Curious about the specs of servers that you are buying.
We are looking for some non-GPU HPC servers, but there's always the question of whether second-hand servers will be good-enough/power-efficient for our use case.
Nice site, could see myself using it. But please, allow also changing to usec and nsec. Plenty of software uses uint64 for nanoseconds since epoch, it'd be nice to be able to convert these as well.
Having first hand experience of all of the named public services, I beg to differ heavily.
These corporations tend to be heavily left-leaning, with no real guardrails preventing this. The consequence is pretty biased coverage, under the guise of a "trust-us, we are here for the greater good".
Look at the handling of Middle-East by BBC, the Zucman tax at France Television, or the current allegations of fraud in some communities in the US.
My current take is that it is really hard to get a fair unbiased coverage, unless you actually state that you will strive to hire and promote both sides. If these corporations had to publish the composition/promotion/pay of their newsroom across the political spectrum (as they do for example by gender), you may start to have fair unbiased coverage. But many journalists working there see it as their job to describe "not the reality as it happens, but rather as it ought to be" (to quote the CEO of France Television). We should acknowledge that people are biased, and measure the balance of biases rather than assert there is no bias because they serve the greater good.
Public interest stories are left-leaning only in that they tend to oppose the wielders of centralized power, and centralized power is generally a right-leaning construct.
That's objectively true. They're center-left or center-right. They're certainly not democratic socialists (who are the barest left of the left). The parent is complaining that there is some objectivity at all in liberal/center-right media, that it isn't calling for pure repression by force of middle eastern people and recognizes they sometimes suffer from aggression in ways that are understandable to human beings.
None of these outlets object to this repression being meted out, they only care that it is done in a way that is respectable. A left wing take would criticize the imperialist nature of these wars of aggression and genocide and examine the economic, class, and other social dimensions that cause these events to occur and call for a social revolution via means that are electoral or otherwise. A left-leaning liberal take would say something like "man it's crazy they don't respect the UN charter or even US laws". This should give some objective sense for how rightward our discourse has been drawn.
All experts in restoration/conservation have argued that the tapestry is too old and fragile to be moved.
Macron has pushed for it (to announce as part of his state visit to the UK), the director of the Bayeux Museum has accepted (he is a civil servant, and more subject to politics).
The museum where it is exposed is supposed to go through renovation, and experts are worried even to move the tapestry within the same museum just for renovation purposes... one can understand their fears when it's about packing and transporting to the other side of the channel (notwithstanding the amazing level of the British Museum conservation team, among the best in the world).
That's great, I really like it. My main thought is that most of non-american engineers favor SI units, so getting values in cups, ounces and pounds is not too great.
A possible improvement would be to replace freedom units with their international counterpart (with sane rounding to a two digits precision, or similar).
Thank you! I agree completely. Right now it just uses the units in the original recipe, but being able to toggle between the two is definitely something I would like to do.
I've used beancount extensively, spent many hours a few years ago. Built importers parsing bank PDFs (in UK, plaid doesn't work. Plus I'd rather also keep all the original statement PDFs).
Probably built 10+ importers, plus some plugins to do automated transaction annotations.
I have not made any update for many years now, because:
- Downloading statements is still a pain, have to manually go through all websites. Banks are bad at making the statements available, and worse making it possible to automate it.
- The root of the issue is actually that beancount is too slow. Any change/update takes ages. Python is both a blessing (makes it easy to add plugins/importers etc), and a curse (way slower than some other languages.
I believe the creator of beancount has started working on v3 with a mix of C++/python, relying on protobufs, a C++ core for parsing, etc. AFAIK, that is not production-ready yet.
I have a very similar setup but with HLedger[1]. A "do-nothing"[2] script helps me download statements by opening bank websites, waits for manual import and finally checks balances. That makes it a lot less repetitive and error prone. Or at least, I catch the errors faster.
I've found HLedger and Shake to be fast enough to process almost a decade of finances. Dmitry Astapov has an extremely well produced tutorial workflow[3].
How have you managed the PDF parsing? Mine has become a bit of a mess dealing with slight variations in formatting as they change over time. I've been considering using LLMs but have been nervous about quality.
Why not spot check your PDF LLM outputs? I always make sure my accounts balance by hand anyway. Though Occasionally it's really painful especially if it's a missing Venmo transaction. It's rare that I need to really comb through my accounts to account for some money but when I do it's really time-consuming.
I also use ledger/hledger to process a decade of finances. I reconcile once a year when doing taxes. I have multiple python scripts orchestrated with org-mode to generate reports/plots. I run them in separate processes since they are independent, which makes it fast enough (seconds).
I suspect Python isn't the limiting factor here - it's the file format. You can end up with huge interconnected text files that have to be fully parsed on every change.
If you have 1e5 - 1e6 of lines of transactions, I think a SQLite database would be a huge step forward. If you have much more than that, you probably need an ERP system.
Of course the text files make it ~easy to enter transactions, but maybe there's an elegant way to use those for ingestion only; that does make the system much more complicated to use. That might not be a problem for the kind of person using plain-text accounting over the course of years though.
I'd be really curious on how hard programmatic access to your own, personal banking data might be in the PSD2-era.
I can link my secondary bank account to my main bank's app so I can see the balance in one place, but the catch is that I need to refresh this authorization through the app every 90 days.
Ideally, you'd just use your banking credentials to authorise the API access and pull data through that. What this requires in practice, I have no idea but it probably involves a bit of bureucracy.
Some modern banks (Monzo, Starling, etc) give the account holder (read-only) access to their API.
If you can't, you can try use one of the open banking providers such as TrueLayer, Plaid, Nordigen (seems to be acquired by GoCardless: https://gocardless.com/bank-account-data/), etc. Most have a free/dev tier that nevertheless allows connections to real accounts and might be enough for personal use.
Finally, screen-scraping is potentially an option. One of the few benefits of shifting everything to SPAs is that you generally have clean JSON APIs under the hood that are easier to interface with than "conventional" screen-scraping involving parsing HTML.
Ran into this annoyance recently setting up new accounting software, that the access my bank provides is last 6 months only, so I still had to go and export a csv, rejigger the column names and date format, to reimport the first 8 months of 2024.
My thought for working around tracking new transactions without a third party is to just set up email alerts so I get a notification on every charge, deposit etc and set up some cron job to read new emails and update my books.
> Downloading statements is still a pain, have to manually go through all websites.
Have you considered using Playwright?
I used aider[0] recently to log into my work's payslips and download all the relevant payslips into JSON format (with values encrypted). It took about 3 hours, but that's mostly because of my lack of knowledge of good CSS selectors.
It makes it about them not about you. I don't care which banks and other financial providers I use. I care about managing my funds in a way that is efficient and healthy for my life. The banks I use are simply service providers, a subclass of service providers across all the dimensions of my life. They have regulations they must abide by but in so doing they attempt to force me to think and act in those terms and I think they're poor.
You're justified in writing that mine is a weird (I know you wrote curious but I'll go further) take. I expanded my thinking beyond the scope you referenced but at least in part, yes. I have to log in to their interface, figure out and drill into where they offer that download. I don't want their branding and I don't want to manage my money in the way they constrain me to. I don't really want multiple accounts or to play interest maximization games by acting fiddley for example. At the highest level, I think about my flows in percentage allocations. 10% for charity, 10% for my kid's college (until there was enough), 10% for savings, so forth. As presented I'm constantly fiddling with specific money amounts for automation and stuck in the ledger rather than with sources and sinks with tagging based allocation and management policies. I'm ignoring the horsecrap around the ways they bilk the poor which is a separate kind of evil.
"banks allowing export of transactions" is only the start.
I deal with two banks for credit cards.
One (call it "Blue Bank") allows me to download a statement. I filter out a couple of things (payments mostly), check that it matches the paper statement balance, and post it. About 15 minutes start to finish.
The other (call it "Orange Bank") allows me to download a "statement". I filter out a couple of things (payments mostly), check my previous month's transactions to see which ones at the beginning of the file actually go in the current billing period (not already paid), stare at the last transactions to see which ones actually were posted to the current billing period (not after the cutoff), run the script to check the total (nope, doesn't match) then do that a couple of times until it matches. The time they changed the meaning of the "credit" column from "just confirming this is a credit" to "it's a credit, you need to flip the sign" it was 45 minutes.
Maybe. What I was trying to get at was, some banks (the 'orange one') don't provide sane semantics, so even if the input format is compatible, reconciliation can be a nightmare. You may not be dealing with your 'orange bank'; if I only dealt with the blue one I would not be aware of the problems of the other (and it would not have occurred to me that the orange one could botch it up).
I run into the same issues here with banks in the US. It is a real pain in the ass, and makes tracking this sort of information way more time consuming then it needs to be.
My other issue is with stores like Costco that sell both household goods, groceries, clothes, and even misc kids stuff. I like to track each separately. Which means I then need to fetch and analyze the receipts.
> I like to track each separately. Which means I then need to fetch and analyze the receipts.
That is a reality. To make my life easier, when I check out at a store, I put all my grocery items first on the belt. Then everything else. Usually "everything else" is only a few items. So I categorize those additional items, and then specify "Groceries" for the rest.
Often I buy only groceries, and I throw those receipts away. When I'm in a ledger/beancount session, if I don't have a receipt, that means it was just Groceries.
This method alone really reduced my time dealing with receipts.
Being in the uk, we were fortunate enough to choose rust as a main language with my co-founder about two years ago. We chose it after trying it out for some toy projects, and with no real experience with it (but both of us having heavy experience of C++, C#, Python, Ruby, and having tested many others).
We chose it because it felt "right", giving us c++ performance, productivity when writing, and a feeling of cleanliness from its type system I had not experienced since ... Ocaml.
But what we did not expect was how great it was from a talent perspective. We started hiring at a time where lots of rust developers were being laid off crypto, and the caliber of candidates is just ... amazing. Rust devs enjoy working with the language, and you get a type of developer who likes producing good code, and is usually quite passionate about coding.
So, I understand rust jobs are not easy to get by, but being on the other side of the table, it's a wonderful talent magnet for our team, allowing us to hire great developers.
Apologies for the off-topic but I am currently in a job search. I'd rate myself below the guys and girls you hired but I am very enthusiastic working with Rust. You hiring?
Again, sorry. :( But I am not getting any networking opportunities lately and couldn't resist replying to your message.
I skim it, but I typically only see maybe 2-3 roles in my domain. And these days, maybe 1 is in the US and the other 2-3 are in the EU. Such a rough market.
The crypto bit is an interesting filter. Wether the developers you found are true believers, grifters in on the scam, or just mercenaries for hire welding crates, they can't not have an opinion on cryptocurrency so my question to you is how much of that do they bring to work? Are there coffee chats about Ayn Rand and politics or do they steer clear of any of that.
> I think you have a very skewed view of what people interested in cryptocurrency are like.
Given that it's a heavenily gift for criminals (including those wishing to evade taxation on otherwise legit commercial activity) while leeching a good share of world's energy resources, I think he's excused.
Absolutely! It's a spectrum and people lie somewhere on it. I can't have a picture of the entirety of it (though I'd love to), but I can only go off my own experiences. I try and get as full a picture as I can, but it's unfortunately going to be skewed. yours is too. I'd love to hear which way your POV skews towards
I’m just a dev, and don’t hang around parties in the Bahamas. Like I said, I’ve never met a single person who’s a grifter.
Calling out FTX is like doing background checks on the company you work for’s VCs, their LPs and then their associates. Nothing to do with crypto on the ground
Let's assume a normal distribution of humanity exists in crypto, ie, broadly, over all of humanity, there are good people and bad people, so we would expect there to be good and bad people in crypto, as, while there are some self-selecting aspects to cryptocurrency enthusiasts or developers, there isn't a way to select for "only good people". This is true for every group of people. This is true of the police, true of the clergy, true of school teachers, true of software developers, politicians, etc.
So if you've never once seen them, either you're wilfully blinding yourself, or you haven't looked very hard. Now, whether or not grifters are overrepresented in the cryptocurrency community, the cryptocurrency developer community, or the right wing crypto YouTubers community, is an entirely separate question, which I made no claims about. Though I imagine North Korean crypto devs fall into a certain category.
But to claim they don't exist, because you've never seen one is questionable. I mean, that works for some things (eg unicorns and dragons), but I've also never seen eg the Vegas Sphere in person, but I'm fairly convinced it's a real thing that exists.
Nah, I don't claim they don't exist but I also claim that I've never met any - 99% of people I know in crypto are devs who chose to be there because of the ideals and challenges. From what I've seen in media, it's not the devs who are the scammers but the people up top - founders and sales people, which again I don't know many of that kind.
Numatic Henry's are a classic of design [1], are built to last with the same design for 50 years. All parts can be changed, spares are plenty, and they were built with janitors in mind, so meant to handle daily use.
I'm looking for cordless for small places. If I had the space, I would definitly go for an industrial vacuum. I've enjoyed using the Henry at my school for shit and giggles, a good vacuum can feel theraputic like pressure washing.
