skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
That's true, but it really depends a lot on the kind of software you're writing. If you're Google or Facebook and make fractions of a cent per pageview despite doing an enormous amount of computation then optimizing your code and infrastructure is very important indeed. On the other hand someone like Airbnb is very likely to make tens or hundreds of dollars off a handful of pageviews, so cloud costs are much less of a concern.
Ask HN: Is there a book where you build a database engine from scratch?
I know there are plenty of books where you write your own ray tracer from scratch in C++ and same for OSes (and they include code snippets). Is there anything like this for database management systems? I'm aware of the cow book, but I'm looking for something that walks you through implementing an entire database engine with code snippets. I understand the theoretical components but I have a hard time architecting them together in code.
> I think the assumption that a company should outfit their developers with “the best” machines is problematic.

I’ve worked at several production companies, games & films, that had policies of giving devs the worst machines. The thinking being that artists who use the tools should always feel less pain than the devs who make the tools, not more.
Contributing to the Azure Terraform Provider
I once had to debug an online service from a cruise ship. The network connection was painfully slow due to being over satellite. SSH is practically unusable with that latency. After suffering through that ordeal, I now take much greater care when developing software that requires internet access. Perhaps others could learn from this experience.
Looks very decent. Make it configurable and I'll pay for a subscription.

What I mean is instead of indexing the entire internet with an adhoc ranking, trying to guess what I want, let me whitelist and blacklist domains and let me configure the ranking. I'd begin with stackoverflow, hackernews and arxiv and probably blacklist pinterest and other paywalled gardens.

From time to time your search engine could suggest search results from other sources, so I could update my whitelist.

It could index pdf files or even show their summary with some ml model, perhaps for an additional fee.

Another idea that's been bothering me for a while is searching for movies or songs. If you figure how to show me the most interesting (according to my filters) movies in 2020, I'd pay for that. Even more so for music.
Can you cite sources beyond anecdote for any of these claims? Facebook documents group takedowns on their Newsroom, and those bans are largely foreign interference networks or far-right groups (proud boys, boogaloo, etc).

The more reasonable (and widely accepted) reason as to why conservative content thrives on Facebook, is because conservative users are active in greater numbers on Facebook.
Your job is to make cost effective decisions actually. And that’s a long game not a short game.

If you fail to make those consistently you end up with large infrastructure bills and unhappy customers eventually.
Taiwan will never let TSMC go as long as it's a national treasure like it currently is. I think for a similar reason the UK will buck the Nvidia buyout of ARM
We do know quite a bit about how proteins fold in the cell, though of course there is likely still a lot to discover there. Chaperones are known for a long time now, and there's been plenty of research on them.
There is no 64%. It's hypothetical if there were 1000 draws per day. If you want to proof their math wrong please do more than calling it flawed.
Totally this
We need a contest to come up with the most plausible album for "Never Mind the Manganese Ore Export Quotas, Here’re the Enjoyable Popular Music Boys."
For some new coding articles I’ve been working on, I’m currently experimenting with a hybrid presentation, because I encountered two serious problems with a plain text representation.

One was that small devices are awful at handling them. On a phone screen held in portrait orientation, even relatively short lines of code may be too wide to fit. Requiring constant horizontal scrolling is not pleasant or efficient for the reader. If you rotate the phone to landscape instead, the scaling and text resizing behaviour in mobile browsers can be surprising and not at all helpful.

The other problem was that in some cases I don’t just want to show plain code, I want to show some sort of annotation overlaid on top of it that illustrates the idea I’m discussing in the article. Once you go beyond simple things like line numbers or basic highlighting, you start to need an image for this.

My original thought was to have an SVG overlaid on plain text code, but you can’t control the underlying text well enough to align them reliably, not least because of the first issue above.

So then I moved to using an SVG for everything, code and annotations alike. This guarantees everything is aligned correctly, and you can also guarantee the whole thing fits and scales sensibly on small screens and in different orientations using the usual CSS for images. You can even have the text partially selectable, though anything produced in a graphics package is unlikely to faithfully reproduce white space used for indentation and the like.

I’d like to investigate whether it’s possible to have fully-selectable listing text that copies and pastes correctly using a hand-crafted SVG, but this approach might prove to be prohibitively time-consuming even if it’s possible. I’d also like to know whether assistive technologies like screen readers would then handle the text correctly.

For now, I have settled on using SVGs for listings but also including a link to a plain text source file and somewhat detailed alt text describing the annotations. The longdesc attribute for an img element might have been a better way to do this, but it has been deprecated so browser support is in doubt.

If anyone else has been experimenting with presenting illustrated code listings on the web, or has found a solution to mobile browsers doing strange things with listing formatting after device orientation changes, I’d be very interested to know about it.
Oh look at you. If people would take the vaccine you condemn, they'd be able to come back to your coffee shop.

But that's not what you want either it seems.
This is the official justification. There exists an alternative explanation: it's a filter to keep the gullible. Scammers use similar techniques like making you watch a lengthy movie to get to the actual pitch.

"Gurdjieff was a magnificent old rascal, who lived a joyous life, and most of his disciples live extremely restricted, rigid, and serious lives -- because the object of Gurdjieff's method was to weed out those who understood from those who do not, and those who understood went away and those who did not understand remained."
She didn't call him a racist. She pointed out that there's more to addressing bias than just acknowledging that it's there. If you are going to say "Well, garbage-in, garbage-out!", why do you keep putting the racist garbage in? Why do you, knowing of the problem, keep using biased sources of data, knowing of the potential harms?

That's the deeper question ML research/industry has to grapple with. When these models are deployed increasingly quickly and at scale in ways that can potentially cause massive harm, why is it okay to keep doing the same exact harmful things?

LeCun mentioned that there would have been opposite problem if it were trained on a dataset from Senegal. But why wasn't it trained on a dataset from Senegal? Why do we always see these errors where white-centric datasets produce white-centric results?

It's obvious that while it would be a symmetric situation a vacuum, we do not live in a vacuum. We live in a world with deep sociocultural biases in favor and against various racial groups. And it is unjust to let AI perpetuate and entrench these biases by acting at with this bias at scale.

Acknowledging dataset bias by itself doesn't address the bias meaningfully. In practice, we often treat the bias as an exogenous factor when it is not, moving it outside the scope of our responsibility. But it is very much the product of our work, a reflection of our choices, values, and beliefs about what to prioritize. We can't abdicate our responsibility for it (even if we choose not to prioritize it.)
I think this is getting hot product thanks to iPhone 12 Pro's LIDAR camera but Google kills.
Faster computers and network speed will encourage higher level of abstraction. We can't just leave all those extra performance on the table! Unused cpu cycles is wasted cycles, unused ram is wasted ram, and unsaturated bandwidth link capacity is wasted capacity! \s
It sounds nice, Glass-Steagall for tech. Worked in finance for a long time.

But I think that technology is going to make it easy to work around structural separation. Facebook derives its power from building dossiers on billions of people. They are intelligent motivated people. I don't think that pushing different activities into different orgs is going to do anything to limit that power.

Their surveillance business model is what needs to go. Will society collapse if we shift from behavioral to contextual advertising? I doubt it.
My take was that they were primarily referring more to the costs associated with handling the overwhelming tech support requests from less/non-technical users rather than what sounds like occasionally selling specific items at a loss.

It's the difference between user 'A' getting their device, having a problem and realizing that they need to do some searches/ask in the forums/get in a chat room to resolve it (i.e. self-support by the user... what many Linux users have been used to forever on the desktop/server side) and user 'B' having the same problem but deciding to contact Pine64 saying 'make this work!' (i.e. full support from the seller)

It's one thing to contact Pine64 if you've done your due diligence and determined you have a faulty device (or worse: found a design flaw.) It's something else entirely, and the thing they aren't set up to handle, to expect it to be a consumer ready/friendly solution.
Carnegie Mellon AI Professor Joins UAE AI University (Middle East AI)
Technical debt means guaranteed work in the future for software developers.

I only say this half-jokingly.
Programmers should get whatever machine makes their build times tolerable, which probably means a pretty fast machine. Not because they are superior beings but just plain-old cost/benefit analysis.

Product managers and designers should use average equipment for their target market.

Your equipment should allow you to do your job better, not show your rank.
Because we're in the middle of an incident.
> I’m not sure what else there is possibly wrong here. Is the width of their convolutions racist?

Not that parameter specifically, but if you say the data is wrong then that means any other parameter might be wrong too. More data might mean the model is too small to fit it, or the hyperparameters might be wrong to train it, or you now have the wrong ratio of other phenotypes (let's say that instead of races…) in the training set and their results regress.

Also, if you're adding people with darker skin, that of course means the pixel values are lower. That matters for image processing code, things like SAD thresholds or noise reduction will work differently.

> Their choice to work on super resolution?

Superresolution is only useful as a toy and they should have mentioned that when they put up a live colab, yes. They added a disclaimer later on and it was good - there was a big issue where people were convinced this was somehow a surveillance technology because they watched too many TV shows, even though it literally can't work that way!
We'll still need oil, not for energy, but as a raw material for production of plastics and many other products.
LOL! tx.
Seriously, if you were going to fix it you'd pick a random looking sequence, not something that would draw attention...
I was around to get a peek at one of their "we need to make the OS faster and more stable" pushes and I recall engineers being told to do all their testing on the oldest, slowest iPhone still supported–everyone hated using them, of course, but when the finished product came out it was glorious how good it ran on even the oldest hardware. I get the impression that the last few releases this has been less emphasized. Performance is one way to tell this, of course, but another is that you'll notice the the UI of a lot of Apple's apps doesn't work well on smaller (and thus older) screens anymore ;)
I believe they're referring to loss of publishing control often cited as a reason for the video game crash of 1983 that the NES helped carry the industry out of.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Video_game_crash_of_1983#Loss_...
The curious thing is that is isn't a bug in the debugger itself usually. It's the optimizer process that doesn't leave proper instructions of where "x" is at this point.
"You don't have to take the vaccine, but if you don't we won't let you travel anywhere, or attend any public events, or send your kids to public school. Up to you!"

> The population never really had the freedom to run around and spread diseases harming people.

I don't know what you mean exactly. People have generally enjoyed the freedom to roam without being subject to liability or investigation as to whether they might be spreading an illness. Flying or going to the grocery store with a bad cough and a fever was considered poor etiquette but not a matter for legal sanction. The worst that would happen was not being allowed to send your kids to public school.
Google definitely uses pagespeed as a major factor. They may also with AMP although that may be changing. They could do more though.
some interesting ethical dilemma's around this.
Employees, but not future employees :(
I've read a guess: As known, Google uses monorepo and own libraries, so they need to maintain all applications to keep up to date to work with libraries. That's why Google kills minor but worth services.
> developers see more value on extra features.

Yet another post blaming developers when it's the product managers and business development people that decide the direction of the product.
In my first job, management purposely prohibited developers from using really powerful machines because we needed to make the software faster. The problem was it was hard to make the software faster because it was so slow to run, measure, and verify changes.

Those managers were eventually all let go and one of the first things new management did was buy us the most powerful machines they could find and institute performance regression tests that rachetted down. Each change could only keep the existing performance or make it faster. And changes that made it faster set the new watermark. Regressions required management approval.

After performance having been unimproved for a year, it was largely resolved in 6 months.

Since then I’ve been a believer that you give your developers nearly the fastest platform money can buy but then have automated, gatekeeping tests for your lowest target platform, with spot checking to make sure your tests reflect actual user experienced performance on that platform.
The whole point is that it never is trained on a "Senegal" dataset, is it? Why do we always see these errors where white-centric datasets produce white-centric results?

While it would be a symmetric situation a vacuum, we do not live in a vacuum. And acknowledging dataset bias by itself doesn't address the bias meaningfully. In practice, we often treat the bias as an exogenous factor when it is not, moving it outside the scope of our responsibility. But it is very much the product of our work, a reflection of our choices, values, and beliefs about what to prioritize. We can't abdicate our responsibility for it; the stakes are too high.
I didn’t condemn any vaccine... I’m condemning the corruption of the legal process by removing people’s ability to seek damages from a vaccine and I’m condemning mandatory “lockdowns” that violate the rights of innocent people.

The existence of a vaccine should absolutely have no effect on anyone’s ability to do business with anyone else. That should be their decision to make. My life has been ruined from this. I’m blown away that I have to state this in a liberal democracy.
That's not entirely correct. So for example, let's say I ask users about users' name and address, and I ask their permission to store this under GDPR. In a separate table, I store "anonymous" sensitive data, like which how many users in each country have a particular health issue, but it's "anonymous" so I never asked the user's permission to collect it. I am violating GDPR, because I can use my demographic data to identify some specific users who have some specific health conditions, and I never asked permission to do that.
> the UAE will never become poor

But their land might become uninhabitable in a few decades.
Why would a developer be in charge of testing the user experience from the user perspective? Either have good relations with your end users or use QA with properly outfit machines.

Or you should -know- what specs your users are using (this is really not hard) and optimize for that.

You can get chrome to degrade network performance etc. It's not easy to downgrade machine performance tho.
The oil price can go negative then why not this.

The planes are just a cost for Boeing once they are built and they obviously need to them in the air to convince everyone that they are safe and ok to buy.
And plastic does not turn into CO2.
No ones talking about forcing anyone to develop any thing.

We also need to stop talking about individual purchasing decisions as if they represent the broader market. The point is not that there are zero competitors in a monopolised market. It’s that those competitors suffer at the will of the monopoly and cannot bring viable competing products to market. Hence all the competitors outside of the big two in the mobile space having effectively zero market share combined.

Far from forcing people to develop something anti-trust is design to increase competition by opening up the market. Offering more people the opportunity to build the innovative things they want and consumers the ability to choose. As we saw with the results in this happening to MS it works reasonably well.
Consider two models of car. One was sold in large numbers in the early 90s and has proven exceptionally reliable, but obviously it's built to early 90s safety standards, and has been involved in a huge number of fatal accidents with various causes ranging from operator error to scattered manufacturing defects. However, no serious design issues ever surfaced.

The second is a 2020 model, equipped with state of the art safety features. However, its fatal accident rate is the same as the other model (though the absolute number is much smaller), and nearly every single such accident happened in the exact same way: the driver assist system, which cannot be turned off, has a nasty habit of overpowering the driver and steering into oncoming traffic. The NHTSA investigation reveals that this system was implemented hastily, using outsourced labor and cheap non-redundant components, so that the manufacturer could qualify for a tax credit. Specific concerns regarding the implementation were raised by engineers but overruled by management.

I'll take option A, thanks.
I have a desktop PC that I built from cheap components 10 years ago (first generation core i3). It doesn't feel particularly slow at all using most current software.
> Your job isn't to build the smoothest, most optimized, experience for your customers.

That is literally my job! You should have someone like that too, or else you'll end up shipping an Electron app like Discord does.
Parkinson's law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parkinson%27s_law
I agree with you on the processor part, but them using Metal instead of Vulkan while deprecating OpenGL doesn't really help game engine developers who want their code to run on Android, Apple, Windows (and maybe Linux) devices.
You have a right to freedom, it doesn’t matter if that’s computing freedom or any other freedoms.
> You can't have T-cells and antibodies covering every single potential surface area of every cell of every tissue in the body, so there can be places that are infected in the body even though you're totally subclinical

That is exactly the mechanism how non-sterilizing protection by vaccines for respiratory diseases occurs: the cells in mucosa in the upper respiratory tract are infected every time one is exposed to the virus before the antibodies can respond. The mucosal cells shed the virus even if the infection doesn't have to result in symptoms. The viral shedding is however high enough to allow transmission to the unprotected.

Note that at this very moment there are still no reports of a vaccine inducing sterilizing immunity, especially in nasal mucosa.

Up to now, for the vaccines which reported the efficacy, it was by design measured and reported as protection to the symptoms of the disease. The press releases take care to mention "efficacy according to the primary study objective", where just "protection from Covid-19" (as in: from the disease with defined symptoms) was reported. Not the sterilizing immunity. (2)

And, specifically for Covid-19:

https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6...

"Challenge studies in vaccinated primates showed reductions in pathology, symptoms, and viral load in the lower respiratory tract but failed to elicit sterilising immunity in the upper airways." (1)

"These observations suggest that we cannot assume COVID-19 vaccines, even if shown to be effective in reducing severity of disease, will reduce virus transmission to a comparable degree. The notion that COVID-19-vaccine-induced population immunity will allow a return to pre-COVID-19 “normalcy” might be based on illusory assumptions."

"Crucially, it will be important to communicate to policy makers and the general public that first-generation vaccines are only one tool in the overall public health response to COVID-19 and unlikely to be the ultimate solution that many expect."

(Note: All cited here are the papers directly studying Covid-19, which are far more relevant in this case than a wikipedia article about what "herd immunity" were, when and if it exists.)

1) See https://www.nejm.org/doi/10.1056/NEJMoa2024671 and Figure 3 and https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-020-2608-y "Viral gRNA was detected in nose swabs from all animals and no difference was found on any day between vaccinated and control animals."

2) See also my other posts here, e.g. the one which directly cites the Moderna protocol. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25286838
Well, the whole financial system with its zero interest rates and 0% bank deposits looks rediculous compared to insane 50%+ gains by just buy and hodl. No government would tolerate this, especially without the ability to collect taxes.

This is a stalemate. On one hand they cannot call it a Ponzi scheme, which is what it is, because everyone is already in, on the other hand, they want to regulate it to death and tax every single transaction.

So, adoption and other bullshit aside, the internet meme stocks for the poor will be allowed only on coinbase and others "certified" exchanges with direct data feeds right to IRS and other govt agencies. Everything else will be banned. Nice and simple.

It is when, not if. EU will follow.
How much I made as a good Engineer at Facebook
With an Average IQ of 100, British will find a way to prevent apocalypse :) https://www.worlddata.info/iq-by-country.php
Indeed - right after the "ignoring you", it's the phase of "they fight you".

Notice how following the elections, in many states, drugs are now at the "then you win" part.
By a conservative estimate the incident is threat to about 0.5% of the servers. To prevent that, we're talking about pushing code to all of them.