whakim

13 ms·

121.
by whakim 3y ago
As long as you’re appealing to “common sense” at any level then people will disagree. 1 in 10 people think piloting a commercial airliner over the park violates a “no vehicles in the park” rule, which seems crazy to me but obviously logical
122.
by whakim 3y ago
But you’re just moving the goalposts. According to your rules, a toy car should be banned. Should we define in excruciating detail what a car is? Should we define an exact decibel level at which the noise threshold kicks in? People will alw
123.
by whakim 3y ago
But if you look at the graph of response sets it clearly isn’t “common sense.” Most people don’t agree and don’t come close to agreeing and, as Dan says, this is a fairly trivial example which doesn’t delve into corner cases.
124.
by whakim 3y ago
But what is a "real thing"? I would argue that photography is a medium for understanding a deeper underlying reality - just like our own brains and sense-perceptions are, but with different mechanics. The angle with which you take
125.
by whakim 3y ago
At the scale of hundreds of millions of embeddings (the most I have experience with) pgvector has some sharp edges. Vacuuming is a huge one; it’s difficult to vacuum indices that are hundreds of GBs in size. And reasoning about recall is th
126.
by whakim 3y ago
But we’ve learned over the decades that footguns should usually be avoided and discouraged rather than made easy to use like Ruby does. There’s a reason we aren’t writing GOTOs anymore, GC is a thing in all but the most performance-critical
127.
by whakim 3y ago
The biggest problem with Vroom (and its peers) from a business perspective is that they’re trying to operate a two-sided marketplace with incredibly low margins. On the sell side they’re competing with Carmax and co., which means they’re tr
128.
by whakim 3y ago
I'd also start with pgvector (it's easy to switch), but the limitations around hybrid search and filtering + ANN are real and if you're doing any kind of RAG-like thing it's worth being aware of them upfront. pgvector is
129.
by whakim 3y ago
As engineers I feel we should show a little bit of sympathy for difficulties involving naming ;) In all seriousness though, Free File pretty much does what it says on the tin (allows low-income taxpayers to file for free); it has existed si
130.
by whakim 3y ago
I'm pretty sure we agree; I misread your statement about "inherent differences in their respective support for slavery" as an implication that Britain would have been just as opposed to the slave trade (and later slavery) in
131.
by whakim 3y ago
Do you actually know that the only source of the data is a static CSV? Or is that just speculation? I think we can dispense with the risky argument, because this API has existed for years without issue. When you make the argument that &quot
132.
by whakim 3y ago
I’m not sure if you’re serious (given the spammy nature of your posts, I’m inclined to believe not), but given that REST is the de facto standard for exchange of information between machines across the internet, I think the onus is on you t
133.
by whakim 3y ago
But British opposition to slavery did not pick up steam in earnest until the late 18th and early 19th century, and at first was mostly limited to opposition to slavery in the British home islands and the transatlantic slave trade. Neither o
134.
by whakim 3y ago
REST APIs are extremely battle-tested, easy to integrated with, and far more mainstream than BigQuery public datasets or any other niche technology that may or may not exist at some point in the future. If cost is truly an issue, perhaps th
135.
by whakim 3y ago
The embedding step is certainly slower than clustering, but the memory requirements blow up pretty fast when you're doing density-based clustering on a dataset of even, say, 100k embeddings.
136.
by whakim 3y ago
I don't think this issue is specific to the IRS; it has much more to do with how the government is funded - via a series of Continuing Resolutions which make it really difficult to achieve any sort of long-term planning or projects. In
137.
by whakim 3y ago
In this particular case, this funding does change that priority. Janet Yellen has instructed that "any additional resources—including any new personnel or auditors that are hired—shall not be used to increase the share of small busin
138.
by whakim 3y ago
The article says that "in one possible scenario included in the agency’s report to Congress, the I.R.S. could fill out tax returns with information it already has." We can only hope :)
139.
by whakim 3y ago
This claim is not correct in several ways. The $80B was not earmarked for hiring agents; that was an additional $80B for the entire agency spread over 10 years. While some of that money might be used to hire additional agents, it will also
140.
by whakim 3y ago
I certainly respect your take. I just don't think that XUL is a killer feature that vast numbers of people are clamoring for.
141.
by whakim 3y ago
I don't understand this oft-regurgitated opinion that Mozilla needs to "focus all their resources on browser development." Mozilla does focus a large portion of their resources on browser development. Firefox is fast enough
142.
by whakim 3y ago
This is addressed in the article. As Hacker News readers and expert computer users, we have a bag of tricks that we can reach into in order to make our searches perform better. With a similar level of effort and an expert user's intuit
143.
by whakim 3y ago
But there's still plenty of signal. It isn't as if there are no working YouTube downloaders, or factually correct explanations of how transistors work. It's just that search engines don't know how to (or don't care
144.
by whakim 3y ago
I really don't think that's true. For example, page 29 of your link describes "Lowest Quality Content." Most of the search results that the author rated as spammy or scammy clearly fit these guidelines, which means that
145.
by whakim 3y ago
But the author tried Kagi and the results don't appear to be noticeably different, filled with scammy adspam just like Google and Bing. Kagi's results seem to mostly aggregate existing search engines [1], so this isn't much o
146.
by whakim 3y ago
I'm pretty skeptical of the tipping section. Sure, it might work, but the two examples are a bit suspect. The first example relies on a tweet lacking in context that doesn't actually show the system prompts and outputs. (The autho
147.
by whakim 3y ago
Storage limitations from the 80's (as described by sibling comments) is one reason, but there's also another: which characters are considered their own graph (versus variants) is a somewhat fraught geopolitical issue, especially w
148.
by whakim 3y ago
I always see comments like this on HN, and I struggle to understand why. Firefox is plenty fast. Its interface is extremely similar to most of its competitors. It works well. What special sauce do you expect Mozilla to implement that'l
149.
by whakim 3y ago
I agree that this is a bold claim. However, tax-deductible philanthropy is profoundly undemocratic, because it effectively amounts to everyone else subsidizing the philanthropic preferences of the ultra-wealthy. I think the onus is therefor
150.
by whakim 3y ago
I will say the 15 Pro is a little smaller than the 14 Pro, and while it isn't a small phone per se, it's a lot smaller than most Android flagships. That's something at least.

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