skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I don't agree there's any links between an appstore and malware.

Sandboxing and app distribution are two concept which might or might not be linked depending on the implementation.

For example, if somebody implemented an appstore for WindowsXP which had zero software protection, the appstore would have been a significant vector of distributing malware as well.
That's not true. Heat pumps are efficient enough that isn't the case.
Is "couples" the reason? I (implicitly, no idea why now that you bring it up) read the other descriptions of weeklies as not-with-partner events. Perhaps not strictly not-with-partner, but default without.

"Couples" puts everybody in involuntary performance mode. It starts super harmless, the "and" element (the side in a couple that came along) having a natural desire to be good with the friends of their partner (the "and" side is prone to greatly overestimate the depth of the relationship that lead to the invite!), the other side (the one that had the "link") trying to make their partner feel good with that group. So far so good, everybody does the reasonable thing, sounds super nice. But that very same thing happens within every couple, nobody in the room who isn't in "prove myself to my partner" mode. Before you know it escalates into a take-no-prisoners battle of showing off which couple functions best. It's certainly possible with couples despite all this, but there is infinitely more that could go wrong along the way.
Simon, you are a beast, is there anything you don't do?

many thanks for all the content and inspiration, your blog is genuinely my favourite read right now!
A small correction - Russia cut off EU from gas, not the other way round. The EU had a long term plan to wean itself off Russian gas, but Russia pre-empted it.

The ballsy part was that EU was leading a foreign policy (support for Ukraine) while knowing it will probably lead to Russia cutting off the gas supply.
I don't really see avoiding vendor lock as the most important part of creating systems. It's definitely nice to have and all things being equal, I'll take a solution that avoids vendor lock over a solution that doesn't. But I'm still going to keep using AWS Lambda for example, since I can get pretty good value out of it despite it being not a portable solution.
Wow for sure if my genius was recognized like that would be surprised too
https://archive.is/1bzyL
Valve turned it into a business model just fine. Their long-term goal is to not be dependent on proprietary OSes and this is why Linux is installed on Steam Deck by default.
If I'm not mistaken, they use a fork of an old version of llama.cpp

I've been running Vicuna locally for several days now using llama.cpp (i.e. CPU only, because my laptop lacks a good GPU). It's not that hard to set it up yourself from scratch. Compiling llama.cpp is straightforward under Linux. The model (13B parameters, 4 bit) can be downloaded from HuggingFace.

There are several difficulties, however:

1) Vanilla llama.cpp doesn't appear to have a simple-to-use interface to interact with it from another process (your app), such as REST API (an idea found in Fabrice Bellard's text-synth) -- you want your main app to be decoupled from a process which consumes a lot of CPU and RAM and can crash. I solved it by using llamacpphtmld project which provides HTTP access to the model. It's a pretty simple project and I think of making my own Go wrappers.

2) Vicuna was trained on ChatGPT output so it often responds with garbage such as "As an AI language model..." and refuses to discuss "controversial topics". I solved it with prompt engineering where I add things like "%bot_name% never moralizes", "%bot_name% is rude" etc. (it's not always rude but that somehow stops it from moralizing)

3) it's pretty slow, at least on my laptop (1-3 minutes to process a phrase -- although I include dialog history as well)

So far I'm very pleased with the results (aside from the fact that it's very slow) -- the bot feels GPT3-level when you use it as a chatbot, or as a story generator. In fact, in my tests, it feels like it actually exceeds GPT3 in that regard. I run two bots on my IRC channel, one is Vicuna and one is GPT3-based, and I feed them same prompts to compare. Vicuna feels better as a general-purpose chatbot which can talk pretty much about anything, and it's pretty imaginative. GPT3 often refuses to talk about things, and it loses track of our dialog more quickly.

Although it's not that hard to set it up, it takes time to get things right, so I thought maybe open-source my findings as some kind of middleware to quickly integrate with other projects (localhost REST API + read-to-use weights and preset prompts). So far most projects I've seen are either very low-level (like llama.cpp) or very high-level (web-based chat).
One way would be to get people to let AI watch as they interact with computer (watch YouTube or perform other tasks). You might even be able to outsource some of the computing to the local system.
I don't think so. I'm not in US, but here „third place“ was not a thing regardless of density. In fact, now climbing out of ex-soviet past (read poverty and totalitarian regime preventing the third place as well as urban sprawl), we got both urban sprawl and growth of the „third place“. Well, little growth from next-to-none. Which is hitting a low ceiling of rather intraverted culture that is caught up in TV and interwebs. Why go to bars if everybody is sitting in tight groups-of-friends and scrolling together...

Ironically, somewhat-third-place, seems to be most active in suburbs and rural areas. Where neighbours need to work together to solve various community issues. And that turns into partying together as well. It's common to have a community house where everybody can use the space for organising whatever, from playing table games to art classes to random lectures to movie nights. While densier cities seem to be less socializing outside of family&friends circles.
China won't invade Taiwan. Xi isn't going to oversee the massacre of fellow Han people. There is very little appetite within the CCP for openly invading Taiwan.

Looking at the diplomatic wins China has racked up recently, it's entirely possible Taiwan willingly folds itself into China within a decade.
its a host platform, but a great one? Given that the platform lacks a lot of native features long used by Lisp systems. For example one can work interactively, dump a memory image, copy and restart it later, just continuing the the work. The JVM does not support that. The native object system is not tailored towards incremental change, class loaders are a pain, ...
That's an aspiration. It's not what Android does these days.
Mobile OS permissions (at least Android) have become pretty weaselly.
Protecting you from malware blatantly asking for root is obviously very important. Sandboxing is important.
But the sneakier use of permissions for privacy exploits and data harvesting is different and more subtle.

GasBuddy ("GasBuddy Is a Privacy Nightmare")[0] is a case in point. Geolocating users and selling that to everyone. Harvesting users' driving habits then selling those to Allstate subsidiary Arity ("turning mobility and driver data into meaningful behavioral insights, leveraging telematics to make transportation smarter, safer, and more useful for everyone!"). (But there's an opt-out!)

So are fitness apps and trackers. Private equity loves acquiring them.

Permissions can be abused in ways that aren't made obvious to users. Obvious example: just because you disable "location access", doesn't mean the app can't (indirectly) geolocate you in a variety of sneaky ways.

Even if the app doesn't intentionally crash if you disable its location access: indirectly geolocating users indirectly from IP addresses or metadata on photos they upload. Device fingerprinting from motion sensors, so that you can track a unique user across networks and devices, and develop "behavioral insights". And on and on.

[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30636730
You strive for simplicity, but you just threw away any attempt at ethics together with it.

Ethics, as in, a set of rules to separate the right from the wrong. I'm not aware of any ethical system which does not try to be universal and accurate. And if the world is so complex that you can't describe it in rules, then ethics is impossible.

Needless to say, I disagree with that notion. Not on the grounds that it's an absurd conclusion, but because an ethical framework doesn't need to be complex in principle, and because simple rules can be accurate.
This sounds like a great idea. I don't suppose you released those edited models?
I agree, probably for a different reason. IMO the fact that Sam is saying this likely means that the LLMs are close to the upper knee of the S-Curve and after GPT5 they likely dont have many new fundamental ideas (additional SCurves) to throw at it. since they are ahead of the rest, it likely means we might be headed for an AI improvement pause for couple of years after GPT5.

Still good enough to upset the balance in search/ad market. Interesting times.
IIRC there is a reserved area in the beginning of th SD cards flash which is used for internal housekeeping. When this area is overwritten/formatted the card is bricked. [add] The size depends on the size of the card. I think it is around 32KB on cards with a capacity under 2GB.
According to the office for national statistics in China, for jan/feb of 2023 http://www.ce.cn/xwzx/gnsz/gdxw/202303/27/t20230327_38464161..., car manufacturing profits is down 41%. non-metal products manufacturing profits is down 39%. chemicals manufacturing profits is down 56%. electronics manufacturing profits is down 71%. In fact, all businesses have dropped 22% in profit.

That's data with existing businesses. It's been reported that within the last 2 years, China has had 1M+ SMB closures.
Yes, it should be at a park.

What sort of activity?
Minetest 5.7.0 Released
Not my Cabbages!

Perhaps he was an inspiration to the Avatars cabbage guy.
Show HN: GraphAr – Open-source file format for archiving/exchanging graph data
Hi, Hacker News! We're excited to announce the release of GraphAr, an open-source file format for archiving and exchanging graph data.

The landscape of graph processing systems is fragmented, with various types of systems, including graph databases, graph computation systems, and GNN systems. However, currently, there is no common file format for efficiently storing and exchanging graph data while maintaining its schema and graph semantics.

GraphAr is designed to address this issue by providing a simple, lightweight format for storing and exchanging graph data. GraphAr is a flexible and adaptable format that can be used across a variety of applications by decoupling the storage of metadata, adjacency, and properties. It is also designed to be efficient by leveraging existing formats such as ORC, Parquet, and CSV as much as possible. This makes it easy to integrate with existing data processing systems and provides a level of familiarity for users.

Furthermore, GraphAr preserves the semantics of graphs and can maintain the schema of property graphs. This means that users can maintain the same graph structure across different systems, ensuring that the graph's semantics are not lost.

We have developed both a C++ library for accessing and creating GraphAr files, and a Spark library for transforming data into and from GraphAr files. With these libraries, it's easy to work with GraphAr files in your existing Spark connectors or C++ projects.

As GraphAr matures, we aim to move the project to a vendor-neutral venue, such as Apache, LF AI & Data. This will ensure that the project continues to be developed in an open and transparent manner, with contributions from a broad community of developers.

To get started with GraphAr, check out our GitHub repository, where you'll find detailed documentation and examples of how to use the libraries. We welcome any feedback or contributions to the project.

Let's make graph data archiving and exchange more efficient with GraphAr!
Consider the counter argument. Complete anonymous Internet has allowed for various dangerous groups and trolling individuals online.

There's little to no recourse to take if they destroy and cause chaos, because of being anonymous.

These days, I wonder if a South Korean style pseudo anonymous system would be better. We remain anon, but police can arrest people for criminal behaviour.

Ie death threats online aren't uncommon in social forums, but is that really good?
Maybe? Depends on the rest of the software you’d be developing and what features and abstractions you’d need.

The point was that “just use redis” is a poor and incorrect advice.
In short term, China loves "strategic autonomy" because Macron has also suggested that China invading Taiwan should not be EU's business under the principle(apparently he used much stronger words but was censored by his own communications team)

In longer term, (pure speculation) I think China may believe that after a while, China would have so much global influence that even strategically autonomous EU would be reluctant to side with US even for blatantly "unjust" cause.
Because the alphabet was “a, b, …, x, y, z and &” (pronounced “… why zed and per se and”) and now it’s “a, b, …, x, y and z” (pronounced “… why and zed”).
Natural gas plants are entire factories designed to extract as much energy per unit of gas as they can. If you want to just compare carbon emissions, it's better to burn gas in a plant to generate electricity to do whatever you wanted than to pipe the gas to a home. This is not even accounting for the fact that this also removes the danger piping highly flammable gas to people's homes, and that it also removes the source of pollution away from population centers.
Show HN: Open-source VSCode shortcuts sharing site
I made this for the Supabase Hackathon.

This is my first open source project! Let me know what you think. Thanks

Link: https://vscodeshortcuts.com/

It is a place like HN where users can submit new shortcuts and upvote their favourite shortcuts

Pain point: lots of shortcuts out there, many good, many bad, how do I learn and focus my time on the best

Reason for building: trying out supabase

Plans for the future:
depending on how people like it!

* allow users to post custom shortcuts with gif/video demos

* potential issue regarding duplicates - I could check whether the shortcut commands match exactly. And then show a warnings. An extra step here would be to create an embedding of the description for the shortcut and if the description is too close to another, show a warning as well. This might prove difficult because shortcuts such as Indent line and Outdent line are very similar

* apply to other verticals, photoshop etc

auth

embedded code editor so users can test them out in the browser
> given all the lispers so fiercely dismissive of OOP

note though, that Lisp was 1994 the first officially standardized object-oriented language.
For me it's search.
I loved search (and search operators) on Twitter. Used it heavily to curate my twitter lists, to only get tweets pertaining to topics I was interested in.

When many tech folks began moving to Mastodon, I also decided to kick the tires to see what all the buzz is about. But I got tired of sifting through unrelated toots from people to find technically relevant ones.

Now, I know proper search support will never be added to Mastodon, so I don't plan to use it. I understand their reasons for it, but it's not for me.

Thankfully twitter for other topics I am interested in seems largely untouched.
This book is such a gem and was so easy to read. I highly recommend it to anyone who hasn't read it yet.
Or the fact that the entire German gov mobile communication stack was recently handed over to Apple (email, calendars) and Wire (messaging). Both US owned.
The EdTech trash that's challenging them is even more predatory and awful.

There's also very little focus on actual learning. Everything seems to be oriented around landing a job.
Websites can override the setting and force browsers to do it, and quite a lot of them seem to for some reason
> So maybe they won't outright insult the US like Macron did

When did Macron outright insult the US?

As someone who both speak and read French, I haven't seen him say anything particularly shocking. As far as I know, the whole thing is mostly the US press being its usual self.

Macron said Europe should aim for more independance and refuse to be a vassal of the US, that Europe shouldn't let the US drag it in its own current commercial conflict with China and that France stands being the status quo regarding Taiwan as it has always done.

That all seems pretty tame.
SD Cards have computers inside of them. Security conscious users will be really worried using a blob for their stuff.
> It's already more efficient than the terrible stove.

How are you calculating that? I highly doubt the total net environmental impact of butane canisters (including shipping and packaging) is lower than piped gas.
Ask HN: How do you pay your affiliate marketers?
Curious as someone who is about to start their own affiliate programme (using custom built code).

> What kind of KYC information do you get from people?

> What payment/money transfer service do you use?

> How long do you wait between taking a sale and paying the affiliate?

Finally, what are some points/problems to be aware of?
> Sam Altman is saying we have reached the point where spending $100M+ trying to “beat” GPT-4 at everything isn’t the future.

I don't disagree, but it does align pretty well with the OpenAI business model, no? "No need to develop your own base model, just buy our own"
You might have missed some more recent physics, but light is absolutely quantized, it comes only in integer multiples of a photon.
Catchy name. He should also make another social media company called Truth Social. Oh wait..
> For inheritance, there's no escape hatch. Best you can get is a crippled proxy

You can use gen-class here. Granted complex Java interop trends toward a point where it becomes easier to write and expose a Java library; the option is there though.
I do some development with dev boards and firmware stuff and regularly dd images onto SD-card without any skips or something like that. I never bricked any card.
I would like to know how people do salons that work.
Sure, if you can wait for it to load from unallocated resources (and risk failure) then it's a very different scenario.

But, very notably, you can have a suspended cloud backup even if your main servers aren't cloud. And the added complexity for datacenter-to-cloud HA doesn't have to be significantly higher than the cloud-to-cloud version.
> it likely means we might be headed for an AI improvement pause for couple of years after GPT5.

I suspect that a pause in base LLM performance won’t be an AI improvement pause; there’s a whole lot of space to improve the parts of AI systems around the core “brain in a jar” model.
It’s such a pity that Heroku has fallen so much. But I definitely wouldn’t run anything I cared about on Heroku these days. I ended up with my apps on NorthFlank which I’ve been very happy with. Railway also looks like a good choice, especially for those looking for a free plan.
Whenever I went for low latency, I noticed 2 things:
1. Actual latency was not what I set in the encoder because of frame sizes, chunk sizes, tcp Windows, decided buffering
2. Forcing super low latency caused drop-outs, which is worse for music than delays.

Overall I just found flac to be rock solid and lower latency without much tweak
Seems harder to make friends in developed countries. Not sure why that is. Maybe people can be more independent
I actually have high hopes for the hybrid architecture Ben Goertzel has been working on at OpenCog. I think the LLMs are soon going to hit a S curve w/o introduction of additional scientific knowledge like physics and notion of energy (wrt AGI development, they'll still be good for tonnes of other jobs displacing things).
OP here: I agree my phrasing is kind of problematic. Will rephrase shortly. Thank you for bringing that up.
Crazy how the Western media still clings on to people like Baerbock. Swear to God, even media in the dying days of the Ceausescu regime was not that deluded, and I say that as a on-and-off (mostly on) Economist reader for 15+ years and I also used to glimpse at some newspapers that my dad used to bring home when I was a kid (for the Ceausescu media part).
Yes, chargeback is pretty much a nuclear option. But in his case they'd already closed his account and are not responding, so time for the nukes.
How is this better than dd(1)? Does it "format" the card with any specific filesystem or just overwrite/erase its contents?
I don't think the page actually says that the security section has anything to do with the potential for poor performance; those are discussed in separate paragraphs. It's mentioning the security section to warn the user that this tool will not actually wipe every byte of the card, just the normal unsecured data storage area.

The performance pitfalls are not stated, but I'd guess they're referring to the possibility of using suboptimal file system block sizes or alignment. I wouldn't worry too much about recent tools getting alignment wrong or recent cards being overly sensitive to block sizes.

The official SD tool probably also ensures that it uses the exact filesystem called for by their standards (ie. when to use FAT32 and when to use exFAT), as a guarantee of compatibility with any device that interprets the standards too strictly.
Honestly, Windows is trash but so is MacOS. They both have surveillance software and their crap that they force upon you. Microsoft is obviously way worse but Apple is no saint here.
> Kids takes way more risks, including social risks, because they don't know those are risks.

> Kids do that all the times, without even thinking about it.

> But the process is seamless to kids, while it requires effort to adults.

Clearly your childhood was nothing like mine or that of a lot of other people here.
It omits the obvious. How can one download this and try at home?
I'm dubious about this claim, I have completely destroyed the partition table and mkfs on the raw device...
> isn't a reliable friend or ally

France knows the US isn't a reliable ally since the Suez crisis. Look at what happened to the US allies in Afghanistan or to the Kurdish fighters in Syria for a more recent exemple. The issue is that it's a useful one.
Because so many of urbanite anti-car commenters are so strident that there’s very little point in engaging with them. (HN probably is younger which tends to correlate with more urban these days but it’s generally not worth trying to have certain discussions that will change no one’s mind.)

As a peer commented if you live in Silicon Valley, among other places, you live in the suburbs even if you can maybe walk to a few places.
It's not that many schools and they stopped the policy again...

To my mind, the outrage is somewhat exaggerated. You could call it "outrage fetishism about culture war issues". Also an opportunity for "smart people" to feel good about "how they managed to learn things despite having to go to school" and how much better they think they could organize the school system, or how much smarter they would have been if no schools had existed.

Yes, maybe the stated reasons for trying this reform were stupid and maybe it should have been obvious to people it wouldn't work. But, crucially, they are willing to scrap what doesn't work and try something else. That can go a very long way given some time. And yes, that leaves us with an imperfect school system. Very different from arguing against having schools at all, a position far more outrageous to my mind than any "woke nonsense" I've been subjected to so far.
Net Promoter Score (NPS) Is a Dangerous Metric
Why should China setting foot in Taiwan be EU's business? It's literally half-way around the globe from us.
Back in ye olde days of 1998 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Egg_Banking

Monzo started probably the closest to OP description - https://www.alexanderjarvis.com/monzo-pitch-deck-raise-serie...