skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> The volume of the unit d-sphere goes to 0 as d grows! A high dimensional unit sphere encloses almost no volume!

This feels misleading to me.

Directly comparing volumes in different dimensions doesn't make any sense because the units are different. It doesn't make sense to say that a quantity in m^3 is larger or smaller than a quantity in m^4. Because it doesn't make any sense to compare the area of a circle with the volume of a sphere.

> More accurate pictorial representations of high dimensional cubes (left) and spheres (right).

The cube one is arguably accurate -- e.g. in 100 dimensions, if the distance from the center of a cube to the center of a face is 1, then the distance from the center of the cube to a corner is 10.

But the sphere one, I don't know. Every point on a 100-dimensional sphere is still the same distance away from its center. The sphere is staying spherical in an intuitive way, it's just that the corners of the enclosing cube have gotten so much further away.

So what is accurate to say is that the proportion of volume of a sphere relative to that of its bounding cube keeps decreasing. Which, rather than being supposedly "counterintuitive", makes perfect intuitive sense -- because every time you add a dimension, you can think of it as "extruding" the previous sphere into the new dimension and then shaving it round, the way a 2D circle can be extruded into a cylinder in 3D and then shaved down to make it into a sphere. Every time you add a dimension, you shave off more.

The article suggests that a 3D sphere has greater volume than a 2D circle -- with a unit radius, the sphere is 4/3π while the circle is just π. But again, they're in different units, so it's a meaningless statement. It makes much more sense to say that a 2D circle takes up (1/4)π≈0.79 of its bounding square, a 3D sphere takes of (1/6)π≈0.52 of its bounding cube, a 4D sphere takes up (π/32)π≈=0.31, and so forth. So no, the volume doesn't go up and then down -- it just goes down every time when taken as a unitless proportion (and proportions are comparable).
It's undeniable that the worst drivers on the road are those working for ride-hailing services like Uber. It's a big point in Waymo's favor that their automated vehicles behave predictably - Uber drivers are typically Crazy Ivan types doing random u-turns, staring at their electronic devices while driving, blocking pedestrian walkways and bike lanes, etc.
I also recommend Acemolgu's recent book "Power and Progress" on the relationship between labor and technology [0].

If you don't like reading, Acemoglu gave a talk about it at HKS recently [1]

[0] - https://ig.ft.com/sites/business-book-award/books/2023/longl...

[1] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WT0NzlATjf0
Rhombus is research. IMHO, Honu parsing stuff is interesting (e.g., maybe it helps add richer syntax extension to languages with syntax that traditionally makes that hard).
> all-new construction material

Foam glass gravel? If this was an analogous computer software article, it would read

"""
... and in 2023, the team shipped a frontend in record speed using an all-new programming language "JavaScript"...
"""

Maybe foam glass gravel is new on the scale of construction materials, sure? But it's been used in road construction since the 1990s.

So this article reads a bit... strange to me.
I’m part of the WordPress Accessibility team and I’m still working on accessibility today.
Boeing hasn't really had to do much on the X-37B for ages and I suspect the company is quite silo'd (for good and bad reasons).
I'm not sure how effective the database engineers are going to be at solving this, but I guess we can ask them to try...
It probably depends on what you mean by real-time. Hair isn't something I deal with a lot, but I'm familiar with the space.

It says the top model had a few hundred thousand hairs. Doing real-time flat-shaded grooming in a DCC that supported this type of generation is likely doable. However, I haven't seen any real-time hair simulation that wasn't clever shader manipulation in a game engine or the like. It's just too much geometry (including constraints and self-collisions) for the hardware we have now while simulating everything else. And then you've got to shade all of those individual hairs which wuld have a ton of surface area. It would be super resource intensive.
Their fact checkers can neither communicate with the dead or those few in a deep hole surrounded by hostages.
for sites like that temporary-containers[1] is the way I go

[1] https://addons.mozilla.org/it/firefox/addon/temporary-contai...
How do people discover these things?
Tbf, either can be made to be fast, or slow. MySQL used to have a huge advantage for range queries due to its clustering index (assuming you have designed a schema to exploit that capability), but as time has gone on that gap has narrowed [0] (despite the title, it's not just about inserts). My own benchmarks for strictly read-only queries have also borne that out.

The biggest difference, IMO, is if you _aren't_ aware of the clustering index, and so design your schema in a way that is suboptimal. For example, given a table with orders or something similar, with a PK of `(user_id, created_at)`, a query like `SELECT... FROM... WHERE user_id = ? ORDER BY created_at DESC LIMIT 1` can be quite fast in MySQL. With a monotonic integer as the PK, and a secondary index on those two columns, it can still be quite fast, depending on insert order. If however you invert the PK to `(created_at, user_id)`, while MySQL 8+ will still be able to use the index, it's not nearly as efficient – in my tests, I saw query speed go from 0.1 msec --> 10 msec.

In contrast, while there is a small difference in Postgres with all of those differences, it's just not that big of a difference, since it stores tuples in a heap. Again, in my tests, query speed went from 0.1 msec --> 0.7 msec. This is a point query, of course; with range queries (`WHERE created_at < ...`) Postgres suffered more, jumping up to ~25 - 50 msec.

[0]: http://smalldatum.blogspot.com/2024/09/mysql-and-postgres-vs...
> Price doesn't come into it

Not true, price did come into it, you just decided the price differential was fair. If Uber was 1000x more expensive then you wouldn't have taken it, even if they massaged your feet and kissed your forehead.

> And if uber can't gets its operational costs

They can't, because the idea itself is flawed. Taxi companies don't need a tech stack. It costs very little to pay some bloke 10 bucks an hour to operate a phone. Paying hundreds of software engineers is very expensive, and it doesn't really matter if you switch away from Ruby or whatever. That's the least of their worries.
It is all about gravity and displacement.

Tell us more about your situation so we can know what you really want to know.
Nasa probably publishes press releases almost daily, not as if anything is original reporting
Throwing away old code and rewriting it in a sexy, new language also takes time away from projects that are actually meaningfully innovative: ie projects that help customers do more, or be more efficient
What's Left for Me? The AI Existential Crisis Song [video]
My personal opinion is that money and open source should mix more. In the sense that more open source development should be done by salaried engineers, and especially engineers whose salary is paid by the users of the software. Instead of donating money, companies should donate engineer hours. Shift the ownership from cathedralic upstreams to the user bazaars. The whole idea that projects would have semi-independent funding for development feels to me somewhat wrong.

I'll admit this is idealistic view and not very actionable.
An Artist Signed over His Career to Investors. Now He Wants It Back
Anyone know if Pierce's book (dated 1961) is still a good intro to the topic?

My background is in CS, and this would just be evening reading out of general interest.
http://archive.today/miA74
this is why people write their own static site generators...
Particle physicists chart a course to the future
A reasonable standard for the plugin infrastructure would be to charge and allow free access to people with sufficient contribution history.

So Matt’s company which has sufficient contribution history would get free access and WP engine could either pay for access, contribute more to WordPress, or make their own plug-in infrastructure.
I don't know, I want them to self disband if they're done instead of adding emojis.
mandatory retest every 5 years
The pro-Trump tech folks are 90% about crypto. It's single-issue politics, like abortion or gun rights.

Scratch the surface on a SV Trump supporter like Marc Andreessen, and you'll find a big bag of crypto that they want to keep dumping on retail investors.
display-buffer-alist appeared only in version 24 and is still only a hack to bludgeon the editor into somewhat less insane condition than the default.
I wonder if an upgrade like this would be less painful if the db layer was containerized?

The migration process they described would be less painful with k8s. Especially with 2100+ nodes/VMs
Plausibly, there is no real monitoring of co-orbiting bodies in space. If there aren't cameras pointed at every location of the sattelite (why would their be?) you could place a small kill device nearby to avoid the need to shoot down the satellite in the future.

Satellites are flimsy things, all one would need to do is break the mirror/telecom array to stop satellite guided weapons.
The WebAssembly Component Model is attempting to do this though it seems to be progressing rather slowly.
Vacuuming is a design decision that may have been valid back in the day, but is really a ball and chain today.

In a low-resource environment deferring work makes sense. But even in low-resource environment the vacuum process would consume huge amounts of resources to do its job, especially given any kind of scale. And the longer it's deferred the longer the process will take. And if you actually are in a low-resource environment it'll be a challenge to have enough disk space to complete the vacuum (I'm looking at you, sunos4) - and don't even talk about downtime.

I don't understand how large pgsql users handle vacuuming in production. Maybe they just don't do it and let the disk usage grow unbounded, because disk space is cheap compared to the aggravation of vacuuming?
> Sandboxing is used when the host is concerned about running programs that he doesn't trust.

Trust? Trusting criminals doesn't stop them from committing crime.

You may trust your emacs color theme author. Pretty colors from an innocent artist. You run the theme code without any sandboxing. Everything is going well. Then the author adds a keyloger, project code scrapper, and phone-home feature in his theme.

You update all your emacs packages automatically without any code review. Then you start getting emails from your companies security team asking why you uploaded sensitive projects to a 3rd party.

Wouldn't it make more sense to restirct color themes to color and font related tasks? Why should a color theme be allowed to scrape sensitive code from your disk and upload it to a 3rd party without your consent?
The second Book Was Speaker for the Dead. The shadow books came out later.
You quote "evidence is worse than" for emphasis, suggesting that you don't find that standard to be met by evidence that TikTok gives major inside access to an actively repressive and genocidal government. That suggests you think other social platforms are equal or worse, somehow, but you don't give any basis for that idea. Indeed your commentary consists entirely of snarky side tangents, rather than actual arguments. If you mean something other than the obvious interpretation, you best be explicit.
Vial with nerve agent that killed woman contained enough to kill thousands
Author seems to conflate innovation with progress.

Just because something is innovative (like in his example introducing kotlin when everyone else is using Java) doesn’t mean it will lead to progress.
> I also wouldn't say it's all roses, some of my Russian and Jewish friends have felt very uncomfortable participating in FOSS projects during the past couple of years

Yeah, this is something I often argue about with my colleagues. They claim that Russians brought it upon themselves, that they should oppose Putin etc. These arguments are ridiculous when you dig deeper, as an individual in Russia, whether a powerful one like Navalny once or almost unknown like the pianist hero Pavel Kushnir, you mean nothing. You will disappear just like that and nobody will even say a word.

Of course when you start advocating the war online and spread putinist propaganda, that's another question. But normal Russians are normal people like you and me, if anything they are more hostages of this terrible situation than Westerners.
I recently saw a tweet where someone pointed out that "today morning" was an Indian phrase.

I had to really think hard why it is incorrect / not common elsewhere. Had to see comments to learn -- someone explained that a native English speaker would instead say "this morning" and not "today morning".

As a Indian ESL speaker -- "today morning" sounded (and still sounds) perfectly fine to me -- since my brain grew up with indian languages where this literal phrase (equivalent of "TODAY morning") is not only very common, but also the normal/correct way to convey the idea, and if we instead try to say "THIS morning" it would feel pretty contrived.
Another way to save weight would be to make the booster out of carbon fiber instead of steel. I wonder whether they will do that eventually.
Paragraphs in the west as, indentation or separation of text, are not even a thousand years old. In the ancient world a paragraph was denoted with a typographical mark.
Byte order mark is classical Microsoft. It makes some small task convenient (reading/writing characters in UTF-16 in both byte orders I believe) and makes everything else much harder.

Byte order mark should have been spurned. We know better at this point in time.
This. The people with the wealth have captured every regulatory environment. As long as that situation persists, do not bet against the wealthy because they will move heaven and earth to make sure they always come out on top.
Kinda funny to see people argue AM vs FM when much of the world has already switched to DAB.
Rather than blowing up satellites and causing debris, wouldn't you rather attach a thruster to move it out of orbit?
I fail to see how using an app is more convenient than hailing in person or using the telephone.

What happens if you don't have the app or don't want to download it? We really have to sit down and make an account and do all this bullshit?

It's "more convenient" because you've been influenced. But, certainly, I can make a phone call faster than calling an uber. And I can do it without any data or without even a smartphone. In actuality, it's not more convenient, it's just less human.
FWIW, the threat model you're imagining is an attacker being able to run code to display directly to the desktop using the lowest level native API. A local[1] code exploit at the level of an interactive user is already a huge failure in the modern world.

Is that a reasonable argument against using X11? Sure, for some use cases. Is it a good argument for wayland/windows/OSX/whatever to do your tiling WM experimentation? Not really, those environments kinda suck for playing around with.

[1] Or "local-ish", your system or a trusted remote has to have been compromised already. Untrusted X11 protocol still exists but is deliberately disabled (and often blocked) everywhere. Even ssh won't forward it anymore unless you dig out the option and turn it on manually.
That s very cool... Speaking of which: any easy way to allow two people, both on X, to both share and interact (keyboard and mouse) with a common X window?

The app that we d like to share and both control is a browser (running on a machine on our LAN) so a browser extension would work too I guess.
It’s very regional, for instance in Quincy Washington they are actively constructing well over a million square feet of data centers. Each one has hundreds of electricians working in it. My personal friend is clearing $350k before union benefits the last three years as an electrical foreman. They work 6 days a week 3 weeks a month and work 10 hour days in a really small town. Union work, prevailing wage, over time and completion bonuses increase the pay in these jobs to be triple what a local electrician would make doing house calls. Of the 500 heads my friend oversees, most are not even from this state. But… once those data centers are done being built the economy will crash for many local business rely on those high paying jobs. Restaurants, hotels, etc are hit hardest. And a lot of the workers will to another “hot” region, or go back to where they came from and earn half. I know a few that “retired” by 40, making $300k living in a trailer on site, in a town with nothing to do after 8, gives you a lot of chance to save money.
I know what you mean, and you’re probably right, but there’s a deeper problem, which is the overuse of adjectives and overall wordiness. It’s quite jarring because it reads like someone trying to impress rather than get an important message across.

Frankly, ChatGPT could have written this better with a simple “improve the style of this text” directive.

Example from the start:

> MySQL v8.0 offered a compelling proposition with its promise of substantial performance enhancements.

That could have just been “MySQL v8.0 promised substantial performance improvements.”
> Plausibly, there is no real monitoring of co-orbiting bodies in space

[capable] nations operating sensitive satellites and other space assets absolutely are monitoring foreign objects maneuvering in their orbital vicinity.
> I simply stating the obvious that money should be taxed exactly once, not so many times.

Why is that obvious? Doesn't a rule like that necessarily create distortions in who gets all the benefits of civilization? For example, in only income is taxed, but not gains on investments, doesn't that mean that working people do ALL the work AND pay ALL the taxes, while people who are rich enough not to work literally do NO work and pay NO taxes?

People like you don't realize that economics involves living, breathing humans.
The Cont monad in Haskell is only for single continuation targets and can't do branching/unification like Rama. That kind of behavior doesn't seem like it would express naturally or efficiently with just "do".
One thing to note is that the "Snake" maneuver was designed to keep the tower safe during the test, and not forced on the rocket by the chopsticks.

The rocket was set to come down on the pad just in front on the tower and launch mount until the final 3-engine landing burn started. This kept the infrastructure safe until the last moment, but also required that lateral translation you referred to.
You are right. It will be interesting to see how it changes given the fast rising Asian American demographics in the coming decades as Asia becomes host to more powerhouses.

Regarding your confusion, ancestry is the whole point of this thread. This sub-discussion just focused on a specific part of the discussion :)
This actually sounds plausible. I'm not sure how well the service module survives the reentry (hopefully not at all) But I bet alot of nations will start asking questions if they dont provide disclosure beforehand.
Bombers are long obsolete. When is the last time someone used a bomber? Missiles/ rockets have already replaced their functionality
You’re not renaming tables when you’re at scale.
The slow and messy process of reaching consensus (or close) via a complex web of institutions help “western” (in the sense that Kotkin uses) societies avoid really bad policy and adapt to mistakes.

Some people are frustrated by this and think it would be much better to substitute their judgment for this process. They don’t necessarily hold this view selfishly or maliciously, they are just short sighted.
I stopped reading tfa after that terrible advice.
I imagine the Linux timezone database has grown a lot over the years
The thing I find most frustrating about “The Boring Revolution” is that it feels stuck in the particular year of 2015. Like, React has been out for 12 years. React is older now than Ruby on Rails was when the Boring essay came out. And yet I still hear people talk about React as this “shiny trendy thing”, even though it’s a mature technology with huge adoption, mountains of examples and documentation, and millions of developers with years of experience building in it.

If the essay had come out in 2008, Ruby on Rails would’ve been the “exciting” thing it was calling out. But instead, Ruby on Rails is generally considered in the “boring” camp, while things that came out closer to the essay’s publication like React are in a state of “Permanent Shiny”.

All of which blinds people to the fact that the web space has in fact settled down years ago and is not in the state of immense flux that actually was happening in 2015.
It's G as in "forge" and J as in "yo".

In Esperanto Ĝ represents that soft G sound and the word is spelled "forĝejo", which breaks into "forĝi" (to forge) plus "ejo" (a place), i.e. a place where one forges.
Good bye Arc Broswer Your Killing My M1 MBP
Arc Browser cam on strong as the next Chrome replacement, and I bought in hook line and sinker. NO MORE! The memory hungry browser makes my M1 MBP fill 10 years old and the most basic Web Dev Tasks are just painful. I am in search of a lite AI FREE browser. Know any?????
Not sure this is a good idea. What if the disappearance of corals at higher temps is part of a natural regulation system for Earth, where if they are artificially preserved, homeostasis will be perturbed?

In general I am against these ecosystem engineering type projects: because the systems are so complex, we do not understand them, and we cannot test in isolation.
I don't understand what is meant here by "dimension." Is the definition of "dimension" consistent for 3-dimensional figures and n-dimensional figures? In other words, what is the importance of the orthogonality of the axes? The axes of dimensions beyond 3-d are not orthogonal, does this change the definition of "dimension".

I cannot conceive a geometrical image of higher dimensions. Algebraically, yes, but not geometrically.
I actually heard this allegory from someone years ago, but didn't know the source. So I asked ChatGPT where this allegory came from. I expected some title or so, nevertheless ChatGPT was not able to provide the source either.
It's context is an Gnostic fable or allegory. Its pretty close ChatGPT come up with as I remember how it was told to myself.
>>> Wouldn’t folks feel better making smart, reasonable, and incremental improvements? Consider cases like introducing Kotlin to gradually level-up a Java shop.

while I could agree on the "principles", specifically for this example I still have scars.
Too much costs, no much gain, and you end up with a single project (the first and last one) that no one want to touch and that will be the first to be "engineered back" to java - years later and with a lot of loss
Needed an emphasis curve applied to it.
I haven't used any of them outside of briefly out of curiosity. The main reason I don't is because I don't see the value I'd get out of them.
Going to Mars is relatively easy compared to setting up a self-sustaining human civilization on Mars, which will be thousands of times harder. Many people don't understand the scale and scope of the biosphere services the Earth provides to humans free of charge, though, and forget that little of that exists on Mars, other than gravity.
Your comment would be much more helpful if you explained your thoughts. Currently, it just sounds like "you're stupid."
It’s not really about crypto. It just self interest.
This author tries to make a claim but the argument involves too many things at once and isn't quite precise enough to make an impact statement.
Show HN: Solving JEE Advanced Problems Using Python – Exploring Binomial Theorem