agonz253

There’s no such thing as the greatest movie of all time.

Whether a song is uplifting or not is completely subjective. Intelligence has nothing to do with it… Sometimes even a perfect expression of despair in a song can be uplifting to the listener, for many reasons.

Whenever I’ve been at my lowest, for ex, the various versions of Dylan’s "Not Dark Yet" have always been a source of comfort.

Is it the embargo that prohibits fishermen in Cuba from fishing, farmers from harvesting, cubans from freely doing business? Is it also responsible for cubans getting beaten and imprisoned for thinking differently? Was it the embargo that destroyed every sugar mill in the country, textile factory, shoe factory, you name it?… The dictatorship is the one responsible for all these things.

I feel the same way but do agree there’s a general lack of respect for the field relative to other professions. Here’s another thread on the subject https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23676651

Since you mentioned Einstein, it reminded me of a comment by Max Born on the subject, from the Born-Einstein letters:

“Einstein expressed over and over again the thought that one should not couple the quest for knowledge with a bread-and-butter profession, but that research should be done as a private spare-time occupation. He himself wrote the first of his great treatises while earning his living as an employee of the Swiss Patent Office in Bern. He believed that only in this way could one preserve one's independence. What he did not consider, however, was the organizational rigidity of almost all professions, and the importance which individual members of a profession attach to their work. No professional pride could develop without it. To be able successfully to practice science as a hobby, one has to be an Einstein.”

Indeed. I recommend also checking out the 2nd volume of Einstein's collected papers. There is one with the proceedings from a conference on the subject, and Einstein is basically alone in trying to convince his peers, including Planck, of the reality of "quanta" of light, independent of the process of emission and absorption or mathematical tricks.

Are there no distinguishing features between these vector databases? I'm not familiar with them so I was looking for any comment on that in the article, whether some make different tradeoffs than others, are easier to operate or implement, more scalable, etc. That together with their relative novelty might help explain why there are so many.

> most successful podcast ever made.

What's that Schopenhauer quote, "he who writes for fools will always find a large audience". I suppose the same can apply to podcasts.

Individual machine failure is not likely, but we're hypothesizing the need for multiple shards for high performance. So now we have more machines and so the probability of failure increases. So we need to add replication, but then we need to deal with data getting out of sync, etc.... As others have mentioned though, these issues only really become important at a certain scale.

It's not purely a matter of cost, right? Say you want or need a highly available, high performance distributed database with externally consistent semantics. Are you going to handle the sharding of your Postgres data yourself? What replication system will you use for each shard? How will you ensure strong consistency? Will you be able to do transactions across shards? These are problems that systems like Spanner, CockroachDB, etc solve for you.

Which reminds me of a quote attributed to Newton: "I can calculate the movement of the stars, but not the madness of men."

Dup of https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37428817

This looks great. However, without a truly comprehensive test suite it’s guaranteed to have a great many subtle bugs :). I recommend trying to hook it up with the tests from MIT’s distributed systems course: https://pdos.csail.mit.edu/6.824/labs/lab-raft.html.

It looks as though it would take only a minor refactoring at least for the leader election and log replication.

This is Science: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LK-99#Replication_attempts

Feynman’s perspective on this: https://youtu.be/tWr39Q9vBgo

Putting the personality of the owner aside, they have been running an experiment for the last few months on how to operate a tech company, overworking your engineers and treating them like replaceable automata. Do you want them to succeed and set that as an example for others to follow?

It was edited https://twitter.com/nntaleb/status/1609746341760217088?s=46&...

Take a look at his “A day in the life” video, or how he boasts about half marathon runs typically preceded by meditations on the horros of WW2 and followed by “deepwork on tensorflow”, all on the same “typical” day. Or how about the time he boasted on Twitter about going to Ukraine to try and get Zelensky and Putin together on a podcast to stop the war through the power of love (his whole schtick). Talk about peak narcissism and phoniness… This is to say nothing of his claim to be an “AI researcher.”

It doesn’t matter. It is simply not possible to adhere to such a reading schedule while also doing anything else. The level of phoniness of this guy is outstanding.

Why the assumption that only the implementation needs to change, especially when significant refactoring is involved? The interfaces themselves may need to change when striving for a better system design. This is also part of refactoring.

Those tests themselves may need to change if significant refactoring is involved. Doing so after the refactoring seems to defeat the purpose of using TDD in the first place?

John Ousterhout has a different take on this in "A Philosophy of Software Design":

The problem with test-driven development is that it focuses attention on getting specific features working, rather than finding the best design. This is tactical [as opposed to strategic] programming pure and simple, with all of its disadvantages. Test-driven development is too incremental: at any point in time, it’s tempting to just hack in the next feature to make the next test pass. There’s no obvious time to design, so it’s easy to end up with a mess.

One place where it makes sense to write the tests first is when fixing bugs. Before fixing a bug, write a unit test that fails because of the bug. Then fix the bug and make sure that the unit test now passes. This is the best way to make sure you really have fixed the bug. If you fix the bug before writing the test, it’s possible that the new unit test doesn’t actually trigger the bug, in which case it won’t tell you whether you really fixed the problem.

What's fraudulent about them is not their papers (there are none of any relevance to speak of) but their character. They are both self proclaimed misunderstood geniuses who have been denied Nobel prizes in spite of their revolutionary discoveries (in 3 different fields, Physics, Economics and Evolutionary Biology). In actuality they are narcissistic master charlatans with delusions of grandeur.

For an expert's take on Eric's claims specifically, see https://www.cantorsparadise.com/eric-weinstein-how-not-to-fo...

One claims to have discovered a Theory Of Everything, putting forth a paper riddled with mathematical errors and with the caveat that it is a "work of entertainment". The other claims to have made a Nobel worthy discovery that revolutionizes evolutionary biology.

I recommend this podcast for a complete breakdown of the Weinsteins. https://decoding-the-gurus.captivate.fm/episode/eric-and-bre...

It doesn't help his cause that he continued to promote this study's findings even though he knew they didn't replicate.

[0] https://statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2021/08/19/a-scandal-...

Two mathematical physicists took the time to go through his talk on it and pointed out serious flaws with it, which the author didn't address in his paper and has gone on to ignore.

[1] https://timothynguyen.files.wordpress.com/2021/02/geometric_...

[2] https://decoding-the-gurus.captivate.fm/episode/special-epis...

> “When I read Helmholtz for the first time, it seemed so odd that you were not at my side and today, this is not getting better. I find the work we do together very good, healing and also easier.”

Note that this was written when they were both undergraduate students and would study together.