skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Reaction: Computer "integers" pretty much are actually integers - just with a limited range. Floats, however, are NOT real numbers - they are poisoned from Square Zero by their limited precision. Any and every time that you use floats, you have to make extremely sure that their piss-poor precision won't turn your program's results into sh*t.

Also - if your org can't be bothered to run long-duration tests of your life-critical real-time control software, your org's managers need to be fired and probably blacklisted.
> I don't mean banal stuff like Copilot, which is a double-edged sword that might be used against junior developers. I mean world-changing benefits, one step closer to the techno-utopia.

Every (tech) sword is triple-edged, and it's the third one that people trip up on because they never expect it.

That code generation is "banal" to you, or a threat to junior developers, suggests to me that it's already huge.

Likewise the job replacements you fear: that's only even possible when the AI doesn't suck massively.

The current state of downloadable models implies any corporate advantage is temporary.
https://github.com/netbirdio/netbird/issues/1111
I'm not sure there is a good answer, beyond "the US stuck with Edison's 110V, Europe went with 230V because it's cheaper". Both 110V and 230V are reasonable choices. And of course technically the US primarily uses 230V split between two phases. But Europe mostly uses 3-phase 400V, with each phase delivering 230V (because phases are 120° offset to each other), so then we are just talking about 230V vs 400V, and two vs three phases.
It's not, really. It's more about a political divide, with STEM vs liberal arts being used as a proxy. There are some people who don't want to give up the chauvinistic, pre-#metoo era of the tech industry. Clinging to the meritocracy myth is a coping mechanism.

Ultimately, it's telling on one's self that one is a bad communicator. One might generally perceive any use of -cel neologisms to be a projection of the speaker's own feelings of impotence.
As a Brit, the best thing about 230v is being able to run a 3kW kettle to make my tea. I took this for granted until I moved to the US.
Do you know the answer? (Of course your remark makes sense even if you don't, but, if you do, then I'd love to know.)
>A doctor for every person, a teacher for every child, available any time and for free.

I'm sorry... I'm supposed to trust my healthcare and child's education to a piece of software whose primary feature is its ability to effectively hallucinate and tell convincing lies?

And assuming AI is at all effective, which implies valuable (which implies lucrative,) you expect services built on it to remain free?

That's not how anything works in the real world.
> private, local and in the hand of the people.

We've seen time and time again that "the people" prefers centralised, paid, convenient management of complexity.

If the majority of "the people" prefers paying a subscription for watching movies or listening to music, I doubt they'll make the effort to learn how to tune and run private LLMs locally, for medical aspects or otherwise. Not when there will be major companies spending billions on marketing more convenient options.

Guillermo Rauch's essay [1] still rings true: it's hard to forego efficiency (though it works just as well for convenience).

[1] https://rauchg.com/2017/its-hard-to-forego-efficiency
Yes and no. If you wait to indicate # of results from filter choices you run the risk of the user "drilling down" to zero.

That is...pick...pick...pick...Go.."No results for your filters". That's not fun either.

I find I use filters - again Home Depot is a good example of bad - because the search is too loose. I'll enter a brand in the search term and have to use filters to pick only the brand I want to see.

The search should first try to answer the users search, not dump more possible products in the customers' face hoping the buy sonething.
WSJ is US media, but ad a certain us business slat and more recently is now owned by a world wide media magnate Murdoch whose bias in owned outlets is also renowned. So while wsj is “legitimate”, one need to look past the labels of legit/non-legit as there is context for everything.
> A doctor for every person, a teacher for every child, available any time and for free.

For free meaning that it is paid by quietly slipping ads into prescriptions or lessons?
No. Most were in the $1-10 million net worth range before taking office. Former presidents, of course, can easily make tens of millions on book sales and speaking fees. But that's still small time compared to the owners of major firms.
Welcome to *.stackexchange.com
Ask HN: What database to use for high fanout write such as a social feed?
Hi,

I've been reading about Twitter's architecture and Facebook's TAO architecture.

I am curious what database is best suited for the high fan-out write part?

I really enjoyed this blog post: https://blog.redplanetlabs.com/2023/08/15/how-we-reduced-the-cost-of-building-twitter-at-twitter-scale-by-100x/
The study did look at activity levels separately. It found that activity levels have actually gone up, but I'm unsure what they specifically mean under "activity levels" ie would driving instead of walking county?
Avoid the Junior Word
I have no horse in this race (and you obviously do).

There were a TON of red flags around V for at least 1 year after the initial announcement. Funding, exaggerated claims, etc.

I wish V the best of luck but the start wasn't something that inspired confidence in neutral observers like me.
Is this based on something or just a random conspiracy?
The Upside of Impostor Syndrome
I didn't say they would be better. Most people on earth lack any access to healthcare at all. https://shorturl.at/joA23
> building a general-purpose (humanoid) robot has become 1000x

Why? I'm not even sure how ChatGPT is that relevant for this? Sure if you want a scifi style "intelligent" robot, which is capable of basic reasoning, you can talk to it's useful.

However I don't see how does it help with it being able to pick up fragile stuff without crushing it, operate in dynamic 3d environments etc. LLM don't seem to be that useful for these kind of problems.
Show HN: AI for Your Direct Email Marketing
Boy that has aged like milk.
(edit: this comment is quite useless, I need to leave it to keep the discussion understandable)

Interested in the answer which I don't have.

That said, UK is wired to the continent, which runs at 230V, 50 Hz.

Everyone runs at the exact same frequency (same fluctuations) at any moment across the whole continent for technical reasons. (edit: UK is actually not synchronized with the continent, I didn't know that either).

I guess having the about the same voltage as the rest of the continent is at least convenient (edit: apparently it's not exactly the same?).

So I guess the question is US vs the European continent.

Curious about the rest of America (North and South).
TIL UK (or EU) uses 230V, not 220V like my country.
I've been playing with OTEL for a while, with a few backends like Jaeger and Zipkin, and am trying to figure out a way to perform end to end timing measurements across a graph of services triggered by any of several events.

Consider this scenario: There is a collection of services that talk to one another, and not all use HTTP. Say agent A0 makes a connection to agent A1, this is observed by service S0 which triggers service S1 to make calls to S2 and S3, which propagate elsewhere and return answers.

If we limit the scope of this problem to services explicitly making HTTP calls to other services, we can easily use the Propagators API [1] and use X-B3 headers [2] to propagate the trace context (trace ID, span ID, parent span ID) across this graph, from the origin through to the destination and back. This allows me to query the metrics collector (Jaeger or Zipkin) using this trace ID, look at the timestamps originating at the various services and do a T_end - T_start to determine the overall time taken by one call for a round trip across all the related services.

However, this breaks when a subset of these functions cannot propagate the B3 trace IDs for various reasons (e.g., a service is watching a specific state and acts when the state changes). I've been looking into OTEL and other related non-OTEL ways to capture metrics, but it appears there's not much research into this area though it does not seem like a unique or new problem.

Has anyone here looked at this scenario, and have you had any luck with OTEL or other mechanisms to get results?

[1] https://opentelemetry.io/docs/specs/otel/context/api-propaga...

[2] https://github.com/openzipkin/b3-propagation

[3] https://www.w3.org/TR/trace-context/
Companies don't go around donating their source code to universities either, even if it was only for the purpose of learning.
One of the authors, Trae Stephens, is a co-founder of Anduril, the Anduril that is applying AI (and other tech) to military usage.

And he wants to lecture the rest of us about choosing a "good quest". A middle-finger seems like an appropriate response.
I'll try that. But I find that when say, adidas has sales on eBay is a very time consuming experience.
> Unfortunately, I suspect we will get a two-tiered system, where the "middle class" (whether that's disappearing is another question) can afford human content/human support/etc, and the working class are forced to endure poor experiences with AI generated content and so on

Have you dealt with human support agents recently? It's just an exercise in gaslighting. I can't wait for AI to take over.
Body temperature would be a big factor. As far as I can tell thermoregulation is the highest consumer of energy in the human body.
That sounds like a five-minute job.
Apparently they use british Type G plugs. ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AC_power_plugs_and_sockets#/me... )
Do you think they know we know they know we know?
I did the same, although we took the other path, figuring we'd learn faster by going all in. We learned that the slower path is likely more appropriate for most hardware based robotic startups.

We had fantastically supportive VCs, and raised nearly 10 million, but some things just don't go faster with more money, especially selling to slow moving industrial buyers.
We stopped trading a few years ago and helped our employees find other roles while we entered cockroach mode to try and revive it, without success.

I'm happy to share my learnings with anyone who may benefit.
It was still a wonderful experience, and worth it just for the people we met along the way.
Yes the state machine data structure are also used in regex engines. The author of the fst crate also created Rust's regex crate and the ripgrep [0] CLI tool.

The regex crate has multiple implementations of regex matching algorithms, which is exposed as a library [1]. The implementations are selected at runtime based on which is faster and works right for a given regex. See also [2]

[0] https://blog.burntsushi.net/ripgrep/

[1] https://blog.burntsushi.net/regex-internals/

[2] https://docs.rs/regex-automata/latest/regex_automata/#availa...
The one explaining that Edison's DC system they were competing with, in the US, was using ~100v DC. And the public disinformation campaign characterizing AC as unsafe. Including attacking anything higher than approximately 100v as unsafe. That seemed like it answered the question to me.
> We're not going anywhere :)

That's what everyone says (https://ourincrediblejourney.tumblr.com/).

Only time will tell. I'm not in a rush to use a new language, so as I said above, I can run the ultimate test.

I can check back on V in 5 years from now, if it's still around.

Good luck!
Maybe what we need is a hybrid communist/capitalist system.
Governments should nationalize public stock markets and all large companies with a market cap above a certain amount.
The coexistence hasn't exactly been friendly, what with things like Microsoft being SCOs biggest financial backer during the Unix lawsuits.
> Come back and say this after spending a year living in rural Africa

Sure. And what will Starlink do for them when climate is so bad they cannot eat?
Sceptre has non-smart TVs. I bought one a year ago and haven't had any issues with it.
> They rewrote, which is known to help too. Going from 30 to 15 instances is not bad but it's very likely that a Java-to-Java rewrite would have helped go down too.

A java-to-java rewrite could have been as much if not more painful than a java-to-elixir rewrite, especially if the service is highly concurrent.

Rewriting synchronous code as asynchronous in Java is a lot of work and not fun at all IMO.

Given the recent arrival of virtual threads in Java 21 this may not be necessary any longer but at the time I think it was a perfectly reasonable choice.
With induction stoves getting more popular that’s less of an issue nowadays.
after a quick research, i think it's the socket not the plug, it's easier to touch the live wire if the socket is flat.

edit: can't reply to the child comments, maybe there's a time limit, i'll answer here. i have no experience with the british plugs, if you say it's impossible i believe you. i don't understand, though, how does this happen to the person from the top message.
Plus the Swedish Gripen jet fighters are designed to operate off roads rather than requiring long, smooth runways, as well as be main†ained in the field.
I'm not a native English speaker and ChatGPT is the best existing tool to spell check and fix gramatical errors in emails. Copilot is another very useful application, and I think your dismissal of it is invalid. Even if we accept that Copilot hurts new devs (which I don't know if you have any proof but I'll make the concession that it is a possibility). A double edged sword hurts and helps the same person. I and half the programmers I know who pay a subscription for Copilot already know how to program perfectly well.
Not sure about creativity. But.

Previously, I had to deal with "Junior python" or "Junior bash" crap at $work.

Finding the dangerous bugs, was measured in seconds. Helping the person to be better in the future, used to work.

Now, all the company is requesting code to ChatGPT. Hey, please, use my script.

I have to deal with "looks fine at first/quick view" code, that needs deep analysis to understand what it's trying to do, why, and where are the (100% sure) hidden "break production" kind of failures.

It's more like "were is waldo"... you know that there will be at least one or two things really really wrong, always, always one or two (or more) catastrophic details, but that they are hidden below something "apparently nice".

And what is worse, all effort to point and fix issues, is lost. Or repeated again and again.

I apologize, but as a senior sysadmin/oncall model, I cannot run your chatgpt code, until you understand how things work.
Those electric kettles in the US boil water _really slow_ when one is used to 230v.
What? That isn't at all about computer scientists. One of the most fundamental reasons for it is actually mathematical.

Functions like exp and sin can be defined on numbers, but are also well defined on square matrices. In languages that have automatic broadcasting of functions across arrays, if you write exp(x) and x happens to be a matrix, you won't get the mathematically correct answer. You actually get [exp(xi) for xi in x] which is nonsense.

Having the dot operators make it very easy to tell if a function should be operating on entire arrays or on elements of those arrays. It also enables performance enhancements, because if I write

exp.(x) .+ 1

that will do [exp(xi) + 1 for xi in x] instead of [y + 1 for y in [exp(xi) for xi in x]] which wastes and allocation
> Earth observation satellites are incredibly useful for monitoring sea levels, tracking atmospheric CO2, identifying methane emissions, measuring deforestation, levels of sea ice, etc.

And we already have them, don't we? SpaceX is making a business out of space, never forget that.
1B accounts. But how many of those are active or even semi-active users?
> Technical references, definitely, though they are often available as HTML rather than needing a reader for ebook formats.

If you can read HTML, you already have an epub reader available. epub is just a package of HTML documents.
Thanks, this is a good idea. I'll give that a look.
Pgvector 0.5.0: HNSW indexing support
As time passes it feels like Google slowly morphs into a Hooli-esque enterprise. Google's corpspeak has become insufferable...
Switzerland hides some of their jets in mountains and uses the highways as runways.

https://migflug.com/jetflights/hidden-swiss-air-force/
I think people are just going to spend less time on devices.

All in all it’ll probably end up being a net-positive, although it’s a shame that it had to happen in exactly the way. The dawn of the internet was one of hope and optimism and the potential value that it held was an ocean compared to the eventual drops that it was mortgaged in pursuit thereof.

Search is becoming useless. People are becoming inoculated to social and its viral effect will slowly wane. People after exposure to all this value-less capitalism will eventually wise up, because that’s what makes sense, and will be left for us in terms of value will be the original oldies but goodies that we started with: Wikipedia, YouTube maybe, personal blogs, and commerce.

For many people this has already started. I don’t care about going online so much, and I’m much more interested in my community and what’s happening around me. My friends and I all use social but more as a tool and it’s increasingly becoming more local. When I meet younger people it’s even more extreme. They’re so cynical about tech that I’m convinced they’re going to usher in 3rd spaces and better urban planning and the likes when they grow up.

I’m not saying we’ll abandon tech just that we’ll only engage when there’s a legitimate value proposition. Ultimately that’s why there’s so much nonsense anyways, because it is legitimately hard to create actual value. On the long view though only value survives. I didn’t even mention “AI” but that will probably just hasten this process from a content perspective. In the future it’ll be around but we’ll just endure it, but we’ll also seek out meaningful interactions whenever we can.
AI will shape early-career tech jobs
Well, if that doctor is fully programmable by the big companies it could just diagnose more diseases and write more prescriptions.
Succinctly, remote work enables arbitrage from US wages to EU cost of living.

Some of the misgivings of living in US is balanced by the high wages (example: living in San Fransisco vs San Fransisco wages); effectively firms are subsidizing US education costs and healthcare costs via wages (instead of taxes). With remote work being more common, people can start living in lower cost, more tax-subsidized areas while also being qualified for the high wage jobs. After a while, San Fransisco firms might notice that they do not have to subsidize San Fransisco landlords in order to get good developers. They can instead give a little less wages to equally good developers who live in less costly areas. If the wages are depressed enough, living in US might not make sense at all; after all you need to pay for your children's school, have someone drive them everywhere until they are 16, and account for unexpected healthcare costs which are already accounted for in Europe.
> I guess there is some unfortunate reason why they can't do the same here

Because they want to support Git for Windows which is built upon
Cygwin/msys. And this is fine because Cygwin is much faster than WSL
and a good Windows integration is so much easier. Would be a total PITA
if Git would only be available through WSL.

Cygwin is still the best thing ever happened to Windows (or to Linuxers
who are forced to work with Windows).
I don't understand your point. So you want to live your whole life in a spaceship? Is there a reason that would be better than living in a bunker and never going out?
This and Substack are the last two places I still regularly read Internet content.
Met. Police Information Stolen in Major Data Breach Affecting 47,000 Officers
Accuweather API is pretty decent and relatively affordable(free) for personal use: https://developer.accuweather.com/apis
But I haven't seen any good argument as to why an AI teacher that is even cognitively equivalent to the real deal (and surpasses a human in everything a machine can) won't just become an intellectual worker. I'm not saying this eliminates the need for education, but it certainly erases its major component and that is to be competitive on the job market.
It's almost North America (and some friends) vs rest of the world, really:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mains_electricity_by_country
> mowing

Robots which do this are already cheap and widely available, I see them everywhere.

Snow blower robots seem to be a thing too, not sure how useful are they. Racking leaves is probably also solvable problem.

It just seems that it might be more effective/cheap/viable to have a bunch of way more simple specialized 'robots' than a very complex/expensive general purpose one.
Unfortunately most doctors don’t have the time to be that hands on and at the end of the day are just taking your symptoms and comparing it to their flesh database of illness.

There is a lot of value from just having help diagnose/triage people with illness. Certainly not a replacement but definitely a complement to get access to healthcare to more.
As for generative AI: "mimicry is always sinister" (Friendship's Death (1987), Peter Wollen).
(not algorithms, just beautiful math related visualisation)

https://seeing-theory.brown.edu/

https://www.3blue1brown.com/

https://playground.tensorflow.org/

I wish there are more researches on text prompt based generation of information rich diagarms/animations(flow chart, algo visualisation).
"Edison's lamps were 100V" is in one of the answers.
Neither on British nor European Plugs can you touch a live plug when only partially inserted.
That's some haphazard site but fits with the museum theme I guess! Nice to hear about the effort. Fond memories of brief visit in the before times.
> what will LLMs ever do for us?

Hallucinations are an engineering problem and can be solved. Compute per dollar is still growing exponentially. Eventually this technology will be widely proliferated and cheap to operate.
Still, putting the stove on to make a cup of tea seems wrong.
No. That is precisely the wrong attitude. It is the 'corporate' drive to push service to be cheaper (for them) that lead to outsourced and IP poor user services, which AI will take to a whole new level of bad.

What should be desired, is a return to quality and respecting the user (or at least taking the time to understand them), which unfortunately seems unnecessary now with a global reach and unimpeded manipulation and influence that can ignore demands for improvement.
A recent post from 6 months ago about the Computer Museum and lots of anecdotes and discussion:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34831880
Presumably if only 4 years ago that would still have been WSL2, but they have done a lot of improvements over the years. The audio and graphics WSLg stuff is pretty cool. Maybe worth giving it another try.
I accidentally wiped a few years of files like that once. Now there's a gap there and it makes me a bit sad. I definitely go back and sift through some of the old stuff from time to time. It's pretty great.
yeah but it is 5 times faster than a kettle
> Both 110V and 230V are reasonable choices.

Are they, though? With modern appliances, power requirements are going up and 110V is struggling to keep up. One example would be an induction hob.

I know that technically US homes can access 230V but they aren't wired for that, probably 99% are wired just for 110V except for maybe a few special lines.
We always end up with waterfall
Visualizing sorting and other algorithms with classic dances: https://www.youtube.com/@AlgoRythmics/videos