No such thing as exactly-once delivery
We’re Sequin, and we add streaming capabilities to Postgres. We recently had a debate over on a GitHub issue about delivery semantics. Below, we expand on our take. We say Sequin is system with “at-least-once delivery” and “exactly-once processing” guarantees. What’s the difference between delivery and processing? And why don’t we consider Sequin an “exactly-once […]
Code Generation in Rust vs. C++26
One of the things I like to do is compare how different languages solve the same problem — especially when they end up having very different approaches. It’s always educational. In this case, a bunch of us have been working hard on trying to get reflection — a really transformative language feature — into C++26. […]
Liquid Foundation Models: Our First Series of Generative AI Models
Takeaways We announce the first series of Liquid Foundation Models (LFMs), a new generation of generative AI models built from first principles. Our 1B, 3B, and 40B LFMs achieve state-of-the-art performance in terms of quality at each scale, while maintaining a smaller memory footprint and more efficient inference. Try LFMs today on Liquid Playground, Lambda […]
How the Product Bubble Burst
The Mystery Box is Out of Outs For nearly two decades, investors looking for somewhere to park trillions of freshly printed dollars funded the Product Management bubble. Now it’s bursting. How we got here Product Managers straddle two economies that are increasingly disconnected. In the Real economy, businesses run, ordinary people work for a living […]
Type-erased generic functions for C: A modest non-proposal
Type-erased generic functions for C: A modest non-proposal September 29, 2024 Earlier this year, I read Martin Uecker’s proposal N3212 to add parametric polymorphism to C. It’s easy to scoff at the idea of adding generic programming to plain C, when C++ already has templates, and nearly every modern systems language has some form of […]
Safety Goggles for Alchemists
The Path Towards Safer Transmute Since Rust’s inception, mem::transmute has been the poster-dragon of unsafe code, but its reign of error is coming to an end! In this talk blog post, you’ll learn how Rust is poised to become the first systems programming language with transmutation safety, and how safe transmute is already being put […]
Launch HN: Inkeep (YC W23) – Copilot for Support (Think Cursor for Help Desks)
Hi HN, We’re Nick and Robert, founders of Inkeep (https://inkeep.com). We help companies turn their content into AI support copilots. So far, we’d focused on customer-facing experiences (e.g. find us as an “Ask AI” button in the docs of companies like Anthropic and Pinecone). Today, we’re excited to share our new copilot, Keep, which is […]
Y Combinator Traded Prestige for Growth
Y Combinator is arguably the most successful early-stage VC fund or accelerator ever. The issue, however, is that they never truly grasped the factors behind their success, which is why YC’s peak is already behind them—it’s likely all downhill from here. In particular, Sam Altman didn’t grasp what truly made YC successful. He did what […]
The End of Private Libraries
There seem to be two kinds of people on this earth—those who love books and everyone else. The bookish have always been far outnumbered, and the gap must be widening in this age of endless digital entertainment. I count myself among the proud minority, but a book, of all things, has brought into question my […]
Browser built-in bookmarking system is good enough (2024)
Along the years I have tested various browser bookmarking systems. And for 10 years, I’ve realised that the best bookmarking system is already built-in to most browsers (Firefox, Chrome), and that is: files! See the video, the drag-and-drop creates a .url shortcut file: Just that. You drag and drop the URL to the Desktop or […]