That's not the whole explanation for their success, though. They could have cratered after that for all sorts of reasons. A large part of how they succeeded was the discovery of the ad model. A lot of people forget that ads were all manually negotiated before Google offered self-serve ad creation (Overture did the bidding system first, but Google was better).

They also starting building on "big data" very early on; AdWords reused the same tech that drove relevance ranking (PageRank and click-through feedback loop), so by the time competitors were scrambling to compete, Google had amassed tons of organic data that were only available thanks to their scale, and not something competitors could bootstrap.

But none of that would have mattered if the product wasn't good. I started using Google around 1998. The childish design was off-putting at first, and made me feel uncertain about whether it was a serious brand that would last — this was the age where new search engines appeared all the time (I used HotBot a lot myself) — but the search quality and speed was undeniable.

These days I often write queries like this (especially when doing exploratory ad hoc queries, but also in apps) even when it's not necessary to use a CTE:

    WITH
      a AS (
        SELECT ... FROM ... WHERE ... etc.
      )
    SELECT * FROM a

This has a bunch of nice benefits. For example, it allows me to add steps incrementally, and to "comment out" a step I can simply change the next step's input to read from the preceding step. Each step can be read and understood in isolation.

I work a lot with Postgres, ClickHouse, and SQLite, and generally find that the database inlines and optimizes CTEs, and challenges mostly concern performance traps (like IN or EXISTS) that allly to non-CTE situations as well.

I'm a strict vegetarian myself and have been for about ten years. But as much as I love plant foods, I absolutely miss meat — I was never a big meat eater, but I would enjoy burgers, salami, pepperoni, bacon, Italian meatballs, prosciutto, things like that.

I dislike Beyond products, which taste a bit weird and metallic to me. The only imitation meat product I've remotely enjoyed is Impossible Burger. Nobody has managed to make anything else — if someone would nail plant-based pepperoni or bacon I would be all over it.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47387586

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People who say you need adjust your posture are mostly incorrect. Your body will assume a slouching position after a while no matter what. You cannot consciously will yourself to just "sit better". Good office chair and placing your screen at the right height do help enormously; these are things that make your body adopt a certain posture subconsciously. But they're not a complete fix.

The only real fix is to work out. Bad posture resolves itself over time if you build up strength in your muscles and tendons, all the way from your legs to your neck, the whole shebang. You can think of your body as a piece of rope. If not adequately exercised, the individual strings will start to sag and the rope goes floppy. Training tightens the whole thing into a stable, tight bundle.

You don't need to go full "gym bro" or even enjoy it. But you need to do regular strength exercises — squats, deadlifts, crunches, the usual — every week. You don't need to do super heavy lifting or intense cardio, just a healthy, generalized workout routine focused on the whole body. In theory you can do this at home. But as someone who's patently not a gym bro, the only way I was able to do this is to get a personal trainer.

I found a wonderful gym where they did small, four-person group classes. There are many of these around, and while they may be pricier than regular gym membership, they're worth it. You get a personalized program with a trainer who monitors your progress carefully and corrects your form and technique, and keeps you motivated.

I wouldn't work out on my own as I would find excuses to stay away, but by setting up a regular appointment twice a week, I kind of forced myself into it. And when you have a trainer you see twice a week, it's much harder to cancel just because you don't feel like working out that day.

Lastly: Stretches (like the classic "stand against a wall" tricks you find online) do not work, because you're just temporarily stretching muscles and tendons. These need to be actively worked out in to build up, and stretching can actually be counterproductive. This is one reason why physiotherapists typically don't recommend yoga and Pilates, which put too much emphasis on stretching rather than strength exercises.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47380042

Points: 3

# Comments: 0

Solaris by Lem is perhaps the one above all. Lem wrote several of these "inscrutable alien first contact" novels: His Master's Voice, The Invincible, Fiasco, and Eden are basically all variations on this theme, each one unique and highlighting a different aspect of humans' inability to understand the universe. The last three are a little dated now, but still enjoyable to read. HMV is rather dry, a Borgesian essay on an investigation into an alien signal, with lots of references to fictional scientific papers. (Len also wrote two collections of very Borgesian essays that are basically reviews of fictional books: A Perfect Vacuum and Imaginary Magnitude. They're interesting and funny, but I wouldn't put them among his most entertaining work.)

Roadside Picnic by Arkady and Boris Strugatsky is also a masterpiece. They also have a few stories about unseen aliens manipulating the history of humanity by placing traps or transforming humans into infiltrators. The Max Kammerer books (e.g. Beetle in the Anthill) involve this storyline and are very good, probably not well known today.

I tried Tchaikovsky (both Children of Time and Shroud) and found him to be completely unengaging as a writer. Just really dull writing and flat characters. Watts and Reynolds are much better writers. Watts in particular can really pack a punch.

The process control policy, that's kind of niche and should definitely not be something agents are always allowed to do, so having a shorthand flag like you added in that pull request is the right choice.

I'm sure Anthropic and the other major players will catch up and add better sandboxing eventually, but for now, this tool has been exactly what I needed — many thanks!

I also wonder if this could have be a plugin or MCP server? I was using this plugin [1] for a bit, and it appears to use a "PreToolUse" that modifies every tool invocation. The benefit here would be that you could even change the Safehouse settings inside a session, e.g. turn process control on or off.

[1] https://mksg.lu/blog/context-mode

I've seen sandbox policy documents for agents before, but this is the first ready-to-use app I've come across.

I've only had a couple of points of friction so far:

- Files like .gitconfig and .gitignore in the home folder aren't accessible, and can't be made accessible without granting read only access to the home folder, I think?

- Process access is limited, so I can't ask Claude to run lldb or pkill or other commands that can help me debug local processes.

More fine-grained control would be really nice.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47301085

Points: 823

# Comments: 178