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Mertax commented on Is our universe trapped inside a black hole? This JWS Telescope discovery   space.com/space-explorati... · Posted by u/janandonly
perihelions · a year ago
I'm utterly confused what's going on. They're measuring galaxies' rotations by looking at images of the subset that are spiral galaxies, and checking which direction the arms spiral. They describe their image processing algorithm in their paper [0]. (it's around figure 3)

How can local movement of stars within the Milky Way affect which way spiral galaxy arms are pointing?

[0] https://academic.oup.com/mnras/article/538/1/76/8019798.

Mertax · a year ago
There is no absolute direction for a galaxy’s spin—it’s always relative to the observer’s perspective.

So I’d suspect they’re saying time and distance would need to be factored in rather than just looking at static images relative to our position today since our own spin may have caused a particular galaxy to appear to have been spinning in a different direction at another point in space-time

Mertax commented on Show HN: I made an app that consolidated 18 apps (doc, sheet, form, site, chat…)   nino.app... · Posted by u/harrisonlo
sgarland · 2 years ago
That introduces a new problem when it syncs to others in the same workspace, if it’s large.
Mertax · 2 years ago
Nice thing about SQLite is you can “clone” the repository by copying a single file. And in cases where you need incremental sync, you can use an SQLite of diff’s as a single packfile (similar to git).

Things like cr-SQLite also have a lot of potential to make single SQLite per client a lot more viable. But I’m interested to see what you think the problems are? Have you found a solution or alternative?

Mertax commented on Ask HN: Who is hiring? (November 2023)    · Posted by u/whoishiring
Mertax · 2 years ago
Juniper Systems | Logan, UT or Costa Rica (Hybrid) | mid - Sr. | Frontend Web, GIS | Typescript, C#

https://junipersys.com/company/careers

About Us With a legacy spanning over 30 years, Juniper Systems is a well-established company with a rich history in hardware innovation for rugged field environments. As we continue to evolve, we're pioneering the future of mapping, GIS and field data management through cutting-edge software solutions. Join our team and play a pivotal role in architecting and designing the frontend of our groundbreaking Uinta mapping & field data management platform.

Job Description: Are you an experienced frontend web developer eager to shape the future of geospatial data and in-field project management? Juniper Systems is actively seeking a highly motivated and talented individual to join our software engineering team. In this role, you will play a pivotal role in building and scaling the web frontend of our Uinta platform, a revolutionary product positioned for substantial growth. This is a unique opportunity to join us during the exciting early stages of product development. You will have the chance to drive key decisions regarding the technology stack and development processes we employ in creating frontend web applications at Juniper Systems. Simultaneously, you can take confidence in the knowledge that you'll be contributing to a product that has already demonstrated significant success in the marketplace. You'll be an integral part of a seasoned team with a well-established track record of excellence.

If senior, pick your frontend framework React, Vue or Blazor! No visa, no-relocate

Mertax commented on Kart: DVC for geospatial and tabular data. Git for GIS   kartproject.org/... · Posted by u/starkparker
polemic · 2 years ago
One of the benefits of building on Git is a lot of people have put a lot of time into make it work really well with lots of objects. And even though we say "files", Git abstracts that into packfiles etc very efficiently.

So, we're seening pretty good performance. We're maintaining a number of repositories with several millions features, with a decade of weekly updates of ~10,000+ rows. It _does_ take some time to push that data around, but it's _vastly_ better than old ways, and once you have your clone, maintaining updates becomes extremely trivial - a _major_ unsolved problem in the GIS/data world.

I'd add - Kart has GIS specific features that nullify some of these issues. The ability to spatially index the objects, then filtering them on Clone, means I rapidly clone a tiny subset of the data to work with.

Mertax · 2 years ago
Is there a public git repo available somewhere that represents a Kart repository?

Are the raw files in the working repository GeoPackages? How is it tracking the changes made inside the geopackages? What happens if it's replaced with an updated copy of the geopackage the was edited via some other application? How does it diff the changes?

Mertax commented on Kart: DVC for geospatial and tabular data. Git for GIS   kartproject.org/... · Posted by u/starkparker
sccxy · 2 years ago
Cool project but homepage needs two things:

* Docs should not be hidden in small font and as disabled link color, make it big button in features list or make features clickable to relevant docs.

* Add some screenshots

I spent way too much time clicking every heading to figure out what is this all about till I found Docs link.

Mertax · 2 years ago
Just saw this, which might be a better home page: https://koordinates.com/products/kart/
Mertax commented on Show HN: Turn long videos into short videos   boltfoundry.com... · Posted by u/randall
Mertax · 2 years ago
This looks neat!

I assume it’s using WASM for browser based web encoding? Is local encoding always guaranteed to be faster or could some internet connections be fast enough that an upload would beat out the client side encoding depending on device capabilities?

Automatic captioning and clipping based on transcripts are great features.

Mertax commented on How Is LLaMa.cpp Possible?   finbarr.ca/how-is-llama-c... · Posted by u/birriel
Havoc · 3 years ago
What I find more stunning is what this implies going forward. If tech advances as it tends to do then having a 200bn model fit into consumer hardware isn't that far away.

Might not be AGI but I think cliched as it is that would "change everything". If not at 200 then 400 or whatever. Doesn't matter - the direction of travel seems certain.

Mertax · 3 years ago
And then things like neural implants and BCIs -- seems like your dog could have language capabilities sooner than you'd think ;)
Mertax commented on What we know about LLMs   willthompson.name/what-we... · Posted by u/wilhelm____
killernap · 3 years ago
ChatGPT was announced November, 2022 - 8 months ago. Time flies.

Question for HN: Where are we in the hype cycle on this?

We can run shitty clones slowly on Raspberry Pi's and your phone. The educational implementations demonstrate the basics in under a thousand lines of brisk C. Great. At some point you have to wonder... well, so what?

Not one killer app has emerged. I for one am eager to be all hip and open minded and pretend like I use LLMs all the time for everything and they are "the future" but novelty aside it seems like so far we have a demented clippy and some sophomoric arguments about alignment and wrong think.

It did generate a whole lot of breathless click-bait-y articles and gave people something to blab about. Ironically it also accelerated the value of that sort of gab and clicks towards zero.

As I am not a VC, politician, or opportunist, hand waving and telling me this is Frankenstein's monster about to come alive and therefore I need billions of dollars or "regulations" just makes folks sound like the crypto scammers.

Please HN, say something actually insightful, I beg you.

Mertax · 3 years ago
I wonder if language translation will be one of the "killer apps".

Especially if it can be done real-time and according to the context/level of the audience/listener. Even within the same language, translation from a more technical/expert level to a simplified summary helps education/communication/knowledge transfer significantly.

Mertax commented on LiteFS Cloud: Distributed SQLite with Managed Backups   fly.io/blog/litefs-cloud/... · Posted by u/nalgeon
benbjohnson · 3 years ago
I agree with everything the OP said above. Typically if you need to scale writes in SQLite, you'll want to look at sharding. The "single writer" restriction is per database so you can split your SaaS customers across multiple databases.

If your SaaS is in the hundreds or thousands of customers then you could split each customer into their own database. That also provides nice tenant isolation. If you have more customers than that you may want to look at something like a consistent hash to distribute customers across multiple databases.

Mertax · 3 years ago
In scenarios where an individual customer/tenant can have isolated data this makes sense. Is there any reason why the client application itself can't be one of the nodes in the distributed system? Does LiteFS support a more peer-2-peer distribution model (similar to a git repo) where the client/customer's SQLite database is fully distributed to them and then it's just a matter of merging diffs?

u/Mertax

KarmaCake day139June 11, 2018
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