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whytai

391 karma · joined July 31, 2019

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whytai··on The Productivity Mirage
I wonder if any old software companies like amazon, microsoft, apple, or google have data on how many prs a software engineer would produce per day over time. I wonder what that major spikes on the graph would be? live reload? vscode? faster and faster laptops? llms?

I have a hunch the amount of prs written per day per engineer is likely the same or only 10-15% higher.

whytai··on China blocks Meta's acquisition of AI startup Manus
the manus founders moved the entire company, researchers, and IP out of china to singapore. most of the researchers and business is still there, but unfortunately the founders wives/parents and family stayed in china. ultimately this is why they had to come back when the PRC summoned them after the meta acquisition.

sad day to be a chinese founder.

whytai··on Using an engineering notebook
surprised to hear others don't do this! obsidian also works well for daily notes
whytai··on Show HN: CodeRLM – Tree-sitter-backed code indexing for LLM agents
i thought the reason claude code defaults to terminal-ish workflows (glob/grep) is bc they trained with bash-y sandboxes, and the creator argued for this approach vs indexing + bespoke tools. would be interesting to see how often the model defaults to using grep for everything (in my experience almost always..)
whytai··on My simple knowledge management and time tracking system
I really enjoy the obsidian daily notes feature for this [1]. It's a dedicated button to create a new note with a title of your choosing. I typically do YYYY-MM-DD d, so 2024-12-1 mon.

I'm not sure about the time tracking though. Is this more for people working on contract for billing? I see the value in having the data but collecting the data seems difficult.

[1] https://help.obsidian.md/Plugins/Daily+notes

whytai··on New models and developer products
Every day this video ages more and more poorly [1].

categories of startups that will be affected by these launches:

- vectorDB startups -> don't need embeddings anymore

- file processing startups -> don't need to process files anymore

- fine tuning startups -> can fine tune directly from the platform now, with GPT4 fine tuning coming

- cost reduction startups -> they literally lowered prices and increased rate limits

- structuring startups -> json mode and GPT4 turbo with better output matching

- vertical ai agent startups -> GPT marketplace

- anthropic/claude -> now GPT-turbo has 128k context window!

That being said, Sam Altman is an incredible founder for being able to have this close a watch on the market. Pretty much any "ai tooling" startup that was created in the past year was affected by this announcement.

For those asking: vectorDB, chunking, retrieval, and RAG are all implemented in a new stateful AI for you! No need to do it yourself anymore. [2] Exciting times to be a developer!

[1] https://youtu.be/smHw9kEwcgM

[2] https://openai.com/blog/new-models-and-developer-products-an...

whytai··on Higher Intakes of Potassium and Magnesium, but Not Lower Sodium, Reduce CVD Risk
It's certainly true that most people are deficient in potassium. The daily recommended dose for males is over 3 grams per day![1]

To make matters worse, the FDA limits the amount of potassium that can be present in supplements to 100mg[2]. So good luck taking 30 supplements to meet your daily requirements!

One option Id like to advertise is salt alternatives at grocery stores which are filled with potassium, some with at least 800mg per tsp. This can be another way to supplement potassium and magnesium in the diet [2]

[1] https://ods.od.nih.gov/factsheets/Potassium-HealthProfession...

[2] https://www.health.harvard.edu/staying-healthy/should-i-take...

whytai··on Launch HN: Grai (YC S22) – Open-Source Data Observability Platform
For testing:

- we have a dedicated dev environment for analysts to experience a dev/test loop. None of the pipelines can be run locally unfortunately.

- we have CI jobs and unit tests that are run on all pipelines

Observability:

- we have data quality checks for each dataset, organized by tier. This also integrates with our alerting system to send pagers when data quality dips.

- Airflow and our query engines hive/spark/presto each integrate with our in-house lineage service. We have a lineage graph that shows which pipelines produce/consume which assets but it doesn't work at the column level because our internal version of Hive doesn't support that.

- we have a service that essential surfaces observability metrics for pipelines in a nice ui

- our airflow is integrated with pagerduty to send pagers to owning teams when pipelines fail.

We'd like to do more, but nobody has really put in the work to make a good static analysis system for airflow/python. Couple that with the lack of support for column level lineage OOTB and it's easy to get into a mess. For large migrations (airflow/infra/python/dependecy changes) we still end up doing adhoc analysis to make sure things go right, and we often miss important things.

Happy to talk more about this if you're interested.

whytai··on Launch HN: Grai (YC S22) – Open-Source Data Observability Platform
How do you guys do the static analysis on the queries? I notice you support dbt, bigquery etc, but all of our companies pipelines are in airflow. That makes the static analysis difficult because we're dealing with arbitrary python code that programmatically generates queries :).

Any plans to support airflow in the future? Would love to have something like this for our companies 500k+ airflow jobs.

whytai··on Telling the Bees
I always thought bee communication through "dancing" was visual. On reading more, it seems the bees build up electric charge which interacts with the antennae on other bees.

Excerpt [1]:

> Honeybees accumulate an electric charge during flying. Bees emit constant and modulated electric fields during the waggle dance. Both low- and high-frequency components emitted by dancing bees induce passive antennal movements in stationary bees. The electrically charged flagella of mechanoreceptor cells are moved by electric fields and more strongly so if sound and electric fields interact. Recordings from axons of the Johnston's organ indicate its sensitivity to electric fields. Therefore, it has been suggested that electric fields emanating from the surface charge of bees stimulate mechanoreceptors and may play a role in social communication during the waggle dance.

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waggle_dance#Mechanism

whytai··on Debris found came from missing Titan sub, says friend of passengers
The boat may not have heard it, but the navy certainly did: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36439661
whytai··on Sam Bankman-Fried is ‘under supervision’ in Bahamas?
Dubai is one of the few counties that lacks an extradition treaty with the US[1] and has a high standard of living.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_extradit...

whytai··on Monumental (if correct) advance in number theory posted to ArXiv by Yitang Zhang
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sayre%27s_law

  In any dispute the intensity of feeling is inversely proportional to the value of the issues at stake
whytai··on Monumental (if correct) advance in number theory posted to ArXiv by Yitang Zhang
Even more incredible is that his own advisor refused to write him letters of recommendation upon graduation [1]

  After graduation, Zhang had trouble finding an academic position. In a 2013 interview with Nautilus magazine, Zhang said he did not get a job after graduation. "During that period it was difficult to find a job in academics. That was a job market problem. Also, my advisor [Tzuong-Tsieng Moh] did not write me letters of recommendation." ... Moh claimed that Zhang never came back to him requesting recommendation letters. In a detailed profile published in The New Yorker magazine in February 2015, Alec Wilkinson wrote Zhang "parted unhappily" with Moh, and that Zhang "left Purdue without Moh's support, and, having published no papers, was unable to find an academic job".

  In 2018, responding to reports of his treatment of Zhang, Moh posted an update on his website. Moh wrote that Zhang "failed miserably" in proving Jacobian conjecture, "never published any paper on algebraic geometry" after leaving Purdue, and "wasted 7 years of his [Zhang's] own life and my [Moh's] time".
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yitang_Zhang
whytai··on Pandora says laboratory-made diamonds are forever
> It can't be both an ethical stand an a convenient way to increase profits.

Why not?

whytai··on Market is the most important factor in a startup's success or failure (2007)
Palmer Lucky?
whytai··on The Vintage Beauty of Soviet Control Rooms (2018)
Can you provide any recommendations or links?
whytai··on Ask HN: Mind bending books to read and never be the same as before?
Meditations by Marcus Aurelius.

This book makes every bit of life advice you receive afterwards feel shallow. It feels like a reference to western thought.

It's also very well translated and reads very easily, and is very short. I read about a chapter every morning when I feel motivated, and certain passages really stick in my head.

It also helps to read whenever you feel overcome with emotion because of something.

whytai··on Ask HN: What scientific phenomenon do you wish someone would explain better?
Here is a video of a researcher at Microsoft Quantum lecturing on this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F_Riqjdh2oM "Quantum Computing for Computer Scientists.".

However, even with understanding how a Quantum Computer works at its most basic level I still have difficulty understanding the more useful Quantum Algorithms:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shor%27s_algorithm

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grover%27s_algorithm

whytai··on Time is the only real currency we have
I think you can apply this by journaling or keeping a personal diary as well. Just sit before bed and recount the thoughts of the day and put them on paper, maybe intending to read over them later to find out when some event happened or in 20 years to see what you were doing during the quarantine.

The act of reflection and organization itself is meditative.

whytai··on Biggest Oil ETF Could Go ‘Lights Out,’ Warns Wall Street Strategist
Seeing that the OPEC production cuts don't go into effect until the 1st, what would actually happen to this oil if nobody could legally buy it due to lack of storage?
whytai··on What Would a WeChat Replacement Need?
A few points. Uber drivers cannot see if individual riders have tipped them. They also cannot see your individual rating of them, nor you of theirs.

Policing their own platform works both ways. When I order an uber I expect a certain quality of service. ie a safe, comfortable ride. Likewise, when I drive for uber I expect people to respect my property (my car). I expect uber to fulfill both of these things so that it is a usable platform.

Beyond that, if you get removed from using uber can't you use lyft, didi, a taxi, or public transit?

I would hope that the long term effect of this is that people behave in ubers. I personally have had friends throw up in them or drunkenly harass female drivers.

whytai··on Google users in UK to lose EU data protection – sources
Why is Poland also listed as an exception?
whytai··on Amazon has long ruled the cloud – now it must fend off rivals
They hated him, because he said the truth. Azure also does not run sharepoint, teams, and it didn't run skype.
whytai··on Personal information and ads on Twitter
Is this against GDPR?