skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
No. Language stays a framework for modelling. Reality stays available to us only in form of models (pictures, sounds, ideas, measures, texts, videos, this text and what you imagine based in the text). The claim "Reality is structured like a language and the free play of symbols reigns over all" holds regardless of us thinking in symbols, words, pictures, concepts, cliches, emotions or _other models_. We have access only to symbols (not reality they represent) thus we "stuck" with this postmodernism discovery for observable future.
What's funny is this is an homage to RuneScape, a longtime Java based MMO.
Doesn’t the driver notice that the boxes weigh almost nothing? Doesn’t he say anything?

If I was driver and the pizzeria handed me empty boxes I’d refuse to deliver and I’d call DoorDash. Ain’t no way I’d take empty boxes to a customer and then have the customer potentially accuse me of removing all of the food they paid for.
Well, yes. But that assumes someone with the capital and interest in kicking off a probably money-losing museum. After all, another computer museum with some significant holdings also went out of business 20-30 years ago. Silicon Valley is not unique but computers and other industrial artifacts are just not what most people have in mind when they're looking for a museum to go to.
Portal 2 was 32-bit, but macOS could already run 64-bit apps since 2007.
SQL is not going anywhere. If anything it’s becoming more and more popular.

Every developer I’ve worked with who touches server-side code has eventually said some version of ”Bah damn these ORMs can we just write SQL?”.

And now with local-first there’s a growing trend of putting SQL on the client as well. Working directly with an in-memory (ish) SQLite and syncing to the server occasionally is super nice it turns out.
A good ORM will mostly get out of the way and let you write something like

return Cars
.query()
.select(avg('price'))
.where( { brand: "BMW" })
.groupBy('year')
.orderBy('year')
If we're naming and shaming cloud providers who enable bad actors, may as well also remind everyone that nearly every* DDoS-as-a-Service provider uses Cloudflare to keep their sites online and origins hidden. It's been the case for years and they do nothing about it unless compelled by law enforcement, which is convenient for a company whose bread and butter is DDoS mitigation.

* the few exceptions use the Russia-based DDoS-Guard, not any of Cloudflares mainstream competitors, who all seem to be willing and able to turn DDoSers away.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DDoS-Guard
I would love it if an AI could build what I’ve been banging my head against for over a year. How many lines of SQL can an LLM write and does it come up with the pipeline architecture all on its own? How does it incorporate subject matter experience to aggregate or transform the data? Like I said, I would love it if I didn’t have to worry about the nitty gritty stuff. But I have not seen that type of performance out of an LLM. Also I don’t get the comparison between LLMs and query optimizers which seem to be much more deterministic and logical about how they choose to build the query plan.
Contractor fulfilled obligation.

City contracting office failed to specify the requirements correctly. In particular the curing schedule/temperature.

If this was a homeowner getting a driveway paved, it would be one thing. But a city needs to employ people who know how to write contracts. If they do not, and bad contracts are legally fulfilled, then yes I'd argue that it's entirely the city's fault.

And the contractor's unethical exploitation, of course. But that's contracts.

To your edit: I agree, and it sucks! But this is not a novel problem, and people in this business know how to get their desired results. I would argue that this kind of error does not happen accidentally.
I was interested in electrochemical 3D printing awhile back:

1. Deposition can be very precise (they say micron-level resolution here), but it's typically slow for a naive approach. That's not necessarily a problem if you need that precision. They say their approach is fast, probably by using some kind of array of nozzles (think an inkjet printer head).

2. You can also selectively run the process in reverse, so an electrochemical printer is actually a combo additive and subtractive manufacturing machine.

3. Because it's electrochemistry, I believe such a 3D printer is mostly restricted to depositing pure elemental metals and only a few alloys. This severely restricts your material selections.

Very cool to see this commercialized though, I'm curious how far they can take it.
I'm bilingual (having learned English relatively late - in school), and i think in both languages. I think my mind language depends on which one I'm immersed currently (work/browsing internet: English, real life meetings: my native one). I have very long internal monologues in both languages picked unconsciously/randomly, and sometimes switching.

Another fun quirk is sometimes I remember that I've read a sentence, I can "quote" it, but I'm not sure if I've read it in my native tongue or in English. I guess my mind sortes them in a language independent way sometimes?
Japan's Transport Ministry Proposes Automated Logistics Link: Tokyo-Osaka
Yes, QUEL is a language for querying relational databases. Relations are fundamentally unordered.

I suppose if your example is using a NoSQL (meaning non-relational) database, that is ironically queried using SQL, then you might need something else. But my understanding is that we're back on the relational kick these days.
> The big elephant in the room in terms of energy is that we have no energy problem. None. Zero. [...] If batteries get good enough we are done.

But if batteries do get good enough, then we'll just use and waste more energy, and then we'll run out again, right? It's like how software bloat expands to match the available hardware resources. So maybe it's better to act as if things are scarce even if they're not.
When I started my dev career in the early aughts, by no particular plan, ended up down the route of a DBA after doing a few Access to MSSQL migrations. Wrote some really gnarly SQL sprocs back in those days.

In those early days, ORMs were really bad and didn't feel very ergonomic to use.

But the tooling has come such a long way. Today, ORMs are generally pretty competent for 80-90% of the use cases I would find in a typical business app. Microsoft's Entity Framework always seems to surprise me when I find that I can do fairly complicated queries and have it generate almost perfect SQL. It's migrations are pretty good to the extent that it's rare to have to manually amend its migrations. Even though I think I'm quite good at hand rolling SQL, EF Core just makes it far more productive to work at the application layer instead.

I think the biggest hurdle to SQL today is that the DBA is a dying breed and SQL hasn't really had a "revolution" to meet the (sometimes perceived) needs of younger teams. For example, scaling relational database still requires more forethought and each approach comes with some limitations and gotchas. On the other hand, the rise of NoSQL databases and JavaScript in the application stack means that document-oriented databases like Firestore and CosmosDB are perhaps easier for teams to adopt, even with the limitations, because infrastructure concerns (scaling, replication, etc.) disappear.
37: Why is this number everywhere? [video]
This sounds like two things: a badly written contract, and a company working in it's singular best interest. Making it so that best interests of all parties aren't at least somewhat aligned is usually a recipe for disaster.

On example of this going right: there was a local public works project to widen a highway. The contract was written so that if the company working it completed the work early they got a small % bonus depending on how quickly it was complete.

It got done early - the incentives were aligned properly.

Yes, there are all the obvious caveats about correct quality standards and corners weren't cut, but that would be the case anyway.
Those busy humans can always switch to rust or Java? Those ain't bad languages either.

And let's face it, given its bare metal nature, there are always going to be limits on how "secure" you can make it in order to "protect" the developer from goofing up in C/C++.
Only the bad version that created a mindless cult-army.

The good version was heavily guided by a single human.
Even if this was the case, this is a (somewhat) solved problem. Look at how Formula E deals with limited range.
I am not bilingual but rather can speak fluently in some foreign language. However, I constantly find myself thinking in the foreign language I know, especially for topics I learned from reading in foreign books.

Another simpler example is when I count I usually count in my native language, even in a specific dialect when I was taught very young!
If you can mark up where the connectors go in a way that makes them accessible, you have some chance of making this work.

I think it would require extensions to HTML. There are already mechanisms for linking some elements to others, but most of them have pre-defined semantics (labels for controls, headers for sections and widgets). The closest is probably the `form` attribute that links form controls to a non-nesting `<form >` "parent" element... but forms are a worse hack for a flow chart than CSS connectors.
Some people use language in thought more than others. Some don't use language at all. It's certainly time to exit the notion that language is necessary for complex thought.

Thinking the Way Animals Do: Unique insights from a person with a singular understanding.
https://www.grandin.com/references/thinking.animals.html

> A horse trainer once said to me, "Animals don't think, they just make associations." I responded to that by saying, "If making associations is not thinking, then I would have to conclude that I do not think."

>I have no language-based thoughts at all. My thoughts are in pictures, like videotapes in my mind. When I recall something from my memory, I see only pictures. I used to think that everybody thought this way until I started talking to people on how they thought. I learned that there is a whole continuum of thinking styles, from totally visual thinkers like me, to the totally verbal thinkers. Artists, engineers, and good animal trainers are often highly visual thinkers, and accountants, bankers, and people who trade in the futures market tend to be highly verbal thinkers with few pictures in their minds.
Whether or not it's worth it financially isn't clear. The guy got 100k after legal fees. Not sure if that 100k gets taxed and to what degree. This was after the police department spread his mugshot around and tried to smear his reputation

He probably should've gotten more
I'm not arguing you can make something like this work. However it will cost a lot of $$$ and in the end you won't have anything better than known freight trains. Even if you convince every [geographical area the size of Japan] to install one, the scale factors still won't make this better or cheaper than a train.
In what way? It can make up for a lack of sleep?
That and the randomly updated dates with no changes
Yes, we had to remove the publication date from our archives because Google was heavily down ranking it. We left an “updated” date but are probably going to remove that as well. I fought hard against this until it became clear there really was no other option.
The one thing that interests me about the large CDN providers is active protection against DDoS attacks. As a small business that depends on its website being available to stay in business, how does it protect itself from DDoS attacks without using these large services? It would be too easy to take down an independent site by any malicious actor.

Other than that, yeah, I'm not a fan of the vast majority of all traffic coming from these 3 or 4 services.
I could just throw in a mention of Betteridge's law, but the question being asked is rather nuanced and is worth actually answering:

No, it is not. SQL is a way of thinking about your data, and querying against those assumptions and mistakes. If you think SQL is just a dumb row storage engine that you write garbage SQL for (ex: every single MySQL use I've ever seen), then you failed SQL 101.

A good proper use of a real SQL database (I'm obviously a huge pg and sqlite fan, but no hate towards DBA wizards that fight Oracle, DB2, and MSSQL every day at work) can shepherd your data, maintain its consistency, and conquer some of the weirdest footgun anti-patterns that keep showing up in business code that use 'modern' nosql databases.

To be absolutely fair, all technologies are a set of tradeoffs, and you have to understand them; if you don't, it will be fatal. Not today, probably not tomorrow, but in 3 years when your startup runway ran away. As technology advances, the meaning of those tradeoffs change; how I would answer some questions for people 10-15 years ago isn't how I'd answer them today.

Scalable DBs that make other tradeoffs are slowly being eaten by the march of technology. When someone picked up a mishmash of parts that don't fit, a nosql row store here, a nosql columnar store there, a dedicated event logger somewhere, all glued together with some message passing bus: its all people who don't understand the tradeoffs because they never learned the thought process behind how to use SQL effectively.

If you're asking "is SQL becoming a niche skill", you're really asking, "is thinking a niche skill?". Half of HN seems to absolutely adore the fake AI scams and willingly threw themselves down that flight of stairs, so I'm worried some people here really do think the answer to "thinking is a niche skill" is yes, and a dying one at that.
ketamine you get in germany for $50 which is enough for 4-8 hours.

'not that exclusive' for someone who is an addict and wants to do it regularly for sure.

For someone to just try it out once but being poor (really poor), borderline.
Was just remembering some advice I received from a counsellor years ago: "thoughts lead to actions, actions lead to emotions". That never fully resonated with me, because if thoughts as we understand them are the origin of everything, we should have a lot more control of ourselves than we actually do.

Now I tend to think that both thoughts and emotions have the same origin: some sort of internal representation of the world around us that we do not directly control. Thoughts, whether visual or auditory or symbolic, arise from this "model". I'd like to think of this model as not consisting anything that we would recognise directly as thoughts or emotions or even memories. It may be a "machine language" layer that has no conscious representation. I wouldn't call it subconscious thought because that would imply a thought being thought, only without conscious awareness.
This is common across so many industries now. The number of people stressed by student loans, childcare, and other typical expenses is extreme. It’s easy for someone to appear more productive by having fewer or no kids - but disastrous for the economy in the long run.

How much of the recent US economic growth can be attributed to monetization of public and private balance sheets?
Everyone here missing the point. Yeah it’s doable elsewhere, but the SQL is so perfectly readable.
A belt of solar panels encircling the moon would solve that problem though perhaps a bit ambitious at present.
Again, I'm agreeing with you. One can of pepper spray would have rendered the entire armory of the Capitol Police ineffective, and Democracy would have been stolen from us.

One thing these Trumptards with their gun fetishism have over us is their extensive firearms knowledge, and they know that only one molecule of capsaicin entering the firing chamber of a .40 S&W pistol or .223 rifle completely disables it, so this Terrorist would have laid waste to the entirety of the defensive apparatus of DC. We really got lucky, here.

Every time I think about this Attack On Our Solemn Democracy I tear up. It could have gone the wrong way, very very fast. This incredibly well-organized, armed-to-the-teeth Boomerwaffen SS would have been no match for the Capitol Police, the DC Police, the DC National Guard, or the entirety of the Department of Defense under Posse Comitatus. The mechanized divisions of mobility scooters armed with Big Gulps alone would have overwhelmed this nation's defenses, and we would be living under a Dictatorship, forced to watch Fox News and re-runs of Murder She Wrote.
Servers don't like it hot
We need more "fun" places on the internet. It feels so dreary and manufactured most of the time.
MicropolisJS
Many of the vocals were rerecorded as well.
But that's the thing, it has already been done, already been proven and it does work. Roads and classic freight rail are not the only thing that are used right now that do this.
You could use it with only a local account though.
Just go through the W3Schools website first. It's free and you can write queries in the little window to test out things against their simple database.
They'll do the opposite.

"Introducing GitHub Windows 12, coming 2025"
Tailoring pattern-recognition should be easier for a word than for a concept. Then future AI will be able to interpret thoughs of those who think in words because these "words" are common cross many people unline concept-thinking.
> This makes no sense. That would mean any country, including Russia and North Korea, could make the NSA’s routine, intended activites “illegal” simply by passing a law saying “its illegal to spy on us”. What then?

Permanent global disharmony, mass delusion, misallocation of resources, unnecessary suffering, etc?

Actually, I suspect (our) nature would find a way anyways regardless of this one relatively trivial rule. The pursuit of suboptimal outcomes is hardwired into our culture, we demand it.
htmx is a hypermedia-oriented library (like hotwire, unpoly, etc.) and so when you use htmx you exchange HTML with the server, rather than JSON. This means that HTML construction takes place on the server side, where SQL is available.

This is in contrast with traditional SPA libraries such as React, which typically access data via JSON APIs and construct a user interface on the client side. You can't make SQL generally available on the client side due to the obvious security issues, but projects like GraphQL have attempted to make the client side more flexible. Unfortunately I believe there is an inherent trade off with client-side data access that I outline here: https://intercoolerjs.org/2016/02/17/api-churn-vs-security.h...

So, as developers rediscover hypermedia & hypermedia oriented libraries, they will suddenly have access to SQL again.

And, as I mention above, new technologies like React Server Components, by putting evaluation on the server, also make SQL more easily accessible for developers.
The so-called "right tool" is also considerably more expensive on AWS. We let our actual needs mandate the tools we use. We don't play the game of gold-plating our tools because we might need it someday. Also, migrating data from MongoDB to PostgreSQL is trivial. Since our architecture mandates that clients access data via APIs then the clients aren't affected by the change.
I enjoyed stamp collecting as a kid. I inherited a stamp album from a distant relative who I think was a clipper ship captain or something along those lines. Was probably worth some money once upon a time. I should look at it one of these days. I'm sure it (and my own collection) are worth nothing today.
Kudzu, the Pigweed team's Gameboy-style badge for Maker Faire (2023)
NYC's government is entirely comprised of profit-seeking middlemen. Every mid- to high-level politician gets rich in office. That happens for a reason.
Good/serious SQL I think yes. It's gone except in legacy systems.

We see a lot of complexity moving into the application and the rdbms used mainly as a dumb table storage. The whole idea of normalised models is out the window, which kinda makes sense because that's a carryover from the 70s when storage costs were high and now they are negligible and development costs/time are instead the barrier. Really nobody gives a crap about their database size :P

I do see some stuff like stored procedures for security but the whole complex 10-table hyper optimised join, the kind you tweaked for a week so it could finally run at an acceptable speed and you'd feel like a magician, that stuff seems to be over.

These days if you need some kind of summary you just add it to the business logic and keep a separate table updated. Of course you have total duplicate information and a risk of mismatches but at agile breakneck speeds and basically zero storage costs this is not an issue these days.
MIA launches "tin foil hat" merch line to block 5G waves from entering body
You can have a look at Langroid[1], a multi-agent LLM framework from ex-CMU/UW-Madison researchers, in production-use at companies (some have publicly endorsed us). RAG is just one of the features, and we have a clean, transparent implementation in a single file, intended for clarity and extensibility. It has some state of the art retrieval techniques, and can be easily extended to add others. In the DocChatAgent the top level method for RAG is answer_from_docs , here's the rough pseudocode:

answer_from_docs(query):
extracts = get_relevant_extracts(query):
passages = get_relevant_chunks(query):
p1 = get_semantic_search_results(query) # semantic/dense retrieval + learned sparse
p2 = get_similar_chunks_bm25(query) # lexical/sparse
p3 = get_fuzzy_matches(query) # lexical/sparse
p = rerank(p1 + p2 + p3) # rerank for lost-in-middle, diversity, relevance
return p
# use LLM to get verbatim relevant portions of passages if any
extracts = get_verbatim_extracts(passages)
return extracts
# use LLM to get final answer from query augmented with extracts
return get_summary_answer(query, extracts)

[1] Langroid https://github.com/langroid/langroid
Even "obviously" guilty people are entitled to competent, robust, and vigorous defenses (and whether or not this 99% are truly "obviously" guilty is an entirely separate HN thread). This is where the imperfection lies: These public defenders have such a huge case load that they cannot properly and competently defend their clients.

If I could wave a magic wand, and we'd magically have 100X the number of public defense attorneys, each now having the ability to properly prepare for and litigate for their clients, even if those clients were "obviously guilty," why wouldn't I?
For anyone wondering, 2000km is 2 Megameters.
I wonder.

I hypothesize that one of the reasons the yarn performed so much better than the deer net is because it is more permeable and thus formed a better bond with the concrete.

In this scenario, I would imagine that it would be "locally tensioned" because the cement is effectively tightly bonded across any point of stress. Would be an interesting experiment!
> What's with all the people that talk or even brag about how much money they make doing ridesharing, food delivery, etc?

Got any examples?

I can think of a few possibilities:

1. I wouldn't put it past a company like Uber to pay to produce propaganda where someone lies about much money you can make driving for them. After all, a steady surplus of naive and enthusiastic drivers is essential to their business model.

2. You might have some schmuck doing that for the for free, by trying to brag about themselves as personally successful on social media (either for ego reasons or just trying to get clicks).

3. I think a lot of the drivers are "misinformed, bad at math." I've read it's pretty common for casual drivers to be totally ignorant of some of the major costs they're paying indirectly (e.g. not factoring in the wear and tear on their car or (more egregiously) fuel costs).

4. Being a rideshare/food delivery driver may be profitable if you're really savvy and have unusual advantages (like you live near a stadium and only drive after a baseball game during maximum surge pricing).
Neurobiologists Reveal a Secret of Ondine's Curse