MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by jancsika | 2025-05-27 16:51:29+00:00
> Mozart was never able to.

* ending of the last movement of the Jupiter Symphony

* Introitus of the Requiem (four-voice ricercare in the instruments, then cascading upward in SATB choral writing, both combined with an operatic-style accompaniment)

Here's a mind-blowing one-- at the end of his String Quartet K. 387 in G major. This is a modified rondo-sonata form where the rising figure of the rondo theme-- normally just a simple, catchy, tune-- is actually the subject and answer of a fugue! I'm fairly certain Mozart is the only composer of his era to substitute a fugal exposition for the rondo theme in a modified rondo-sonata form[1].

Even more impressive, the 2nd theme is a different fugue which continues into the rondo theme for-- you guessed it-- a double fugue.

All of this is so fast, effervescent and seamless that someone like OP could be forgiven for not even noticing the fugue. So now OP must ask-- how many other examples are there of Mozart subtly shifting into and out of first-rate Bach-like contrapuntal textures?

It's a question Beethoven undoubtedly knew the answer to, at least for all the Mozart scores he could get his hands on.

1: Haydn has a great musical joke at the end of the so-called "Lark" quartet-- in the middle of a fast, old-school Rondo he switches to minor and plonks down a thick four voice fugal exposition and development against the fast-flowing figuration from earlier. It disappears as quickly as it came, like Carl Stalling but before the era of cartoons!
by sokoloff | 2025-05-27 16:51:36+00:00
Exactly (on the first two paragraphs). I (almost) never type anything into the REPL window itself.

I might type a "5" and evaluate it just to see if the REPL is busy or not, but otherwise, everything the REPL evaluates comes from an emacs source code buffer, sent via CIDER to the REPL. At most, it might be in a "Rich comment" and thus not evaluated next time I load that file, but those tend to be small, interactive tests and not defns.

Unless emacs crashes with the buffer unsaved, there's nothing the REPL has that the source file doesn't.
by zahlman | 2025-05-27 16:52:06+00:00
> zealous moderation makes a platform better for its existing aging population, while discouraging new members.

Yes; gatekeeping does tend to exclude people who are fundamentally aren't supposed to be there because they're looking for a different place that works differently towards different purposes; and such exclusion is helpful in preventing projects from morphing into things they aren't intended to be.

And, of course, people who aren't "the existing aging population" will tend to see this as a bad thing, because they don't have access to the resource that they want to use for a different purpose. (And, of course, said "existing aging population" will always be in the minority.)

But personally, I strongly believe that people should generally be allowed to make the things they want and showcase them in public without being forced to turn them into something else.
by kuratkull | 2025-05-27 16:52:51+00:00
> my_list = [1, 2, 3]

> pyrefly, mypy, and pyright all assume that my_list.append("foo") is a typing error, even though it is technically allowed (Python collections can have multiple types of objects!)

> If this is the intended behavior, ty is the only checker that implicitly allows this without requiring additional explicit typing on my_list.

EDIT: I didn't intend my comment to be this sharp, I am actually rooting for ty to succeed :)

ORIGINAL: I am strongly against ty behaviour here. In production code you almost always have single type lists and it is critical that the typechecker assumes this, especially if the list already has same-type _literal_ items.

The fact that Python allows this has no bearing at all. To me having list[int | str] implicitly allowed by the typechecker seems like optimizing for beginner-level code.
by topspin | 2025-05-27 16:53:28+00:00
> must still be justified

Trump Brain doesn't do that calculus. Trump Brain maintains lists of who is Good and who is Bad, and moves people among the lists at need.

> Cutting off military aid before peace negotiations was clearly upside down and backwards

Not in Trump Brain. At that time, Putin was on the Good list, so Trump Brain was obligated to stop the arms.

The good news is the lists are fluid, and the likely outcome given Trump Brain is support for Ukraine with more enthusiasm than Biden et al. ever had.

You can see this in this latest snap decision to lift limits on range: all concern about nuclear war vanishing as if it never existed. You can see it in his latest words, since Trump Brain is, for better or worse, forever committing candor. He wrote, "This is Zelensky’s, Putin’s, and Biden’s War, not 'Trump’s,'" Again, the personalities here are all that matter to Trump Brain, and Putin made the Bad list.

Today, on Putin: "He’s playing with fire!" So Trump Brain is still hung up on Putin (personally, note) two days later. That's a long interval for Trump Brain: Putin on the Bad list for the whole holiday.

The worm is turning. This is no longer a campaign issue to beat Biden over the head with. Now Putin is a problem for Trump Brain, and Trump Brain has absolutely no loyalty for those that disappoint. Zero.

It was always going to get here, because the reality of Ukraine and Putin was always going to come into conflict with Trump Brain's placement of Putin on the Good list. But Trump Brain had to figure this out on its own: you can't tell Trump Brain anything that conflicts with current standing. Even trying gets you on the Bad list, which is one mistake Zelensky made. If Zelensky had the first clue, he'd be on a plane wearing the finest Italian suit ever made to get to Trump before the end of the news cycle and thank Trump publicly and exclusively for lifting the range limits, giving Trump all the credit, deserved or otherwise.

The fact that Putin, personally, is now the problem as far as Trump Brain is concerned, and likely to remain so given circumstances, might actually pay off handsomely: when the kleptocrats of Russia decide they need to solve their Trump problem, removing Putin becomes their expedient. Ultimately, that's what this is going to require in any case, so perhaps Trump Brain is on to something.
by csa | 2025-05-27 16:53:54+00:00
> if Google becomes too self-referential, it risks losing the very web it was built on

This ship has sailed.

Paywalls and wall-gardens are the mid-term future, imho.

Most of the useful internet spaces I interact with fall under these categories. It feels like a Balkanized version of the AOL/Compuserve days.
by ta1243 | 2025-05-27 16:54:06+00:00
In the 2000 my team had to deal with everything from compilation problems to hardware answering arp answers with fake mac addresses. The team consisted of a wide range of skills and abilities and information obviously leaks. While the DBA didn't need to know anything about OSPF, just by being in the same team as the network person they pick up how things work.

Now it seems that teams seem to be far more specialised and there's less cross-specialist learning.
by zhousun | 2025-05-27 16:54:49+00:00
Using SQL as catalog is not new (iceberg supports JDBC catalog from the very beginning).

The main difference is to store metadata and stats also directly in SQL databases, which makes perfect sense for smaller scale data. In fact we were doing something similar in https://github.com/Mooncake-Labs/pg_mooncake, metadata are stored in pg tables and only periodically flush to actual formats like iceberg.
by phillipcarter | 2025-05-27 16:54:55+00:00
Probably good to add a disclaimer at the top that clarifies the definition, since RAG is ultimately just a pattern, and vector indexes are just one way to implement the pattern.

Indeed, industry at large sees RAG as equivalent to "vector indexes and cosine similarity w.r.t. input query", and the rest of the article explains thoroughly why that's not the right approach.
by willlma | 2025-05-27 16:55:14+00:00
As someone who has built a timer-based procrastination browser extension, I'd like to add that it would be a nice touch if you could stop playback between videos (or maybe between chapters on long videos) rather than cut people off right as the timer goes off. It's a bit jarring to be in the middle of something you're enjoying and for the screen to go blank.
by viccis | 2025-05-27 16:55:30+00:00
The visualizations here remind me of the old Bach WTC analysis and commentary website that used David Korevaar's performance (and some others for the ones on organ or harpsichord) and Tim Smith's analysis. Problem was, they were all done using Flash.

Some amazing person uploaded video versions to Youtube. I would highly recommend them: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLYwl4jo5DoXTTPY0P8Tlc...

This one in particular is beautiful: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g9ShwIrMJlU
by venriq | 2025-05-27 16:55:46+00:00
I don't deny how powerful PostgreSQL is, but it appears that the decision to choose PostgreSQL was the most significant issue all along. It's shocking how often we find teams selecting Postgres to implement a solution that it's not suitable for. Yet, you see a document with a forced and non-logical narrative trying to justify the decision.

With the NewSQL options available today, which provide distributed relational databases with multi-masters out of the box, it seems to me that many teams select Postgres simply because that's all they know, and that's the source of the problem.
by wg0 | 2025-05-27 16:57:03+00:00
Yes already did through most of them. Either we have libraries around CRDTs or we have full BaaS (think Parse if anyone remembers or Firebase) soft of things that possibly can be self deployed but have a very heavy and iron clad curtain on the underlying storage medium (Postgres/SQLite) etc exposing a world view of their own.

tinyBase seems to be the only one that stands out in that regard or this LiveStore now.

PS: Thank you for putting this landscape. That really has enabled me or anyone else to look at what options are there. No amount of googling would do that kind of compilation. I find it very useful.
by cesarb | 2025-05-27 16:58:19+00:00
> I have used only whole-disk XFS SSDs and HDDs for more than a decade.

I wouldn't recommend that. It makes the disk appear to be empty to many tools (and possibly some operating systems), which could lead to data loss. That's the reason GPT has the protective MBR: it makes the disk appear to be full to legacy tools which don't understand the GPT format.
by Pfhortune | 2025-05-27 16:58:47+00:00
Killing off their one active product in order to copy everyone else in chasing AI... In "doing something new and different!" they are doing the same thing as the herd, and losing all loyalty and good will they built over the years in the process. Wow.

Why would anyone trust The Browser Company after this? Who's to say Dia won't be dead in a few years in favor of the next trend?

And they won't even open-source Arc because of some "secret sauce" libraries they think are special. Shameful.
by mindslight | 2025-05-27 16:59:46+00:00
Markets are not computationally easy (ie globally efficient), as you seem to be assuming. If they were, central planning would actually work.

Rather there are many sticky intrinsic factors like network effects, path dependency, and economies of scale that would need to be overcome to make the scales tip the other way. This is why once manufacturing started going to China, it then continued accelerating. To start bringing it back, we would need to clear a high activation energy.

Then there are the additional issues with the current approach. For starters, building new factories requires a bunch of industrial equipment. But with the blanket import taxes that has all shot up in price as well.

There is also the uncertainty of trying to plan on the long term scales of capital payback in the presence of an administration that flip flops on policies by the month, has seemingly no clue what they're doing, carves exceptions for the politically connected who bribe at McDonalds-al-Lago, and continues escalating the attacks against our traditionally stable-for-capital rule of law. From the investment perspective, it feels we're moving in the direction of a South American dictatorship where it only makes sense to run economically-colonizing "suitcase operations" rather than broad-base industrialization.
by kelseyfrog | 2025-05-27 16:59:49+00:00
I'm a big fan of killing time on long drives with friendly word games. One of my favorites is a mix between rhyming and square theory. Here's how it works: one player picks two words that rhyme perfectly. Then, for each of those words, they choose a clue word, usually a synonym, but any kind of related word is fair game. They say those two clue words out loud, and the other players have to guess the original rhyming pair.

What makes it fun is trying to reverse-engineer the original rhyme from the clues. It's like solving a little logic puzzle. It's easy to come up with new puzzles, but cracking them can be surprisingly tricky. Still, the structure gives just enough to keep it solvable most of the time.

1. Somewhat described here https://bestlifeonline.com/jeopardy-rhyme-time-opera-version... It's actually quite difficult to find a description of the category many of us are already familiar with.
by AfterHIA | 2025-05-27 17:00:15+00:00
My Grandfather is a Marine and this kind of thing is exciting but given the, "tried and proven" nature of Marine processes the fact that my grandad's beloved corps has gone headlong into digital space makes me a little nervous. I'm remembering Nicaragua in 1925; the two most recent middle eastern conflicts. We have to stay ahead of known adversaries but unless everything is vetted again and again there will be stark vulnerabilities. If Marine digital units are using external libraries; connecting to the internet all it would take is a North Korean or Chinese hacker to reprieve warfighters of necessary assets- or even turn assets against our Marines. This is an exciting and dangerous time.
by datavirtue | 2025-05-27 17:00:26+00:00
These people are "undisciplined" because they have no idea how profitable investing is. Neither do educators (pensioned) and a lot of people have an ingrained misconception that you are going to lose money "in the stock market."

They hear of possible returns like 10-15% and shrug and look at bear markets as harmful to their wealth.

Really an education issue but it is complicated. Stuffing money in a mutual fund is risky and also not an option if you are behind. A lot of people are behind.
by ethbr1 | 2025-05-27 17:00:30+00:00
Some, mostly-western, US states have citizen-initiated state constitution amendment processes. [0]

I especially like Nevada's -- a majority in two successive general elections.

Sustainable democracy needs a jury nullification-like direct popular escape catch to solve legislatively-intractable issues (term limits, party primaries, redistricting, etc).

[0] https://ballotpedia.org/Initiated_constitutional_amendment
by zahlman | 2025-05-27 17:00:34+00:00
> Its moderation policies (in particular allowing mods to rewrite your replies) were absolutely not okay.

You write answers, not "replies", and everyone is allowed to propose edits (and people above a certain reputation threshold can do it unilaterally).

The reason for this is that when you use Stack Overflow, you are not using a forum. The point is not to "reply" to the person asking a question; the point is to answer a question in a way that is useful to everyone, not just the person who asks.

The curation policies are extremely well thought out and have been carefully refined over multiple years through extensive discussion.

They absolutely are okay. Just not for the purposes you want them to serve.

You are not the one who gets to decide what purpose the site should serve.

The site was already designed and intended to serve a specific purpose before you got there. You were the one responsible for understanding this.
by spenczar5 | 2025-05-27 17:00:48+00:00
Even though it's in your own SQL DB, there's still some sort of layout for the metadata. That's the thing that trino/bigquery/whatever won't understand (yet?).

> They solve query parallelism by allowing you to perform computations on the edge, enabling horizontal scaling the compute layer.

Hmm, I don't understand this one. How do you horizontally scale a query that scans all data to do `select count(*), col from huge_table group by col`, for example? In a traditional map-reduce engine, that turns into parallel execution over chunks of data, which get later merged for the final result. In DuckDB, doesn't that necessarily get done by a single node which has to inspect every row all by itself?
by rudi-c | 2025-05-27 17:00:48+00:00
This looks like interesting technology! Congrats on the launch, it's great to have people exploring the space of realtime data storage & sync. Some thoughts, that I hope you can find constructive.

The landing page draws comparison to Figma, Linear and Notion. But they are vastly different use cases.

Figma is document-centric, which means that:

- All data is tied to a single document, limiting their size.

- Requires that single backend session holds a document in-memory and deals with split-brain issues.

- Operational complexity arises around deployment.

- User interactions are often continuous (one event / frame), imposing tighter latency requirements.

- Generally requires that the document stays loaded in a memory in a stateful backend session.

- Technologies like Jamsocket are targeting such use cases.

Notion & Linear, on the other hand, have collaborative editing but not to the same degree of realtimeness. - Data is not tied to a single document.

- Data can grow unbounded.

- Data is typically more relational.

Presenting both these uses cases adds confusion. By using SQLite (emphasis: database and "SQL"), it makes the technology appear at first glance more suited for the Linear/Notion use case. However, the opposite appears to be true after reading https://docs.livestore.dev/evaluation/when-livestore/.

- "All the client app data should fit into a in-memory SQLite database".

- "Reasons when not to use LiveStore" -> "Your app data is highly connected across users".

The Figma-like document use case does seem like something that LiveStore could support. When it comes to designing a data model for collaborative apps (CRDT or CRDT-like), the most simple and flexible solution is to store every object as a map of [Object ID] -> [Property Name] -> [Property Value]. Assuming that the properties names & values come from a fixed set and are typed (this will generally be true unless you allow for arbitrary user-defined fields), that looks like a database row! So why not just store it in a database, indeed.

However, among databases, there are object stores and relational databases. The latter is useful, as applications often want to represent relationships between different objects. But if we support multiplayer-like use cases which implies the absence of server-side transactions, how should conflicting events involving the creation/deletion/relationships between objects be handled? Is it entirely on the application to think about it? This is an interesting topic that I believe LiveStore seems well-positioned to innovate in.

I also find the "local-first" emphasis to be at odds with all of Figma/Notion/Linear. Local-first software tends to have a limited number of concurrent users accessing the data in-mind. SaaS applications that are truly targeted at collaboration tend to have a lot of different requirements. On the other hand, those applications do tend to have relatively limited offline support, which a local-first application tends to emphasize more.

The Figma-like use cases also has additional requirements. But I understand this is beta and look forward to seeing further development!
by photochemsyn | 2025-05-27 17:01:20+00:00
Isn't auto-grading cheating by the instructors? Isn't part of their job providing their expert feedback by actually reading the code the students have generating and providing feedback and suggestions for improvement even at for exams? A good educational program treats exams as learning opportunities, not just evaluations.

So if the professors can cheat and they're happy about having to do less teaching work, thereby giving the students a lower-quality educational experience, why shouldn't the students just get an LLM to write code that passes the auto-grader's checks? Then everyone's happy - the administration is getting the tuition, the professors don't have to grade or give feedback individually, and the students can finish their assignments in half an hour instead of having to stay up all night. Win win win!
by mattgreenrocks | 2025-05-27 17:01:41+00:00
A few facts about my favorite quality-centric company: https://www.fractalaudio.com/

They build hardware-based amp/pedal modelers (e.g. virtual pedalboards + amp) for guitars that get a very steady stream of updates. From a feel and accuracy perspective, they outcompete pretty much everyone else, even much bigger companies such as Line 6 (part of Yamaha). Pretty small company AFAIK, maybe less than 20 people or so. Most of the improvements stem from the CEO's ever-improving understanding of how to model what are very analog systems accurately.

They do almost everything you shouldn't do as a startup:

* mostly a hardware company

* direct sales instead of going through somewhere like Sweetwater

* they don't pay artists to endorse them

* no subscriptions

* lots of free, sometimes substantial updates to the modeling algorithms

* didn't use AI to build their product quickly

Quality is how they differentiate themselves in a crowded market.

This isn't an edge case, either. This is how parts of the market function. Not every part of every market is trapped in a race to the bottom.
by primeradical | 2025-05-27 17:03:02+00:00
The algo bettors aren't using kiosks at the track. They're using dashboards and monitoring live video feeds. At least in my experience in the US.

Most of the serious younger bettors are feeding daily form PDFs into an LLM and getting analysis, and placing bets using custom apps, rarely using UIs from the larger ADWs (advanced deposit wagering company). Older bettors are using phone wagering for larger bets.

There is never a shortage of kiosks available for casual fans. Most tracks are either owned or partnered with ADWs that all have mobile apps, or sites for placing wagers, and casuals are encouraged to use those as they're more sticky after they leave the track.

Even if algo bettors are influencing the odds because they're throwing money around, the house doesn't care because its percentage cut is the same (parimutual), and the casuals aren't bothered because they can't even tell what's happening.

The totes are the ones analyzing fraud and abuse, and they don't care what tea leaves you read to place bets. They just care about avoiding government oversight and ensuring profits for the ADWs and tracks.

Source, formerly a SWE for an ADW
by GuinansEyebrows | 2025-05-27 17:03:07+00:00
townies in university cities have been dumpstering during move-out week since time immemorial. i remember finding an entire complete set of MS Office 9x on floppies in a dumpster when i was in 5th grade :) among many other things over the years. even once found what would have been a treasure trove of 'adult' videos only 5 years prior... 8 hour vhs bootlegs with 3-4 "films" each. but that was 2007ish and VCRs were mostly gone by then.