skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: What A/B testing or Feature Flag micro-SaaS product would you pay for?
With Google Optimize being sunset, lots of bigger players in the A/B testing and/or Feature Flag space are trying to capitalize on their new potential customers.

From what I've heard here on HN, most of these tools are overpowered (and with prices to match) for the needs of non-enterprise apps.

I've started on a no-code page editor with a trivial A/B framework. Basically it's click your HTML element (any text or <img>) and modify it as you please. Then set a % chance the user will get the edited variant vs the original.

I'd like to eventually start selling this thing; and this is my attempt at "talk to your customers."

What is a low feature set tool I can build that brings outsized value for a much lower monthly price tag?
Why are they strange? Interceptors seem to enable migration away from reflection, for better support of AOT compilation.

For example: https://github.com/DapperLib/Dapper/issues/1909
> Time Zones often have a "friendly name" in the format Continent/City|Island

Continent/City are not friendly names, they are political boundaries that gice more precision. For example, CET covers many countries that might decide to stop applying DST at different points in time. If you store CET in your database you won't know if you need to apply CEST or not. This is why you always need the Continent/City form if you want to be future proof (and past proof)
I don't know why but this title hurt my brain.
He might have been a “top physicist”, but it appears he has long since started phoning it in.

See the link to Aaronsons blog elsewhere in the thread for an example of the kind of drivel Kaku puts out, and why he shouldn’t be taken seriously.
If you’re implying what I think you’re implying, I agree.
You use local time + location, because tzdata timezones can and do get split.
It’s clearly one of those tools meant for big teams with big scale problems.
> PG&E has to get these things approved by Sacramento

San Francisco, actually. CPUC has HQ in SF with Sac and LA field offices.

> just like a UBI would be.

The revenue for a UBI would take a legislative supermajority (because of Constitutional rules related to taxation), a change in utility rates takes a CPUC majority. Its a smaller margin in a different body.

So, no, the approval is not “just like a UBI would be”.
Don't discard the juniors, maybe ask them to process your prompts for you. That'll give you some space.

I feel the opposite: I had a great experience asking GPT-4 to do some tasks for me and have been feeling like I'm missing out ever since by not using it more often.

However, I'm wary of posting work-related code into it so I either have to come up with similar examples, which is time-consuming or ask it conceptual questions for which I haven't been able to make it much helpful. Sometimes I even noticed that a conversation with a colleague produced a much better result and it wasn't even something very specific to the project. So yeah, I feel like it's a great tool but I'm having a hard time using it productively. It definitely feels like being creative with your prompts is an important part of getting value out of it.
> Does it really bug you so much that they gave you just a tiny taste of the perspective of a woman who works on this stuff?

Well, yes, that's why I wrote my post.

> This kind of text is everywhere in science journalism.

Indeed.
I always look for comments by bcantrill (hi Bryan!) whenever the topic seems like it could receive its attention.

I really love hearing him speak, particularly when he loses it and rants against stuff (bonus points if “stuff” is Oracle)
Sad to see that my related work on token-level constrained text generation is not cited in the paper: https://github.com/Hellisotherpeople/Constrained-Text-Genera...

https://aclanthology.org/2022.cai-1.2/
Now if AWS would learn that lesson as well... for example, AWS Backup Plans or CloudWatch Events always run in UTC, and there's nothing I hate more than doing timezone math - and on top of that, at least for CloudWatch Events (that trigger starting up/stopping a number of very expensive instances based on business hours) I have to manually update the schedule at each DST shift.

AWS, do. fucking. better. I know you have the resources for it.
This Weekend, the Ionosphere Becomes a Canvas
I’ve done better with less:

https://danangell.com/blog/posts/type-level-api-client/
> To verify a user’s age, the proposed vape pairs with a phone app, requiring a customer to either upload their government ID and a real-time selfie or input personal information and allow a third-party database to verify their identity

OK, but why would any customer be willing to do this? Wouldn't they just go with a different brand instead?
Chat GPT is Nr 1 for sure, Nr 2 is Bard. I love Midjorney most, but sometimes use Stable Diffusion.
All it really needs for the ultimate brain melt is to replace Twitter with X.
Can off-the-shelf libraries translate from any Bizarro time to UTC?
But your app doesn't have to do that.

The TOS are generally broad enough from the start that you can do anything you want with user data as is necessary to provide product features. Nobody's updating TOS every time they add a new feature.

Realistically, this is specifically about situations around selling data to third parties, and/or training for AI that is not related to product features. (There's a big difference between Zoom using chats for building LLM's, versus Google training on Gmail messages to build Gmail autocomplete.)
I've been exposed more to pipeline automation than GPT4, like argoCI/CD, and can see that taking away a lot of jobs. If customers are connected to the code repository then developers just need to push commits and argo will take care of the rest, including getting the latest code to the customer.

*This may be a bit of an oversimplification, but argo showed me that the whole pipeline can be automated
> Both of those corrections are absolutely part of the model

Is there a way to gain a better understanding of how these parameters are modeled and what the scientific evidence is for the various phenomena in astrophysics? It's somewhat perplexing to me as an outsider of the field to understand how things like mass and distance of stars and planetary bodies are determined when 1) the scales are so outside of conventional experience 2) observation is limited to 2D imaging of the night sky 3) the observations in general are not consistent with our knowledge of gravity and relativity without adding hidden parameters.
Or via the Number constructor:

const y = Number(x) + 12

Depending on your audience, that might be clearer in intent than `+x`.
"However, acquiring this key decompiling the mobile application, monitoring requests through a proxy or relying on values discovered by others."

This is again not true. The key is in the HTML of every /watch?v= YouTube page. It's a public key; it's not hidden in any way.

Further, it's possible, up until today at least, to use the "WEB" key with clientName "ANDROID" of "IOS" and receive unthrottled URLs. The key in the shell script is in fact the WEB key. The key for IOS is different.

curl -40s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aqz-KE-bpKQ \
|grep -o \"INNERTUBE_API_KEY...[^\"]*\"
A different anecdote: Netflix (probably) thinks I'm gay, but I'm not. It recommends categories with "LGBT" in the name, for example.

I watch a fair bit of queer content, because I'm tired of seeing the same old storylines. Queer creators often see in novel ways, and not just when it comes to sex or relationships.

I could hazard a guess that once they've thrown off one set of societally-imposed patterns of thought, maybe they're more open to others. Certainly gay people have been over-represented among actors and artists for a long time, even when they had to pretend to be straight in public.

I wouldn't put a lot of weight on that guess, but it's certainly true that I enjoy more queer-coded content than one might expect for a straight man. And maybe that's also happening for the author: it may be less about her bisexuality as about her generalized interests.
v6 basically is v4 with more bits. You could do what you describe with it.

The problem is that nobody has the authority to enforce such a timetable on the Internet as a whole, so that's not actually a workable plan.
> pre-commit code review

Unless you're referring to automated precommit hooks, this sounds baffling. What's wrong with reviewing pull requests? What if I want to push a WIP while I switch to another branch, I still need a review? Is the final PR reviewed again at the end?
Unravels here means still has 11,000,000 DAU, approximately 10% of its rival Twitter (sorry x.com).

If unraveling means "gains 10% of the market in the first month after launch", then I would love for my next business to "unravel"
As a customer, that is great to hear (well, read). I was reading about how a restore scenario with Borg would look like if "append only" really matters (so in a ransomware scenario), and what I've seen makes me rather uncomfortable [1]. I don't want to have to do that in a stressful situation.

Is there a particular channel where you intend to post your findings? :)

[1]: https://borgbackup.readthedocs.io/en/stable/usage/notes.html...
I am completely fine with calling past dubious design choices. This isn't one of them. That was your labeling, provided with no evidence or reasoning, not mine, and that's what I was criticizing.

The Lisp-1 and Lisp-2 discussion is several decades old, with many discussions arguing the benefits of one over the other. The article highlights some of those trade-offs, which should be clear if someone is willing to get past superficial syntax notes.

However, given how intent you are on putting words in my mouth and on distorting contrasting opinions as white lies, let's call it a day.
True, but what I was trying to introduce into the discussion was what another sibling commenter astutely labeled the anti-cargo-cult: industry feeling that anything at Google is an anti-pattern even when that thing is firmly established among other successful software developers for a long time. And in my experience comprehensive unit testing is one of those things that I have sometimes heard waved away.
Nevermind all the people with long covid who still have brain fog, or the people who just flat out died from covid. No let's worry instead about some made up side effect of the vaccine that THEY don't want you to know about.
[e: i apparently mistook discordio for a couple of the other discovery platforms we utilized, but it seems to be the same concept as the others, looking at the web archives]

discordapp back then was really just a collection of servers pretty siloed/insulated from each other, with barebones voice and text chat functionality.

discordio offered some basic form of discovery and cross-server exploration/networking when it was effectively nonexistent back then. it, along with other outreach efforts on our part, certainly helped boost our community size and amusingly also attracted a lot of teens approaching us to ask if we wanted to "partner up" with their server (i help administer a studygroup server on discord).

my 2c, as a fairly active user since '16.
We have seen people bounce back from early signs of dementia after cataract surgery.
Zoom said: “we won't use your data to train AI without your consent”, but given that they require your consent to join a zoom call you can see what to do with such a statement.
> This proposal would reduce total bills for the working class.

I sure hope so, but I still doubt whether it will happen. I'm sorry for my ignorance on the topic, and I need to research it more. But it is counter-intuitive to me.

We pay much more than the rest of the country already. We are the utility's source of revenue. We should get a fair price if we generate enough electricity through solar and other means by switching to market rates.

Why can't they just adjust the expense for those who generate electricity? Or directly lower the incentive by removing tax cuts and credits since the widespread adoption is ongoing anyway. I am still trying to understand why I have to share costs with wealthy people without clear benefits.
I would consider myself pretty centrist, but I thought HN was a good place to get away from the thoughtless political vitriol that exists everywhere else. For a forum that's usually very well spoken, it's wild to see how quick people are to make claims about people and things they know nothing about. Political polarization really is going to destroy this country, damn.
More like tree roots.

Part of the problem that things like this fix is "catastrophic paralysis" where you get stuck trying to find the single most advantageous thing you can do, which often ends up being subsumed into converting money into political blathering.

Whereas if you spend $400m to plant trees, you get trees (or, sadly, you get trees that die instantly because you didn't manage the project at all to verify that the trees will do something, and instead burnt it on a tree planting company that doesn't care if they survive).
When I’m in a long message thread about an issue our application is having, a little “this would make a good blog post” bell rings in my head once the discussion grows beyond a certain threshold.

I’ll copy/paste the text into my notes and will later generalize it and turn it into a blog post.

Even if the topic seems simple and self-evident, there’s always someone out there who will benefit from learning from your experience.
"A to Z of The Designers Republic" is finally getting a much-needed reprint next January

https://www.thamesandhudsonusa.com/books/a-to-z-of-the-desig...
And yet almost all of western Montana is still powered by clean hydropower.

Why does the west love to rip ourselves to shreds over non-issues? Our enemies aren’t half as dedicated as we are.
Does this mean that I need to call the LLM API once for each token?
It actually made the story more interesting to me. I like learning the human side to the stories.
Maybe I’m projecting my own personal experience, but I doubt public chargers are a significant percentage of most people’s charging.

Before buying an EV, I was super concerned with public charging infrastructure.

Now as an owner, I’ve only used public charging enough to verify it works. With 300+ miles of range it just isn’t a concern, I either have enough to go and return, or am staying long enough to charge the car enough to return (I visit family 200 miles away at least monthly).

I’ve owned the car for 2.5 months and 5,200 miles. 12% of my charging has been public, and 43% of that was in the first 3 days because the car didn’t come with a charger and it took a week to arrive.

So based on my own experience, I’d expect public charging to be a negligible single digit %.
More than that, behind the scenes Microsoft helped AMD design x64.

(Source: someone who was there when it happened who then told me over beer.)
Scientist recently got a good picture of one
And when you interact with people 8 time zones away, concepts like "today" or "tomorrow" break down completely. It's a very uncanny feeling.
Can BTRFS snapshots on OpenSUSE Tumbleweed (btrfs+snapper) provide same functionality as ZFS Boot Environments?

Nope.

Cite from System Recovery and Snapshot Management with Snapper for OpenSUSE Linux.

● Limitations

A complete system rollback, restoring the complete system to the identical state as it was in when a snapshot was taken, is not possible.

With ZFS Boot Environments you are bulletproof.

With btrfs+snapper you are crossing fingers if it will work the way you need.

Not the same thing.
PHP also uses different operators for addition and concatenation, but I feel that it has just as much, if not more, implicit conversion weirdness as JS.

It seems to me like those two things are orthogonal. (Not that JS wouldn't necessarily be nicer with a separate concatenation operator.)
It's really a planning discussion not a personal one. Planners where I lived chose rail as well as streets and I get reliable transport by rail or the Schroedinger street choice.
>The quality of the average codebase written in 10 layer-abstraction-heavy

This meme needs to die. I've seen "10 layer abstraction heavy" code base only once

The code was simulating hardware/firmware behaviour when the real impl. was not available, and when the real impl. was delivered, then it was called instead.

So that was quite reasonable why they went with this like that.

Normal apps are mostly MVC-like where controller receives HTTP request (like 5 LoC?),

moves it to some handler which performs business logic / calls db and the returned stuff is either HTML or JSON.

That's your average web app.
Obvious experiment: Test their AI's reactions to some of the more explicit and violent parts of the Bible.
World race to the seventh continent: the Moon
Plummets here means still has 11,000,000 DAU, approximately 10% of its rival Twitter.

If plummeting means "gains 10% of the market in the first month after launch", then I would love for my next business to "plummet"
> ChatGPT makes us very productive. Personally, in my early 40s, I feel my brain is back in 20s.

Is it supposed to be a good thing?
What is "untyped" exactly? Google tells me it's the same as "dynamically typed".

Remember the context. The thread started with Elang VM making it impossible to make code faster, due to the need to accommodate Erlang's dynamic typing features and do runtime checks for that. Top comment said that dynamic typing per se can't be the obstacle for programs being faster, and gave x86 as an example of a presumably dynamic VM which does not limit the speed of the programs.

So "dynamically typed" from the article here meant that there's some runtime checks you can't unsubscribe from, and due to them there's a cap on how much faster you can make your code. It applies to some extent to x86, there's also checks there like segfault for example, and maybe you could save some space on silicon if you removed them and required the machine code to be verified to never cause segfaults. But I argue that this is too much of a stretch. Runtime checks that x86 performs are negligibly simple, and x86 is not a valid counter-example for the article's point. In my view the article's point is valid.

> 1/ there is no static checker

"return 0" is the static checker for x86 machine code.

But seriously: this is not a necessary condition for something to be statically typed, it can't be.

> 2/ if there was, the interpreter would run the failing code anyway

Failing code does not exist. All code is valid.

Haskell is undoubtedly statically typed. But division by zero will still cause a runtime error.

> 3/ memory can be integers, floats, machine instructions all at the same time

Ok. Disregard what I said about machine words. The only datatype in x86 is byte. Some operations use 2 bytes, some use 4. They may interpret them differently (some may see an int, some float), but it changes nothing, since both int and float operations are operations on bytes.
I wonder if the next iteration of OpenAI features is something like:

right now you can inject prompts that the LLM takes into consideration before the output

I wonder if you can make it have a "post" generation function that says like "keep re-trying in a loop (aka hallucinating with randomness) until the output message passes XYZ format/checks/scoring"
yes. If GraphQL is anything it's absolutely batteries not included.

When people speak of tooling they are almost certainly talking about Apollo. I think you could probably find a similar analog in the SOAP XML days. There were lots of vendors, lots of tooling, and mostly the same challenges and outcomes. It could be as nice as you wanted if you spent the time and effort getting there.

To make this more concrete, GraphQL is "strongly typed" in the sense that you get a run-time error when you use the types incorrectly. That's fine for development. Not so much for production. In order to get end-to-end typing you need to integrate with TypeScript or whatever language you're using. That has its own set of challenges. Your build process needs to know which GraphQL endpoint to use (not so easy when doing development on the API or need to use staging environments, etc.) and then generate typings based on that.

Errors are another GraphQL travesty. Do you use out-of-band HTTP errors? In-band error codes? Both? (ugh, but probably once more than 1 developer touches the code). Do those errors kill your entire query? What or who determines that?

I could also mention caching. But that's enough headaches for today. You need tooling just to get up to bog standard HTTP and browser caching gives you for free.
The BilletLabs story is soul crushing.
If Linus does not claim responsibility, is not better than any other hypocrite he criticized.
> Python made it through a backwards-incompatible source change.

That's skipping a few fact, isn't it? Let's call it what it was. Python was a victim in a cataclysmic software disaster of biblical proportions. It spend 10 years in rehab afterwards but miraculously made it through yes.
It's not the elites who are behind this - it's commercial real estate bankers who stand to lose their shirts, and city governments who are losing income tax revenue. Simply put, some people were making money off of the previous status quo and they'd like to get back to doing so. They don't give a fsck about workers or "quality of life" or any of that BS. They just want their money.

We're stupid if we let them win.

You've had a taste of freedom and flexibility - are you going to let them take it away so they can make money? Because, that's what this is actually all about.
there is certainly a possibility, but it would not be easy nor cheap. there's a company out there that does Raptor conversions for regular F150s, they have some videos that talk about the challenges of trying to get the software to talk to hardware that it wasn't designed for. so you'd have a hardware swap and the software challenges after that. most likely it would be cheaper to use a Comma.ai kit or trade-in for a model with the hardware you want. of course that's not so much hacking!
I would say in E EU white bread additives are not as much a problem as is alcohol and red meat.
Mount Washington?
Or JSON that correctly answers what the prompt is asking.
Time in the U.K. is europe/london. It’s entirely possible in the future that outlying Scottish islands may decide to keep DST while the rest of the country goes to year round daylight saving.

You can’t always be future proof.
True, but not all positive results deserve to be published either!
Between that and catching 400 Bad Requests coming back from the server, you're pretty much catching any communication errors resulting from version skew.

SvelteKit can poll to check server version and refresh, both on timer and if assets are 404. But as you implied, that doesn't help with API evolution and e.g. users interacting with a form (apart from increasing the likelihood the page will refresh soonish due to navigation).
So which is it? Did I never comment on the policy, or did I declare blind support for it?

Do you really think I know _nothing_ about the policy?

I've had enough of the insults, the assumptions, and strawman attacks. I don't see any effort on your end to understand my position, and you've done nothing to convince me that porn providers should not have to verify the age of their users. Ciao.
Not in advance. Or better, they can translate it in advance, but they will translate to an incorrect value.
I go to tech conference. [video]
> (or have it done for them via a router)

And then we are back to NAT...
The first spate of articles from this publication were like this, which really made it stand apart from the others. Somehow a complete inversion has taken place since then.
As far as I know, the existence of black holes is accepted by basically every astrophysicist.

There are several smoking guns:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_hole#Observational_evide...