skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: Why did Google Maps turn ugly?
I've always enjoyed Google Maps having a light-feeling interface.

In the last few weeks though, it started feeling very heavy and ugly. I am not sure why?

I think a lot more areas are now shaded in various grays instead of plain white, which adds to feeling of heaviness and mental distraction of colours... Meanwhile roads have moved from bright, easily seen high-contrast yellow with thin outline, to blah-gray, which blends with new shadings, so they've thickened the outline to try to compensate.

It feels significantly worse, to me at least, and I'm not sure why/when changes were made (note: Firefox and Chrome on Windows 10 and 11. My iOS app seems to still be OK, Android app seems to slowly be switching over).
SQLite has a number of functions to work with time but the underlying storage format is just going to be--depending on what precision/range of timestamp you want--a float or an integer... to the extent, of course, that SQLite has types at all (as it frankly doesn't, thereby making this question kind of moot).
The problem is that it is not easy to find a real sense of community because there is no worthwhile way to search the available communities. I find this hugely frustrating. For all their distasteful aspects Twitter and Facebook do help some in this. Perhaps the solution is some sort of dynamic "meta-social medium" for finding communities. If well managed, the economics of such a medium would be huge.
> What they've proven is that you can build functioning systems that perform intelligent tasks purely at the level of syntax. But there is no (or very little) understanding of semantics.

That's not how LLMs work though, and I'm increasingly convinced that "syntax" and "semantics" are turning into annoyingly useless ideas people forget are descriptive, in the same way grammar books and dictionaries are descriptive.

My model of LLMs is that, in training, they're positioning inputs in an absurdly high-dimensional[0] latent space. That space is big enough to encode anything you'd consider "syntax" and "semantics" on some subset of dimensions. As a result, the model sidesteps the issue of "source of meaning" - there is no meaning but that formed through associations (proximity). This is pretty much how we do it, too - when you think of "chair", there is no token for platonic ideal of a chair in your mind. The word "chair" has meanings and connotations defined via other words, which themselves are defined via other words, ad infinitum, with the only grounding being associations to sensory inputs.

--

[0] - On the order of 100 000 dimensions for GPT-4, perhaps more now for GPT-4V / GPT-4-Turbo.
A game that caught me completely off guard. It's superb in its execution and captures Lem's atmosphere perfectly.
I can’t wait to see what the buttplug.io does with this. Apple is going to catapult teledildonics so much closer to the singularity.
Here's an audio impression of the chord those planets are playing:

https://fritzo.org/live#a=dmFyIHJhdGlvcyA9IFsyLzMsIDIvMywgMi...
It's a sign that the compiler devs value backward compatibility with earlier incarnations that lacked such programmer aids. These are features that come with an associated cost and you don't pay that price in C without explicitly choosing it.
It's perfect marketing for its target audience: people who don't know better (no offence meant).
Maybe they know their situation and have a better view into what their librarians think than you do.
Window management becomes a whole other thing with really large monitors. I recently got a UHD 43" and to make the most of it I designed a custom grid but struggled to find an optimal solution. BetterSnapTool with custom snap zones works but is a bit clunky. Lasoo has the exact imagined solution I wanted (keystroke > grid representation appears at mouse pointer > drag window size) but doesn't yet support custom grids. I've requested the feature but not exactly hopeful.

I could see that yabai could be a solution but haven't committed to a proper setup.

Anyone else using a single large monitor? FancyZones on Windows (PowerToys feature) looks pretty good, but I got sick of autoupdate BS random driver breaks (common linux thing) and went full mac.

My custom grid for 4K 43" snap zones in case anyone's interested:
- diagram: https://imgur.com/a/axTw1tI
- 3840x2160 1:1 grid: https://imgur.com/a/pUSoafG
A lot of the specs have changed since their initial reveal of the Cybertruck, but it still looks as ugly as they promised it would. So, at least in that respect, Tesla has lived up to their promises, and it's only right to salute them for that.
I really enjoy these. Great post.
I'm not sure I see what you mean. This is an x86 chip, is it not?
The name comes from "Google Dorking", but replaced Google with Q since it's basically query search string dorking :) Nothing to do with the current Q-hype!
> My academic interests are pretty broad, and I could improve in every subject, so why don't I?

My suspected culprits:

1) The massively increased complexity of ordinary living is overconsumining our personal resources. and

2) For post-GenX and later, the erasure of childhood (free-roaming & peer-only hours) sabotages[1] the reward systems (joy) that supercharge early learning.

The less joy there is to facilitate learning, the more effort is required (from otherwise overly depleted resources).

[1] similar to what abuse and neglect do
I would say you’re completely wrong and we have thousands of years of Buddhist experience that contradicts everything you said, including that Buddhist think their inner monologue comprises their inner thoughts.

First, not everyone even has an inner monologue. Just like many people can’t close their eyes and see things while others can, many people don’t think in words.

Second, you absolutely can suspend your thoughts. I do regularly. In fact the entire point of Buddhist meditation is to practice the act of suspending observable thoughts entirely in a controlled environment to carry the practice over into every day life. I like you didn’t think it was possible until after several years of practice I could. With that I lost my anxiety and depression, and found a way to be generally happy. I still think, but it’s in service towards a goal. Otherwise I let myself simply live. In so, I have a happy marriage and a successful career. Much more so than before.

I don’t feel compelled to convince you I’m not lying or otherwise deluded if you choose to not believe me.

Now, how do you choose to begin thinking again? The fact is you’re always thinking when you are conscious and aware, but it’s happening in an aspect of your mind you can’t perceive directly. While I’m not thinking I still make decisions and take actions and initiate things, even carry on conversations and form intentions. But they aren’t thoughts that are articulating in my mind like we typically think of as thinking. I usually drop into thinking when I need to analyze something rationally or methodically plan, particularly if it has to be verbalized or written in some way, or recorded on a schedule or something. How do I begin that? I can’t observe the process and isolate it as that’s just the way things are. I’m definitely aware of my intentions, but I’m not thinking about them or articulating some thoughts in my mind. They just flow naturally from the present. When my mind needs to think, it does. Because, my thinking facilities in my mind are merely a tool of my mind - the crucial insight is that we are not our tools.

I don’t think any of this is mystical in the least. I think people who think their thoughts are really important are the mystical thinkers. We are meat brains, and our thinking facility is a late evolutionary feature that we’ve become ensnared in much to our own suffering as it distracts us from our more natural states of being because they’re so seductive in its constructs. I think Buddhism in its most raw form is almost entirely devoid of mystical thinking and most mysticism associated with it is an accretion of animistic and ancestor worship indigenous societies where it developed.
This is true. Had one eat a burning ember from a roaring fire. Its beak melted and became stuck to the fire. I Had to kick it free. She survived. Apparently chicken breaks are like nails and grow back.

Another one pecked at something under a ledge and managed to break its neck by trying to stand up.

If they get out of my fenced area they will ram into the same section for the whole day trying to join the flock even though there is a clear opening 3 feet away.

Never had turkeys but apparently if you leave any kind of hanging object they will find a way to hang themselves.

Just a handful of examples.

They are stupendously stupid.
Prompt: act like a snarky redditor. Write a short and dismissive response to this headline.
hah better than a German at German grammar? don't think so
I agree that open source (or source available) is better, in particular the weights and code, the training data is immaterial. But I think a lot of this is pretty naive. The "best" model is the best and it's unlikely to come from some idealistic consortium. And the data they have is virtually irrelevant, as every company that thinks they have a great trove of data finds out. My recommendation would be to use whatever the leading source available models is (one of the big llamas?) and focus on the guardrails needed to make it a helper for medicine. Reinventing the wheel is a bad idea.
"Parents, 40ish, push their kid to do some publicity stunt"

Here's a fixed title.
I agree 100% and the observe this all the time with things that “magically fix themselves.” But Im not sure it applies here since they seemed to have actually quarantined it.

I suppose since they dont know the root cause it’s impossible to say. But I think the saying would fit better if they kept the gif but made some change that seemed to fix it without knowing why.
Use a managed platform like minikube for your laptop, or terraform to provision EKS if you’re in in AWS, or the equivalents in the other clouds.

There’s no point to building your own control plane from scratch anymore for 95% of cases.
Apply some sciencey thinking.

Test a variety of ideas (perhaps start with what is given here) until you find something that works for you.

Challenge yourself: either practice someone else's technique, or invent your own.

Outcome: satisfaction for the rest of your life every time you use your technique and get a perfect avo!
If you want to create your own design systems / UI components and want to have a simple place to show that without any actual apps running ( or as some have mentioned, without any data - related logic ), Storybook makes this easy and clean. You can build it right off from your actual application.

The company I work for uses it for frontend devs (who are mostly freelance) to understand the feel of the UI designs and how the components should be built/used.

You can see lots of showcases here:
https://storybook.js.org/showcase
Or worse, your 30 year-old program that used to compile and work just fine no longer compiles and you now have to figure out why.
ZFS DRAID Visualizer
I wonder what the process of choosing a new platform looked like and how they landed on Microsoft To Do. Hopefully they do a followup post.
They said it also crashes when they just load the gif. It seems hard to believe they always had tons of tabs open for these tests.
> same 250 mile range but AWD standard

AWD is much less important on a truck than most people think. I spent my youth driving my family’s farm trucks around in the mud and driving large cattle trailers to auctions. No one in my family could afford a 4WD, but there was maybe one or two times ever that I felt like I needed it. Mostly it’s just huge cost and a large amount of weight and fuel economy lost for rural people to signal their high status.
It's like the swiss cheese security model. You don't have to and can't cater to every possible individual disability in the same happy path as long as you've provided options to allow people with the most common disabilities to use the $thing in some way. People that are simultaneously blind, deaf, wheelchair-bound, and mute are not actually that common and design guidelines aren't written assuming that every disabled person has every disability simultaneously.
Well for one I use Google to do search. If they can't figure out how to handle all this autogenerated SEO rubbish, I don't know how search will work.
That will be hard to beat :)

Go grab it then! For that kind of money you really can't go wrong.
>The problem also happened exceedingly rarely -- we needed about 100 of these devices to run constantly a certain operation and it took us to wait for about a week until one of these devices died

That's one failure per 16,800 hours, or 700 days. That's pretty goddamn rare.
I still use Moom with keyboard shortcuts
> was shocked when it ran correctly the first time

This overall "if it compiles it works" philosophy is quite common among Pascal-family languages, and derived languages like Ada. Though there is also PL/I if you want a language with a loosely Pascalish syntax that relies on the complete opposite design style - the one that was carried over to C and its derivatives.
Retaliation from military claimed after questioning cushy IT contracts
it's amazing how well it holds up. most of the jokes they're making would work perfectly fine if you swapped in whatever the overhyped tech fad of the day is.
Yes, but people BUY 16gb of ram, and BUY a pickup bed, and BUY extra bathrooms...

and they BUY a truck that can accelerate (almost) like a porsche.

note truck cannot accelerate like a plaid :)
It's the reverse-Norway problem - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26671136
Great question, and I thought about mentioning Sam specifically.

First, these nice little boxes I made are somewhat arbitrary and imperfect. That said, they have a use.

Sam is currently a 3 imho, but he has enough tech chops to be able to work with 2s effectively. I think any sufficiently large tech company, especially if the tech is complex and/or consumer-oriented, needs at least one 2 and one 3. OAI is a great example of this.

I’m pretty sure Sam can’t do any of the AI work on his own, but he knows enough (or learned enough) to be able to empathize with the AI leads, clear roadblocks for them, and otherwise support their work in an effective manner.
not a repository as such but i linked to some good examples in my sept recap

https://www.latent.space/p/sep-2023

https://github.com/swyxio/ai-notes/blob/main/Monthly%20Notes...
You might want to check out AeroSpace :) https://github.com/nikitabobko/AeroSpace

AeroSpace reimplements workspaces by emulating them. https://github.com/nikitabobko/AeroSpace/blob/main/docs/guid...

The result is that workspace switching is instant, and disabling SIP is not required

Note: I'm the author of AeroSpace
There are a couple males (under Human, click 4th dot) and an ironman robot too (first under Humanoid).
Use -Werror for the build server and have a policy that you can't commit code that generates warnings. That lets you still build locally without having to immediately fix minor warnings that would be a distraction.
Segregation in Big Cities
I learned Pascal in highschool the last year they taught it before switching to Java! I remember the textbook we used had a Dune themed question/problem to solve which was delightfully nerdy compared to the corporate OOP blandness of Java
Interesting question... based on DOS 1.25, I can't imagine there are many choices. (Maybe the earliest Compaq machines among them).
That's because we're looking at different things. I'm looking at the state of the world in general, the number of people that have to deal with the fall out of all that wealth in terms of climate and pollution. That welfare comes with a massive cost.
Unfortunately it's a little bit tricky today. The main issue is that we rely heavily on torch.compile + Triton for performance in this repo, and there isn't an Apple Silicon backend either for torch.compile or Triton.

For example, there's an AMD backend for Triton (and it's also integrated into torch.compile), which is why we can mostly do the same optimizations on Nvidia and AMD GPUs.

Ideally, there'd be an Apple Silicon backend for Triton, and then this repo would mostly work out of the box :)
Sorry you've had those experiences, but mine have been consistently profitable and pleasant. I think a big part of that was that I asked around before I selected an offshore partner, instead of just choosing the cheapest or the first.
Yes, my method too. I'm a little disappointed the article did not mention this.

Since lime juice is an ingredient in my guac, that's handled and I don't have problems with the guac discoloring unless kept too long.
Offtopic, but what software do they use to create the benchmark flamegraphs? I've been using cProfile with snakeviz, but am curious to try alternatives.
I used blue/yellow in Emacs until I bought a laptop with a glossy screen in 2011. Now it's grey/yellow. Some habits die hard.
What term do you prefer over “coder”? I’ve had this issue with pretty much any term for what I essentially do. I don’t like “developer”, “programmer”, “techie”, “IT… guy”? (The last two being particularly bad)

Even “engineer” is a bit strange to me and I feel it doesn’t really fit, so I actually never knew what to call myself.
Yeah. I would also recommend the Cyberiad and Star Diaries to start. Both are slightly interconnected short story collections with a lot of humor. The Futurological Congress is a complete (but short) novel and the first follow-up to the Star Diaries, it's also a good place to start.

For Solaris (a serious novel) I would recommend the new Kindle translation, if you are reading in English. The old one was a retranslation from French for some reason.
Russia is very typical Asian country, or to be more strict, typical country of Central Asia, not European, for example, South-Eastern Asia is very different.

And Russian behavior is very typical for Central Asia. Absolutely nothing extraordinary.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Central_Asia
Although the general meanings of modern and contemporary are similar, in art they have different meanings. The production of modern art is considered to have ended in the 20th century, and contemporary art is being produced right now.

For a similar historical nomenclature, see the musical style ars nova or "new art." Ars nova continues to be called ars nova, even though the music was written in the 14th century.
Also, Pascal is a direct descendant of a very, very old language (ALGOL-58 from 1958). In the 1950s, HLL compilation was at the extreme edge of what computers were capable of doing and a key goal of language design was (or should have been - cough COBOL cough) to make it as efficient as possible.

By the time Ken Thompson was designing languages, hardware had improved a lot and he could make compilation efficiency a lower priority.
No, really, he was 100.
Of course it does something in this instance. Otherwise the light would never change to the barely-used crossing.

There’s a pervasive myth about elevator buttons and crosswalk buttons being there as placebos. Yes, I’m certain there are instances where—when the traffic lights regularly cycle all day long—they might be placebo buttons, but the vast majority of them will at least lengthen the cycle time for your direction, and if appropriate will trigger a change sooner than it would have occurred otherwise.
I think you struck a nerve!

In my younger days I thought it would be neat to build an electromagnetic grapple to latch onto semi trucks. Add even more drag with the alternator to power the magnet. Perhaps even some control loop to maintain a close distance without actually touching. With an electric vehicle it seems even better because you could add even more drag and recharge.
Launching spy satellites has utility
Well, it worked if that was the goal - this is one of the leading articles in the Times today: "In Praise of Nerds"
https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/the-times-view-on-apples-...
Would be cool to make some of these that look like different things under red/blue light.
>And besides, we'll be making similar comments about more your favorite recent languages once they're 38 years old and the field of computing changes. And if you don't believe so, you're in for a very rude awakening.

I'm not going to have a problem with critique of my $fav_lang if its designers and implementators underperform.

So far they managed to do really good job after >2 decades.

>This kind of disdain really should be put to rest. All it does is alienate people that were on the fence, or maintain projects with different goals in mind.

I believe that languages and compilers should go way beyond just "enable things to be possible", but they also should be user friendly and be safe/sane by default.

That's why I'm critiquing this chaos. Don't you see this long ass list:

">-O2 -Wall -Wformat=2 -Wconversion -Wtrampolines -Wimplicit-fallthrough \ >-U_FORTIFY_SOURCE -D_FORTIFY_SOURCE=3 \ >-D_GLIBCXX_ASSERTIONS \ >-fstrict-flex-arrays=3 \ >-fstack-clash-protection -fstack-protector-strong \ >-Wl,-z,nodlopen -Wl,-z,noexecstack \ >-Wl,-z,relro -Wl,-z,now"

It is insane. Just because someone values different things then it doesnt make it flawless.
Heh-heh, "challenging" is the polite term.

12-tone serial composition is simply a technique for removing natural tonality from a composition.

I think the big issue is whether 12-tone approaches are used occasionally in a piece as an expressive tool, or as a "new way of life" where the entire composition is serial, and the listener is stuck in it. Or all of a composer's work is serial.

Which is what makes it... challenging.

It's the same with Minimalism.

But used in smaller doses, it's a powerful technique.

Here's an example, in Frank Zappa's "Brown Shoes Don't Make It" there's a little section that's a 12-tone piece, starting with the lyrics "We see in the back of the City Hall mind...". It's short, it's weird, and it works very well in context.

And in Zappa's "St. Alphonso's Pancake Breakfast", the middle instrumental section, the first 20 notes are going up and down a simple C-Major scale... (What could be more tonal?)... and then he rips into a 12-tone row. The result is downright delightful.
Featuring the classic rhetoric of: "Have a different opinion from the one true opinion? You're causing harm". It's "think of the children" for upper middle class people with college degrees.
I feel my life has improved immensely by the revelation of storing avocados in the fridge.

1. Ripeness-window is days, maybe even a week, and they can be super squishy and still not turn brown.

2. Because of #1, buy a good number of avocados when you notice you’re out and immediately toss them in the fridge. Maybe work to find that one in the store that is ready to go for today/tomorrow. Sure for the next few days you might not have an avocado ready, but…you probably don’t have to eat avocado every day so you’ll be ok.

3. If you really need avocados and you’re annoyed at the unripe avocados in your fridge, take one out and put it on the counter for tomorrow.

So much less stress to immediately use that purchased avocado. Net-net so much less wasted avocado.
The interesting thing about Turbo Pascal is that by the time it was TP6 it was just about as expressive as C itself. (Evidenced by the fact Turbo Pascal for Windows could easily interoperate with the heavily C-based Win16 API).