skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I appreciate the lengthy response.

I won't address every point here, but a couple of thoughts:

- To close the syntax point — I opened https://github.com/PRQL/prql/issues/3518. We're currently using the output of the rust's canonical SQL formatter. (so any claim we're obfuscating SQL's syntax is incredulous — do you agree?). I'm open to hand-written examples if SQL doesn't have sufficient auto-formatting tools available.

- "never answering (what I believed to be) substantive questions regarding extensibility and lowest common SQL denominators" — some of the features are implemented, some aren't, there are issues on GH for by-and-large all of them. Feel free to open other issues. I don't think there's a duty to respond to every question in every comment on HN, and I certainly don't think losing your composure is an appropriate response to others not answering every question.

- Many of the answers to your questions are in the docs — for example escape hatches. You don't have to read them to engage, but claims about a project's "youthful exuberance" are less credulous from those who haven't done so.

- Stepping back, are these are informed & constructive criticisms, or are they grasps for straw-men as part of a reactionary response? For example, the response takes two phrases from the website out-of-context to load a whole argument on the words "stable" & "standard". But stability & standards can each mean multiple things, and taking the least generous interpretation of a word doesn't make for a reasoned critique. Does a point such as:

touting itself as a production-ready alternative standard to SQL

...have any grounding in fact? Or does it come through this aggrieved reactionary lens? For context, PRQL's Readme specifically states:

PRQL still has some bugs and some missing features, and is probably only ready to be rolled out to non-technical teams for fairly simple queries.
In 1970, I suppose there are many people whose birthdate is before 1901-12-13?
I worked in a newspaper or two back in the day and the sub editors who wrote headlines were banned from putting a question mark in a headline.
Which is worse than Coffee Lake era systems. I suspect misconfiguration, a truly awful power brick, or inaccurate measurements.
Terraform's license change suddenly makes sense.
> Everyone else used PCs.

And Commodores, Ataris, TRS-80's... 8-bit home computers (and some 32-bit ones) survived long after the introduction of the Mac. What really killed them was the cheap PC clone.
I suppose they figured, quite reasonably, that things written in the 60's would be updated by 2038 and to address this problem was premature optimisation. In the 2000s 64-bit went mainstream which gave us a solid ~30 years to tackle this issue. 32-bit time was introduced in a time where there was a very real argument for it in terms of performance, simplicity, and cost.

I'm not even sure if in hindsight the wrong decision was made.
Same I can float my mortgage for literally years
Wonder if they have to pay licensing fees to hashicorp for using terraform this way. It’s essentially replacing terraform cloud for GCP resources.
I don’t see any value in these principles.

Minimal Viable Products over prototypes

What’s the difference?

APIs over databases

I feel like this is a terrible decision that has nothing to do with data science.

Clever use of computation over convenient assumptions

Why not both?

Dashboards over reports

Dislike this as well. Dashboards don’t contain analysis.

Validation, scrutiny and repeatability over convention and ad verecundiam

Sure, but this is not controversial
That's true for conventional fine-tuning, but is it the case for parameter efficient fine tuning and qLORA? My understanding is that for a N billion parameter model, fine tuning can occur with a slightly-less-than-N gigabyte of VRAM GPU.

For that 70B parameter model: an A100?
I think it needs a more memorable intro. It's a manifesto! It should express more emotion if you are issuing proclamations like this otherwise you are just giving bullet points.
Yeah, the whole Apple cult thing has never made much sense. I remember talking to some environmentalists in the mid nineties who cared a lot about reducing industrial activity but were also strongly advocating the Mac. I was trying to ask why they felt so strongly about that given that any computer is basically a non-essential luxury good that requires a lot of toxic metals to produce [1], whereas pencil and paper has very low environmental impact and even some recycleability. There wasn't a clear answer. I think it's irrational.

[1] at that time, electronics used a lot of lead, cadmium and mercury. It's less of an issue now.
Yes absolutely. Dates are too complicated, requiring to much context, with too much to go wrong, for any non human readable format. At least with strings other systems have half a chance of parsing them correctly, or at least parsing them in a transparent manner.

Or to put it another way, they cannot be trusted to engineers to get it right every time. Let's face it, even something as simple as floating point numbers have serious issues when implemented in computer systems (so another candidate for strings quite frankly - notable that JSON is strings all the way through).
I think it’s fair enough in this case to say “modern” probably means “modern programming languages can compile to and run on it”

There’s some question in the comments here about how much of the ISA is actually implemented but it should theoretically be possible to write Rust code and run it on this thing, for example. There are many other toy CPU designs out there which are much more limited in terms of what can compile to run on them.
I forgot all about having to download replies. Yep. Daily syncs.
Control was a fantastic game. A must play.
Have you tired Gambas https://gambas.sourceforge.net/en/main.html ? I used a lot of VB6 in the old times (and not so old). I didn't try iGambas, but it looks very similar.
Something like this got passing mention in Greg Bear's [1] book Moving Mars (1993) [2], under the name Legal Logic. The (human) Martians used it with AI assistance to formulate legislation for their newly independent society.

For those who don't know, Greg Bear was a well-known SF author who died less than a year ago. His passing was discussed here at the time [3] [4].

He was one of the authors that influenced my youth a great deal, and I particularly remember this aspect of Moving Mars as catching my imagination, so will be interested to read what Catala has to offer.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greg_Bear

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moving_Mars

[3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33679668

[4] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33675708
> (It used to be that making a drainage system under a tower required consultations of magicians and terminology used was including dragons.)

It still does. I'm part of a hobby community that builds basically every part of houses from the ground up, but the one thing we never touch is plumbing. A lot of people aren't too keen on electrics which I guess is fair enough considering the dangers of getting it wrong, but the real dragon is water.
Every release of C++ since 11 has relaxed limitations on `constexpr`, and several relaxed limitations on `template`. Many other features have had various rules relaxed in certain releases, including `for` loops, lambdas, labels, moves, and atomics.

It's true that there are usually new features which arguably make older code no longer idiomatic, but modernizing code is always optional, so what's really the issue there?
It reminds me of https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Financial_Modelers%27_Manife...

Does it not make sense? A lot of people doing data "science" are spraying bullshit out through their teeth, unknowingly even (there are too many people in the field). Far too often the dominant approach seems to be jamming a model onto unfamiliar data.
I mean that sounds good and cool and worth trying for the average hackernews, but not for the average adobe user. Like people are not paying for AI tech to get the 80% mostly-there version, they're paying for the 100% spit-and-polished end product that has the 80% of the work needed to achieve the last 20% of productizing. Consumers have demonstrated over and over they will pay a lot more to avoid dicking around with stuff and professionals can have an even stronger tendency to do this bc their time has a cost.
... or reader mode on Safari
I wish AWS would do this and deprecate CloudFormation.
This is great news, congrats on the grant!
OK, so we agree they're not fully equivalent
Imagine what we could do if we could find a way to put the same effort we do into killing other humans into helping other humans.

Curiously, this simple idea is not nearly as popular as one might think, a lot of people even think it is humourous.
I struggle with why this access is an issue. If the health data were used in making insurance decisions, marketing, employment, or any sort of way that has a personal impact on the people in the data set then absolutely not. But presumably personally identifying information is in no way relevant to the task of training models, so what specifically is the concern? Medical data is a constellation of observations over time. Why is this particularly sensitive, especially if it’s not associated with any specific identifiable person?

HIPPA has seemed to create a view that anything related to medical care is the most secret information in all the world, when in fact it’s pretty useless to anyone but yourself and people that want your money in some way that exploits your health situation. HIPPA itself only really erects barriers between your health data and disclosure to insurers and providers without your consent.
I do have an account with probably thousands of tweets over the last few years.

There’s a sign out button.

The reason I initially signed out was because I was tired of scrolling past dozens of 0 follower, 0 likes, 0 RT, low value commentary by people who paid for Blue in order to get to the first substantive comment by someone who didn’t. That of course is also a significant change (not sure if he rolled this back since then and thankfully don’t care if he did).
I too love the way LaTeX output looks and it blows my mind that I can not make things that look as good with other tools.
Doesn't look like anything has done the legwork yet. There's an opening for you!
Builds on https://agilemanifesto.org/, maybe overly so.

I disagree with some of these points:

- Minimal Viable Products over prototypes: depends on use case. Prototypes within a timebox evaluation are helpful and don't have the overhead of delivery. Maybe better: prototypes during discovery

- APIs over databases: nah, use both.

- Clever use of computation over convenient assumptions : if the assumptions are well founded, calibrated from external references, etc., then no issue. For example, you don't need to perform raw research to understand how many joules heat water by a degree Celsius

- Dashboards over reports: depends on the use case. Dashboards generally limit use choice.

- Validation, scrutiny and repeatability over convention and ad verecundiam: Reasonable (though argument by authority is the more common name than ad verecundiam).
It really goes to show what is possible when there is a centrally planned economy vs having the labor tied up serving decentralized market forces without any clear directive. The fact that the U.S. was able to do this at the home front, with some 12 million of its laborers in their prime working years serving overseas instead, is just bewildering. It makes you wonder what the state of our nation and technological progress might have been by today, if we didn't abandon the centrally planned economic system that was established during world war ii and instead shifted it towards peacetime goals.
Latlearn: Latency instrumentation API and reporting for Golang
The effects can be observed from satellite images which one hand gives a "hands off" way to know it worked or didn't work without extra effort on your part but it also means everyone else will know you (or at least somebody) did it.

See https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/west-coast-o...
Interestingly it's only 500kHz clockrate
I have debugged a problem that was due to a left shift of 1ULL by 64 (in a routine that tried to set the lowest n bits by shifting 1 left and subtracting by 1). I needed to read the Intel docs to find out what actually happens to work out how badly we’d corrupted the customer data and how to write a fix to unmangle it.

What Intel processors do is ignore the upper bits of the shift quantity, so it’s effectively (1ULL << (x % 64)) - 1, therefore the function that should have set all ones for x=64 actually set all zeros.
> Why not both?

A financial example would be that some models are designed to be particularly tractable when those in the know could use a tool like autodiff to make a more sophisticated model more usable at the same scale
Other countries also had a much larger proportion of the population off fighting and dying. UK casualties in ww2 were 0.94% of the 1939 population, France's were about 1.44%, the USSR's were about 13.4% (of course the USSR was a wild outlier). The USA lost about 0.3% of its 1939 population, still an appallingly huge number, but smaller. Since the people who were off fighting were predominantly the healthy young men who worked in industry at the time the impact on industry was magnified.

The US was able to focus a much greater proportion of its effort on making things.
For me I see IDS as a natural easy win; collating a shitload of sensor
data, tripwires, logs... and providing carefully graded alerts and
advice seems like something ANN trained on lots of good field data
would excel at.
Meaning that it would be harder for those languages on the clr because of generics? Would typing all generics as Object not be essentially equivalent?
Here in Spain too. A while back in Barcelona it was "Year of the Book" with events all year, in many kinds of places, celebrating books and reading. The even created a free book, to cover all the things they were doing. But the English in the book was HORRIBLE. And it still is on many government websites, tourist things, trains and buses etc. Such a bad LOOK.
I haven't used Cloudformation in three years, how's it doing these days?
Buy my book: "Finding middlemen for loosers"
> The US never had any real threats to the mainland

Hey, the Japanese destroyed the backstop on the baseball diamond at Fort Stevens in Oregon. They literally threatened America's past time! /s
This is so cool. Hopefully this will give access to thousands or millions more developers in the space
I figured something like this is what drove Hashicorp's licensing decision, but thought it would be Amazon.
There's a lesson here for everyone who thinks they have a new no-code solution. There's a long history of these solutions that never caught on, and the best outcome you can hope for is Filemaker, Access, or VB. It works for simple things, but it quickly escalates to needing a "real" programming language.
We will list your startup on directories to boost your DA
> not full-sized modern aircraft carriers.

17 "full-size modern" Essex class fleet carriers, assuming you mean 'modern' by contemporary standards.
I'd say it's a bit more involved than a single command stream: you can include any number of nested lists inside the outermost list, and each list acts as its own self-contained scope for configuring the style. For instance, if you write Graphics[{Red, Disk[{-2, 0}], {Green, Disk[{0, 0}]}, Disk[{2, 0}]}], you'll get a green disk surrounded by two red disks. Often, when I'm constructing a long Graphics call, I won't have any commands at all in the top-level list, but instead put each part in an isolated sublist.
Also I think the API thing if some right is the right way. Databases can become an unversioned blob for too quickly.

I don't think raw APIs are really it either, maybe a persistent airflow-y DAG type thing that's secretly backed by a proper database?
I find it revolting that it is hardcoded this way. A button should look like a button.
It's just a guideline.
The point is that you only care about discovering these lies when things aren’t going good. When success is effectively trivial, why would anyone act antisocially.

It’s only after we have an obesity epidemic so people start questioning whether our cereals have become candy.
I've been interested in book scanning for a while. I think I remember seeing your software! I built one of the early versions that I saw on the site, and then happened to meet Jonathon Duerig and do some waterjet cutting for him a few years ago.

When I saw the linear bookscanner the first time, I realized it was upside down. If it were suspended, and able to move itself, then all the issues about not knowing the mass of the book, and dealing with friction could be avoided. Counterweights could keep the force constant, and it would be moving a known mass when scanning any book.
Yes. It says "WWII" right there in the title. Modern aircraft carriers are..well, modern.
> When viewed as a DSL for set theory, views, CTEs, set-returning functions, et al are indeed proper first-class query abstractions.

It's still lacking even then. You can't assign a set to variable for instance, and then use that variable in other definitions or queries.
hey at least link Krita instead, which is far better than gimp
The author offers strong arguements for the value of twitter, does a survey of inadequate competition, and leaves off with vauge specs of a better platform. Not discussed are ways twitter might recapture the minority who no longer use it.

I'm starting to think Elon is actually going to increase Twitter's value. It sure seems sticky. Even this minority of highly political people who hate Elon enough to quit twitter don't seem happy with the other offerings. Perhaps a rebranding and distancing himself from the platform will regain this lost market share. I never really cared about twitter before this whole saga started! Now it's really interesting.
It's a way to encode land to make predictions of it. E.g. is the land arable, is it rural, how similar is it to X, etc. Embeddings help encode data in formats more usable by ML models.
Once you become the "dashboard guy" at your organization, it's game over - that is all you'll be doing - there is literally a never-ending demand of dashboards in any org that works with lots of data, and those dashboards will grow into full-blown apps, sooner or later.
I wouldn't trust "the news" all that much these days, given how much scaremongering brings in the views and ad $$$.

As for the trend, what about the years before 1988?
The author talked about this a few months ago on Tim Ferriss' podcast[0]. One of my favorite episodes.

I'm passionate[1] about the concept but articles like this are a reminder to me that we need to make self hosting an order of magnitude simpler and accessible to more people. It shouldn't need to involve any CLI, DNS, TLS certs, port forwarding/NAT traversal, IP addresses, etc etc.

Self hosting shouldn't be any more difficult or less secure than installing an app on your phone. The flow should be 1) install the "self hosting app" on an old laptop or phone. 2) Go through a quick OAuth2 flow to connect your app to a tunnel that enables inbound traffic. 3) Use the self hosting app to install other apps like Jellyfin, Calendar, Nextcloud, etc. Everything should be sandboxed (containers work pretty well on Linux and Windows 10/11 via WSL2) and secure by default. Automatic backups (ideally an OAuth2 flow to your friends' self hosted installations) and auto app updates are table stakes.

There's no technical reason this can't all be done, but lots of technical challenges, and it's unclear whether anyone will pay for tunnels. I'm currently trying to figure out how to do reliable auto backups without filesystem snapshots.

[0]: https://youtu.be/0BaDQCjqUHU?si=0wDf-2RH-u9vdm3g&t=1380

[1]: https://github.com/anderspitman/awesome-tunneling
WITH t AS (SELECT 1 x)
SELECT x FROM t JOIN t u ...;

That breaks if you fill in the ... with "ON t.x = u.x" because there are two columns called "x", but works with "USING (x)" because they get collapsed into a single column. I think it makes sense to say those aren't fully equivalent.
A lot of Androids (the ones I have kicking around) don't have a scanning app that comes with the OS so you have to install one, I think most of those use a commercial or open source QR code scanning library that they got from somewhere but not always the same somewhere.

For my three-sided cards I finally realized I can just put a URL to a web-based QR code scanner on the back of my cards and not have any trouble navigating all the scammy looking listings you see when you look for a QR code reader on the play store.
Do any of those economies really have laws protecting an author's "style"? Because I'd really like to see a legal definition of an author's style, and a case that found someone guilty of infringing on that style (separate from trademark and copyright of course)
> Validation, scrutiny and repeatability over convention and ad verecundiam

Does repeatability mean you can't change your product based on the outcome of an A/B test? Because you probably won't get a chance to repeat those conditions.
Central planning is great when you have one clearly defined goal that takes precedence over any other, namely winning a war. It's trash for anything else.
One accepts an arbitrary subdomain as a matter of verification policy, and the other has broader PKI implications: how should verifiers handle name constraints with multiple prospective paths? How should they handle CAs that issue longer-lives certificates than the CA/B guidelines permit? CAs that allow end-entity certs with known insecure algorithm choices, etc?

In short, allowing user-controlled name-constrained intermediate CAs opens up multiple cans of worms that the ecosystem is not currently prepared to handle. Presenting a compelling argument for these user-controlled CAs means explaining (and getting buy-in) for solutions to the above.
One can easily imagine the privileged son of a medieval samurai attempting to purchase a lemon-lime Shasta from a vending machine outside his castle, only to have his coin repeatedly drop into the return slot.
~10 gallons of diesel per cubic meter container crossing the pacific. And the majority of that is high sulfur, which is prohibited almost everywhere except high seas due to environmental impact.
Julia Allison Was the First Online Influencer and Was Vilified for It
> Welcome to VAXBARN, Camiel Vanderhoeven's computer collection, located in a 200-year old farmhouse in the tiny village of Netterden, in the east of the Netherlands, on the border with Germany.

https://wikipedia.org/wiki/VAX
I recently had a thought that when a meaningful piece of text/image is written/uploaded on the internet, the energy or willpower if you will spent in producing it by a human reduces entropy a bit. Up until now that entropy reduction was unmeasured and unharvested, because really who would browse through 170000 forum pages and combine the bits and pieces to produce an answer on how to do a niche little thing, but by these LLMs being trained on this data and commoditizing it, the "magic" if you will is really harvesting and repackaging informational entropy reduction.
One FAQ is "Why do we even need symmetric cryptography? Why don't we just do everything with public key cryptography now?"

It's because public key cryptography is extremely CPU resource-intensive, while symmetric cryptography is not. So we typically use public key crypto only to exchange symmetric keys, and that way we get the best of both worlds without chewing up too much CPU time.
Americans and HN couldn’t handle a whatever balloon, they surely couldn’t handle an alien vehicle.
This is super cool, but what happened with Tom's Hardware? There are so many ads in mobile that is way too hard to read the content.
Perhaps there are many who think "it's just a painting on my skin".