skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'm not an expert and every distributed database is different. My intuition about strapping a consensus library to a database is that you're going to have way higher latency because every operation, writes and reads, must go through consensus. (IIRC some databases like Cockroach mitigate this by having many mini Raft clusters rather than one single one [which IIRC is how rqlite works anyway].)

The advantage you undeniably get is durability/high availability.

> Scalability: Distributed databases can be scaled horizontally by adding more nodes to the network, making handling larger amounts of data and higher volumes of requests easier.

This is only possible if you have a data partitioning scheme, right? But data partitioning is sort of a different problem from consensus/HA, right? If you do the simplest version of a consensus + database implementation, every disk on every instance of the consensus cluster is basically identical. So you don't benefit in that simple approach from adding more disks. It potentially just makes write latency worse unless you do flexible quorums so the quorum size is independent of the number of nodes in the cluster?

> Localized access: With a distributed database, data can be stored closer to the users who need it, which can improve response times and reduce network latency.

This would also only be true if you relax consistency requirements, right? If you need to be at the highest level of consistency you must send reads through consensus too otherwise if you read from the node nearest you it may be out of date.

It would be cool to see some numbers about the difference between latency of reads/writes in sqlitecloud and sqlite on a single node! It would help my intuition anyway.
I attribute it more to open source and free plugins into existing Adobe products like Photoshop.

People are already using these plugins to do inpainting etc with Stable Diffusion. Adobe is trying to provide official support simply to keep up.

To me, the most novel thing is the data source being free of licensing concerns.

But that, too, will be eroded as more models appear based on datasets with straightforward licensing for derived works.

Image stock collections (and prior deals around them) seem more valuable now than they did before all this.
More details on 20:

Announcement: https://inside.java/2023/03/21/the-arrival-of-java-20/

VM improvements: https://tschatzl.github.io/2023/03/14/jdk20-g1-parallel-gc-c...

Non-JEP Improvements: https://nipafx.dev/java-20-guide/
>You can't prevent a bank run if people are going around whatsapp groups of major depositors telling each other to get their money out.

Sure you can. You close the bank when it's insolvent and people are saying to get your money out.

>They absolutely did, even when the rules didn't say they had to?

Yes and my post was to illustrate why. Perhaps that was not as clear as it could be.
Is that not just "adaptive gamut" or whatever it's called — where a display capable of HDR (like the recent miniLED-driven iPad displays) will still be driven with an SDR signal most of the time to save power (as SDR content has a lower contrast ratio, and so is less demanding of peak brightness), but will switch into HDR mode when displaying HDR content (and so "desaturate" — i.e. bring down the black level, lowering the seeming contrast level for darker content — in order to display bright lights as really really white)?

It's maybe strange that compositing HDR + SDR together results in SDR rather than HDR, of course. You might consider that to be the bug.

But I could see that being an intentional choice by Apple (though one that's maybe not thought out in the context of an iPad-as-consumption-device.)

In most situations where you're staring at a composited HDR+SDR signal for a long time — e.g. a video editor editing an HDR video timeline/preview, inside an otherwise-SDR UI — the SDR content exists both before the HDR content is opened, continues to exist after it closes, and takes up the majority of the screen. So you don't want the SDR content changing its gamut just because some HDR content shows up. You want the HDR content to be squashed down to SDR for preview. If you want to check how the video looks in HDR, you'll preview the video fullscreen for a bit. (Or, if you want to always be seeing the video in HDR, then you'll use a dedicated second display that the video is always fullscreen on — as any color-grading software expects you to do.)

The scrubber widget being composited on top of HDR content is an exception to this, of course. That widget should be brought into HDR, not the other way around. But maybe this is a very low-level compositor thing, that's hard for something all the way up at the app level to signal down to to say "hey, don't mind me, we're watching a fullscreen video up here, just make me HDR!"
But AI is their turf!

Google was always a ML company masquerading as a search engine.

I guess that the art of "generating text" is not their kind of AI?
What you describe is the definition of price gouging. A global disaster occurred which caused supply shocks, demand shocks, or both in various industries which led to companies increasing their prices as a response. Society only has so much tolerance for selling to the highest bidder, especially when a product is more of a necessity than a luxury. People still have a fair price in their mind and it is viewed as unethical to charge more than that even if some people are still willing to pay that price.
From Adobe's reddit post[1]:
> We are developing a compensation model for Stock contributors. More info on that when we release

If they can properly compensate the stock contributors based on usage then I think this is a very fair approach.

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/photoshop/comments/11xgft4/discussi...
It took about 20 minutes to get off the waitlist for this (US Based). Initial impressions are that it significantly lags behind the OpenAI offerings.
Creativity (storytelling) is very limited, response lengths are similar, and it does occasionally cite sources.

They did finally get the James Webb telescope facts correct too!

(copied from other thread)
Maybe in theory, in practice anything moved down the list basically is not on a list.
I smell sarcasm, but still, you're not that wrong. The motivation absolutely matters - US Imperialism is much softer, even in it's war crimes, than Russian Imperialism that comes with genocide bundled. In the former case where it hurts is that they try to paint a rosy picture (freedom and democracy etc.) while committing war crimes / invading left and right for business interests, and that hypocrisy is very annoying. At the same time when the Russians invade, they're brutal, war crimes are part of their process. I'd take the former over the latter any day, even ideally neither should be a thing in the 2020s.
This is amazing! I've been following Aaron's short database videos on Twitter and he is the real deal. Accessible, straightforward explanations of complex db stuff. I highly recommend checking this out.
+1

Google track record tells us they have no problem with with blurry ethic lines. They create the software for weapons, track the entire planet and were part of PRISM.

So yes, I tend to think your explanation is most likely.
Yes, they are in fact, "surprisingly accurate."

https://climate.nasa.gov/news/2943/study-confirms-climate-mo...
A region-locked service with a waitlist is hardly "broadly available". I can't even enter.
Nah - 2 years, because that's the amount of time you can juice a new project on a promo packet.
Gmail was so much better than the competition... in fact, it still is.

Bard, on the other hand...
But I have no means of doing that. It's a commodity market, and there are many, many suppliers competing with me, and ruthlessly. As pricing rose, we even saw surges in European imports. The only thing that drove up lumber prices was extraordinary demand. And if that happened for lumber, I'm inclined to believe that was the driving factor in other product prices too.
I think this is supposed to be the last preview version of FFI and the other JEPs from Project Panama, so hopefully we will have them at least but I definitely share a bit of that concern.
> Undeniably, in the beginning, yes. Eventually it would be distributed more evenly as those people spend or die. We already have billionaires and the difference is that, with the current system, their money will not become distributed.

Why would a bitcoin billionaire's money be distributed more than a traditional billionaire's? At least a traditional billionaire will invest his fortune in assets like stocks and thus help fund some innovative companies to protect his fortune from inflation. The bitcoin billionaire can just hold his fortune in bitcoin forever since it's deflationary.

Every time I see a bitcoin backer talk about finance, the things said fly in the face of Econ 101 and basic common sense. I guess I "just don't get it".
Its kind of interesting. Ebikes being popular (I have one).

What it is a reminder of to me is how many bike components are commodities now, and bike companies seem to just be integrators. The brakes, derailleurs, wheels tires are all usually made by other companies (shimano, suntour, et al..) do designing a bike is designing the frame and geometry and specing/ installing the
components.

Frames matter, but most people don't care a lot, and bikes end up being a commodity.

I wonder if electric cars will go the same way.
As a writer, I find ChatGPT can provide some vaguely useful scaffolding. On the other hand, I'm not someone who finds a blank page especially difficult to start writing on--and, in fact, I generally want to start off with something non-formulaic to draw a reader in. Still I can see it being helpful in a way that automated spellchecking and grammar checking is.
I got a 4.5% raise for my annual review last month, hah. I effectively make less than I did a year ago.
Google says its Bard chatbot isn’t a search engine – so what is it?
A primer on public key file formats
Capital = physical

AI = control of how to wield the Capital and defend against intentional damage

What are the obvious limits?
And stayed that way until after the hype died off, murdering their own chance at network effects.
I've formatted ~100 non-scientific books with LaTeX, including poetry and experimental/avant-garde fiction that makes considerable layout demands. I have yet to run into a problem that could not be solved. It isn't always the best tool for the job — for layouts with lots of images that need to be precisely placed with text, something like Affinity Publisher or InDesign would be a shorter path to the right result — but it's an amazing and remarkably painless system. If you are producing "incredibly inelegant bloat code" with it, I'd hazard that something other than LaTeX itself is responsible.
the difference is: you choose which people you interact with, and may never even meet a bot account, if you just stick to people you know
Plus much shorter write-up from Bloom and Sisask: https://arxiv.org/abs/2302.07211
If the metric is important (and it might well be! -- I bet it is) it needs not translate into more profit for amazon.

Say you want to maximize efficiency, and you think revenue per worker is a good proxy. Then you can use the extra resources for:
* charitable donations
* keeping the employees and putting them in an open-source charitable division

I agree that market forces are powerful and can be used to do good things. I disagree that this fact should be used to justify evil behavior and greed

(also, laying A off and hiring B is ok -- they are not, they are reducing the workforce)

(also, the argument is symmetrical. If they had not hired, and were profiting too much, I'd think that almost as greedy and evil -- the difference is the disruption of the life of the person fired)

(also, firing A and giving the money away to some charitable cause is ok)

(also, profit maximization pure and simple is ok, as long as the government has the balls to take a lot of it and redistribute, to keep capitalists from concentrating too much money -- concentration leads to distortions, in the sense that the needs of the ultra rich are prioritized. The point of having a healthy economy is to have people in general live more and better lives.)
Discovery of a single tile that tiles the plane only aperiodically
Let's see if we can get the front page tiled in all whales
Our Seventieth-Anniversary Issue
Iceland has like 300k people; it's a rounding error with regards to European population. It's like trusting Rhode Island as a barometer for the US, it just doesn't follow.
Thanks for the anecdote and your service. Sometimes there are situations where everyone is wrong. I just don't know what the answer is here.
Ask HN: Long App Store review times?
I submitted an update for our app one week ago and it's still waiting for review.

Anyone else experiencing something similar?

No major update or anything like it. Just a small feature.
Show HN: DevScreen Recruit – a better software engineering interview
Hello HN!

I want to share DevScreen (https://devscreen.io/). We’ve been iterating on DevScreen for a few years now with the goal of delivering an awesome interview process for both candidates and the company. We achieve this by using realistic job-based tests and allowing the candidate to use their own editor - not a whiteboard or unfamiliar online code editor.

Many of the existing products in this space just bring the same old whiteboard coding puzzles to the web, without solving the core problem: those tests are not a good indicator of performance. This is a waste of time for the candidate and a missed opportunity for the company. All it tests is the candidate’s ability to read ‘Cracking the Coding Interview’ and work well under the pressure of being watched. Neither are particularly important attributes of an engineer and result in companies often missing great candidates or hiring sub-par engineers.

Today, DevScreen supports three different test types: code reviews, bug fixes, and projects. To help prevent the challenges from being made public, we spin up a new private Github repository for each test and add the candidate. Once they’re finished, they are automatically removed from the Github repo and we review their submission (or the company reviews the submission themselves).

We have a library of tests in place for various different skillsets. There are short, open-ended tests that can be done in any language or framework, and there are very specific tests that assess a candidate’s abilities in, say, React and TypeScript only. We lean towards open-ended tests ourselves, but we’ve found that companies who are hiring contractors like to test very specific skills only.

There’s a demo video on the homepage, but if there are any parts you want to see that aren’t included in the demo just let me know here or email darragh[at]devscreen.io and I’d be happy to answer any questions or go more in-depth on the product. This is our second “show HN” and we’ve iterated on the product a lot based the feedback we received last year, culminating in this version 2.0.

Please check it out and let us know your thoughts!
The article appears to be written by taking key sentences out of the podcast transcript, and then doing a very light edit only to vaguely connect the sentences together.

In the actual podcast they mention the company by name multiple times. I think including the company name just got missed in the edit
C'mon, we're not talking about some startup here. Google is a global mega-corp, if they really wanted they could launch every single product globally, no matter if physical or not.
Hmm, I feel like I should have known this! Nice clear explanation.
> a base64 string representing a compressed image

Parent explained that the base64 encoding held compressed data.
Well, I just watched a video about a can opener. And while the start was a little slow, I ended up enjoying this very much—and I subscribed to the channel. Thanks.
"Those who thought it was free money are now discovering that they have to pay for it retrospectively." -Nassim Taleb
The government doesn't want to be responsible for making all the loans banks do. It's not easy to do and if the government makes bad ones and loses money people will complain.
In my opinion, iterating ChatGPT and the like isn't going to get us anywhere, at least in terms of general AI. It's an interesting trick that might have some uses, but iterating it isn't going to lead to more understanding. It's effectively an extensively well-read and quick-thinking bullshitter. It's knows a lot of words and sentences, it can put them together in ways that sound creative or intelligent, but it doesn't understand anything at all about what it's actually saying. Right now, I see it as a dead end.

I'd rather more effort was going into parsing language into the underlying concepts, making connections between them, and looking for new understanding in how those concepts might fit together in new ways or finding new ways of using that underlying understanding to solve problems. Basically what people, do, but better.
I like the eye trace point. This rule seems to be ignored by the indie masses.
You could use ChatGPT to filter the posts for you, and then make a "I used ChatGPT to filter ChatGPT spam!" post to HN (which would get filtered)
Russian developers blocked from contributing to FOSS tools
They're setting up a regulatory fight.
Hello, my friend. Your question has given me pause for thought on the subject of achieving desired results.

If we consider the desired outcome of a particular thing, then failure to achieve that outcome cannot be considered acceptable. However, we must allow for a sufficiency of time wherein the thing will progress and improve before coming to a conclusion.

On the other hand, if we contemplate the impact of a thing on its intended audience, then it must meet their expectations and desires to be deemed as effective. It is important to note that the relevance of a thing to its observers may depend on various factors such as timing and perspective.

Ultimately, effectiveness is determined by the desired outcome and the audience it serves. We must assess the purpose of the thing and its surroundings to determine its success or failure. It is similar to crafting a powerful message - we must consider the intended recipients and create a message that resonates with them.
Yes.

AWS https://aws.amazon.com/architecture/icons/

GCP https://cloud.google.com/icons

Azure https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/architecture/icons/

OCI https://docs.oracle.com/en-us/iaas/Content/General/Reference...
"Bard isn’t currently supported in your country. Stay tuned!"

Can't wait to ask "Bard" what's the rationale to "not support" a service like this based on my country..

These "global companies" are so global regarding their revenue and tax schemes, but when something is different than the "business as usual" they turn into hyper local shops. It's just an observation, I'm not really that mad and desperate to try their "chat-bot" since I'm sure it will be as exciting as eating cardboard.
What are you trying to say here? Russia is intentionally kidnapping children and murdering innocent non-combatants in a campaign of terror to break the spirit of Ukraine. They're launching cruise missiles into apartments and hospitals. They told their own soldiers that the Ukrainian people wanted Russian occupation so badly that their army sent riot police instead of regular army when they made their first push toward Kyiv. The US made a lot of mistakes but the soldiers on the ground did the best they could to not harm people. In the invasion of Ukraine murder of noncombatants is so routine that it's a matter of course to mention it.

It's disingenuous to claim that the US and Russia are exactly the same and that they both fought for the same things in both wars. The war in Ukraine is a land grab for Putin to expand his power.
Microsoft is just licensing their technology from OpenAI, which is still a small company, if not still a startup.
> You close the bank when it's insolvent and people are saying to get your money out.

How does this materially differ from what happened? Is there a federal power to temporarily close banks? Doesn't the run immediately continue when reopened?
The party in the House always threatens to not raise the debt ceiling if the POTUS is of a different party. It has been like this for decades.
Show HN: Old SGI demos running in the browser
Some Silicon Graphics demos from the 1980s, re-compiled for the web using Emscripten and SDL2. This is the original C source compiled to WASM. Primitive by today's graphics, but these were the first examples of interactive 3D at the time.
Is Jensen voice AI generated at current GTC 2023?
Or I'm tripping
> Bard isn’t currently supported in your country. Stay tuned!

Sigh. Google never learns.

By the time they add support for using this in my country, there's no reason for me to use it anymore as competitors have already swept in.

It's the same playbook with every US-only launch:

1. get everybody hyped up

2. make it accessible to only a minor subset of people but advertise it as a "launch" or "open beta" or whatever

3. tell the rest of the world that "lol, by "avialable" we mean US-only" or "Open means "open for people with US IP addresses only"" etc.

4. Wait till competitors have launched global-from-the-start alternatives

5. Open up the service globally

6. ...

7. Shut down the service because there's no uptake
(surprised_pikachu.jpg)

Rinse and repeat.

Self inflicted wounds and all that..
If we compare this to crypto mining, most mining is done by big players with datacenters.

But it's still decentralized, and decentralization drives competition in a way that traditional B2B contracts cannot. The fact that anyone on the planet who can afford a GPU or an ASIC can be a competitor is significant.

For example, an RX 6800 will generate ~$0.34 per day minus electricity costs if you mine with it. That's the true value of that card on a global decentralized market. But renting a similar cloud GPU will cost about $0.30 per hour. 95% of that cost could be eliminated with a decentralized market.
Have you tried chatgpt with gpt 4 yet? my limited experience is that it is much better than 3.5. Trying to avoid the excessive hype but I was pretty impressed.
Decap CMS: Rebranded Netlify CMS
Cool! Now we need this for Postgres.
If you're self publishing (like I was), your publisher is probably Amazon, and they take a PDF, which is the output of weasyprint.

I haven't looked at wider distribution, but I believe most of the print on demand publishers accept a PDF file. I think some (all?) also take InDesign, which is Adobe's thing.
Because interest rates went up.

When money was free they overhired. Now that's it's expensive they have to unwind.
I have wondered if it is cheaper to film a bunch, edit together enough shots that are super short but not complete shit, and call it a day.

I can't stand most modern movies because of the dramatically decreased average shot length. I just can't even watch most of them.
Thanks for the guidelines link.
I was genuinely not aware of guidelines in the comment section.
Financial advisors for tech employees and founders
We help tech employees and founders find financial advisors who truly understand them.
I'm not sure why either but this is also the case for Colab Pro here in Norway. They refuse to take my money.

My suspicion is some sort of US export embargo on AI or something like that.