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REACT ANTI-PATTERN: STOP PASSING SETTERS DOWN THE COMPONENTS TREE

Passing `useState` setter functions as props to child components is a React anti-pattern. This creates an abstraction leak, tightly coupling the child to the parent's internal state management and making the code fragile and less reusable. The solution is to instead pass a callback function that encapsulates the state change, allowing the child to update the parent's state without knowing the specific implementation details.

CONDITIONAL PROPS IN REACT USING TYPE DISCRIMINATION

TypeScript's type discrimination can be used to manage conditional props in React components, making sure props are type-safe and mutually exclusive when required. This article shows practical examples, like defining components that accept either one prop or another but not both.

OFFSET CONSIDERED HARMFUL OR: THE SURPRISING COMPLEXITY OF PAGINATION IN SQL

SQL pagination is complex and using the offset keyword can make it worse. `offset` can lead to duplicate results and degrade performance, especially with large datasets, due to its need to process and skip data. A better alternative is to use predicate-based pagination with a `where` condition.

ONCALL SHIFT SHOULD BE TUESDAY TO TUESDAY

A Tuesday-to-Tuesday on-call rotation is better than Monday-to-Monday because it accommodates weekend issue resolution and holiday scheduling, allowing for a more thorough follow-up on problems. It's a simple, low-cost improvement to overall team efficiency.

HOW I SHIP PROJECTS AT BIG TECH COMPANIES

Engineers should prioritize impact over optics and focus on delivering meaningful results that improve metrics and benefit users. Trust and recognition are gained through impactful work and should not be the primary goal.

REACT SCAN

React Scan is a tool that automatically detects and highlights performance issues in React applications. Unlike other tools, it requires minimal code changes and provides clear visual cues to pinpoint problematic components.

PGLITE-FUSION

Pglite-fusion lets users embed SQLite databases into their PostgreSQL tables.

UNDERSTANDING THE BM25 FULL TEXT SEARCH ALGORITHM

The BM25 algorithm is a full-text search algorithm widely used in systems like Lucene/Elasticsearch and SQLite. This post goes over the algorithm's mathematical components - inverse document frequency (IDF), term frequency, and document length normalization - showing how they contribute to a relevance score.

AWS LAMBDA TURNS TEN – LOOKING BACK AND LOOKING AHEAD

AWS Lambda launched in 2014 and quickly gained traction. Today, it has over 1.5 million users and tens of trillions of function invocations monthly.

GO TURNS 15

Go recently celebrated its 15th anniversary as an open-source project. Its user base has more than tripled in the last five years. Recent Go releases (1.22 and 1.23) were focused on improving for loops, iterators, and generics, along with improvements to the standard library, including the HTTP router and execution traces.

DATA ENGINEER HANDBOOK

A collection of data engineering resources, including projects, interview guides, roadmaps, books, and more.

DYNAMICALLY GENERATING PWA APP ICONS IN THE NEXT.JS APP ROUTER

This article goes over how to dynamically generate different Progressive Web App (PWA) icons for various environments (development, staging, and production) in a Next.js app, with code examples.

PLEASE JUST STOP SAYING "JUST"

The word "just," when used to describe a software engineering solution, minimizes the complexity of the task, discourages critical thinking and alternative solutions, and contributes to imposter syndrome.

ASK HN: HOW DO YOU COMMUNICATE IN A REMOTE STARTUP? (HACKER NEWS THREAD)

Tips for improving remote startup communication include keeping discussions public on platforms like Slack, recording and summarizing meetings, sharing solutions openly, maintaining clear documentation, and avoiding excessive DMs.

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DOJ WILL PUSH GOOGLE TO SELL CHROME TO BREAK SEARCH MONOPOLY

Justice Department antitrust officials will ask federal judge Amit Mehta to force Alphabet to sell Google's Chrome browser as part of the ruling that Google illegally monopolized the search market. They will also ask to implement measures related to artificial intelligence and Google's Android smartphone operating system. The proposals have the potential to reshape the online search market and AI industry. States are still considering adding some proposals and some details could change. Google has plans to appeal the antitrust ruling.

NVIDIA'S DELAYED BLACKWELL AI CHIPS ARE OVERHEATING IN SERVERS

Nvidia's upcoming Blackwell GPUs are prone to overheating when connected to each other on server racks. The issue is due to the server rack designed for Blackwell, which can connect up to 72 GPUs at a time. The racks have been redesigned, but this could cause further delays. Nvidia originally said that the GPUs could ship as soon as Q2 2024 before it encountered challenges.

A.I. CHATBOTS DEFEATED DOCTORS AT DIAGNOSING ILLNESS

ChatGPT outperformed doctors in diagnosing disease in a study that looked at whether the chatbot could help doctors diagnose illnesses. Doctors who had help from the chatbot performed only slightly better than doctors without the tool, showing how doctors sometimes will stick to their diagnoses even when presented with a potentially better option. Many of the doctors didn't know how to use chatbots and treated ChatGPT like a search engine for direct questions, which could have affected results. Only a small fraction of the doctors copied the entire case history into the chatbot and asked it to answer the entire question.

SPACEX POISED FOR NEXT STARSHIP FLIGHT TEST NOV. 19

SpaceX launched three Falcon 9 rockets in less than 24 hours on November 17-18 ahead of a planned flight test of its Starship-Super Heavy vehicle today. Falcon 9 has reached 113 launches this year and 398 since it debuted in June 2010. Starship Flight 6 is slated to launch at around 5-5:30 PM from SpaceX's Starbase complex at Boca Chica Beach, Texas. SpaceX is hoping to catch the Super Heavy booster again using a pair of mechanical arms on its launch gantry and relight a Raptor engine in flight. Starship will not reach orbital velocity and will make a targeted splashdown in the Indian Ocean.

RUST FOUNDATION RELEASES PROBLEM STATEMENT ON C++/RUST INTEROPERABILITY

The Rust Foundation's problem statement on the challenges and opportunities in C++ and Rust interoperability outlines three key strategic approaches: improve existing tools and address tactical issues within Rust to reduce interoperability friction and risk in the short term, build consensus around long-term goals and develop the tactical approaches to begin pursuing them, and engage with the C++ community and committee to improve the quality of interoperation for both languages to help realize the mutual goals of safety and performance. The 'interop initiative' was launched earlier this year to make cross-language development more accessible and approachable for the wider programming community.

DOCUMIND

Documind is a document processing tool that uses AI to extract structured data from PDFs. It can handle PDF conversions, extract information, and format results as specified by customizable schemas. Documind is designed for flexible deployment on local or cloud environments.

ELON MUSK WANTED TO BUY SUBSTACK AFTER TWITTER PURCHASE

Elon Musk reportedly had plans to combine Twitter and Substack. He saw acquiring Substack as a way to aid Twitter's subscription service. Substack executive Chris Best declined the acquisition despite Musk offering him a chief executive position at the combined company. Substack pivoted to politics soon after the offer as some of the largest election pundits found a home on the platform.

FILE OVER APP: A PHILOSOPHY FOR DIGITAL LONGEVITY

Creating digital artifacts that last requires using open file formats that are easy to retrieve and read. This means using tools that give people this freedom. While it isn't always possible to choose 'file over app', there are almost always options that allow users to export their data, which can later be scraped into usable formats. This post provides links to tools and projects that align with the 'file over app' philosophy.

IN

AMD DOMINATES CHIP SALES ON AMAZON

The top 10 best-selling CPUs on Amazon are AMD processes from the Ryzen 5000, 7000, and 9000 processor series.

SECURITY MEANS SECURING PEOPLE WHERE THEY ARE

Security at scale means deciding how to divide a limited pool of engineering resources such that the largest demographic of users benefits from a security initiative.

CHATGPT IS SLIPPING

Production code that utilized gpt-4o and gpt-4o-mini suddenly stopped working on November 13, suggesting there was an update to the model that made them incapable of doing the previous task.

MISTRAL UNLEASHES PIXTRAL LARGE AND UPGRADES LE CHAT INTO FULL-ON CHATGPT COMPETITOR

Mistral has added image generation, web search, and an interactive 'canvas' to its free web-based chatbot, Le Chat.

GOOGLE IS TURNING CHROME OS INTO ANDROID TO COMPETE WITH THE IPAD

Google is also building a new version of Chrome for Android with extensions support and a Terminal to run Linux apps on Android.

INSIDE ELON MUSK'S MESSY BREAKUP WITH OPENAI

Elon Musk's suit against Sam Altman has given Musk a chance to reveal how Altman secured power in the company's early days and his willingness to go toe-to-toe with for-profit competitors from the beginning.

Abstraction

→ Check out pgai on GitHub [5]: a framework for developing RAG, semantic search, and other AI applications directly in PostgreSQL

PIXTRAL LARGE

Pixtral Large is a 124B open-weights multimodal model built on top of Mistral Large 2. It is the second model in the multimodal family and demonstrates frontier-level image understanding. The model is able to understand documents, charts, and natural images while maintaining the leading text-only understanding of Mistral Large 2.

PERPLEXITY INTRODUCES A SHOPPING FEATURE

Perplexity has introduced a shopping feature for Pro users in the US, making it a one-stop solution where you can research and purchase products.

BEN AFFLECK TELLS ACTORS AND WRITERS NOT TO WORRY ABOUT AI

Ben Affleck reassured Hollywood actors and writers during an interview that AI poses little threat to their jobs due to its current limitations.

LLAVA-O1: REASONING VLMS

While this is not an actual replication of the process used to train o1, it is still a strong VLM trained on reasoning traces.

CASE STUDY OF SONNET 3.5 COMPUTER USE

This work aims to systematically test the ability of new autonomous computer use agents. It finds Claude quite powerful at traditional linear tasks.

TEACHING VIDEO MODELS TO UNDERSTAND TIME LIKE A STORY

This paper introduces NumPro, a creative solution that helps Video Large Language Models handle Video Temporal Grounding tasks.

LLAMA 3 405B INFERENCE

Cerebras has the largest Llama model, running 12x faster than comparable systems and 18x faster than some closed model API providers. It can run at almost 1k tokens per second. It will be available via API at the beginning of next year.

CLIP FOR SEMANTIC SEGMENTATION

Despite CLIP's success in open-vocabulary tasks, it struggles with semantic segmentation due to noisy features and limited resolution. Trident addresses the resolution issue with a training-free framework that combines CLIP and DINO features from sub-images and uses SAM's encoder for global feature aggregation.

CERTIFIED ROBUSTNESS

This work focuses on improving the certified robustness of smoothed classifiers by fine-tuning off-the-shelf models.

RECAPTURE

This paper from Google shows how you can change the camera viewpoint of an existing video.

NOUS RESEARCH FORGE

The Forge Reasoning API allows you to take any popular model and superpower it with a code interpreter and advanced reasoning capabilities. This has been shown to increase model performance.

WHERE'S MY ROBOT BUTLER?

Advancements in AI and robotics are accelerating the development of humanoid robots such as Atlas, Optimus, and Neo, robots aimed at fulfilling domestic tasks akin to Rosie from "The Jetsons." Challenges persist in creating cost-effective, safe, and efficient actuators. AI models are crucial for training robots to perform complex tasks autonomously. Despite progress, these humanoid robots are currently more suited for industrial settings. They may eventually transition into home environments if significant breakthroughs occur.