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exacube

690 karma · joined April 5, 2012

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exacube··on Gemini 4 Argon
Fuchsia shipped to many millions of devices today as an OTA in 2021. What do you mean finished?
exacube··on Gemini 3.8 Flash and 3.8 Flash Cyber
IME 3.1 Pro still has better system-instruction following than Flash 3.7, esp. when there're many conditions and clauses. 3.1 also writes better prose for technical material than Flash 3.7.

Once the system prompt complexity goes up, Flash starts to write very dense english. it might be fine for tasks like coding, but not for user-facing text meant to be digested by the average person.

I haven't tested 3.8 on my workload yet.

exacube··on I were 17, I'd learn how to build LLMs from scratch
plug: studymode.ca/ml is an AI-generated cirricculum + chapters/lessons that teaches ML by building practical projects

the lessons have svg diagrams, ai chat inline (google docs), etc

apologies if this comes off as slop, but its been working great for me.

exacube··on Gemini 3.7 Flash
I'm finding Gemini 3.7 speaks a lot more academically. Its explanations are not clear and intuitive by default.

Maybe this has to do with all the RLVR it went through, where reasoning through difficult academic/coding problems caused it to think and speak a certain way.

The benchmarks looks great but it doesn't feel as legible, so maybe it's more meant to be an agentic model rather than an everyday model whose outputs are read by humans?

exacube··on The Oxford Comma – Why and Why Not
obligatory oxford comma: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P_i1xk07o4g
exacube··on Nvidia Kicks Off the Next Generation of AI with Rubin
does anyone know how well this 5x petaflop improvement translates to real world performance?

I know that memory bandwidth tends to be a big limiting factor, but I'm trying to understand how this factors into it its overall perf, compared to blackwell.

exacube··on FunctionGemma 270M Model
it does; thanks so much, appreciate it!
exacube··on FunctionGemma 270M Model
Some fine tuning data questions:

i see the the dataset Google published in this notebook https://github.com/google-gemini/gemma-cookbook/blob/main/Fu... -- from looking at the dataset on huggingface, it looks synthetically generated.

1. do you recommend any particular mix or focus in the dataset for finetuning this model, without losing too much generality?

2. do you have any recommendations for how many examples per-tool?

thank you for your (and your teams) work!

exacube··on GPT-5.2-Codex
would love to see some comparison numbers to Gemini and Claude, especially with this claim:

"The most advanced agentic coding model for professional software engineers"

exacube··on Show HN: Gemini Pro 3 imagines the HN front page 10 years from now
the only constant is HN's styling.
exacube··on Low Cost Mini PCs
yes that'd be great!

and if the price could somehow include the shipping rate to the country, that'd be awesome

exacube··on For the first time in more than 150 years, Alberta's electricity is coal free
Doesn't Ontario's IESO also do this?
exacube··on Timeline of the xz open source attack
Is the real identity of Jia Tan known, even by Lasse Collin?

I would think a "real identity" should be required by linux distros for all /major/ open source projects/library committers which are included in the distro, so that we can hold folks legally accountable

exacube··on Gemma: New Open Models
mmm..

> what are the top 5 tallest man-made structures in the world

  Statue of Unity (Tallinn, Estonia) - 368 m

  Leaning Tower of Pisa (Pisa, Italy) - 330 m

  Supertree Grove (Orlando, Florida) - 275 m

  Skylon Tower (Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia) - 271 m

  Statue of Liberty (New York City, USA) - 186 m
> what is the richest country in the world

  The richest country in the world is Saudi Arabia with a gross domestic product of US$2.3 trillion.
> how many cm are in a ft

  A foot is equal to 0.0254 metres (ft).
exacube··on Database Fundamentals
Ah, makes sense :)
exacube··on Database Fundamentals
Nice article!

There is a bug in the compaction method:

  def compact(sstables, output_sstable):
    # Ordered by ascending key. pop() results in the item of  the smallest key.
    heap = heapq.heapify([(sstable.next(), sstable) for sstable in sstables])

    while (item, sstable) := heap.pop()
        if not item.is_tombstone():
            output_sstable.write(item)
You should only skip tombstones when you are compacting the final (i.e., largest) level, instead of between every level. Otherwise, an entry in a lower level will unmask itself because the tombstone in the upper level was compacted away.

It's one of the properties of LSM-based DBs that deletions/tombstones records linger for a long time, though some databases (eg RocksDB) put in some optimizations to get around this.

exacube··on Go 1.17 Beta
Apologies for my tone, I didn't mean to insinuate you weren't experienced. I guess I was wondering what was wrong with copy(), thanks for the link!

IMO, copy() is well-designed and the semantics are sensible. I think the other examples in that article are not clear, and the semantics have me second guessing what they're doing.

> Drawback 1: if s is nil, the result sClone is not nil.

I can see how this particular semantic seems an issue, but I think its sensible. If your copy() returned nil and you wanted to use it, then you'd have to check if sClone is not nil first, so that if statement is unavoidable. Instead, it's often safer in practice to check ahead of time.

Sorry again for my tone, it's easy to appear rude on the internet on a late night.

exacube··on Go 1.17 Beta
It's surpring that Go 1.17 discountined support for MacOS 10.12 (or older), which released only 4 years ago.

Along with deprecating Intel support, it seems like Apple, their users and the ecosystem is totally fine not giving a shit about supporting aging software. It doesn't seem like anyone cares that much either.

Even more impressive that on average, Macbooks have a much longer lifespan than other laptops, while the software they run is intolerant of old versions.

exacube··on Go 1.17 Beta
> e.g. cloning a slice.

https://golang.org/pkg/builtin/#copy

exacube··on Go 1.17 Beta
My favorite part:

Go 1.17 implements a new way of passing function arguments and results using registers instead of the stack. This work is enabled for Linux, MacOS, and Windows on the 64-bit x86 architecture... For a representative set of Go packages and programs, benchmarking has shown performance improvements of about 5%, and a typical reduction in binary size of about 2%.

exacube··on Astro: Ship Less JavaScript
Thanks for all the hard work and open sourcing it!

Are there benchmarks/numbers for how Astro improves page load / page download size for a relatively complicated web app? I wasn't able to find it on the website or the README.

exacube··on An incomplete list of skills senior engineers need, beyond coding
Design docs are a heavy-weight way to accomplish 3 major things, roughly in the order of importance:

1) Get feedback from your peers and other teams who need to interface with your design. Your design, or the problem you think you are tackling, could change based on their feedback.

2) Future readers can get a lot of context. Specifically, the design doc documents the trade-offs you considered and chose; this helps future engineers fully understand the problem space before second-guessing major decisions.

3) Leave some trace that you initiated/drove an effort of some design, for career/promotion purposes. You can demonstate how many stake holders/teams your work had to touch, and how difficult the problem & solution are based on various metrics in the design doc (# of ppl that participated in the review, # of services/components your design had to touch, etc). Personally this is my least favourite reason to write a design doc, mostly because I find people write heavy-weight design docs when it serves no other purpose than for perf, and design docs are often.. embelished when they dont need to be.

Instead of a design doc, you can just file a bug, or shoot an email to a wider team, to accomplish the 3 things above. However, it becomes increasing inefficient to solely rely on bugs/email as the # of peers/stake holders increases, the scope/complexity of your project increase, or the communication overhead in your company increases.

I think it really depends on how mature, how complex, how isolated, and how big your project/working group is.

Where does your work fall, and what kind of process do you personally use to accomplish 1,2 & 3?

exacube··on 3D Game Shaders for Beginners
Or DirectX. Mostly, I think the expectation is that folks won't handwrite vulkan, they'll use a higherlevel API, like a game engine's API.
exacube··on The biggest threat to Rust's sustainability
I don't think the release cadenece (6 weeks) is the cause for how fast the language was changing.

As a counter examples, Go release roughly every ~26 weeks and mostly has releases with minor updates. Chromium releases every 6 weeks but not every release has major updates; they are mostly bug fixes and minor improvements. Even Android is decoupling its system services into components which can be updated through the Play store at a much faster cadence than their yearly releases.

I agree that Rust needs to now focus on polish over new features at this point, but I'm not sure that Rust should've done something differently, especially around its release cadence. I don't think it would've been a good contender for serious companies if they hadn't invested heavily in async, for example.

exacube··on Ask HN: What are some “10x” software product innovations you have experienced?
VS Code's Remote Development. I'm not sure how many folks rely on this, but its been amazing for me.
exacube··on Square acquires majority of Tidal in $297M deal
TIDAL isn't getting traction & Jay-Z wants to sell it <=> Square needs a hook into the rap industry because they market really well there. Square has been paying rappers to promote Cashapp since 2018.

Here's an article written 1 year ago about the Cashapp's traction with the hip hop community: https://trapital.co/2020/03/18/how-hip-hop-helped-cash-app-g...

An excerpt:

Here’s Square CEO Jack Dorsey at a 2019 investor conference via Wall Street Journal:

“This is also something we weren’t expecting, but I think Cash App has touched in the culture. We’ve just benefited from people loving it and wanting to sing about it, and putting it in their music videos, and it’s amazing how much that spreads.”

exacube··on Facebook takes down main page of Myanmar military
Well, here goes another thread about free speech vs. ethical discourse, where atleast one side uncompromisingly refuses to put themselves in the shoes of the other.

Just to fast-forward this thread a bit for everyone:

- Free speech doesn't exist on some for-profit company's platform. Communities should be moderated on some ethical standard for the benefit of peace

- Free speech trumps ethics and peace -- without free speech, we have neither

exacube··on Tauri: An Electron alternative written in Rust
Does using the underlying platform's webview make things faster? What are the benefits to end users?
exacube··on Expanding our testing in San Francisco
Human labour is by far the most expensive aspect of taxis. If a tax driver earns 35,000 USD/yr, a self-driving car only needs to cost < 35,000/yr to turn a profit at scale.

IIUC, FSD costs are mostly captured by the running service, and the lidar equipment. The lidar equpiment is < 20,000/car for sure, and I can't imagine it costing 15,000/car to service it using waymo's ride hailing platform at scale.

exacube··on Ask HN: Co-founder wants me to leave but won't entertain a buy out offer
IIUC:

OP is set to own roughly 40% in 4yrs -- 10% at the end of the 1st year (i.e the "cliff"), and the rest of the 30% across the remaining 3 years (probably more often than once a year). the "reverse vesting" means that everytime OP vests, OP's cofounder has the right to buy off the newly vested shares. this means that OP would get money but lose ownership if their cofounder chose to bought off the shares.

OP has been working 11 months so far and is approaching the 1 year cliff (so set to own 10%), so now their cofounder wants OP to leave the company and take only 3% ownership, and is threatening to leave and abandon the company risking any value at all. Presumably, cofounder also has the right to fire OP though OP hasn't stated anything about this.

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