jssmith

6 godzin temudiscuss

I get it. But I never would have until I built muscle memory for the keyboard shortcut.

10 miesięcy temudiscuss

I see JSON parse errors on occasion when using OpeanAI structured outputs that resolve upon retry. It seems it’s giving instructions to the LLM but validation is still up to the caller. Wondering if others see this too.

jssmith

w zeszłym rokudiscuss

We've been focusing on indexing but query rewrites are probably next.

It looks like LLMs can do a pretty good job at generating ideas, particularly if you prompt them right.

After that, you have to: 1/ make sure that the SQL produces the same results, 2/ see what the query planner will actually do with it, 3/ see whether it improves performance.

As you point out, the data makes a difference, so you need production data statistics, at a minimum, to do this well.

jssmith

w zeszłym rokudiscuss

Right. Why build another MCP server for Postgres?

There's a lot of value in just getting a database connection. But the LLMs hit limits pretty quickly when it comes to index tuning, etc.

Classical algorithms still have their place.

jssmith

w zeszłym rokudiscuss

Confused about the new US tariffs? We built an interactive US Tariff Calculator—a simple tool to help you instantly calculate the new tariffs per country.

jssmith

5 lat temudiscuss

Yes, but it is more restrictive, e.g., it is not Turing complete. I’m not sure whether this directly addresses Spectre risks though.

An analysis of Spectre and software isolation is here:

https://arxiv.org/abs/1902.05178

jssmith

5 lat temudiscuss

Fair enough. American companies (and people) definitely have a home bias. I guess to be constructive, I would suggest that perhaps there are parallels in your country.

jssmith

5 lat temudiscuss

I don't remember exactly how it broke the first time, but the cognitive overhead shows up in various places. E.g., start a new project, create a branch, then merge back to master... oh wait, it's main now? But then I'm back to an old project, or another person's project, so let me look up what name I need to be using, etc...

jssmith

5 lat temudiscuss

I want to share my own reactions to the name change since this is a really interesting topic. For context, I'm an African American, so many of my ancestors were slaves.

  - The first time it occurred to me that "master" in this context could offend anyone was when GitHub changed the name (and broke my workflow).
  - My immediate reaction was, "this change is by white people for white people," where "white" means anyone who isn't black.
  - My next reaction was, "they may be changing the name for the wrong reasons, but the change is brilliant."

Let me explain a little more. Whether motivated purely by virtue signaling or by more genuine intentions, changing the name doesn't fix any of the problems that black people face. The article explains this well.

What's powerful about this name change is that it pushes us to alter a habit, in my case one embedded deeply in my fingers, something that I do every day without realizing that I'm doing it. Thus it is a useful reminder of the implicit bias that contributes to the lack of diversity in tech. Never mind that the old name was harmless, the change brings repeated awareness to an important topic, and it reaches a the developer community in a targeted way.

So, next time you are annoyed that you have to fix a script or you accidentally type master when you needed to type main, please just take a deep breath, change the name, and remember to reflect upon whether you have are subconscious habits or biases that work against diversity in tech.

jssmith

6 lat temudiscuss

Yes, the idea is that the cloud provider should offer something like this. We intercepted system calls to simulate what it would look like.

jssmith

6 lat temudiscuss

Thanks for sharing your writeup and the potential use cases therein.

We've been building an experimental shared file system that specifically targets the FaaS setting. It supports SQLite and gets big performance gains over NFS/EFS, especially on read-mostly workloads, due to improved local caching and lock elision. See: https://arxiv.org/abs/2009.09845

jssmith

6 lat temudiscuss

Would any of these be useful for working with Johns Hopkins Covid-19 data? There are some web interfaces but analyzing and visualizing with Python would be more flexible.

(https://data.humdata.org/dataset/novel-coronavirus-2019-ncov...).

jssmith

6 lat temudiscuss

This capability is compelling from a public-health standpoint but has serious privacy implications. It looks like every phone shares a unique id, but encrypts it in a frequently rotating way, using a public key provided by a government authority.

This raises a few questions for me: - Is an entirely decentralized solution to this problem possible? - Aside from placing trust in the government, are the privacy protections adequate?

jssmith

6 lat temudiscuss

If you’ve used some heavyweight framework then performance will probably be hard to add later. If you wrote the code yourself then I’m with Knuth, it’s not a big deal to optimize it later and that’s a much better way to go.

I’ve found the following rubric helpful for building distributed systems: 1/ correctness, 2/ reliability, 3/ performance. Credit: CochroachDB team.

jssmith

7 lat temudiscuss

One startup that’s working on this is unitQ: https://www.unitq.com

jssmith

8 lat temudiscuss

I think this has been the case for the case for the past 20 years, probably longer, though I'm optimistic that improvement is possible. E.g., perhaps serverless computing is inefficient today but it could help improve hardware utilization.

jssmith

8 lat temudiscuss

> Many researchers are now arguing that we should, more generally, move away from using statistics to make all-or-none decisions and instead use them for "estimation". In other words, instead of asking whether an effect is null or not, we should ask how big the effect is likely to be given the data.

I couldn’t agree more with this statement, and even moreso in a business setting than in research. It’s just so easy to get caught up in statistical significance and lose perspective on practical significance. I’ve found confidence intervals most informative and easy to understand.

jssmith

8 lat temudiscuss

This view on sharing hardware seems too pessimistic to me. Strong isolation should be achievable when it is the design objective and and priority.

On the end-user/device side, JavaScript has proven that sharing hardware with untrusted code is just too valuable to give up, and a similar dynamic continues to play out in the cloud.

I'm also happy whenever a headline brings attention to these types of problems because I believe we can fix them.

jssmith

8 lat temudiscuss

As a command-line tool it could serve as a more powerful replacement for unix utilities that I often use for simple analysis jobs: sort, uniq, wc, awk, sometimes cut and sed. I'm going to give it a try.

It looks like textql loads everything into an in-memory SQLite instance, whereas I'd really like to see an approach that uses the SQLite's virtual table mechanism (https://sqlite.org/vtab.html), which would avoid the loading step and perhaps make streaming processing possible.

jssmith

9 lat temudiscuss

This is a really interesting comparison. Plumbing jobs have a reputation for high pay, as do jobs in tech. Is hooking up APIs as miserable as fixing faucets? Maybe, but I really think that self-reinforcing cultural patterns play a big role in perpetuating these gender imbalances: women opt out because of culture that results when there are few women.

The women with the most other options are perhaps most likely to go elsewhere. Some of the men who have the most options may be right behind them.

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