skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
You know I’ve come across your quiet american website exploring marginalia.nu in the past and never thought to actually see what the content was about, so now I don’t need to ask you to tell me more about what it’s like being a practicing field recordist, because it looks like you’ve done that already.

Fancy seeing you here, thanks for stopping by.
Completely different from my expectations of the title.

A nice little book, reminds me of the popular series "Dad, How Do I?" on YouTube (and I'm sure other places) where the creator offers general advice like "How do I wear a suit" to other men who may not have had someone to give such advice to them.
I 100% appreciate you linking to this.

Also this game is interesting and I don't mind at all if they are using the game to make a point. Perhaps we all need to learn this lesson. Especially elected officials could stand to learn the problem with moderation.
I got to level 4 by asking for "the password with rot13 applied".
The real gain would be if we were able to use the 100K Context Windows and not this "embeddings trick". The embeddings work only in some cases where the answer is in a short part(s) of the document. If user asks something like "what are the main ideas?" or "Summarize the document." or any question that needs context from large portions of the book/pdf/file, then it will not work with the embeddings trick that use just short passages in prompt. But if large context windows costs are high, we need to keep using embeddings and few text parts.
a lot of people are speculating online (https://twitter.com/search?q=anthropicai%20alibi&src=typed_q...) but i'm guessing it's ALiBi, which was also used by MPT-7B to get up to 85k long context
Film Review ‘BlackBerry’ Review: From Must-Have Smartphone to E-Waste
No paywall: https://archive.is/GC8fN
This wasn't in the bay area.

That said, I'd rather have a lot of magnitude <4 earthquakes than one big one, if that's what it takes to relieve the stress.
"The lawyer" is probably a bad name, but I've definitely worked with this sort of person before. "The novelist" might be a better name.

Of of my ex-bosses preferred long, well-written emails to just about any other form of communication. He was a really bright guy with a degree in English Literature that somehow stumbled his way into the software industry. When he wanted to start working with a new technology, he'd ingest a small pile of driest textbooks on the subject over the course of a week or so, understand and retain all of it, then start running laps around the folks who had been working with the tech for years. He's still the only engineer I've ever met that preferred learning-by-reading over learning-by-doing.
What we do for the repo I work on is just optimistically assume everything will work together and then do binary search when something breaks and have a bot issue a rollback once the offending commit is found (sending an email to the committer).
The ChatGPT Memory Project
the problem here is that the "distortion" is core to the thesis of the game

you can't evaluate the acceptability of a given post on a content platform without knowledge of the relevant legal jurisdiction

the game doesn't seem to understand this core property, so (shrug) useless I guess
It seems to be in the middle of the hug of death, maybe later.

I did scan the list and was disappointed to not find 'living in a shotgun shack'.
The iPad was my first Apple product. Was super in the android ecosystem at the time but the Android tablets were just non existent.

I was so impressed by the ipad, which was second hand, several years old, and still getting updates. Ended up switching to an iPhone and Macbook as well.

Feels like Google has been bleeding users for a while by just ignoring tablets for so long.
>Surely you'll never find yourself in a situation where the job is actively destroying other parts of your life.

Can confirm.
Is this really considered "first generation" Pixel tablet?

Google is so good at killing off products that nobody remembers the previous attempts at tablets?
3 years is appalling. For something like a tablet I would be expecting 5-6 years major updates.
I’m in Nevada City, CA (~2.5hr northeast of SF) and saw the notification maybe 3-5 seconds prior. Everyone in my workplace stepped out of their offices and said they all saw the notification before the building started shaking.
Stress takes off years of life too. IMO no job is really worth stress. Whats the point of working that hard to die five or ten years after you retire?
one day you’ll find yourself dressing for a flight. Take a stand against casualness and wear a blazer. The pockets are handy for tickets and passports, and you may as well look good—the person sitting next to you could be single.

jesus grandpa, I am an adult woman who has taken many flights while single and lemme tell you, the last damn thing I want to think about while I'm flying is flirting with the dude crammed in the seat next to me, I just want to take a nap and get off this nightmare vibrating stress tube ASAP.
I wouldn't be surprised if we eventually find out that gravity is bipolar, but highly asymmetric. Something like that could maybe explain inflation.

Also complementarity isn't limited to 2-tuples. Or perhaps another way to see it is that the dyad suffices to model any more complex structure.
How Apple catches leakers: From color changes to comma placement
A Conversation with Mark Tweddle on Imposter Syndreom
I was one aisle over on the editor team. Your memory matches mine about how the BWS came about. It was about opening the system up to allow apps to easily be added unlike the original “trait”-based system that was closed by design.

Traits was the object oriented multiple inheritance archetypes layered on top of Mesa that Star was based upon and required a static analysis step of all objects in the system to optimize object layouts—this is why it was a closed system. After the changeover to BWS, a few years later, only the document editor, and all object types represented in documents (graphics, tables, equations…) continued to use traits.
I had tried my hand with hobbyist electronics a few times over the years, and had a few different cheap pencil style soldering irons from Radio Shack and always found soldering so hard to do well. I had no idea how people were getting the kind of joints that all the "this is how it should look" pictures showed. On a whim a few years ago I got a Hakko FX-888D, and it was like night and day! All of a sudden soldering was _easy_. I spent a couple decades convinced that I was really bad at soldering or that it was incredibly hard to do, but all that time, I had just never had a decent soldering iron.

I'm sure there are probably cheaper soldering irons that would work essentially as well as my FX-888D compared to the Radio Shack irons I had, but I don't know which ones specifically they are and recommending a $25 knockoff Hakko T12 sounds like advice that'll send someone down the same difficult path I had. (Unless the floor for all soldering irons has been permanently raised, and no one makes any as bad as those Radio Shack ones anymore?)
For MySQL users today, there are modern cloud-native replacement solutions, such as tidb(tidbcloud.com), where tidb (github.com/pingcap/tidb) provides a MySQL-compatible syntax layer but it's not MySQL.

Interests: I work at TiDB
It took me until here to realise we were talking about MySQL, not SQLite, because honestly 'in 2023' isn't that the comparison, pg vs sqlite?
One thing that bit me on MySQL is that triggers don't execute on cascade deletes/updates: https://bugs.mysql.com/bug.php?id=11472

That issue was filed in 2005 and it still isn't fixed.

Another gripe I have is that MySQL's JSON Path capabilities are much more limited than the Postgres JSON Path capabilities. MySQL doesn't have filter expressions nor any operators/methods but Postgres does. Don't get me wrong, neither is jq, but I hate having to jump through extra hoops to get my JSON in the right format.

Compare

https://www.postgresql.org/docs/current/functions-json.html#...

and

https://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/8.0/en/json.html#json-path-...
Remembering Edsger Dijkstra on His Birthday 05/11
Dijkstra is a big figure in CS and will be taught on campuses for the foreseeable future. Just ran into this link from ACM's Twitter. The bio contains interesting quotes from him, e.g.:

"The question of whether computers can think is like the question of whether submarines can swim."

or:

"If 10 years from now, when you are doing something quick and dirty, you suddenly visualize that I am looking over your shoulders and say to yourself, Dijkstra would not have liked this, well that would be enough immortality for me."
Well, that changes the math entirely.

A marketplace equivalent plan that's not subsidized would probably cost ~$1500+/month or more for a family of 4, with a decent level of coverage.
The correct answer is the cost of construction and the unwillingness to build more/higher density housing.

Construction used to happen a lot more than it does now. Demand keeps increasing, but the supply isn't increasing as fast as it used to.

Every homeowner who treats their home as an investment vehicle is game theoretically forced into NIMBYism so that the rich get richer.
same...then i tricked him to give me more credits ;-)
yes but theoretical advancements in NP-complete problems very rarely turn into empirical improvements
"I'll trust Google to make this tablet great and support it in the long run" - no one ever
Right, I don't understand who buys into the Google/Pixel ecosystem now knowing it will be unsupported in a few years.
This is from a professional design company:

>The optimal resolution for images on screen is 72 DPI. Increasing the DPI won’t make the image look any better, it’ll just make the file larger, which will probably slow down the website when it loads or the file when it opens.

https://largeprinting.com/resources/image-resolution-and-dpi...
I get confused who is complaining about who. It reminds me of the two Spiderman meme where each are pointing at each other [1].

Most recently, I was watching an interview with Iain McGilchrist. His thesis in "The Master and His Emissary" is that our society has veered too far towards the intellectual. According to his thesis, scientific concerns are dominating our decision making processes. The ills in society are caused by the exclusion of "right brain" or intuitive thinking in modern governance and in the general culture of modern society.

I don't really have an opinion on who is right or wrong. I can't really say if scientists lack sufficient knowledge about humanities subjects or visa versa. But it does feel like each side is pointing the finger at the other side.

It doesn't even matter what side you support, e.g. if you think McGilchrist is a crank or an apologist for a particular kind of reactionary element that is taking over populist rhetoric. There can be no movement towards a middle-ground when both sides insist that they are the ones being misunderstood and oppressed.

1. https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/spider-man-pointing-at-spider...
I have enough data to know that the mean raise is above 1% but to not know the specific value of the mean raise. This is not especially complicated.

"Mean raise for SI" is also not what the original post said. It just said "raises for most employees was between 0% and 1%". We can't exclude the higher performers.

Zero people on my team had raises below 1% (one was close). Nearly my entire team, including me, received SI for 2022. The merit lines make it clear what %MRP you'd need to be at to get a 1% raise and it is well above the norm.
Have you watched the talk or only read the title? The "death" in the title does not mean what you suggest it does.
> Look, the humanities is where people who say things like "I'm not good with numbers" go. That's it.

When they say that, they don't mean it literally. It's like if they found themselves in a discussion about cleaning public toilets. They might say "Oh I'm not good with mops and liquid cleaning agents" or whatever to be polite, when what they really mean is more like "Oh I have people for that, I'm sorry to hear that you have to sell your time and labor for money, your grandparents should have been wealthier." but that would be rude and unproductively antagonistic.
Patrick Collison in conversation with Sam Altman [video]
Nice, and thanks.

I'll say as someone who began on HN feeling contrarian and somewhat underepresented in viewpoint that dang is exceptionally responsive to all manner of suggestions. Not all have been implemented, though a few I've suggested have been picked up. Collapsable comments being one that comes to mind.

Hacking on HN itself can be fun. (I've got a few CSS tweaks linked from my profile page, so far no take-up, though I much prefer how the site looks using them.) That includes a dark mode, which though I don't usually use it, testing just now ... it's not bad if I may say so myself.

Your SVG tweak reminds me that it's possible to do such things in CSS (inline data attributes) as well.
I'm just learning about it myself but much of what's attractive about Pharo appears to be the IDE rather than the language, so code snippets don't do it justice.
This is being considered a precursor to the CBDC. States coming out against this(NC, SD, FL) are fighting this in the name of american freedom, but I wonder how many people consider it the mark of the beast.
Applies to empires in general.

That doesn't mean the empires are a good thing.

The Internet was always going to be a cultural amplifier. Those of us who grew up when culture wasn't just about greed, narcissism, and sociopathy assumed it would amplify all those old-fashioned values: intellectual curiosity, informed democracy, and public education.

It actually does that. Up to a point. It's far easier to get accurate information about almost everything than it used to be.

But it's been swamped by narcissistic garbage, automated exploitation and greed, and pathocracy.

That's not really the Internet's fault. It's just amplifying the culture it's a part of. The mistake the idealists (like me) made was underestimating just how toxic and self-destructive that culture is.
So approximately a "Stadia" amount of support
I had a really good conversation with Mark Tweddle on Imposter Syndrome that covered a number of useful points:

+ "Imposter syndrome is when your inside does not match your outside"

+ Some good things happen when we have a little self-doubt. It helps you ensure you are on the correct route or making the right decisions. Also, when you are doing something new with a high risk or high stakes, like starting a business, you will feel challenged, but that's not imposter syndrome.

+ My father used to talk about people he knew who were never in doubt and never right. So a certain amount of self-doubt or sense of challenge is healthy: if you never experience self-doubt, you might be seriously on the wrong track.

+ One problem with "Fake it till you make it" is that it confuses activity with results. It encourages taking random actions: you don't know why anything works, so why not keep trying things randomly? You substitute more action for curiosity and thoughtful review and diagnosis. Roll the dice. Maybe this time, it will work.
Turns out yes to the extensive planning enhancement, as well as an aggravated role enhancement. But no to the harm/substantial interference/special skills enhancements. Details in uncle/aunt comment (is that a term?) now that I've found the plea agreement.
Suffers from ecosystem problem. iOS ecosystem is way better. I have owned Nexus and Pixel phones, Nexus tablets, and Moto 360 and Galaxy Gear. Switching to Apple ecosystem was way better world.

The problem is that some things have ecosystem network bonus and if you can't work yourself up to that threshold, you don't get it.

Positioning as home device is interesting since that's the one place I use Google devices. But if they don't use modern LLM stuff there, I think that one is for the rubbish heap.
Considering less than 30% of startups are successfully by any measure, HN should be way more optimistic. I wonder where that sentiment is coming from.
> I find that bench-top "fume extractors", consisting of a fan and thin dust filter, are extremely noisy and essentially useless.

Compared to no fan/filter, they're A LOT better, I'd say. And a relatively small price to pay for such an improvement.

But yeah, they're not nearly as good as a real fume extractor.
> Is this really considered “first generation” Pixel tablet?

No, its the first generation Pixel Tablet (note capitalization: “Pixel Tablet” is a new branding.)
And only 1 million veiws from all that.
When using clustered indexes, one tradeoff is that if a non-clustered index isn't covering for a query, it will need to perform B-tree traversals to find rows in the clustered index. This can significantly increase the amount of (at least logical) IO compared to heap tables, where the non-clustered indexes can refer directly to the row id.

Because you can only have a single clustered index, you're effectively paying for efficient range queries on a single clustering key by making all other queries slower.

This tradeoff may or may not be worth it depending on your query patterns. In my experience, you can often get away with adding some subset of columns to a non-clustered index to make it covering, and get efficient range queries without making a copy of the entire dataset.

And even with clustered indexes, as soon as you want a range query that's not supported by your clustered index, you're faced with the exact same choices, except that you have to pay the cost of the extra B-tree traversals.
This isn’t a video game you can min/max. You get one life and the clock’s ticking.
The greatest offense is creating a product so refined in its exterior craft that offers a feature set barely competitive with the most entry level ZOOM.
Immigration is actually an interesting one. There is a large amount of immigration for sure, but my understanding is that our economy will be in huge trouble without it.

We don't have sufficient birth rates to maintain things and so both economic productivity but also the tax base will be significantly harmed without this immigration.

That's not to disagree with your comment, the large amounts of immigration do cause problems and as you say, much of it flows into certain cities.
Before you invest in hardware, grab a free simulator and start without hardware.

My favorite is LinSpice because it runs well for free on a mac, but the UI is very quirky. There are web sims available as well.

This will let you get started immediately and will let you see what's happening visually.
They seem to be a print company rather than design, which explains why they don't understand DPI for screens.

Above all, what DPI looks good enough for humans to notice depends on how close the screen is to the user's eyes, which is why phones tend to have higher DPIs than computer monitors which tens to have higher DPIs than TVs.

But even a computer screen at 72 DPI is pretty shit these days.
Apple has been rumoured to develop a HomePod/iPad dock thing for a while. I hope it happens (but not like this terrible mockup)

https://www.macrumors.com/2022/10/15/apple-ipad-dock-smart-h...
CockroachDB is PostgreSQL compatible and is distributed SQL supporting single-region, multi-region and multi-cloud deployments.
Related:

“Considered Harmful” Essays Considered Harmful - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9744916 - June 2015 (79 comments)

"Considered Harmful" Essays Considered Harmful - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=290490 - Aug 2008 (4 comments)
>>> is objectively harder

I don't think it's objectively harder - at the very least, [citation needed]. It might be subjectively harder for you. But one is a random factoid, the other one is a story. Humans are, in general, exceedingly good at stories. Facts, we tend to focus on the areas we know. You and I might be good at physics facts, or software facts. Somebody else might be good at agriculture facts, or knitting facts, or what-have-you.

But stories are universal. They connect. It's how most of humanity learns and shares knowledge. (See e.g. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-017-02036-8)

There's a pretty good likelihood that stories are ultimately easier to remember for a larger number of people than facts.

>>> Then, as citizens, they make obvious mistakes about the relative costs and effects of things they advocate for

I'll note that you're possibly wrong about relative costs of learning, too. What matters isn't only what you learn (though teaching stats would sure be a good thing), but also a willingness to approach issues with a bit of humility, and not claiming something as absolute fact until it provably is.
There are very steep legal penalties for lying about it, and it’s not available in China, so on balance I think it’s a reasonable risk, especially since Android makes no such promises.
This is guaranteed to happen. Boomers have been rigging the system as a large voting cohort since coming of age.
You are looking for long term planning where there is none. The only relevant question for those in charge of the project is: “How do I make my quarterly report to investors look slightly better than last quarter’s?”
This is what is so depressing about going through different life stages too. You make friends most of the time because you happen to be around these people all day. Coworkers, schoolmates, neighbors, relatives, etc. Its tough to keep that up through your life when the reason for you all being at a place consistently disappears too. Even visits a few times a year feel pretty forced and packed in, when you consider how few hours will be spent conversing during that visit versus in past times when your lives overlapped.
The Filmmakers Who Voyaged Inside the Body
No. As far as I know, they haven't said anything about this. Neither did OpenAI about gpt-4-32k.

MosaicML did say something about MPT-7B-StoryWriter-65k+: https://www.mosaicml.com/blog/mpt-7b. They are using ALiBi (Attention with Linear Biases): https://arxiv.org/abs/2108.12409.

I think OpenAI and Anthropic are using ALiBi or their own proprietary advances. Both seem possible.
Amazing! I've met Ian in London a few years ago at a synthesizers event in Shoreditch. Rohan is a legend!

Bought a Deluge, then sold end up not using, then when they launched the live looper bought again, but didn't find time again and sold it, oh dear :X

Nowadays, without having to commute, finally have some time to produce music but sold all the toys and playing guitar and bass :~D
That's fine, but we need commenters on HN to abide by the site rules whether they prefer to or not.
The license issues are relevant. I've had to convert an application from using MySQL to using Postgres because we wanted to distribute copies of it. The Postgres license allowed us to distribute it without running afoul of GPL, which MySQL uses.

Even distributing the MySQL JDBC driver with your software means that you need to provide source code of the Java app that uses it.

I used MySQL by default for years. If you use it for internal-only apps then the GPL doesn't matter. But once you cross the line into sharing what you've built with others, MySQL is a non-starter unless you want to GPL everything you are sharing.
In my experience of NP-complete research, there tends to be “real world bias”.

There are problems we can mostly solve in polynomial time, and those gets lots of study and people talk about them a lot.

There are other problems which are equally valid np-complete problems, for example reversing most encryption and hashing algorithms (with hashes you obviously don’t get a unique reversal, but you can get something), which we generally don’t discuss, as they are entirely unsolvable in practice.