skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Love Postgres, but here's what I wish was different:

RDS Proxy/PG Bouncer should be default connection behavior. Ideally no persistent connection at all, more akin to https would be great.

Vacuuming is ridiculous. It doesn't make sense to me what could possibly take so long. It also doesn't make sense to me that it needs to be blocking (I understand that it's now parallelizable-ish). Using a comparatively slow interpreted language, I can iterate through millions of items, on disk, and do any number of things, within a few seconds at most. I have had databases with like, a few thousand items, somehow take hours upon hours to vacuum/analyze.

Nested transactions would be great. I know there are savepoints but it doesn't work well when dealing with anything in parallel.

And finally, my #1 complaint: Please let ME decide when to roll back/invalidate a transaction. If I want to write something like an upsert, maybe my code says "insert this record, and if I catch an unique constraint error, update the record." In Postgres, at the initial insert, because there's an error, it will just invalidate my transaction! I could have done 100 other things in this transaction so far, all invalidated because of a DB error. An error that I was expecting to catch and handle myself at the application level, and now the entire transaction needs to be rolled back. WHY?
It isn't, but I'm pretty sure the status quo is a time consuming interview with lots of puzzle solving coupled with a probationary period and a vesting cliff. I think because hiring is so difficult (on both sides of the table) that people get cold feet with marginal performers during the probationary period. Employees are reluctant to leave - interviewing is very hard, and managers are reluctant to fire - sourcing is very hard.

My thesis is that if interviewing was easier, both leaving and sourcing would be easier and everyone would win
I’d highly recommend that podcast as well. I’ve listened to that episode twice. It was really fascinating.

EDIT - meant to add that the summary style of your interviews is great. Keep up the good work!
I haven’t read Preacher in around 20 years so I don’t remember that characater. Proinsias is actually the Irish version of “Francis”. The most famous modern-day example being https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proinsias_De_Rossa

Your first stab at pronunciation wasn’t far off. You’d get away with “uhs” as the final syllable. I’d also say that the first “o” is pronounced similar to the first syllable in the English word, “onion” (as opposed to an “aw” sound).
I agree with you overall but the impression I'm getting is that comp is taking a nose dive for premium jobs. Probably 10% of those pay what they used to, 3-4 years ago and the competition is 100x worse, and it was bad before.
WOW! congrats! it's been ages I didn't see anyone actually manage to make a website that doesn't work with the non-dominant browser!

I cannot even login using firefox.
My analogy is an EV - of course your EV isn't going to pull current that's dangerous but fast charging it has been shown to degrade battery life - especially if the EV doesn't have active cooling for the battery pack.

Putting that EV on a slow charge that might be sufficient for an overnight charge might be better for the battery pack.
A couple years back this may have been useful, but we've pivoted towards a different approach with less reliance on an external crm, except as a routing and presence engine
Always has been.

I've been using PostgreSQL for a decades, and I feel so spoiled. It always Just Works. Not to say there've never been bugs, but compared to anything else with that much surface area, it's a brilliant piece of engineering.

It's astonishing how often it's a perfectly fine stand-in for the "right" solution. Need a K-V store to hold a bunch of JSON docs indexed by UUID? Fine. Want to make an append-only log DB? Why not. Should you do those things? Probably not, but unless you specifically need to architect for global-scale concurrent usage, it's likely to work out just fine.

For me, it's the default place to stick data unless I have a specific requirement that only something else can meet. I've never once regretted using it to launch a production system, and only a couple of times have needed to migrate off of it due to performance demands.

Thanks, PostgreSQL team! You rock.
because most people have something called life experience or come from a culture not brainwashed by the american dream. of course YOU can do anything, but whether you are successful with that or not is up to a million factors you cannot control, no matter how much of your all you give.

go to a casino, throw your life savings on one number. if you win, tell everyone how you gave it all and you manifested it by pure will. if you lose, nobody will ever hear from it.

in addition, pg is so heavily biased on this and should never be taken as gospel.
The back springs in many cars are still separate from the shock absorber and it is those back springs which often fail. I have replaced them on several cars and can only conclude that the job can be done safely as long as you use a pair of reasonable-quality spring compressors - two of them, one on each side of the coil so that it can not pop out. These are used both during the unloading of the old spring as well as when installing the new ones.
ETA: this gathers up the bluesky thread readably https://skyview.social/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fbsky.app%2Fprofile... although you'll probably prefer "unroll" over "tree" (but "tree" seems to capture everything including a handful of replies).

Cross-posted to x/twitter: <https://twitter.com/duetosymmetry/status/1769913120099545488>

(ETA: there are 38 (thirty eight) entries in the thread. Logged in on x/twitter I see them all, but bsky (logged in and not) sometimes doesn't show them all in one scroll-through. :/ )

tl;dr (it's a very technical explainer thread)

[preliminary] this is physics, it is important to match GW (and optical) detections of mergers, not to model "spherical cows"

[a] post-Newtonian (PN) methods are cheap to calculate for black hole binaries when they are far apart (and other methods are good for extreme mass ratios) but in the last moments before merger we need numerical relativity (NR). NR is expensive even on supercomputers.

[b] PN and NR are different enough frameworks that knitting together the early inspiral PN and the late pre-merger NR requires some overlap and iteration.

[c] results from a couple dozen simulations give interesting technical insights

[d] orbital eccentricity (and ellipticity) make everything harder, especially for PN, because the plane of the orbit and the orientation of the black hole spins against the orbital plane all precess (and differently from each other)

Finally, if you can't see the thread on either platform, the prerpint is at https://arxiv.org/abs/2403.10278

(I did double-check and can read the bsky thread via the Tor browser (obvs. not logged in). x/twitter is ... uncooperative when not logged in. Finally, mastodon threading is ... confusing.)
you can also write one using a 256-byte switch, which ain't so big. i wrote an 8080 emulator in fortran77 on a dec10 that way, back in the 1980s. but of course size wasn't an issue. it did prove to be quite portable - to vax and ibm vm/cms. we used it for teaching assembler programming.
> Many people quote that a set should be priced at around $0.10 per part to be worthwhile. Is this the average?

This has been the average, and it's so "perfect" that it has to be that Lego has been aiming for it. They've accomplished this by having more and more detail (read: smaller pieces) in newer sets.

They appear to have been forced (or trying) to jump to $0.20 per piece in some sets (e.g., https://www.lego.com/en-us/product/cinderella-and-prince-cha... )
Eagerly awaiting Mordechai's paper on this one.
Rack and query chaining are great for two different reasons.

Rack because it's simple.

Query chaining in things like AR is fine because it is mostly debuggable up to a reasonable point with things like to_sql, etc. Since the actual query only runs in the end, it is decoupled enough, and the "escape hatch" of Raw SQL is not really a leaky abstraction, is just the of the abstraction itself.

The problem with things like Trailblazer is that it intertwines itself too much with the business logic, so using breakpoints is very difficult. And its internals are also super complicated, not to mention people build even more complex abstractions on top of it (since it's a bit lacking). It works fine for toy examples but anything multi-layer deep ends up making it too difficult to debug and make sense of.
> what are its actual, real-world claims on our major experimental infrastructure in the present?

At present, now that the LHC has failed to show any of the evidence for supersymmetry that string theorists were confidently predicting it would show, string theorists appear to be pushing for the next more energetic collider, confidently predicting that it will show evidence of supersymmetry.
> Every single time in my career that I've had someone complain about a flaw in make, what I discover is a significant flaw in their description of the make rules. If it is not behaving correctly, you did not fully describe the DAG.

You can look at the dependency graph in two ways. The first is, in order to build X, you first need to build Y and Z. These kinds of dependencies tend to be relatively easy to figure out. The second way is to ask, if Y changes, what needs to be rebuilt--and these kind of rebuild dependencies aren't going to be correct unless they're autogenerated, and getting autogenerated dependencies done correctly is challenging. (This basically reaches the point in the article that any system that doesn't support dynamic dependencies ends up hacking its way to support for dynamic dependencies).

The other key point I will make is that, while it can be possible to describe the DAG you want with make, it tends to fight you every step in the way. If almost everyone is complaining about how hard it is to get the DAG correct in make, then maybe the problem isn't that everyone can't figure out how to fully describe the DAG, it's that make isn't a good option for specifying the DAG.
Be interesting to see median or quartiles instead of just average; licensed sets probably skew the average up.
Thanks Mitchell (big fan, btw!).

Indeed!https://github.com/hashicorp/vagrant/blob/main/lib/vagrant/a...

Yes, it's not a new pattern by any means, and there's many ways to "halt" the pipeline as you say. For example ActiveRecord stops callback chains if any callback throws ":halt".

Other examples are Redis.rb's pipelining API https://github.com/redis/redis-rb?tab=readme-ov-file#pipelin...

Or more generally any builder-style pattern that composes a set of operations for later execution, including again ActiveRecord's query chaining.

In my article I tried to show a specific implementation using the Railway pattern (where the result must only respond to "#continue?() => Boolean")
I wasn't familiar with this painting, for the very good reason that it doesn't exist

Are you sure? The wikipedia page on Flaubert's novel says: "In 1845, at age 24, Flaubert visited the Balbi Palace in Genoa, and was inspired by a painting of the same title, then attributed to Bruegel the Elder (now thought to be by one of his followers)." And the National Gallery seems to think they have it in the West Building (https://www.nga.gov/collection/art-object-page.41602.html).
> Was there a plan if it went wrong?

It is sad, but Hamas leaders may just regard all this as a worthwhile sacrifice for their greater cause of Palestinian liberation.

> History has shown that Palestinian lives mean nothing to the Arab world.

They do care. They talk about it every day. They sponsor a good part of the aid. Not letting Gazans out is mostly because Israel may not allow them back in again.

I'm not saying palestinians are a priority to the Arab leaders. They are just doing what is safe for themselves. So no wars or economic blockades. Actually, the Houthis and Hezbollah are doing just that, and they are labeled as terrorists for it.

> What the benefit is to Israel to starve 1.1 million people to death. It would be a good way to turn the entire world against them.

The EU foreign policy chief and the UN said it simply: "It is probably used as a weapon of war." If what Israel had already done did not turn the entire world against them, why do you (or why would they) think this will? Because of the horrors of 7/10, Israel now believes it has carte blanche. It was bad before, but now almost all limits are off.
Why not? We are able to design systems, and we are able to objectively recognize and understand emergent behaviors in arbitrary systems.

Sure, we can't exhaustively find every emergent behavior, but we are not 100% blind to them, either.

The only way to guarantee an emergent behavior continues is to preserve the structure of its system. That means the only strategy that can change emergent behaviors is a strategy that changes systems.
I've browsed through the topic.

Here in central europe ticks are a massive problem. Lyme's caused serious year long health issues for a family member. It also almost killed my dog when he caught one of his first ticks ever.

I also do "checks", avoid tall grasses and have the whole system for management of my family's "tick security" (sometimes with their complain in the background). However, studying this problem basically every single summer I once found the alternative explanation as to why tick population today explodes globally in moderate climates.

Collapsed deer predator population[0]. Deer and small rodent populations are unchecked because predators can't thrive in ecologically stressed areas (There's little to no wild forests of enough of the size for wolf in most of Europe). Herbivores had far easier time adapting to the transformed environment compared to their natural predators. They also get less hunted by humans, obviously.

[0] https://hal.science/hal-03015707/document (ctrl+f > "tick")

No amount of DEET will solve that. There's also no need to CRISP'r anything or spend a decade of research on poor quality vaccination. This is system's fragility problem.

Then again... ticks were a very common occurrence for the first settlers in North America. There're diary entries mentioning them "in swarms" explicitly. But, what's different today is that you don't need to be even close to a deer trail to get 23 ticks of your dog after the walk.
His namesake museum is the best attraction in Oklahoma. Get up close and personal with a real Apollo control panel.
I think it’s partially because of the nature of VCs (which is partially why I’d never use a vc but rather bootstrap and fail). If your parent organisation’s goal is a 100x return you don’t mind 9/10 startups burning up in an attempt.

YC in that sense is a full “all guns blazing” thing. It’s generally younger folks who don’t mind eating ramen and don’t have to take care of a large family, and hence are more likely to go into a startup full time. Combine these two and I think you see what I mean.

Btw this isn’t a new criticism of YC/VCs, it’s something that’s been around for a while.
Could this be related to the recent news that Apple is in advanced stages of choosing Google as its AI provider? Maybe the last hope for Inflection was to become Apple's AI provider and when that fell through it was time to put an end to the misery.
AI history starts from Newton gradient descent ;)
I just skimmed and came away with “Satya is dumping more Azure credits on some AI thing to screw with Big G again”. The rest was noise.
Another factor is that Lego is using more greebling than in the past. So you have more "parts", but they're all small pieces used for detailing rather than larger structural components of the build.
I'd like to see it per pound. I suspect (based on my feelings) that licensing is less per set than you might think, and that the price per pound has been trending up as piece size trends down.
> Nowadays he tweets minimally veiled racist tweets about the supposed biological superiority of his brain compared to the rest of us, especially other races.

I’m curious, what are you referring to?
Tailscale is a mesh overlay network that uses Wireguard under the hood. Traffic moves peer to peer as much as possible. DNS happens locally (the special 100.100.100.100 address actually points at the tailscale daemon running on each machine, which already holds the name -> address mapping that MagicDNS needs to work).

You login to Tailscale from each device in order for the central Tailscale control plane to authenticate the device and for it to distribute that device's public Wireguard key out to the rest of the mesh.
Right, Karen Simonyan is not technical at all...
The thing AlphaZero did away with, AFAIK, is supervision with expert games. Instead it just knows the rules and tries to win.
Bell Labs had a very nice portability framework also -- there was a Cygwin-like product called U/WIN that made extensive use of it -- might find it associated with ksh93 maybe.

Speaking of Bell Labs, there are some great ideas for a build tool in the Bell Labs "nmake" tool - I believe it was originally created to speed up ESS5 switch builds, which took 3 days before make. It has programmable header file scanning for example, a shell coprocess to avoid all the fork/exec of standard make, build state files, lots of other things I have forgotten.
> You don't need to be upset that this isn't for you.

The person you're responding to does not seem upset to me.

You add an interesting perspective that some people want to find encouragement in these types of essays. And the personal jab just isn't necessary.
Wow, just looked that up. That's a chunk of change for a headphone amplifier.
Why are society’s little cupcake nannies so flustered about this innocent gadget?
You both are probably right. I see a lot of difference in how different companies or different dev cultures see seniors.

A lot of what people used to call senior has become "staff" in larger companies.
Strong Sapir-Whorf (linguistic determinism - language constrains thought) became pretty much seen as a joke by the 1980s. Linguistic relativism (weak Sapir-Whorf - language shapes thought) is still respectable (because, I mean, of course it does).

Actually, this research might just as well be evidence for linguistic universalism (Chomsky - language enables thought).

In general linguistic philosophers have been coming out with either laughably obvious or utterly untestable hypotheses for a century and it’s amusing to see how these AI studies shake up the hornets.
Interesting work, please continue it. Great times ahead. Thanks!
> I do personally feel that the #1 application of FPGAs is to make short run and high-end hardware fantastically more expensive for business and government (+military) customers.

Not sure I understand. Take for example applications in communications where you need a real time signal processing. The alternatives (custom ASICs) are several orders more expensive. I would actually say the opposite, FPGAs make short-run, high-end affordable to others that are not government or large coperations.
I just wanted to make the either/or pun.
Is this true? I thought it was just named after the emoji. I knew they had a chatbot product at one point but I didn’t think it was for therapy.
Is he related to the infamous Familia Toledo http://www.biyubi.com/?
I think it was a mistake to use the word shareholders to try and explain it in terms people are familiar with because in this world what would even be the point of stock? What would market cap even mean? How you divide up ownership among employees I'm sure would be the source of much bike-shedding but let's just say it's 100% split weighted by salary.

(I'm using the numbers for AT&T) Say you work for a big company so at your salary it translates to 0.0004% ownership. Just as before fiduciary duty and all that the company as a whole has the solemn duty to make it's owners as much money as possible and you make record profits to the tune of $72B. Great job really fantastic. Now instead of a $4B stock buyback it's a dividend paid to the owners (which is you) and you just made a cool $1.6 mil. Sure as hell beats that 2% bonus.

You can't sell ownership as a way of raising money anymore and you have to get loans or issue corporate bonds like all those plebeian small businesses do but the value of your work is returned right back to you as an employee/owner. And you're the board -- let's go (representative) democracy at the workplace! It's gonna make it really hard to push through truly unpopular decisions.

This kind of thing isn't without downsides or a magic solution to all of our problems, but like, employee ownership of business / labor owning the means of production that doesn't require state controlled industry, gulags, or whatever, and roughly lines up with current corporate governance.
Birds inspired planes. Later, aerodynamics fed back into ornithology. I've been waiting for LLMs to be evaluated as a model of human thought. Complexity and scale have held neuroscience back. It's nowhere close to building a high-level brain model up from biological primitives. Like ornithology, it could use some feedback.

All arguments about AGI aside, a machine was built that writes like a human. Its design is very un-biological in places, so it's tempting to dismiss it. Why not see how deep the rabbit hole goes?

Like all conjectures it just might surprise us. For one, the intuition that language is central to thought predates LLMs, but it's certainly consistent with it.
>Guy who led it hired his unqualified childhood buddy to replace me. Didn't matter. All on me. Everyone wanted to do it, and gee whillakers, refulgentis went mad and dropped the ball completely for some reason.

How is that possible at Google, which should have a hiring committee? Managers aren't allowed to just hire rando person.

Did your director or VP not like you or something? I'm curious if there's more to this story.
The tone isn’t smug. pg simplified his language for a teenage audience. Simple arguments made simply can come across as smug because they lack caveats and polite hedging, but I don’t think the accusation of smugness sticks in this case.

I also disagree about the incredible qualities entrepreneurs need and hardships they have to endure. Many incredible businesses are just good product + good distribution. Many kids think starting a startup is practically impossible, and pg correctly points out that it isn’t.
I have made a (internal only unfortunately) meta build system for my work. Instead of being Turing complete is uses Horn Clauses as the primary mode of logic. This means that the problem of determining "is this compiler flag set" or "is this file used in this build" is always solvable in polynomial time.

It has been in use for over ten years by multiple teams around the world for all sorts of whacky toolchaims and projects.

I don't believe anyone has missed Turing completeness.

Despite all that, I agree that if you need a metabuild system then things are probably too complicated. I guess the main reason I would argue for one is when building a cross platform thing, it is nice if developers using toolchain X don't need to modify build files for all the toolchains that aren't X - making Linux developers have to fight Visual Studio just to add a new file to a build is not ideal. But in principle - I still agree that the resulting question of "how do I build this thing from scratch?" Should probably be answerable in 2 sentences (e.g. "Compile and link all the C files with the top level directory in the include path. Don't compile files that have an operating system in their name unless you are building for that os")