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geophile commented on Making geo joins faster with H3 indexes   floedb.ai/blog/how-we-mad... · Posted by u/matheusalmeida
geophile · a day ago
Z-order based indexes avoid the resolution problem. Basically:

- Generate z-values for spatial objects. Points -> a single z-value at the highest resolution of the space. Non-points -> multiple z-values. Each z-value is represented by a single integer, (I use 64 bit z-values, which provide for space resolution of 56 bits.) Each integer represents a 1-d range. E.g. 0x123 would represent 0x123000 through 0x123fff

- Spatial join is basically a merge of these z-values. If you are joining one spatial object with a collection of N spatial objects, the time is logN. If you are joining two collections, then it's more of a linear-time merge.

For more information: PROBE Spatial Data Modeling and Query Processing in an Image Database Application. IEEE Trans. Software Eng. 14(5): 611-629 (1988)

An open source java implementation: https://github.com/geophile/geophile. (The documentation includes a number of corrections to the published algorithm.)

geophile commented on Coding agents have replaced every framework I used   blog.alaindichiappari.dev... · Posted by u/alainrk
rglover · a day ago
A significant number of developers and businesses are going to have an absolutely brutal rude awakening in the not too distant future.

You can build things this way, and they may work for a time, but you don't know what you don't know (and experience teaches you that you only find most stuff by building/struggling; not sipping a soda while the AI blurts out potentially secure/stable code).

The hubris around AI is going to be hard to watch unwind. What the moment is I can't predict (nor do I care to), but there will be a shift when all of these vibe code only folks get cooked in a way that's closer to existential than benign.

Good time to be in business if you can see through the bs and understand how these systems actually function (hint: you won't have much competition soon as most people won't care until it's too late and will "price themselves out of the market").

geophile · a day ago
The article gets at this briefly and moves on: "I can do all of this with the experience on my back of having laid the bricks, spread the mortar, cut and sewn for twenty years. If I don’t like something, I can go in, understand it and fix it as I please, instructing once and for all my setup to do what I want next time."

I think this dynamic applies to any use of AI, or indeed, any form of outsourcing. You can outsource a task effectively if you understand the complete task and its implementation very deeply. But if you don't, then you don't know if what you are getting back is correct, maintainable, scalable.

geophile commented on A Crisis comes to Wordle: Reusing old words   forkingmad.blog/wordle-cr... · Posted by u/cyanbane
lkbm · 7 days ago
> Wordle has been around for 1550 days

I'm confused. Today's Wordle is #1,688.

geophile · 7 days ago
I did an approximate calculation.
geophile commented on A Crisis comes to Wordle: Reusing old words   forkingmad.blog/wordle-cr... · Posted by u/cyanbane
geophile · 7 days ago
The analysis misses a point. Wordle uses two lists of five letter words: words that are in the dictionary, and can be used in a guess; and those that can be used as the daily secret word. The latter list is smaller, and sticks to more common words. Wordle has been around for 1550 days, so they have used 67% of the possible words. In another couple of years, they have to either start using uncommon words, or recycle. There's no rush, so it's unclear why this is happening now.
geophile commented on Microsoft forced me to switch to Linux   himthe.dev/blog/microsoft... · Posted by u/bobsterlobster
reconnecting · 11 days ago
Apple forced me to switch to Linux!

Linux should consider paying Microsoft and Apple for new customers. Perhaps the customer acquisition funnel is quite long, at least it took 20 years of using Apple in my case before switching to Debian (Xfce), but it was worth it!

geophile · 11 days ago
For a long time, I had a MBP (this is in Intel days), with a Linux VM. It was like a reverse mullet, party in front (multimedia), work in back (dev).

And then:

    - Butterfly keyboard
    - Touchbar
    - M-series CPUs, which, while technically awesome, did not allow for Linux VMs.
So I switched to System76/Linux (Pop OS) and that has been wonderful, not to mention, much cheaper.

geophile commented on Microsoft forced me to switch to Linux   himthe.dev/blog/microsoft... · Posted by u/bobsterlobster
geophile · 11 days ago
FWIW, On Reddit, I am seeing more and more discussions on the Linux subreddits or people getting fed up with Windows and switching to Linux. Usually, it's the Windows 11 upgrade that finally did it.
geophile commented on Atlas Shrugged (2024)   david-jasso.com/2024/04/1... · Posted by u/mnky9800n
geophile · 2 months ago
This seems like a good time to remind everyone of a letter by David Packard, to his employees. There is more morality, common sense and insightful business advice here than in any 1000 business titles you would care to name.

https://aletteraday.substack.com/p/letter-107-david-packard-...

I think that OPs essay identifies that something bad happened at HP but completely misses what it was. Look at this quote:

    Around 1997, when I was working for the General Counsel, HP engaged
    a major global consulting firm in a multi-year project to help 
    them think about the question: “What happens to very large companies that
    have experienced significant growth for multiple successive years?”
OP says that the findings and recommendations included: "the decade long trend of double-digit growth was unlikely to continue", and "the company [should] begin to plan for much slower growth in the future."

OP then goes on to talk about fighting for resources for investments, a "healthy back and forth" on these tradeoffs, and then losing the "will to fight" following this report. "The focus became how not to lose".

Unlike OP, I did not work at HP. But I have seen up close startups, middle-sized companies, and huge companies, and the transitions among these states. So I feel justified in saying: OP has missed the point. And in particular, he makes no reference to that letter from David Packard.

Look at this quote from the letter:

    I want to discuss why a company exists in the first place. ...  why 
    are we here? I think many people assume, wrongly, that a company 
    exists simply to make money. While this is an important result of 
    a company's existence, we have to go deeper and find the real 
    reasons for our being. ... a group of people get together and exist
    as an institution that we call a company so they are able to accomplish 
    something collectively which they could not accomplish separately. 
    They are able to do something worthwhile—they make a contribution 
    to society .... You can look around and still see people who are 
    interested in money and nothing else, but the underlying drives 
    come largely from a desire to do something else—to make a product—to 
    give a service—generally to do something which is of value.
I think this is the essence of what it means to do useful and interesting work in any technical field. Unfortunately, there are many, many examples of companies that have lost their way, forgetting this key insight. HP was certainly one of them. I would argue that Google and Microsoft are examples too. Boeing, for sure.

And sadly, there are very, very few companies that actually embody Packard's ideas. I think that JetBrains is such a company, familiar to many HN readers. Another one that comes to mind, from a very different field, is Talking Points Memo -- an excellent website that does news reporting and analysis, mostly on US politics. It started as a "blogger in a bathrobe", and 25 years later, it is a small, independent news organization, supporting itself mostly through paid subscriptions by a very loyal readership.

To me, the saddest part of the essay is this:

    In the last few years more and more business people have begun to
    recognize this, have stated it and finally realized this is their
    true objective.
(This is right before the "You can look around ..." section quoted earlier.) It seems to me that very, very few business people recognize the way to run a business, as outlined by Packard.

geophile commented on OOP is shifting between domains, not disappearing   blog.jsbarretto.com/post/... · Posted by u/ibobev
1718627440 · 3 months ago
I thought structured program was about language support for control flow, simplification and formalization of control flow and single return. Not ADTs.
geophile · 3 months ago
I thought I expressed that: "I came across structured programming. The core idea was ... Then there were Abstract Datatypes, ..."
geophile commented on OOP is shifting between domains, not disappearing   blog.jsbarretto.com/post/... · Posted by u/ibobev
senderista · 3 months ago
> And while we're at it, GOTO is never a good idea, don't use it even if your language provides it.

Good luck with that if you're a C programmer.

geophile · 3 months ago
Well sure, but don't use it to implement if/while/for.

u/geophile

KarmaCake day4772July 22, 2010View Original