MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
Kronotop: Horizontally scalable, distributed, transactional document database
by mastabadtomm | 2025-04-30 10:13:16+00:00
The Distributed Document Database with ACID Integrity

Kronotop is a distributed, transactional document database designed for horizontal scalability. It provides a robust foundation for applications needing to manage large volumes of documents while ensuring strong consistency guarantees for critical metadata operations. By leveraging FoundationDB as its transactional backend for metadata and indexes, Kronotop delivers ACID integrity, offering reliability often sought in demanding environments.

Kronotop features an MQL-like query language and uses the RESP3 wire protocol, ensuring broad compatibility with the Redis client ecosystem. It implements core Redis in-memoru data structures like Strings and Hashes, alongside its own specialized structures: ZMap (an ordered key-value store acting as a RESP proxy for FoundationDB) and Bucket (designed for storing JSON-like documents). While document bodies are stored directly on local filesystems, Kronotop uses BSON as the default data format to organize and store within Buckets, with JSON also available.

https://github.com/kronotop/kronotop
by BrandoElFollito | 2025-04-30 10:15:28+00:00
I find that the concept of shifted "worth" was nicely done in the series The Orville[1]. This is a surprisingly deep series under a layer of comedy.

The idea is that a device that gives you whatever you want was discovered, and this completely changed the priorities for people. The one that became the most important was "trust". You earn it, you lose it, you are defined by it. I like the concept.

I would be happy to not do a lot of things that are "socially accepted" - job, clean environment etc. and more focus on people relationships as a determinant.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Orville
by tTTempOrary | 2025-04-30 10:16:38+00:00
There is a thing, i call "cos-playing" - where basically everybody agrees upon a "golden past" and by "reenacting" the golden past in clothing, language and behaviour, this "golden past" will be brought back and forced to stay. Not in the picture are external circumstances, circumstances the golden past brought about, that make a repetition impossible (pension systems calcifying society, monopolies, etc. ).

The truely dangerous phase is reached, when the frantic cosplaying shows no effect and the conclusion slowly crawls towards "insanity is what you do with your life". Because then you have people with nowhere to go and the tools of the past, wishing for an end.
by pjmlp | 2025-04-30 10:17:37+00:00
I very much doubt it, when someone decides to make full of use of recent ISO C on a C library header file.

I claim they aren't focused on what matters, we don't need C++isms into C, we already have C++, and C should have been done as language back in C89.

Anyone that wanted more has always been able to use C++ instead, or Objective-C on Apple/NeXT land.

What we need is for WG14 to finally take security regarding strings, arrays seriouslys, not yet another reboot of functions using (ptr, length) pairs.
by shadygm | 2025-04-30 10:17:59+00:00
Yeah I agree, lack of visuals sometimes makes it hard to tell what's happening when a field moves as fast as it does in GS. There's a github page called Awesome3DGS [1] that is updated whenever there is a new paper in GS. It helped me a lot when I was getting started.

Most papers also have their own project page that showcases their contributions or demo their project as well (:

[1] https://github.com/MrNeRF/awesome-3D-gaussian-splatting
by mindcrime | 2025-04-30 10:19:14+00:00
Interesting, but... starting in 2022? That's not an "AI Timeline", that's an "LLM Timeline" or maybe a "Generative AI Timeline". But AI proper goes back much, much further. At least to Dartmouth in 1956[1] and if you accept some of Jurgen Schmidhuber's reasoning[2] then back to around 1800 (if not 1676).

That said, there's a fairly good "history of AI" page[3] at Wikipedia that covers a lot of the early material.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dartmouth_workshop

[2]: https://arxiv.org/abs/2212.11279

[3]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_artificial_intellig...
by hello_computer | 2025-04-30 10:19:17+00:00
i think it’s more than irony. why would the government—irrespective of party—give him billions in refundable credits for over a decade? remember paypal was also an in-q-tel investment? “boring company” to connect DUMBs. starlink for the control grid. spacex to deploy it. tesla as the self-driving AI slam-dunk (windows update car is another control grid). the government has been heavily invested in elon long before donald trump got political. why? with the kind of budget the CIA has, you could make anyone seem as though they had “the midas touch.” name one of your kids “damien” and dress up like the antichrist. the devil has an army. the pentagon points south (down). we ponder our next pleasure as the innocent are slaughtered with our energies, with our tacit approval.
by dspillett | 2025-04-30 10:20:25+00:00
As an aside, there are a lot of people out there standing up massive microservice implementations¹ for relatively small sites/apps, which need to have this part printed, wrapped around a brick, and lobbed at their heads:

> A well-optimized, lightweight setup beats expensive infrastructure. With proper caching, a $6/month server can withstand tens of thousands of hits — no need for Kubernetes.

----

[1] Though doing this in order to play/learn/practise is, of course, understandable.
by hliyan | 2025-04-30 10:20:29+00:00
We are, if speaking uncharitably, now at a stage of attempting to finesse the behavior of stochastic black boxes (LLMs) using non-deterministic verbal incantations (system prompts). One could actually write a science fiction short story on the premise that magical spells are in fact ancient, linguistically accessed stochastic systems. I know, because I wrote exactly such a story circa 2015.
by rco8786 | 2025-04-30 10:20:36+00:00
If Obama was best buds with Elon and telling the USA to buy Teslas and calling any vandalism against Tesla terrorism and campaigning together and doing Oval Office press conferences together and having Thanksgiving dinner together and letting Elon run a made up government agency?

Come on. It’s blatant corruption in broad daylight. Don’t try and both sides it.

But to answer your question directly if Obama had declared a fake economic emergency to consolidate power to himself and used that emergency power to abruptly pass a series of sweeping tariffs with no clear strategy or messaging and then selectively rolled back some of those tariffs in a way that only benefitted a specific company. Yes. I would feel the same.
by dkh | 2025-04-30 10:20:44+00:00
By "hostile" are you referring to Europe's tendency to adopt new technologies deliberately and methodically, taking into consideration things like ethics, public safety, and societal impact? I think it's hostile (to people) to not do these things, to charge towards new and potentially society-altering technologies with roughly the same level of caution and care as the Kool-Aid Man smashing through walls with reckless abandon
by arghwhat | 2025-04-30 10:21:17+00:00
I don't think your experience here is weird - just seems like you had a good environment for practicing a bit with your wife, which I think is more important than any other aspect of the learning methodology. Now, nitpickers might argue that "better" methods would have achieved much more in less time, but eh.

Try to force some more exchanges with your wife. Make a day of the week the day you only speak her language (for at least a few hours, but don't give up from the frustration when vocabulary runs short - keep it going even if you need to point and sign).

Doubles as a silly/fun couples activity.
by eviks | 2025-04-30 10:21:19+00:00
> It seems to be entirely preferential

Having this whole functionality is entirely preferential, so?

> If you prefer naming tabs it's extra friction to access the input field.

It's not, you can have different commands/mouse gestures for different workflows with customizable defaults to avoid most of the friction

> Options are always nice, but you will rarely cover 100% user cases on a first release.

That's a bad, though universal (can say exactly the same thing on 100th release) excuse

> If you want zero real estate, you close the tab, optionally bookmarking it.

Or close the browser. That's nonsense, why would I want absolute zero??? I want zero waste

> I don't know if some 5 pixel strip really helps anyone

Gladly there are ways to get knowledge! You can start by measuring actual width instead of making up tiny numbers. And then go on estimate the % of users who have more tabs that fit the screen width - that's the number is anyones no waste will be helping
by kgeist | 2025-04-30 10:26:21+00:00
>Currently, the team behind Perfect Wiki is just two people. I handle the development and product, and my colleague manages user support

Good product, but I'm concerned about relying on something developed essentially by a single person due to the bus factor... If it's open-source, that's fine — we can fork it if needed. But if it's a SaaS product, what happens if something happens to the developer? Will all my data be lost? Then again, one of the tools we used before was discontinued despite being developed by a fairly large team...
by theasisa | 2025-04-30 10:26:42+00:00
Wouldn't those only mean that the account was initially created by a human but afterwards there are no guarantees that the posts are by humans.

You'd need to have a permanent captcha that tracks that the actions you perform are human-like, such as mouse movement or scrolling on phone etc. And even then it would only deter current AI bots but not for long as impersonation human behavior would be a 'fun' challenge to break.

Trusted relationships are only as trustworthy as the humans trusting each other, eventually someone would break that trust and afterwards it would be bots trusting bots.

Due to bots already filling up social media with their spew and that being used for training other bots the only way I see this resolving itself is by eventually everything becoming nonsensical and I predict we aren't that far from it happening. AI will eat itself.
by naughtyfinch | 2025-04-30 10:26:43+00:00
Congratulations! Great work so far. I too have been looking to do something like this for a long time now. The biggest challenge for me is that I am locked into the golden handcuffs that FAANG companies put on you. Guess I will wait till I get laid off. I don't have the guts to resign and follow my dream (heavy sigh)
by pjmlp | 2025-04-30 10:26:50+00:00
In the early days, it was a long distance call to either Lisbon or Porto, I only got a modem, when regional numbers were available to the district capitals.

However on BBS days was much worse, it was mostly long distace calls to someone around the country, and they usually only had a couple of connections available like five or so.

Ah another thing is that they adopted the same model as mobile phones, so at least we could pre-pay the calls, and went we run out of cash there was it, no surprise bills, even if frustated.
by wesselbindt | 2025-04-30 10:28:26+00:00
Ideology is their sales pitch, it's for you and me to consume. It has nothing whatsoever to do with their goals and intentions. This has been true of Thatcher and her deeply protectionist policies all the way up to today with Trump and his tariffs. We're not choosing between regulations and no regulations, we're choosing between regulations that benefit the working class and regulations that benefit the owning class. (Although I suppose it could be argued that in the US you choose between regulations that benefit the owning class and regulations that benefit the owning class more)
by GuB-42 | 2025-04-30 10:29:02+00:00
Is the LLM reset between each event?

If LLMs are anything like people, I would expect a different result depending on that. The idea that random events are independent is very unintuitive to us, resulting in what we call the Gambler's Fallacy. LLMs attempts at randomness are very likely to be just as biased, if not more.
by jasode | 2025-04-30 10:29:05+00:00
>a new world map that accurately portrays countries by size.

Search for "equal-area" in the list of map projections: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_map_projections

You can see that any translation from 3D sphere to 2D plane will always create a tradeoff of geometry somewhere. E.g. Distorted shapes and lines, torn oceans, etc.
by sofixa | 2025-04-30 10:29:13+00:00
> There was a lot of time spend sitting in a room and "learning", yet I basically learned nothing

Do you think that was because their methods were bad, you didn't bother and they couldn't force you, or that their methods were not adapted to the way you learn?

Also, I'd find it surprising if you really learned nothing. From what I know of German schooling from people who went through it, you certainly learned at least a bit about the depths to which humans can go to and how to prevent them (Holocaust and wider Nazi atrocities). Also, you probably learned social skills, basic project management and collaboration, and some knowledge which is probably useless other than maybe as a basis of understanding the world and various things you might encounter. I don't recall much from my biology or chemistry classes, but I recall vague outlines, which is enough.
by bjackman | 2025-04-30 10:30:57+00:00
The global economy has depended on finessing quasi-stochastic black-boxes for many years. If you have ever seen a cloud provider evaluate a kernel update you will know this deeply.

For me the potential issue is: our industry has slowly built up an understanding of what is an unknowable black box (e.g. a Linux system's performance characteristics) and what is not, and architected our world around the unpredictability. For example we don't (well, we know we _shouldn't_) let Linux systems make safety-critical decisions in real time. Can the rest of the world take a similar lesson on board with LLMs?

Maybe! Lots of people who don't understand LLMs _really_ distrust the idea. So just as I worry we might have a world where LLMs are trusted where they shouldn't be, we could easily have a world where FUD hobbles our economy's ability to take advantage of AI.
by avianlyric | 2025-04-30 10:31:07+00:00
The core of an LLM is completely deterministic. The randomness seen in LLM output is purely the result of post processing the output of the pure neural net part of the LLM, which exists explicitly to inject randomness into the generation process.

This what the “temperature” parameter of an LLM controls. Setting the temperature of an LLM to 0 effectively disables that randomness, but the result is a very boring output that’s likely to end up caught in a never ending loop of useless output.
by sofixa | 2025-04-30 10:31:31+00:00
> What is the point of school? Why do children have to spend 12 years of their lives learning basically nothing and coming out anything but well formed adults.

So that every kid has a uniform and common base of knowledge that helps them understand the world around them, and enables them to go further by learning more or starting to work.

With no mandatory schooling, most kids would be illiterate and ignorant. A lot of countries, even developed ones, already struggle with the second (antivaxers, flat earthers, voting for dumb populists, etc.). Which indicates the need to improve, not remove.

If there was no schooling, how would kids becoming young adults even know what they're interested in to do? Would they know that e.g. chemistry or physics are things that exist if nobody explained the basics to them? Or would they just continue doing what their parents did, condemning them to a vicious cycle and almost zero social mobility? From history, the latter.
by ZeroGravitas | 2025-04-30 10:32:15+00:00
This and Sam Harris realising that all his fellow travellers were both evil and stupid is my fave source of schadenfreude at the moment.

I think Scott had a subscriber only post a couple of weeks ago that was tiptoeing in the direction of admitting that all his BS concern about woke universities helped get us here but I can now find no trace of it (though I'm not a subscriber so that may be normal).

edit found it:

https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/twilight-of-the-edgelords

Still not read it as it's paywalled, but there's a response that suggests "the edgelord were right" implying Scott has started to realise the edgelords were wrong (though of course he can't just say that simply so it's all very vague):

https://www.writingruxandrabio.com/p/the-edgelords-were-righ...
by technothrasher | 2025-04-30 10:32:17+00:00
At my son's school, they have to put the cell phones into the "phone hotel" at the beginning of the day, and they pick them back up at the end. But it is performance only, really. If the kid really wants a cell phone, they'll just put an old one in the phone hotel and keep their real one hidden in their bag. But even that isn't really done all that much, as they're required to have laptops for class and they can do anything social and/or distracting they'd want to do on the phone on the laptop instead.
by somethingsome | 2025-04-30 10:32:18+00:00
I teach my students to make a tree of the promising optimizations and suboptimization (it can be rough), keep track of each interesting optimizations, then implement the branch that seems the more promising and at each step use the profiler massively, memory bound, compute bound, latency bound, number of flops, cache accesses, etc..

After narrowing the smallest leaf, think about another branch and if some optimizations studied could lead to nice results there too.

With time they learn which branch is more promising and which optimizations are good beforehand with their problem.

I guess this could be called branch and bound with memoization instead of brute force aha.

Note: we write code in cuda
by abanana | 2025-04-30 10:32:49+00:00
And not only that, but how much vagueness and weasel-wording can he pack into one sentence?

"I’d say maybe 20%, 30% of the code that is inside of our repos today and some of our projects are probably all written by software".

> He knows exactly what he is saying

Very much so. He's plainly pulled those figures out of his arse, keeping it vague so he can't be blamed later for lying, for nothing more than "look how much we use AI" marketing purposes.
by JaumeGreen | 2025-04-30 10:34:18+00:00
One of the projects that I have only in my mind space is an Iversonian language with more data structures and the tools to easily navigate an traverse them. Trees, graphs, ... the sky is the limit. And with the power of notation as a tool of thought, and a pen interface, it would be fun to do whiteboard sessions that produced real code that could be executed as is.

OTOH I read/heard that the beauty of array languages is that they have few data types, but they can be easily worked on. So maybe the answer is not easier tree traversal primitives, but better literature/training on how to transform it in a more manageable data type.

Sometimes the answer is to adapt our vision to our world, sometimes the answer is to adapt the world to our vision.
by constantcrying | 2025-04-30 10:35:00+00:00
>Do you think that was because their methods were bad, you didn't bother and they couldn't force you, or that their methods were not adapted to the way you learn?

It was because they had nothing to teach. I still remember trying to learn fractions from a teacher who clearly did not understand fractions either.

Just to be clear, I did very well in school. Given their standards I would be considered a "successful student" and I went on to get a university degree.

>Also, you probably learned social skills, basic project management and collaboration, and some knowledge which is probably useless other than maybe as a basis of understanding the world

None of that I learned while sitting in class. I learned it despite the school activities I had to do.
by bhasi | 2025-04-30 10:36:01+00:00
The Valmiki Ramayanam is a much more accessible document than the Gita to learn Sanskrit from as an advanced learner after completing the basics. There's the aspect of a story that unfolds progressively which is nice and engaging, as opposed to the deep metaphysical stuff in the Gita.

The first section of the Ramayanam is the Sankshepa Ramayanam, or, the Ramayanam in summary. This gives the outline of the whole story which then is expounded in detail in the subsequent sections.
by snkzxbs | 2025-04-30 10:36:28+00:00
You can also avoid fines for mentioning what the Quran says by simply not talking about what the Quran says.

(Read the article: “disparaging” means quoting what the Quran says about what Muhammad did)

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2018/10/its-not-fr...

Restrictions on speech always begin by something that many will argue is sensible, then they start growing into what boils down to totalitarianism.
by globnomulous | 2025-04-30 10:36:36+00:00
> good-enough slop

It isn't nearly good enough, as far as I can tell.

Systems that nobody understands because nobody wrote them are unsafe, unmaintainable, and brittle.

Art generated by AI can't be copyrighted so its use can't be controlled.

> Why do anything that makes us think or exhibit any human qualities when it's not the most cost effective way in our lovely capitalist AI dystopia?

If the most optimistic reasonable projections of the AI optimists are true, the decay of human capability by itself among people who rely on AI will be so damaging that those who don't rely on it will become more valuable on the labor market.

If the most optimistic projections aren't correct, then in all likelihood these will continue to be simple tools that nobody should use for anything serious.

And apart from market/labor dynamics, I have seen no evidence that those who shun the use of AI tools are worse off for it (quite the contrary), so the spread of these tools should, if the current tend continues, actually become a rallying cry for and proof of the value of human work and the intrinsicness and necessity of our participation in the worlds we make for ourselves.

The longer the hype continues, the surer I am that it won't replace humans.
by rc00 | 2025-04-30 10:37:44+00:00
> I think Zig is mostly community-driven and seems to have some traction. Not Rust levels of traction but definitely relevance.

Zig already appears to have lapped Rust in areas like game development, GUIs, compilation speeds, C FFI, etc. and all that despite Zig not yet being 1.0. That means backwards compatibility is not guaranteed until then nor is the full feature set fully defined. Notwithstanding that 1.0 release, traction and relevance only seem to be a matter of time.
by Orygin | 2025-04-30 10:38:35+00:00
I admit I didn't read the entirety of the post, but I read the following:

> Many of our clients came to us after trying the Microsoft built-in Wiki. It was clunky, inconvenient, and didn’t do the job well. We focused on simplicity: the essential features only, nothing extra — and everything should function inside Microsoft Teams.

So I know it wasn't a coincidence, and rarely are such software built without understanding the needs first.

I just wanted to point out that in this case, the business relies on Microsoft not doing a proper job. Otherwise they would be at a serious risk of being Sherlocked by the provider.
by _joel | 2025-04-30 10:39:01+00:00
You can set only allowed filepaths for file handling. I don't there's an explicit way to guardrail it to not run something bad from a shell though (althogh you need --no-preserve-root nowadays in that rm command). You'd have to check every command before running. It's anecdata but I've been doing this stuff for a good few months now and it's not tried to delete my filesystem or lock me out of an airlock, just yet.