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cdiamand

1,269 karma · joined August 15, 2013

Working on http://www.topstonks.com

(I'd love to get your feedback!)

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cdiamand··on Show HN: Now I Get It – Translate scientific papers into interactive webpages
Great work OP.

This is super helpful for visual learners and for starting to onboard one's mind into a new domain.

Excited to see where you take this.

Might be interesting to have options for converting Wikipedia pages or topic searches down the line.

cdiamand··on Introduction to PostgreSQL Indexes
Linking to the postgresql docs since they are very well written and surprisingly enjoyable to read.

https://www.postgresql.org/docs/current/indexes-intro.html

cdiamand··on Show HN: I made a heatmap diff viewer for code reviews
Thank you. This is a pretty cool feature that is just scratching the surface of a deep need, so keep at it.

Another perspective where this exact feature would be useful is in security review.

For example - there are many static security analyzers that look for patterns, and they're useful when you break a clearly predefined rule that is well known.

However, there are situations that static tools miss, but a highlight tool like this could help bring a reviewer's eyes to a high risk "area". I.e. scrutinize this code more because it deals with user input information and there is the chance of SQL injection here, etc.

I think that would be very useful as well.

cdiamand··on Show HN: I made a heatmap diff viewer for code reviews
This is something I have found missing in my current workflow when reviewing PR's. Particularly in the age of large AI generated PR's.

I think most reviewers do this to some degree by looking at points of interest. It'd be cool if this could look at your prior reviews and try to learn your style.

Is this the correct commit to look at? https://github.com/manaflow-ai/cmux/commit/661ea617d7b1fd392...

cdiamand··on Tidewave Web: in-browser coding agent for Rails and Phoenix
Looks pretty neat, and certainly addresses a missing element in the current AI workflow.

Question: What happens to our data - i.e. the code and context sent to your service?

cdiamand··on Show HN: I built website for sharing Drum Patterns
Great stuff! You're missing a few bass drum notes in "When the levee breaks"
cdiamand··on $400M armored Tesla gov contract
Is there a link to the contract somewhere?
cdiamand··on Show HN: Interactive systemd – a better way to work with systemd units
The security section is good to see. Thanks for that!
cdiamand··on LLM based agents as Dungeon Masters
I've used LLM's in this capacity, and it's awesome. It quickly becomes a crutch.
cdiamand··on LLM based agents as Dungeon Masters
Last year, I built a DM for myself using the OpenAI api and an elevenLabs voice generator. I asked it set my character in Baldur's Gate, so it could pull upon the huge amount of DnD source material it had been trained on.

A few takeaways:

1. An LLM based DM can give the player essentially infinite richness and description on anything they ask for.

2. There is difficulty in setting the rules for the LLM to follow that match the DnD rulebook. But this is possible to solve for. Also, I found the LLM to be too pliable as a DM. I kept getting my way, or getting my hand held through scenarios. Maybe this is a feature?

3. My conversation quickly began to approach the context window for the LLM and some RAG engineering is very necessary to keep the LLM informed about the key parts of your history.

4. Most importantly, I found that I most enjoy the human connection that I get through DnD and an LLM with a voice doesn't really satisfy that.

cdiamand··on Mapping all 13.8 gigapixels of the Caves of Qud world map
I come back to it from time to time and play for a week. It looks like it's been getting more accessible over time, with a new UI update having been rolled out recently.

There's definitely a certain mindset that helps make it more enjoyable. Imagination being key! From the technical side, the developers have peeled back the curtain on how they've created parts of the game:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U03XXzcThGU&ab_channel=Logo%...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jV-DZqdKlnE&ab_channel=GDC20...

cdiamand··on South Korean president declares martial law, parliament votes to lift it
Can someone familiar with South Korean politics give us some context for what is happening here?
cdiamand··on Unreal 5.5 is a big deal [video]
Blender has the famed Donut Tutorial, which is a blast if you're even slightly interested in learning about it.

Does Unreal have something similar?

cdiamand··on Japan's declining births on track to fall below 700k
I think a cascading series of negative economic effects from less consumerism, leading to societally destabilizing conditions is a concern.
cdiamand··on Sci-fi books that you may never have heard of, but definitely should read
Seconding the Book of the New Sun - It's great as a standalone, and the series is rewarding if you keep reading. It's an excellent 'puzzle' of a story as OP stated.
cdiamand··on Amplification of electromagnetic fields by a rotating body
Could this be used as an engine of some kind? The spinny thing giving off EM waves and those waves are caught by something like a solar sail?
cdiamand··on RoRvsWild Ruby Documentation Theme
This looks great. Nice job!
cdiamand··on What's New in Ruby on Rails 8
Thanks for this. I've run into "giant cache" issues in the past in this exact use case. I'll give solid_cache a look.
cdiamand··on What's New in Ruby on Rails 8
Anybody have any opinions on moving away from Redis for cables/caching/jobs?

I supposed it'd be nice to have one less thing to manage, but I'm wondering if there are any obvious gotchas to moving these features over to sqlite and postgresql.

cdiamand··on Dance training superior to physical exercise in inducing brain plasticity (2018)
"Regarding cognition, both groups improved in attention and spatial memory, but no significant group differences emerged."

So, the dance group showed increase volume of brain matter. Is there a benefit to having the extra brain volume, even if it doesn't lead to improved cognition?

Is it possible that increased volume just helped them become better dancers?

cdiamand··on Scaling Rails and Postgres to millions of users at Microsoft
I ran into some scaling challenges with Postgres a few years ago and had to dive into the docs.

While I was mostly living out of the "High Availability, Load Balancing, and Replication" chapter, I couldn't help but poke around and found the docs to be excellent in general. Highly recommend checking them out.

https://www.postgresql.org/docs/16/index.html

cdiamand··on I sold TinyPilot, my first successful business
Haha! That's great! Selling the company - also incredible. Congratulations my dude.
cdiamand··on I sold TinyPilot, my first successful business
Digestively, how did you handle all that dessert in such a short timeframe?
cdiamand··on The wealth of the 25 richest families in the world soared 43% in the last year
So in this case we would be eliminating the power of the individual to undertake large, risky undertakings that would provide a net benefit to society.

Now you'd have to cobble together a group of investors, but if you can't find people who don't understand your vision, you're out of luck.

Or you could go to a bank, so now the banks have more power, but they probably won't invest in your risky idea anyway.

Okay so I guess, now it's up to the government to undertake this large risky project? Great.

I don't know, I like the fact that motivated individuals can take a large amount of their own capital and take on large projects.

cdiamand··on The wealth of the 25 richest families in the world soared 43% in the last year
Let's say an (extremely) successful businessman wants to create a new business that requires a 250m investment to launch. Wouldn't this prevent that individual from starting the business?
cdiamand··on My time with Rails is up (2016)
On balance, I like Rails because you get so much functionality out of the box.

My biggest concern is that when your project deviates from the happy path of that functionality you've got to invent your own architecture and patterns. Knowing when to create a service objects vs say adding more functionality to a model is an example. In that case, you're out of the land of convention and into the land of opinion.

cdiamand··on Ask HN: Where do I find good code to read?
DOOM

https://github.com/id-Software/DOOM/tree/master/linuxdoom-1....

cdiamand··on DARPA Seeks to Shield Blood from Fungal and Bacterial Pathogens
Has anyone here ever done any work at DARPA, and if so how was the experience?

Also, I'm assuming you need some kind of background related to the projects you apply to work on right?

cdiamand··on The Darwinian argument for worrying about AI
> No single change is going to produce AGI. We're going to have a lot of forewarning, and it'll be obvious we're opening Pandora's box.

AutoGPT is an interesting example where an AI system, just by self prompting, led to an order of magnitude increase in (change/productivity/activity), extremely rapidly.

cdiamand··on Github.com is down
Status page just flipped:

Investigating - We are currently experiencing an outage of GitHub products and are investigating. Jun 29, 2023 - 17:52 UTC

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