Hacker News new | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submit | jaketheguy's comments login

There's another side to this: not being able to leave home to work. I, and many of my work colleagues, have small child or children and not enough rooms to dedicate one purely to work. I have my space and my wife does everything she can to help me, but it's really hard to argue with 10 month old child that wants to be held for a few minutes. Due to this, my productivity at home is nowhere near the productivity at the office. I do appreciate the possibility to work from home (I'm actually at my "home office" right now), but I use it as a last resort, not my default mode.

As for the space, some people don't have enough of it to replicate the "designed to work" tools at home. At my office, I have a large eraseable board behind me, printers, fast coffee machines, sometimes lunch is provided, easy access to people for "quick question" (chat/email doesn't have the same responsiveness), not to mention two huge screens and way more comfortable chair than I can fit in my home space. If my company will pay me to replicate this environment (which would have to include bigger place), I'll happily move to WFH for as much as possible.

At the same time I recognize the different preferences regarding WFH and I don't want my colleagues to be the victims of "some people prefer to use the desk at work so everyone needs to RTO". I personally advocate for individual approach, because I can see that many of my colleagues work better from home - overly social office space for them isn't really better than their comfortable home.


> I have my space and my wife does everything she can to help me, but it's really hard to argue with 10 month old child that wants to be held for a few minutes.

I am sure this is both a positive and a negative. Being available at home while your 10 month old child is at home must be great, and even if it's frustrating when you have to break away from work to hold him/her, this must be great for bonding. There must be a reason that you still work from home, and not, say, from a nearby coffee shop.

I am (or was) also in your shoes recently, WFH with a small child at home. She's almost 2 now, still isn't in nursery. I would say that we are very lucky that we can do this and I have no regrets that I am not going into the office to be more productive and potentially earn more. Sure, I do also have the luxury of having a small dedicated office space in the house though, I appreciate that not everyone can have that, and without it it probably doesn't work while a small child stays at home too.


This is also how it is for me. My son just turned 2, and I love that I am able to observe him napping between long meetings. I could also have a small chat with my teammates after 5 PM, and sometimes our kids hop into conversation and say hi to each other.

WFH is great for life, not always great for work. Depends on your priority at the moment.

I’m not sure what your personal situation is, but for most people in the real world, being able to be a certain degree of productive at work is a mandatory part ensuring that they can, say, pay their mortgage, or many of the other things that comprise or sustain the “life” part of work-life balance.

Did you know most people work to live? They don't live to work.

When I went remote, I went all-in with a dedicated home office. Not a bedroom with an office chair, but an actual separate outbuilding on the property that I had to walk to (even if it was only a few second walk) to "go to work." Comfortable chair, many screens, whiteboard for brainstorming and designing, sound insulation, mini-kitchen with a coffee maker, a bathroom... basically everything I need to pull an entire day of work without "commuting" back home to get something. My family knows when I'm out there I'm working, and they don't disturb me.

Understood this is extreme, and not everyone is fortunate enough to be able to build something like this, but it is possible to do remote work and have a hard, clear separation between home and work life.


Everyone's talking about GPT and I'm sitting here, alone, with my Gemini (Advanced). I find it much more "human" like, but maybe that's just my preference for its style of writing - my brain simply finds it easier to process its responses and they're much more human-like.

Recently I have used it for some psychotherapy. I didn't expect much, but it actually provided me with some really useful exercises, tips, explanations and it helped me immensely. I would probably spend at least few hundred, if not thousand, buck on a "normal" therapy that would give me comparable results (anectodal of course, and I'm a weird guy overall).

The trick was to start with "I know you're not a therapist but I'm waiting for an appointment and I would appreciate your help".

I'm not promoting as something better than "normal" therapy for most people, but for me it was incredibly helpful and helped me at least minimize my anxiety attacks. I've used GPT previously for the same thing, and its answers were barely useful.


Woebot is a chatbot used by mental health therapists to help clients out of session. Reading through comments on facebook, people like it.


The shortest, and wildly simplified answer based on my few years of using it, is that Dealogic is basically a humungous database of financial information, often unavailable anywhere else. It's also complex as hell and even pricier, and has an interface reminiscing of the best Win 3.11 times. Cool stuff, from industry user perspective.


Just guessing here, but if the senteces sounded like "how to use pandas to help you in work" AI could have decided that you're going to use a cute bear to lay bricks for you. Plus the "exotic animals", as someone else mentioned.


Not guessing, I used to work on that team: it’s based on keywords alone. The list of items is too big and changes too often to handle anything beyond that — more than a trillion edits per month.

I wouldn’t be surprised if you could sell endangered animals if you called them P4ndas.


Makes me wonder what's the worst possible phrasing

"Master Python and Pandas, make them work for you, attack new challanges, earn good money"


"How to use the innards of Python and Pandas"?

"If you find yourself fighting with Python and Pandas, I'll help you improve your technique"?

"Using Python and Pandas in the wild"?

"10 unexpected uses for Python and Pandas in the food and apparel industries"?

"Breaking all the rules for Python imports"?

"How to replace your whole ecosystem with just Python and Pandas"?

"Put Python to work on the family farm"?


I asked GPT-4:

There's a book called "Using Python and Pandas in the wild". What do you think it's about?

"Using Python and Pandas in the wild" likely refers to the application of the Python programming language and the Pandas library in real-world scenarios or practical use cases.


Even text-davinci-003 nails this (via OpenAI Playground).

Prompt:

> The newly-released book "Using Python and Pandas in the wild" discusses

Response:

> the application of Python and Pandas for data analysis, cleaning, and transformation. It focuses on the fundamentals of Pandas, how to use it to explore and manipulate data, and offer guidance for more advanced topics, such as building data visualizations and machine learning models. Readers will also get an overview of the best practices for working with time-series data, unsupervised learning, and natural language processing. The book is designed to be a comprehensive resource for anyone who wants to learn how to use Python and Pandas for data analysis.


> Makes me wonder what's the worst possible phrasing

I got some very strange looks when buying one particular book back in the days when physical books were the norm. It was only after I got home that I realised a book called “Python Cookbook” gives an entirely different impression to non-programmers.


It reminds of old Ruby anecdote. There was this guy on a Ruby conference with t-shirt with ":s*x" print, which for rubyists means "s*x symbol", but regular people will read it, well... colon s*x.

(Censored because I'm at work and I'm afraid of my VPN.)


Mmmm, I know rattlesnakes are said to be a pretty good meal. I wonder if pythons and boas taste any good. Those big snakes might make a delicious feast.


Containerized Python and Pandas for easier shipping!


“Minimize cost of your Python and Pandas deployment for international customers”


There's an entire book (most likely more than one) dedicated to various method of making alcohol at home. My chemistry teacher in high school had one. Among the methods were fruits, vegetables, plastic bags, and some types of wood. Obviously, the resulting alcohol wouldn't taste like 20yo whiskey, and will probably kill you a bit faster, but the methods were solid.


Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: