skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Google buying Youtube was the only outcome where Youtube would survive, at least at it was. The same way Napster wouldn't have survived as it was.

We're in agreement here, but it's I think a broader discussion on how media companies make money and where we stand as consumer, in particular how we feel about RIAA/MPAA.

I still think Google is doing a good job, better than most of us would have predicted, but I personally would have preferred a world where Youtube was viable on its own. Looking at Spofify for instance.

> FB buying Instagram

Even the regulating agencies that let the deal pass are looking back at it as a wrong decision.

I personally can't find any single meaningful
aspect where we benefit from FB owning Instagram.

I partially fault Instagram for having a shitty business plan aimed at being acquired from the start, and kinda wish they had to make the hard decisions at the end instead of selling the whole audience to the worst company to handle it.
>Agriculture competes with urbanization and it will always lose, as it should, because it's not an inherently superior or moral use of land

Easy for you to say when you have a full stomach. See what happened in countries that disregard their farmers or agricultural sectors. Food price soared, and social unrest set in leading to crime, anarchy and governments collapsing.

People need to eat, simple. Hungry people will eventually turn to crime to survive, including the people paid form your taxes to protect you (police, military, etc)

Being agriculturally self sufficient is essential for any country.
Author here: yes, you can use Debezium without Flink, via Kafka Connect. Alternatively, if you're not using Kafka but Kinesis, Apache Pulsar, etc., via Debezium Server (Discussing the different options on this slide: https://speakerdeck.com/gunnarmorling/change-data-streaming-...).
How I combined ChatGPT and SQL to analyze big datasets
Hey everyone!

I wanted to share my recent project, where I've combined ChatGPT and SQL to make big dataset analysis more accessible and user-friendly. While ChatGPT is an incredible tool, it does have limitations when it comes to analyzing large datasets.

Here's a more technical overview of how the system works:

1. Users upload their dataset in a CSV format.

2. The system automatically detects the data types and generates an SQL database, ensuring proper data storage and structure.

3. Users can then ask questions or provide prompts in natural language.

4. ChatGPT processes the prompt and generates an SQL query, adhering to the necessary rules and syntax for a specific RDBMS (e.g., MySQL).

5. The query is executed against the SQL database, and the desired stats/data is retrieved and displayed in a user-friendly format.

Here's the project, https://2stats.chat

Feel free to ask any questions or share your thoughts on this project. I'd love to hear your feedback and suggestions on how to improve the system further!
They do, the catch is that 250k of equity has a high chance of ending up as $0
Also we have pretty solid ideas about why some arbitrary rules regarding eating pork/shellfish came about.
This seems like an oddly woman-hostile take that's only very tangentially related to the study.
Let them eat datacentres indeed.

The counterpoint here is what gross tonnage per annum does the population of the Netherlands consume .. and in the event of supply chain disruptions, should (say) NATO hiccup, to what degree are they self sufficient?

Farming and urban land uses aren't a straight either|or, they're a complex need both.
This is because the private sector can't (for the most part) coerce you to deal with them. If the government can keep a lid on external costs, the private sector has to create value people want or they lose money and go away.

The government can force you to give them your money and obey their laws. This is what makes them uniquely powerful and dangerous. In a democracy they do have to get your vote once in a while, but that's within a framework they mostly create and police, with extremely high barriers to entry and very little reward for doing "the right thing".

It baffles and saddens me that otherwise thinking people can be so eager to hand power and authority to the government. I understand that -- after a lot of thought and reading and with much reluctance -- one could conclude that the government should be given a particular power because the alternatives are worse.
My brain instantly went to function currying instead of the food. Any possible application? Lol
I felt your pain. I live in Victoria and also make $100k but can't afford much more than a 1 bed without destroying our savings goals. Unfortunately my current job is hybrid and they won't let me go full remote. We plan to leave as soon as I find a new opportunity - despite loving living here by every other metric.
Most of the criticism of those policies is false or misleading. You always need to be careful to research the actual policy instead of the media soundbite as the two usually diverge quite a bit.

There are perverse incentives at work. When the EU does something right the national politicians usually take credit (when they convert a EU directive to local law), and when a national politician is struggling with a local problem, often of their own creation, they will blame the EU. It was generally perceived as harmless to use the EU as the scapegoat, but since Brexit showed there are real harms some of the politicians have dialed it back. Not all though.

Which is not to say the EU does nothing wrong, but I find the standard of policymaking at the EU level usually exceeds that at the local level.
What if transformer models are the totally wrong approach?

Frankly, I say "so what?" For this to be "wrong" implies that the only useful outcome is AGI. I posit that that is clearly not the case. Current approaches are obviously useful and create value. It's like trying to invent television and getting radio instead. OK, fine, you still got something useful, so what are you complaining about? And the other will still come in time.

What if we're about to spend ten years iterating on a fancy parlor trick?

If it keeps getting better at doing things that people find useful, then that's fine.

We might invent something that almost seems like AGI but really it's just calling a bunch of APIs invented (and maintained) by humans.

Not really relevant, IMO. If the thing we invent behaves in ways that can be classified as showing intelligent behavior, then it's intelligent. If it reaches the bar that most people are willing to say "that's general intelligence", then it doesn't actually matter how it works. OK, to be fair there are senses in which it matters (getting into things like explainability, alignment, etc. yadda, yadda) but in terms of saying "is this intelligent or not?" we don't really have to know or care about the inner workings. I mean, we consider other humans intelligent (well, sometimes) and we don't know all the details of how human intelligence works either.
Same for the Netherlands
This may be true in theory, but we are seeing rather different development in the West.
1) power seems to have a tendency to concentrate, which ultimately leads to corporate oligarchy.
2) most markets have high barrier to entry which breaks the alignment of market and interests
3) the concept of rational markets is not as clear cut as it is often perceived, and most studies have failed to incorporate findings from related to bounded rationality

However, the government's incentive is to stay in power and not let that happen. The tool that government has is regulation.
The concepts "personal" and "confined to bulky, expensive tracks" don't seem terribly compatible.
XUL was one thing that prevented me from using Firefox back in the day, as my PC was slow and whole UI just lagged, as compared to native Windows applications. That's why my main browser then was Opera. Funny enough, Electron now has similar issues with application menus, as they have some lag and works a bit different (compared to native implementation) than one might expect when using keyboard navigation.
Its about the speed and not so much the height
https://what-if.xkcd.com/58/
http://cs231n.stanford.edu/

cs231n is still a really solid course, despite the more recent lecture videos not being publicly available.
> There are plenty of cities in Germany with very cheap rent, where apartment buildings get torn down because they're vacant.

There are plenty of cities in Finland like this too.

But the problem is that the jobs aren't there. I could buy a huge house with a big yard from one of those cities, but then my commute would be over 300km every day. Not really worth it.

Or I would have to quit my job and start working in the local paper factory or sawmill.
I’m not sure what you mean by her not being an elected representative. She was a Swedish member of parliament for a long time, not just one term. The tradition in Sweden is that ministers are taken from among the ranks of the ruling party’s MPs, even though exceptions sometimes are made.
If so, lottery winners are still useful for disentangling the effect that presumably comes from the wealth itself. Yes it's not entirely random who wins (not all play the lottery, not all play it equally much), but it's a lot more random than other ways to wealth.
> If it doesn't collapse, then society may collapse?

But there are plenty very cheap areas to buy houses or rent. Sure, many people don't want to live there, that's why it's cheap today. But it is a possibility nonetheless, one that is better than collapsing society.

I'm always honestly confused why today it is seen as impossible to move to a cheap area? People have been doing this for generations (centuries?). It's never the most fun solution, but it is a solution.

When I was in my 20s I wanted to live in Manhattan more than anything in the world. But I was never able to make it happen, it was too crazy expensive even back then. Eventually I gave up on that dream and moved to a place that was cheap and was able to buy a house no problem. It's no Manhattan, but it is home and has been a good place to live for decades now. In hindsight it was a great decision to move away and buy a home in a cheap area instead of banging my head against the impossible real estate market of NYC.

It's always an option to move to a cheaper location!
The datacenters are mostly air cooled but also use massive amounts of water when it gets warmer. Exactly during the times that f the year when citizens and farmers are called upon to use less water. How much? Independent studies showed up to 4 times more then Microsoft claimed. Furthermore the water they put back in the local lakes contains some unknown kind of chemical. So yeah I get why locals and farmers might be upset. https://www.rtlnieuws.nl/tech/artikel/5326566/datacenter-mic...
For 3 letter intelligence agencies I think it was 10 year statute of limitations... This may have changed
This is a negotiating position (!) by the EU Parliament, not a finished regulation or decree.

Regarding the actual content: If adopted as proposed (which is unlikely), it would force owners of the 30% of least energy efficient houses (compared to the national, not EU-wide, housing stock) to upgrade their houses to come in line with the next higher energy efficiency class – by 2033, so ten years from now.

I own several buildings, both quite old (1960s), as well as brand new (net-positive energy). Improving an existing building in the worst energy efficiency class to come in line with the proposed standards is in most cases an expense in the low five figures, which (at least in Germany) will be subsidized with up to 50% of the costs. Lower energy consumption will in most cases pay for the renovation within a few years. Many of the measures (i.e. new heating source and radiators, new windows) would have to be done on those houses anyway, because the old systems reach their end of life.

So what are people complaining about, exactly?
For what it's worth, the software industry is also a shitshow.
I moved from the UK to Finland, and while the overall process is similar there are some niggles.

Generally you'd have a similar amount of time off here, 4-5 weeks, and it would run April-April as you said for your own.

The biggest difference is that you must take two consecutive weeks at least once a year.

That said there are pluses I think I'm allowed to stay home to care for a sick child 11 days a year, paid. That's a nice bonus, and it has been useful as a parent. When our child was a baby, or toddler, sickness mostly meant that he stayed asleep all day and was lethargic and quiet. Now he's older there's no chance that I'd be able to work from home and take care of him, so those days come in useful. (Helps that I get my 11 days, and my wife gets a similar amount too.)

Otherwise it feels like most Finnish people take a month off in the summer, to the extent that a lot of shops/places in the city close down due to no staff, so there's often a bit of negotiation within teams about who can be away, to make sure there is cover. But it feels pretty relaxed and friendly.
Debezium relies on Kafka Connect's `OffsetBackingStore` contract [1] for persisting and restoring offset positions (that's subject to abstraction from Connect's SPIs at some point). While acknowledged LSNs are committed to the source DB in case of Postgres indeed, the offset store is still needed in most cases, e.g. for persisting other information, e.g. the fact whether or not an initial snapshot has happened yet.

> I don’t want to manage that in data producers anymore.

Could you elaborate a bit? The outbox pattern typically _is_ implemented in source applications, so I'm curious what alternative you have in mind? Stream processing e.g. with Flink actually can be an alternative, creating external data representations after the fact, though challenges arise e.g. in terms of transactional consistency.

[1] https://debezium.io/documentation/reference/stable/developme...
It has always annoyed me that "region settings" don't just take into account the realities of the situation; they're OBVIOUSLY designed to prevent people in "rich" countries from buying media designated for "poor" countries in a form of market segmentation; but that should mean the "rich media" should just work in all devices.

Of course now things like the players are so cheap you can just buy multiple if you want to bypass region encoding on DVDs, for example.

I wonder if off-brand ink would have just completely ignored the region thingy.
Japan is currently suffering from an egg shortage, thanks to the avian flu epidemic.
I have a project on my backlog to build "Google Reader" how it might have looked today, but Google is very slow with their Material Design 3 implementation for Web.
If a branch falls in the forest and there is no-one there to hear it, does it make a sound?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/If_a_tree_falls_in_a_forest#:~....

"... majority view of the quantum mechanics community then and arguably to this day is that existence in the absence of an observer is at best a conjecture"
60 percent of dutch meat is exported, we can do with a whole lot less.
Or fired.
That would make me rethink my position.
The obvious explanation to me is that having children costs money, and having children is a big disadvantage for many effective money-making enterprises.
What is you definition of the word “understanding” in this context?

The way you put it, my guess is that LLMs need to start paying taxes and be driven to court for FUD, lies or damages.
Oh, I remember reading this (Estonian translation) as a teenager. First time it dawned to me that the world of computers can actually be kind of scary or even dangerous, and yet so compelling... Nice reminder, thanks!

I guess I will do some procrastination reading @CliffStoll's posts on HN right now.
Here, we can set Lisp aside and take grandparent comment's definition of syntax to be concrete, character-level syntax.

Python concrete syntax is harder to manipulate programmatically compared to Javascript concrete syntax.

For instance, to insert one statement into another, we need to traverse the lines of that syntax and add the right amount of indentation. We can't just plant the syntax into the desired spot and be done with it.
I often feel the same - the thing that surprises me the most about American time off is people who say they're allowed XX days of sickness a year.

Sure if you're sick you shouldn't work, and on average most people are probably healthy enough that they lose 1-3 days a year, maybe a few people lose a week or two, but it just seems wrong that somebody could be fired for being too sick, or be forced to work because they've used their allowance.

In the UK I've been off sick for several months at one point in my career, and while I started to lose money pretty quickly at least I knew that I'd not get fired, and would/could return happily.

(Where I live now I'm allowed around 11 days, paid, to stay home to take care of a sick child. That's a pretty nice bonus, though I remember last year I was trying to count the days up to see how close we were .. covid must have used a week, twice, and then the standard child-sickness that go in waves at daycare/preschool/school.)
In basically all cases course material is developed by professors and TAs, though the current lecturer might have adapted from several years of previous work. Who owns the IP exactly is tricky (likely the university has at least an equal stake?), but I expect that if lectures are recorded, but not open-access then it's the lecturer's decision. It might be copyright issues, re-use of someone else's slides, not wanting to let students see past years' work, etc.

For example, I work at ETH and we have a large internal video archive of lectures (as do many universities pre- and post-covid), but some lecturers choose to post material on YouTube too. It's not a blanket yes/no policy at the institutional level, as far as I'm aware.
My personal anecdote is that I had an ex-SpaceX engineer as a VP of Engineering for a startup I worked for. And he was great. He is a nice guy, super friendly, very knowledgeable, solid manager, always bringing people into the fold, and technically very talented.

The company he was the VP of Engineering for was an indoor vertical farming startup (which is failing), and he moved onto a new venture in the climate space.
The VC model is invest in a bunch of companies, with the idea that one goes to the moon and the rest fail. One success pays for a lot of failures.

So if you personally see a lot of failures, that doesn’t mean the VC model is failing. Although most VC funds lose money (there’s a power law for their returns too!)

Paul Graham wrote a scathing summary of VCs, and one reason for YC is to be more honest and fair (YC still aims for capitalist gains, they just play the game differently). http://paulgraham.com/venturecapital.html He also wrote that it is near impossible to pick investment winners (which is what VCs are “supposed” to do).
Bingo.

I moved to a lower tax country and my income almost doubled (no more 50% Swedish tax). Sweden is a bad deal high earners.
Or, if you already have a dot, remove it.

i.e. Gmail treats

example@gmail.com

the same as

exam.ple@gmail.com

or

ex.amp.le@gmail.com
Ask HN: Resources to Understand Vector Databases
Hi HN,

I've been trying to experiment with QA systems based on OpenAI APIs recently, and there are a bunch of new topics which I am quite uninformed about.

One such topic is Vector databases. I know of FAISS, Pinecone, Vector extension for PG, etc. However, the landscape seems quite bewildering to me presently, and most of the documentation is not helping me grasp the essence of this technology.

What'd be some good resources to learn Vector Databases from multiple perspectives? I'm looking for how-tos, tutorials, intuitive explanations and references - anything that helps me understand these things better.
Maybe that’s just setting a low bar.

Dutch agriculture is anything but a bucolic idyl, instead consisting of very large industrial operations owned by an ever decreasing number of companies that produce vast amounts of food for export using imported feed and plowing the manure that remains, truly stupendous amounts, into the soil thereby rendering it effectively dead.

Large tracts of the province of Drente, formerly poor and backward and hence, in a way, pretty, have been taken over by lily plantations (yes, the flower) that are absolutely drenched in pesticides.

Most food crops are grown in enormous greenhouses that take monstrous amounts of energy to heat and that are lit up 24 hours a day to increase yields, making it difficult for people in surrounding villages to sleep. They are automated as much as possible and the work that can not be automated is done by underpaid immigrant workers living in horrible conditions.

So, yes, Dutch agriculture has “as good or better yields”, but it’s still ecologically disastrous.
The difference in Sweden is that they gave out ridiculously long loans for housing. Like 60-100 years. The kind that was never meant to be paid back.
I think your last sentence hits the nail.

We have to remember that "we" have selected the best of bad options. This system is not good and will get worse by time. People have to remember that we must not let power accumulate to specific groups, be it private or public sector. Unfortunately the tendency seems to be towards the opposite of what is "good" for average individuals. If government has too much power it cannot be held accountable, and the interests have disaligned.
The farmers are mostly giant moaning hypocrites. They’re the cause of the nitrogen crisis.
> they’d be able to make 200,000 semis a year

But 0 other cars.

> it could most certainly make a ton of sense compared to diesel for consumers

Not in most cases when you factor in reduced cargo load due to the 10,000 pound battery and recharging time. You need megawatt charging to get charging time to less than an hour. You won't be able to charge many at the same time with that much current draw. You might even have to warn the power company that you are going to start charging one.

https://youtu.be/o3dCDNIRM34?t=567

Tesla has been very reluctant to reveal how much the truck can haul but they seem to have accidentally revealed when bragging about how fast the truck can go up hill in the video timestamp I linked to. Tesla said that a truck carrying only 11 jersey barriers on a flat bed weighs 82,000 pounds. This means that the truck is incredibly heavy.
"What is wealth? How do you define it?" I think I've done myself an injury from rolling my eyes too hard. Tax departments have this incredibly hard question covered, for some time now
I think part reason HP had trouble solving this case is the fact that most skilled people have decent ethics, and refuse to work for Vito Corleone [ink edition].
Hehe... Really
So, wait a minute I get that everybody can choose a laptop. But if this holding you back, you can a Linux vm or a Linux distro.
No, it's mostly about ammonia from lifestock.

The "nitrogen" problem is about NO2, NO3 and NH3, where most of the NO is from transport and industry, but the NH3 is from bio industry.

Huge factory-like pig and poultry farms. The ammonia gets in the air, spreads and hugely enriches the soil of nature that can't handle that. And way too much manure that is spread out over grass land and runs off into surface water and groundwater.

We import a lot of animal feed and artificial fertilizer, then the N in those ends up in our nature.
As with much of film making, Dogme defined a set of rules which were a departure point, and film makers went about finding ways to break them. Some of Harmony Korine’s most important films like Gummo were influenced by Dogme but are not pure Dogme 95 films. Films that do abide by most of the rules, like Von Trier’s The Idiots are almost unwatchable - and that film in particular would be considered porn in the US. Those films are like a reference implementation in the software world.
In algculture setting, it is far easier to record sound than testing for chemical.
Twitter: Each like gets a 30x boost, each retweet a 20x