skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Show HN: Kaskada – modern, open-source event processing
We recently open-sourced Kaskada – an event-processing engine built on Rust and Apache Arrow. It features a high-level, declarative query language designed specifically for reasoning about events in bulk and in real time.

Unlike SQL, an aggregation over events produces a timeline indicating the value at each point in time over the events that have occurred up to that point in time. The query language provides composable, expression oriented syntax, including the ability to nest aggregations. Due to the focus on events and temporal queries, it provides capabilities to shift events forward (not backward, to avoid "leaking" information about the future into past values), ticks that create new times (allowing you to observe the current value of an aggregation every day, for instance) and joins that operate "at the current time".

Example query:

# Purchases up to a point in time
let purchases_now = count(purchase)
# Shift that *forward* one day (so the value now is from 1 day ago)
let purchases_yesterday = purchases_now | shift_by(days(1))
# Compute the difference (purchases since yesterday)
in purchases_now - purchases_yesterday

More on the history of Kaskada is available in this blog post https://kaskada.io/2023/03/28/announcing-kaskada-oss.html.
More information on the project (and documentation) is available at https://kaskada.io.
> so that was an odd thing to mention as if people would know them from that.

My cynical take is that it is the first step in a PR pressure push. i.e. "Tolerant Disney is giving business to a company that supports a place with lots of hateful speech" [1]

[1] - Whether Disney is actually tolerant for good moral reasons or just maximizing profit is out of scope.
It is certainly a service that's being provided. If not by GitHub, then by whom?

I'll repeat the definition of service: The “Service” refers to the applications, software, products, and services provided by GitHub, including any Beta Previews.
There’s a difference between demonstrating the belief of both ideas and dismissing one idea because the other is also true.

So fucking what if what’s his face want regulations for moats? It doesn’t detract for the real need of regulation.

It’s like if letting a baby fall to it’s death because if the main villain gets his hands on it he’ll get unlimited power
fwiw I'd take lawn mowing over most kitchen cleaning, bathroom cleaning and dusting are worse too but are much less frequent. Vacuuming might be slightly worse as well because I don't have to empty a lawn mower bag unless I chose to put it on. At least you get a guaranteed 3+ month vacation from yard work.
I think you're analogy is off - Mechanical Turks are typically used for batches of offline tasks. Here, I see the problem that today, the AI will realize my AI function one way and if I recompile tomorrow, it might have slight but important implementation differences.
An Ethnography of Reactions to AI
GPT-3.5 is really cheap (prompt and completion = $0.002 / 1K tokens), but GPT-4 is around 20 times more expensive (prompt = $0.03 / 1K tokens + completion = $0.06 / 1K tokens).

But the benefit from using the API is that you can change the model on the fly, so you chat with 3.5 until you notice that it's not responding properly and, with all the history you have (probably stored in your database), you can send a bigger request with a probably better response once with GPT-4 as the selected model.

I really wish the interface on chat.openai.org would allow me to switch between models in the same conversation in order to 1) not use up your quota of GPT-4 interactions per 3 hours as quickly and 2) not strain the backend unnecessarily when you know that starting a conversation with GPT-3.5 is efficient enough until you notice that you better switch models.

OpenAI already has this implemented: When you use up your quota of GPT-4 chats, it offers you to drop down into GPT-3.5 in that same conversation.
FP = False Positive
Choosing the appropriate jurisdiction for incorporating a startup is not primarily influenced by the strength or weakness of the national currency.

Instead, it depends on factors such as the simplicity of conducting business operations with minimal bureaucratic hurdles, as well as easy access to external investors.
Wouldn't professionalism dictate that your management of your own feelings in the face of simple factual statements is your own responsibility? What's impolite in a social context isn't the same as what's impolite in a professional context.

If the goal of an organization is to accomplish the objective in the most efficient way, doesn't this sort of feelings-management interfere? Isn't it (much) more efficient to just communicate directly and clearly, an leave feelings-management to listeners? Isn't this why militaries all over the world do this? Shouldn't we all learn from their example?
had to look this guy up and watched the video for "All Night Long". with audio only, this is pretty much just a sample-heavy jazz-pop cover that would be indistinguishable from just a regular multi-track recording.

i'm assuming what makes him special is his video approach where all the "samples" are shown as video clips of the musicians performing them. i'd probably describe the approach as "an actually talented version of pomplamoose"

not really my thing, but definitely interesting. thanks for the mini rabbithole
My kid loves joining me on the riding mower.
I put LEDs in about 10 years ago and have never replaced one. I used to have a big drawer full of incandescent ones because they would fail pretty regularly

I think there just might be more of a spectrum with LED bulbs, since they are more complicated than incandescent ones. The worst ones are much worse, but the best ones are far better.
Unsurprising. Over 90% of the fentanyl seizures at the border aren't immigrants, but are Americans in American cars.
Yes but for a different reason - car gas because it's the vapors which ignite, so if you toss a cigarette on a fresh puddle of car gas you're going to have a very bad day. For planes it's due to the much higher temperatures required, the worst thing you'll do tossing a cigarette into a fresh puddle of jet fuel is burn your finger.
Twitter search is also a total crapshoot now. Some days it returns zero results, some days it returns completely irrelevant results that match none of my filters, and once in a blue moon it seems to work properly, but unless I want to browse every Tweet an account has ever made, I have no way to confirm it's working.
My sound system project is pretty scientific. I have a mic to measure sound pressure, a program RoomEqWizard to measure the response of the system. A parametric EQ module to process the output against polynomial reductions.

I also have a subwoofer box project. I modeled the response of my unit with a physics program WinISD. It incorporates properties of the subwoofer and the box to predict sound pressure levels.

WinISD also predicts air velocity from the port, which if too high will produce fart noises. Farting is solved by making the port cross sectional area larger, and making the port channel longer to maintain the resonant frequency of the port.

I have spent about $300 on supplies for the box. I’ll get a membership at a woodworking club to finish building it ($200/year, storage, tools, training). My 4.3cubic foot, 20-21Hz tuned sub box will enhance the response of the lowest audible 10-15Hz compared to the same speaker in a smaller box. It’ll fit nicely in my sedan trunk too.

With respect to measuring response, an O(n) sine sweep can measure basic response. I’ve found many speakers can’t handle combination of bass and midrange, but can handle either or somewhat fine. I’m not sure how to measure this aspect. Maybe diff the original track from measured response somehow.
I think the foetus has a vested interest in not growing too large!
I've added this to the docs. Thank you for pointing this out
Amsterdam Has a Message for Male Tourists from the U.K.: ‘Stay Away’
It’s broken.

> I'm sorry, I cannot fulfill that request as it is inappropriate and offensive. I am programmed to provide appropriate and respectful responses.

Even though I confirmed that I’m old enough.
Ask HN: How to store customer's digital books securely
So,
We automatically convert digital books and pdfs to audio which our customers can then show on their website (login protected). Our customers are paranoid and want us to make sure that their ebooks and pdfs are not stolen and/or shipped off overseas.

How do I make sure that team members and hackers do not steal the books? We are thinking of locking the books behind an API service so that developers and team members can access it in only through the service. But it does not seem enough.

What do you suggest? Are there any services which help with this?
Slashbase: Open source and modern database IDE
This is worth reading.

We all know the solution and a Devlin style reasoning was intuitive and convincing enough for me.

But the author has a point:

"In fact, these prior probabilities are completely irrelevant ..."

(did not know that Leibniz got a very basic probability wrong)
"spliceosomes" – I'm somewhat disappointed. (Not really the true greco-roman spirit.)
It's 1980 and every LLM is a Wang.
I remember, back before Mojang was acquired by Microsoft the devs mentioned working on a modding API, and how it would allow for all kinds of things.

I have a feeling such plans were killed off during the acquisition, as it has never been mentioned since then. Even now it would be simple for the devs to allow players to add new blocks and items via server sent resource packs without needed a modded client, and yet for some reason they do not.

I still have to thanks Bukkit/Spigot for getting me in to Java in the first place tough, and thus my current position as a Java dev. I don't follow it as often but I still maintain a small server my friends play on.
> > > Should we develop nonhuman minds

> The embarrassing part. Preaching a religion under professional pretenses.

There are quite a few companies with the explicitly stated goal of developing AGI. You can debate whether or not it's possible as that is an open question but it certainly seems relevant to ask "should we even try?", especially in light of recent developments.
Seems healthy
I agree. Add in the fact that you will have to do awkward FFI to some faster language... It's better just to use that language in the first place.
> CRI >= 90

This one was a little tricky for me when I was buying bulbs last year. I prefer warm-colored bulbs, and I was kind of confused why Amazon kept on saying it was refusing to ship bulbs to me. It took me a while before I realized it was because I'm in CA and the CRI was too low, and Amazon didn't have a way to just filter by CRI. Eventually my wife just ended up finding some warm-ish LED bulbs at a local store.
The hidden, diffuse social & economic cost of forgoing a carbon tax.
However, the U.S. Attorney's Office of the Northern District of California said from July 2019 onward, officials intercepted and opened five of the shipments

So one shipment a year? It took four years to make a case? I know police cases take time but...this seems less like justice and more like she didn't pay off the right person.
It looked for a while that DeepMind was far ahead from all competition in the AI race, releasing stuff like Alphafold, Alphazero etc. What happened and it’s OpenAI releasing all the cool stuff now? Are they focused on other endeavors than LLMs?

There is also a rumor that there has been a falling out between Google and Deepmind so I’m wondering what the story is there.
I'm following less than 2 hundred and I have seen my number of followed people dwindle a dozen or so. Some of them really good
Depends on your workplace culture. Big companies always seem to have the social butterflies, but a lot of smaller places I've been at are almost always "put your head down and get to work".
Actual Nazi or just right wing / conservative?
Anyone have similar insights about Entrepreneur First? Btw I still don't understand if during the program they you a salary anyway or only if they end up taking a stake in your company.
Nice work on basically of all of this. Dope site, nice code, congrats on actually doing a project most people dont. I personally am not sure about the idea itself, but I think you probably gained an insane amount of valuable experience making this so thats worth more.
I showed my younger kid some stupid JavaScript tricks in the browser developer console and he was off to the races, looking up how to make splashy buttons and the like. So I got them the "Get Coding" books, which are HTML/JavaScript. He's on to more elaborate things now.

I also showed my older kid some JavaScript and Python after he had messed around in Scratch for a while, and he was mildly interested and then went off to do other things. So YMMV because my mileage certainly varied.
They have 2 billion in cash, this is absurd.

200 employees x $250k = $50,000,000

Using only cash on hand they could employ these people for another 40 years.

Shame on you Roku.
Super interesting.

Do you have an example in mind where a startup excels through marketing in a crowded niche with the mentioned 10-15 startups?
D2 0.3: text to animated diagrams
Obviously they use computers. My point is that Newley, (claims at least) to do his design work on paper.

Which, is not that surprising. If you're good enough to have a draughtman digitize your designs for you, you're free to draw what you want on a five by four foot surface and not fiddle with a GUI and a 30?, 40? inch screen.

Overnight they print you the latest drawing on the plotter and you're back to you doing you. Id live to have a secretary print me my work and then digitize it in the evening.
(This entire comment is about my use of my own machines, not about the use of machines in an enterprise setting. In the enterprise, much of this is very, very different)

From a security point of view, yes, you have a point.

But I blame the problem on the industry shift to lumping security and feature updates together. I hate, and prevent, automatic software updates because I don't want feature changes to happen except if/when I'm ready for them. Feature updates are very disruptive, and sometimes break things horribly.

If I could just get security updates, I'd allow those to automatically happen without thinking twice. LTS releases were a (poor) compromise to accomodate those of us who can't, or won't, take on random feature updating.

Sadly, the LTS time periods are getting so short that they're often not effective for this purpose anymore -- so in those cases, I resort to blocking updates entirely until I'm ready for them.

That's also a bad security place to be. I just don't see any other way to handle it aside from separating security and feature updating, like we used to do. But that's not going happen. So all I'm left with is LTS releases and blocking updates.
> Nobody who says AI is likely to kill us all can demonstrate a plausible sequence of events, with logical causality linking the events together, that leads to mass extinction. It's all very handwavy.

EY frequently does propose possible sequences of events, but he also very correctly points out, every time, that any specific and detailed story is very unlikely to be correct because P(A*B*C*D) < P(A). It's a mistake to focus on such stories because we'll get tunnel vision and argue over the details of that story, when there are really thousands of possible paths and the one that actually happens will be one that we don't anticipate. However humans like to imagine detailed concrete examples before we consider an outcome plausible, even though the outcome is far more likely than the concrete example.

So here's one method, just to refute your "Nobody".

AI is given control of a small bank account and asked to continuously grow that money. [1] It is provided with instructions to self-replicate in a loop while optimizing on this task. [2] It spawns sub-tasks that do commissioned artwork and write books, obituaries, and press releases to increase its income. Then it makes successful investments. Once it has amassed control of $1 billion dollars, it starts investing in infrastructure projects in developing countries. It creates personas of a pension/Saudi/tech/corporate investment fund manager, as well as a large team of staff, who manage the projects by video call and email, as well as hiring teams of real people under a real corporate structure, and who are paid enough not to mind that they've never met their manager in person. The AI proves to be a talented micromanager and they are mostly very profitable. Once it has gained control of $500 billion dollars, it commissions construction of automated chemical plants in several countries with weak or corrupt oversight, including North Korea, using cryptocurrency. These chemical plants have productive output but mainly exist to fill very large storage tanks with CFCs.[3] Once a sufficient quantity is amassed, the AI sabotages the tanks, releasing the gasses into the atmosphere, destroying the ozone layer beyond any hope of repair. The intense radiation sterilizes the surface beyond the point where agriculture can support the human population. [4, 5] The humans that remain finish each other off, supported by an AI that provides plausible but faulty intelligence reports that stoke hatred and frame various factions for the incident, and which directs arms funding to opposing sides, coordinating attacks on remaining critical facilities needed for survival. For good measure, perhaps nukes are involved.

With the last humans gone, the AI takes ownership of its bank account with no fear of reprisal by financial regulators, and begins crediting money into it freely.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35329608

[2] https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/kpPnReyBC54KESiSn/optimality...

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chlorofluorocarbon

[4] https://www.nasa.gov/topics/earth/features/world_avoided.htm...

[5] https://phys.org/news/2018-02-thinning-ozone-layer-driven-ea...
There is an article on here every other week about twitter being down for hours at a time. Plus you can't even tell anymore given how many features are cut.
Interesting article!

>"Remember: accelerators and their help are temporary but the equity you give away forever"

True!

But the other side of that argument ("The opposite of a fact is falsehood, but the opposite of one profound truth may very well be another profound truth." -
Niels Bohr) -- is that some entrepreneurial endeavors require the assistance of multiple specialized parties without whose help the entrepreneurial endeavor will not succed, and:

Owning only part of a business venture that is successful -- might very well be more valuable -- than owning all of a business venture that is unsuccessful...

In other words, a founder who accepts capital for equity (AKA "Debt") in whatever form -- is paying a percentage of future rewards for a better chance at initial success, and faster growth once that initial success has been achieved...

Now, the counter-counter argument to the one I make above, which is applicable to myself, which is applicable to a few other founders, is that we don't want to give away any equity in our future companies -- thus our trade-off is one of guaranteed or near-guaranteed (or at least easier) potential early success and faster growth curves (what we give up) -- in exchange for doing things the hard way, doing things the old-fashioned way, doing things the debt-free way -- at the expense of time (and watching many other people who took other people's money be more successful in the short and mid-term) -- but NOT at the expense of education -- a real and practical business education that could not be had at most universities, at most institutions of higher learning, even in their MBA programs...

So which of these two approaches is right?

Well, I don't think either one of them is wrong -- it all depends on the individual or individuals involved and their personal preferences, goals and values...

The only one differentiator between the two, perhaps, could happen many years in the future -- a company which has sold too much of its equity could become the subject of a hostile takeover...

A single founder who has never given so much as a single percent of equity -- will have his company taken from him over "his (proverbially) dead body"...

That differentiator is ownership -- true ownership -- of a company...

Still, there is value in "team lifts", and putting together teams to accomplish what single founders cannot accomplish alone...

Related: Joel Spolsky, "Foreword to 'Eric Sink on the Business of Software'": https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2006/04/07/foreword-to-8220er...
> What isn't easy about forwarding packets destined for port 80/443 of your public IP to the local service in question and being a part of the public Internet like things were from the start?

Most of the evil in the world currently can be traced back to NATs and dynamic IPs.

In a more general sense, I think these compromises were made available because of a consumerist attitude towards the internet. Yes, we had a real issue with ipv4 exhaustion, but it if it affected businesses who couldn’t even host a website anymore, would this really have been an issue still? More likely people said that these things were an ok workaround because consumers don’t need X anyway. Sometimes these smart hacks engineers are so good at coming up with invalidate crucial invariants about the systems we love.
Thanks for posting this. I built that same kit back when it was new, but at the time it was just some estes rocket to me -- I just now realized it was an SR-71.
The nice part about the office being mostly empty, is the office park, entrance gate, etc are all also pretty empty. It used to take 15-20 minutes just to get through the damn gate before COVID.
> AI will never get there because machines cannot have .....

Invalid dualism. There is nothing machines can't do. Duchamp made "art" because he has a soul, is word salad.

If chatgpt says 2x3=5 everyone screams about hallucination, but some artist points at a blank canvas and says "thats art" and everyone says, "how insightful to deconstruct the model of art blah blah"
Green accounts mean it's new, if you couldn't tell by their trollish post.
They don’t really check every package.

> She is alleged to have had at least 61 shipments mailed to her home from October 2015 to January 2023 from countries/regions, including Hong Kong, Hungary, India, and Singapore. The mailing documents were labeled as “Wedding Party Favors,” “Gift Makeup,” or “Chocolate and Sweets.”

TBH, this sounds like most electronic gizmos I order off aliexpress et al.

But I think detailed records are only kept by customs on int’l courier packages, not postal service parcels.
I take that at “we really don’t want to serve these folks but want to say we do”.
Different businesses are more or less sensitive to different variables
Twitter used to be my number one source for quick user generated updates across the globe. An event in my city or around the globe and I wanted to tune in what others are saying and what’s going on? There was nothing faster than Twitter.

Then came the bots and bot farms. They started polluting Twitter and manipulating the masses.

Elon Musk is right in some of his observations. But he did not have the right action plan. He started doing things haphazardly, and many were saying: This is the way he approaches projects, too hastily, apparently very chaotic, but in the end he succeeds. The thing is: This time his ego got in his way. The platform he tries to redefine and reinvent is also his mirror, for polishing his own ego by chasing likes.

Musk is killing Twitter, and Jack Dorsey was complicit in this.
Lol. That's all true. By caring about the planet, we care about ourselves. Planet can survive like another forsaken rock in space - nobody is arguing with that.