skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
What major changes have happened in back end software engineering
So, i have been in a hole for a while, slaving away on a ok paying enterprise solution, while my kid grew and now I want to begin catching up with a sabbatical. I wanted to ask HN about new approaches and stacks i might have missed & would like to look into them / dabble with it, with the intention of dusting up myself with a sabbatical & some exciting project in next 8-10 months & then finally work with some startups along those same lines.

I consider myself a backend engineer (used to be C++, now Java). I mainly enjoy knowing about the underlying system aspects, improving performance & the likes of it.

I havent worked on any hyperscale cloud projects at all either (I know !!)

What are the areas, which have proven themselves well in the past 15 years, which you think i must catch up on ? eg functional / async-io / serverless ? reactive ? wasm / nodejs / go & rust ? Kubernetes ? AI / ML ?

Thanks in advance
Just tested on an older (2015) Intel UHD 620 GPU (integrated), and surprisingly all the demos except one hit ~45FPS and up. The first one - Big Forest - struggled to get ~10fps, and was extremely laggy.
I wonder how much of this is just the fact that main ski resorts started when the 10th came home from WW2.

Those guys ended up founding alot of these resorts. Areas in the backcountry, where the land was super cheap and they managed to get leases for them for pennies.

Over time they became more commercial and less of a personal project. Plus these areas became more valuable because of the skiing and that priced out the locals, the people that actually worked the slopes.

I think this story is way more complex then to point to climate change.
Apple Intelligence is a nothingburger so far. We'll see if that changes with app intents, or if Siri ever actually gets better (it still mis-hears me on a regular basis!), but I'm getting pessimistic
NocoDB is a universal database GUI that supports multiple backends, while Mathesar is Postgres-only but deeply integrated with its native features, like using Postgres roles and privileges for access control. NocoDB also adds its own UI-level abstractions on top of database objects, whereas Mathesar directly reflects the database structure. That said, NocoDB has features Mathesar doesn’t yet support, like kanban and calendar views, forms, and more Airtable-like data types.

Baserow is more of an open-source Airtable alternative and doesn’t connect to existing databases at all—unlike Mathesar and NocoDB. It has many of the same UI-driven features as NocoDB, such as different types of views and forms, but it doesn’t function as a database interface the way Mathesar does.

Mathesar, however, has a visual query builder that allows joins and query creation directly from the UI, as well as some data modeling tools, like moving columns between tables and merging duplicate data—neither NocoDB nor Baserow offer these. Mathesar is also 100% open source, while both NocoDB and Baserow follow an open-core model with paid features.

We do want Mathesar to be competitive as an Airtable alternative over time. You can already create a database from scratch (we’re not just a GUI for existing databases), but we’d likely need more data types, views, and integrations before it can match Airtable across a broad set of use cases.

And Postgres is definitely amazingly versatile! That's one of the reasons we were comfortable focusing on it as the only supported DB backend for now.
> want to make sure that they keep the part that'll actually stick around

The part that can't easily get jobs elsewhere?
Chinese state-linked accounts hyped DeepSeek AI launch ahead of US stock rout
Maybe, but I think that's just a function of where you draw the database boundary. My naive (external to Google) understanding of Spanner is that it probably is drawn to include these sorts of things, and similarly FoundationDB's internal architecture looks a bit like this setup.

I think perhaps the view of a database being a single server codebase like this is a bit naive. When you read about how Meta deploy MySQL for example, it's a whole service ecosystem that provides different levels of caching, replication, etc, to create a database at a higher level of abstraction that provides the necessary properties. FoundationDB is similarly better viewed as a set of microservices. When you architect a database like that it is possible to achieve these things, but that doesn't seem to be a new idea, that seems to be just how it has been done in the industry for a while now. The article isn't entirely clear on whether they realise this or are proposing something new.
Xmake uses lua if you want to give it a try.
I've always thought that there ought to be a way to create an investment fund specializing in East Coast ski resorts, Florida homeowners insurance, and other investments that are getting hammered by climate change, and advertise it on Fox News as being for investors who "are smart enough to know that climate change is fake" or something like that.

Unfortunately it would probably be illegal, as it seems like a textbook example of pump and dump.

Unrelated, the comments here bring up a good point - ski resorts have been supersized since the 60s, just like grocery stores and fast food portion sizes, so even though the loss of skiing is real, the number of resorts may be a lousy metric for it.
Purely factual books are copyrightable. It is the collection and curation of those facts that is protected. You cannot just copy someone else's 100 Amazing Facts about The Rainforest verbatim; if you publish 100 Cool Truths about The Jungle and it has those same 100 facts, you'll get sued and they'll easily win.
Submitted title was "Inducing brain-like structure in GPT's weights makes them parameter efficient". We've reverted it now in keeping with the site guidelines (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html).

Since the submitter appears to be one of the authors, maybe they can explain the connection between the two titles? (Or maybe they already have! I haven't read the entire thread)
DeepSeek R1-Zero's self-verification and search abilities in just 3B parameters
As a side note, we _are_ considering adding support for other database backends through Postgres foreign data wrappers: https://wiki.postgresql.org/wiki/Foreign_data_wrappers. If this is something you'd be interested in, please feel free to open an issue on our repo.
It seems like for the past five years, DCC has been at the top of every ratfic rec thread, and despite this, the sum of the discussions I've encountered has amounted to a bunch of people saying they enjoyed it.

What do people who like it also like? What's DCC about? Who /are/ you?
Mini-R1: Reproduce DeepSeek R1 "Aha Moment"
> Absolutely noone can convince me this is a wise and justifiable use of our (my) taxes.

HIV affects everyone. It's best to reduce it wherever you can.

You either want soft power influence or you don't. If you cede influence to other nations they will happily take it over for you.

A reduction in soft power influence will make the US smaller and weaker. Nations will form business and military ties with whoever wants to be the next world hegemon (i.e. China).
It came from the new regime, which has a vendetta against certain things and tries to pin everything bad on them.
> Again: $50 million dollars is an insane amount of money

Again, that's not "insane" .. it's literally the least outlay for a very small publicly listed mine; it covers a few 100 tonne haulpaks, machine shops, staff, screens, small crusher, a few conveyors, and sundries.

It strikes me that you might well be out of touch with the cost of various activities.
Copyright law stipulates the conditions in which content can be reproduced, not conditions in which it can be consumed.

Arguably the material has been learned and not copied. Maybe in some cases learned with an uncanny ability or photographic memory, but learned. (People with photographic memories also cannot reproduce content in an unlimited fashion).
>Everybody railing against the assessment fundamentally misunderstood the test. There are no DEI questions.

The issue is the correct answers were intentionally leaked to a black ATC union
Make, in all its various implementations, is far more brittle than CMake. Ninja requires a meta-build tool like CMake.
Don't obsess with any programming langauge, dynamic typing, or static typing.
I just use what makes sense for the task at hand.

Shopify is a billionaire company built on top of ruby on rails. It hasn't replaced ruby on rails with something else. Facebook still uses PHP.

What's bad is classical OOP. Once you write most code in purely functional style with immutable data, most issues go away.

Haskell makes sense sometimes. Sometimes, PHP makes more sense. I don't care about typing anymore. I just avoid JVM because I don't need it outside android, and I don't develop android apps.

I learned java, haskell, clojure, javascript, python, and php. Eventually, I stopped caring about what langauge I use as long as I can get my job done. After being burnt by haskell, I look forward to working with php and python. At least, python and php are more pleasant to work with than java.

Just write clean code in any programming language.

Just pick the right programming langauge for the task at hand. You wouldn't write in haskell for a wordpress plugin, would you? You also wouldn't write haskell or clojure for an emacs configuration.

The grass is not greener on the other side. All programming languages are going to disappoint you at some point. Just focus on making progress in the real world.

If you try to use a specific programming language outside its niche, you will get burnt. Just don't get excited about any programming language and any typing system. There is nothing particularly good on the other side.

The decision to just choose the right tool for the task at hand simplifies things a lot. Life is too short to care too much about the ideal programming languages. No programming language is going to be ideal for many things you want to do.

The reason that you obsess with specific programming langauges is why mark zuckerberg and Tobias Lütke are rich, and you are broke. Just choose what makes sense.
That is because most American slang derives originally from black and LGBT culture, specifically African American Vernacular English.
Mine is a snail riding in a car. It's a baffling ad campaign; am I expected to google "Genmoji", or want to buy an iPhone because I can combine emojis? I could combine images on KidPix in 1989...
You should check out both Go and Rust as new languages that are excellent for back end services. If you want to explore a little more, also give Zig a try for a toy project.
Even if they do, the recovery itself would surely have costs. It can't be easy.
https://roadmap.sh/backend
> Thank you for your money and the data, we'll be in touch soon; pinky promise?

That's very much an option when it's something this popular - the Olympics I went to did an even more extreme version of that ("Thank you for putting in which events you wanted to see, your card may be charged up to x some time within the next month").

Or you can do it like plane seats: allocate 50k provisional tickets during the initial release (async but on a small timescale), and then if a provisional ticket isn't paid for within e.g. 3 days you put it back on sale.

Ultimately if it takes you x minutes to confirm payment details then you have to either take payment details from some people who then don't get tickets, or put some tickets back on sale when payment for them fails. But that's not really a scaling issue - you have the same problem trying to sell 1 thing to 5 people on an online shop.
Did DeepSeek steal from OpenAI? [video]
How to implement C23 embed in GCC 15
They could reignited sales if all iphones as base had 16GB Ram and 256GB storage. Also easy system wide integration with open source models - something like ollama +but also for TTS and STT. If they cannot make decent on the edge models and they make big release once a year they should allow easily bring open source models like ollama that have tight system integration for UI

Also their appleTV has a lot of potential but is wasted opportunity for them. Wish apple tv could replace router, backup server, wireless charging, smart speaker, vpn, private home cloud, private local ai models hosting - basically acting as home server similar like umbrelOS [0]

[0] https://umbrel.com
I'm not sure why a subreddit was acting as a company's customer support in the first place.
Just "ask" and take no action to protect themselves?
It skips the intermediaries. It's a more direct accounting system.
The Artificial Dialectic: Let a Hundred Flowers Bloom
This technology enables frequency counters for laser light.[1] Input a red laser, and you can directly measure its frequency in Hertz with 14 digits of precision.

[1] https://www.thorlabs.com/newgrouppage9.cfm?objectgroup_id=11...
The ADS-B Transponder requirement for non-commercial aviation took decades.

And oh, how we howl at the expense! $2500 so your airplane pings out its position and heading.

I stopped flying right about then, mid-2000s, so I never had more than a hand-held GPS to go along with the usual radio stack.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automatic_Dependent_Surveill...
If you used it you should know how last minute crappy it is.

Whoever is running Apple now has really dropped the ball.

Maybe the ghost of Jobs had found pease and left.

They being said I think tech in general is failing. We see it at Google and other big companies.

My assessment is those who can code are finally outnumbered and out ranked by those who can’t code but want to get paid like people who can actually change the world. Business folks are winning and they will squeeze wifey last cent out before it is worthless.

No. I am not talking about entrepreneurs. I am talking about passionless MBAs who want to remove the art from making amazing products.
I think HN normally disprefers video, but this one is excellent: full of information, concise, technical yet accessible, by a pilot, using visual aids and exploring potential causes for this tragedy.

Also the comments section is unusually high quality for YouTube when I checked, and even contains the likes of which you'd expect to see on HN.
I needed to Google about "bump allocators". I found this: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/62076569/is-this-impleme...

> It's a really naive allocator that can be very fast due to the tiny amount of housekeeping involved, but you have to live with a pretty heavy constraint: there's no "free" operation for individual request - you just destroy the whole thing.

To me, this sounds like an arena allocator. I remember seeing them in Apache SVN source code a squillion years ago. What's the big deal? For RAII, we can just do placement new in the ctor, and "arena free/delete" in dtor -- which might do nothing in practice.

Also, was the original article focused on gamedev? I don't see any mention of it. For us normie programmers working on CRUD apps, we don't need bump/arena allocators. Ctor->new, RAII/Dtor->delete is just fine for us.
This paywall product must have required a staggering amount of work. And yet, the entire text of the article is right there in the network tab.

Why send it over the wire, then try to hide it?
This paper imports an arbitrarily-chosen aspect of cortical architecture — topological maps of function — and ignores every other aspect of biological neural tissue. The resulting models show lower performance for the same number of parameters — not surprising, since they are more constrained compared with baseline. They may be slightly more robust against pruning — not surprising, since they are more regularised.

The figures show individual seeds, presumably, with no statistical analysis in the performance or pruning comparisons, so the null hypothesis is there is no difference between toponets and baseline. I would never let this paper be submitted by my team.

We haven't learned anything about the brain, or about ANNs.
Adagio is not really that great, take a look at the r/tea wiki for better options [0].

[0] https://old.reddit.com/r/tea/wiki/vendors/page_01
This is super cool & I'm impressed that it's working with WebGL.

From reading the code & seeing the examples in the sandbox, it looks like the sprite layer is defined one time (initialization) with specific sprite & animation properties that are exposed to JS via the SpriteGPULayer config https://github.com/phaserjs/phaser/blob/v4.0.0-beta.5/src/ga... , then that class passes the info over to the vertex shader which has ifdefs to determine which animation, other features are enabled for a given SpriteGPULayer - https://github.com/phaserjs/phaser/blob/v4.0.0-beta.5/src/re...

This way you don't end up having to do any updates per frame on the CPU and it remains one draw call for the entire layer right?

Are there other use cases besides from large scale sprite/animated backgrounds that you've thought of?
Thank you for this.

I'm still convinced that evidence of DEI is not evidence of its culpability. The real "affirmative action" is the coddling of white men from birth to job placement, while women and POC are deprived of equal opportunities.

These assessment discrepancies are negligible. DEI is a red herring.
You can publish public domain content on kindle.

https://kdp.amazon.com/en_US/help/topic/G200743940
Streaming DiLoCo: Towards a Distributed Free Lunch (Google DeepMind)
Better Scala Builds with the Mill Build Tool [video]
this is part of a very obvious change they could make to separate the device from the monitor/view capabilities, and have it connect to other apple products and communicate. The reality is that its not an easy thing to do and they would have to create something very new to be able to do it. Don't hold your breath. They actually decreased OS capabilities of the device when they went to mobile intentionally and they have no incentive to increase capabilities.

Apple has come a long way from people waiting outside the stores for products of the future to charging $200 more every release for an extra 2 mega pixel on the camera. They are over due for some disruption. Hopefully, someone sees the opportunity.
The human input makes sense, otherwise, couldn't you bruteforce generate billions of low resolution images that cover a vast range of situations and then use that to attack anything similar enough to fit the substantial similarity condition? You could even plug a news feed into the generator.
Same experience here. Weed doesn’t make you dumb or lazy — choosing to sit on the couch watching reruns of The Simpsons is what makes you dumb and lazy, weed or no weed.
> let's see how you feel when your daughter is abducted and taken over state lines

Well, if it’s any comfort, the person most likely by far to abduct your daughter is you. Stranger abduction is exceedingly rare.
DeepSeek Debates: Chinese Leadership on Cost, Closed Model Margin Impacts
Haiku?
> "Where a human inputs their own copyrightable work and that work is perceptible in the output, they will be the author of at least that portion of the output," the guidelines said.

This policy is sensible. Most AI generated works should be uncopyrightable, except where a substantial human contribution is in the output.

Simply describing a picture and letting AI generate it shouldn't be enough for the same reason that dictating what you want to a painter isn't enough to earn you copyright over the resulting painting.

I would be wary about integrating too much AI output into works one wants to enforce copyright over without some level of documentation. The nightmare scenario is having your copyright stripped away because of evidence one used AI extensively.
AI + VR will most probably create addictive, lifelike experiences that may affect real-world relationships. Like TikTok and Instagram algorithms, this could reduce the desire for intimacy and worsen declining fertility rates.
okay can you at least tell me how the architecture of https://github.com/llvm/llvm-project is "bad"?
> Why would anyone go through the effort of training the next groundbreaking model if they know they can just wait for someone else to do it and leverage that work?

Why would anyone write, work or research anything if they know it would be consumed by AI and sold on a $xx/month subscription?
My buddy and I have talked about this for decades, done the math.

They're simply not profitable anymore. Too much seasonal skilled labor, too much making snow, etc.
> In fact, for most of humanity, we were pretty damn egalitarian. Capitalism changed things, and the problem is getting rapidly worse - precisely because of billionaires [0].

Slavery was common for the majority of human history, or when was it that slavery was invented after the "egalitarian" past? When exactly did the first slave happen? At least in current day we have a good part of the world, at least the developed world in which this is unthinkable.

At the very least you would point to the egalitarian times being before civilization happened, which would rule out capitalism.

> Nope. It's about human nature being warped. By billionaires and their pets.

Billionaires are humans and are the way they are because of human nature. You can't take them out of the equation by just saying they're somehow special individuals... either they deserve to be billionares or not... if they deserve it then there's no problem here, if they don't deserve it that means that there are other forces at play and anyone could be in that position if they had enough luck to be born to the right family, in the right place, etc., which means that it's a lot more complex than just blaming individuals, or even blaming the current systems which come about from the collective nature of humans.
Many states[0] have explored this. IIRC, the New Mexico legislature once, back in the 1980s, helpfully defined alpine skiing as a "hyper-dangerous" activity, trying to place all liability on the skier, but a reference eludes my google-fu.
[0] https://caselaw.findlaw.com/court/pa-supreme-court/1528129.h...
What do you mean, 'despite'? I don't want it. And it seems impossible to get away from theses 'assistants'. I'm all the time reminded that I have somebody snooping on everything I do and say on my phone because it seems to me that Siri is impossible to get rid of. I know we are talking about 'Apple Intelligence' but I am sure the same shit applies.

What happened to putting the user in control? At least in the OLD walled garden I got toggle the switches (mostly) myself.
Indeed, the enchant is very nasty stuff, it's not easy or clean to do so.
My understanding coming from mechanistic interpretability is that models are typically (or always) in superposition, meaning that most or all neurons are forced to encode semantically unrelated concepts because there are more concepts than neurons in a typical LM. We train SAEs (where we apply L1 reg and a sparsity penalty to “encourage” the encoder output latents to yield sparse representations of the originating raw activations), to hopefully disentangle these features, or make them more monosemantic.This allows us to use the SAE as a sort of microscope to see what’s going on in the LM, and apply techniques like activation patching to localize features of interest, which sounds similar to what you’ve described. I’m curious what this work means for mech interp. Is this a novel alternative to mitigating polysemanticity? Or perhaps neurons are still encoding multiple features, but the features tend to have greater semantical overlap? Fascinating stuff!
Actually, it is. Just because you deem that innocent enough "because everyone is doing it", it still leaks a lot of information to various parties.
Google Pixels are heading in this direction, with Pixel 8 supporting USB-c DisplayPort Alt Mode and Android working on Debian Linux VMs.

Hopefully Pixel Tablet 3 will challenge Apple iPad Pro with Linux VMs, https://www.androidauthority.com/google-pixel-tablet-3-power....