psadri

To be honest I also just read about it. However everytime I pass through Heathrow I think someone really took the idea to heart.

Aside for the algorithms and how well they work, there is a psychological aspect to how people perceive "wait" times. It turns out just waiting is very annoying. But having people do anything during that same wait period → perceived as progress → not upset.

An example iirc was waiting for luggage at the airport. It takes min of x minutes for the first bags to show. In one version, passengers went directly from the gate to the luggage carousel and waited x mins for the first bag → unhappy. Then the airport decided to add a long, round-about "walk" path from the gate to the luggage area that burned some of those minutes → same total "wait" but happier passengers.

A version of this idea was mentioned in one of the Three Body Problem books. There, the bombs were pre-positioned along a path and detonated sequentially like dominos, with a vehicle riding the blast waves.

Sure. But I think they can do it more exhaustively than humanly possible.

I don’t think we have spent enough time on the creativity axis.

When we solve problems we usually follow a heuristically guided energy efficient path. We just prune a lot of possibilities based on our existing knowledge and experience.

Creativity happens when we consciously (or not) go off the beaten path and explore. Most of those explorations are dead ends. But some will yield unexpected connections, patterns etc that we call “creativity” .

An AI system could also go on those kinds of explorations. Today they aren’t it because we are not asking them to.

Be sure to visit the basement museum to see the upside-down string + tiny sandbag weights model that was used to simulate the structure. Pure genius.

Learning to code = understanding a problem, breaking it down into small, manageable pieces, putting all the pieces back together. Debugging. Iterating towards better metrics, etc.

All these are amazingly valuable skills/mindsets that can be highly portable to other "problem solving" domains.

This will cause an extra round trip to the LLM. Which means more $ spent.

I met Om once in SF over a meal. I could tell he was a kind soul. RIP.

The comment about memcached being ephemeral is orthogonal to whether people will use it as if it persistent. If the cache appears to get hit 99.9% of the time and is always there, sooner or later people will write code that relies on that behavior.

Maybe the client libraries can help by returning nulls 10% of time, in dev mode?

We are witnessing the birth of the term "pre-times" you often see in dystopian sci-fi.

It’s interesting that you have to be an A to tell the rest apart.

And good luck if you have a lot Bs that believe they are As.

Claude: configure my Emacs such that … has worked pretty well for me lately.

This is part of the plot in Murakamui's Hard Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World.

I believe 1:1 is fundamentally different than ever 1:2 ratio. So, even if you can have 3 person classrooms, I don't think it would be the same as 1:1 time.

As soon as you are working with more than one student, you have to teach the common denominator, which may or may not (more often not) be the thing that will most help any of the students.

In 1:1, you can identify were the specific gaps in skill, knowledge are and tailor the session to close them. Personalized.

This is even a more interesting idea! I guess similar to the teacher assistant system in higher education. One version of this could be students a year ahead teaching the previous year's students. In elementary school it might be tricky, because besides interest, there are issues are classroom discipline and behavior which might be beyond the capabilities of an 8th year old.

If you had the budget for two teachers, I’d utilize them as one teaching in the traditional way, and the other spending 1:1 times with each student (20 students in a class → 1-1:30 hr / student).

Separately, I love the word “bloke”. I wish it would take off here in the US.

You are correct. I apologize. I seemed to have read the next pragma’s depreciation notice!

Aside from this - SQLite has tons of cool features, like the session extension.

For one it seems to be deprecated.

What do you think is missing? I'm a big SQL fan and the idea of direct SQL to X seems appealing at least on the surface.

Most of the software we interact with is at the end of the day some db tables, queries to read/write, and some ui to read/write. There have been so many times I wished I could just do my own db joins on the underlying db to get the views I wanted. But I can’t - because the app has pre-defined ui/query paths.

With AI, I should be able to ask for things the product designers didn’t anticipate or left out and the system could query, create ui on the fly, etc…

What’s interesting here is that with AI, all our interfaces should evolve away from previous generation rigid forms / buttons / tables etc. towards something more fluid / dynamic / “natural”. Yet all the AI coding is geared towards producing more of the former.

I did the EBC trek last year and at ~4400 meters, we heard about a local Nepalese woman dying from complications of AMS in the local clinic. There might be fishy things going on with the rescues, but the health risks are real.

Related, I’d love an editor that’d let me view/edit identifier names in snake_case and save them as camelCase on disk. If anyone knows of such a thing - please let me know!

Could you share some samples / pointers on how you do this?

They launched March 2025. It’s great that’s considered a long time ago.

Does anyone actually compute / use this key feature? Or do you rely on implicit caching? I wish HN had a comment with a poll feature.

Google Maps or any other aggregator has an inherent interest in market participant diversity. A lot of suppliers would mean competition, which results in ad spend, which result in higher revenue for the aggregator. Same with Google Search.

It's an interesting equilibrium point. They want local businesses to suffer enough to pay up for ads. But also not too much that they die. A good local business that does not need to advertise because it is simply good is actually a burden to the aggregator even though it is exactly what the end users want to see.

In the past, when I was a in position to build a search engine, we took the trouble of always including organically ranked results that were genuinely good, regardless of whether we got paid or not. I felt it was a long term investment into creating real value for our end users and therefore our service.

25 years ago Perl allowed you to express what was in your head 10x more concisely as in other mainstream language (which have since caught up with some of the features).

This was not the best when it came to others (or even yourself 6 months later) reading the code. But it was great for cranking stuff out that was simply too tedious in other languages.