skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It's not mumbo jumbo at all. Please read the rest of that wiki article. This is not a regular HDD. Buy a few, build a RAID out of them, then try to rebuild a drive while the front-end is online. You'll probably get data corruption and everything will crash.

It's an HDD technology that has to be combined with very specific type of logical volume management and protection workloads, and is very cheap at the tradeoff of these limitations.

To build a large, fault tolerant storage system on top of this "just another HDD technology" as you call it, is not something you can do at home with your normal tools. They did it, and they saved lots of cost because of that.

Do you ever walk into a meeting with an engineer SME talking about a topic which you had to look up on wiki, and because you don't understand what he's saying you dismiss it as "tech mumbo jumbo?" You will be very successful as middle-management at a large corporation.
TV's are cheap enough now and people are using tv's less. I don't think this is viable.
> A reasonable question, and one not terribly often asked, is "What is the point of the economy, growth, etc?"

My take is that is terribly often asked that question. And the degrowth-camp have been answering with 'is not really about the economy, it's about [insert your fab quality of life kpi]'

My take - and probably not terribly unique - is that while the traditional political discourse focuses on growth as a goal in itself - we don't measure growth and set growth goals because thats what we want. We want the things that 'they' claim to come with growth. And while economical growth is maybe not the best indicator for how well other things are - in aggregate - it is definitely not the worst one.
Large retailers don't have armed security. At least, not mostly. Things are still at the point where they are more worried about liability than the stuff getting stolen.

The $500 million is less than 1% of their cost of goods. It's an easy place to look for improvements, but it isn't really a threat to their business.

I definitely think things have gotten worse. I've directly noticed a couple of thefts at my local Walmart in the last couple of years and hadn't seen any in previous years. In one case I saw a person just push their cart through a self checkout area. In the other, the self checkout I walked up to had an incomplete transaction sitting there.
Some people who suffer from chronic depression do so independent of their life circumstances.

But other people who suffer from serious depression do so in ways that can be connected to their life circumstances and the framework of meaning they build for themselves around it.

I think one of the biggest disservices we do to people suffering from depression is lumping those two categories together.

It's like we have a single diagnosis for "bleeding" and very rarely distinguish stab wounds from hemophilia.
Cheap, almost disposable eyes for every soldier or platoon could easily be a game changer in a way a million dollar drone can't. Just having a drone to look around a corner on demand could be a big deal.
Hallucinations mainly occur when the prompt does not contain the information required for the completion.

When you add parts of the content of the PDF to the prompt, which is how these tools work, then it is very likely to produce a completion consistent with the PDF.

I say “mainly” and “very likely”, but in my experience I have never had a hallucination when the prompt is augmented with factual data.

Hallucinations occur with regularity when the prompt does not contain what is requested to be completed.
This sounds rather familiar, in Software :)
Think of all the greenhouse gas emissions that will be saved when everyone collectively removes an entry from their $PATH…
Wow, me too. Coding without copilot is incomprehensible to me, let alone outside of vscode or pycharm.
Yeah it is mediocre. I think the issue is having to first upload/read then push back data. It has not been optimized yet. It needs lot of work. I am not sure which open-source has that capability yet to run it locally. Perhaps that will be faster but I have not played with or explored that area.
Well recently the chemical imbalance thing was debunked - no measurable imbalance. Maybe they will make progress now!
You can build an AM radio out of 4 resistors, 3 capacitors, a couple transistors that are present in most electronics and easily cut out, and a coil of wire. If you have a crystal, you might not even need a voltage source!

I just looked it up, and there are FM circuits with similar component counts, so I guess I have no idea what I'm talking about! :)
Why trust in freelancers is so low?
When I tried freelancing it took me months to land first client, the job was around 30$ so I gave up soon after that.

I took another path and ended up in startup world. Long story short my startup grew to the certain point at which we had some issues in operation and development so we decided to go with outsourcing.

I was definitely up for hiring freelancers to do the job but my co-founders did not really support the idea, they preferred to go with an agency as more reliable option.

Since the company was funded we had that option to pay extra buck for some decent outsourcing company to do the job, I was still voting against it, but we end up paying 6 figures for ridiculous stuff. I know, it sucks... I could hire 100 amazing freelancers for that amount.

The project end up failing and we had to throw the towel in. That 6 figures left the scar on soul :) everyone left the company and I ended up with the product in my hands but it needed major overhaul since the digital agency and my co-founders ruined it.

With my last money I decided to hire some freelancers to help me do the job as I couldn't complete it alone.

I even took a major move and moved to India to cut the cost of life and development. I met a lot of freelancers on my journey, and I successfully assembled the small team of freelancers who did a great job with the product! A 100 times better than the overpriced agency. I managed to sell the product and exit with some decent amount of cash.

Could we do it better with the company and went with the freelancers at first place? Yes. Was it better to give 5 figures to freelancers instead of 6 figures to an agency? Yes. But why people have so low trust level that freelancers can not complete major projects? I would try to solve that question with my new startup, so lets see how it goes...
> function whose purpose is non-trivial and not straight-forward

Nah. It will just be tons and tons of trivial, straight forward code, calling other trivial code, that calls more trivial code.

Yes, some of it will be created manually, but if you go with "the IA created it" you will get it right 99% of the time. And obviously, the more code, the more it will fail; but people always try to fix this with more code.

Remember the times of Enterprise Java?
It is explained in the paper.

> In this work, we use sine and cosine functions of different frequencies:

> PE(pos,2i) = sin(pos/10000^{2i/d_model})

> PE(pos,2i+1) = cos(pos/10000^{2i/d_model})

> where pos is the position and i is the dimension. That is, each dimension of the positional encoding
corresponds to a sinusoid. The wavelengths form a geometric progression from 2π to 10000 · 2π. We
chose this function because we hypothesized it would allow the model to easily learn to attend by
relative positions, since for any fixed offset k, PE_{pos+k} can be represented as a linear function of
PE_{pos}.
I saw this announcement a few days ago and I am enthusiastic. Even though I only use Colab 3 or 4 hours a month, it is a good product and so I happily pay $10/month for it. I hope Codey is available on the $10 plan.

I have been using CoPilot for about a year (mostly in Emacs, sometimes in VSCode) and I find it very useful, so I am especially excited to see what Google offers.

I also find myself using Bing+ChatGPT a lot for writing short functions in a variety of programming languages. All of these tools, at least for me, eliminate most of the tedium in my programming projects.
>Another factor is that Windows 95 was developed for "install it and leave it" operation, with the next upgrade coming in a year or two. Giving more attention to detail was unavoidable because you could not patch a bug a week after release.

This should be qualified. Windows95 was famed for its weird bugs e.g. 49.7 days of uptime leading to a crash. Once these bugs were in the wild they were very hard to fix on the majority of installs.

If the price of being able to fix bugs UX easily with an internet connection is shoddier initial development on the initial release it's a small price to pay.
OS X Lion is now 13 years old. :-)
let's contrast the sensibly designed device with the design i think you are describing

on the sensibly designed device, say i'm answering an email. i look at the screen, ponder for 30 seconds, scroll down, ponder for 30 seconds, and hit reply. redrawing the screen took, perhaps, a million clock cycles each time, so it required powering up a 240 megahertz esp32 for 2 milliseconds. so i've consumed 6 milliseconds of cpu, 0.6 millijoules at 100 milliwatts, plus the 50 microwatts of the screen for 60 seconds, which is 3 millijoules

then i spend 10 minutes typing out a 300-word reply at 60 words per minute with a duty cycle of about 50%. each time i press a key, the cpu powers up, processes for an average of 65536 clock cycles (0.3 ms), updates the screen, and powers back down. in total my 1500 keystrokes result in 450 ms of cpu time and 45 millijoules. keeping the screen active has cost another 30 millijoules.

finally i power up the 1.5 watt wifi radio hardware for 100 milliseconds and send the mail, consuming another 150 millijoules

total power consumption to read and answer the email: a bit under 250 millijoules. i'll get over 9000 emails out of a cr2032 coin cell, about six months of use

[i'm being very generous with these numbers to be sure to estimate conservatively. my best estimate is that this screen will hold 12 lines of 40 characters of text readably, and proportional-font layout with word wrap takes about 40 clock cycles per character, including blitting from a font bitmap, so redrawing the screen should take about 19200 cycles, not a million; and handling a text editing keystroke should average 7500 cycles, not 65536; and sending an email over wifi should require it to be powered up for 1 ms, not 100.]

with what i think is your proposed design, i have to leave the pi zero running at 1 watt for the whole 11 minutes, so i use 660 joules, 2640 times as much. the cr2032 coin cell will last me for 3.3 emails

2640 times more energy consumption means 1/2640 the battery life. with the battery they propose to use i think it's 33 emails vs. 90000 instead of 3.3 vs. 9000

[corrected obvious dumb math error above, sorry]

evidently the second device is not an adequate replacement for the first

even if it does support sixel

---

as for corrupting the flash, a flash block that was partially written before the chip lost power looks exactly like a correctly written block some percentage of the time, maybe a high percentage like 99%. but sometimes you will read back corrupted data, maybe depending on temperature, emi, or state of charge. so cutting power to your industrial sds when you're not sure if the flash is writing or not is going to bite you sooner or later

better hope it's not on orbit when it happens

it was for me
Sneller Regex vs Ripgrep
If you itemize separately, then you can start to ask the important questions, like, “why is shipping $500”.
There's a very special skillset to working with freelancers, and not every one has it.

Also the best freelancers either start their own outsourcing company or get snapped up.
If the query causes a trigger to fire, will any additional locks that are created by the trigger(s) (that is, any functions called by the triggers) be noted?
This whole thing is amateur to the core, it’s an improperly licensed (are you open source or not? What license? You don’t get to say “probably eventually MIT” lol) freemium scrape of linkedin masquerading as a product
Way behind the eight ball. He managed to take an already toxic platform and make it worse (somehow). When I visit it, not logged in, all I see are promoted Musk tweets and stupid memes totally unrelated to the content I just viewed. Makes it entirely unpalatable for me.

As they say, at least it’s not rocket science. Except in this case apparently running a social media site is actually more difficult than rocket science.
Aluminum is a fantastic heat conductor. You can slice ice using a non-sharpened aluminum flat, easily.
85% of jobs are filled via networking
Why do you consider this cheating? The context window is currently too small for it to work in any other manner.
> Colab will use Codey,

"OK, team. With our founding cash cow threatened, we're at a critical juncture that could preserve or break us. If we're to survive, we must make the most of every factor of success at our disposal. This includes branding, and that's why we hire you, some of the best in the world at it. First major disruptive tech up for branding is a code LLM. Brainstorm now."

"Codey McCodeface!"

"Looks like we can go home early."
Why is this figure not followed by an “M”?
Slow migration of user data (2020)
I'm a total amateur / recreational musician and have found IMSLP useful for finding music to play. Happy to see it getting some attention here.
That's not an ad hominem attack. Ad hominem would be "you're a crackpot, so everyone should ignore you". That might be true, but it's not the claim I made.

The claim I made is that you should learn some physics, and your response only serves to reinforce that.

And a very large upper bound on exponential growth is still an upper bound. It won't last forever. Once you accept that, you are ready to face the questions of when and how it should end to minimize the damage done by its end.
Blatant violation of constitutional rights… what a shame!
You are moving the goal posts. You wrote:

> Businesses solve one problem, and one problem only: how to get money into the business owner's pockets.

I rebutted that by pointing out that businesses can and do solve other problems.

Are you changing your claim?
> Even still, the fact that the core game can be recreated without too much effort does suggest that that it was more about being a good idea than being difficult to implement

As someone that's "recreated the core game" a few different times using a few different techniques (Unity, then Unreal, then OpenGL twice) this just isn't true. Minecraft is very deceptive in the fact that it looks simple, but recreating the core of Minecraft alpha is incredibly time consuming and difficult. Most of the clones you see don't truly recreate the core either, they'll add very simple biome generation, chunking, and some player movement and lighting.

The core of Minecraft alpha consisted of: mobs, "smart" blocks (fences that join to other fences, interactable blocks, animatable blocks etc), water, lava, physics, pathfinding AI, inventory management, crafting system, Redstone (this is actually pretty huge because it's not trivial figuring out how to properly update chunks), multiplayer networking (also not trivial by a long shot), survival mode, biomes and the nether.

Just building the base game with all of that will take around a year of full time dev work, which it did take Notch around that much time. Additionally, making all of these systems good and fast is a whole 'nother story. There are so many optimizations that can be made that add a lot of extra dev time to the mix.

So, sure, creating a cool blocky chunk renderer where you can add and break blocks can be done in like a week. But Minecraft alpha is not a simple endeavor, and I don't think it would have taken off the way it did if Notch just left out all the actual game mechanics.

> I don't look at Minecraft and think "wow I could never do this." Instead I look at it and think, "Wow. That was a really great idea."

And again, I know what you mean by this because I thought the same thing, but this couldn't be further from the truth! It's funny how I wildly misjudge the amount of effort that making a thing takes until I try to make that thing.

And we also have to remember that before you can even begin to create Minecraft you need all the prerequisite knowledge of how the graphics pipeline works and how rendering in general works. But anyways, I just wanted to interject some personal experience here and mention that a lot of the "simple details" cough multiplayer are actually pretty tough to pull off :D
The link between TCE and kidney cancer has already been very well established though. The Parkison's is just a cherry on top. If we know this place is contaminated, then we know there's increased risk of cancer. Full stop
I've had bad experiences with esbuild. Don't remember what specifically but didn't work for my use cases.

Roll-up for libs and webpack for apps. Only thing that works for me and all the wonky edge cases involved in building for web and node and npm and old browsers and various file types and loaders and whatnot.
That remains a supported configuration, you just need an initramfs that mounts /usr before transitioning into the real /.
Not as much of an expert as others commenting here, but I believe the sine/cosine stuff comes in just because it’s a standard and very efficient way of comparing vectors.

(“Vector” is just an alternate way of talking about a coordinate point - you can say “a point is at (x,y)”, or equivalently you can also say “turn x degrees and then travel y units forward”, either method gives enough information to find the point exactly.)

I don’t think sine and cosine are actually factors in human language - rather, the process of turning words into vectors captures whatever are the factors in human language, translates them into vectors, and in that translation process the factors get turned into something that sine/cosine measurements of vectors is good at picking up.

A toy example would be that arithmetic doesn’t seem to be a factor in political orientation, but if you assess everyone’s political orientation with some survey questions and then put them on a line from 0 to 10, then you could do some subtraction and multiplication operations to find numbers that are close together - ie doing arithmetic to find similar politics. The reason that works is not because arithmetic has anything to do with political orientation, it’s because your survey questions captured information about political orientation and transformed it into something that arithmetic works on.

I guess this explanation doesn’t do much except push the unintuitiveness into the embedding process (that’s the process of turning words into vectors in a way that captures their relationship to other words).
Sure, and the fact that .zip is both a common file extension for downloading AND now a TLD is not a good thing (I don't know who though having .zip as a TLD was a good idea), but I still don't think it's the main risk here. Maybe it'll finally prompt Google (and other browser distributors) to stop automatically stripping stuff from URLs, and to check/warn on Unicode homographs (hell, it doesn't even warn on www․google.com - and that's NOT a regular period/full stop after the first www - I doubt anyone would be able to register www․google.com as a domain but who knows).
> plus two-window resizing (like we already have with the current full screen snapping feature)

Rectangle Pro[0] (the paid version that's more akin to FancyZones on Windows) has this now (though it doesn't animate it, it just resizes the other windows after you resize one). It seems to just detect what windows are adjacent and resize them to match.

[0]: https://rectangleapp.com/pro
> 10-15 years out AI will be good enough to wipe out at least half of all software developers on the planet (that is, people writing actual code). That's not a risky prediction, that's very easily going to be the case.

The only prediction I feel is easy to make is that nobody can accurately predict the effects of an emerging technology 10-15 years down the line. That is a long time, and prognosticators almost always get it wrong. Coding will absolutely change, but I'm very skeptical that anyone can predict how with any sort of specificity.
Things changed after the transition from Republic to an Empire. One of the factors in that transition was the shortage of land to provide to soldiers, who at that time were mostly Roman citizens.
Similar to climate apocalyptic fanatics this degrowth-lovers camp have also taken their doctrine too seriously and failed to see how their discourse of doom and gloom have not and will not take them and humanity very far in persuit of a better future.

I mean, every authoritarian knows that urgency, spartanism and desperation only lasts so long in aligning people towards common causes.
Author here. We recently published a post about our last 4 years on SMR usage here: https://dropbox.tech/infrastructure/four-years-of-smr-storag.... Note that SMR technology just 5 years ago was rather nascent and a lot of software support was not great. Using SMR for us is possible without penalty only because of our sequential write workloads.

We use a custom disk format along with libzbc, but libzbd now provides many advantages, which we are looking to adopt. I did want the QCon talk to have some super straight-to-the-point conclusions and these, I believe, have saved us the most since I have been on the team. Largely due to the sheer scale of managing such a system.
The key missing context is:

Solaris implemented the core part of the /usr merge 15 years ago already, and completed it with the introduction of Solaris 11

But more generally, Sun had a lot of smart people that cared deeply both about the *NIX Desktop and the general user experience. A trip through the PSARC archives[1] will show that things like the /usr merge were carefully considered and reasoned about. Some of those people are still working on Solaris today, although sadly, I'm no longer one of them.

The Linux and BSD folks should take advantage of the good things that Sun left behind and carry them forward wherever possible.

DISCLAIMER: I'm a former Solaris Principal Software Engineer so slightly biased ;)

[1] https://illumos.org/opensolaris/ARChive/PSARC/
Or go back to the old fashioned model of "you tell the clerk what you want, and they fetch it for you". The last store I'm aware of that did that faded away in my lifetime. (Brand Names, although maybe it still exists somewhere). I remember going to Toys-R-Us as a kid, and to purchase video games, you took a ticket off of the wall, and paid for it, and then exchanged the ticket for the actual item at a locked booth near the exit.
If you're trying to trim down on phone time, but still want to be somewhat contactable?

I guess this would require a phone with a WiFi hotspot when you're out and about, but if you're at home and not wanting to reach for that phone this device could help.
I bought someone's HTC Vive Pro gear on eBay. It was a sketchy listing with very few pictures and details, but I had a good feeling. Delightfully, it came with four v2 lighthouses. One of them didn't work, though, and had chew marks from someone trying to pry it open.

The unit being Valve branded, I messaged Valve's customer support. I asked if I could mail the broken lighthouse to them to make sure it got recycled properly. I made it very clear that it was a sketchy eBay purchase that I essentially got for free, and I really just wanted to make sure it got e-wasted responsibly, rather than float around in my garage for the next decade.

They had no record of its serial number, and explained that it was most likely HTC's inventory rather than Valve's. Despite that, they insisted on RMA'ing it and mailed me a functioning unit! They even sent me a prepaid mailing label, but I printed my own to save them the $5.

That's not my only story where I politely made a modest request of their customer support team, and they significantly over-delivered.