Hacker News Reader

dwagnerkcon 100 Greatest Bird Names of All Time

Predicted Antwren is a new favorite. How interesting.

dwagnerkcon The Self-Tuning Piano [video]

Well, I don't think face palm emojis are support on HN, but certainly this would be the time for one, Ha!

dwagnerkcon The Self-Tuning Piano [video]

Same. I found this because I got my piano tuned yesterday and it bothers me it can't sound that wonderful every day - bothered me even more that it did not seem to exist as a commercial project or DIY solution. I'm in KC so might try to connect, maybe even get it for my Kawai!

dwagnerkcon The Self-Tuning Piano [video]

Supposed to be able to install on any piano, and remove without any sort of permanent damage or anything, can see on this page https://dgdevices.com/gallery

dwagnerkcon Swappa.com for GrapheneOS compatible devices – Stay Away

Well never needed an unlocked bootloader specifically, but have found Swappa to be solid place to buy used gear more generally - purchased 4 used iPhones and 1 Macbook Air so far.

dwagnerkcon Polars Cloud: The Distributed Cloud Architecture to Run Polars Anywhere

they came for the speed but stayed for the API

This is exactly how I would describe my experience. When I talk to others about polars now I usually quickly mention its fast up front, but then mostly talk about the API, its composability, small surface area, etc. are really what make it great to work with. Having these same semantics backed by eager execution, query optimized lazy API, streaming engine, GPU engine, and now distributed auto-magical ephemeral boxes in the sky engine just make it that much better of a tool.

dwagnerkcon The best way to use text embeddings portably is with Parquet and Polars

If you want to try it out. Can lazily load from HF and apply filtering this way.

  df = (
    pl.scan_parquet('hf://datasets/minimaxir/mtg-embeddings/mtg_embeddings.parquet')
    .filter(
        pl.col("type").str.contains("Sorcery"),
        pl.col("manaCost").str.contains("B"),
    )
    .collect()

)

Polars is awesome to use, would highly recommend. Single node it is excellent at saturating CPUs, if you need to distribute the work put it in a Ray Actor with some POLARS_MAX_THREADS applied depending on how much it saturates a single node.

dwagnerkcon Ask HN: What is the most useless project you have worked on?

Them: We need this iOS app. The government of XYZ wants it.

Me (2 months later): Here it is.

Them:

dwagnerkcon A bird's eye view of Polars

I have spent probably over 100 hours now fiddling with data using polars and it is just so enjoyable to use. The interface is the real magic here.

This was captured well in their company announcement blogpost [0]:

> A strict, consistent and composable API. Polars gives you the hangover up front and fails fast, making it very suitable for writing correct data pipelines.

[0] https://pola.rs/posts/company-announcement/

dwagnerkcon OLMo: Accelerating the Science of Language Models [pdf]

That post also very helpfully links to another paper they published alongside the OLMo paper just on the dataset.

Dolma: an Open Corpus of Three Trillion Tokens for Language Model Pretraining Research

https://arxiv.org/abs/2402.00159

dwagnerkcon Ask HN: Who wants to be hired? (June 2023)

404 on resume FYI

dwagnerkcon Getting Started with Tmux

I would add Prefix + z for temporarily maximizing/minimizing pane to the full windows is very useful.

Config doesn't have to be very complicated, I've used this for a while.

  set -g mouse on                # allow mouse
  set -g history-limit 999999999 # unlimited history
  set -sg escape-time 0          # vim esc response faster

dwagnerkcon Pypi.org is running a survey on the state of Python packaging

Try using mamba (https://github.com/mamba-org/mamba)

We ran into many unsolvable or 30m+ solvable envs with conda that mamba handled quickly.

The underlying solver can be used with conda directly as well, but I have not done that (https://www.anaconda.com/blog/a-faster-conda-for-a-growing-c...)

dwagnerkcon Show HN: Leaf – Create interactive coding tutorials

Great idea. Just FYI on mobile home page looks good and even the tutorials look good, but the Explore page was offset so as to be unreadable. Also feel like Explore page should put top 5 examples at the top instead of random test examples.

Will definitely try it out.

dwagnerkcon Ask HN: Which tools have made you a much better programmer?

I've used these plugins to get vim bindings in Juypter Notebook / Lab.

Jupyter Notebook: https://github.com/lambdalisue/jupyter-vim-binding Jupyter Lab: https://github.com/jwkvam/jupyterlab-vim

dwagnerkcon Nototo – Build a unified mental map of notes

Slick. I’ll be following the project.

I’ve been tracking the Munx VR [0] app which is similar, but unable to try it out without a VR headset. They just announced desktop version support so going to give that a go soon along with this Nototo app.

[0] https://linguisticator.com/p/munxvr

dwagnerkcon Americans Are Receiving Unordered Parcels from Chinese E-Criminals

Our great mail mystery has finally been solved!

~50 hair tie packets, ~5 beanies, a scarf, and some makeup.

My wife sometimes wears the light blue beanie they sent and the scarf. I still hear her say "I need a hair tie. Can't find one anywhere" every couple of days. Keep 'em coming guys.