skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
First-principles is a physics/math way of thinking, and is common parlance in the mathematical modeling world.

When we say a model is a first-principles model, it means it is derived through fundamental equations like conservation of mass/energy, and other known relationships. This is in contrast to a data-driven model, where the underlying phenomena are not explicitly modeled -- instead the model is created by fitting to data.

Elon Musk became associated with it because he applied this form of thinking to business problems, i.e. by establishing the "fundamental equations" (as it were), questioning some basic assumptions and coming up with conclusions that are necessarily true but that no one else has arrived at.

Data-driven models (or the human equivalent: reasoning by analogy) are convenient to build and work well in the space the data has been collected in (~interpolation). However, they do not extrapolate well -- you cannot be sure they will work outside of the space of training data that the model has seen.

First-principles models (or the human equivalent: reasoning by principles) are generally more difficult to build and test (I worked on first-principles physics models for a decade -- they are a pain), but because they are built on a structure of chained principles/truths, they often extrapolate well even to areas where data has not been collected.

This is why if you want to improve efficiency and operations in known spaces, you use data-driven models (fast to build and deploy, accurately captures known behavior).

But for doing design and discovery (doing new things that have never been done before), first-principles models/thinking will carry you much farther.
I think the ability to start completely over again is one of the saddest losses of the modern world.
Isn't Tesla getting batteries from Panasonic? because I had the impression tesla has now a scale advantage.
In my opinion there should be more information about the offering before asking users to hand over their Google login.
It isn't just production, but is also the chemistry. Tesla has the lowest amount of cobalt and nickel in their batteries of any battery manufacturer in the world. It makes their batteries cheaper, but also use less rare earth minerals (which are difficult to get ahold of at their scales). Tesla isn't sharing their chemistry, which is demonstrably better than anything LG Chem or Samsung, etc has been able to come up with. As a result, their batteries are actually better.

You can scale up manufacturing of inferior batteries, but you still will have an inferior product.
The app with 1000 users was horribly buggy. Statistically, it crashed 3 times per active user per day (memory leak with photo scrolling). But the thing is that it was crashing 3 times/day and not 1 time/day, meaning that users kept using it. This was 2015, but even today, I'm working on a glitchy unpolished app, and customers just keep using it.

The app with 200 users is http://random-character-generator.com

So generally, I disagree that customers want something fully functional. But fintech is a big exception, because people want something solid before trusting it their money to it. We made up for our glitches by handling payment in person (Automated WhatsApp messages and bank account transfers, rather than shopping carts).

I still think that validation is #1 priority, because you'll probably have to build a dozen prototypes before you get to something people want. Our app with 1k users was ironically a low risk prototype. We were making a recipe app, but decided to test user behaviour by making a low carb variation first. Turned out that there's a lot more demand for low carb recipes than any recipes.
Kernighan's Law: You are not smart enough to debug it
This is good technology.
He mentioned buying a Pixel but didn’t because of the difficulty in buying one. One of his primary complaints against an iPhone was about it not having a headphone jack.
SSH Whoami.filippo.io
And that sentiment comes out when men are threatened, but largely when women have issues, silence. That's my point.

The meme 'I fight injustice wherever I see it' is overused and weak - because so many occur just as some kind of correction is pursued to even out the field. Its ok to have equality, but whoa! not if even one man is affected negatively.

If I missed your defense of women being discriminated against, please list the links here! I'll eat crow.
Startups: The Formula of No Formula
Politics is for Power, Not Consumption – hobbyism prevents pursuing power
Does anyone know if Tesla are using SiFive[1] for their custom silicon design?

[1] https://www.sifive.com
Reliance on npm is one of the things covered in Ryan Dahl's "10 Things I Regret About Node.js" talk at JSConf EU 2018 and is fixed in Deno.

Includes a built-in package manager for resource fetching, thus no need for NPM.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deno_(software)
I’m not sure what to say here. You have reiterated that there is no health issue, but my point is that
whether or not a given behavior presents a physical harm to others is not the sole standard by which public behavior is governed.
Now that I'm not the downvoted one, I can say this: I'd want to force every downvote to have an explanatory comment (or at least, an upvote on one). If you can't explain why you downvote something, then you probably shouldn't.
Show HN: Insights – Visual PostgreSQL Explorer for Startups
Hi Everyone!

Over the past several years I've been working on a tool called Insights, mainly to scratch my own itch in my day job.

Insights aims to become an open source and self hosted version of Google Looker or Google Data Studio, without the "Google" part in it.

Insights is under active development, yet already usable with its current and limited set of features. Right now it's basically a tool to visually explore a PostgreSQL database, with an emphasis on generating graphs that show business performance over time.

Please check out the Github Repo [1] for the full features list or try the Live Demo [2] to explore it further!

All any all feedback is appreciated, yet keep in mind how young this project is! :)

[1]: https://github.com/mariusandra/insights

[2]: https://demo.insights.sh/
I've heard of Svelte, but didn't understand what set it apart from the others, so thanks for the pointer! Do you think it will gain much traction, or will there likely be another one inspired by it, but driven by a megacorp that pushes it out of the picture?

My work has a react front end, not sure if there's lots of transferrable skills between the two. For one thing I'll have to learn basic web stuff like CSS, HTML and all, and that will transfer, at least.
Once you cross the 1+ million chip threshold, custom chips stop being such a big deal.
Iranian hackers hacking VPN servers to plant backdoors in companies globally
Since the network is down, can this still be traded?

I know exchanges use 1 big wallet, and internally keep track of who owns what. So in practice you would still be able to trade, just not able to add or request funds.

But if all exchanges block trading, nothing can happen to the price can it?
It's interesting that the Wikipedia article on "fagging" — as the practice was known — paints a much rosier picture of the practice. When I grew up it was definitely presented as being demeaning and having no particular merits

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fagging
>It feels like car technology stopped when the generation of those born in the 40's retired. Ever since then, younger generations have been focussed on the internet, computers and phones, and the car has become a tool like a pencil - it works well enough, and new models only see incremental changes.

What kind of "car technology" are you talking about? It sounds like you're talking about traditional tech, not tech that increases the ability of the driver on the road.
Motivation beyond money: the trifecta of mindful productivity
That is a great talk. Thanks for sharing.
It's all over the place in physics and chemistry, and as a consequence on the engineering areas that are based on those (AKA, nearly all of them).

It is rarer to see it in CS, but it's more because CS used to deal with very simple theories up to recently than because of some fashion. As CS theories start to construct up from the earlier ones, it's appearing more.
Where you're defining better as faster, however, it uses enormously more energy, which impacts overall driving range. It doesn't need to be faster past a certain point. They've already got enough bandwidth to run the entire set of self driving neural networks in duplicate at production speed on the current FSD hardware version 3 computer. There is a point of diminishing returns wrt speed and I think we're quickly approaching if not already surpassing it. Now it is down to efficiency, which the Nvidia solution gets utterly spanked by Tesla's computer on. Ever ran CUDA simulations? GPUs always use enormous amounts of power to do anything, but they're incredible at floating point math.
Gigafactor is also producing the battery cells (though it might be Panasonic's tech) as well as the packs: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giga_Nevada

> the production rate of battery cells in the Gigafactory had reached 3.5 million '2170' cells per day.
This was a recent topic on the Hidden Brain podcast. It's a very good podcast.
> Its business model is to publish simple classic games, but with ads.

Can you explains what's wrong with this?

You are aware that some people enjoy playing simple classic games? You are aware that some people don't like or can't even use credit card online right? What's the solution do you bring that allow theses peoples to have entertainment? Are you going to bring them their simple classic games that they want for free? Why aren't you already doing it?

No one force you to play theses games, but in a weird way you enjoy seeing people losing a great source of entertainment. That's kind of worrying.
Ask HN: Any Alernatives Similar to TripleByte?
Can't find my old notes, but found this graph on a quick google: https://www.cdc.gov/sids/data.htm

Note the decline in SIDS rate, which starts in 1988 (see e.g. https://pediatrics.aappublications.org/content/105/3/650 ), before the recommendation (1992) and "back to sleep" campaign (1994) and though it does track the decline of belly sleeping position, I found in the past graphs of belly sleeping from before 1986 in which it was essentially uncorrelated (or even inverse correlated, if you go back enough - but I don't trust that data).

But what's more alarming, is that although there is a continuing decline in SIDS, if you look at the combined SUID (Sudden Unexpected Infant Death) rate, it is essentially flat since 1996 (following a decline from 1990 as visible in the CDC graph, and which goes much farther IIRC). As a data scientist, this hints either (a) change of classification system that was not properly noted, or (b) that there's an underlying reason which causes infant death, which may manifest in different ways depending e.g. on whether the infant sleeps on their belly or their back.

As a new parent, this was terrifying (is anything really ever safe?) but also reassuring (the expert advice might technically be true, but seems to be useless).

I've found this over and over in many other cases - e.g., statins seem to reduce the change of a heart attack, but do nothing for (or even slightly increase) all cause mortality. Also financial advisers give advice which is technically correct but often useless.

Experts rarely qualify the limits of their advice, and that goes double when it is delivered 2nd hand (by nurses or even doctors who never bothered to look at the data but just parrot the official recommendations).
I hear this fit and finish critique of Tesla often. But the whole package of a Tesla is clearly compelling to people, who are willing to pay a luxury price for it.

High end Volvo’s are a good example of old-school quality — gorgeous interiors, beautiful trim. But they’re still predominantly internal combustion engine era designs. The height of it from a luxury finish standpoint. But, Tesla’s different.

Maybe it’s that petro cars reached a peak, and the only way to really differentiate has come down to “door sound” and body panel alignment measured in nanometers.
Ask HN: Personal knowledge management/note-taking: How do you do it?
The idea of having a note-taking system that can support one in any context and for any duration of time, almost as a second brain seems quite popular.

FOr instance, the Zettelkasten methodology is quite frequently cited. However, most note-taking systems I saw so far are either too simplistic (missing support for embedded images, tables, easy linking between notes, ...), are only designed for input but not recall (i.e. plan text, monospace input and one needs to render the output for it to be readable), or only work online (e.g. Roam).

So, I was wondering what HN uses for full-fledged personal knowledge management
Love the project, just installed it and trying it out now, got some nice results right away.
If it was so bad, why did tesla claim for years that all their cars were shipping with sufficient onboard capability for eventual "full self driving?"
The art project is dedicated to all space pioneers
The Cap Theorem
Is “Single-Tasking” a Lost Art?
I'm impressed. In the US, such a recommendation would be disastrous and whoever made it would be sued to oblivion ....

But then, you nords leave your babies to sleep in the snow which is perfectly healthy but would get you a visit from child protection services in the US (did not hear of such a case, but have heard of cases for letting 9-year old kids walk from school or play basketball without parental supervision)
OK, that picture looks more like there is a gas cloud blocking the view than that the star itself is fading. Since it's asymmetrical.

BTW, Betelgeuse is more known as Orion's left shoulder.
If I need graphic charts/diagrams, I've already passed the markdown stage. There's absolutely no workflow I can think of that is improved by my sitting there and trying to ASCII Art my way into a diagram. Does anyone go, hey, you know what would make my note-taking or web design faster and easier? Spending 20 minutes making an ascii art diagram instead of slapping the same three figures out in powerpoint in 20 seconds.

I love markdown. It's an elegant tool for many situations. My own workflow depends on using Kiwi and Noteplan on my phone with a common dropbox directory for their files, which is a project directory for Sublime on my notebook and desktop. All of my organization is a centralized set of markdown'd text documents, be it my calendar or my knowledge base, sync'd across all of my devices and super-easily edited, searched, or converted to web pages.

But there is a point where using a simple and elegant tool stops being simple and elegant - it can only be tortured so far outside its intended use-case before it stops being useful.
Japan’s Economy Shrinks 6.3% Annualized
Each of the page operations (e.g. click) automatically wait for the specified element to become visible before being performed. That way, your automation code is declarative about what you want to do, and to what element(s), and you can allow the Playwright framework to handle any “waits” on your behalf (without having to rely on time as a pseudo event).

To make the act of selecting elements more resilient to change, Playwright also supports a collection of “selector engines” that allow you to choose the best strategy for selecting elements (via CSS selector, xpath, text content). Additionally, you can author entirely custom selector engines, and compose them together with the built-in types. This is still somewhat experimental, but we think this can enable another level of robustness to test automation: https://github.com/microsoft/playwright/blob/master/docs/sel....

Finally, in addition to waiting for element visibility, Playwright allows you to wait for specific page events to occur (e.g. network request work made). This enables your code to leverage deterministic “signals”, not timeouts (which are the source of a lot of flakiness!). Overall, we want it to be possible to author automation that is entirely event-driven, and includes zero arbitrary timeouts.
> If you think the "placebo effect" is a thing, then homeopathy is justified even if the only person who believes in it is the patient.

That depends really - some people are deterred from taking real medicine by homeopaths, and there have been a few high profile deaths where people had been persuaded that homeopathy was superior to, say, mainstream cancer treatments.

Further, even if you believe that homeopathy is somehow a 'useful' placebo, that doesn't justify any of the claims of efficacy that are made about it.

Unfortunately yes, it is quite mainstream and there are billion-dollar businesses making money from the gullible with this stuff.
> transactions will typically take a couple days to show up in the statement

Wait, in what century do you live that your online banking transaction overview doesn't have up to date data ? Also, your bank allows you to log in with just a username/password ?
Neither of you is wrong. There's two basic models that I see.

Some people never cook, and only eat food from restaurants. They only use their kitchen as the place to store leftovers in the fridge and reheat them in the microwave. The way they get food is to have experts make standard items for them, and maybe sometimes ask the expert to customize it slightly.

On the other end of the spectrum are people who cook every meal for themselves. It's not that hard to get started, and the consequences of failure are pretty low. Various people like to do it because it's fun, or cheap, or social, or they have special requirements, or whatever.

Software is exactly the same. Some people want only standard pre-built units from experts, and want to pay those experts to build, customize, and deliver it for them. Other people think it's {fun/cheap/social/necessary/whatever} to build and customize their own software, and don't want this to be solely the domain of experts.

RMS is clearly in one camp, or if it's a spectrum then he's all the way on one end. It's true that a lot of software today is pre-built units from experts, with only minor customization possible. That wasn't always the case. RMS is presenting a vision of a future where we're not eating all our software from restaurants.

Having seen how childish and uncooperative corporations are with software, I think it's a great vision and I'm all for it.
Neat, but the browser-side rendering for some examples is very slow on my tablet (tens of seconds). At first I assumed the article I was reading was plain text.

It should probably be done server-side with a static site generator.
If homeopathy consisted of selling tubes of plain water with a label of "may help the common cold", I wouldn't really have a problem with it.

Instead recommending people to take crazy doses of supplements, making entirely crazy claims like "cures strep throat" or "can prevent infections" or generally pushing unregulated supplements is absolutely preying upon the weak, weakening the ability of medical providers to actually do their job and is nothing more than naked profiteering by private companies. Anybody supporting or pushing homeopathy is immoral.
Oh, puh-leeze! THE book on rebuilding civilization is How to Invent Everything: A Survival Guide for the Stranded Time-Traveler[1] by Ryan North.

[1] https://www.amazon.com/How-Invent-Everything-Survival-Strand...
I just found this!

http://metatopia.sourceforge.net/
And that's been fixed in newer firwmare versions, per the hacker who fixes those in the first place.
The amazing thing about Code is how it traces the connection of formal logic (in the Aristotelian sense) to the, as you say, pre-computer code of braille and even flag signals to form the foundations of modern computing.

I am a self-taught developer and probably had 10 years experience in web development when I first read Code. I would have these little moments of revelation where my mind would get ahead of the narrative of the text because I was working backwards from my higher level understanding to Petzolds lower level descriptions. I think of this book fairly often when reading technical documentation or articles.

I recently listened to Jim Keller relate engineering and design to following recipes in cooking [1]. Most people just execute stacks of recipes in their day-to-day life and they can be very good at that and the results of what they make can be very good. But to be an expert at cooking you need to achieve a deeper understanding of what is food and how food works (say, on a physics or thermodynamic level). I am very much a programming recipe executor but reading Code I got to touch some elements of expertise, which was rewarding.

https://youtu.be/Nb2tebYAaOA?t=1351
It's very depressing that I've been a developer for 8 years and I've never heard any of those terms you mentioned. I'm self taught but I've always felt like I should go back and really learn the fundamentals.
As someone that doesn't do much frontend I was pleasantly surprised by Vue after playing with it last weekend. The only thing that confused me is that the Vue community talks about Vue 3 as it's already been released, but I couldn't find a single trace of even a v3 beta on their website or Github. The reason is probably easy to find with a search engine, but still weird (as an outsider) that it's so well hidden on the official channels.
We’re many years down the road, so we’ve mostly baked it into job descriptions and expectations at this point. In some geographies, we’ve had to craft those responsibilities and pay/comp time philosophies in specific ways to comply with local laws. In others where the law is silent, we’ve taken a laxer “if you got crushed by off-hours work, take appropriate comp time”.

During the old days of “you commit code and ops runs it” and during transition to “you build and run it”, we did have some bonuses for being on-call or doing stints in problem management. Now, we bake that expectation into base salary except in locales where we have to split it out to comply with local laws.

Along the way, we've given enough merit increases, market adjustments, and promotions that it's impossible to say whether we had a bump specifically because of the industry's new philosophy on ops. If you wanted to make the case that we did, you could. If you wanted to make the case that we didn't, you equally could.
Landing a Message (Kafka)
And the graphQL documentary :-)
The Bolt is not priced the same as the Model 3. Examples:

https://www.cars.com/for-sale/searchresults.action/?mdId=362...
I don't know anyone making 14k cash in three weeks. Definitely worth it for someone uneducated that can earn max 50k.
Maybe we're all wrong and a nearby civilization just wants to contain the supernova explosion...
Already on my nope not even gonna try it list.

The demo page does that annoying crap where it tries to prevent you from navigating to your prior site.

I thought that trend peaked in like 2001.
Power and capability. Custom silicon means they can build the chip with all of the chip's surface being used for things their software needs (ie. extra surface for parallel computing and zero surface for unneeded features). They can also tune the chip with ops/watt in mind. Nvidia has touted their A.I. chips being x10 more powerful, but they also took twice the power to do it [1]. For an electric vehicle that lives on only the charge stored in its batteries, you want to use exactly as much power as you need to get the job done and no more.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19732974
i mean, for my own reminders and messages that i forget to delete.
I like notion : https://www.notion.so/
Awesome! Please don’t hesitate to let us know how we can improve. We want to make web automation not only more reliable, but also more enjoyable. So we’re keen to hear how we can continue to push that goal forward :)

https://github.com/microsoft/playwright