skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I haven't used LangChain, but my sense is that much of what it's really helping people with is stream handling and async control flow. While there are libraries that make it easier, I think doing this stuff right in Python can feel like swimming against the current given its history as a primarily synchronous, single-threaded runtime.

I built an agent-based AI coding tool in Go (https://github.com/plandex-ai/plandex) and I've been very happy with that choice. While there's much less of an ecosystem of LLM-related libraries and frameworks, Go's concurrency primitives make it straightforward to implement whatever I need, and I never have to worry about leaky or awkward abstractions.
beyond just launching a product, the launch has to have some sort of "impact" (at least, this was true in the time period where I was trying to get promoted, roughly 2010-2013). Something that is not perceived as impactful by the promo committee is likely not going to count towards promotion. It's the job of the employee and manager to document the "impact".

If your manager is a director or higher, they can appeal the promo denial and an appeals committee can be manipulated into giving a promotion. That's what happened to me- promo saw no impact to my launch. Then my director went to appeals and basically said "promote him, he's doing good work".

Everything about Google messed up my expectations and planning around career. To work anywhere else (a startup, or a pharma) I had to unlearn all the bad habits of self-promotion and cookie-licking and impact-demonstration.

Of course many people joke the best way to get promoted at Google is to leave, get promoted elsewhere, and return to Google at a higher level (using all your newly learned negotiation skills).
By data I mean a format for data interchange, like JSON.
Whoa, incredible resource. Thank you!
List of people who created a programming language
> How long will service remain available?

> Month-to-month customers without an active contract will have until Monday,

> September 30th, 2024, 5 PM PDT to off-board.

I'd love to hear from someone with expertise in vendor onboarding and business continuity risk: how do vendor contracts typically protect customers in situations like this?

I'm sure will be super frustrated with datastore vendor change, which would need nontrivial resources from product development to system migration in such a short span of time.
What happens if you go over the 200GB or 2 Million monthly requests limits?
The reason we got here in the first place was trying to standardize the language and its module loading. If you come up with a solution that doesn't work in browsers, we're back to the same thing. Instead of the `require()` polyfill, we'd need the `importSync` polyfill.
Well that's the theory. Then the code becomes so complex that the type checker is not able to explore all the ramifications anymore. Or if it does then it takes an exponential amount of time, which is the worst ever. After all I guess you're right that the code won't run, but not for a good reason.

Have you ever waited forever for Typescript to finish its typechecking and it eventually just gave up and timed out because it was too complex? Now imagine that the typechecker is the only thing that stands between you and insanity.

If there is a bug in the framework (here Effect) then you're in trouble because these layers of abstraction make it an absolute nightmare to figure out that it's not your code but the framework that has a bug — you can't step through your code, and there is only so much that you can encode in types.
Yeah multi million dollar decisions, lifesaving decisions, this is intense.
sorry to hear that, totally understand feeling burnt

ooc - do you think theres anything we could do to change that? that is one of the biggest things we are wrestling with. (aside from completely distancing from langchain project)
Ideally, success of customers should mean success of company but the incentives are wildly misaligned here. It seems perfectly "okay" from the company perspective since they are in it to make money but doing that by telling their customers to "leave because we got acquired and no longer care about what we sold you last week" is really harsh.
At 41, I've been wondering the same thing except that I'm basically a C++ generalist. I'm finding it hard to find a new job because well paying companies want specialists with experience in domains like graphics, HPC, embedded, or finance. I'm undecided where to invest my time in order to become more valuable than a simple C++ generalist.

- Graphics: I'm interested in graphics (I learned some OpenGL years ago) but the amount of material is vast and it appears that there are many sub-domains to specialize in.
- HPC: With zero experience, I'm unsure if hobby projects would be enough to get a HPC role.
- Embedded: I've heard embedded doesn't pay great. Also, different people have different definitions of what qualifies as embedded. I've worked on car software but it was basically just a headless POSIX app.
- Finance: No real interest. Looks stressful.
Oil wells literally pump out stuff from purely natural dinosaur landfill. Coal mines extract material from tree landfills that happily accumulated waste for millions of years.

Give us a million years or two and we'll figure out what to do with plastic as well. Either we are gonna do it or some other species.
Is this a different phenomenon though? It seems that there's a difference between an informed risk assessment and not giving a fuck or letting the bureaucratic gears turn and not feeling responsible. Like there's a difference between Challenger and Chernobyl.

But, maybe someone can make a case that it's fundamentally the same thing?
Fused multiply add. A single operation that does

a += b * c

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multiply%E2%80%93accumulate_op...
That's been in the UK for ages. Like 5 years. Everything works fine, have been to a McD's dozens of times over the last few years and never seen a problem, apart from sometimes the printer is low ink.

The reason it takes longer has nothing to do with the touch screens. It's because the stores that are touch screen are now cooking to order, no picking stuff cooked already off warming shelves.

It is annoying when you want to grab something quick. But on the other hand, no more floppy, soggy, burgers. Everything is freshly cooked. Less waste.

They just have coupled the two changes, touch screens + cook to order, together. So when a store gets one, they get the other. And if you look behind the serving counter you should be able to see the difference, no warming shelves, but a slide that fresh food is coming down, which gets immediately bagged and then put straight into your hand.
Again, that's a peculiar way to characterise decolonisation.
ooc, what was the "same single solution"
> If employees had ownership over which changes they think are best, a good employee would act on bringing the alerts back to zero before they take on new features or a new project

That requires that you have good employees, which can be as rare as good management.
If you are going to just plug your product in comments, can you put more effort into discussing the post first?
HackerNews user discovers Upworthy is till around – you won't believe what happened next!
So you would rather waste time in spreading negativity than positivity? Ok.
Ask Snowden.
I don’t know where 60% comes from since you didn’t explain it, but the percent is a subjective matter of what you choose to include or exclude, and I think you’re still including revenue sources that are not used to fund NASA, and being nonspecific about what spending you’re talking about. If you want to claim which number is “correct”, you need to explain it fully and carefully. Do note the difference between 50% and 60% is smaller than the percentage deficit, so we’re debating something smaller than the margin of error, and there’s no such thing as the “correct figure”. For example, 50% is the revenue portion of the budget that is comprised of individual income taxes, but if we look at the individual income tax revenue of $2.2T versus the total spending of $6.1T, then individual income taxes are actually only 36% of spending, so it can legitimately be argued that the average NASA share per citizen is closer to $26.50. Since that’s an average, it’s always incorrect relative to any given citizen; we haven’t even touched on income brackets and regressive/progressive taxes.

I agree that businesses pay too little, and yes taxes are a bit complicated. I’m not seeing intentional obscurity at this level, just that there are multiple different valid ways to frame NASA’s budget. The top comment was correct that the average per citizen cost to fund NASA in 2023 was slightly under $75. This is already very low, so that was the point from the top. Mine was simply that the actual amount we pay is even lower. Whether it’s 36% or 50% or 60% or even 85% doesn’t matter much, that ends up being about 1 or 2 cups of coffee either way.
At that scale, thought and attention are proportionate to money moved. So even if 5 interns produced a better tool, the company wouldn't notice it. There's no skin in the game unless millions are involved.

Once the millions have moved to a contractor, it can hire 5 interns to deliver the same product. And it will be used because it cost millions.
> how do vendor contracts typically protect customers in situations like this?

That's in the termination clause.
Not a dog in the fight, at least this particular fight, but this might sound to many as "just learn the language of the oppressor". This gets thorny real quickly.
This. Every society in every era has a large amount of necessary work and some amount of interesting work and a minuscule amount of glamorous work.

The fact that those categories happen to overlap for a lucky few makes for a great commencement speech, but IME it's the extreme exception.

The good news is that there's really never been a better time to be a dabbler. Lots of tech things that used to have a huge barrier to entry are accessible at a hobbyist level now.
Thank you. I appreciate your ability to reverse course.

The quality of 3D AI isn't there yet, but it's just a matter of time. When Sora quality 3D generation arrives, it will be incredibly disruptive.
Looks like we'll finally be able to search our past ChatGPT convos without having to Ctrl-F the data export
What?

I'm American and I thought 2016 showed us that Americans don't understand error bars. We're innumerate.
Good point. Here are some notes on it based on what I've observed happens in Academia and in other environments:

I think handwaving comes in different flavors:

- Handwaving and not knowing what they are doing, when they know they don't know:

This is arrogance and/or fear of people thinking you are a fool. Bad practice. Professionals who do this are status chasers and not fun to be around. Students who do this are mostly insecure, and they might just need some help with their self-esteem. Help them by letting them feel comfortable with being wrong. Foster a good environment so that the arrogance and fear fade away.

- Handwaving and not knowing what they are doing, when they don't know they don't know:

I believe this is a good thing, in particular for Students, if they are within a nurturing environment. It can lead to interesting ideas and to discussions of innovative ways to move forward. I believe this to be a way of actually "training your intuition muscle" both for Students and Professionals. It lets them know not to fear moving on, tackling the thing that captures their attention the most at first, and later on filling some of the gaps, which I feel is common practice for people who have been working on the field for a while. However, if the gaps are left unattended it can lead to bad things... Environment matters.

- Handwaving and knowing what they are doing, when they know they don't know:

For trained Professionals only... :)
This modality kinda kicks in when deep in mathematical work.
It's the path that leads to the Eureka moments...
Pure trained intuition acting almost as a separate entity to oneself. We are facing the unknown and something tells us that certain aspect can be handwaived, we don't fully know why but we feel it is. Later on it becomes clear why we could do the handwave. It works itself out.

- Handwaving and knowing what they are doing, when they don't know they don't know:

For trained Professionals only...
Kind of a stretch, but might be where our intuition either fails us completely, or completely takes us by the hand to turn the unknown unknowns into known unknowns, then it goes back to the previous category.

This isn't set in stone by the way, just some thoughts I had while reading the article...

Any ideas or suggestions for modifications more than welcomed.
I think what they were saying, especially given the phrasing “How many projects luckily succeeded after a reckless decision?” is that, if things hadn’t failed we would never have known and thus how many other failures of procedure/ ethics have we just not seen because the worst case failed to occur.
I'd doubly emphasize this. Technology changes rapidly regardless of bubbles, its better to learn how to pick up skills quickly and grok (deeply understand) them.

I found these two courses to be really good foundations for kicking off in my own reeducation post-bachelors (in CS). They filled in blanks and reinvigorated my internal monologue of "yes i can do/learn that" growth mindset.

https://www.coursera.org/learn/learning-how-to-learn

https://www.coursera.org/learn/mathematical-thinking
Testing Human Limits: How to Build Life-Changing Mental Resiliency
Ads are most often manipulation, not information. They are pollution.
What did you get your PhD in? What were doing before?
Instant Cold Starts for Serverless Apps
Very unexpected acquisition. I don't think that Rockset is a suitable infrastructure for RAG, a purpose-built inverted index would be far more efficient (both in terms of compute and storage), so I'm not sure how much of the technology would actually be useful for them.

I can think of two options

- Pure acqui-hire: virtually all of Rockset engineering leadership is ex-Meta, and OpenAI has been hiring several senior infra engineers from Meta, so these are all people that have worked together previously.

- OpenAI is building some product where customers can ingest large amounts of data, which could be managed by the Rockset infrastructure as source of truth, and then indexed by their RAG systems.
The key thing with Challenger is that the engineers working on the project estimated the risk to be extremely high and refused to budge, eventually being overruled by the executives of their company.

That's different than the engineers calculating the risk of failure at some previously-defined-as-acceptable level and giving the go-ahead.
Yet regulations have happened and continue to, just different ones of varying ... quality/purpose. Even among preservation/piracy there have been moderately successful efforts.

Apathy will not bring change. Only speech and action.
Impact of Deployment Frequency and Batch Size on Software Quality
To your point about i/o bottlenecks....these days, there is an i/o bottleneck between main memory and the registers--and even between the registers and the ALUs.

This changes the tradeoffs. And its why we use chips sporting data parallelism and pipelined floating point units. Both techniques are, in the final analysis, backing off of pure RISC and making more complex instructions.
What is or isn't necessary is for each developer to decide. Maintainers or community being too conservative can prevent innovation from happening, causing stagnation and loss of interest.

For example, I tried to implement a simple library/module system in the GNU bash shell. I was writing a lot of shell scripts and just wanted an easy built in way to load them from a standard conventional path. I didn't expect this feature to be controversial in any way. I went to their mailing lists to talk about it and it culminated in other users describing it as "schizophrenic". I now view as a huge mistake my decision to write bash scripts instead of using a proper language from the start.
They’ve been growth hacking the whole time pretty much, optimizing for virality. Eg integrating with every ai thing under the sun, so they could publish a seo-friendly “use gpt3 with someVecDb and lang chain” page, but for every permutation you can think. Easy for them to write since langchains abstractions are just unnecessary wrappers. They’ve also had meetups since very early on. The design seems to make langchain hard to remove since you’re no longer doing functional composition like you’d do in normal python - you’re combining Chains. You can’t insert your own log statements in between their calls so you have to onboard to langsmith for observability (their saas play). Now they have a DSL with their own binary operators :[

VC-backed, if you couldn’t guess already
Speaking of Plato’s wrestling coach…

Pythagoras was also a successful wrestling coach. In fact, he coached the most winningest Olympic athlete of all time: Milo of Croton. Milo won 5 consecutive Olympics over a 20 year period.

Pythagoras himself was thrown out of the boys Olympics at age 16 for being too effeminate (long hair), but then entered the men’s Olympics and won. Supposedly, he introduced some new kind of martial arts technique.

This is documented in Thibodeau, 2019
“The Chronology of the Early Greek Natural Philosophers.” Happy to share the refs. Ok, back to maths…
My very first Multimodal AI star on Github. Hope we see more of these in the future.
I am more interested in meta-cognition, advanced cognitive architectures, learning about how humans learn and then figuring out how we get machines to do that better and faster
Reminds me of fixing an ~11yr old bug in Enemy Territory. I had to spend a night debugging the C code only to realize the issue was in the UI config: https://github.com/etlegacy/etlegacy-deprecated/pull/100/fil...

(IIRC UI scrolled twice for every mouse movement + you couldn't select items in server browser with mouse wheel as it would skip every other one)
Sure, I follow you. But you need to actually have some hard skills in order for those to have any value, right?
Even before the LLM AI hype, IBM talked a big AI game but rarely delivered. Their market seemed to be out-of-touch CEOs who fell for their marketing.
Is a modern book written by a pre-modern person, modern at heart, but classical in content?

Whats the new term then? Post-modern? Cutting Edge?
> If you completely separate identity from age checking using some cryptographic method, the loophole is that a single identity token with an adult age can now be used by everyone, everywhere to tell websites that they are above a certain age

There a two counter techniques used to address that problem. Tokens can get time limited down to a number of seconds (10-30?), and a single token is only valid for one session at a given website (assuming the website honor those restriction on their side).

In addition, token providers may rate limit how many tokens a person may generate, and the application that request tokens may require a bit of work from the user (like typing a pin). Any person who need to do more age verification could be required to contact customer support to unlock such features, which also mean the provider can keep a closer eye on accounts that generate tokens in strange or abnormal patterns. Depending on how the market for identity providers are, different providers may provide different service and different levels of authentication.

In Sweden currently we are in a situation where there are multiple competing identify providers. They have to follow a certain certification, but the exact details of the technology varies a lot. There is a bit of talk to make those an open standard, including defining exactly what information the provider and the recipient should get. There is also the hope that the user application could be made generic, so switching/choosing provider becomes easy.

The problem with the technology in term of privacy is not so much in the protocols or cryptographic methods, but rather a social one. You can not create an fair identification system if all it does is ID control for porn sites, just as one can not create a VPN if all it can access is porn sites.
Why do you think so? In my opinion these countries are equally bad. The western support for Ukraine is huge only because the west is against Russia, they could stop the war but they didn't.

In the current world diplomacy is a joke, countries and their diplomats are unable to find a peaceful solutions. People are dying on both sides ( Ukraine-Russia, Israel-Palestine, ... ) while the world watches.

The media also spread hateful propaganda on all sides of conflicts, politicians make hateful comments. Nobody cares.
Two reasons:

1. To use all 3 would require remembering more conversion ratios

2. More people (even in the US) are familiar with meters than those units. I was not familiar with the Rod at all, which is the closest to meter in utility for discussing block lengths.
'Midlife crisis' is just a term, coined by who knows who because who knows why.

It's only a 'crisis' if you do stupid things with the greater income/experience that you have now.

Don't.

Your age means you've grown up and it can be the greatest period of your life.

Also, instead of thinking that you're getting 'older', notice that today you're also the youngest you'll ever be in your life.

Try not to waste your energy regretting the time that has gone by, instead focus on how much more you could do with the time you still have.

Work and tech is just a small part of life. Surely you dreamed to do or get things but couldn't when you were younger. Now is the time to do that!

First and foremost, focus on your health, get fit. Make it a hobby. This will give you the positive energy you need to pursue whatever dreams you've had.

Now on the tech side of things, just a few thoughts:

Storing/pulling from DB, transforming and presenting is pretty much what we all do. The difference is the db and type of transformation and presentation.

So your experience is great and you can learn anything new that inspires you plus apply your skills to that!

Pick a subject and read about it every day, work through the tutorials, start small projects, until you can walk on your own.
Technology changes fast and now with the emergence of AI it's hard to tell what will stick or if any of the skills we've learned for decades will still be useful in 5 years.

Fundamentals usually stick, refresh/get deeper into them, grokk the common algorithms, system design, architecture, design patterns.

As you get older, younger people will start to look up to you for guidance. Try softening your skills.

Software development is not just about technology, it's also about communication, intuition, knowing who to engage with, when to take up stand, when to back down, etc.

Those things come to us as we get older, so try to include them in your thought processes.
I'm not even trying to say you're wrong, but how can you be your own source about what will happen 25 years later in your mid 30s? Did you first start doubting your career choices when you were 10?
There should be a way to turn plastic into something we use a lot like bricks or road support material.
I totally disagree. "Gifted kid burnout" pretty much refers to the experience of being "gifted" with intelligence and never needing to work hard to be praised as a high achiever. The "gift" really does exist, and that's why it's harmful to focus on intelligence over hard work. The gift is a curse if not utilized well, leading to depression and burnout in young people.
https://x.com/shaun_vids/status/1589961115752013824

musk's basic problem is that twitter was not being run by lefty sjw types surpressing free speech, it was being run by business people who were trying to make money. with the same aim he'll end up trial-and-erroring his way back to their exact policies
Yeah yeah, it's also well covered by journalists how all Americans are racist.