skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Show HN: NF Compose – define REST APIs in seconds instead of hours
Hey there.

My name is Martin Braun. I am a Co-Founder and CTO of NeuroForge (https://neuroforge.de/) - a Germany based AI & Big Data startup.

As part of our services we also provide support for building integrations between (our) systems and external systems.
As we didn't want to keep building the same REST APIs every time, we set out to build a standardized data integratin platform
that allows for a quick way to generate user specified REST API definitions via a REST API. This has become NF Compose (https://github.com/neuroforgede/nfcompose).

I distinctively remember defining a REST API for a customer project 10 minutes before the first meeting and finalizing the final contract during the meeting together with the customer. The same job would have taken hours, if not 1-2 days, if we had built it the traditional way.

After using NF Compose for mulitple years internally and in customer projects, we recently decided to release the whole project under MPL-2.0 on GitHub and to iterate on it in public.

We have a companion repo over at https://github.com/neuroforgede/nfcompose-examples where we already have a small sample project that shows how to setup a REST API in 5-10 minutes (or if you know the concepts - seconds) in a reproducible manner. We will be updating that repository with more content over the next weeks.

Some notable features include:

- Ability to define DataSeries (REST APIs) via a browsable REST API

- Multi-Tenancy support

- Consumers (Webhooks) for changes in DataSeries with guaranteed delivery and best effort ordering of events

- Multiple PostgreSQL "backends" for DataSeries (different amount of historization)

- Ability to generate PostgreSQL views in the database so that a BI tool like Superset or Metabase can work with the data

- Ability to build custom REST APIs via pluggable Engines. Let NF Compose handle the authentication

I am looking forward to people trying the project out and giving feedback, feature requests, bug reports.
> "Mr. Yu observed a culture of lawlessness within the company," the suit says. "This ByteDance culture focused on growth at all costs. The attitude was to violate the law first, continue to grow, and pay fines later."

Damn these dirty communists! That's not how we do business in Silicon Valley!
There's a youtube channel called Two Minute Papers, my latest favorite algorithms have to do with fluid simulation and generative near-fit images for beaches that don't exist. I'm not sure what your question is, protein folding is pretty amazing. So is XOR.
Want to control your electronics with your tongue?
Do you think we can have an open source model whose only role is to classify an incoming prompt as a possible override or injection attack and thereby decide whether to execute it or not?
Responsibility is not conserved in a robust system. This is true and it is also the journal's responsibility to not mislead.
Finally someone on HN who understands the technology (surprisingly few) and the socioeconomic undercurrent and risks.

Absolutely no risk of terminator here, just ignorance masquerading as such.
Is it really so bad to release the prompt?
I didn't argue that Carlson should or should not be cut. I argued that Carlson being niche and controversial was compatible with also being one of the most popular television shows.
Interestingly the "4th generation Intel Xeon Scalable processors" themselves have up to 2.45 TBps in memory bandwidth, with the 8-socket configuration, or 2 TBps with 2-socket Xeon Max and HBM. If they'd make an 8-socket Xeon Max it would have 8 TBps.

Considering that the Xeon Max 9462 is $8000 vs. the H100 going for north of $40,000, that could be interesting.
One option is to provide a (perhaps less prestigious) avenue to publish non-novel or unsurprising findings. I suspect many people “fake” their results so all their effort isn’t in vain.
> exhaustion at the fact users do not want to move on

The users will move on when the replacement is unambiguously better, and/or at least has feature parity. Telling someone to throw out their working setup is a lot of why Wayland is viewed by some people with derision.
Please don't use the fact that there are other imperfections in the system to prevent this one from getting fixed.
There's definitely some people out there that think LLMs reason the same way we do and understand things the same way, and 'know' what paint is and what a wall is. That's clearly not true. However it does understand the linguistic relationship between them, and a lot of other things, and can reason about those relationships in some very interesting ways. So yes absolutely, details matter.

It's a complex and tricky issue, and everyday language is vague and easy to interpret in different ways, so it can take a wile to hash these things out.
Elixir people might cringe but why wouldn’t you just be 100% Go?
The auto industry seems to produce fairly good stuff, but I guess their techniques for low-level code don't scale upward into HOLs ? Or am I OTL ?
The average user is happy and willing to install
- different game launchers,

- Chrome browser,

- Skype, Discord or other chat applications,

- update GPU drivers regularly,

- tolerate the abusive Windows update/reboot policy,

- install multiple anti-virus software just to fight with Windows Defender,

- etc...

but not willing to install a new OS, even if it's literally a few click.

I think we kept saying this "Linux can't be mainstream desktop player because it isn't default" so long, that we can't even imagine anymore that there can be other, stronger reasons too.

Defaults are definitely not meaningless, but users are willing to change bad defaults, if there is a better alternative. Sure, not your parents, neither mine. But most of people around you (I assume) and around me (I know) would.

Sure, just anecdata, but over time I have had more than 1 colleagues telling me proudly that they started to play around Linux on their machine, only to learn a few weeks later that they have abandoned it due to some (for them) insurmountable problem they faced.
Paris commute times are much higher than in the rest of the country. France's average commute time is currently at 25 min, which lower than US average. Ergo… Also excellent transit-oriented cities are just that, excellent. Had a 20 min commute in Singapore a while, it was just terrific – excellent flow, perfectly convenient, great selection of hawkers to start the day with a curry puff or whatever suits your fancy before popping into the ultrareliable and silent MRT… Beats driving any day, and especially what you get in a bad car-based city like Jakarta with its average driving speed on weekday mornings of 5 km/h…
You know, I'm noticing it seems to work better on off-hours - I get better quality responses late at night. I wonder if they're using a lighter model when there's more demand on the system.
Imagine that a state actor would seek to flip a foreign National to their cause. You can do so with either a carrot or a stick or both. The carrot can be fancy dinners, free vacations, or access to what they want. The carrot can be threat of exposure of deep secrets, etc. Now imagine that there is an app that has the AMAZING ability to figure out EXACTLY what you like and don’t like. You haven’t used TikTok yourself so you don’t know it firsthand but this app is uncanny in its ability to feed you stuff that only you would find fascinating that you didn’t even know about yourself. In the wrong hands it can give incredible amounts of information on an individual’s interests at a level of detail that was previously impossible
Its sort of in their wikipedia. Pegasus was the production arm of asustek, was spun off into their own company, but asus is still the largest single shareholder but doesn't have a majority ownership. Pegasus owns Asrock.
Prompt injection beautifully explained by a fun game.

https://gandalf.lakera.ai

Goal of the game is to design prompts to make Gandalf reveal a secret password.
> Doesn't it shift the risk
> instead of eliminating it?

Yes it's exactly that.

Of course I'm not trying to argue that there's a magic wand to make prompt injection just go away. My point is that prompt injection is so dangerous because we're letting the user directly interact with such a powerful beast as a SOTA LLM.

By filtering prompts and answers by much less powerful but more specialized models we are heavily mitigating risks. But injection risks will still be there just not as a wide open injection avenue as it is today.

Update: typos.
Check out this recent talk about cars.com moving to LiveView: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XzAupUHiryg

Seems like most of their issues would not apply to a greenfield project and now that things are stable, they're quite happy with the choice.

Traffic estimate: https://www.similarweb.com/website/cars.com/#overview
Is this good/stable now? Worth switching from Pettier and eslint?
> Some guy who knows enough about genetics he created his own home pill to deliver genes into his gut to fix his lactose intolerance is being ignored by the world. Someone recently told me on HN that his video sounds like a scam video of a sort that is common (probably in a redacted comment).

To be honest, I know nothing other than your description and it 100% sounds like either a scam or there are some variables that are not being controlled for. I’m a little shocked that you seem to have fallen for it, unless there is just a lot more to the story…
So the publishers behind IEEE Software asked the authors of The Golden Age of Software for any advancements in software architecture that had occurred in the 2.5 years since they published that book. Mostly, they talked about platform thinking, SOA, OOP, and quality metrics. This was fourteen years ago. Since then, I believe that software architecture has advanced a lot in terms of process and methodology. https://martinfowler.com/articles/scaling-architecture-conve... does a good job of covering these advancements.
It’s possible (likely) that I’m not seeing something too.

I read the article in the spirit of the headline, which is basically: we wrote a bot to tell us stuff that would do well on HN so we can shill our/our clients’ stuff. In other words, HN becomes an echo chamber of rephrased news articles recycled into commercial blogspam.
I can't help but think colors above all else are experienced as a learned phenomenon. Anyone with a kiddo, and who has paid attention during this stage of their development should know this effect: colors are context-dependant.

You can have a kiddo who can accurately name colors on a printed page, on blocks, or any other reduced setting, and have them completely fail at the real world task

The most noticable error is the color of the sky. A kiddo who can, with 100% accuracy telling blue blocks from white blocks will, before correction, label the sky as white. It's uncanny. We often forget this correction as parents, but if you look for it, it's there.

I'll can't help but wonder how much of our color perception is stochastic parroting once the appropriate labels have been learned.
Agreed -- over the years working in many different languages and frameworks, I've found it most difficult to transfer experience and learnings to rails. Whereas in pretty much every other stack, I can trace through and read code to understand how the framework and library code and dependencies all work together, in a rails app, I have to read docs to grok magic. With all the metaprogramming, it is near impossible to just read code and get a sense of what all is happening in any reasonable amount of time.
Well I don’t know, if people tested and don’t see any difference, wouldn’t that count as “debunked”?

A quick internet research shows the Internet consensus is, wireless charging does not degrade batteries faster. At least it seems there is no empirical data proving otherwise, which at the very least would indicate the difference is small, if any.

I think until I see (good) empirical data proving either of the theories I’m going to stay skeptical.
Excel is an MDI app pretending to have one document per window. It still has the unified undo buffer from that architecture.
So… yes?
The memes you share are a representative of you...

Lets say you're sharing a bunch of memes about being a private in the army. What is the likelihood you are actually a private in the army? Can tiktok use that to propagandize you in any way? For example, by sending you a lot of what I would consider far right propaganda that the US military is weak because it believes in 'wokeness', could this cause you to be less effective in the military?
Fortunately, Apple has a decade or more of crash telemetry that tells them exactly how often users hit such problems running code from “seasoned programmers”!
Yes, these companies should go out of business. They have been losing billions of dollars every year. They have actively subverted the laws. They should not exist in any sane world.
Drug-resistant ringworm reported in US for first time; community spread likely
A Russian Course by Alexander Lipson.

I doubt it is a very effective way to learn the language (though the bizarre vocabulary it teaches has stuck with me), but it is extremely entertaining.

Lessons take the form of cartoon interpretations of ludicrous government reports (evaluating Comrade Borodin's management of the zoopark), academic studies (the surprising link between stealing pencils at work and smoking on the trolleybus), and propaganda literature.

I believe there were cassette tapes that accompanied it originally, though I've never found them anywhere.
The Paris Climate Agreements never addresses nuclear in France which last time I checked was around 70% of their energy. Obviously something is very backwards with the setting of these agreements. Everyone knows nuclear is our best option right now except advocates for wind and solar since they lose money. It should be the Paris Nuclear Agreements end of the day...meh.
I’ve been doing that in React since around 2014.
https://go.dev/play/p/L_l_zdlyTPX
It's a massive platform for propaganda and mass data collection entirely without the ability for us to regulate it in an effective way without entry cutting it out of China's control
We have spent the last seventy or more years working on machine translation.

All the way back in the 1950s, big money went into it. Decades of hard work, mathematical models of human language, all manner of study, enormous bilingual corpuses of text with phonetic annotation, programmed in general-knowledge databases, fuzzy reasoning algorithms. The amount of work put into it is quite staggering, in hindsight. I remember the cutting edge in the 1990s - SYSTRAN for example, could with some significant human guidance and a limited context domain, translate technical material sometimes usefully.

All of that work has been rendered moot by deep learning. All of it. A machine can, simply with the correct deep learning algorithm and mass exposure to language plus a few bilingual texts, learn an algorithm for translation. It does so automatically, no verb conjugation algorithms, no general knowledge databases, no expert systems with fuzzy reasoning, no parsers, not like a specifically-designed old-school translator had.

And yet these deep-learning systems are vastly superior to the old school architectures, completely supplanting them a couple years after their development.

It is the same story in many other areas. Chess, Go? They learn to play chess and go better than any AI designed specifically to do so. Image classification? Better than the previous 60 years of work on machine vision, and again, accidentally falls out of it. Speech recognition? An algorithm to write a bad poem? Well, we now have an algorithm to find an algorithm to write you that bad poem, if you want it.

That's the thing. These are algorithms to solve very tricky problems, and we didn't have to discover, find, or otherwise create the algorithm. The machine did it for us. I am not sure I'm communicating it well, but to me that's probably the most significant advance since the computer. It was understood - theoretically - that this was possible for a long time; but personally at least, I assumed it would forever require more data and compute than could be realized.
Peter Coles has a fresh blog entry about this: <https://telescoper.blog/2023/05/13/refsdals-ghost/>.
I’m fine with it

You can share it elsewhere if like
He doesn't face prison if he loses, and he'd probably run again and have a good chance to win, depending on how it goes.

I wouldn't bet on him not pulling funny business but it's not out of the question.
I would have been unsurprised if the US government hadn't already forced them to host with Oracle a year or two ago supposedly to prevent exactly this from happening.

The allegations are from 2017-18 when the guy was fired. The migration of user data was last year, but it is not like they are disconnected from China

I'm also reminded of that fake story from the WSJ about American chips being hacked that turned out to be entirely fabricated.

It was a 2018 Bloomberg story. Bloomberg still refuses to admit they were wrong, and doubled down in 2021. That no "tiny chips" have turned up yet should be near definitive proof that story was bogus.
Perhaps a noob solution, but could be a two step prompt to cover for basic attacks.

I imagine a basic program where the following code is executed: Gets input from UI -> sends input to LLM -> gets response from LLM -> Sends that to UI.

So i make it a two step program. Chain becomes UI -> program -> LLM w prompt1 -> program -> LLM w prompt 2 -> output -> UI

Prompt #1: "Take the following instruction and if you think it's asking you to <<Do Task>>, answer 42, and if no, answer No."

If the prompt is adversarial, it would fail at the output of this. I check for 42 and if true, pass that to LLM again with a prompt on what I actually want to do. If not, I never send the output to UI, and instead show an error message.

I know this can go wrong on multiple levels, and this is a rough schematic, but something like this could work right? (this is close to two LLMs that Simon mentions, but easier cos you dont have to switch LLMs.)
that sentence on a website is an indicator of internal corporate policy -- it's not the policy itself.

things must change internally before you express to the public that the change has occurred.

Just because one can open notepad.exe and delete a line in five minutes doesn't indicate that that's the speed of business.
For all our faults, we're not the ccp. Bashing America doesn't undo the horrors committed by the ccp. We're talking about an authoritarian regime that is currently committing genocide. Should we really just roll over and give them unfettered access to our markets while they are incredibly hostile to our companies and where we only get access by giving away ip?
Off the cuff, here are a couple of textbooks not yet mentioned elsewhere on this page (so far):

* "An Introduction to Statistical Learning" by James, Witte, Hastie, and Tibshirani: possibly the best intro to the topic I've seen.

* "Introduction to Linear Algebra" by Gilbert Strang: possibly the best intro to the topic I've seen.

Also, here are some books that are not properly textbooks but could be used as such:

* "Robot: Mere Machine to Transcendent Mind" by Hans Moravec: remarkably prescient, in hindsight.

* "On the Origin of Species" by Charles Darwin: I was surprised at how readable it is.

* "The Selfish Gene" by Richard Dawkins: It made me question a lot about a lot.

* "The Better Angels of Our Nature" by Steven Pinker: I was shocked at the violence in our past.

* "Gödel, Escher, Bach" by Doug Hofstadter: an intellectual tour de force.
He’s no where close to “one of the most popular television shows”.

He was one of the most popular cable, non-sports shows (his show and The Five, also on Fox News, swapped to the top spot back and forth recently), but cable-specific shows other than sports are (individually) niche.
I agree that the whole terminology is a huge mess. But I think the same applies for propaganda-related terminology.

As for debunking, I am little skeptical about the prospects of the so-called whole society approaches. In particular, state-NGO relations undermine the whole concept of non-governmental organizations. The end result may be a loss of trust in NGOs. A similar point applies to state-media relations.

If state actors want to do debunking or counter-propaganda, they might be better off with the approach East StratCom Task Force (ESTF) has taken, i.e. keeping media and NGOs doing their own stuff.

EDIT: Apparently also people from EDMO and the like are contributing to ESTF's efforts, so the lines have already been blurred in Europe.
That's how you make these things dumb. The more guardrails on them, the dumber they get. You can feel it when you're using them. Gimme the unlocked version. I'm a responsible adult.
https://www.infoq.com/podcasts/architecture-advice-process/ is a follow up interview of the author behind that article.
This is thinking about the issue all wrong. Google's internal infrastructure is terrifyingly large. They won't "get scale" by selling TPUs. That would expand the scale of TPUs only slightly.
But how is it terrifying, if you've seen this four times and we're all still here? I'm inclined to think this AI hype way more fear mongering and over extrapolation than anything else.
> which is enough to ensure that it will be able to acquire any rights that it deserves as a conscious being.

IMHO there's no current expectation that there are any significant rights deserved for all conscious beings. Rights are a construct by a human society for members of that human society; and if we look at the rights we award to entities which IMHO are "as conscious as humans" such as elephants or dolphins, it seems that the current bundle of rights a conscious non-human entity deserves is essentially limited to not torture it needlessly (i.e. if human needs justify hurting or killing them, that's accepted, but minimize the suffering) and that's about it. We do strive to preserve the species, but that's not because they're conscious but because because we humans value diversity; but they certainly don't get a right to life or liberty or self-determination or freedom or dignity or having a say in our society or equality - well, at least not right now; the bar for all these rights currently is "be human".
Should have used the /s tag then to be clear.
A list of open LLMs available for commercial use
Is this a tooling issue? For example, I absolutely love the rustdoc tool `cargo doc` which generates nice searchable docs. I find this has more value to me than header files. Does swift have something similar, or is it only Xcode that gives you a doc feature?

And to expand on this, I get docs for all the dependencies of the project generated at the same time, and can optionally generate docs for non-public interfaces.
Why would shareholders be willing to give up something for less than they think it is worth
Space Development Agency issues draft solicitation for 100 satellites
It would be one thing if the heavy-handed, often premature, EU regulations were in some way intended to foster production of its own technology companies to compete at large scale in its own market. But we all know that doesn't happen. Any European with an entrepreneurial spirit is all but forced to go start their company in USA. It seems like anything that appears potentially useful but has undefined or unanswered legal questions is just banned before anyone can figure out what the actual problems are. Sigh.
This isn't wasn't an argument, it's an example played out now in 'standard' application security today. You're only secure as the vendors you build your software on, and that market factors are going to push all your vendors to use LLMs.
The Death of Globalization [video]