skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I've run Postgres at large scale (dozens of machines) at multiple companies. I've also run MongoDB at large scale at multiple companies. I like both generally. I don't really care about data modelling differences - you can build the same applications with approximately the same schema with both if you know what you're doing.

I don't understand how folks seemingly ignore Postgres' non-existent out of the box HA and horizontal scaling support. For small scale projects that don't care about these things, fair enough! But in my experience every Postgres installation is a snowflake with cobbled together extensions, other third party software, and home-rolled scripts to make up for this gap. These third party pieces of software are often buggy, half-maintained, and under-documented. This is exacerbated by Postgres' major version file format changes making upgrades extremely painful.

As far as I can tell, there is no interest in making these features work well in Postgres core because all of the contributors' companies make their money selling solutions for HA/sharding. This is an area where MySQL is so significantly better than Postgres (because so many large Internet companies use MySQL) that it surprises me people aren't more unhappy with the state of things. I don't really want to run another Postgres cluster myself again. For a single node thing where I don't care about HA/scaling I do quite like it, though.
I thought extraordinary rendition was

a) started later and aimed at "terrorists" (and it seems hard to argue that this guy is in that category)

b) used to take people to black sites in 3rd countries, not to face charges or detention in the US

... and because of its dubious status under international law, it seems like it would be not a good look as a response to corruption issues?
Any favorite intermediate French ones? I already have One Thing In A French Day, Duolingo French, and Francais Authentique.

I've got a bunch of native French podcasts as well, mostly on science, but they're often past my limit. About the only one I can handle is Il était une fois, which is also very slow, targeted (I think) to Francophone children.

BTW: I use Pocket Casts. It does a really good job of rendering these at 80% or 90% speed, for a bit of extra help.
Buffalo and Bison are often interchangeable in American English.

I know in Polish, "żubr", which is the European Bison, is often translated as buffalo and the American Bison is known as "bizon" which is understandably translated as bison. I would not be surprised if Belarusian was similar.
https://github.com/tukaani-project/tukaani-project.github.io... Does this mean anything that it changed to a parameter??
I literally said "they", I know, I know, in English that can also be interpreted as a gender unspecific singular.

Anyways, yes it is an interesting question whether he/she is alone or they are a group. Conway's law probably applies here as well. And my hunch in general is that these criminal mad minds operate individually / alone. Maybe they are hired by an agency but I don't count that as a group effort.
"Quadruple quantum: engineers perform four quantum control methods in just one atom" (2024)
https://www.unsw.edu.au/newsroom/news/2024/02/four-different... :

> [Antimony] was chosen because its nucleus possesses eight distinct quantum states, plus an electron with two quantum states, resulting in a total of 8 x 2 = 16 quantum states, all within just one atom. Reaching the same number of states using simple quantum bits – or qubits, the basic unit of quantum information – would require manufacturing and coupling four of them.

"Navigating the 16-dimensional Hilbert space of a high-spin donor qudit with electric and magnetic fields" (2024) https://link.springer.com/article/10.1038/s41467-024-45368-y
Sholto Douglas and Trenton Bricken – How to Build and Understand GPT-7's Mind
Is the rate of these incidents increasing, decreasing, or about the same?
Certainly does, people have been doing this in computer vision for years.
I don't know, way outside my domain. Possibly none I guess?
The size difference between text and video is enough to kill a tax per gigabyte proposal.
In the 1980's we had C/C++/Ada/Pascal/Fortran/Assembly/Lisp. Since the 1980's the languages have exploded.

But we still only have one language for querying a database. And a kinda not very good one at that. Why is that?

https://www.holistics.io/blog/quel-vs-sql/

One could argue that ORM's are the alternative language people are looking for.
Maybe, but not sure you’re getting much from that trade. If you’re not querying often, then performance shouldn’t be an issue. Modern hardware/dbms can definitely handle a couple of joins without blinking. So you’ve mostly lost flexibility.

Also having to redo later will wipe out the time savings of many, many simplifications. Not to mention doc and teaching reqs you’ve added to new devs.
I had no idea that the movie was based on a book. Also, $400+ for a used book is a bit beyond my budget sadly. I'll see if I can find it in a library maybe?
Except the line is spinning around faster than you can see and you measuring it makes it stop. Your example makes it sound like the angle was decided before you measured.
https://archive.ph/UWE3s
> You can use the keyboard shortcut with old UI

That's the joke :-)
My company considered it, but went with Cassandra instead.
If a jurisdiction is reducing the number of election day polling places in an area, they're also going to reduce opportunities to vote in other ways. An egregious example is Houston, where there is now one (1) place to drop off early ballots in a county of 4 million people.
Case in point: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39843930
A CIA office jam packed with SIGINT capabilities and there's zero hard evidence of this microwave weapon. Just a bunch of anecdotal symptoms that sound like a hangover.

My evaluation and analysis capabilities don't include just believing whatever the CIA says.
Only thing it could realistically do is keep an already hot drink hot - which by itself isn't bad if it didn't advertise itself as being able to make a not hot drink become hot.

It is designed and advertised to keep a hot drink hot, which as you say, it does well!

They don't advertise it as a heater, and explicitly say that it won't work.

https://support.ember.com/hc/en-us/articles/115002625471-Emb...

Maybe they could be more clear to avoid misunderstanding. But it works great it keeping a cup of coffee warm, and I've never even installed the app.
The Miseducation of Kara Swisher: Soul-searching with the tech "journalist"
My understanding is that it's like two of the same scratch-off lottery ticket. There are two spots you can scratch, only one has a prize, we don't know which one that is but it's same for both tickets. The tickets are taken to separate rooms. The people in each room then pick a spot and scratch it. How likely is it that at least one of them will win?

The odds of one scratch winning are of course 50%, and the odds of the other person winning are of course also 50%. The odds of both people winning are 25%, and both people losing also 25%.

The CHSH experiment suggests otherwise: that when one person loses the other person is less likely to also lose, such that the likelihood of both losing is only 15%. How can this happen? I haven't a clue. I'm not a theoretical physicist, and I haven't personally conducted this (~ $5,000) experiment. But it's a result that deeply bothers me.

If you build this system you can then scratch a whole lot of tickets. Each ticket has a 50% chance of a side having the prize, but as long as both parties are consistently scratching the same side of entangled pairs they will win more often than they lose, revealing whether or not they are in agreement. I have no idea how this could be true, but people keep running the experiment and keep getting similar results. And, it seems like this could result in faster than light communication, so there's probably a better ELI-5 out there.
Wouldn't assigning leaks a specific value and creating an industry to insure against it make it easier to weigh the relative risk of cutting corners and ignoring risk?

If anything, an insurance policy for it allows the companies to externalize and distribute the fines.
The test code generated by older autoconf is not going to be work correctly with newer GCC releases due to the deprecation of implicit int and implicit function declarations (see https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Changes/PortingToModernC), so these projects already have to be updated to work with newer autoconf.
> we are presently incapable of detecting ourselves at a distance of 4 LY

You don't need to detect a civilisation. All you need to detect is a planet hospitable to whatever biology suits you.

That said, our detection tech improves relatively quickly and we might be able to directly image rocky planets before this century is over. It's safe to assume that, if there is someone curious enough to look for planets with biosignatures or technosignatures that has been perfecting their craft for thousands, or millions of years, by now they must be very good at that.
Myths of Metaverse Interoperability
So the comment above admits that people are taking more time off and working less. So is your argument that the majority of work that we lost didn’t matter anyway?
I feel like math writing shouldn't be written for the general audience. It's proffesionals writing for professionals. And only then is the job of journalists and pop science writers to "translate" it for everyone.
I've never worked with a project with more than 7 dimensions, yet
Interesting. I am also working in similar space. Lot of niche ideas that would be sustainable SaaS products but industry is sales driven and requires industry connections.
I'd be interested to know further on your offering
Huh seems kinda interesting
That's a fair point - I probably shouldn't have disparaged teenagers.

I know that I drove much more aggressively as a young person, that it isn't good for your cars or the people around you, and I realize that many other young people don't have this same predilection.
Fundamentally there don’t seem to be any physical laws prohibiting us from solving biological immortality at least, so maybe if we can get the robot bodies up and running for ourselves we’d be able to do some exploring over a very long time.
It's a trick question. Gloves go in a glove box.
MySQL was more popular for a while, but from a technical standpoint Postgres was always ahead.
>I might have bought the idea of a mechanical issue causing the opening if it had been a clean cut and the contents had been otherwise undisturbed

When an envelope gets jammed in a sorting machine and some postal worker has to quickly clear the jam, stuff the contents back, and restart the machine, what you receive will look like a complete mess.
I suppose it comes down to your definition of kicked off. There were only a few lands protected as national parks before Teddy arrived and protected more land than any other individual has ever done.
I’ve read about them after getting introduced to: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Żubrówka
Yeah really, they didn't give any example of the "more"...
> Voice Engine preserves the native accent of the original speaker

I sort of understand this as a goal, but the American-accented German is weird. Like they nail some difficult "r" sounds but botch the easy ones. An odd hybrid between a fluent speaker and a total beginner.
Did you check Chinese social media?
They recently got rid of Prop 13 on inherited homes -- apparently because people got real mad at Jeff Bridges for having a second home -- which is currently fucking me over personally because it's taking a long time to prep the inherited property for sale.
It takes a minute to create a new email address. And you can change or fake an email address on a git commit trivially. You, too, can writing code as anyone you want by just doing "git commit --author='Joe Biden <icecream@whitehouse.gov>'". On the internet nobody knows you're Joe Biden.
All JavaScript conference talks from 2023 ordered by the number of views
Given how the US legal system works in practice, a plea deal is also the most likely outcome for any other felony. Playing for time isn't really a good idea when that translates to extremely long jail times while waiting for a trial you're not going to win anyway.
I provided my reasoning, and you just seem incapable of understanding it.
Here, the information literally just wrote an article on $100 billion data center:
https://www.theinformation.com/articles/microsoft-and-openai...

It seems the most ignorant also tend to be the most arrogant.
I've used (and introduced) MongoDB in production. Though I much prefer PostgreSQL, SQLite, MySQL, or SQL Server, for some use cases a document database is fine.

However as I discovered myself, once you realise you need to use Mongoose with it you should usually take that as a prompt to consider going relational.

Don't get me wrong, Mongoose is a good package. But the things it solves could likely be better fixed by moving away from MongoDB - I'd go so far as to say that in most cases Mongoose should only be added to help an existing project; if you need it from the start you probably should go relational.

(YMMV and there will be exceptions.)
It's hardly any more conspiratorial than roman influences on Christianity, John the apostle spent a long time in Greece and wrote revelations there. Never mind the Church would actively integrate local cultural iconography into the bible to make it's spread more palpable.
Which is why a really good backdoor is a one line logic bug somewhere which is fiendishly difficult to trigger.
Sounds great for DIYBio stuff :)
Those tarballs are PGP signed, too..
.deb has epochs too, but I think Debian developers avoid it where possible because 1:5.4.5 is interpreted as newer than anything without a colon, so it would break eg. packages that depend on liblzma >= 5.0, < 6. There may be more common cases that aren't coming to mind now.
LLMs have been trending towards obscenely large number of parameters (314B for grok), which makes quantization crucial if you want to run them without a Meta-sized budget.
The gloves doesn't change their state when you check on them. Quantum particles do.

Example: Lets say you check if the glove is white or black, you see it is white. Then you check if the glove is half white/half black, or half black/half white, you see it is half white/half black. Then you check again if it is white or black, now it is black. That is how quantum gloves would work, but real gloves doesn't work that way.
AI Dungeon has been around for a while: https://aidungeon.com/
per https://hachyderm.io/@bjorn3/112180226784517099, "The only contribution by them to Wasmtime is a doc change. No actual code or binary blobs have been changed by them."
Ah yes, I forgot to mention the obvious, the linked article is an infomercial. Glad somebody else pointed it out.
> California's spending per pupil is so high right now? 24,000$?

Different sources on the web give wildly different numbers for per pupil spending by states (obviously, including different universes of spending), but every one of them puts CA near the middle of the 51 (states+DC). So, no, in relative terms, its not “so high”.
> both the straight line and the great circle distance

Curious what you mean by “straight line”; Rhumb line?
Debian has epochs, but it's a bad idea to use them for this purpose.

Two reasons:

1. Once you bump the epoch, you have to use it forever.
2. The deb filename often doesn't contain the epoch (we use a colon which isn't valid on many filesystems), so an epoch-revert will give the same file name as pre-epoch, which breaks your repository.

So, the current best practice is the +really+ thing.
This reminds me of:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37199495

Kris Nóva has died
(865 points | 7 months ago | 130 comments)

Interesting deaths.

R.I.P.
It will exist soon in the US since FedPay was rolled out this year. It will take a while for banks to support it, but my guess is everyone will support it as replacement to ACH.

I don't think Venmo will die since there is a need for app to provide nice interface. But Zelle has been lobbying against FedPay since it will destroy them.
>tax

Don’t see why politicians should get to profit from it
>of some sort of rotten problem

Agree. Out of control neo-feudal lords taking up all the slack out of every system they can get their tendrils into in the name of efficiency, thus endangering us all in order to extract as much profit as possible out of our entire economic system.

The "other side"'s solution tends to be to further deregulate industry and the economy, and to empower and lower the tax burden of these neo-feudal lords, all while pointing at gays, trans-folk, and immigrants as if they are the reason people can't afford rent and bridges are falling down.
Yeah right... Epstein drive and wormholes, with some nasty ghosts unhappy about aliens using intelligent nano machines for building extra-dimensional highways through their neighbourhoods.

It's fun, but it's not an accurate prediction of our technological abilities.
Systemd is actually pretty damn good and it's GPL licensed free software.

I understand that people don't like the way it seems to work itself into the rest of Linux user space as a dependency but that's actually our own fault for not investing the man power that Red Hat invests. We have better things to do than make our own Linux user space and so they have occupied that niche. It's free software though, we always have the freedom to do whatever we want.

By the way, all the stuff you mentioned is not really part of the actual init system, namely PID 1. There's an actual service manager for example and it's entirely separate from init. It manages services really well too, it's measurably better than all that "portable" nonsense just by virtue of using cgroups to manage processes which means it can actually supervise poorly written double forking daemons.
This article implies most content on the internet wasn’t already pollution anyways. It was already possible to min max SEO with bash scripts, AI doesn’t change any of that.
I made no claims.
I've been reading the LRB since I was a kid (30 years ago) and I'm not sure what happened: Did I grow up or has it taken a nosedive? Seems like the reviews have become meandering, and increasingly political. I used to learn so much from each article and now I can't bring myself to finish a whole paper.
Gsheets? You can easily get it out as a JSON https://www.freecodecamp.org/news/cjn-google-sheets-as-json-...

You can also script it to do integrated geo lookups with Apps Script
Fuchsia 2024 Roadmap
Lol classic smug comment about HN comment culture acting as if you're owed discourse.

FWIW, I'm also pretty sure this type of comment (and therefor my comment?) are against the rules, but I've been rate limited for like 90% of my time here because I don't use burners to get into fights so dafuq do I care.

Anyway, hope you have a Good Friday. If it makes you feel better, you're much lower on the crucifixion scale than the even providing it's name.
My point was, this is not "Debian did a thing". Lots of other distros do the same thing. In this particular case, it was in fact fortunate for users of all these other distros that Debian did it, lest this vulnerability might have never been found!

Also, only users on sid (unstable) and maybe testing seem to have been affected. I doubt there are many Debian servers out there running sid.

Debian stable (bookworm) has xz-utils version 5.4.1: https://packages.debian.org/bookworm/xz-utils
Sounds plausible. The obvious Q though is - were the researchers able to identify a causal effect? Or could it be that the highly-paid new hire is a sign of the market being hot, so the top performers are able to get new better offers? i.e. would they have left even without the new hire?
Looks like one of the backdoor authors even went and disabled the feature the exploit relied on directly on oss-fuzz to prevent accidental discovery: https://social.treehouse.systems/@Aissen/112180302735030319
https://github.com/google/oss-fuzz/pull/10667

But luckily there was some serendipity: "I accidentally found a security issue while benchmarking postgres changes." https://mastodon.social/@AndresFreundTec/112180083704606941
It seems the trick here is they first quantize it to 1- or 2-bit, and then they fine-tune the quantization bias parameters (the parameters that dequantize from 1-2 to 16 bit) via LoRA. Then they have specialized kernels to do matrix multiplication at the bit level.

Also, the 2-bit model seems much better than the 1-bit model - they use [-1, 0, 1, 2] - I wonder if '2' is needed in light of the 1.58b paper (which claims -1 is def. needed).
I’m in the unique situation where I’m hiring my replacement after having made a promotion. I know they will make (substantially) more than me. How would I negotiate a matching or superior salary?
Burning Heroes AI for Humanity Hackathon 2024
That's assuming you're experienced with them, if you know next to nothing about databases, Mongo is a much better choice. In this case it looks like when they got started the team just didn't have all that much experience with databases.
$5K cash + $10K AWS Credits for 1st place.
Starts in 2 hours.
How about HA and horizontal scaling? I’ve heard that MySQL excels in that area.
Indeed, this one is spectacular.
I wrote something similar in the past.

It was credit card terminal application. It was supposed to behave correctly regardless of when in the process of transaction something happened. Something could be application crash, power cycle, etc. Users were frequently impatient with the slower communication methods (we had land line and GPRS modems back then) and would frequently power cycle the terminal if it took a moment too long to do something.

I designed the application in such a way that it always moves transactionally between series of well defined states with no observable states in between. Then I put test points between the states to crash the application at random. Many of these points were put in places in code which would be extremely difficult to test other way (it was extremely unlikely a power cycle would happen naturally at that exact point in time, between those two exact instructions).

The application had capability to crash at literally any point and simply continue operation once power cycled.
The history of lead pencils and their lack of any lead (2021)
Used to be a high performer at Big Tech. Found out a coworker with less experience at the same level had $200k/year more in comp. I didn’t care about the money, I care about being taken for a fool.

There were additional factors, but I left and started my own company within three months and nobody in my old team has anywhere close to my experience.
In the late 90s I worked at a place that recognized the issue where they were having problems bringing people onboard so they offered more. But in our department they also did a yearly "adjustment" across the board to make sure they avoided paradoxical issue of new guy / longtime hire guy unexpected pay disparity.

In that case the new guy getting paid more or close to the same was a largely non-issue as you knew you'd get adjusted. It was arguably good news for you.
A muon collider could revolutionize particle physics, if it can be built
> Seems innocuous, but maybe they were planning further changes.

Seems like an attempt to get 90 days of "use" of this vulnerability after discovery. If they only had checked performance before!
> Affected versions of XZ Utils

Most people, to find the affected versions, would either have to bisect or delve deep enough to find the offending commit. Either of which would reveal the attacker.

By not asking for the version, there is a good chance you just report "It's acting oddly, plz investigate".