projectileboy

It is impossible to overstate how utterly horrible and dystopian this is. I have not been one to reject AI, but they seem hell-bent on driving me to that conclusion.

For anyone interested in digging, check out Karatsuba's algorithm (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karatsuba_algorithm), Strassen matrix multiplication (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strassen_algorithm), and Toom-Cook multiplication (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toom–Cook_multiplication).

Of course, there are also implementation considerations. For example you can speed up Strassen by recursively breaking down the matrix into sub-matrices in parallel, but only down to a point - once the sub-matrices get small enough, it becomes faster to simply do a straight Strassen computation. And it depends on your hardware. For something seemingly so simple, you can go pretty far down a rabbit hole!

More enjoyable to read this within a broader context: https://pdos.csail.mit.edu/6.824/

Congratulations! This is incredibly well done. Please consider creating a “part ii” that expands on the entire thread to one level of greater detail.

Frankly, this doesn’t matter. What matters is that an unofficial agency of the executive branch is deciding unilaterally - with no oversight - to stop payments that were voted on by Congress. Even if Musk and team were geniuses and doing brilliant work, it would be outside the rule of law.

Hacker News tries to avoid political news in general, but it seems warranted in this case because Musk is a major figure in the tech industry, and also because it appears he’s using a small number of young engineers from his companies to gain access to and control over systems at OPM.

I just picked this one at random today; took about a minute to find something: https://www.startribune.com/mom-ids-son-as-teen-left-with-br...

I’m relieved to read that racism isn’t as bad as I think it is.

This is a weird hill to die on for a billionaire. Is wokeness a problem? If I recast it as an assault on free speech, sure. But exactly how bad is this assault? I sure hear a lot of really rich people talk about wokeness, despite the proclaimed suppression of their speech. And is it as much of a problem as racism, sexism, homophobia or other forms of bigotry endemic in our society?

I live in Minnesota. I hear what you’re saying, but I would say two things: in general, teenagers here are not being somehow denied farm work that they really want but is unavailable; and there’s a pretty big difference between Minnesota/Iowa summer heat and picking cantaloupes in inland California. The big difference being about 20 degrees on average, with more sun.

I apologize in advance for not offering something constructive to say. I just wish anyone here who is younger could see the difference between what the promise of the web was in ‘95 and what it has become. Such a burning pile of trash, it’s heartbreaking.

Is there some reason why Edward Tufte isn’t being properly being credited anywhere? This is copyrighted material.

Hear, hear. The design subordinates to clear presentation of static content. Most newspapers and magazines would benefit from a similar approach.

Would you be willing to elaborate on the ways in which the $200/month subscription is better than the $20/month subscription? I’m genuinely curious - not averse to paying more, depending on the value.

The difference between what cocoa farmers get paid vs what chocolate companies make selling their product is so enormous that I find this article incredibly offensive. But the chocolate industry has a very long history of this kind of shameless exploitation.

I’d be surprised if they had, working on what you work on! I’ll bet you would find them interesting in other ways, though. I’ve had a ton of success using them as study guides in other areas (e.g., biology).

I read most of them with my kids when they were little; I used to just gloss over certain panels…

I can’t really be too specific. But I can say that at least one pattern of problem it tackles very effectively is: “we’re migrating from X to Y, and it’s going to touch a ton of files, and the nature of that migration is much more involved than what we can reasonably hope to accomplish with sed and a bash script.”

I understand why you would have that impression, but for what it's worth, my team has been helping other teams internally to use Devin, and we also did due diligence and experimented with OpenHands, as well as try rolling our own solution. While OpenHands is cool for what it is, neither it nor our homegrown solution came within a mile of doing what Devin could do.

I work with a team at Nubank that has been using Devin. I would say that it doesn't quite make sense to compare it to Claude 3.5, because Devin isn't really like Copilot; it's more like an assistant to which you can assign a project. We're using it only for particular use cases, but for those particular use cases it's like having a superpower.

Thank you for this comment; articles on the rising costs of college almost always uncritically treat it like a law of nature, and rarely have I seen articles that attempt to study in-depth the extent to which college administrations have become bloated, self-perpetuating jobs programs. All while at the same time departments are cut, professors are expected to do more with less, and more and more classes are pushed on to adjunct faculty who get paid a pittance. Until this is addressed, any efforts to improve the ways in which students finance their education is just a band-aid.

I think this was mentioned in a Paul Graham essay from many years ago, but half the battle in tackling a new area of study is finding out what the best books (or papers) are. There aren’t that many, and yet it’s hard to know what they are if you aren’t already well-versed in the field.

They express behaviors, yes, but they do not express intent, or any broader context. I’ve been on more than one project where well-meaning developers forbid comments and additional documentation because they felt that the only documentation should be the tests, and the result was always a complete lack of understanding as to why anything worked the way it did.

As soon as they got bought out by a private equity firm (10 years back) it marked the beginning of a long, slow end.

I can’t say enough good things about The Craftsman Blog. Was my primary source for learning how to rebuild my 100-year-old double-hung windows. Lots of good stuff to explore.

I feel like I’ve been looking at the same marketing slide deck for 10 years from these people. Wake me when they ship something.

Fascinating, but I really wish this work was being published as a series of papers in peer-reviewed journals. Otherwise it’s hard to take the work seriously.

I have said this a million times and I will say it again: anyone who thinks the US healthcare system isn’t a flaming train wreck hasn’t used it much. Or is rich enough enough not to care.

I get it. And to be clear, I have seen SPAs that justified their existence. I just feel very strongly that for most of the apps I use on a regular, daily basis (email, messaging, newspapers, bank, etc), SPAs are just totally unnecessary.

A hill I will die on: the users NEVER asked for them. The UI community likes to pretend otherwise, but the users never asked for SPAs. What users want is the simplest, clearest and fastest possible experience, that changes only gradually and only when necessary. SPAs often stumble on simple and clear, and straight up explode on fast.

OMG it feels so good to not be the lone voice in the woods. I would say about 3/4 of my frustrations as a user are from sites that should have simply been built with HTML + CSS and minimal Javascript. The front end community most days feels like a jobs program.

He would have to deny it, even if there were none of the shenanigans surrounding all this.