Hacker News Reader

bagavion Tesla reports steep drop in profits despite US rush to buy electric vehicles

The value derived and average usage of a car has increased too... Also the financing around cars have made it smoother to buy one. Also Electric can demand a premium because they save on gas costs.

bagavion SQLx – Rust SQL Toolkit

You seem to know your stuff. What's your opinion of diesel?

bagavion Data Version Control

Can this be used with GitHub? If yes, I would shift from dvc immediately

bagavion S3 as a Git remote and LFS server

Dvc is great tool!

bagavion Uber charges more if you have credits in your account

You need share holders' approval to join the board. Today's markets immediately punish a company which supports union. So forcing your way is the only practical way to get a union board seat

bagavion FCC votes to restore net neutrality rules

The null hypothesis is that market forces takes care of it. Like your airline ticket prices. The onus of proof is on you to market forces aren't enough.

bagavion OpenAI's Whisper is another case study in Colonisation

Whisper is not a mature enough to be criticized at this level. They are trying to solve a very hard problem, give them constructive feedback.

IPhone didn't support 100s of languages in the first few years.

The author is either entitled or resentful; neither helps.

bagavion Amazon and iRobot call off their planned acquisition

https://maticrobots.com/

This company is doing the reverse, putting self driving tech in vacuum bot...

bagavion Amazon and iRobot call off their planned acquisition

https://maticrobots.com/

This is an American company I believe considering they are taking privacy seriously

bagavion Amazon and iRobot call off their planned acquisition

https://maticrobots.com/

Has anyone heard about them? It apparently offers complete privacy by doing all computes on device.

bagavion A Decade of Rust, and Announcing Ferrocene

https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/matician/56979df7-cb5e-45c3-baa9-3e...

bagavion FANN: Vector Search in 200 Lines of Rust

https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Vivek-Kumar-Bagaria-2/p...

This idea improves the scaling from linear in dimension to logarithmic when very little loss using ideas from multi-arm bandits

bagavion Microsoft is bringing GPT-4 to US Government agencies

Why judge it by it's worst qualities and worst case behavior? This attitude is uninspiring and worse the luddistism.

Every new technology initially has its own shortcut comings.

Steve jobs in his inaugural iPhone launch, used four different phones because each phone was capable of only one feature.

bagavion The tiny corp raised $5.1M

Waymo and Cruise have burnt through money like no one else. They want to make their own cars, thier own Ai chips/lidar, their own self driving tech. Delusional at best, malicious at worst. They made a hard SW problem into hard HW+SW problem. They are zombies unless some magic happens in the world of nn (which is not unlikely tbh)

Whereas comma is taking the right approach of a nimble team, iterate fast and ship a working product (even if not L4-5), get cash flow, next milestone.

bagavion Show HN:Matic Robot – A privacy-preserving autonomous home robot built w/ Rust

What fraction of your stack is rust? From my understanding rust doesn't have good library support.

bagavion Show HN: Want something better than k-means? Try BanditPAM

Simple explaination of the general idea using nearest neighbor search as example:

1. You want to calculate the l2-nearest neighbor to y from a set of x1, x2, ... xn. Where each point is a d-dimensional vector.

2. Naive approach will take O(nd) computations. For very large d, say 1e4, this is very expensive

Multi-arm bandits idea:

3. Estimate the distance of y to each point (xi) by sampling only along log(d) dimensions.

4. Keep the nearest n/2 points (throw away the rest)

5. Repeat step 3 and 4 until you have one point left

6. The total run time = nlog(d) + nlog(d)/2 + nlog(d)/4.... = O (nlog(d)log(n))

This is a huge improvement over O(nd) for large d (which is usually the case today)

This paper (https://ar5iv.org/abs/1805.08321) from Stanford pioneered this idea for nearest neighbors and many such household problems. It also theoretically proves that the above approach gives the right answer and empirically gets huge (100x) speed boost on large datasets.

The k-medoid paper is based off of this work :)

bagavion Master Plan Part 3

Isn't it better to rely on one's greed than their benevolence?

bagavion SVB collapse could mean a $500B venture capital ‘haircut’

You have to play silly games and try to fix the system simultaneously.

You always keep your foot on the brakes in case someone is drunk driving on the road. At the same time, you'll try to fix those issues via legislation (DUI) and technology

bagavion SVB collapse could mean a $500B venture capital ‘haircut’

It's thier choice to adopt either solutions.

My point was that the existing tools and infra was enough for svb customers to secure themselves. At a high level, they didn't bother getting an insurance and now they beg for bailout.

bagavion SVB collapse could mean a $500B venture capital ‘haircut’

The banks don't want you to split the money because they will have to pay higher insurance to FDIC. This will eat into their margins. The business and the customers interests are not aligned in this case.

Until the law changes, you have to look out for yourself and not beg for bailout. Also, this is not complex since software takes care of it behind the scenes. Our company did it from day 1.

Also more than half of deposits by volume are FDIC insured so the system can handle the whole volume if the customers choose to do so

bagavion SVB collapse could mean a $500B venture capital ‘haircut’

Can't you have multiple accounts in the same bank?

bagavion Scientists developed simple way to cook rice that cut calories absorbed by half

As I previously made it clear, I want to eat rice because I like it (I don't want to reduce the activity I like) That's not causing food shortage.

Food problems (famine etc) in the modern world is not because of lack of food. It's because of human errors (policies, logistics)

bagavion SVB collapse could mean a $500B venture capital ‘haircut’

Break up your deposit into 250k$ accounts, each insured by FDIC. Let software handle the logistics of payments via multiple bank accounts.

Asking depositors to do the due deligence is a strawman.

bagavion Scientists developed simple way to cook rice that cut calories absorbed by half

Why not both? I want to be able to eat rice without feeling bad about the calorie intake

bagavion Meta plans to cut thousands of jobs, after CEO predicted no more layoffs

The same reason our society held the cigarette companies partially responsible for lung cancer deaths.

Meta is not breaking any legal law circa 2023, but history will bucket it along with asbestos/cigarette businesses

bagavion Oxen.ai: Fast Unstructured Data Version Control

This is the real deal breaker for me. Dvc is super slow but it works with S3 (one of the greatest technologies built in last 15 years). At our company, we've written own (10x) faster version of dvc for commonly used features.

bagavion DoorDash lays off 1250 employees

Really? Lamest? Of all the comebacks you've read?

bagavion DoorDash lays off 1250 employees

Really? Lamest? Of all the comebacks you've read?

bagavion Data Version Control

The alternative tool you are referring to is `Dud` I believe

Dvc is the best tool (I found) inspite of being dead slow and complex (trying to do many things).

What alternatives would you recommend?

bagavion Spotify made a cowardly choice: to submit to the Kremlin

Imagine USA being bycotted by all companies for attacking Afghanistan or Iraq. This would unite the US citizens no matter what thier president did. Everyone, think twice before imposing crippling sanctions on a country with nukes.