skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> Spending $100K now, once, vs. spending $25K/month indefinitely does not take a genius to figure out.

If you multiply your month payment for 1/i, where i is the interest rate your business can get, you will get how much of up-front money it's worth.

... that is, until next month, when the interest rate will change, a fact that always catches everyone by surprise, and you'll need to rush to fix your cash-flow.

So, yeah, I don't understand that either. Somehow, despite neither of us understanding how it can possibly work, it seems to fail to work empirically too, adding a huge amount of instability to companies.

That is, unless you decide to look at it from the perspective of executive bonuses, that are capped to 0, but can grow indefinitely. So instability is the point.
Previously, we used the tool Docusaurus to maintain our Help Docs. However, using this tool was challenging for us.

In mid-2024, we suddenly realized that Apidog itself is a documentation tool (though primarily an API documentation tool). Would it be a good idea to use Apidog directly to maintain its help documentation?

We made several features for this. In early December, our new version of Apidog Help Docs went live.

Now I can proudly say that Apidog is an excellent tool for maintaining help documentation and API documentation. Most of the above features are free.
The style of the code is an implementation detail, once implemented it enters the realm of spec.
Hi, I'm the author of the article. I think you're right, and we’ll update the description in the blog. Since binary operations are simpler than floating-point operations, the speedup could indeed be greater than 32x.
I do not really belong to that group, but when I am learning a new language I avoid using LSPs and anything more than a generic autocomplete because I find that too distracting while I try to learn the language. Moreover I realised that it actually slows down my learning; I may type stuff faster but I learn and gain understanding slower compared to eg typing everything and searching the docs. In stuff I am already proficient with, it makes more sense to me as such tools help me code faster, including finding and fixing bugs faster.

As for copilot, I find it impractically distracting and I do not understand how people are supposed to code with it tbh. While coding I spend most time thinking about the code than just typing, and having random autocomplete suggestions popping up with lag while typing disturbs my chain of thoughts. Maybe if I was writing more boilerplate I would have liked it more, or I am using it wrong somehow, or maybe one gets used to it after some time. I sometimes use copilot chat though.
Rust is fun for me but I keep it high level with Rc and built-in data structures. It's fun thinking about variables as little boxes of fixed size that values get moved into or out of. It's so different than almost any other language where stuff lies often god knows where and is referenced ad nauseam. Although that can be fun too if the language treats mutability as exception rather than a rule.
Well sure but you could make similar complaints about a bacterial infection killing a human. It is still natural selection even if it is arbitrary, pointless or destructive.
It's odd, considering this is digikey, that there isn't a "Buy now" button.

I'd totally do that if I got everything shipped to me, and knew I wasn't forgetting something.
Just take a pen and a sheet of paper and see how far you can get.
In cancer there's an abundance of clinical trials with high quality data, but it is all very complex in terms of encoding what the clinical trial actually encoded.

Go to a clinical cancer conference and you will see the grim reality of 10,000s of people contributing to the knowledge discovery process with their cancer care. There is an inverse relationship between the number of people in a trial and the amount of risk that goes into that trial, but it is still a massive amount of data that needs to be codified into some sensible system, and it's hard enough for a person to do it.

> That’ll be wonderful to explain in court when they figure out it was just data smuggling or whatever other bias.

What do you mean by this? I'm not aware of any data smuggling that has ever happened in a clinical trial. The "bias" is that any research hypothesis comes from the fundamentally biased position of "I think the data is telling me this" but I've seen very little bias of truly bad hypotheses in cancer research like those that have dominated, say Alzheimer's research. Any research malfeasance should be prosecuted to the fullest, but I don't think cancer research has much of it. This was a huge scandal, but I don't think it pointed to much in the way of bad research in the end:

https://www.propublica.org/article/doctor-jose-baselga-cance...
I have jumped around over my career: Sublime -> Vim -> Emacs -> VSCode -> Neovim -> Cursor, which is now my daily driver.

However, I still relish in the ability to open up a nerfed Sublime or basic Vim install where it’s just me and the text. I do so when I want particular lucidity in my thought process and code composition.

Then I can always fire up heavier tools for code review after the fact. How do I “do” it? I got really good at grep’n my way through a code base. It’s amazing what grep/ack/rg/etc can tell you when you know what to ask. And if you don’t know what to ask, well finding that answer is going to teach you a lot more than just hitting Tab on autocomplete or GoToDef.
Hi, I'm the author of the article. We actually rely on a new quantization method called RaBitQ instead of ScaNN. You can read more about it at https://dev.to/gaoj0017/quantization-in-the-counterintuitive....
This is discussed in the lex Friedman episode. AMD’s own demo would kernel panic when run in a loop [1].

[1] https://youtube.com/watch?v=dNrTrx42DGQ&t=3218
> and I'm talking a nice Southern California mall, not one somewhere in the middle of the country

This isn't the bound you seem to think it is. SoCal is quite wealthy, but the workers aren't exactly motivated or caring. I remember going keyboard shopping at Fry's well before any talk of bankruptcy and the whole aisle was basically a pile of scattered keycaps and nearly-empty keyboards. And I was just in a Macy's the other day (not in SoCal), and actually remarked how nice the store was set up compared to the overall trend of everywhere else going down hill. So as usual, YMMV.
> lack of decent build system

At one point I was using gulp.js to build my small C++ experiment.
Yeah, right. After he got arrested in France where he went with his escort, then, shortly after, he started censoring, and, suddenly, Telegram became profitable!
It definitely is, yes.
https://www.businessinsider.com/henry-blodget-this-is-too-ab...
> But to flip this around, let's say you want to use this third party in some other "modern" language how would this become better?. Clearly if someone hadn't done the work to package in vcpkg/conan you can expect it wouldn't exist in pip/cargo/npm either. So if you had a bad time in C++, you would have a dramatically worse time in other languages.

Err, no?

In case of Rust usually there is really no work that's necessary to package it and upload. You just type `cargo publish` and you're done (after filling out metadata in Cargo.toml). Even if someone wouldn't upload it to crates.io as a Rust crate you can just add a single line to your Cargo.toml:

package_name = { git = "https://github.com/user/repo", rev = "revision" }

and you're done, you can use it as a dependency.
I worked with oncologists and this isn’t true.

Oncology has a rapidly changing treatment landscape and it’s common for oncologists to be discussing the latest paper that has come out.

If you’re an oncologist and not keeping up with the literature you’re going to be out of date in your decisions in about 6 months from graduation.
I learned and worked for decades before these tools were available. If they still weren’t available today, you would find that you too could program without them.
PDFs are the opposite of machine-readable if you want to do anything other than render them as images on paper or a screen. They're only slightly more machine-readable than binary executables.

I hate, hate, hate, hate, hate the practice of using PDFs as a system of record. They are intended to be a print format for ensuring consistent typesetting and formatting. For that, I have no quarrel. But so much of the world economy is based on taking text, docx (XML), spreadsheets, or even CSV files, rendering them out as PDFs, and then emailing them around or storing them in databases. They've gone from being simply a view layer to infecting the model layer.

PDFs are a step better than passing around screenshots of text as images - when they don't literally consist of a single image, that is. But even for reasonably-well-behaved, mostly-text PDFs, finding things like "headers" and "sections" in the average case is dependent on a huge pile of heuristics about spacing and font size conventions. None of that semantic structure exists, it's just individual characters with X-Y coordinates. (My favorite thing to do with people starting to work with PDFs is to tell them that the files don't usually contain any whitespace characters, and then watch the horror slowly dawn as they contemplate the implications.) (And yes, I know that PDF/A theoretically exists, but it's not reliably used, and certainly won't exist on any file produced more than a couple years ago.)

Now, with multi-modal LLMs and OCR reaching near-human levels, we can finally... attempt to infer structured data back out from them. So many megawatt-hours wasted in undoing what was just done. Structure to unstructure to structure again. Why, why, why.

As for universality... I mean, sure, they're better than some proprietary format that can only be decrypted or parsed by one old rickety piece of software that has to run in Win95 compatibility mode. But they're not better than JSON or XML if the source of truth is structured, and they're not better than Markdown or - again - XML if the source is mostly text. And there are always warts that aren't fully supported depending on your viewer.
AMD has WMMA.
Because it's pointless? The validity of everything they said has nothing to do with what you were calling out. "You are being a hypocrite" is both (a) not a criticism of what they said, at all, and (b) probably false, as it's likely not even something they have any control over.

Plus---what's with all the conspiratorial language? "Beg"? "Conscious choice"? "makes a profit"? "Spying"? Like... fuck off. Maybe none of that applies at all? You have no way of knowing. There's no point in seeing the complete worst in it.
Valhalla – Java's Epic Refactor [video]
Any large issuer of gift cards has an income stream from gift card breakage to the tune of a few percentage points of their outstanding gift card obligations each year.

Imagine a business where people give you cash and don’t ask for 5% or so of it back. Meanwhile your use of that cash is regulated with a feather (compared to a bank or other deposit-taker) and you can earn some yield while you wait for people to ask for their money back.

Gift cards are very lucrative at scale.
Some folks' elementary or middle schools had stock picking lessons with fake money: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21642395

From mine, all I remember was getting the impression that putting money in particular stocks without knowing what you're doing is a bad idea. Pretty valuable lesson, I guess, as I've never bought individual stocks since then...
I suppose this is like a lot of tools in general: you just get used to doing it yourself. People wrote code before tools like that existed, and you can too if you put your mind to it.

I typically just use plain Vim without much customization. You get used to it. I am somewhat forced to use just plain Vim on most things because I often write code on random HPC servers and have no control over what is available. But Vim is universally available, so I got good at the one tool available to me. Vim does have have Ctrl-P to auto-complete a word, though.

I also have books and other documentation available, when possible. Man pages are actually quite good and available on many systems I work on. For C, you can type something like "man 3 printf" to get basic documentation on "printf". This works for MPI too with things like "man 3 mpi_allreduce". I've been pleasantly surprised at times how much offline documentation is available.
It's probably auto when you wanted auto&.

A copy was made instead of a reference. I've been bitten by that.
I think this one user is automated: https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=todsacerdoti
PSA: Stop using the title attribute as tooltip
This one? https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=todsacerdoti
Every so often I receive commercially sensitive information about my company which I'm not allowed to disclose before it's formally communicated to the stock market. For fun, I try to predict what impact it'll have on the share price (though of course I can't actually trade!)

I can successfully predict the direction of the share price movement 50% of the time and successfully predict the magnitude of the share price movement 0% of the time.
Yes! Boost.Asio is still the go-to networking library. (It's also available as a standalone, though.)

Some parts have been adopted by the C++ standard library and can thus be considered obsolete, there a still quite a few goodies!
I saw it floating around Twitter with some expansive commentary "This could be an incredible revolution in Cosmology. The Dark Energy model of the universe, which won a Nobel Prize in 2011, may be completely wrong.", etc.

For whatever reason, engineers really hate dark energy and will glom onto any fringe theory that appears to disprove it. Not to psychoanalyze too much, but it seems to be a topic where non-experts get to feel like they're smarter than those PhD cosmologists because they watched a Sabine Hossenfelder video.

See literally any thread about dark energy (or dark matter, which elicits similar reactions) on HN.
FAA probes holiday drone show accident that injured a boy in Florida
Hi, I'm the author of the article. Meta have conducted some experiments on dynamic IVF with datasets of several hundred million records. The conclusion was that recall can be maintained through simple repartitioning and rebalancing strategies. You can find more details here: DEDRIFT: Robust Similarity Search under Content Drift https://arxiv.org/pdf/2308.02752. Additionally, with the help of GPUs, KMeans can be computed quickly, making the cost of rebuilding the entire index acceptable in many cases.
On HN a post only counts as a dupe if it got significant attention, which that one didn't (only 3 points and 2 comments - but we'll merge the comments hither)

When an article hasn't had significant attention yet, we let reposts through (after 8 hours) - this is on purpose, to give good articles multiple chances at getting attention.

Of course that leaves the submitters in a bit of a lottery situation, but it at least evens out in the long run if you keep submitting good articles!
Everything is comparative. AMD isn't perfect. As an Ex Shareholder I have argued they did well partly because of Intel's downfall. In terms of execution it is far from perfect.

But Nvidia is a different beast. It is a bit like Apple in the late 00s where you take business, forecast, marketing, operation, software, hardware, sales etc You take any part of it and they are all industry leading. And having industry leading capability is only part of the game, having it all work together is completely another thing. And unlike Apple where they lost direction once Steve Jobs passed away and weren't sure about how to deploy capital. Jensen is still here, and they have more resources now making Nvidia even more competitive.

It is often most people underestimate the magnitude of the task required, ( I like to tell the story again about an Intel GPU engineer in 2016 arguing they could take dGPU market shares by 2020, and we are now 2025 ), over estimate the capability of an organisation, under estimate the rival's speed of innovation and execution. These three thing combined is why most people are often off the estimate by an order of magnitude.
Comments moved to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42468255.
It will be interesting to see what caused this. The video looks like more than just two drones colliding. Or that was what started it, then two drones colliding can cause a cascading failure, which seems suboptimal. Do these drones all answer to to a master controller, or do they coordinate with each other?
Sure, but given the resourcing at OpenAI, it would not be hard to clean[1] the inputs. I'm just trying to be realistic here, there are plenty of ways around contractual obligations and a significant incentive to do so.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clean-room_design
>I’m old, so won’t see the benefits of this I’m sure

you won't see it because you'll be enjoying one of those lovely blackouts we'll get when we turn off all the AGRs and didn't build more nuclear
Do you have your neovim config public?
I worked there for a very short stint. They hired me to write a programming language to help streamline the process of building installers. But I ended up being tasked with helping get Vista support out the door. I think I was there for less than 2 months. It’s the second-shortest stint in my career. It was a shadow of its former self by then, but it was really interesting to walk the vast manufacturing floors.
It was long time ago. The schema was basically one table with a lot of fields and records and multiple small tables with way fewer records. Query in question resulted in small number of rows (because of LIMIT clause).

It was faster to get rows from big table and then run few additional queries to get data for found rows from smaller ones than join everything together in one query. Maybe the nested loop buffer was culprit or whatever. Maybe I ran into edge case of query planner MySQL had 20 years ago. Who knows.
I never really thought about it. I guess some people just like having those features, but I find them annoying.

I use Neovim with 0 plugins (apart from themes). I code in Go, and frequently reference https://pkg.go.dev.

When I do need to code in VS Code (rarely), I find that the autocomplete just gets in the way of my though process. It's like having a train of though barreling along and then suddenly an elephant gets on.

Also, I didn't even know what an language server was until looking it up after reading this post.

About Copilot: I have many problems with AI. They guzzle electricity, tend to be run by corrupt corporations, and are filling the internet with BS.

If I need to look up the definition/implementation? `:vsplit` works fine. If it's on the internet? https://pkg.go.dev.

If you don't trust me, you can check my dotfiles: https://codeberg.org/Kaamkiya/dotfiles
> What do you do if you need to look up the definition/implementation of some function which is in some other file?

At some point, for me, ‘find <dir> -name “*.ext” | xargs grep <pattern>’ took over for recursive grep, because the required tools are available on most Unix systems.
I think Google have wanted to do this for a very long time. An excuses to get out of the Apple Search Deal without igniting a war. And now Google also have an excuse or tools if Apple ever were to develop a Search Engine they could argue Apple is a monopoly.
You just skim over the API docs and learn the APIs. Grep can help look things up. Depends a lot on how many new APIs one is using and how non-trivial their implementations are.
I didn't say it's impossible for just me, it's impossible for anyone.
Ask HN: Ideas for algorithmic programming challenges for high schoolers?
I'm in a compsci club, and I need some ideas for programming challenges related to algorithms.

Not merge sort level, more like Huffman coding level.

Any ideas?
> I remember downloading everything when it was released, adding it to my hoard, never using it for anything.

If you or anyone else in this thread want to do a small short-term favor for others, use a web seed capable BitTorrent client to download the torrent from https://archive.org/details/glitch-public-domain-game-art and keep seeding it for a while. This way other people who want to add it to their hoard can leverage BitTorrent for what it’s best at instead of everyone doing web dl from IA :)

The BitTorrent client I am using is not web seed capable, but by downloading from other peers I can also keep seeding it for others. I have a computer in my home that’s on 24x7 that I use for seeding some public domain torrents, alongside seeding some open source torrents also.
There’s a small link at the bottom to “Add all DigiKey Parts to Cart.”

But one of the parts is apparently already obsolete and unavailable, and two more have minimum quantities above what’s needed here, so it’s not great.
The number pi has an evil twin
I do this exercise once year, just for fun. Would recommend.
Last I heard Noam Chomsky was still alive, and a quick Google doesn’t contradict that. Or is this some kind of high brow joke that went over my head?
It should be obvious that having children is going to cause a negative impact, for an extended a duration, on a relationship. I find folks jump into being a parent with rose tinted glasses, not fully grasping what a 20+ year commitment looks like (trying to juggle a career and the economics, a partner, and children in what is essentially perpetuity).

https://ericalayne.co/wp-content/uploads/2013/06/kidhappy.gi...

https://www.ted.com/talks/rufus_griscom_alisa_volkman_let_s_...

https://www.hhs.gov/sites/default/files/parents-under-pressu...

(parent)
Fun little site that I think most of us have seen before! This is the first time I noticed it has a chat feature from the web console, which I thought was a pretty cool feature and something I have not seen before!
Yeah that's strange, it's like they heard that null was a mistake and removed it without realizing that it provides a useful function
I like syntax highlighting and basic automatic indenting, but not much beyond that. I can't stand autocomplete if there's an automatic popup. I tried some LSP stuff and it was quite nice but I couldn't turn off some features in my editor and they distracted me. The thing I really can't stand is automatic closing of parentheses!
Hi, I'm the author of the article. In our product, VectorChord, we use a quantization algorithm called RaBitQ, which doesn’t require a separate codebook. Unlike IVFPQ, it avoids the need to maintain and update the corresponding codebook, so the update issue you mentioned is not a problem. Regarding filtering, I’m not sure which specific scenario you’re referring to, but we currently support iterative post-filtering and are technically capable of perfectly supporting pre-filtering as well.
> I have to return so much stuff, live with so many things that I don't actually love, … and spend hours on hours researching everything because I can't hold it in my hand.

i’ve basically stopped shopping online for these exact reasons. including my entire Christmas shopping list, all bought in actual stores.

- the amount of time researching what i was buying online was beyond ridiculous

- the colors or size or material was just plain wrong or misleading more than it was correct

- after all of the research, i would still end up returning so much of it.

over the past year i just save all that time and frustration and just go to the store, hold the thing, and buy it. done. so much easier.

i can’t stress how much i detest the dishonesty and misleading garbage of online stores.
Furbies for adults.

(But not that "adult", thank goodness.)
RFC 3986 is a lot simpler than WHATWG spec. You can literally write a zero copy 3986 parser whereas you can’t with WHATWG. (And Ada is still faster than 3986 parsers)