skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I think it was an artifact of applying physical construction project concepts to building software.

If you're building a house, or something bigger, you don't just start nailing lumber together. You have a blueprint. Pretty detailed, and it uses industry-standard terms and markup. Any builder can take it and use it to construct the building. It has the dimensions and specifications for the foundation and all the rooms. It has considered where the rooms are, which walls are load bearing, where the staircases and HVAC and plumbing and electrical runs are, where the windows and doors are, pretty much everything. An engineer has signed off on the overall design as being safe and meeting all the applicable codes. You can order a list of supplies based on this plan and you'll be within a few percent of what you actually use.

Some small changes were allowed. You could change finish details like what style of cabinets or trim or door knobs would be used. But you could not really approach the builder once the framing was complete and say actually I wanted the living room over there and the bedrooms over here and also I want to add a third storey. You also didn't build one bedroom, and then based on that experience extrapolate the design for the next one, and then apply that to building the kitchen, and so on. It was all done up front.

People, especially people who were used to managing physical projects, thought that with the same level of planning, and the same approach to management, the same results could be achieved in software projects.
After you have 10 years of institutional knowledge, you'll get 1 meeting per various projects, including some of those you used to be a part of.
Recently was looking at a distributed microservice system at a company that thought they would need massive scale, but pivoted from d2c to enterprise b2b and then found out enterprise b2b companies want data separation. They would have been much better off going monolith first and probably actually sticking with a monolith.
Is this a sleep apnea thing because I've always been told you want to sleep on your back?
They're tracking movements. Apple has a doc on how it works here[0]

>Apple Watch tracks movement with triaxial accelerometer signals, which capture coarse motion of the
body as well as fine movements including motion associated with breathing. Apple developed an algorithm
that uses the accelerometer time series data to classify Breathing Disturbances that occur during sleep
tracking, which are temporary interruptions in the breathing pattern.

> A total of 1499 participants were enrolled, with 1448 completing the study. The sensitivity was 66.3%
(95% CI: 62.2% to 70.3%), and the specificity was 98.5% (95% CI: 98.0% to 99.0%), demonstrating that
the feature meets the design objectives to confidently identify sleep apnea while minimizing false positives.

>It’s important to note that the specificity was 100% (95% CI: 99.7 to 100%) for the
normal category, indicating that all participants with a “positive” algorithm result had at least mild sleep
apnea. Also, sensitivity was higher in the severe category at 89.1% (95% CI: 83.7% to 93.2%), indicating
that the large majority of severe cases were identified.

0:https://www.apple.com/health/pdf/sleep-apnea/Sleep_Apnea_Not...
Oh good, the company that can't even align its people and product to its non-profit mission is also telling you they'll eventually align superintelligence and surely not be outmaneuvered.

"Currently, we don't have a solution for steering or controlling a potentially superintelligent AI, and preventing it from going rogue"[0] -OpenAI

Ya don't say?

[0]https://openai.com/index/introducing-superalignment/
I really like s6. I've been using it for a couple of years now as it's how HAProxy runs all of their containers, and modifying it has been pretty simple. The docs are excellent, and it's in 'just works' territory. I'd place it alongside redis and beanstalkd for 'just works' territory.
I personally am a fan of runit

https://smarden.org/runit/

But s6 is excellent as well.
"JavaSciript" implies it's some scripting language related to Java, which was originally an idea, where it was meant to control Java Applets. But that is not a thing anymore. Thus the name makes no sense. "JS" is just a name only conflicting with my initials.
The problem with kale is that it’s shipped with ice over the top. This itself is not a problem. But a box that won’t fall apart when the ice melts has to be slathered in pfas.(if you’ve ever received a shipment of kale you’ll know what I mean, the box is this weird stuff oily thing) Kale has staggeringly high levels of pfas that bioaccumulate in our bodies and cause organ failure.
Not a criticism of kale itself. Love the stuff. If anything an example about how 3m’s suppression of the science of pfa exposure has resulted in the largest mass poisoning in human history.
They took one of the healthiest foods on the planet and made it bad for you.
When I come home from my morning walk, I'm usually a bit hot and sweaty, and it feels good to sit down and take the watch off and throw it on the charger. 10-30 minutes is enough for it to charge; I wish it would ding when full.

If it lasted 36 hours that would be enough for me to sleep with it.
Yeah, that’s nuts and is obviously flawed behaviour that can interact poorly with any number of things - not least of all any kind of checksums within the response.

I’m surprised to see that in a RFC.

Edit: it’s only for the cache key:

> Note that any such normalization is performed solely for the purpose of generating a cache key; it does not change the request itself.

Still super dangerous.

Edit edit: I just typed out a long message on the GitHub issue tracker for this, but submitting it errored and I’ve lost all the content. Urgh
> Different processor, battery life, etc sure..

So there’s no way a better processor would be needed to get acceptable all night battery life and that could be the reason?

Sounds like you may have nailed exactly why they did it.
On scrum projects I've been on, its essentially the waterfall model. Business comes up with a product and date, product and engineer give high level estimates. Program manager creates a project with all the stakeholders, product managers then write requirements, engineers then write designs. Finally this gets translated into jira epics/stories so engineers can do the implementation. The implementation runs in sprints so engineers can feel like they are doing agile. Finally when its all done, there's manual end to end testing with product and engineering.
There’s a reputational risk in selling software that gives unvalidated medical advice.
I agree that they do not, but our current AIs are based on neural nets/brain structure, I.E. biological intelligence, and so the comparison seem valid.
If you made a completely faithful and realistic medieval role-playing game, only sociopaths would play it.

Even if such a game started players off in positions of enviable social status, the things they'd be required to do to maintain order would be so distasteful that only seriously screwed up people would want to continue playing. The obstacles set up by society in the way of going on any sort of adventure outside of a few strict avenues (e.g. a pilgrimage or crusade) would be so infuriating that even sociopaths would be hard-pressed.

Medieval society is seriously alien. We can look back on their art, literature, architecture, etc. and see their humanity shining down through the ages, but we've carefully tended and cared for only the portions of medieval culture that still hold appeal. From top to bottom and in almost all respects, medieval society would shock and horrify us today.
A monolith is just one microservice. Is there a choice to be made?
"We love monoliths so much so we have dozens of them"
Having had lots of friends work there, the approach seems to be "Complain about working at Amazon for literal years but never really do anything about it", followed by "Get laid off"
Yeah, doctors can write a prescription for over the counter drugs for this reason.
Bezos isn't the CEO, and hasn't been since 2021.
Does this mean that you could be prescribed an Apple Watch if you were at risk of apnea? Or even use an HSA?
I see a lot of people in here using hledger or beancount over ledger. Could somebody explain the differences? Looking to get back into PTA, but am facing some choice paralysis now.
Wait Pollard rho runtime is based on the order of the group not the size of the private key. Maybe there's more to it? This strikes me as more of a hidden number problem. But to make it work you need to observe something using that small number. A transaction might have been enough.
how many people do you think even understand “actual statistics”? i was reading a study done by actuaries working at one of the largest reinsurers in the world, and they made conclusions based on confidence level values overlapping, which is a nontrivial mistake i identified within seconds. and these are actuaries, people who by and large, so understand statistics. how do you expect the average person to interpret any of it when they struggle to understand what a rate of change (inflation) is?
NixOS Server Up in Minutes
Asking clearly if an app can send you notifications is consent. Sounds like you have a high bar for notifications, and likely don't tap OK that often. That's fine; that's your choice. But calling a crystal clear opt-in mechanism non-consensual is just strange. Others are also free to make their own choice.

Yes, notifications can be used for engagement. That's okay too. Users often need help onboarding, learning how to use an app, reminders to complete actions on specific days, etc. You're assuming every notification or every attempt at engagement is unacceptable, and working back from there. Some can be. Some can be marketing but still welcome (thanks for the 50% off coupon DoorDash). Some can be essential to the user's goal for downloading the app (workout reminders, mindfulness check-ins, pill reminders, onboarding completion, etc).

If you don't like notifications from a specific app, turn them off. It's not that complicated.
"So, we’re asking each s-team organization to increase the ratio of individual contributors to managers by at least 15% by the end of Q1 2025.." .. manager layoffs coming too.
Next step will be to let go of people to rehire people on a team to be in the same location. This will all be in another attempt to help push salaries down. It's stupid in my opinion and will kill productivity and velocity in the near and mid term.
I think there is a variant of "you don't currently need it" that people should follow more. Build towards what you think you will need, by all means. But try and only build what you need right now.
Don't confuse "bias for activity" with "bias for action"
You may not need a bundler (2022)
I’m on Garmin watches as well but this line of thinking is getting old. Partner has an Apple Watch and they charge it while in the shower/getting dressed and occasionally 10-15 minutes in the evening to make sure it gets through the night. Charger is in a convenient location and it’s dead easy to drop the watch on it.
If you’re running ultras, then by all means stay on Garmin. But honestly for the day to day I’ve rarely seen it be an issue.

ETA: there’s plenty of valid reasons to prefer other watches (ANT+ compatibility being one of mine) but honestly the battery life thing is really not that bad for most users.
Yes strive to find one good language and use it everywhere. Then when greater languages like Rust come out you have a problem.
If you're curious where these tools might be used, one place is it's a popular init system for containers, notably https://www.linuxserver.io/
Unless you are actually a FAANG, you don't need them. And in the extremely unlikely case you become the next FAANG you'll have plenty of money to throw at the problem.
imo nano had it's time in the limelight to shine and has just slowly died out.

The Raiblocks and BitGrail hack sealed it's death.
Yes? but that really isn't the problem. You can do both monoliths and micro-services badly.

The real thing that makes software easy to maintain is consistency with itself.

If you have one guy that formats his code with spaces and another tabs, that creates friction in the codebase. If you have one guy that always uses `const` or `final`, but another guy that doesn't, again hard to maintain.

The hard problems are boundaries between business logic is divided. If the application is consistent in how it divides responsibilities, it'll be a pretty clean codebase and pretty easy to navigate and maintain. If you have two different rouge agents that disagree on coding styles and boundaries, you'll have a pretty difficult codebase to navigate.

The easiest codebases have consistent function signatures, architecture, calling conventions, formatting, style, etc and avoid "clever" code.
Hi there,
I would start with looking up complex trauma and looking for a therapist in your area who specializes in EMDR and parts work for complex trauma (I'm a therapist myself). The book The Body Keeps the Score provides a ton of information and good tips/strategies as well. Lots of luck and healing is possible.
The 36 hour battery life also isn't a best-case scenario. According to apple.com

"All-day battery life is based on the following use: 90 time checks, 90 notifications, 45 minutes of app use, and a 60-minute workout with music playback from Apple Watch via Bluetooth, over the course of 18 hours;"
We discovered a new type of wood – and how it could help with climate change
At this point maybe we should 'furlough' Boeing top management (partially to jail) and focus on quality and reliability of the product?
Liability insurance for a VW Golf with 15 million € coverage around 160€ a year [1], if you want replacement/weather damage coverage it's about 300-400€. New drivers obviously pay (way) more.

https://www.cosmosdirekt.de/autoversicherung/vw-golf-7/
Interning in Go
iOS Secure Exclave makes its way from M4 iPad Pro to iPhone 16
The problem is that these at home tests aren’t good enough to eliminate the costly and time consuming and inconvenient step of a sleep study in the lab. At least near me, to get a CPAP you first do a take home study with a wrist based (watch like) recorder. Then they make you go into the lab for an overnight sleep study (or multiple of them) anyways, for a study that costs your insurance several thousand dollars per night (and you have some copay potentially) and it is of course a massive hassle and barrier to getting CPAP treatment. They claim it is so they know your air pressure numbers but it is all just regulatory capture, because CPAP machines can auto adjust your pressure and people like to tweak numbers manually to their comfort level anyways.

Can Apple do something about eliminating all these bureaucratic barriers that hurt the health of so many?
Eventually, the goal is to have everyone live in an apartment building in the city and walk to work. That is far less CO2 than people living far away from infrastructure and services in detached single family homes and driving everywhere in their unnecessarily large vehicles.
Yes, sleep apnea mostly gets worse if you sleep on your back so they suggest sleeping on your side.
I recommend getting on Twitter to follow closely the leading individuals in the field of AI, and also watch the leading Youtube channels dedicated to AI research.
CSS is text based, so it should be gzip (or brotli) compressed. Minifying something isn't as effective as compressing it. You could do both, but the difference is small.
your phone should get a notification when its full!
Other corporate hellholes furiously taking notes and looking at the reactions. A month later: "Metoo! Metoo!"
Wall St. tightening their grip on the STEM population.
Strong (G3) Geomagnetic Storms Are Likely on 16 September 2024
That depends. A lot of people experience significant GI issues. And it isn’t clear yet if those issues are reversible after stopping. It’s still best for people to naturally control their weight and diet. Is one better than the other - depends on how overweight and how severe the side effects. Right now I feel like there isn’t much focus and rigorous study of those side effects but over time I expect it will reduce the overall positives of the drug somewhat.
Yes, always has, always will. Unlike products of many other manufacturers, it keeps what it learns on your devices, and doesn't send it home to big brother.
IQM Quantum Computers reaches production milestone of 30 quantum computers
What is the risk you have in mind?
How does it detect your sleeping position? Is it based on the watch position or is there another trick?
Fascinating. I have two quick questions, if you find the time:

…we’ve built our own foundation model, GFT (Generative Forecasting Transformer), a 1.5B parameter frontier model that simulates global weather…

I’m constantly scolding people for trying to use LLMs for non-linguistic tasks, and thus getting deceptively disappointing results. The quintessential example is arithmetic, which makes me immediately dubious of a transformer built to model physics. That said, you’ve obviously found great empirical success already, so something’s working. Can you share some of your philosophical underpinnings for this approach, if they exist beyond “it’s a natural evolution of other DL tech”? Does your transformer operate in the same rough way as LLMs, or have you radically changed the architecture to better approach this problem?

Hence: simulate the Earth.

When I read “simulate”, I immediately think of physics simulations built around interpretable/symbolic systems of elements and forces, which I would usually put in basic opposition to unguided/connectionist ML models. Why choose the word “simulate”, given that your models are essentially black boxes? Again, a pretty philosophical question that you don’t necessarily have to have an answer to for YC reasons, lol

Best of luck, and thanks for taking the leap! Humanity will surely thank you. Hopefully one day you can claim a bit of the NWS’ $1.2B annual budget, or the US Navy’s $infinity budget — if you haven’t, definitely reach out to NRL and see if they’ll buy what you’re selling!

Oh and C) reach out if you ever find the need to contract out a naive, cheap, and annoyingly-optimistic full stack engineer/philosopher ;)
The Emergency Website Kit (2020)
Thanks for the explanation. I am still a bit confused how this takes care of the errors? I can see how the weather prediction for tomorrow might have less errors. But shouldn't the errors accumulate as you feed the predicted weather as the input for the model? Wouldn't the results start diverging from reality pretty soon? Isn't that the reason why the current limit is close to 6 days? How exactly does this model fixed this issue?
I have the same issue with noise spaces... If I can't see the person talking, it's impossible for me to distinguish anything but the loudest thing. I may as well be def in a noisy room.
Well, there are alternatives. Many people user TypeScript (which then is compiled to JavaScript) or some other alternative. JavaScript is just a compiler artifact format.
Reading the comments posted thus far makes me wonder how much exposure folks have to Kent Beck and his work and writings? I got started in the industry around 2005 so to me, Kent is a kind of celebrity / thought leader. But it seems that in recent times his cultural footprint in tech is not as large.

That's a shame in my opinion, because this is a person that has been working to make life better for developers in the industry for a long time. And Kent's place in the software history books is assured, he surely impacted the industry for the better.
Today's best chess models use no heuristics, I think starting with stockfish 16 they got rid of HCE (hand crafted evaluation), they're now neural nets and would absolutely eat Deep Blue
Seems like a version of not counting points and giving all the kids a gold medal. It's pink and fluffy.
Crypto's Missing Plateau of Productivity
Great questions.

1. The truth is we still have to investigate the the numerical stability of these models. Our GFT forecast rollouts are around 2 weeks (~60 steps) long and things are stable in in that range. We're working on longer-ranged forecasts internally.

2. The compute requirements are extremely favorable for ML methods. Our training costs are significantly cheaper than the fixed costs of the supercomputers that government agencies require and each forecast can be generated on 1 GPU over a few minutes instead of 1 supercomputer over a few hours.

3. There's a similar floating-point story in deep learning models with FP32, FP16, BF16 (and even lower these days)! An exciting area to explore
You articulated this better than I would ever could. Yes, I absolutely agree. Many people here seem bitter or have an idealistic point of view (perhaps due to the bitterness?) that doesn't match the real world.
Is it GLP-1 or just weight loss due to it? Most sleep apnea is caused by weight issues after all.
Most of those names strike me as particularly affluent or benefitting from a rich sponsor. Which does not really contradict the original point that majority of the population were focused on survival.
Also in Berlin (Wedding, previously Moabit) and Amazon has been very reliable except in some odd cases where it’s delayed by a day. DHL on the other hand is a crapshoot.
Actually I heard from a friend that worked there that eventually Amazon will run out of people to hire in the US who haven’t previously worked at Amazon, tho this includes warehouse workers.
A lot of companies view employees having CSVs and Excel files locally on their laptops to be a huge security risk — it just takes one employee getting their machine compromised to leak ~all the company's sensitive data.

But you're right, there are people who really want local-only. We'll probably make a desktop app in the future.
I firmly believe that monolith vs microservice is much more a company organization problem than a tech problem. Organize your code boundaries similar to your team boundaries, so that individuals and teams can move fast in appropriate isolation from each other, but with understandable, agreeable contracts/boundaries where they need to interact.

Monoliths are simpler to understand, easier to run, and harder to break - up until you have so many people working on them that it becomes difficult for a team to get their work done. At that point, start splitting off "fiefdoms" that let each team move more quickly again.
We have an app which delivers medical care, and Apple let us on but required proof of medical licenses, malpractice insurance, etc. Medical apps are allowed, but there's a higher bar for evidence.
How does this relate to sleep apnea detection?

I agree the battery life is shit compared to Garmin, but then you need to compare features and usability too. And as a long-time Garmin owner I am 100% certain that is not a fair comparison either.
The American dream is dead for many. Social democracy can bring it back
This is a good point, and lines up with the real yagni argument.

However, I do not like the readiness that people have with throwing around the yagni argument for things they don't want to support, build, or disagree with, often contorting or oversimplifying it to get their way.

The yagni argument itself is reasonable, but is often misused/abused.
Layoffs AND fuck with human lives at the same time, what could be more arousing for the chief director of directors or whatever. :)
A monolith is not a single microservice.