skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Yes, that's true, although it's always irritated me slightly because it has a repetitive element, from one generation to the next, an element of "kicking the can down the road" or "passing the buck". Which is not to deny that it all generates knowledge and makes progress, but it (parenthood) generates a lot of churn, too.
Because I know such people, and it is inconceivable that one would notice one's childless status only before dying.

Why does it seem strange to act so as to minimize future regret? That's just common sense. This principle guided Jeff Bezos, for one: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jwG_qR6XmDQ
Indeed.

Use trie constraint for quotes.

Use BNF for grammar languages (json, python etc).

Projects like llama.cpp/ollama should make it automatic/dynamic, just rely on triple quote sections where you enter those constraint modes automatically.

Ie. every time you enter into section starting with "```json" you automatically switch to JSON BNF.

Every time you enter into "```json:Foo" you enter JSON BNF + JSON-SCHEMA for Foo object definition.

"```python" for python grammar etc.

"```quote:documentRef" you enter trie based constraints.

"```llm:otherllm" you enter other llm.

"```whatever:whatever" you enter whatever you want.

If you want just json output you start output with "```json" and that's it.

As its all inference time it could be plugin based, ie:

1. character based - given input (from the start of opening "```foo") it returns allowed next characters, or

2. token based - same as above but returns allowed native tokens (not sure how performance would behave here, would it be acceptable?)

IMHO also very interesting area would be exploring stable AST representations for programming languages (a'la darklang I believe?) – where variable names are detached from AST itself, ie. differently named functions that otherwise have the same structure have precisely the same AST representation. This would dramatically reduce space to navigate around.

ps. [0] in case somebody else is interested

[0] https://github.com/ollama/ollama/issues/3019
I don0t understand what this does. DO you have a example or an screenshot?
> Personally, I've never found text-based formats to be a good choice for data that humans will rarely need to read or write; I much prefer simple and efficient binary formats, which can be just as extensible without the additional inefficiency and needlessly-introduced-failures of string handling.

Many modern serialisation / deserialisation libraries (like Rust's serde) let you serialise your data structures to a variety of formats, including both JSON and various binary formats of your choice.

But it should also be relatively easy to take any binary format, and define an alternate text based format for it that allows one-to-one conversion in both directions. A bit like assembly vs binary machine language.
The tool itself is at https://downpour.games/
Very high end digital pianos have an action that is quite similar to a real grand.

This is a relatively cheap digital piano action https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S_VT0IpM66k

These are 2 versions of a mid-high range digital piano action https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rJEAKI2jBLU

This is a very high end digital piano action https://kawaius.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/Kawai-NV10S-M...

That very same action is also used in acoustic pianos, and the acoustic version looks like this (you can see the main difference is that the hammers have felt) https://snadenspianos.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2018/05/MG_9...

And this is another (more traditional) acoustic grand piano action https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v5O1Kfd_4Fw
Those are truly the best dads /s
I am personally conflicted on this. Our current society needs resources that have to come from somewhere. There is a 'perfect world' where we recycle so perfectly that we don't need to mine more but the technology, and social will, to make that a practical reality just aren't here. So, do we mine on land or take from the sea? Both destroy ecosystems. Probably the best route is to start small and increase as we understand more. The reality of what will happen though is likely to be that we will start small and then massively increase capacity to the limit of regulation.
"Could this be a trap?"

"Listen carefully."

"Message ahead."

"Try finger, but hole."
Ya, the nightmares towards the end when you are finally writing your thesis are the worst, but it was mentally fulfilling and I guess I don’t regret it, even though my thesis will never be read by anyone else. The things you actually learn and the thing you study can be really different.

I actually still have nightmares about not finishing my thesis for some reason, or having my topics rejected (although for some reason, the mental stress didn’t start until I got past that point).

Design topics are the worst: you can’t measure how fast they are or how effective they are. My advice to anyone who wants to do a PhD is to get into a field where the metrics are obvious, and then lean into Goodhart’s law for all its worth (but be super honest with numbers and careful with your methodology).
Because lisp syntax (s expressions) are a cleaner and terser superset of all markup languages, and even of JSON-like representations.

IOW, if you take Lisp expressions, add cosmetic syntactical changes like angle brackets and closing tags, then remove about 90% of functionality and cripple what's left, you'll have XML.

Cripple it further and you'll have JSON.
Google and Facebook are among others now regulated as well.

The European Economic Zone sets regulations around economic policy. Their creation of the DMA was that while the markets did not have monopolistic abuse, that there were areas that still did not have _enough_ competition.

Now I would argue the DMA is misguided, because they are basically trying to regulate in a counter to the network effect. The problem is (for example) that even with barriers lowered, an upstart messaging app cannot compete with WhatsApp because they still cannot grow by the network effects the way WhatsApp did, because WhatsApp already exists and is popular. An upstart will still have to already be on target to become larger than WhatsApp in order to supplant them.

Alternative Marketplaces have been possible on Android for years and really haven't succeeded except in markets where Google Play is unavailable. Why would developers put time and effort into being where nobody is? How does anything in the DMA change their minds - better transaction fees on no sales?

The DMA does give companies an opportunity to innovate, such as how MacPaw is going to have a SetApp Marketplace which is a subscription service for mostly utility apps (similar to Apple Arcade as a first-party marketplace for games). But I would argue there is no way SetApp will be as popular as the App Store - it is a business opportunity, not market competition. I would say this is akin to F-Droid - it is an alternative marketplace on Android, but not one that really competes with Play.
Ask HN: What are your predictions for 2034
Reading old threads on people’s predictions are always interesting:

[Ask HN: What are your 2014 Predictions?](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6994370)

Would love to come back in 10 years and see how right we are
Basically everything you wanted to now about digital signal processing, with examples in Matlab.

Based on your interest, the books could be read following this graph:
https://ccrma.stanford.edu/~jos/sasp/Book_Series_Overview.ht...

The books are available on Amazon:
https://www.amazon.com/stores/Julius-O.-Smith-III/author/B00...
Well, you've gotta make a refinery on the moon, for starters.

Maybe in a few decades, that will be feasible, with lowered marginal costs for doing anything other than floating around in space. But until then, doing pretty much everything is prohibitively expensive, so asking "why not just refine it there?" is putting the cart before the horse.
It depends on the culture you were brought up in. In Indian/Chinese/Asian cultures ones sense of identity is typically tied up with academic achievements.
Ask HN: Common Patterns/Trade-Offs in Large-Scale System Design
What are the common patterns/trade-offs in large-scale system design that:

1) Give you a clear picture of the design space
2) Help you evaluate & categorise existing solutions better?

We have all have come across fundamental trade-offs in system design, such as:

1. CAP Theorem (or variations thereof)[1]
2. RUM (Read-Update-Memory) Conjecture[2]
3. Latency vs. Throughput (& Queuing Theory)[3]

Are there any research papers/book/blogs/videos where all such fundamental trade-offs for large-scale system design have been documented?
If not, what other fundamental trade-offs do you swear by when designing or evaluating large-scale systems?

[1] https://dbmsmusings.blogspot.com/2010/04/problems-with-cap-and-yahoos-little.html
[2] http://daslab.seas.harvard.edu/rum-conjecture/
[3] https://blog.danslimmon.com/2019/02/26/the-latency-throughput-tradeoff-why-fast-services-are-slow-and-vice-versa/
I don't know if it was the same list, but the words were possible to not get.
Could also be plumping the turkey for sale.. ..who cares about sales and marketing if you’re just worried about cooking the books now and not the long term. Might also explain why there’s the overly rushed 1 month deadline (which is the bit I’ve found hardest to swallow).

As a user of the free tier, the short deadline has really soured my view of the company - I would have transitioned to a paid tier sometime down the line, but that’s not going to happen now. It’s fine if they don’t want to focus on me as a customer. But the tech world is small, I might end up being a decision maker in a tech company with a vldb requirement, is my opinion of planetscale going to be bias because of this now - absolutely.

But either way who cares about the long term if you’re just making yourself pretty in the shop window?
>has been basically the default

It came pre-installed on your operating system?
RDF is listed on the linked page ("known XML languages"):

https://xml.coverpages.org/xmlApplications.html

SVG and MathML are also listed there, both of which seemed to be used a fair bit.
It’s a question I would like to ask Musk; some of his words and actions say humanity is the most important thing there is and the rest that comes out of him say he doesn’t actually care. I wonder which it is.

But humanity is a blib on a tiny ball. Easily missed (well, incredibly hard to spot) in our own quadrant of the galaxy.
> To be glib: that's ridiculous. Offer $1000/ride and I guarantee you'll find a long line of patient, empathic and caring drivers signing up for your service.

Do you honestly believe paying a huge salary will attract kind empathetic people? I can say it will for sure attract a lot of people who will claim to be.

But I do think the genuine angels that do so much to help people do deserve to be paid well.
I wish that this was just a sdk built on top of a provider/standard.
Amqp 1.0 is a standard protocol.
You can build all this without being tied to a product or to rabbitMQ, with a storage provider and a amqp protocol layer.
My 4 Monitor Computer Setup
Oh, is this another "excel vs. scientific communication" thing? ( https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/negative-numbers-... and https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/change-the-way-ne... )
You would think so, but IQ and conscientiousness have essentially zero correlation. Smart but lazy is an actual thing.
The power dynamic isn’t the inherent problem. Apprenticeship has been a successful training model for many hundreds of years.

The more central problem is the incentive structure of the academy. Genuine training outcomes cannot be measured by the bureaucracy and therefore don’t matter.

Without solving the incentive problem nothing can really be improved. In aggregate the most successful PIs will be the most ruthless blood sucking fraudsters. A few exceptional empathetic geniuses will sneak through on principle, but mostly we’ll continue hobbling along.
AGI means artificial general intelligence.

Artificial: man-made

General: able to transfer knowledge between domains and work on problem domains it was not trained on

Intelligence: efficiently solves problems

We've had A.G.I. since 2017.
Dictators and monopolies are always very rich.
Most universities have absolutely zero policy or protocol for changing supervisor.

I had to do this and even though everyone involved were exceptionally kind people with the utmost integrity, it was made pretty clear to me that if my old supervisor would have launched an even halfhearted campaign against me (they did not), nobody at the university would have stuck their neck out for some junior grad student.

And this was primarily b/c there is no established process. One should be able to:

1. Confidentially state to an ombudsman that you wish to change supervisor

2. Have the ombudsman obtain the consent of the would-be new supervisor to take on the student

3. Have the ombudsman inform the old supervisor that a decision had been made to change supervisor

4. The ombudsman, old, and new supervisors sit down and discuss what projects the student can keep persuing

If anyone here is faculty at a university and cares about their grad students, please promote something like this.
Don't waste time thinking you have time
I think the US will become an authoritarian regime similar to China in terms of internet censorship & surveillance.

AI hype will taper off and become just the norm. It won’t fully replace search engines but will become what search engines are to schools.

Linux will be the most popular operating system.
100% agree, this is the crux of the issue. Pretty much everyone I know, myself included, felt used and taken advantage of by their PhD advisors.

The combination of complete control over their students (mainly due to being able to decide when/whether they can graduate) and the pressure of tenure and the publishing race makes it no surprise that so many professors slide into abuse. Reporting abuse while still a student is obviously extremely risky, and even reporting it after graduating can cause a career setback by giving up the recommendation letter.

I wonder if it would be possible to expand the role of the PhD committee (which is currently pretty much relevant only for the thesis defense) to become a replacement for a single advisor.
Having written that, do you have a second thought or refinement of it at all? For instance, maybe thinking-about-meaning isn't such a bad distraction, and if that's the distraction I pick, we're back where we started. I could happily admit that our minds are just elaborate functions, and so we might as well get on with it and function: but part of that function is being concerned about meaning (or purpose, a similar but more active term), so this assertion undermines itself.

Death lurks on the far horizon, distracting us and hustling us along, and perhaps tends to bias us toward the "stop worrying and get on with it before you go belly-up" point of view. Which is a shame, but practical.
This might be a crazy idea, but maybe... it's not completely useless? Maybe if many countries deem it necessary, and many people who (I assume) have more expertise than most casual observers like us on HN also deem it necessary, maybe they might be right and we might be wrong about how necessary or not this is?
i don't have time to address all the wrong assumptions and bad knowledge in your comment. but your crown your ignorance by praising apple marketing against all common sense.
Pretty much, plus to independent developers who wish to use the IPA installation off the web feature. (The Article speaks about "features", not just APIs)

Remember that it says "free of charge". 50 cents/install past 1M installs is not free of charge now is it?
(looks like no, the linked article currently says "at 203 K (−70 °C) and at extremely high pressures" so it was more likely just a typo/transcription error)
JSON is basically a subset of JavaScript. Parsing XML sucks, everyone rolled their own RSS and it was basically a nightmare having to deal with invalid XML. JSON has always been really strict and simple. If JavaScript in a browser couldn't parse it it just didn't work. libxml was also a nightmare, XSLT pages looked terrible and honestly there where just a lot of bad XML ideas out there despite gems like SVG. SOAP was horrible, and still is for people having to interface with a SOAP API like Netsuite.

But what was really the end of XML was the end of XHMTL and the HTML5 working group that said they weren't going to do XML HTML and it was funded by Google's large sums of money and involved talented people work at a hot new browser called Firefox and the web dev community went their way and everyone followed.
I can't speak to the Plaid/Square integration specifically and why transaction history is requested in that case, but in general, a common reason Plaid would want transaction history for an ACH transfer is to do risk assessment for ACH returns. The product marketing page for Signal explains what the merchant is getting out of it: https://plaid.com/products/signal/
I don't know exactly when, but I think it had a lot to do with the fact that in 2004, Python, Ruby, and yes JavaScript were all fairly niche.

(This might be hard to believe for some, but it's true. GMail had just come out, and it was one of the first web APPS in JavaScript, certainly the first really good one. Paul Graham wrote "the Python paradox" https://paulgraham.com/pypar.html , and Ruby on Rails didn't exist yet.)

JSON maps well to core data structures of Python, Ruby, and (obviously) JavaScript, but XML doesn't.

XML seemed to be associated with Java. There was a lot more ceremony around the APIs. You didn't just manipulate data; you had to create classes and call methods.

So basically neither JSON nor XML are really convenient in Java. But JSON is very convenient in the dynamic languages. You don't need extra abstractions / layers / code generators -- it's just "there".
Choosing to do a PHD means you are willing to dig into a bespoke topic.

They had no way out of their predicaments - it seems their mentor had forced them into a corner, where either they had to produce fraudulent work, or abandon their entire career.

I think there is also a lot of cultural pressure at play also. Being caught after producing fraudulent work is also an easy way to have the same effect of abandoning your whole career.

And without a fruitful result of your life's work, it would feel that you have wasted your whole life.

And in some cultures, that would mean being terribly judged by your family and friends, and worse.

So they did really think that they had no other options out and everything else was "worse than death".
I still remember working briefly in 2008 with a thing called Magic (now uniPaas I think)
XML all way down. Even the code : each line was a XML .
You were supposed to code with a weird GUI. Still have nightmares
As deathbed regrets go, 'working more' and ‘having kids’ aren’t two I hear a lot of.
And adding insult to injury is that the PhD candidate won't even know how bad it is until it's too late.
You are right. I remember I read an article about a PhD student struggling to reproduce experiment results despite he performed them hundreds of times. And when he talked about his worries to his friends, they told him they were in the same situation. So everyone had to write in his/her paper the results the mentors wanted. I wish I could find that article. He was into biology.

Off-topic, but related: "Reproducibility trial: 246 biologists get different results from same data sets" (https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-023-03177-1)
> If you look into the way that hydrogen adsorbs into a platinum lattice, and how phonon resonance modes can induce tremendous crushing forces on anything between two platinum atoms, cold fusion actually looks quite plausible.

No, it is not. These things are well understood. The behaviour of hydrogen in crystals is studied a lot. In metals because of issues with hydrogen embrittlement and fusion stuff, in some oxides for the storage of hydrogen for energy applications, and in material in general because proton irradiation is a common tool when studying them. All of this to say that this is not something that was never investigated.

> It's not like perpetual motion--there's a clear possible mechanism for it which is surprisingly fully compatible with the laws of physics as we understand them.

The orders of magnitude just do not match. The pressures involved is typically 1 GPa (usually less in metals, more in ceramics). That is far from enough to bring nuclei sufficiently close for fusion. There is a reason why nobody claims this, and it is not because we don’t look at the behaviour of hydrogen (or other light nuclei like deuterium, tritium, helium, or lithium for that matter).

> The theory behind LK-99 is pretty solid. The linear structure of these apatite compounds create chains of conductive electron bands that in theory might have sufficient band gaps to enable superconductivity.

Again, it is not. Some preliminary electronic structure calculations showed interesting features, but these features were no indication of superconducting behaviour, and indeed LK-99 is not a superconductor. There were plenty of people who tried to reproduce the results and it clearly showed that the initial paper was wrong.

> If you could get atomic precision in the copper/lead alternating pattern that creates those stresses.

Our understanding of what causes superconductivity and the creation of Cooper pairs is not complete. Otherwise, we’d design materials with the right properties from the beginning, rather than testing a lot of stuff just to see what works.

> However I fear any research into room-temperature linear superconductors will now be as taboo as cold fusion.

Contrary to cold fusion, superconduction is actually a thing. Current high-temperature superconductors work at the temperature of liquid nitrogen; finding one that works 100K higher is not that much of a stretch. The gap is not 6 orders of magnitude like with cold fusion.

In fact, there is quite a lot of funding for research on high-temperature superconductors even this year so your fear is not really well founded.
That's beautiful, thank you.
I saw this presentation by Dennis Whyte years ago and it left me really optimistic about Sparc/Arc's chances...

He goes through a lot of the interesting design details, including why REBCO is such a huge difference and will make their commercial reactor design possible:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KkpqA8yG9T4
This is an extremely dark take that is certainly not true in most CS and EE programs. Students change advisors all the time and there are plenty of internal mechanisms to report misconduct and blow the whistle. The fact that the student felt bullied and pressured is of course extraordinarily unfortunate, but it has more to do with cultural issues and a particularly abusive and toxic working relationship set up in that research group and maybe institution.

Blaming the system is wildly off base.
I'm reasonably good friends with Windell & Lenore, and I think "gobbled up" is not the right way to look at it.

It's my understanding that they've known the folks at Bantam for some time now, and that given how hard it can be to run a physical product company (especially one that does some in-house manufacturing for your own products!) in the bay area, that they're looking forward to having such niceties as 'pto'.

They're really excellent people, and made a huge difference to me when I first moved to the bay area, so while it's sad to see them leave, I understand it, and hope this leads to a better situation all around for them.