w1's comments

On: Is the world becoming uninsurable?

[w1]

No

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge%27s_law_of_headline...

On: Why is homeschooling becoming fashionable?

[w1]

Most people here would be good homeschooling parents.

This site doesn’t represent the world at large.

I was personally homeschooled, and while I ended up with a positive outcome, I cannot say the same thing for any of my peers (other kids I met through homeschooling groups.) There were many children that, in retrospect, were suffering from abuse or neglect that the structure of school could have prevented, or at least a mandatory reporter could have caught.

For more anecdotes, take a look at r/homeschoolrecovery (which is nearly 1/6th the size of r/homeschooling.) Many of the stories there are so gut-wrenchingly bleak. Any margin improvement in educational outcomes hardly seems worth it given some of the pain described there.

On: Suits, money laundering, and linear programming

[w1]

This is also a problem for accountants, trying to do “account reconciliation” to determine which transactions contribute to a given balance.

I made a simple tool that does this client-side for an accountant friend a while ago: https://reconciliation.spcdx.com/

(Warning: runtimes do quickly scale, due to the time complexity described above)

On: How a Gas Compressor Station Works

[w1]

>> You don't repeatedly recompress along the pipeline length

Yes, you do. That is the primary purpose of transmission compressor stations. You may just lose a few psi per mile or something, but over the course of 100s of miles..

On: Solving methane mysteries with satellite imagery

[w1]

This is factually incorrect and has the direction of causality wrong.

Enclosed combustors are _more_ efficient than flares, and can be tested to show that they achieve complete combustion of methane (unlike flares, which do not combust all methane.) Because of this efficiency delta, enclosed combustors were introduced to adhere to new air quality regulations.

I.e. regulators forced companies to install them to improve their emissions; they aren't being installed to hide emissions.

"Enclosed flaring is, in truth, probably less efficient than a typical flare. It’s better than venting, but going from a flare to an enclosed flare or a vapor combustor is not an improvement in reducing emissions", based on vibes from a former regulator from the linked article, is incorrect. E.g. see https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S266679082...

On: The scary truth about how far behind American kids...

[w1]

>> people that self-select to homeschool their children are going to diverge from the general population

Yes, but not necessarily in a way that is correlated with higher educational performance for their children.

[Asraelite → w1]

True, but it's not necessarily not correlated either. So the answer to the question

> what does that say about regular homeschooling that is still practiced?

is still "not much".

On: The scary truth about how far behind American kids...

[w1]

speaking from the sample size of all the other kids i knew in homeschooling groups, the modal outcome (for my 90s / early aughts cohort) is bad.

On: Show HN: Will I run Boston 2025?

[w1]

Note that the root site (https://getfast.ai/) also has a marathon time predictor, based on your Strava data.

On: Homeowners fined millions after buying properties ...

[w1]

maybe this is better: https://casetext.com/case/thomas-v-cnty-of-humboldt

On: Using Your Vector Database as a JSON (Or Relationa...

[w1]

Postgres (with pgvector) is an unbelievably goated vector db. Idk why anyone would use anything else.

[stephen37 → w1]

It's nice to begin with but you usually quickly hit a scale issue from what I tried and talked to different people using it.

Also they only offer index stored in Memory as far as I know, also lack the support of different index or more advanced ones like GPU index.

https://zilliz.com/comparison/milvus-vs-pgvector

[brigadier132 → w1]

PgVector stores the index in memory right? Do you really want your primary db using all its memory for vectors and all its cpu for doing vector dot products?

[Bella-Xiang → w1]

There are significant differences in performance, accuracy, and other aspects when using a general-purpose database like PostgreSQL. These differences can lead to bottlenecks in performance and data scale. You can refer to this comparison article to learn more https://myscale.com/blog/myscale-vs-postgres-opensearch/

[manishsharan → w1]

So you want to run mission critical workloads on Postgres and do a vector similarity search on the same DB?

[trosterud → w1]

And Datomic is the goat outside of vectors