ANTIREZ

For many years people said that Hacker News was ruined, full of noobs for the most part, and I kept saying: it's not that bad! Not like the first years, but it's still a cool place. Well now, in 2024: OK YOU WERE RIGHT, HAPPY NOW?

I love this trick when traversing graphs where I can't visit already visited nodes. At every scanning: graph->epoch++, then as I visit a node, node->last_visit = graph->epoch. Much faster than a collection of visited nodes, but threading hostile... Other alternative: bitmap + node_id, but sucks.

Concurrent programming is hard, but also so oddly satisfying and the design space is larger than expected. Once I'll see this program that I'm writing working very well with read/write locks, optimistic insertion and the like, I'm sure it will be a good few seconds (after which life sucks as usual).

Please note that I'm also at @antirez.bsky.social. I see Bluesky gaining traction. I'll post here and there for now, but I hope one will win and the community will be back glued together.

BREAKING I may add SSL to my blog in the next days.

HNSW: you write the first implementation and think, wow, that was simple, just following the paper general idea. A few weeks and iterations later: wow, I had to invent half the algorithm that was missing in the paper.

Was playing with random projections for dimensionality reduction but had to stop and think: how can today CPUs be *so damn fast*?

I pip live my life the --break-system-packages way.

My comment on HN about open hardware in the context of 3D printers. Worth sharing I guess, since this dynamics are going to be central in the future I guess.

Cool, $200 for a model that can't remotely match $20 Claude Sonnet. This will be a huge hit I guess.

I really hope that the BlueSky firehose will remain open. It's such a great live dataset to do all kind of experiments!

Yesterday I was in a call with my daughter's teachers about an exchange project. They reported they are unable to do exchanges with UK because families refuse to send children here in Sicily :( This doesn't happen with France, for instance. They don't understand causes to fix: UK friends, hints?

So @josefprusa just unveiled a printer that will change the short term story of the 3D printing market, storngly limiting Bambu advantage. Yet I believe that us loyal MK4 and then MK4s kit buyers (or MK4s directly) with purchase proof, should get kit at lower price.

nomic-embed-text via ollama seems to work great for small amounts of text, but the embeddings are apparently a bit less semantically sharp with 2000/3000 tokens. Anyone noticed this as well?