iamlucaswolf
Joined 9 years ago
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Comment · 1 month ago
This is a system for teaching undergrad students how RDBMS work, not a DBMS for modeling human understanding.
Comment · 2 months ago
Yes. But I think that misses the point.
In 1799, Paolo Ruffini published a 500 pages long proof showing that there is no closed algebraic solution for the roots of a polynomial of degree five or higher. The proof is extremely verbose and brute-force, essentially enumerating and checking hundreds of cases by hand. It is by today’s standards insignificant.
About 25 years later, Evariste Galois proved the same result in about 95% less space by describing the first general theory of groups and fields. It is considered one of the greatest contributions to mathematics of that century, not because of the result, but because its approach opened up a whole new universe of questions, methods and insight. There would be no AES encryption without Galois.
To me, Astras proof looks like Ruffinis proof.
Comment · 2 years ago
What exactly is the ask here? Do you want input for a programming model? Practical advise for building a compiler? Do you want to target real hardware or a software simulator?
> I'd settle for a good way to express said tree in a plain text file
What you are referring to is commonly called an IR (intermediate representation). Compilers typically take the AST generated by the parser and translate (“lower”) it into increasingly hardware-near and optimized IRs before performing instruction selection.
I briefly browsed through the links you provided. IIUC, BitGrid is essentially one of the Turing-complete 2-D cellular automata. This Reddit thread might be interesting to you [0].
Comment · 2 years ago
I think this question mixes up two orthogonal dimensions: transactionality (i.e., OLTP vs. OLAP) and data model (relational, document-based, graph, vector, ...).
Regarding transactionality: There is an entire area of research on "hybrid transactional and analytical processing" (HTAP) systems that unifies OLAP and OLTP systems. Hyper [1] pioneered this path at TU Munich, it's successor Umbra [2] recently incorporated as CedarDB [3]. There are lots of others. Most of these systems, AFAIK, are relational.
Regarding data model: What we've seen in the past few decades is that non-relational DBMS (excluding key-value stores) only make sense in rare edge cases that require huge scale. There has, e.g. been research [4] that shows that graph databases are still, well, lacking, compared to relational systems. The common pattern seems to be: unless you need to service very specific workloads at huge scales, SQL is probably enough [5]. Then again, it really comes down to intrinsics. If you were to, for example, implement distributed locking using Postgres, you would likely run into problems with MVCC and Xids very quickly.
So, as you already mentioned, there is no silver bullet. But even today, unless you are Meta or Google, SQL is probably enough for a long time and lots of use cases.
(Full disclosure: I'm working on Hyper full-time).
[1]: https://hyper-db.de/ [2]: https://umbra-db.com/ [3]: https://cedardb.com/ [4]: https://homepages.cwi.nl/~boncz/edbt2022.pdf [5]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VxKt245X_ws
Comment · 2 years ago
If you had <50% accuracy in expectation you could improve your analysis by inverting it, I suppose...
Comment · 2 years ago
My read is that investing into AI is the trendy thing to do in 2024. No CEO will have to justify pouring money into AI; they would probably be seen as negligent if they don’t. It’s just the zero-risk strategy at this point in time. That’s not to say that there is no value to be realized, it’s more a question of how much value and at what price. If in the next 12-24 months we find out that AGI, robotics and the end of labor is not as imminent as some have hoped and that perhaps not every car dealership needs an AI chat assistant, and the first companies announce reductions in their AI spending, the dominos might begin to fall. Or not, let’s see.
Comment · 2 years ago
Umbra was recently spun out as CedarDB [1].
And Hyper is alive and well at Salesforce/Tableau! The team working on it is still in large parts the original Hyper team from TUM. You can actually download Hyper (as a binary with language bindings) and play around with it [2] for non-commercial use cases.
If you think Hyper/Umbra is cool, the TUM database group has lots of other very interesting projects going on at the moment. LingoDB [3] pushes the database-as-a-compiler idea to the extreme by implementing query optimization and compilation query compilation in MLIR. LingoDB is open-source. Also Viktor Leis, who stands behind (among many other things) Hyper's Morsel scheduling and ART indexes as well as Umbra's buffer management recently started a very interesting project [4] to heavily co-design the DBMS together with the OS in a unikernel approach. Really interesting stuff!
Disclaimer: I work on Hyper. Views are my own.
[1]: https://cedardb.com/ [2]: https://tableau.github.io/hyper-db/docs/ [3]: https://www.lingo-db.com/ [4]: https://www.cs.cit.tum.de/dis/research/cumulus/
Comment · 2 years ago
Thanks, that seems to be exactly what I was looking for!
Any insights on the business model? Is this just to advertise the pro tier or do they monetize usage in another way (e.g. selling training data)?
Comment · 2 years ago
I believe this is a rational assessment in general. A lot of the discussion around this topic seems to be negligent of market dynamics.
However, the crux is in the details:
> You can increase the % enough so that overall demand for developers goes down or doesn't grow as much as it would have otherwise.
I would be at least skeptical of this. Every push for commodification that we've seen in the software space so far has been absorbed by demand. Will this continue forever? Nobody knows. At least where I work the backlog is filled to the brim, and every new iteration of tooling begets more babysitting to unlock the promised gains. And customers still have a never-ending list of hyper-specific feature requests.
The friends and colleagues at the Senior/Staff level who are using Copilot/GPT-4 (and have admittedly become much better than me at prompting) didn't exactly become "hyper-productive". Sure, they get code pushed out faster, but they still work long hours and complain about deadlines.
This is not to say that we're all fine forever and things will not change. But as long as we don't experience an across-the-board temperature shift in the job market decoupled from macro-economic events I wouldn't put too much attention there. In the end, doom scrolling is also just a form of procrastination.
Comment · 3 years ago
First few lines are almost verbatim ChatGPT (without knowing your exact prompt): https://chat.openai.com/share/a7a9c996-f655-427d-bc23-4e9161...
Look — I appreciate that you want to help OP out here, but please keep HN free from low-effort LLM-generated answers like this. Everyone here has access to chatGPT, so the added utility of pasting responses from it is close to zero.
Comment · 3 years ago
As someone who never owned cryptocurrency and frankly never cared that much: could you ELI5 the idea of a Bitcoin ETF? Is it just a vehicle to trade Bitcoin (as in a single cryptocurrency; BTC) on a normal stock exchange? Is it an index-weighted portfolio of BTC and other (e.g. Ethereum)? Does the fund actually own BTC or is it technically a derivative like a synthetic (regular) ETF?
Comment · 3 years ago
Sorta-kinda: VSCode lets you execute code from regular Python files in a Jupyter session [1] by demarcating code cells with "# %%"
[1] https://code.visualstudio.com/docs/python/jupyter-support-py...