skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
There's a ton of abstraction in axolotl, for sure, but so far I haven't found that it gets in the way. The main competitor in that space seems to be Unsloth, but that only works with a single GPU machine, so didn't fit my purposes. I'll dive into your blogpost. Thanks for posting!
Tangental:

Most consumer printers I’ve come across have differing XY and Z axis spatial resolutions

I’ve been wanting a decent algorithm to determine the optimal angle to print models such that the result is aesthetically as high fidelity as possible

Take for example a rigid model crane set to a non orthogonal angle. Is it pleasing to print with respect to one vertical column or the other? What if they are not equally sized? What about which is most likely to be viewed up close?

Generalising that problem to more organic shapes is incomprehensible but I can’t even answer the aforementioned toy example

I’m sure there are dozens of excellent potential approaches but I can’t easily find it for arbitrary XY and Z (or other combinations thereof) spatial resolutions
Adults underestimate the trouble a kid will cause from boredom and curiosity and self-centredness. It’s a self-serving underestimate (the less trouble we anticipate, the less we need to do now). Pay in school IT isn’t great and frequently there’s a hobbyist going “I can make this [glorious thing] possible” and not thinking ahead to “and I also make this [annoying/ destructive/ unlawful/ inconvenient thing] possible”.

Extension to the wider software industry left as exercise to the reader.
When UX designers started to look at their job more like science than art, the tech world became more boring, dull, and soulless.
Are they filled with other CEOs? I thought boards were filled with different people concerned with different topics. Where do you see that they're filled with other CEOs?
Care to explain? Why is cloudflare inaccessible to you?
I still long for a world where we got ASM.js and SIMD directly in JavaScript.
Are there really people with no internal voice at all? I understand that not everyone has this constant internal chat as I do, but it's hard to me to imagine, for example, solving math problems without "thinking" the numbers aloud.
I'd like to try this. Recommendations? (My quick search's results were roobios, white tea, etc.) TIA.
Good thing no one ever travels between the east coast and west coast
I have an internal monologue and I struggle to imagine how someone can think without one. Yet I also wonder if bypassing the need to articulate thoughts in words is actually more efficient. Do those people have a higher thought throughput? I suspect we may never know.
Seafood consumption per capita drifts higher in the United States
Great. Yet another special case added to CSS.
You could set up simple interactions entirely via the GUI, like making buttons navigate to other cards.

HyperCard also came with an extensive set of stacks that contained premade buttons and fields with useful scripts, and you could copy and paste those objects into your own stacks or modify entire "template" stacks into customized applications without necessarily even looking at the scripts.

The general idea was to provide users with a smooth ramp: no code -> using someone else's code -> tweaking someone else's code -> writing your own code.
Isn't there something in the guidelines about chatbots not being allowed to post here? If not, there should be.
It's probably not the winner, but we're now seeing opening moves in a game where technology providers like Mobileye and Waymo will work with vehicle makers to create vehicles that integrate cost-reduced sensors and interior screens that will enable profitable deployment over a vehicle's lifespan.

Non-shared rides seems to be the first target since they're easiest to manage but I'd expect a variety of form factors to emerge.
I feel like this is one of those "of course" papers that people will dismiss, but it is good in science to confirm via orthogonal methods things that ought to be true[0]. All evidence points to language evolving for the purpose of communication, so of course its primary function is communication. It was only later co-opted for use in thought.

[0] I like the analogy of a subway network. Something like a star topology is unreliable because you have one problem and a whole swath of the city is inaccessible. But if you start building secondary and tertiary links between stations, you get robustness. Even if there's a problem or two you can still get anywhere.
It is certainly possible, but is it as lean and readable?
SQL is bifurcating, becasue it's kind of two things.

Good SQL is becoming more specialized for dev. No longer are the DBAs tutoring the devs to avoid inefficiencies. Now, the DEs handle really complex pipelining, and get really good.

But SQL isn't just used to "build" - it's also used to "access." And that's less specialized. The PM, BA, etc can all use ChatGPT/Stack Overflow and get things done quickly. And it's a virtuous cycle: the more people access data, the more the DEs are asked to clean things up, the easier it gets to query, and the more people try/succeed.

So SQL-for-development is increasingly niche, while SQL-for-access is increasingly common.
Ask HN: Arch Users – What is your long-term system maintenance routine?
Hi Community,
been a happy Arch Linux user for many years, keeping up with minimal system maintenance and occasionally performing some package cleanups (using commands like pacman -Qtd).

I'm curious about your long-term system maintenance routines. What steps do you take to ensure your system stays stable and up-to-date, and how long have you managed to keep your system running smoothly without needing to reinstall?

Thanks for your insights!
I agree with this most out of all the replies. The PC of the 90s was a personally empowering device. You bought it from the manufacturer (or individual parts), took it home, turned it on, and it was yours, and only yours, to explore and use. You could make it do whatever you wanted, up to the limits of the hardware and your programming ability. You decided when to turn it on and off, what to run on it and when. These devices existed for the benefit of the users, and to make your life easier and better.

Modern technology lost this. Everything now comes with a hidden, or not so hidden, tether to various companies. Unlike the PC of the 90s, ModernDevices today are limited. And the limits are artificial and set by the device and OS manufacturers, not set by physics or your own personal skill with the device. Now you constantly have these manufacturers looking over what you're doing, to ensure it's OK with them, and to ensure it's still making them money. And as soon as what you want to do with your ModernDevice conflicts with what all these various companies want you to do with them, they get to ultimately decide, not you. The companies are more and more deciding when the device can be turned on and off, what can and cannot run on it and when. These devices exist for the benefit of their manufacturers.

Companies' paternalistic attitude of "What should we allow users to do?" is what soured new technology for me.
The idea is to replace TEUs with smaller more manageable standard though. Even though the art shows containers that's not what they are trying to do. In similar systems the proposal is like one cubic meter boxes with max of 100kg. Something easily manageable and can be switched and routed on a conveyor system.
old people don't struggle with tech because they didn't grow up with it

well, they kinda do, but here's the thing

when you're old, all the tech that's out will be alien to you

I'm not even middle aged, I'm a tech enthusiast, and nonetheless it is happening to me already. new UI and new tools all happening too fast to keep up

we should be trying to do something about this for ourselves, not just for our mothers
> Or another way of looking at it: which is more important in the big (geopolitical or otherwise) scheme of things...politeness (deceit, ignorance, rhetoric, etc) or truth/accuracy?

Not being a complete and utter asshole, like you are being here. HTH!
> heard somewhere awhile back:

This is verbatim how Feynman describes it in "surely you're joking" (the chapter with spinning plate and QED iirc).
> As far as SQL itself becoming a niche skill, optimized SQL has always been a niche skill,

Skill issues are not the responsibility of SQL itself.

Also you even mention yourself that MongoDB is not sufficient so to me at least, it sounds like you shoehorn in a PostgreSQL when in reality, using the right tool from the start would have avoided all that work.

At the end of the day its a very intuitive query language. I'm yet to see one that surpasses it. Nor am I convinced there is a need to change it.
Gwern doesn’t write papers. He writes posts.

He’s probably the most prolific scientist that doesn’t have a single whitepaper to their name.
There's an interesting debate here -- see this tweet. https://x.com/ylecun/status/1769137037959913690. Cool to see an actual article on it as opposed to speculation from personal experience.

Now for some speculation from personal experience. Some people leverage language more for internal thought and some people have other intermediate representations. I'm personally more of a language thinker except I have a specific avenue for math/programming that is highly optimized. I imagine many use language to solve math problems (and no way is right or wrong).
NoSQL application databases still a thing?

No data warehouse?

From a language/interface standpoint, there is no alternative.
Are there some shenanigans here with the publication date?

The screenshots looked surprisingly large and high-quality for something published in 2001. I looked up the page in the Internet Archive, and there's no record of its publication before today:

https://web.archive.org/web/20240000000000*/https://susam.ne...
Is it a skill, though? Ask ChatGPT, "In SQL, given a cars table, with a price field a brand field, and a year field, how do you get the average price of each brand for each year...?
I think some of this is due to SQL frameworks becoming a must-have. Which is kind of fine, I guess, because it's certainly nicer to have your objects coming back to you in some known format rather than manually massaging raw row responses.

But at the same time, a fairly basic SQL query I could bang out in two minutes becomes an exercise in acrobatics & research in how to do it right in this version of this particular framework.
AvaTaR: Optimizing LLM Agents for Tool-Assisted Knowledge Retrieval
Wondered same, found this: https://old.reddit.com/r/funny/comments/1b77eq8/fun_fact_if_...
Show HN: Analysing Euro 2024 betting odds with scraping and AI
I created a bot which analyses Euro 2024 betting odds and performs some basic analysis based on the recent form of each team and provides advice on which odds are under/over-priced by email to all subscribers.

The intelligence of the bot is admittedly rather basic but this simple app shows how easy it is to reliably scrape and parse structured data with AI and perform insightful analysis. The initial version of the bot, shown in the notebook took about 15 minutes to build.

Disclosure: this bot is built on our new graph based #nocode platform NodeScript.dev, which we've recently brought to market.
No. Those who refuse to learn it will be niche.
Taxis have to be durable. They don't need high performance. They should be cheap to make and cheap to maintain.
Can you say more about (the|your perceived) relationship between SQL and htmx? When looking up HTMX[1] I was surprised to see what looks like a relatively young project with no direct relation obvious to SQL.

[1]: https://htmx.org/
Not every flight needs to cross the entire continent, just like not every drive requires a vehicle that gets 1000+ miles of range.

I'd bet the very vast majority of private flights in North America are less than 1200 miles.
At both the universities I’ve attended, lectures lasted 50 minutes. The odd few we had that were 100 had a short break in the middle supposedly inspired by research on how attention levels decay and recover over time. Conference talks seem to usually hover around the 60 minute mark.

I find movies have become too long — especially in recent years.
What a shame we have to retire every other plane when this one is adopted.
I worked at an organization that ran an energy market and we had a massive amount of data stored in SQL databases and this was how you did large-scale data analysis. Most electrical engineers there knew the schema backwards and forwards and could write multi page queries (there are a LOT of tables and many many join operations) pretty quick to go through TB, probably at least a PB of data. It wasn't considered a niche skill...more like bread and butter (equally useful as Python). Every now and then we'd hire someone that had a "data science" background that wouldn't know SQL (just some stats and R or Python+Pandas) that would try to convince us we were doing things wrong, but it was generally because the "big data" they learned in school could fit into a dataframes. I'd say SQL is now more important than ever.
Pretty senior developer here (manager now, actually) but I'm realizing that other than college, I haven't really picked up a book on SQL. What would you recommend?
> It's a simple calculus.

It's wrong. But it's certainly very simple :)

You forgot about how an invasion force is supposed to swim across the baltic.

After all, Russia can't move a huge fleet in there, because access is between sweden and denmark. So they'd have to use whatever they already have in there.

And sea invasions are more complicated than land invasions.
Help me out, in what scenarios besides a government three-letter agency or adjacent business is the $13k cost of this thing justified?
Sounds reasonable. Animals (including humans) construct mental maps of their environment without language, which is an important ability for everything from seasonal migration to location of reliable food sources. For social animals, simple vocal phrases like 'follow me to food' (e.g. in parrots, crows, etc.) would be secondary to the construction of that mental map, but do confer a large survival advantage on their social group (group selection in evolutionary terms).

If so, this has some interesting implications for LLMs and AGI. First, LLMs don't seem to be thinking or reasoning if they're only doing next-word-prediction based on a large training set - so a step towards real AGI might be a system that had an internal map of reality that it was constantly updating with new sensory information, with the LLM as a layer above it that allowed it to communicate the relevant details of that internal map to others?

Personally, every time I 'think in words' it always begins with 'how can this be explained' and the actual thinking that precedes that is done with images, diagrams, graphs, etc.
But very, very few of the overall flights in the US are coast to coast non-stop. The average regional flight length (which is what something like this is targeting) in the US is 510 miles (~820 km)[1]. Overall average length of flight 941 miles (~1514 km)[2]:

1. https://www.statista.com/statistics/742763/regional-carriers...

2. https://www.bts.gov/content/average-length-haul-domestic-fre...
This is surprising to me because when I learn something, I usually find that trying to speak it out helps a lot of thinking about it clearly. Put it another way, the effort to turn something into language helps forming the thought about it. Thus I don't know whether counts as a counter argument.
Self driving trains have been in real world use for more than 20 years. What makes them easy compared to cars is with rail you just put a fence around the track and there is nothing else to hit so you don't need complex sensors to avoid killing people (more likely you put the tracks in a tunnel or elevated). Of course that gets into why we don't do this to individual houses - either the fences trap everybody in their own house (maybe they can visit a neighbor or 3, but not the whole neighborhood) or the costs to build it is extremely high.

Roads are dangerous, but also a lot more flexible than rail and so better for low volume use.
They can probably sue GitHub then (their current hoster of their repo), the traditional way?

Though actually I imagine GH would just close the repo before it comes to that, because it looks like a pretty clear case.

I guess it's also possible OpenAI doesn't care about this.
There's a lot of junk science in this article.

"It is literally the fact that a consciousness observes something that changes its outcome."

Yes, that's a popular science trope. It's completely false. The whole notion that a quantum observer requires consciousness is incorrect. All that's required is an interaction with a so-called non-quantum system. It cares nothing about consciousness.

Then the claim is made we don't understand the evolution of humans. Actually, we do. We understand it very well. It is true that we don't have a theory for abiogenesis but to then claim that there's no way DNA could have evolved is specious at best. It should be noted that it took a couple of billion years for that to evolve, however it did. That's a loooooong time.

What this article is actually doing is appealing to God for things we can't currently explain. There's a name for such a God: God of the Gaps. That philosophical idea of God has been abandoned since we always come up with an explanation for observed phenomena that doesn't require God. Not to mention that God presents its own complexities because now that's something else I have to explain - origins, properties, and so forth.
It's a social problem. People make mistakes, or are coerced into letting mistakes persist, because you have to get the features out. And if you stand your ground on security, management will find someone who won't. If software "engineers" were engineers who had the duty and authority to say "no, I won't build something unsafe" we'd have fewer problems.

Not to say that improved tools isn't also a worthy goal, but why not attack the problem from all angles?
I don't know what to believe. That document is pretty damning reading to be honest (thank you for sharing and pointing to the relevant sections), but the original post from Melzer still raises some alarming issues I think
But… skeuomorphism and crispy lines of pixels! And cute sound effects.
This almost feels like a case of Betteridge's law.

Every single job I've had in the software space in the last 6 years (and I've had a bunch) has made pretty extensive use of SQL. Obviously this is a sample size of one, but me being good with SQL wasn't especially impressive to any of my coworkers at any of my jobs.
Ah, woops, good catch. But none of those services are used in the 2 sets of malware described. It's kind of just a throwaway line with no relation to the article.
I have a more broad explanation https://kfx.fr/articles/2024-04-26-onnewdealexp-contrapolis/ and I can add some like https://watson.brown.edu/stoneinequality/events/2022/iceberg... while others are cited in the first article.

But in more practical terms: try to find a project of a MODERN condo, meaning one build with all current "energy regulations" of the western countries, let's say build in the last 10 years or so. Try to elicit the bill of materials, than try to do the same for single family homes of similar "luxury" of the apartments and simply multiply the single home bill of material times the number of apartments.

In infra terms try to visualize how much infra a modern city demand, including highways and so on vs simple roads on a spread area.

You'll find that some elements do cost much (like roofs) but overall single family homes cost less in mere raw materials. If we add the need of renewables and the lack of the mere ability to build a nation-wide smart-grid, while we can build smart-microgrid in homes, and we actually have them in all modern p.v. systems with storage/self consumption, you'll easily visualize that we can't create a "green new deal city" without falling in projects like Neom, Arkadag, Prospera, Innopolis and others modern Fordlandia distopic and disfunctional like the original one. Then you can add evolution, the fact we do not really know how climate change will reshape us humans, with migrations, wars and so on.

Those who know try pushing air mobility https://www.easa.europa.eu/sites/default/files/dfu/uam-full-... not because it's cool nor cheap alone (so far such drones consume the equivalent of a tank vs a car) but because they do not need roads, and roads alone cost too much and can evolve too slowly. We try to push water transports for similar reasons. We know large infra can't be maintained and evolved for long.

However finance capitalism needs dense cities where humans inside own nothing and have to obey simply to eat and sleep.
> C programs routinely suffer from memory management problems.

Again? There is a typo there.
- programs
+ programmers
Undocumented infra is the root of all my problems too.
As a lawyer, I feel like your comment is reflective of the general misunderstandings around this issue.

Sit through a docket or two and you come to a few conclusions. 1. They're all guilty. This is a corollary of: prosecutors like shooting fish in a barrel, not prosecuting cases where they might have to actually work. 2. The role of the defense lawyer in 99% of these cases is to keep them from disrupting the proceedings. 3. Probation / alternative sentences don't work. A good horsewhipping in the town square and 90 hard labor on the farm would be a much more effective way to get through to these people (and thus ultimately more humane).
What about everywhere else?

NYC - Philly 92 miles

NYC - DC 225 miles

NYC - Boston 215 miles

NYC - Portland, ME 325 miles

NYC - Pittsburgh 380 miles

NYC - Cleveland 470 miles

Cleveland - Chicago 350 miles

St. Louis - Chicago 320 miles

Houston - Dallas 240 miles

Houston - Austin 170 miles

Dallas - Austin 200 miles

Seattle - Portland 175 miles

Las Vegas - Los Angeles 280 miles

Las Vegas - San Francisco 600 miles

Las Vegas - San Diego 350 miles
I'm bilingual and I can switch my permanent internal dialogue to one language or another, and It happens automatically if I'm actively using it for a few minutes. This afternoon that I've been on HN for a while I'll think in English, probably until wife comes. In dev words, I could say the same as you, but maybe the serialize phase is not optional.
The impact of post-quantum TLS 1.3 on Time-To-Last-Byte of realworld connections
That demonstrates the point because it's a boring headline. The clickbaitier version would be something like:

"It's 2024. Can We Just Forget About Betteridge's Law Already?"
The Bloody Sunday inquiry reported 38 years after the event.

I'm sure there are others we are forgetting.

And then there's the inquiries that haven't even started yet. Our security services colluded with America's post-911 international kidnap, torture and murder program. David Cameron promised an inquiry when he became prime minister. I guess he found out that ministers were complicit and changed his mind.
What I think a lot of the comments are missing here is that many companies who use Figma are already using Figma to create and present slide decks. (The company I work for is a perfect example.) It's maybe not the intended use of their software, but it's a very popular one.

So the competitive angle here isn't stealing market share from Google Slides/PPT, or trying to get new users to pick this over other web presentation tools. It's adding this as a first-class use case for people already building slides in Figma to further ingrain the 'ecosystem'.