skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'm not convinced about that comparison. MongoDB entirely disregarded the relational model whereas bitemporality—as envisioned by Snodgrass et al. and standardised in SQL:2011—is merely an extension/evolution of it.

> it would be cool if e.g. Postgres had fast native support for bitemporal fields in a way that makes them accessible without changing the whole paradigm

100% agreed with you there. And there has been various work on patches & extensions in this area previously. Unfortunately I'm not sure Postgres' internals will ever be able to flex hard enough to deliver a decent "default choice" experience. At least not until some other system has proven the UX is really worth the effort (which I guess MongoDB did similarly achieve with native JSON handling).
You do not like using debuggers for stepping through code - your choice. I am of the opposite and do use it quite often. There is absolutely no need for us to change our ways. To each their own.
That is a totally fair and reasonable reply. Thanks for the detailed thoughts!
2% for me. I met expectations and was accordingly paid for my performance as one of the company's most valuable assets.
Having it in the roads would be interesting but difficult to exploit. One idea I heard pitched was to put coils in the roads connected to nichrome (thermal) wire and then have trucks mount magnets under their trailers. As they drove down the road it would warm the pavement which would de-ice it in the winter. (make it hotter in the summer though, so not particularly practical without a switch).
Keeping AI Under Control Through Mechanistic Interpretability (MIT Talk)
I believe the US government has been fining methane super emitters for some time [1]. The problem is China is the bigggest emitter - nearly double the next highest country, which is India, followed closely by the US. That said, the US emits far more than any other country per capita.

[1] https://www.texastribune.org/2023/07/19/callon-permian-basin...
Coding Streams – Gbafana25
The second trilogy is great. The last book is a masterpiece of an author reexamining her own work from within her work.
I can’t believe no one recognised the source. It’s all from The Wren and Martin grammar book. The book was popular in colonial India and prescribed for civil servants.
I don't know why this article was flagged. I mostly agree with it.

Remote work is amazing for work-life balance and job satisfaction...if you have an established/high-paying job with an awesome home working space in a town or city you're happy living in and have a strong social network outside of work (or spend less time on work to spend more time on life, which is totally fine!).

If you live in a 1bd apartment/flat with roommates and your working space is also your bedroom, kitchen or closet...WFH sucks.

If you have an awesome office setup in your suburban home that's far away from everything because the alternative is worse and more expensive...WFH sucks.

If a big factor of your satisfaction at work comes from working with your work mates, and now all of them are too busy to hang because they have families and commitments and such...WFH sucks.

If you've just graduated college and are starting your first job...WFH DEFINITELY sucks.

The thing that confused me the most about the push for remote work was the mental gymnastics done in response to the obvious (to me) wage suppression that remote work at scale would introduce.

Why would anyone pay $x for an engineer in SFO when they can pay $0.4x for that same engineer in Kansas City?

Why should the engineer from SFO making $x NOT receive $0.4x now that they live in Kansas City (to take advantage of a $0.4x market?)

Okay, so every engineer is worth $x since $x is determined by skill, not locale. If every engineer makes $x, how do we respond to the insanity that normalizing $0.4x markets into $x markets will bring?
Llama for the win.
Windows has way too much going on in the background that I can’t possibly feel secure when running the system. Windows 11 feels like active spyware.
It's true, and it is a weakness of LMs relative to humans, but it's kind of obviously true and something that's being actively pursued as a topic of research, so it's not a remarkable criticism.

It's also kinda apples-to-oranges - a human child also has thousands of hours of other rich sensory input. Multi-modal models are not as well-developed as LMs.
I’ll take my lumps for saying this: If you’ve downvoted me I’d love to know why!

Did I sound preachy? I really don’t mean to! I’m not an educator, and it’s hard to communicate a discipline’s “common knowledge” without coming off a bit patronizing.

It’s just, every time the dome comes up people want to talk about the physics of it— but the author isn’t a physicist, the journal isn’t for physicists, it’s not making any claims in physics…

It’s a (famous) philosophy paper, specifically philosophy of science, specifically philosophy of physics. If you aren’t a philosopher, physics is annoyingly irrelevant here.

There’s so much more to say— space invaders! It’s way weirder than this! The math still checks out! Philosophy is cool actually! Sorry to take up your time!
My understanding is that weathering of rocks is bigger but slower than organic carbon cycle. It works on order of thousands of years, and is the main long-term balance.
> Does Kagi work as a business if it doesn’t grow to millions of users?

It depends on your definition of "works as business"?

I'd argue that Kagi already works as a business. It has sustainable business model and happy users. Most importantly the business model aligns incentives with those users.

Kagi was never envisioned to be a "Google killer", in fact we use much of Google infrastructure and APIs.

Kagi is made to offer an alternative way to consume the web, that focuses on serving the users instead of advertisers.

For (growing) number of people this is already appealing and I think this will only accelerate when AI search answers become more widespread in classic search engines like Google and Bing, and those start inserting ads in chat answers on a more massive scale.

Since chat answers force you to read chunks of text, and therefore ads in chat answers can not be easilly skipped, ignored or blocked like ads in link based results, this is when a lot of people may have their 'Matrix' moment [1] and realize that information they are being served does not always have their best interest in mind and that itself has a hidden cost.

Will it be enough for them to pay for search? Considering how a lot of people already care about what food they put into their body, extrapolating from this, it is concievable to think that in the future a lot of people will care enough about what information they put into their brains to consider having a search engine (and the web browser!) that work in their best interest being a part of their budget.

So I do not see anything preventing Kagi from growing to million users, apart from our own stupidity and bad decision making. If anything, we have a strong tailwind from the above factors and they do not even account for the enhanced productivity and privacy made possible by aligning incentives in search.

[1] https://blog.kagi.com/age-pagerank-over
What does this even mean? If you chose to work for someone, you don't own shit.
One of my favorite extensions!
A debugger does not preclude you from thinking. You just have less information about the process you're trying to understand. If using a debugger makes a portion of your brain shut off, that's a personal problem.
I am very much in the opposite camp, I am 10x more productive in tech stacks where I can use an interactive debugger.

It’s not that I enjoy stepping through code line by line, I rely on a debugger to verify if my assumptions about “starting conditions” of a certain piece of code are correct and, if so, at which point my understanding of how things should be no longer reflect reality.

This can all be done with printf, if you knew ahead of time what you want to print. But most of the time I don’t, the whole point is that I do interactive exploration of the program state (“evaluate expression” is the main feature of a good debugger). When I find a problem I dig deeper, which is a lot faster within a debugger session than any recompilation loop I’ve ever seen (even in Go).

In similar spirit I play with SQL queries when given a data set that I need to extract something from.
I do not use a multimeter. Because mostly I plug together things with connectors. Because I believe the things have (more or less) been tested to do what they are supposed to and it's seems that the connectors themselves usually work. Some people build the things I plug together, and they probably reach for the multimeter more often.
Yes both Pike and Lemire are correct ( scaling, not the real issue etc ). I used to not like debuggers.

Then pernosco ( omniscient debugger by Rob O Callahan and Kyle Huey ) happened - it’s incredible.
I clicked on the article knowing that the writer would open with something like this:

"I learned to program with BASIC back when I was twelve. I would write elaborate programs and run them. Invariably, they would surprise me by failing to do what I expect. I would struggle for a time, but I’d eventually give up and just accept that whatever “bugs” I had created were there to stay."

People that dont use debuggers for serious software development had their brains develop programming ability without one. They are stuck in their ways, and generally arent aware of it. You cant teach an old dog new tricks
For sure, if people all live in my SimCity2000 designed cities of everyone lives over here and works over there : - )
TFA agrees: Do the needful originated in India, is commonly used in African countries, and was once heard frequently in the United Kingdom as well. After the Victorian period, its usage in the West died out, but with the increase in outsourcing to and from India, it started catching the ear of English speakers in the West again.
There's absolutely no way that the West could go back to the long ago dark days of "illegal information" way back in [checks watch] 1995. Of course, in 1995 I could download the Anarchist Cookbook; hell, I could buy it at the bookstore.

I'm starting to suspect that secret police were always focused on illegal information, surveillance, and the prevention of communication between potential conspirators.
How many people invent new words or letters?
This conjures up the memory of articles talking about why syntax highlighting is bad. [1]

It's sort of funny that the author even admits "Ok, well, I do use a debugger but only when it makes sense". Like, are there devs using debuggers when they don't make sense? I don't often drop into a debugger just for fun.

Debuggers (and, particularly the java debugger) are amazing tools for quickly figuring out why things went wrong. I rarely step through code (though sometimes that's useful) but I frequently will drop a breakpoint on an exception and then jump around the call stack to see exactly how a particular exception developed. With a debugger, I get all the inputs for everything up and down the stack. I can pop the stack and replay the exception over and over again. I can evaluate code in the current scope to test and see what's going wrong.

Particularly with really complex software stacks, debuggers are essential.

Consider, for example, this error case I ran into.

Some code took a view on a map. Unfortunately for us, modifications to that view are both allowed AND mutated the underlying map. When the code that produced that view called other code, at about 30 layers down some code said "If there's not a value here, add the value 0". This caused the unusual state where with apparently the same input data when you first called a method, it would pass no problem. The second time, it would error out.

How on earth would you discover this behavior without a debugger? The root method where this all happened was already 20 layers deep in this fairly complicated piece of software (yay finance!). A simple unit test would show everything working as expected, it's not until that second run of the same code that things blew up.

Without actually catching the fact that the inputs were mutated from an earlier invocation there's really no way to know what went wrong. A debugger made that obvious.

[1] http://www.linusakesson.net/programming/syntaxhighlighting/
But messaging my ego is so much easier!
I use a debugger when:

* The logs don't have enough info (if there's even logs); and

* I can't write a quick test to reproduce the issue, either because there's no tests or because they're so overengineered that it's not worth the effort.
Created a one time account just to reply to this.

You don’t like the books, that’s all. They don’t speak to you.

Nothing unusual here, there’s plenty of books I don’t like either that are apparently brilliant (The Vorrh comes to mind).

Being confused doesn’t make sense. You didn’t like them, other people do.
No, they are not.

South Indians are a small minority in India.
I think correct in this context just means standard in at least one dialect of English, which "do the needful" definitely is.

As descriptivist as linguistics is, there is a real distinction between standard and non-standard language.
For the time being, I'm sure. I don't have to use proprietary connected players that can change behavior when reconfigured by vendor against my will.

Until user-friendly hardware projects like frame.work (edit: "open hardware" may be a more suiting phrase), and software projects like VLC exist and are not de-legalized, my point stands.
Thinking of changing careers into Salesforce? Read this
Comments moved to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36993411.
I agree - it would be great if the data was public. I’m sure a large amount of this comes from natural gas flares.
Interstellar radio signal has been blinking every 22 minutes for over 30 years
the old “criticism via quoting a single sentence from a much larger piece” tactic
What if you were to do the same, but with subterannian trains travelling in opposite directions (?) - such that the cars north are met with the subway south and they interact for great justice? (Im serious on the idea, but I dont know the outcome?)

(I am talking about huge magnets. if that wasnt clear.)

(Symbiotic asymetrical train propusion through shared interior corridor walls) (easy concept... hard execution)
it’s entertaining to watch Sony throw these tantrums after one of their prime complaints with the Activision + Microsoft merger was how it might give Microsoft exclusivity for CoD while forgetting how much they love exclusivity for Playstation titles.
I'll summarize it for you:

'I'm the bomb! Just awesome. Here's the evidence.
If you are a CEO looking to improve your time management and delegation skills, you can throw lots of money at me and I can coach you into being almost as good as me.

This article took 1/24th days of my time. B-)'
Yay, PayPal let me through. I just had to turn off uBlock Origin and Privacy Badger... But for Bram, I'm ok with it.
You can ban books and censor websites however you want as long as you are a good person acting in good faith i.e. me.
And native English speakers in India also use the phrase.
Ironically Earthsea is almost exactly anti-Taoist. One of the key ideas in Taoism, that incidentally sets it way beyond Platonism, is the name that can be spoken is not the true name.

LeGuin asks, "what if we could speak it?"
I just published “Safe For Humans AI” – free to read online
Free to read online, and eBook versions released under a Creative Commons License (no commercial reuse, feel free to share).

The full title of my short book is:

Safe For Humans AI

A "humans-first" approach to designing and building AI systems.
This argument isn’t necessarily true, and is one of the reasons why the Xbox 360 couldn’t support backwards compatibility for the original Xbox . The hardware required, for the overhead of emulation was larger than the gap between the Xbox 360 and the original Xbox performance. Eventually they had to recompile from 86 to power PC
One problem is that academic CS-researcher intelligence is completely different to average human intelligence.

Maybe 5% of the population can learn how to solve partial differential equations.

Virtually all of the population can manage extended family-related conversations over Christmas. Even when drunk.

Human intelligence is mostly social, and mostly not scientific. The average human is incredibly bad at model building and self-correcting prediction. What actually happens is that humans have developed a kind of collective cultural exoskeleton which protects - more or less - from the consequences of poor choices.

But it doesn't take much for that to stop working. Covid denial and climate change denial are just two examples.

The cost if living in this space is having to learn a lot of heavily scripted cues. There's a long list of acceptable and unacceptable behaviours and social registers in different social situations. It varies by culture. But generally humans can navigate this space without thinking too hard about it.

Academic intelligence is completely different. There's long been a joke that an AI researcher's ideal intelligent system is another AI researcher, with typical AI researcher interests - math, puzzles, abstract language models, music in an engineering way, and so on.

Current LLMs are the first cross-over product which shows signs of moving into the first space from the second.

You can imagine a future system which uses facial and gait profiling to read emotions, and links a tokenised language model with a tokenised model of various transitions through emotional and social states. Personal background will be missing, and that's not hard to invent.

And now you have something that mimics a large part of social intelligence.

Only it has the potential to do it better than humans do.
This one I absolutely agree with. I love preponed meetings because I can easily skip it.
This is one of those funny things. Debuggers are amazingly useful as a print statement machine. You get prints for every line. You can stop and think as the program executes. But at the same time, most bugs can be found with, as said, prints and thought.

I generally reach for a debugger when code is complex enough that I don't know where to begin putting my prints. But often end up reducing to prints and other output when I get close to the issue.

That said. For buggy code, where the bug appears seldomly, conditional breakpoints are a lifesaver.
Thanks! Macroexpanded:

Low-cost additive turns concrete slabs into super-fast energy storage - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36964735 - Aug 2023 (6 comments)

Researchers have come up with a new way to store electricity in cement - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36958531 - Aug 2023 (57 comments)

MIT engineers create an energy-storing supercapacitor from ancient materials - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36951089 - Aug 2023 (89 comments)

Cement's future could be a combination of carbon capture and electrification - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36339253 - June 2023 (90 comments)
Does the United Nations have conventionally-armed cruise missiles ? Shouldn't it ?
But this has beauty too. Hideous crimes go punished, for the world is watching. Surveillance by the many for the many prevents warcrimes, prevents police brutality, chills a uncivilized humanity, idealized by to many into a civilized humanity. If you aspire to see a unwatched world goto den Haag, travel to auschwitz, to Xinjiang and the Archipel gulag. When the world is not watching and authority story reigns supreme, monsters walk the earth. The cybernetic augmentation of society, the leviathan-cybernetics is a great societal achievement.
Yeah, the majority of why I once used a debugger was to dinf memory aliasing errors or indexing errors in old c++. Now I mostly use rust, or ”modern c++” and I bjust realized I only end up using the debugger when trying to use bindings to older libraries. In the case of rust, with good bindings, that means I'm commenting out code to get it compile, then stepping through to understand some types that aren't visible, or stepping through a runtime error or panic to see what part of the contract is being violated. Occasionally bad bindings or libraries leave me looking for the source of UB or aliasing issues, but that has become rare. So in greenfield rust projects, yeah, t don't think I would need a debugger... That is an odd thought after using gdb directly for a couple decades.
It's absolutely a joke!
To be fair, most people who don’t use debuggers have no reason other than habit because they didn’t learn to debug using the debugger.

I started writing JS/PHP over 20 years ago. Back then I debugged with console/echo/var_dump etc. This stuck with me and is still how I debug today. Every time I see someone use the JS debugger I’m impressed by its utility. Still, I always end up reverting to console logs. It works for me and I can’t find a reason to break the habit.
> from some Scandinavian anonymous FTP site

funet.fi, I guess. Stil up and running (https://www.funet.fi/)
This is a great idea, and it works really well on the examples that I tried.

Perhaps you could get a domain name that makes slightly more sense (ideapersonas.com and personasprout.com are free -- thank you ChatGPT), and add a bit of context or a landing page of sorts.

I doubt people will pay money to use it, but perhaps you can leverage it for something else. Great work!

Edit: The chat function is indeed amazing. On second thought, this might be a great product for marketing consultants, and I hope you get very rich soon.
Roads are tear and wear.

They are everything but not stable.

Also why solar freaking roadways garbage is.
"Git 'er done!" by Larry the Cable Guy.
Creating abstractions without considering performance is probably the correct approach. It’s much better to at least start with a program with enough abstraction to allow reasoning about how things should work. Save performance concerns for when optimization is seen to be necessary.
Google Ngram Viewer seems to agree, putting peak usage of "do the needful" in the mid-1800s. A phrase I would tend to use instead, "do what is needed", appears to be much more recent.

https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=do+the+needful...
See, this is the correct take. Using "resources" for people shook me the first time I heard it in a high-level planning meeting. I'm being serious here that it kept me up all night.
No surprise here, it's the natural move to keep people under subscriptions. I wouldn't also be surprised if every single mayor studio out there actually start doing this. Perhaps in 10 years or less people will have no choice other than to get absolutely online to consume content of any kind. I do hope that at least books will be an exception. I think the problem also originates from people who don't care about subscribing and pay them blindly.
I think whether it’s a bug or not depends on the software requirements and expectations. If the code has some expected bounds on runtime, switching the GPU code to sequential processing (for the sake of exact reproducibility) would break that expectation and could be considered a bug as well. If we expect performant code and exact reproducibility, that just might not be possible…
nic.funet.fi: Serving freely distributable files with FTP since 1990
You can definitely find it in 19th-century UK books on Google Books. Doesn't seem to be very common, but it is used in a pretty similar way to the way Indian English uses it today. From an 1833 English court opinion [1]:

> This letter was immediately given by the bankrupt to the defendant, with directions that as the voyage was altered, he, the defendant, would do the needful.

The opinion then spends several additional pages trying to determine what precisely was legally "needful" in this situation.

[1] https://www.google.com/books/edition/The_Law_Journal_Reports...