skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Show HN: I built a website that generates fake users for an idea
You can type anything into the box shown, and the site will generate a UX persona representing people who would pay for it.

Technically it doesn't have to be a product: it works with book ideas for example.

It's based on GPT 3.5 and uses chain of thought to model a target market, personalities, etc. In the process of building this out I got a really great model of how to tease creativity out of LLMs.

Once you generate a user you can also chat with them, and they'll imagine their use of whatever you're building in as much detail as possible.

You can try things like:

- "a product that only exists in a state of non-existence and disintegrates into nothingness when perceived"

- "a wet sock that is always wet"

- "a mirror of Hacker News translated into pig latin"

- "a web browser that replaces the term 'AI' with a poop emoji"

-

I get a lot of feedback asking how you can trust what the model says, but I've theorized that what LLMs perceive a product as is what most web users will when they first discover what you're building.

If it doesn't align with what you're actually building, it's a sign you'll need to address a certain degree of misunderstanding when people first hear about what you're building.

I'm building a set of tools similar to this one: the next one I have in mind is one that helps you name things. Rather than coming up with a name, it teaches you how to name something for a given domain ("how to name your YC focused SaaS product that's targeted at doctors" for example)
In my experience, telling it "no thats wrong, try again" just gets it to be wrong in a new different way, or restate the same wrong answer slightly differently. I've had to explicitly guide it to correct answers or formats at times.
In a production system, you don’t need easy to do most of the time, you need easy without fail.
Yeah, but how can that happen in a changing regulatory environment? From the article it seems to me that even if you had built a plant and loved the design, it probably wouldn't be legal to build another one just like it a few years down the road. The author says that part of the reason for cost overruns is that the rules change even after construction has begun.
Wow. I used a tool the other day to delete everything as well. I'll check my comments now. Be great if everyone else here could do so as well and report back. If they did, indeed, do a rollback that is serious malfeasance.
If you think it’s bad now (spoiler: it is worse than you think), this is merely the calm before the storm. We haven’t yet seen the massive saturation of LLM generated content on everything from reviews to job applications to anything else you can possibly think of. The friction of sentiment-hacking operations will be dramatically reduced and we don’t have any effective mitigations. To make things worse, the only ones who can integrate the solutions (the platform owners) are not incentivized to take it very seriously.

Fun times ahead!
> moved to runtime

So a completely different scenario? Let's assume for a moment that developers only ever 'build' or 'check' their code, but all actual runtime behavior is in production. In production we have toooooons of security tooling for monitoring and constraining program behavior. On dev computers? Basically nothing.

Of course, developers run `test` as well, and sometimes they run the whole program but these use cases, especially at companies, are increasingly moving to CI.
Excellent post, but we know very little about you.

What do you bring to the table as a founder? Can you bring in money, can you sell? Is your pitch to YC all set to go, just need the validation of a tech cofounder on your team?

Your idea, which I can see working, is far less important than your ability to make it happen. Can you sell yourself as a partner to a top dev to build your machine and share it with you?

As to the naysayers, the reasons they say this'll never work are identical to the reason OnlyFans would never work. Except it does work. Well.
It makes sense to me, and it's a phenomenon I've noticed myself. Now that I think about it, though, I can't come up with any good examples off the top of my head where the middle of the market has truly been abandoned.

In tech, Apple comfortably occupies the premium end of the market, and other companies tried to move in (think Microsoft with the Surface) but with fairly limited success. With cars, the move has been to bigger, more luxurious vehicles, but you still have lower end models at various levels of trim. I have noticed it with, say, dentists, where sole traders and small businesses have essentially been replaced by franchises. Same for chemists.

To me the driving factor is that not everyone can compete on price, and competing for the luxury segment of the market is a fairly obvious alternative strategy. It also goes hand-in-hand with other factors like sustainability, where it might be impossible to make your product cheaply because you source local or recycled materials, or you make a product that is designed to last longer, so your customers don't return to buy your product as frequently.

I'd say the last 7-8 years I've noticed a move to luxury products in most markets just as a general trend. I call it the affordable luxury phenomenon. But I think a lot of it has been driven by cheap credit, and luxury goods makers reaching down into the middle market (the aspirational market) as much as the middle market being abandoned.
The characteristic of the early pandemic was "ground glass" lung X-rays.

If they have that, it's pretty clear cut.

If they don't ... meh.
It would be much better if this knowledge was available elsewhere for other souls to peruse. Say, maybe, a blog?
The outcome of Nvidia's monopoly hold on AI/GPU computing is that consumer level devices that might otherwise be perfectly effective for this sort of stuff are prevented by Nvidia from being used for such purposes.

If there was real competition -like two or more other suppliers on par in terms of capability - then artificially constraining devices just to plump up prices would not be a thing.
gv to reselect the last selected visual mode region is also often handy in my experience.
To clarify search here to you mean search within the podcast or within the summary? We're also looking into better recommendations.
I had exactly the same thing happen. Ended up moving all my domains to another registrar after that happened.
But... isn't the melting point of the alloy far above the melting point of the constituent pure metals?

I'd ask my metalurgist friend, but I don't want to look like an idiot.
Just learned "keygen" is the term the script-kiddies use to describe the act of generating fake activation keys. Never let it be said HN is not educational. But I feel the same way I felt when I noticed idiots using "crypto" to refer to cryptocurrency instead of cryptography.
Remembering Robert Gottlieb, editor extraordinaire
Whether the government tries to cover up or not is of little consequence, the people are already dead.

Multiple 100+ fatality dam accidents happened in the US and other Western countries about the same time, lower fatalities owing to lower population density rather than some different level of diligence.
I think that would probably be impossible to quantify. Would you consider amount of sexual abuse per religion, per believer, per cleric, or what? And, of course, reliable historical data on sexual abuse is unavailable.

I think your impression is likely a result of “deviance amplification”—-i.e, hearing about all the bad shit that goes on in more obscure religions, and taking that as indicative of prevalence.
crypto bot has to get its bag too, keep hustling king
A List of Crypto and Alt Coin Wallets for Windows
We named the project Gorilla cause it is an cute animal that use tools !
I just read a few of the middle/bad reviews and see if they seem like reasonable complaints.
I hope they publish some theories as to how this is advantageous in terms of evolution or survival. From the outside, it seems counterproductive. But the fact that it persists in fly species, there must be some sort of advantage to it.
My comments are all still deleted.
you forgot Windows 11, the worst of them all.

1/3 the width of Windows 10, AND it auto hides. who in gods name could have possibly thought this was a good idea? what are you helping? width is RARELY the problem with desktop real estate, its always height. so you're freeing up space that doesn't need to be freed up. I get the thinking for a mobile device, but we are talking about Windows 11, its a desktop operating system. stop designing assuming everything needs to look exactly like an iPhone. for a desktop OS, its just objectively, scientifically worse:

https://youtube.com/watch?v=E3gS9tjACwU
https://archive.is/vmCBQ
Damn, living in the future is wild.
They already have diagnosis flowcharts where it’s a game it follow the symptom. It would have to be considerably better than the tools they already have to be appropriate.
When keyboard is not supported and I can't scroll by pagedown/space buttons.

When keyboard is not supported and I can't scroll to the bottom.

When I want to scroll to find something in a binary like fashion, scroll to the middle, decide if what I want is at upper half or bottom half, etc.

Not all people have scrollwheel to begin with

Scrollwheel is broken, as many overwrite OS behaviour, and generally slow even if you specify in settings to perform larger motion per scroll action
Citigroup job cuts set to hit 5,000 in first half of 2023
In a common example, the alloy of iron and carbon known as cast iron melts at a lower temperature than pure iron or pure carbon (or low-carbon steel).

But there are other cases where an alloy has higher melting point. Ti(88)Al(12), for example.
> on June 18th

which happens to be a Sunday...
If the content is there but is not accessible (findable) then it may as well not be there. The Internet is content farms and SEO spam strictly because that's what can be found and accessed by the overwhelming majority of people. A non-indexed blog or site, or one that is sufficiently low on the results list, may as well not exist. It's like farting when you're home alone. You farted but nobody but you gets to enjoy the intestinal perfume.
Like TFA I only use ctrl-u and ctrl-d since it's faster than moving one line at time and not as disorienting (in my experience) as moving one full page at a time.

It's also easy to learn since it's [u]p/[d]own.
MIT Press makes this classic text freely available as a PDF here:

https://mitp-content-server.mit.edu/books/content/sectbyfn/b...

(Publishers are making many academic texts freely downloadable in what is called "Open Access", which is what MIT has done here -- there's an Open Access tab on the page linked to by the OP which gets you to the link I provided).
If DoE provided the regulations then they could update the template design as they update the regulations - if the build of the plant needed to change because of a change in regulations then they could account for that in the design.
Everything is relative, and Luc's view has aged better than authoritative admonitions that the virus might never moderate in severity.[1] I mean, Luc was a Nobel prize winner in this field. His ideas were creative, sure, but magical? It's not hard to see the logic-- these kinds of molecules subside in evolution because they didn't arise from evolution in the first place. I mean, his opinion was a first take when the world was Cloroxing bananas, There's more info now, but this still is an example of how the conversation may have gone differently had governments taken the view that lab-origin was viable.

[1] https://abcnews.go.com/Health/debunking-idea-viruses-evolve-...
All the strategies below were ones we tried. You can check it out!
http://vernet.app is an open-source wireless network emulator built with Vue.js+TypeScript. It offers high-fidelity real-time network simulations with smooth animations. Can be used for protocol design/validation and real-time network resource management research. Currently implemented 6TiSCH network, more protocols are coming soon.
Same thing happened to a certain extent with French nuclear. This article talks vaguely about new requirements whilst large components were manufactured, but one of the big problems with Flamanville 3 was that one of the largest and most critical components - the main pressure vessel that formed the primary containment for radioactive materials - didn't meet the existing material specifications and was at increased risk of failing, and the manufacturer had basically faked the testing and certification on it. After discovering this, the regulators went back and looked at the reactor pressure vessels built by the same supplier during the golden era of French nuclear, and a bunch of them turned out to be defective in the same way.
Those pennies in front of that steamroller ain’t gonna pick themselves up.
I think it’s more that he was a provocateur and beloved by prominent figures in the psychedelic subculture.
https://archive.is/pSlW7
> I don't think it would have made the doofuses who took ivermectin act differently though

from NIH https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7539925/

"Ivermectin: an award-winning drug with expected antiviral activity against COVID-19... with demonstrated antiviral activity against a number of DNA and RNA viruses, including severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2)"

Whether or not ivermectin ultimately turned out to be efficacious against Covid19 is not the main point, it was/is a widely known, completely safe, anti-viral, and while everything else in the toolbag was being thrown at Covid19, ivermectin was a good candidate, especially since it showed positive results in some clinical conditions. (and I've heard it pointed out that in order to get profitable approval for experimental mRNA vaccines to be released, there was a huge financial incentive to declare a priori that ivermectin did not work)

If you "believe in science" you wouldn't call people who tried ivermectin "doofuses", doing so you're simply looking in the doofus mirror.

It's best not to join one partisan camp or the other and politicize science, but look at evidence. Ivermectin has well known antiviral properties, and coronavirus is a virus.

> I don't think that we would have done anything differently if we knew that China was responsible

you are fixating on the wrong aspect. Whether or not covid19 is the result of the leak of "man-made" gain-of-function research is extremely important to what we do in the future. The public has a right to know.

you keep arguing your own point here, that "no harm is no foul and we wouldn't have done anything differently so we don't need to look" and to me that's simply you saying you support the politics that played out and you don't want to look at it. To me, science was ignored in favor of politics and it's all exactly what I want to look at.
not sure if you care but they track comments like this on https://news.ycombinator.com/highlights
Following the links throughout the thread, I've not seen a description of how the remastering process worked.

>The scans of this original flight film have been digitally remastered in a lossless format and then converted to laser / LED light

"Lossless encoding" is a red herring if you are looking for fidelity to ground truth, see:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22802909

amongst others
Did you read the article?

WIV collected dangerous coronavirus, mixed those virus's genetic material to make more infectious strains. They wrote scientific papers about this themselves, you can read them yourself. They tested these mixed viruses (called chimeric virus) on mice with human-like lungs to find the most dangerous and infectious ones. You can read about this in the grant funding for WIV.

Then proposed splicing in the furin cleavage site into these dangerous chimeric viruses. The US funders balked at this last step, splicing the furin cleavage site in, and didn't give a grant grant money for this proposed step. It's not proven, but it sure seems like they actually did the research, because the furin cleavage site seems to be main thing that makes COVID-19 so infectious. They proposed testing these viruses on mice with human lungs and circulatory systems.

so... do you now understand why people are talking about gain of function? Viruses like this don't exist in nature, and scientists are making them and then testing them on animals that have been genetically engineered to have human-like organs, so they can figure out how to make the most dangerous ones.

This isn't new, there is a mission impossible movie where a chimeric virus is the boogie man.

Making mice with human lungs and CRISPER is new, and then doing this level of research in place with the same level of biosafety as a dental office is a new wrinkle.
No. Even those formerly traumatized can later become resilient to words.
Should be “and learn encryption” not “or”
The way humans convince each other of the merits of our ideas is by describing our thought processes. The problem isn't actually something being said by someone who "is" a blowhard, but rather that the thing is being said in a blowhard manner - aggressively asserted, with poor supporting reasoning. If there were concrete supporting evidence for the assertion of "China Virus", it would have been mentioned. There wasn't.

When the blowharding is done by the usual talking heads who have a following but lack actual power, it can generally be ignored - the partisans are already crazy. The problem is when it's done from a position of governmental leadership, it requires continual active refutation lest an unquestioned drumbeat turn into action real quick. The fish rots from the head.

Most certainly the reaction to this can be (could've been) used as a cover to deflect from the truth. But blame for that doesn't lay at the feet of the anti-anti-intellectuals working to counter the anti-intellectualism, but rather the initial anti-intellectuals for creating the memetic fog that prevented rational analysis to begin with.
It’s definitely an expense. But this doesn’t fully explain why nuclear is expensive.

-Current nuclear reactors aren’t nearly hot enough to need single crystal turbine blisks. We’re talking on the order of 300°C.

-Coal power plant routinely hit much higher temperatures in supercritical and ultra-supercritical (yes, that’s a real term) steam generators. We don’t have quite as bad a problem building coal power plants.

-We’re not currently building molten salt reactors for power generation.

You didn’t say anything that was wrong. I’m just don’t think this is the reason building reactors is so expensive.
Right, I don't dispute your figures at all, I'm just saying the general population doesn't get headlines about this for coal plants and it's just "a thing that happens" as a result of running a coal plant. A nuclear incident is something that is an accident. It could have been prevented. There's tons of headlines about it, and it goes from minimal cost to a gigantic cost immediately.

It's just short term thinking.
I suppose really that's one of the big benefits of LLMs for everything. They're a friend who always has the time and willingness to try and help.
I have almost finished the book (to be honest, I have skipped the "Validation" chapter) and I found it quite interesting. In particular I liked that it also covered more "exotic" topics such as sequence locks, hazard pointers and RCU. However, in general, I found it a bit too much focussed on Linux kernel code. The code examples are full of kernel code macros, such as READ_ONCE and WRITE_ONCE, instead of C11/C++11 atomics. In the end, I appreciated it because it gave me a new perspective, but I'm not sure if this helpful for people who are not already familiar with parallel programming...
I believe there is less truck driving here on Sundays even though it is legal because truckers try to take days off and see family too.
At the moment we're still using langchain but it is quite cumbersome in the long run. The library is developing quickly and a feature that you might expect to work one week might not the next. Have you had better luck with others?
Donated Blood or an Organ? Police Shouldn’t Have Easy Access to Your DNA
No kidding. Great that we need the last line qualifier on a site like hacker news. Is reddit back working yet?
Modern CPUs are pushing 1MB L1 and 8MB L2 or more. You can fit a dozen FreeRTOS instances in that space. It would be pretty cool to see someone build a system that used a high end CPU but didn't have any installed ram, though I'm not sure if the CPU microcode would be ok with that.
we're far far beyond "trampling on freedom of movement" in SF. We need to enforce basic laws and pro social behaviors like "don't poop on the street", "dont smoke meth within 500 feet of an elementary school", "don't leave a giant pile of poop encrusted needles on the sidewalk".
Another weird thing is that I don't see this thread on https://news.ycombinator.com/ask, despite of some upvotes and replies. I'm 35 years old and I remember days when websites worked as you expect them. Not this madness.
Film cooling and coatings are what allow operating temperatures above the melting temperature. That doesn’t mean the metal is above its melting temperature.
I found easymotion is a bit disjointed, but between sneak (a two letter motion similar to f such that you can do ; and , to go next or back) and /<search> I find I can get places very quickly
>Jobs responded by saying, "I think if I went back to Apple and didn't own any of Apple, and you didn't own any of Apple, I'd have the moral high ground."

>Ellison's response: "Steve, that's really expensive real estate, this moral high ground."

I still have vivid memory of this reading it 10+ years ago. It paints so much character to Steve as a person. Which is mostly considered as an Ass Hole on HN post 2014.
My company laptop I don’t do anything I wouldn’t be OK with my manager or IT seeing. Even something as simple as a recipe lookup I do on my phone or personal laptop.

With today’s software for managing corporate machines, and corporate VPN with network security and firewalls abound, anything and everything can be seen.

I have a joke Wi-Fi name that I’ve even considered changing (or at least create a guest network) just to be safe. It’s likely overboard, but I like the idea of just mailing my laptop if I change companies, and no worries at all
Couldn’t they put the batteries in a heated shed?
Ok, just playing devil's advocate here. How many FAANG companies have you seen have an outage this year? What's their budget?

I think a better way to reply to the author would have been "how often does it fail"?

Every system will have outages, it's just a matter of how much money you can throw at the problem to reduce them.
I am torn on the separation of the output from input. I expect half the time I would be happy for the extra vertical space and the other half I world be annoyed I could not immediately correlate code with output.

Anyway, thanks for spreading the workflow, and I will definitely try it out in the coming weeks.
I'm in a similar boat. Thankfully you can often use an internet cache to view the contents (this doesn't help Reddit out, which would defeat the purpose of the protest).

I've done this for a few coding things that I needed an answer fast. It does show how much will be lost if things don't improve, but like you I didn't want to fuel Reddit in any way (assuming the sub is even open anyway).