2
points
barishnamazov
Joined 434 karma
barish.me
- barishnamazov parentThe production quality of this video is almost too good to be true! Kudos to Yukidama!
- 6 points
- Also want to share B- tree implementation from the Algorithmica HPC book: https://en.algorithmica.org/hpc/data-structures/b-tree/
- > You often need a real environment to iterate, even for the agent: debug, inspect logs, run the dev server, and use the frontend to actually verify behavior. Without that shared runtime, the agent’s feedback loop isn't tight enough, and you can't verify changes as well.
Cloud environments can do that (e.g., Github Copilot). They can even spin up playwright and take screenshots of an app and do frontend tests.
- 2 points
- arXiv creator[0] is one of the co-authors, which gives me better assurance on data collection aspect of the paper.
- The key finding here is the reversal of the relationship between writing complexity and paper quality.
Traditionally, sophisticated writing correlated with higher-quality research (or at least higher status/effort). This paper argues that post-LLM, we are seeing a flood of manuscripts that use complex, polished language but contain substantively weaker scientific contribution.
They claim LLM adoption increases output by up to 89%, which is a massive productivity shock. If the cost of generating looks-like-science prose drops to near zero, the signal-to-noise ratio in peer review is going to crash. We are entering the era of the polished turd, and likely worse case of publish and perish [0].
- Right. In my previous work, I wrote a custom XML formatter for making it look table-like which was our use case. Of course, an ideal solution would have been to move away from XML, but can't run away from legacy.
- I appreciate the polish for non-technical folks, but "clipboard formatter" feels like a feature, not a product. All of this can be done with AutoHotKey script for Windows and similar open-source tools for the other OS. And given how sensitive is clipboard data (passwords, keys, etc.) using a third-party app feels a bit uncomfortable.
- This is pretty cool, but I hope it isn't used for human-readable config files. TOML/YAML are better options for that. Git diff also can be tricky with realignment, etc.
I can see potential usefulness of this is in debug mode APIs, where somehow comments are sent as well and are rendered nicely. Especially useful in game dev jsons.
- Extremely sad that this happened, especially on a holiday night. My condolences and may the injured recover soon.
- 2 points
- 4 points
- Why is Bun marked as no on node_modules (I assume it means NodeJS compatibility)? I have large applications and never had NodeJS compatibility issues (it has worked even when Bun wasn't officially supported).
For benchmarks, I'd try to compare Bun's speed using its own Bun.serve instead of Express or Fastify.
- 8 points
- 46 points
- The original source is from Reuters article [0].
It is profoundly ironic that Meta is apparently using cloaking techniques against regulators. Cloaking is a black-hat technique where you show one version of a landing page to the ad review bot (e.g., a blog about health) and a different version to the actual user (e.g., a diet pill scam).
Meta has spent years building AI to detect when affiliates cloak their links. Now, according to this report, Meta is essentially cloaking the ads themselves from journalists and regulators by likely filtering based on user profiling, IP ranges, or behavioral signals. They are using the sophisticated targeting tools intended for advertisers to target the "absence" of scrutiny.
[0] https://www.reuters.com/investigations/meta-created-playbook...
- Thanks for sharing insight. I also feel like a couple decades ago, technology was also reasonably simple and understandable. Right now, everything is obfuscated and complex. Maybe that's natural, but makes it harder to get excited about seeing new things.
Similar to you, I don't care about mobile phones anymore. Instead of fancy hardware or features what I care is simple, secure, and private phone (open-source OS). I used to get excited on new models.
Recently a couple of my friends were talking about "Telegram vs Whatsapp." One is better because it has this feature, etc. They asked my opinion too. I don't care which is better, I only use them because I have to use them for contacting family and some friends. I just need the send text and image functionality (and I don't use it for private / secure texting).
- I'm 22 and since late college things don't excite me the way they used to, even when I enjoy them. I sometimes wonder if this is what happens when people get older and happened to me early, or if it's just a personality trait.
The 'vicarious firsts' framing doesn't quite land for me because of that, but the 'urgency that won't let you drift' observation resonates. Maybe what matters isn't renewed wonder but having something -- family, friends, caring about the world -- that demands presence. The forcing function matters more than the feelings themselves.
My dad always says something related in nature: caring about and loving your family makes you a better person more than it helps your family.
- I think the better argument is (of course, a wrong one), "I trust that big companies won't share my stuff publicly".
- One of my computer science professors from MIT has installed a smart home. I was over for a dinner and he told me a story about how he hit a third-party API rate limit on opening his garage door. Apparently, these things aren't self-hosted for the most part.
- > "I don't need to care about privacy because I have nothing to hide." is an argument that I have heard countless times. I found this argument difficult to counter in the past, yet deep-down I knew the reasoning was flawed.
This one is pretty easy to counter. Just ask the person to hand you their phone and go through their messages and photos. There's no one that wouldn't feel restless about it.
- Thanks for sharing! I have been dreaming of writing (or better yet, finding!) a similar book for a couple years now. A hands-on guide that peels back the layers of abstraction to teach how things actually work under the hood by building them yourself. I hope one of us gets to it one day :-)
- The "lies" described here are essentially the definition of weakly typed programming, even in statically typed languages.
Functional languages like ML/Haskell/Lisp dialects has no lies built in for decades, and it's good to see the mainstream programming (Java, TS, C++, etc.) to catch up as well.
There are also cute benefits of having strong schemas for your API as well -- for example, that endpoint becomes an MCP for LLMs automatically.
- Happy New Year from Azerbaijan!
- Don't want to be "that guy," but Euler's constant and Catalan's constant aren't proven to be transcendental yet.
For context, a number is transcendental if it's not the root of any non-zero polynomial with rational coefficients. Essentially, it means the number cannot be constructed using a finite combination of integers and standard algebraic operations (addition, subtraction, multiplication, division, and integer roots). sqrt(2) is irrational but algebraic (it solves x^2 - 2 = 0); pi is transcendental.
The reason we haven't been able to prove this for constants like Euler-Mascheroni (gamma) is that we currently lack the tools to even prove they are irrational. With numbers like e or pi, we found infinite series or continued fraction representations that allowed us to prove they cannot be expressed as a ratio of two integers.
With gamma, we have no such "hook." It appears in many places (harmonics, gamma function derivatives), but we haven't found a relationship that forces a contradiction if we assume it is algebraic. For all we know right now, gamma could technically be a rational fraction with a denominator larger than the number of atoms in the universe, though most mathematicians would bet the house against it.
- Law 20 seems to express the state of most startups these days:
> "A bad design with a good presentation is doomed eventually. A good design with a bad presentation is doomed immediately."
- I like that this relies on generating SQL rather than just being a black-box chat bot. It feels like the right way to use LLMs for research: as a translator from natural language to a rigid query language, rather than as the database itself. Very cool project!
Hopefully your API doesn't get exploited and you are doing timeouts/sandboxing -- it'd be easy to do a massive join on this.
I also have a question mostly stemming from me being not knowledgeable in the area -- have you noticed any semantic bleeding when research is done between your datasets? e.g., "optimization" probably means different things under ArXiv, LessWrong, and HN. Wondering if vector searches account for this given a more specific question.