skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> microsoft is walking scot free

Microsoft is currently under investigated for using software licensing to prop up Azure.

> The crux of the issue relates to a 2019 licensing change enacted by Microsoft, effectively making it more expensive to run Microsoft’s omnipresent enterprise software on rival cloud services. Fast-forward to last year’s snowballing antitrust legal challenges, and Microsoft revealed it was making some changes designed to make “bringing workloads and licenses to partners’ clouds easier,” which it did to an extent — with the notable exceptions of so-called “listed providers” that include AWS, Google, and Alibaba.

So in effect, Microsoft is kinda making it easier for companies to run Microsoft software on non-Azure clouds, but only if they’re not using Microsoft’s main rivals’ infrastructure.

https://techcrunch.com/2023/04/20/microsoft-kickstarts-settl...
I hope to be able to play GL Quake on this Duron PC. The graphics card (ATI Rage 128) should be able to do it I think.
> He discovered that in most fields—especially those that are complex and unpredictable—generalists, not specialists, are primed to excel.

As for sports, he argues that individual sports like golf can be mastered through deliberate practice (ex. Tiger Woods), because there are a minimal, defined set of actions that need to happen. So you should go hit your 9-iron 10k times to get better.

However, with complex team sports like soccer, it’s a mix. For set plays and fitness you should use deliberate practice. But for the rest of the game you need creativity because the number of combinations of player sizes, speed and positioning quickly approaches infinity. And creativity can come from similar sports like basketball, or by playing full games against a wider variety of opponents.

And it seems akin to linguistics where the breakthroughs came not by breaking language down into discreet rules but by broadening the knowledge base.

You see this in MMA too where fighters will use deliberate practice for a specific punch or submission, but then will dramatically alter their training camps (often learning new techniques for the first time) depending on their opponent.
It is OpenAI's and Microsoft's position that obtaining, using for training, and displaying data via AI is fair use.
"opinionated" is the last thing you want in a PM. PM's job is to listen to users, and collect data.
One of my clients uses a tool operating within the same space as Debezium called Qlik Replicate to listen for log-based CDC to replicate the data to a different database. The challenge we found was that not everything was recorded into the redo log, like DELETE's wrapped inside functions in one vendor's database. There was a long list of caveats we eventually uncovered beyond even the documented ones. This challenge arises even if performing CDC between two databases from the same vendor on the same version, somewhat narrowing the use cases we could apply CDC upon.

If you must care about bit-level accurate replication, catching gaps after the replication completes is we concluded after a year of chasing that chimera a deep rabbit hole with an event horizon that constantly recedes into the future. If you can tolerate some replication errors and can tolerate not knowing where they happen without a lot of investigation, then CDC works great.

CDC gets us close, but I'm still looking for someone who is working upon covering the edge cases that redo logs alone do not address.
NYC has the unique distinction among Democrat-run large cities of having a well-funded and well-staffed police authority that is not (yet) hamstrung by political interference. The NYPD is actually feared and respected by would-be criminals, which is a far cry from SFPD, PPB, et. al.
Why is this ragebait on HN?
|| When lots of people take some courses and switch to PM positions, well, Product suffers

This mirrors what happened with the rise of coding bootcamps. Another similarity between the two is the whole framework marketing machine.

I think its more related to tech becoming mainstream. A long time ago a lot of the people you met had a genuine interest in computing and then sort of fell into it as a career. Nowadays its fairly well plotted out like other fields, with all the baggage that comes along with that.
Sure, but that's still you having to go to lots of places to understand what individual functions do, which doesn't seem different to the original complaint about OOP.
The funny thing is that breaking up these giants would create more corporations, hence more highly-compensated execs, and also more value for the equity investors (this is less intuitive, but I think that's what typically happens).
You should really try the pilot g7. It's like using a brush. I'll grant that bic pens take some pressure, but that just isn't true of all ballpoint pens.
Just a random thought: but wasn't C written specifically at first for the PDP series of mini computers? On the other side, the language evolved to write Unix.

It feels we don't really have the same kind of match in modern programming languages. I wonder what a modern equivalent of C would look like that was tailor fitted to RISC-V ISA and an OS that was targeted to that device?

It just is the case that one of the most successful programming languages of all time, C, was shaped by the existing hardware and the needs of the OS the language designers were building. But now we are going in the other direction by starting with an existing programming language and presumably shaping the OS to its strengths.
Unlike individuals, large enterprises rarely pay sticker price but a heavily discounted negotiated rate for software and services. I can’t say how much exactly but it’s less than that.
Show HN: Agency – Unifying human, AI, and other computing systems, in Python
Hello hackernews! I'm excited to share a new open source python library I just released for creating AI agent-integrated systems.

The name is `agency`. It differs from other agent libraries, most importantly in that it's intended to address a distinct part of the overall problem, that of agent integration. It is not an agent toolchain like LangChain and others.

`agency` is a framework intended for safely integrating agents with computing systems and humans in a way that all parties can easily understand and communicate with each other.

I've spent a lot of time on the readme which contains a detailed and working walkthrough of building an agent integrated system that includes multiple types of agents, operating system integration, access control, and a flask+react based web application where users can appear as individual "agents" as well.

Also worth noting is that I _just_ pushed an update to integrate with the new functions support on the OpenAI API! (https://openai.com/blog/function-calling-and-other-api-updat...)

I'm eager to hear what people think! I developed this in order to build a foundation for some of my own ambitious ideas. If you find this useful for your own projects I'd love to know!

Thanks for checking it out! I hope this helps you build amazing things!
It sucks egg that fetch/the browser expose trailers nor push. gRPC should just work over existing http2 & http3 capabilities. But for some reason http never gets support from the web platform. Madness & enraging.
Malicious unchecked code in postinstall can just be moved to runtime so blanket blocking postinstall is as effective a solution to supply chain attacks as the solution of blocking npm packages with the word "keygen" in them is to the problem of .... js based keygens???

There are many legitimate purposes for postinstall scripts yet the anti-postinstall crowd acts like they solved security issues with this one easy step.
> i can fork half of github and it wont mean much without maintenance

Well....yeah? open source doesn't mean you don't have to do anything to make it work. Many times I've forked a project, cleaned up maintenance issues so it ran on my instance, and then did a pull request so the original author could incorporate the update.

While we are blessed with many turn-key projects that require little more installation effort than following detailed instructions, FOSS is supposed to be a community effort, not something falling on the shoulders of a tiny maintenance team.
EU moves closer to passing one of world’s first laws governing AI
1. Yes - currently it's just basic upload but I'm working on better asset management and optimization.
2. I don't quite understand your use-case, but:
a) You can save any custom JSON metadata to an article;
b) Tables in the actual content aren't supported yet;
I don't know, this is good advice perhaps for things which are not important.

But, if you are writing an email to a person whose time is valuable, better not to do it quickly. Save a draft, come back to it tomorrow, read again, then send.

If you are writing a legal document, don't do it quickly. Write it, come back to it again to review. Is it still a good idea?

If you are doing something completely new, do it slowly and step by step -- if it is new you don't know if it is right without checking each step.

If you have an idea, read the literature, patents, see what is out there first.
Beyond the Imitation Game: Quantifying the capabilities of language models
As somebody who is mentally ill and has tried lots of different drugs in a very unscientific way, with mixed results, you'd think I would agree with you. But actually, I don't.

Take lithium for example. We have now over 100 years of evidence that lithium is effective for treating bipolar disorder. Do we understand the action mechanism? Not really. And yet it's helped countless people live a better life.

This is just how technology works. Often, the tech precedes the science. Humans are very good at experimenting. There are huge gaps in modern psychiatric science, but also, there are loads of trials being run and evidence being collected about what generally works and doesn't work. But human brains are too different from each other for the same thing to work in every case.

So here we are. It's flawed, but we're getting somewhere, and we have to keep moving forward because mental illness is no joke and people need care. Same is true with experimental cancer treatments.
I didn't say pointless. I said boring.

All the work I do has business value (at least, perceived business value) but I don't think it's fun or exciting to do. It bores me to death. Too much recently, actually. If the job market weren't so shit, I'd leave.
Yandex, I just use for 'spicier' content...they can have my sordid thoughts.
Amazing how many .com companies are on there with a lot of Russian sub-content.
Should've packed it up back in usenet days: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_V._Shaney

Also, if reddit is in any dataset of these models then it's no wonder that I'm not intrigued by artificial """intelligence""" at all.
The author is aware of that, mentions it towards the end:

> Most of Reddit’s current data has been scraped anyway, so the game is to protect Reddit’s data going forward.

But yes, Pushshift archives of all posts and comments until the recent ban [1] are freely available for download [2]

[1] https://old.reddit.com/r/pushshift/comments/135tdl2/a_respon... The ban was followed by allowing the parent non-profit of Pushshift (Network Contagion Research Institute) to use the API provided access is restricted to a use-case Reddit has care for: mod tools. Reddit hasnt replaced those with its own just yet. The rest of us are shut out.

[2] https://academictorrents.com/userdetails.php?id=9863
Another HN user noticed 28 days ago, there's also a clarification from Hashicorp's customer service posted https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35966092
I'm in full agreement, but I see an even better integration in other product lines (mostly gaming and search)

Also, Microsoft doesn't have a generic social network to mine data from.

They may prefer to stick to the professional world, but then acquiring a few high value sites just to close their API would be another move.

How much $$$ do you think it would take for YC to say "hell yes!" to put HN under Microsoft control?

How valuable would it be to add a few conditions like a very generous giveaway of azure credits to HN companies in return of exclusivity (no more S3 or google cloud for the new batch!)
The functionality makes sense given this response. The code sample is not fully viewable without a horizontal scroll; it's cut off about 20 columns in. It's as if you're presenting 2/3 of your website, but not allowing the user to see anything else.
mustard is definitely a mayonnaise ingredient
A niche provider that doesn't do generative AI very well but does "AI powered search with citations" is perplexity.ai

I've used for rather obscure queries and liked the summary the AI wrote as well as the links to dive deeper. I imagine that's what AI search will look like across all providers before long.
If I see a referral link in any kind of advisory/review article, I immediately assume the whole website is a low-effort, no-ethics attempt at making money, and not much else. There are very few exceptions to that rule, where it's fairly obvious that the site is doing fairly extensive testing or research and not just spamming with chatGPT-like platitutes.
You’re on the right track re: the book I recommended, it’s dense but you might enjoy. Heck the intro alone is interesting and you can probably get that through a Kindle “free preview”.

As for my response to you, I think it’s simply “yes”. And also that we lack any sort of clear & universally greed upon definitions for many of the critical terms here.

These were my areas of study, refining through ever more practical levels to cognitive science and then computational linguistics, so I know just enough to know I’m not an expert and true expertise doesn’t really exist yet for truly understanding any of this. (And my comp ling formal education has been made woefully obsolete since the time I began that path). For now, all we can do is chip away at the questions, as this linked article tries to do. Chip by chip.
plenty of engineers have created successful companies on their own. On the other hand there's literally never been a non-technical founder who created something because by definition if you don't have the technical skills you can't build something, even if you have a great idea or problem to solve
People don't want DSLs though. There's an enormous contingent of programmers these days who seem to object to literally any form of abstraction at all. They just want to see - imperatively - what something does from top to bottom.
A lot of these issues remind me of the time I got my US visa. Had to pre-book a flight and plan my itinerary before I could set foot in the US embassy.

Some of the issues (no option for mother's profession, no "Atheist" option, etc.) are cause India is a mostly conservative society. I'm an atheist but according to my government records, I'm a Hindu.

And the government sites are made horribly. One time, I had to pay some taxes but the site kept on crashing. The reason? My apartment's name had an apostrophe and their system only accepts [a-zA-Z ]+. Had to read the obfuscated HTML code of the site, figure out the API calls (read: not an API, an old-school POST request to an ASP.net server) and write a small client JUST TO PAY TAXES.
Apps are easy. Have you built a library?
macros in rust have access to the AST as well and is used a TON in language.
AOP is at times tricky to debug, but super useful for cross cutting concerns.
They can still scrap the website?

The fact is that many, many internet businesses today not make sense. Many of them are bleeding money with no possible path to profitability ahead. Mostly due to the fact that people's expectations are very different and I would argue even skewed. Clearly hosting Reddit is expensive, but who really pays for it? People don't like ads, don't like to pay for services, don't like to be reminded that they can provide donations (Wikipedia). What else is there? Hoping the customers have the suddenly conscience to fund the product?

I foresee many internet companies dying over the next few years with no real replacement to crop up. But people always forget and history repeats itself; so maybe we will just see an endless reincarnations of similarly failed products.
Well that would be a breaking change. Code is going to have to be changed. And if you’re introducing a breaking change why not try to fix all the problems? Even if require is standardised it’s still fundamentally weird.

Let’s say we standardise around require only being used with static strings. Now we’re in a situation where every JavaScript function can be called with a variable as an argument except this special function called “require”, which can only receive strings. There’s no concept of that in the JS language.

What we’re doing is creating a new concept. It makes sense, looking to the future, to create new syntax for it.
When you're not sure what to Google (such as when working in an unfamiliar domain), asking ChatGPT for help and then researching it's answer with normal searches is very effective.
“Open” OpenAI API Server with Open Models Locally
nice, thanks for sharing !
This is on top of them being 100% more expensive for some TLDs than their competitors. Sadly it looks like it's time to find a new registrar.
I'm .... confused. What's "headless" about it? It's got a GUI. Headless means "no GUI" or.. no visible "head".

hugo, jekyll and most static blogs are "headless" CMSs. This is very explicitly setting itself apart from those by HAVING a "head".
I've done this with reddit several times as well. It seems a positive thing to me to retain a level of detachment and not get too involved in building up the karma score or trying to build some kind of reputation. I've also taken to using the randomly generated usernames that it recommends rather than customizing them.
lemmy.ml has been going through updates over the last day or so I think. https://lemmy.world has been a stable option.
I dont know, but I dont think this wull really allow to watch movies in bed.
I have trouble even using small in-ear headphones in any other position than laying on my back, because just the pillow pressure acting on the headphone piece is so anoying. This headset has a strap around the head that will add unfamiliar pressure from basically every direction you would rest your head on.
There are already some cool projects using the PicoW bluetooth, I'm currently modifying https://github.com/DavidPagels/retro-pico-switch to try and make a custom controller from scratch. Hopefully it'll get far enough to push to github at some point.
a good PM or Manager has much higher value than a good coder. the problem is to be a good PM or Manager in tech you need not only good soft skills but also strong technical background. a lot of people in positions dont have either.
Presumably some of those devs will see the warning and think "oh yeah, I probably shouldn't commit the password" rather than find a workaround.
And the Tasman engine that IE for Mac was built around was much nicer than the Trident engine that powered IE for Windows. IE for Mac had good support for CSS and support for transparent PNGs many years before IE for Windows did. I always wondered why MS decided to fix up Trident to create the original Edge instead of porting Tasman to Windows.
I agree, but if we are incorporating the opportunity cost of free-riding 3rd-party users than Reddit also needs to incorporate the opportunity cost of losing thousands of unpaid moderators who keep the site running. I can't imagine the math will be favorable.
Reddit's API change will not stop LLM training, it is far too easy to manually scrape the site. It only needs to be done once.

The intention of the API change is to kill third-party app users who cannot be as effectively monetized as first-party app users.
Whatever VCs invested in it deserve to lose their money. Theranos was a learning opportunity
Tried signing up. Got the email. Clicked the link. Said it was an invalid link.
> putting more functionality on the thumbs

That's why I like Mac keyboards. Cmd is right under your thumb.
I did the same for my Linux machine, so win/alt/ctrl instead of ctrl/win/alt. It's a game changer and doesn't require any hardware modification.
I don't wish to be too dismissive, but I listened to the audiobook for Blood Meridian and found it to be noticeably boring. There were some neat phrases here and there, the descriptions were fun, but felt pretty ripped off of both time and money.

It's frustrating because I generally like writing in a similar manner to how he wrote, but I found it incredibly dull to listen to for any length of time. It was just this meandering mess of "here and there" without anything to pay attention to, or have a need to care for. It wasn't that I hated it, I just didn't like it either. I was entirely indifferent to it, other than a vague sense of politely waiting for it to end. I didn't feel I lost much by listening to it, but had nothing to gain either. It was just a distraction of other things I could have been listening to instead.
For me, this was not just about cost but principally about getting of natural gas.

But regardless, it also made financial sense with the prices here in the Netherlands, in the long run. It was quite an investment, but it should pay off in the end.
A m3 of gas here cost (when I did the calculation in February 2022) about €1.78. That has gone up and down since then. A m3 of gas contains about 9~10 kWh of energy. Let's say 9 kWh comes out via my heated floors. That's ~€0.20/kWh.
At that time, a kWh of electricity here cost about €0.39/kWh. That's double the price per kWh, if I don't take the Coefficient of Performance of our heat pump into account, which multiplies the energy output by 3 (even at -7 Celcius) to 5, depending on conditions.

And I have not yet taken into account here that the energy from my solar panels is cheaper than buying it from the grid.

At the moment, prices are better (install was in March after a year-long wait) and in the meanwhile also got a dynamic energy tariff with lower prices on average, so the comparison is harder to make ATM. We haven't had both a for a full winter yet, so we'll see.
No problems here with firefox on x11 and amdgpu/mesa drivers fwiw
>Try going to Karlsruhe, Göttingen or other univerity cities. They are the big modern cities of germany and you will feel accepted there as an obvious foreigner. ("big city" by german standarts).

Lübeck as well?
My favorite alternatives are email and going outside.
Interesting question but sadly I am in no position to answer it.

I think there are probably issues to address with scraping it blindly:

- Can Reddit imprint its data somehow? A watermark?

- Can Reddit prove that certain type of information appeared on Reddit first and thus that serves as proof its data was used without authorization?

If OpenAI can't work around this, I'm not sure they would be willing to cross any lines in terms of copyright, they've already done it with ChatGPT and I am guessing rules are only going to get stricter on this topic.
It seems to me gamification is a feature in some situations, a bug in other situations and with no uniformity between two people.

I despise the upvote/karma bullshit when it comes to discussions. It completely changes how people think and interact. The "witty" mention from the author is so cringe to me. The average person is just not a comedian and it is really the main reason I never use Reddit. To me, Reddit is an engine of non-comedians trying to be witty and funny playing an upvote game. The worst part is I imagine many are like the unfunny person who thinks they are funny because people fake laugh at their jokes because otherwise the interaction is just uncomfortable given the volume of bad jokes from the non-comedian. It all becomes self reinforcing in an awful way.

That is so different than something like duolingo that is motivating just to do a little bit of work that you might otherwise would not have and keeps bad streaks from forming. I just experienced this using Anki where all of the sudden I haven't practiced my language in 2 weeks but my language of choice is not on duolingo.