I disagree. Spreadsheets are incomparably worse because what you charitably described as "the owner is their job to maintain it" in real life it's reflected as having a single employee who abused a first-move advantage to monopolize and excerpt unduly control over, and even hijack, key operation areas.

We all heard horror stories of how employees screwed over their former bosses because only they had control over things like key spreadsheets. Advocating for spreadsheets is advocating for these vulnerabilities.

The other horror stories of errors in spreadsheets, them yes I have witnessed them regularly.

Spreadsheets will exist regardless of what developers think of them. Ironically, that's a good thing.

Many projects that put food on dev's tables started out as out-of-control Excel monstrosities that were created and operated for long spans of time by well-meaning and productive folks. They start as simple manual spreadsheets with some formulas and then evolve into much more involved beasts. Work gets done and it's all nicely contained in somebody's cube and they look good and can be rightfully proud of their accomplishment.

Things just get done. For a while. Sometimes a LONG while. Until the bitter realities that software developers have learned to deal with over the decades start to seep into these projects and drown the unwitting folks who created them, slowly but surely, like an ever-increasing number of small holes in the bottom of boat. That's when things break or become unmanageable and that's when developers start getting engaged-- assuming these excel masterpieces have actually become mission-critical.

There's a guy at work that operates one of these excel monstrosities. It's been going for ~7 years now. It's a monster excel spreadsheet that, among an ever-growing list of things, does dubious probabilistic forecasting of future PO's based on shit ripped from salesforce (not even using the api). He has a dedicated laptop behind him pulling in data from multiple sources, like clockwork, and has recently started making attractive Power-BI dashboards using his excel worksheets as the data sources. And you know what? He looks GOOD to the people that matter. Does the forecasting actually work? Not really, but being so immersed in all that data has made him knowledgeable about many details of the operation. He's able to keep track of costs and stay on top of things. It doesn't matter (to him) that the whole thing will vaporize when he leaves, or that he could tire of it and just foist it upon some hapless supply-chain person who's just learned to use formulas in excel.

The guy's spreadsheet seems to work. He's delivering what his bosses want to see. You might have an issue with the final output but they apparently don't. What exactly is the problem you think you can fix?

I am on the side of excel being used like this, even if it's hot-garbage. The worst that can happen is that it collapses upon itself and then others need to come in and do it right, or migrate the thing to something else entirely.

Doesn't your resume reflect that if it has that written down somewhere?

Why would a CV be picked over any other if a candidate, say, paid a service to pimp out it's styling?

I could see the point of that approach for a creativity-driven position such as designers, advertisement, marketing, or even front-end development.

For hard technical roles, where substante over style is a mandatory and very basic competence, seems to be a sure way for you to filter out all the candidates you'd be looking for.

What? The article clearly describes how people in Shanghai are barred from accessing the supplies they ordered because their buildings have been literally locked up and there is no way to get their orders past the outside gate.

From the article:

> Sometimes one of the people in the locked building yells to the dabai or anyone who passes, to hand over the vegetables she has ordered and who are now perishing at the locked gate of their building. But people don’t have the key and the ones who do may not necessarily care.

That really depends on what's your personal definition of "keeping everything locked down".

European countries like Spain and Italy showed that lockdowns work quite well in quickly halving infection rates with negligible externalities, but their lockdown focused on non-essential work and everyone was allowed to do basic provisioning things such as going to the supermarket.

Also, if I recall correctly Spain also had in place a kind of stimulus program where people could apply for a guaranteed minimum income scheme.

It boggles the mind how some people conflate a quarantine with solitary confinement under house arrest where people are left to starve to death.

Almost half the restaurants are just gone, other sectors are absolutely devastated too.

The hospitality industry is absolutely fucked, while most hotels still operate they usually have less than half the staff on payroll they used to have before lockdowns.

Because of the economic damage, the security situation in the city has gone to hell. Violent robberies are way up, it’s now normal to get robbed at knifepoint while driving your car. Cars with broken windows are everywhere.

I hate this trend of downplaying how harsh the lockdowns were, even in Western countries. If you think they were worth it because you personally put a high importance on longevity, fine, that’s a legitimate policy position (though I disagree with it). But what happened in Spain and Italy was a catastrophic disruption to normal life by any reasonable standard.

I lived in Spain through the pandemic. I saw from my apartment the army trucks racing across Madrid, the police cars with loudspeakers advising everyone to stay indoors, and army patrols going through the city to enforce the lockdown.

Do you actually know what was a catastrophic disruption to normal life by any reasonable standard? Having to commandeer the local ice rink to have a place to store all the excess dead bodies, and setting up a huge makeshift hospital in the city's expo hall to accommodate the patients.

Knowing that, do you have any idea what finally managed to reign in the outbreaks under control? Lockdowns. Two weeks since their onset, infection rates dropped to residual.

Don't talk about things you know nothing about.

You're somehow presuming that there is no functional difference between being a native speaker and knowing a language as second or third language.

How can you tell?

> ‘Personal data’ means any information relating to an identified or identifiable natural person (‘data subject’); an identifiable natural person is one who can be identified, directly or indirectly, in particular by reference to an identifier such as a name, an identification number, location data, an online identifier or to one or more factors specific to the physical, physiological, genetic, mental, economic, cultural or social identity of that natural person.

No. How can you tell, as a user of any random website, that the script your browser is running as part of that page you've opened isn't shipping PII collected from your usage.

> > > > I’ve needed to send off an HTTP request with some data to log when a user does something like navigate to a different page or submit a form.

> > > No need for that. Stop hoarding data!

> > What's wrong with doing something like this? If it contains PII, then I agree, [...]

> How can you tell?

The context is from the perspective of the application developers who wants to log some data (unclear what exactly, hence my comment differentiates between PII or not) when user is leaving. The comment I'm replying to states "stop hoarding data!" but I'm pretty clear that's referring to hoarding PII, not any data. As you're the developer setting up this "send off an HTTP request with some data", it's clear to you if it's PII or not.

Obviously, as a user with JavaScript turned on, visiting a random website, have little to no control over what data exactly is collected and sent. That's basically the point of the web today, where application developers can write arbitrary JS applications that gets executed in the browser sandbox, and hence why it's so popular in the first place.

IP is technically PII in some places. Personally I am not worried if a criminal gets "my" IP in the same way that I am not worried if they have my phone number. I would be worried if they had my name address age bank account info etc, but then I don't give that out freely

That's not the definition of PII. At best, that covers a small subset of PII.

PII means any information that can be used to identify you, either directly or indirectly.

When you access a website combined with which link you opened or which search keywords you used can be used to infer who you are.

How do you tell if a script is not shipping that info to an undisclosed third-party?

That's kind of my very coarse litmus test for PII: If I'm not willing to post it publicly in a rando internet forum, it's probably PII. There are exceptions obviously, and the inverse is not true: I may be willing to publicly post certain PII.

I don't believe there is any truth to this statement.

The general guidelines for AWS lambda is that a) if you seek performance then Go is the way to go, b) for everything else nodejs (i.e., JavaScript/typescript) is by far the best runtime, specially given lambda's single-threaded nature and nodejs's support for concurrency.

All other options are only relevant if you have very specific non-technical constraints, such as wanting to reuse code (JDK) or just leveraging whatever language your team already uses somewhere else.

That's not exactly true.

As per AWS, with AWS Lambda you only get a second core if you provision more than 1769MB of RAM.

The number of cores can grow up to a max of 6 with provisions of over 10GB of RAM albeit AWS does not specify how that's supposed to be mapped.

There are some empirical and highly unofficial tests on AWS Lambdas that indicate that more than 1 vCPU are allocated with provisions of over 800MB of RAM, but each of those vCPUs are capped at 50% of a CPU core.

The key factor here, and what makes AWS Lambda's nodejs runtime the absolute best runtime and the de facto standard for lambdas, is that nodejs's single-threaded event loop already buys you the ability to execute code concurrently without having to rake up a large bill and resort to arcane tricks to reign that under control.

I'd add that AWS Lambda's blog post on parallel processing in Python starts off by making it clear that nodejs is the way to go.

https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/compute/parallel-processing-in-...

Benchmark your PSO implementation against a) a naive Monte Carlo implementation with an uniform distribution, b) low-discrepancy sequence, c) a global optimization algorithm such as DIRECT, and compare convergence rates.

I'd be surprised if your PSO implementation did not competed for the last place in terms of function evaluations.

They are a treasure trove of easily publishable papers, but frankly the whole field feels like a fraud. Each paper is formulaic and consists of coming up with a metaphor to add minor twists to established heuristics, and in the end they all fare slightly better than Monte Carlo.

The gravy train is provided by the No Free Lunch theorem, which is just a convenient copout to justify why an heuristics isn't good except on a single convenient realization.

My understanding is that this problem got so bad that many (most?) of the top journals in the field have declared recently(ish) that they will no longer publish EvoComp papers of that nature. That is, the ones that amount to no more than "here's a new metaphor based algorithm that doesn't really contribute anything new to our understanding of anything and represent only an incremental improvement over existing algorithms."

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_metaphor-based_metah...

And an algorithm can be based on a metaphor and still be useful, one should just take care to judge it own its own merits and not give it some greater value for being "natural".

I was told this by a professor in graph theory who co-authored a book on TSP. But he had no hand in the implementation or the testing AFAICT.