skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Show HN: New approach to SQL optimization that works (mostly)
I've been messing around with getting AI to reliably optimize complex SQL queries without constantly making errors. A prompt like: “You are a skilled SQL expert tasked with optimizing this: SELECT *...” doesn't get you far.

That's why I've chosen to divide the optimization process (step-by-step approach):

- AI suggests concrete optimization improvements
- The user selects the desired optimization improvement
- AI rewrites the SQL query according to the optimization improvement

This approach has several advantages:

- The user has full control over which optimization improvements are implemented
- AI can handle relatively complex SQL queries without making errors

Screencast: https://files.sqlai.ai/optimize-sql-query.mp4

Try it out: https://www.sqlai.ai/app/optimize-sql
Like with any salesman whether he believes it or not is irrelevant as long as others do.
Supply and demand.

These businesses exist and operate the way they do because of customer desires. The customers could hire better agencies but for a number of reasons don't.
I had a quick brain BSOD reading the code because lot's of things have yy_ prefixes but the code is actually written by hand, not generated by Yacc/Bison.
You would expect the reviewer to do some research and even maybe, I don't know, use the app?
> iCloud backups are usually encrypted (by default with a key Apple possesses).

This is not an iCloud backup. It's "Apple ID account and device information". Keep in mind that Apple is playing a dual role in this case, and you appear to be conflating the two.

Of course Apple runs iCloud Keychain, which syncs client data including the private keys. But that's supposed to be all end-to-end encrypted, including the metadata. It would be quite a disturbing breach of privacy if Apple knew the websites associated with your passkeys, wouldn't it? "Keychain items are encrypted using two different AES-256-GCM keys: a table key (metadata) and a per-row key (secret key). Keychain metadata (all attributes other than kSecValue) is encrypted with the metadata key" https://support.apple.com/guide/security/keychain-data-prote...

But this is not any old passkey: it's a passkey for apple.com. Apple is also playing the role of server to which the client authenticates. That's entirely separate from iCloud Keychain client data. You would think that in its role as server, Apple would have only the same client information as any other passkey server, e.g., Github.
A Mysterious School for the Network State Crowd Is Now in Session
He's annotated all the Elite source code as well, and even fixed some flickering many decades after the original was released.

(edit) https://github.com/markmoxon/cassette-elite-beebasm?tab=read...
Hey, just curious. If you have no Cloud/LB/CDN how are you routing requests to datacenters? Anycast? DNS? Something else?
Yes, SONET includes a "scrambler" for exactly this purpose. It keeps the lasers happier. I tried for a while to produce pathological payloads that would cancel out the scramble polynomial when combined with it, but two things make this impractical:

1: First, most SONET customers at the time weren't actually buying the whole rate line. (Say you have an OC12 coming into the building, are you actually purchasing an OC12c worth of capacity, or are you buying a DS3/STS1 which is only occupying 1/12th of the line, and the carrier just dropped a larger circuit for their own convenience?) So because of byte interleaving, 11/12 bytes (or whatever) are good, and even if you somehow synchronize with the scrambler, you can't cause enough ones in a row to piss off the laser, or enough zeroes in a row to confuse the receiver.

2: Second, the payload framing means that, even if you are buying a whole OCxC worth of transport, your options are still very limited. I'm rusty on this but I think you only get 87 bits in a row of payload before another framing structure ruins your day. I still feel like it might be possible, but it wasn't within my reach given the test pattern constructor built into the ASA-312.
It's also a pretty good debug tool: you can log a trace into a circular buffer in it more or less continuously, then dunno or the contents after a crash or some other failure.
Game called 'Due Process' has procedurally generated levels, but they are based on tilesets - I think rooms generated the OP way wouldn't make sense and would be very disorienting.
(I've vouched for this comment, maybe that helps.)
Chocks Away anyone?
Swiss police make arrests over suspected death in 'suicide capsule'
Some comparison to Thanos would be great!
> The team cultured BMSCs and T cells together, and after 48 hours found that up to a quarter of the T cells had gained extra mitochondria. The researchers dubbed these juiced up immune cells Mito+.

What an incredibly simple idea. Just scale it up.
I’d be interested to hear how long it takes, wall clock, to train the same model to the same loss with same number of batches. I don’t trust utilization to say anything useful.
Windows and pipes/vents are just constraints. Windows are constraints to outside areas and pipes/vents/stairs are constraints between floors.

Rectangularity is enforced by the wall loss function, which is adjustable.

> personal needs: some people need lots of storage space, some a room to play videogames, some a huge kitchen with an isle.

That's... the point. You decide you want your kitchen to be 20% bigger and the floor plan readjusts itself without needing somebody to draw up a new plan.

> With that said, I feel like this project might be good for less serious application like procedural game design, but is too naive for real architectural use.

Given that this is a paper submission to the Pacific Graphics conference, yes. Architecture is not really the point. You could also point out some much more obvious architectural needs, like the fact that houses need an outside too.
We, at Workorb, migrated from Grafana to Oodle and very happy so far. Observability space does need a ground up reimagination and we think Oodle is positioned to do that.
Nations have been at war for centuries and later made peace.
Yeh, exclusively.

For non-gui the closest thing is Docker/Podman.
> It would probably not be infeasible to end-to-end encrypt the metadata, in any case (the private key already is) – not sure why Apple isn’t already doing that.

They are. "Keychain items are encrypted using two different AES-256-GCM keys: a table key (metadata) and a per-row key (secret key). Keychain metadata (all attributes other than kSecValue) is encrypted with the metadata key" https://support.apple.com/guide/security/keychain-data-prote...

What you download from privacy.apple.com is not your iCloud Keychain data. Apple can't decrypt that.
So it’s more expensive to make something ugly. Gotcha ;)

The slowness might be explained by the background tasks of restoring previously installed software and data. I have an iPhone 13 Pro with tons of apps and it’s still pretty snappy. But those specific bugs do pop up from time to time. Especially since they release new phones concurrently with new operating systems.
It's a demo because Braben called it one!

It's technically a game; there's no win condition but there is lose condition (3 lives) and a scoring system.

But I don't think most people play it as a game (aiming to get a new hiscore), they play it as a toy, slowly become more adept at the controls and meander the landscape, the points don't matter.
did i miss something or this is "video editing was too hard so i just made a Wikipedia reading bot that generates drivel for Instagram and TikTok at the same time"?
To be fair, I'd prefer not to give the cancer cells extra batteries.
AI Didn't Write That Bug
Which is interesting, because I can't believe anyone would say the US water is good when no one will drink water from the faucet, it has to be filtered.

It has always been either over chlorinated, or out of a well with all sorts of contaminants such as sulphur.
When can I get my hip and shoulder replacements?
Bunny is also $10-$60/TB/month.

I believe Hetzner should not have any problem with using 100 mbps out of the 1 Gbps on their servers. That's 30 TB/month for free, per server. It'd be $300-$1800 per month on Bunny.
Yep. My experience as well. Once a place starts doing useless box checking stuff like SOC2 it’s time to find a new job or switch vendors.

Positive indicators would be talking to employees and getting an idea of organizational clue level. There are no shortcuts here I’ve ever found beyond doing this sort of old fashioned “know your vendor” style work.
Kudos to OpenBSD!

Similar to the olde-tyme "-o noexec" and "-o nosuid" options for `mount`, there should be easy, no-exceptions ways to blanket ban other types of simply obvious red-flag activity.
> surprisingly

This is the problem with these kind of methods. It works, until it doesn't in an unknown way.
AI Uncensored: An Uncensored Character AI
It were if there wasn't any context.

But as you just downloaded a camera app that you want to use to take pictures, that description is actually already beyond what could reasonably be expected.
Add your Rails app to the Home Screen
That was my first thought as well, "The camera will be used to take photographs" seem pointless, if it's a camera app it's obvious if it's not it does not help the reviewer.
How is this related to the number of mitochondria in a cell?
> Clojure definitely had a huge impact on how I think about software

I could be called a "Clojure programmer", because I make a living from an app written Clojure and ClojureScript. While I always appreciated the incredible JVM, I always looked at Java the language with disgust and contempt, interfacing with it only as was necessary, but recent work on Java makes it much more attractive. I was impressed by the functional interfaces, modern design with mostly static methods, JSR-310 (date and time) is absolutely great — overall, Java has improved a lot over the years.

It has come to the point where I gasp might consider writing some Java code :-)
No the PC would still win as it has Office and other tools.

Yes Archimedes probably would beat Amiga(which Commodore messed up), Atari .

Apple Macs would also exist as they had Pagemaker and the Apple Laserwriter. These were out before the Archimedes.
If the goal of this article is to normalize abandoning your projects then I'm not so sure it's a good idea. All else aside it can be a horrendous waste of time and no amount of "at least I've learned something" can justify that. Learn by also finishing stuff, right?
Because regulations have never resulted in bureaucratic silliness? Oh, wait…
Why fullMode, an Android optimisation, hates Gson so much?
Prithvi WxC: Foundation Model for Weather and Climate
nah. let's base the entire world diet on numbers of calories, provided by crops which are collected annually or biannually so we can have an efficient futures market :thumbsupemoji
How you can tell if the library staff is the "ultimate board of censors" is their behaviour after a child requests a book.

Most library boards are very happy to order any book that is requested by multiple students. My daughter's high school library contains a lot of manga that would never have been ordered by any "ultimate board of censors".
Nice, The feature "OCR-based text copy from screenshot" helping me lot. Thank you!
Apple's process is correct here, in my opinion. They (rightfully) require that an app declare why it needs access to resources/data, and they verify (rightfully) that it is meaningful and does not use circular logic ("The camera will be used to take photographs"). Remember, this is not only for users, it is also for reviewers - to keep out apps that unnecessarily access things (that many users don't have the energy to think about, and will just tap "allow" in the permissions spam they will come to expect from every app if this policy was not enforced).

Given the enormous volume of app submissions and the large number of points each app must be reviewed on, it might be unrealistic to require that reviewers always use the full context of the app when reviewing each individual component - the person reviewing the message might not even know what the app is! And they shouldn't have to! The message should be self-explanatory. The app needs access to the camera because it is a photography app, not because it takes photos.

I applaud Apple's thoroughness on this topic. It's much better than the opposite problem, which is what plagues virtually 100% of other software platforms historically, and I'm disheartened for software as a whole that some people (especially HN users, who should be more thoughtful) can't see beyond the petty "it must be mindless Apple defenders" catch-all, or the "rejection reasons are sometimes non-specific" problem, (the latter of which I am assuming on good faith is a real problem, though I've never personally encountered it).
Detect the cheer everyone makes when the trick lands. Lots of proxy indicators to key off of.
So you can definitely portray historical figures without permission, right?. For example no one is getting permission from Hitler’s estate for WW2 movies AFAIK.

If you have someone playing Hitler in an alternate reality where he was a bartender, is that illegal today?

Can’t you do the same with an actor?

Or do you actually need permission to portray historical figures, and Hitler or Napoleon etc are just special cases because they don’t have estates to be asked?
Round Robin DNS. The browser selects the best server, based on ping or some other internal metric.

Also thanks for the donation!
Here to see all the creative justifications for why Apple is correct, and it's actually the app developer's fault for not clearly stating why an app that users explicitly downloaded to take photos takes photos. It's for the users' own protection of course.

Even after all these years the reality distortion field is strong as ever. Meanwhile if Google had done this people would already be outside their HQ with pitchforks and calling for the government to break up their evil monopoly.
Very curious to know more about this, regarding PMTiles:

> Unfortunately, making range requests in 80 GB files just doesn't work in production. It is fine for files smaller than 500 MB, but it has terrible latency and caching issues for full planet datasets.

Wondering which part incurs the latency here.
Hayes figured out how to make that impossible: The "guard time" interval. When you want to interact with the modem, you have to send _nothing_, not a single character, for a whole second before sending +++ and then another whole second of nothing. Only then would the modem place you into command mode. That way, +++ could happily appear in payload but never mess with the modem, because there'd be other payload either side of it.

Of course they patented this, and anyone who licensed the patent was likewise immune, but the manufacturers who didn't, could easily be plonked like this.

My first "hack" involved a BBS scripting language that involved a delay command... ;)
> Subscriptions-is-the-only-sustainable-model is the narrow-minded view I mostly see on HN. Undoubtedly because the audience are developers.

:-)

I am a developer, but more importantly I run my own business. I honestly have no idea how I could run a sustainable business on one-time purchases :-)
The Apple Camera app comes preinstalled with no warnings or permission requests notifying me why it's requesting camera access.
Compared to both Python and Java, no runtime or packages to fuss with, just builds one static exe
Availability to run within our own environment to avoid data being transited to third parties in direct violation of various client agreements/desires.
Show HN: Sequel – Effortlessly understand your data
Hey, I'm a solo developer building Sequel as a side project. I'm excited to finally launch Sequel! Sequel is an AI tool that will transform how your team interacts with data.

Sequel helps you translate natural language queries to SQL and helps you analyse the result just like a data analyst, without even writing a single line of SQL query.

What you can do with Sequel?

Chat with your databse: Connect your database and ask questions to get results.

Generate Graphs and Charts: Ask sequel to give you charts and you will get beautiful visualizations.

Analyse your data: Sequel's AI helps you understand and uncover hidden insights from your data.

Setup New Database: If you are setting up a new databse, just describe your schema to Sequel and Sequel will create all the tables and columns for you!

Would love to see how your team uses Sequel. Looking forward for your feedback and suggestions!
I'm fine thanks, and I would argue that yes there is impersonation. You can argue why it's not impersonation, but you can't say "nope uh uh no impersonation". That's not how arguments work, you can't begin in a position where you're already right.
> This was in snapshots for more than 2 months, and only spotted one other program depending on the behaviour (and that test program did not observe that it was therefore depending in incorrect behaviour!!)

Fascinating. I wonder what that program is, and why it depends on the NUL character.
GitHub Support for paid users is Non-Existent in 2024
I was trying to think about the best place to post about this, Hacker News seemed like the most related.

About 1.25 months ago, my account unfortunately had a legacy API key that was compromised. That API had access to post GitHub issues on any public repos. As a result, the bad actor posted a total of 5 spam issues on various repos on GitHub. I discovered this and performed the following actions.

* I went and deleted those unauthorized issues from those repos,
* I deleted the API key that was the culprit (I couldn't find an audit log to verify though)
* I created a more specific API key for my app using the new "fine grain access" method
* I removed every oauth service access and reconnected the only ones still in use
* I reset my password and signed out of all active sessions. (I already have MFA and passkey enabled)

Shortly after performing those actions, they "flagged my account as spam" (effectively shadowbanned) my account, and now all my projects are inaccessible publically.

I immediately submitted an "Appeal for account reactivation", however as of posting this, it has been over a month with no response. No confirmation, no "we are working on it", nothing.

So I took some time to pop over to GitHub discussions to search, and it appears that GitHub simply does not respond to these appeals, because if you search "no response" you will see pages and pages of the same story. Opened, 3-4 months or more, still no response.

So I guess the moral of this post, is that in 2024 if you are seeking a good platform for hosting your code in the cloud, don't expect any support whatsoever from Github.

It is absolutely unacceptable for a company who has paid subscriptions (which I pay for monthly and also pay for copilot) to simply not respond to their customers. If they cant get back to customers who have multiple years of verifiable account behavior, they should explain that in their terms of service.

They completely derailed my project deployments and access to my open-source software for public users/devs. Shadowbans also breaks all oAuth login links so any external sites you logged into "using your GitHub account" are also broken. Meaning you will lose access to ANY external sites who use that method.

Thanks for reading my rant.
One thing to keep in mind with this stuff is that it's really heavy. Regular aluminum square tube is much lighter for a given length/size. If you're making something that moves, it may be worth the effort to grab some plain square extrusion and hand-fabricate some brackets.
NASA Astronaut Tracy C. Dyson, Crewmates Return from Space Station
That is a misreading of the article. It's more about discovery through quick, iterative prototyping, which can include rapid discovery of fatal flaws early.
> That is a terrible reason to request camera access.

Oh come off it. It's used to take photographs because it's a photography application. How much handholding do we need?
Huawei laptop teardown shows China's steps towards tech self-sufficiency
"We are in a post-Postel world" is a great way to put it. This needs to be repeated by everyone working with file formats or accepting untrusted input.
There's no sign of Collatz-like behaviour in any of the 37 known values of BBλ [1], so it appears specific to Turing Machines, which cannot compute exponentials so easily.

[1] https://oeis.org/A333479
As Musk would say: Waste metal, not time.
The problem is not space, it's the fact that bandwidth costs 4x the total operating income that the PSF has. Everything else is context to understand and offer some insight into this problem.

This is a pitch for Zig as a C/C++ build system because, as you can see in other comments in this submission, there's still a lot of people that don't even believe this is a solvable problem at all, while in reality Zig does a pretty good job at solving it.

Only somebody actively involved with Python can really say if and how this could help improve the situation for PyPI, but if the people who actually happen to be working on something potentially beneficial weren't allowed to speak "because it's a pitch" then what even is the point of software interoperability.

As an occasional Python user, I also think that it's silly that people keep putting containers everywhere and pre-building a ton of binaries when I know for a fact that you could trivially `zig biuld` that shit, since I do it in my projects all the time (see https://github.com/allyourcodebase/).
Come on, T cells, you can do it
In vast sections of Ontario, Ohio, Michigan, Quebec (and probably many other areas) anyone with a basement has to monitor for radon gas - it's just a normal part of the environment overall because of the geological makeup.

If you can keep a window or two open - it's not so bad - we use an smart bluetooth-connected monitor that I check daily - CO2 seems to be more of a problem than the radon.
Roadsise Picnic and The Snail on the Slope are IMO two of their best books (A. B. Strugatsky). I really liked others like Monday starts on Saturday or It's hard to be a God.

Sci Fi by Ursula k. Le Guin is also written from a very different perspective. Earthsea cycle, which is more fantasy, but unike any other. Also the book on the planet where people marry in quadruplets, The Planet of Exile, part of Hainish Cycle. Whole Hainish Cycle is awesome, Left Hand of Darkness, Rocannon's World.
It's funny because it's true. You can always count on the defenders of the Corp. to show up when needed.
It is trivial to come up with plausible justifications the user might reject if the reason were made explicit.

E.g “The camera will be used to continuously take photographs and upload them to our AI platform for training, analysis, and aesthetic optimization.”
Thanks! I don't know where you'd be able to get property boundaries, I guess it's usually not open-source / public data? Probably depends on the country / city.
Mostly, I remember the inefficient of life before smartphones.

A very specific thing I was unable to do before was pull up a video on how to fix almost anything, anytime. House projects, car repair, networking/computer issues at someone else’s house, etc.

Another is checking stock and comparing prices while I am shopping. I waste near zero time finding items and where are in a store, and finding the best price I can buy them at.

Yet another is taking pictures for my reference, or to send to others instead of having to describe something. Being able to video call has made resolving so many problems quicker and easier.

Product manuals are at my fingertips. Buying a flight. Researching a vacation while sitting on mass transit. Finding places to eat withe menus amenable to my family’s taste while on the go.
Are you? If the user processes their own data on their own device using your software, you're the data processor?
You misunderstood the post I think.