arn3n

What kind of TUI library has a private alpha?

It’s actually really easy to make models that can predict “will the market move up or down in the next X microseconds” that score above 50% accuracy. It’s just that there are so many ways to do it that overfitting is practically guaranteed and most models don’t work when actually trading against the market, which reacts to you. Doing those trades well requires more understanding of the underlying mechanisms, not to mention access to data sources that the public simply doesn’t have.

Cool, thanks for the explanation!

The decision to default to the streaming engine is really interesting. My intuition is that this would be slower than other data frame operations that are more parallelizable with batch processing, because streaming engines necessarily process rows sequentially. Is my intuition off/am I overestimating how much auto-parallelization polars does?

I love these kinds of posts. Simple, fast, AI-free, and I learn something new.

I think you’ll also find that the best way to strongly pressure companies to do something is by law. The work that Right to Repair advocates have been doing across the industry is fantastic.

So be it!

Agreed! It’s a good post.

It was (my) main takeaway and I wanted it to be evident in the headline. I didn’t want to bury the lede; I’ll uneditorialize it because it seems it’s causing some fighting in the comments and I don’t really want to instigate anything, more just warn people using the distro. I don’t think it’ll reach the people who need to be warned if it’s not evident that there’s an issue from the start.

Usually the ads on hacker news are accompanied by a press release or a technical writeup so that I at least learn something new.

Everyone suggesting that they simply charge users for commits to drive off AI-heavy users forgets that Github is owned by Microsoft, who has a big incentive to keep having developers use AI.

I suspect that Microsoft would even prefer to have Github operate at a loss, if that loss were because all its users were using their models and paying for OpenAI subscriptions to generate the code.

Always a fun time to bring up my favorite writeups in database benchmarking: https://questdb.com/blog/lies-damn-lies-and-database-benchma...

There’s also an excellent paper called “Fair Benchmarking Considered Difficult: Common Pitfalls In Database Performance Testing”.

Benchmarks are genuinely hard. Modern systems and hardware are notoriously complex and have different behaviors across runs and with minor tweaks to performance settings.

There’s definitely strategies here; A lot of the floating point operations use subnormals, and a lot of the worst instructions are slowed down by really, really fucking with MMIO.

I have this stance. It’s, for me, a tail-risk calculation: For a given nuclear power plant to be more environmentally friendly than equivalent coal, you have to price in the probability of a nuclear catastrophe with the fact that such catastrophes create fallout that can outlast human civilization.

I can expect that a well-built nuclear plant might not have a catastrophe in my lifetime. But when the consequences are so long-lasting it seems prudent to avoid them entirely. One misbuilt reactor or one governmental regime that rolls back safety regulations and you end up with irreversible consequences. Given the tendency of corporations to “race to the bottom” and abandon safety, and the general unwillingness of the US Government to give proper attention to potential catastrophes (like climate change), I don’t believe that we as a society can handle the responsibility of nuclear reactors. I wish we could have nuclear safely; I don’t trust us to be safe, so I’d rather we not have nuclear at all.

It’s meant to be both funny AND highly unprofessional; Anubis makes money of licensing a version of the firewall where you can change the image.

It’s a good strategy; personal websites and blogs can display the anime girl without fear, and companies that care about their image end up paying. Win-win.

There’s the DSA. Organized resistance to the cost of living crisis in NYC has been mostly organized through them, to great popularity.

Eliza is one of the only games that I enjoyed so much that I sent fan mail when it came out — it’s nothing that a standard Zachtronics game but it stands alone as an excellent visual novel.

I would be disappointed if someone took the completion of my degree and the ceremony behind it as an opportunity to push their business. There’s enough advertisements on the internet; We don't need ads in our universities, too.

What do we think is more to blame for GitHub's massive decrease in quality? I've heard the following theories:

1. Increasing amount of AI-generated code in their codebase, decreasing the quality of the service.

2. Bought by Microsoft, and their bad engineering culture has spread to GitHub.

Perhaps it's a bit of both.

Your link is broken.

I often see people frame music as mathematical manipulation or try to approach music making from a “first principles” approach, where those principles are mathematics and physics. But watching musicians talk about making music, I seldom see any discussion of the underlying math, and instead see discussions of timbres, instruments, and stylistic/historical influences; musicians who make good music seems to believe “first principles” involves historical knowledge and a well-listened ear, and nothing involving math. My question is: Is thinking about music as applied mathematics a good way to create good music? Or is it just the most easily digestible model of music for the crowd on this site?

While not production ready, I’ve been happily surprised at this functionality when building with it. I love my interpreters to be deterministic, or when random to be explicitly seeded. It makes debugging much easier when I can rerun the same program multiple times and expect identical results.

That’s amazing! How did you capture it at that resolution?

The title made me hope for an article about making software serve democracies better instead of consolidating power and wealth. It's about how datacenter build-out in the EU might be accelerated by loosening regulations. Still interesting but a bit of a bummer.

I guess, on that note, are there writeups or articles on how software/compute might be used to help, rather than hinder, liberal democracies? From someone who increasingly sees the tech industry as a tool for authoritarians.

I love their discussion on currying. Currying is very cool theoretically, but I agree that it really causes some bugs and isn’t used that often. It’s cool that most functional compilers automatically curry my functions and give me partial applications, but Id much rather they enforce all parameters be provided and have to explicitly make partial functions when necessary.

Pardon if I’m dumb/missed something: Is Tony Hoare dead? I see no news anywhere.

Parents are competing with multi-trillion dollar companies who have invested untold amounts of cash and resources into making their content addictive. When parents try to help their children, it's an uphill battle -- every platform that has kids on it also tends to have porn, or violence, or other things, as these platform generally have disappointingly ineffective moderation. Most parents turn to age verification because it's the only way they can think of to compete with the likes of Meta or ByteDance, but the issue is that these platforms shouldn't have this content to begin with. Platforms should be smaller -- the same site shouldn't be serving both pornography and my school district's announcement page and my friend's travel pictures. Large platforms are turning their unwillingness to moderate into legal and privacy issues, when in fact it should simply be a matter of "These platforms have adult content, and these ones don't". Then, parents can much more easily ban specific platforms and topics. Right now there's no levers to pull or adjust, and parent s have their hands tied. You can't take kids of Instagram or TikTok -- they will lose their friends. I hate the fact that the "keep up with my extended family" platform is the same as the "brainrot and addiction" one. The platforms need to be small enough that parents actually have choices on what to let in and what not to. Until either platforms are broken up via. antitrust or until the burden of moderation is on the company, we're going to keep getting privacy-infringing solutions.

If you support privacy, you should support antitrust, else we're going to be seeing these same bills again and again and again until parents can effectively protect their children.

I think there's a pretty simple explanation for this: It's hard to admit when we're not doing well. It's easy to say that the world is getting worse, that you're worried for the future, but to admit that you personally are having trouble is depressing and a little humiliating. I'm guilty of this -- even when times are really bad for me personally, I try to be optimistic and consider my current misery as a temporary misfortune. It helps to keep moving forwards.

There’s a basic approach to this using markov chains which works surprisingly well. Scott Aaronson once challenged some students to beat his algorithm — only one student could, who claimed he just “used his free will”. Human randomness isn’t so random. There’s a neat little writeup about it here: https://planetbanatt.net/articles/freewill.html

Double entry account is, in fact, what gave “transactional” databases their name: They were meant for financial transactions! Nowadays TigerBeetle is a custom built financial database just for double entry accounting. The implementation is fascinating.