<rss version="2.0" xmlns:dc="http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/" xmlns:atom="http://www.w3.org/2005/Atom"><channel><title>Hacker News: syats</title><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=syats</link><description>Hacker News RSS</description><docs>https://hnrss.org/</docs><generator>hnrss v2.1.1</generator><lastBuildDate>Fri, 19 Jun 2026 13:15:25 +0000</lastBuildDate><atom:link href="https://hnrss.org/user?id=syats" rel="self" type="application/rss+xml"></atom:link><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by syats in "World Capitals Voronoi"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Great work.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Wed, 10 Jun 2026 23:05:18 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48484009</link><dc:creator>syats</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48484009</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48484009</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by syats in "Show HN: GraFlo - Universal ETL tool for property KG (Neo4j, TigerGraph, Arango)"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Cool! These are indeed very common graph-building steps.<p>Thinking outloud here, but some of these were supposed to be solved with RML (<a href="https://rml.io/" rel="nofollow">https://rml.io/</a>) for the RDF paradigm. I witnessed a bit of their evolution: it started with similar operations as GraFlo and eventually they built some support for arbitrary java code. For example, say you want your node ID to be generated by concatenating the values of the firstName column and the lastName column, but only after some weird string normalization (think of making sure everything is utf8)... you woundn't want to make your schema-mappings Turing-complete, so you'd eventually have to allow for calling other functions.  Any way, all of that was for RDF graphs, it's cool to see something like this for property graphs.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Thu, 06 Nov 2025 16:07:10 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45836705</link><dc:creator>syats</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45836705</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45836705</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by syats in "Show HN: OntoCast – ontology-assisted KG generation"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Been building several of these functionalities myself for a while... Happy to know someone more skilled did it also and released it publicly.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Mon, 30 Jun 2025 14:15:49 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44423582</link><dc:creator>syats</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44423582</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44423582</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by syats in "Johnny Decimal: A System to Organize Projects (2015)"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>For anyone interested in how the obsession for organization can end: <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Otlet" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Otlet</a></p>
]]></description><pubDate>Thu, 14 Sep 2023 15:17:04 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37510155</link><dc:creator>syats</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37510155</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37510155</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by syats in "Proofs based on diagonalization help reveal the limits of algorithms"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>I thought for a second the title was missing a (1936).</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Thu, 07 Sep 2023 10:03:58 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37416789</link><dc:creator>syats</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37416789</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37416789</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by syats in "Ask HN: Who is hiring? (September 2023)"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Link is broken.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sat, 02 Sep 2023 12:04:34 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37360738</link><dc:creator>syats</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37360738</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37360738</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by syats in "Doing laundry on campus without a phone"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Somewhere in HN there's a post about disrupting or revolutionizing the laundromat industry, where some person is showered in praise (and later money) for setting up this lousy system.<p>If it ain't broken, don't fix it.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sat, 02 Sep 2023 07:53:24 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37359371</link><dc:creator>syats</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37359371</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37359371</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by syats in "Transcoding Latin 1 strings to UTF-8 strings at 12 GB/s using AVX-512"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>In countries communicating in non-English languages which are written in the latin script, there is a very large use of Latin-1. Even when Latin-1 is "phased out", there are tons and tons of documents and databases encoded in Latin-1, not to mention millions of ill-configured terminals.<p>I think it makes total sense to implement this.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Tue, 22 Aug 2023 12:06:08 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37221495</link><dc:creator>syats</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37221495</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37221495</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by syats in "Be sceptical of your own work (2009)"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>This article contains an excellent description of the work of a mathematician. It should be part of any curriculum in the field.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Wed, 16 Aug 2023 18:37:54 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37151658</link><dc:creator>syats</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37151658</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37151658</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by syats in "Bad numbers in the “gzip beats BERT” paper?"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Thanks for the replication, this is important.<p>One question, did you try to replicate the other result table (Table 3)?<p>If I understand correctly, top-2 accuracy would be 1 if you have only 2 classes, but it will differ from "normal" accuracy less and less as the number of classes increases (on average). So this shouldn't change the results for table 3 thaaat much as the datasets have large amounts of classes (see table 1).<p>In any case, top-2 accuracy of 0.685 for the 20-newsgroups dataset is pretty neat for a method that doesn't even consider characters as characters[1], let alone tokens, n-grams, embeddings and all the nice stuff that those of use working on NLP have been devoting years to.<p>[1] In my understanding of gzip, it considers only bit sequences, which are not necessarily aligned with words (aka. bytes).</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Mon, 17 Jul 2023 15:10:25 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36759202</link><dc:creator>syats</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36759202</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36759202</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by syats in "Stochastic gradient descent written in SQL"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Re modules/libraries: I meant it is not easy to write a piece of SQL code, and then import it into several queries to reuse it, or lend it to someone else for use on their on schema. It is possible, yes, but seldom done, because it is hell. PostgreSQL extensions could be used for this purpose, but developing an extension requires a different set of SQL statements (or luckily, python or c) than those used by the user of the extension, which makes compounding them a bit hard. Not impossible, just hard to maintain,<p>About your last point, I don't think that was my line of reasoning, but, yes, for the love of what is precious, don't open SQL files as python/java file objects and then parse and rummage through them to find the data you are looking for.  Not impossible, just hard to maintain.<p>Thanks for pointing out pgTAP, didn't know about this.<p>For some reason, data-science folks haven't yet caught up with ORMs.. I don't know if this is good or bad, but (as the OP shows) they are more used to rows and columns (or graphs) than objects. Maybe that will change one day.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Tue, 07 Mar 2023 17:50:32 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35058533</link><dc:creator>syats</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35058533</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35058533</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by syats in "Stochastic gradient descent written in SQL"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Just don't.<p>SQL:<p>- does not allow for easy and clean importing of modules/libraries<p>- is not easily to write tests for<p>- has limited support for a debugger<p>- lacks a consistent style for such large queries (plus most textbook cover fairly simple stuff) which means it's hard for a developer to start reading someone else's code (more than in other languages)<p>- clearly indicates in its name that it is a Query language.<p>Save yourself the trouble and all your collaborators the pain of working with this code in the future, of trying to add new features, of trying to reuse it in another project.<p>If you want to operate near the data, use PL/Python for PostgreSQL.<p>EDIT: Fixed formatting.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Tue, 07 Mar 2023 16:03:31 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35056886</link><dc:creator>syats</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35056886</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35056886</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by syats in "Ask HN: Are we sure LLMs are that useful in a web search application?"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Yes, but not in the form of chatbots.<p>Among other things, a LLM can be seen as a store which you query and get results from. A chatbot is cute because it formats output text to look like conversation, and the recent applications are nice because the query (now known as prompt) can be complicated and long, and can influence the format and length of the results.<p>But the cool stuff is being able to link the relatively small amount of text you input as a query, into many other chunks of texts that are semantically similar (<i>waves hands around like helicopter blades</i>). So, an LLM is a sort of "knowledge" store, that can be used for expanding queries, and search results, to make it more likely that a good result seems similar to the input query.<p>What do I mean by similar? well, the first iteration of this idea is vector similarity (e.g. <a href="https://github.com/facebookresearch/DPR">https://github.com/facebookresearch/DPR</a>). The second iteration is to store the results into the model itself, so that the search operation is performed by the model itself.<p>This second iteration will lead, IMHO, to a different sort of search engine. Not one over "all the pages" as, in theory at least, google and the like currently work. Instead, it will be restricted to the "well learnt pages", those which, because of volume of repetition, structure of text, or just availability to the training algorithm, get picked up and encoded into the weights.<p>To make an analogy, is like asking a human who are the Knights of the Round Table and getting back the usual "Percival, Lanceelot and Galahad", but just because the other thousand knights mentioned in some works are not popular enough for that given human to know them.<p>This is a different sort of search engine than we are used to, one which might be more useful for many (most?) applications. The biases and dangers of it are things we are only starting to imagine.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Thu, 09 Feb 2023 14:14:58 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34724154</link><dc:creator>syats</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34724154</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34724154</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by syats in "Ask HN: Best practices for self-healing apps?"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>This is bad advice for a couple of reasons:<p>1. It is expensive.
2. It moves complexity away from you and onto your providers, so it doesn't really solve the problem, only hides it from you (at a price).
3. The overall cost (energy, person-hours, material) of even the smallest project grows a lot with this approach. Even if you have the money to pay for it, you are wasting a bunch of resources around the world just for an illusion of peace of mind.
4. Most importantly, it will still fail (as all systems eventually do) and then you have no idea where it failed or how to fix it. All you can do is file some support tickets at big-corp support center and watch for updates on their twitter feed.<p>A lot of people complain here on HN about the sad, over-complicated, state of software-engineering, the need to know more and more concepts and to manage more and more tech "stacks" just to accomplish boring, formerly simple, tasks. One reason for this sad state is the philosophy expressed in the parent comment.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Wed, 08 Feb 2023 14:16:23 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34708281</link><dc:creator>syats</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34708281</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34708281</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by syats in "Show HN: Cozo – new Graph DB with Datalog, embedded like SQLite"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Great initiative, hope this takes off :)<p>Just FYI, The largest, most-used knowledge graphs in the world (Google and LinkedIn) are not running on RDF4J or any RDF Triplestore, but on their proprietary graph stores, which also use Datalog as a query language.<p>For those looking for an enterprise-ready equivalent (also datalog queries) and have a good wad of cash, consider <a href="https://www.oxfordsemantic.tech/product" rel="nofollow">https://www.oxfordsemantic.tech/product</a></p>
]]></description><pubDate>Wed, 09 Nov 2022 10:36:12 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33529607</link><dc:creator>syats</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33529607</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33529607</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by syats in "MagicDNS is generally available"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>What is tailscale?<p>I don't like the world where every time someone launches a feature on their product they get to top of HN by calling it "generally available".</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Thu, 20 Oct 2022 18:37:32 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33278823</link><dc:creator>syats</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33278823</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33278823</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by syats in "Ask HN: Who is hiring? (June 2022)"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Application process seems pretty nice. The questions posed for the data science positions suggest a very strong graph-theoretic team is in place. They are looking for top-notch mathematicians, not boot-camp data scientists at all.<p>Do be aware that in the borg collective FAQs they mention NFTs in an apparently positive note, if that is of any relevance to you.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Tue, 07 Jun 2022 17:35:08 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31657641</link><dc:creator>syats</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31657641</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31657641</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by syats in "Parmigiano Reggiano makers embedding tiny trackers in rind to fight cheese fraud"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Could someone please explain to me how this is going to prevent "fraud"?<p>Is every buyer of a whole wheel of cheese expected to have a reader for these tags?<p>I feel sorry for the poor bastard who bought into the buzzword soup of the providers and decided to go on with this project :(</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Thu, 19 May 2022 08:06:08 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31431978</link><dc:creator>syats</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31431978</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31431978</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by syats in "We’ve got a science opportunity overload: Launching the Wolfram Institute"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Let us concede that in the last 20 years, the number of mentions of "I" in his writing has decreased, and there are more mentions of "We".<p>As much as a cellular automata, and computation in general, fan as I am, and after having read a fair amount of his work... I am still not convinced that Wolfram is not just a rich crack pot.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Thu, 07 Apr 2022 05:55:49 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30941072</link><dc:creator>syats</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30941072</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30941072</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by syats in "Tell HN: Did you know you can negotiate price on many things?"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Just be ethical about it.<p>If you are a tourist in the global south, and you negotiate down the price of some craft/souvenir/whatever you are buying on the side of the road, you will be able to buy an extra cup of coffee back home, but the person there might have to stand in the sun and away from their family for 4 more hours.<p>Don't let the well-being of others all in the hands of "the market".</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Mon, 21 Mar 2022 09:11:06 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30751890</link><dc:creator>syats</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30751890</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30751890</guid></item></channel></rss>