way with rich semantic linking..." this sounds a lot like Google's "Knowledge Graph". https://developers.google.com/knowledge-grap…

This essay would benefit from results from computational complexity. P vs NP, of course, but also the halting problem and Rice's theorem: non-trivial semantic properties of program…

Google was founded in 1998 and you could buy ads on the search results page in 2000. https://googlepress.blogspot.com/2000/10/google-launches-sel...

Beyond "very likely", it's right there in the paper: https://snap.stanford.edu/class/cs224w-readings/Brin98Anatom... "The research described here was conducted as part of the Stanf…

Really? That’s very surprising. You can see what this says? https://docs.google.com/document/d/1uYM0vyZiDJbo-5mXmU_6Xtrz...

> If you aren’t sure what your cofounders are doing, trust your git instinct. That's good advice to not lose your HEAD.

Validation can serve the purpose of communicating that one person deeply understands the other's problem.

Including https://xkcd.com/2128/

I'm interested in learning more about the benefits of MECE - I've never heard that before. In particular, it seems radically different from Divio's system [0], which presents the s…