Sometimes I wonder if anyone else feels there is a halo effect around certain personalities on this site. When I see someone ending nearly every comment with a link to their blog or pet project, it gives me bad vibes, as if they have ulterior motives. Especially if a majority of their blog posts are content lifted from elsewhere with minimal additions. Perhaps this is just hustle culture, and YC alum status confers immunity from these types of criticisms. Perhaps my only wish is that other voices would bubble to the top in some of these threads.
In any case I’m truly grateful for this site as a whole, the good and the bad.
> When I see someone ending nearly every comment with a link to their blog or pet project
There is a rule specifically forbidding this, but it's been made quite clear that certain users are above this rule, to the point that the moderators themselves will show up to tell people off if they bring it up.
It's a way to discover their content - content you might miss if you only go on HN once or twice a day.
HN is great for diversity of topics, tech news, random discussions with tech-celebs etc., but e.g. Simon's blog is the best content there is on what the latest LLM gizmo is and how well it works.
The appetite HN has for this kind of naked self-promotion is really something. Get posted (even if by someone else) a few too many times to /g/ and you'll be regularly rebuked with "buy an ad" from then on, but HN just looks the other way, and the "haters" calling it out get flagged, at least until the pattern becomes conspicuous and obnoxious enough that even the more gullible lot of HNers start to notice.
I don't necessarily disagree, but to me the idea of self promotion like this is fascinating because it's not something I personally feel comfortable doing. Even if I know I'm only sharing a link because I genuinely think it would be useful, I would worry that in doing so there is an underlying self-serving reason. Idk.
I'm horrible at sales, selling myself, etc. Even if I believe that a product is genuinely useful, the act of selling feels like it undermines everything else.
In the aughts, I had a blog, which I hated re-reading. With the benefit of time and experience (growing up, they call it), I understood that cringe to be the consequence of trying to look smart and/or play to a gallery.
Your instinct is probably right, if you feel some comment of yours is "sleazy" or "obnoxiously self-serving". The jedi mind trick is to not stop there, but to use that cringe moment as a signal for some introspection.
Think about what sort of a share would make you happy to share? What would you like to see more of in the world? Try to be that person. Do you need to share it publicly right away? Or just bang something out in a markdown file and rant to a pal or two?
Only by doing it, did I properly grasp the fact that I just want to share stuff. And now, I tend to like what past-me shared. Even if he was dead wrong. Besides, I've caught myself re-reading a post from some years ago, because of course, I forgot what I was thinking back then. Or needed a reference from one of the copious footnotes / endnotes I habitually slap in there.
Appropriate framing---combined with action (speech, sharing, conversation) that flows from said framing---makes all the difference. For me, that framing is "learn generously": https://www.recurse.com/self-directives#learn-generously
Publishing one's mind can be a pretty vulnerable act.
It often feels like a confession of ignorance. Often it is a confession of ignorance. However, now I don't really care if I look stupid or am wrong on the Internet. Because being wrong, and then making it right is part of the deal! Thus it is, that my website's entire purpose is to help me live that value. To be available to anybody who might find use for it; including the source code.
In practice that materialises as this:
- Paradox! Above all, be entirely self-serving from an "audience" perspective... The posts are mainly long-form explanations written by me for me, while I tried to figure something out that was not obvious to me. No gallery involved. No analytics, in fact. I have no idea which pages are being read (or not).
- Not infrequently, it applies to so many other people facing the same questions / obstacles I grappled with. And here's the plot twist... Now when I see someone struggle, it behooves me to share my PoV. Not sharing is the "bad" act!
- Technologically, I try to remove all friction from the reader. The site is served as plain HTML and CSS, with excellent lighthouse scores, pleasant reading experience, anonymous RSS feed. Content is CC-licensed, site builder is MIT-licensed. (Screen reader accessibility can definitely use work, but the markup is definitely not a "soup of divs" abomination).
- Certainly not "make money", whatever that means. According to Cloudflare, my site consistently gets ~20K monthly unique visitors (supposedly human / non-bot). I don't even know what that means. It's just "internet number go up".
My real joy is getting the occasional email from some kindred spirit. Once a month someone lights up my life with a delightful conversation. Why? Because I openly welcome it! You can write me too :) https://www.evalapply.org/about.html#standing-invitation
(See, yet another self-share... which I feel fine about, even in a somewhat contentious sub-thread, because I really want to have a proper letter exchange, should you feel up for it!)
TLDR: NAC is a derivative of an amino acid called cysteine, as such it is a precursor for one of the most important antioxidants in the body and it can modulate key metabolic pathways associated with good health across a variety of organs, notably for decades it has been a universally successful antidote for acetaminophen (Tylenol) overdose, it’s available over the counter but NAC is not naturally found in foods, eating cysteine-rich foods like chicken turkey yogurt etc is the next best bet.
No disrespect but paying to verify age feels absurd, let alone putting a private company in charge of what should be an essential function of the government.
How about when you turn 18 or whatever the government gives you a signed JWT that contains your DOB? Anyone who needs to verify your age can check that and simply validate the signature via a public key published by the government.
Simply grab a new JWT when you need it, to ensure privacy.
And sure, sprinkle in some laws that make it illegal to store or share JWTs for clearly fraudulent intents.
> the vast majority of kids don't easily have access to alcohol or cigarettes
This feels like it comes from an affluent perspective, where I grew up it was trivial to acquire these things and much worse, there will always be someone’s older brother etc who will do this for $20 because he’s got nothing to lose.
And they can get porn from all those sites that don't obey laws anyway, like a gazillion torrent sites. So yeah what's the point really. You're not preventing anything.
Also I'm pretty sure we all watched porn when we were under age and didn't get anything from it.
When I was young internet wasn't accessible for consumers yet but I built a pay TV decoder so I could watch their porn at night. It was easy enough. Only did black and white and no audio but it didn't really matter for that purpose :)
Still, I never got the idea that this was normal sex and I've always treated women with the utmost respect.
Fascinatingly, the body already has a mechanism for this: fasting. One of the many beneficial side effects is rapid mucosal atrophy, decreasing villus height and crypt depth.
You can find evidence of this in the literature, but it’s absurdly understudied, because big pharma would rather sell you a subscription to life.
Fortunately there are many good people in the world, especially in the field of medicine, who want to help their patients unconditionally. So there are glimmers of hope, like some of the top cardiologists in the world going against status quo and treating patients with fasting regimes instead of surgery.
Love anecdotes like this! But admittedly I feel a bit lost, so please forgive my ignorance when I ask: why does choosing a subset of k integers at random require deduplication? My naive intuition is that sampling without replacement can be done in linear time (hash table to track chosen elements?). I’m probably not understanding the problem formulation here.
your random number function might return the same number multiple times? So to choose k random but unique numbers you may have to call the random number function more than k times?
Of course my intuition would be that you can do a random shuffle and then take the first k, which is O(N). So I might be misunderstanding.
One of the cooler and lesser known features of JPEG XL is a mode to losslessly transcode from JPEG while achieving ~20% space reduction. It’s reversible too because the original entropy coded bitstream is untouched.
Notably GCP is rolling this out to their DICOM store API, so you get the space savings of JXL but can transcode on the fly for applications that need to be served JPEG.
Only know this because we have tens of PBs in their DICOM store and stand to save a substantial amount of $ on an absurdly large annual bill.
Native browser support is on our wishlist and our contacts indicate the chrome team will get there eventually.
You can do that and that's one of the big appeals. You can serve bost JXL and JPEG from the same source and you8 can actually serve downscaled versions of the JXL image from the original bytestream.
Also OP did say "transcode on the fly" to serve JPEG, not actually storing as JPEG.
I think GP only wants to convert images back for users with legacy browsers, not for everyone. So converting 100% of the images needs more compute money than the amount of storage money it saves, but only converting ~1% of the images on-the-fly would be worth it financially.
Didn't have time to test GCP DICOM store back in the day (not that I'm going to use it, as I've always been working in-house...), but, how is it? Is it a full fledged PACS? a WADO implementation? just a custom API?
This is for when you receive JPEG encoded DICOMs. You transcode them to JPEG XL (saving that 20% of storage) and then, if a modality/viewer/whatever that needs JPEG requests them, they're transcoded on the flight to JPEG losslessly.
Losslessly meaning, with the same quality than the original JPEG received by the storage.
> I strongly believe it is one of the best technologies for AI agents
Do you have any quantitative evidence to support this?
Sincere question. I feel it would add some much needed credibility in a space where many folks are abusing the hype wave and low key shilling their products with vibes instead of rigor.
I have thought about this for all of thirty seconds, but it wouldn't shock me if this was the case. The intuition here is about types, and the ability to introspect them. Agents really love automated guardrails. It makes sense to me that this would work better than RESTish stuff, even with OpenAPI.
Same in terms of time spent. The hypothesis graphql is superior passes the basic sniff test. Assuming graphql does what it says on the tin, which my understanding is it does based on my work with Ent, then the claim it’s better for tool and api use by agents follows from common sense.
This is a task I think is suited for a sub agent that is small in size. It can can take the context beating to query for relevant tools and return only what is necessary to the main agent thread.
I've seen a similar setup with an llm loop integrated with clojure. In clojure, code is data, so the llm can query, execute, and modify the program directly
If you knew GraphQL, you may immediately see it - you ask for specific nested structure of the data, which can span many joins across different related collections. This is not the case with common REST API or CLI for example. And introspection is another good reason.
In any case I’m truly grateful for this site as a whole, the good and the bad.
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