skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Congrats on the initial launch!

Here a few thoughts, feedback, and questions:

* you do a good job in this post of describing why you need more than just ChatGPT to get acceptable quality, but much less of that is in the readme. I wouldn't be afraid to sell the project a bit harder, even in early days

* likewise, I think a small visual of the architecture would be helpful, just to make clear what the relationship is to chatGPT, and the additional features of a context store, etc

* Between the notes here and your product pages, it seems a strategy for commercialization with this repo being a lower level tool, with your commercial service having UI, simplified integration, and a hosted version to make this easier for semi-techical teams? If that is the case, I wouldn't be afraid to make that more explicit. GitHub is more and more a place for discovery, even to semi-techical people, but to do that well, I think focusing on a readme that makes it clear who the open source is for is important

* How are you planning on solving the data access problem? Is this a full SaaS service that will need access to the customer data directly somehow? Do you deploy this in the customer's environment? In thinking beyond this open source release and to the commercial side, that would be what I would want to know

* This point has been hit by others in this thread, but I would be curious to know what your plans are to help protect against valid but incorrect queries? I am not as convinced that this problem is insurmountable, as it does seem like you could build features to remove ambiguity by asking questions, show alternatives, etc that most semi-techical people could reason through, but ultimately it seems like thinking about how to involve the teams that own the data might be an important part of the problem.

Anyways, congrats again! This is an area I am really excited to see how it evolves (and will be exploring more!). My email is in my profile if you are interested in chatting more :)
Yevgeny Prigozhin: Wagner chief was on plane that crashed in Russia
How the World’s Most Dangerous Country Solved Murder [video]
This article and many comments are conflating narcissism (a personality trait characterized by self-focus and self-importance), with narcissistic personality disorder (a pathological disorder marked by an inflated sense of self-importance, a constant need for admiration, and a lack of empathy, often leading to significant impairments).
Thank you — very much the kind of info I was hoping for.

You’re touching on one of the reasons I was asking. Modern usage relies on lots of round trip connections that are bound to make a number of applications unusable. And yet people use them.

Seems like maybe more people are on that sort of connection than designers might realize.

Anyway thanks, and congrats on your fiber!
We’re a few years late but getting this now with FedNow.
why am I an llm ??
In my drawing graveyard there is a couple dozen sketchbooks and (if stacked) a 5 foot tall pile of loose paper.

Sketchbooks are useful to me when travelling, they keep everything thing neat and in chronological order, but beyond that I like the idea of a sketchbook more than the reality.

When I start a sketchbook it's usually a belaboured drawing that sets a standard I feel obliged to live up to, and that can turn into a creative constraint.

If I really want to explore or experiment, I feel a lot more freedom with loose sheets of paper that I can crumple up and chuck across the room if the drawing isn't turning out.
"the best negotiating advice is to have multiple offers"

This is borderline "get in the job cannon and blast off to jobland" territory.

Also - it can be terrifically difficult to line up multiple simultaneous offers because companies would rather explode their offer than generally let people get a better leverage. I know multiple companies who do this on purpose for this explicit reason. Is it inefficient from a market perspective? Of course. But since when has that ever stopped the owner class from oppressing the workers?
I use Nextcloud for my personal file storage - it’s easy to connect to Backblaze. Performance isn’t awesome, but it’s fast enough to work for my non-technically inclined family members as a google drive replacement.
I don’t think Siri et al got worse, we just had time for the hype of the excellent voice to text and back again to wear off, and realized that they were too limited at figuring out actions to be very useful.
I'm more interested in Open Source/Local LLM's ability to consume private data as an internal knowledgeable. For example, feed in your entire source repo(s) and then ask it questions about where something is or how it works.
I assume this is a tongue-in-cheek reference to Chamath’s latest drama: https://twitter.com/chamath/status/1693992134796603477
Also Kojima. Death Stranding may have been the most Kojima game he's ever made. Noteworthy that the three examples mentioned here now are Japanese, might also throw in PlatinumGames.

There is still a remarkable strong artistic vision in the games coming out of Japan. It seems weirdly immune to the ironically named gamification everywhere else.
I thought athletes used sodium bicarbonate to buffer the production of lactic acid during anaerobic activity. I've never heard of it as a stimulant. Can you provide a source for that mechanism?
One reason we treat pigs horribly is because they aren’t smarter than us. The moment an AGI becomes superhuman, it’ll make sure we do it.
Funny, but more generally it’s a mildly interesting question - why did the creators choose that name for their AI?
Read my reply to Angostura.
Basements are always expensive. They are common where the soil demands a deep foundation as when you already need to move a lot of dirt you may as move more and get something useful out of it. Realistically though even in places that need deep foundations you are probably better off building a floor up and no basement.

Either way though, they are easy to remove from plans if you don't want one.
Personal computers have plummeted in price over the decades
Alternative Shells
main.sptfy
SPAC Boom was coincident with money supply and one the most inflationary times.

Median return of 2022 SPAC mergers was -82%, but so was pretty much all high P/E ratio companies.

Cloudflare is down -72% from ATH in 2022.

Defending against the inevitable strawman: I am not saying anything about whether SPACs are good/bad investments. But, in order to show the full strength of their "badness", the author needs to tell us more about the overall market and contrast that with SPACs.
Appreciate your insights. A few comments/responses

1. Agree on the introspection point, but it's worth noting that the future of LLMs might involve self-awareness capabilities, which could provide an introspective mechanism similar to SQL's transparency. the aim would be to build upon this middle layer, not blindly supplant it.
2. While 3NF, BCNF, and other normalization forms have served us well, they are essentially tools to manage imperfections in our storage and retrieval systems. LLMs can be trained to understand these nuances intrinsically. additionally, database theories have evolved, with advancements like distributed databases, graph-based models, and nosql. so, it's not entirely outside the realm of possibility that we can pivot and adapt to new paradigms.
3. The "translational losses" referred to the semantic disconnect between natural language queries and their SQL representations. while SQL is unambiguous, the leap from a user's intent to the SQL formulation often introduces errors or inefficiencies. LLMs can be trained to improve over time, constantly refining based on feedback loops.

not arguing that SQL or databases as we know them are obsolete today, just advocating for a more imaginative exploration about where the tech is headed.
I think this is good advice. Would you be able to give an example of a project to do or a good starting point?
YouTube suggests this as part 2: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fL5AW0enIRA
Saying "I don't have a specific figure in mind", worked for me in the past.
How do they even come up with such puny fines! 650k is not even a drop in the bucket for them to change their practices :-(
The funny thing is that this was actually the third SPAC boom. I cut my teeth on Wall Street in 2008 and they were all the rage then too:

"SPACs have a distasteful reputation due to a number of scandals associated with them in the 1980s. But like Frankenstein arisen from the dead, they are back. Initially, when they first reappeared on the scene the major banks and M&A law firms refused to represent them. Morgan Joseph and Ladenburg Thalmann did the hard work of establishing a market." [1]

Also, I don't think anyone launching a SPAC believes they are about democratizing access to certain deals. They're just another structure for raising funds for acquisitions. If the status quo is doing it through private equity firms, an alternative structure is search funds for the small deals and SPACs for the large deals.

[1] https://archive.nytimes.com/dealbook.nytimes.com/2008/01/06/...
I guess that would be the downside
Clint could be short for CLINician Tool. I didn't put much effort into this name xD.
No, you're not missing anything, NVIDIA's software is super clunky by the standards of most of the software world. However, for the last decade, the competition has been much worse: OpenCL development on AMD would be riddled with VRAM leaks, hard lockups, invisible limits on things like function length and registers that would cause the hard lockups when you tripped over them without any indication as to what you did wrong or how to fix it, that sort of thing. Cryptic error messages would lead to threads scattered around the internet, years old, with pleas for help and no happy endings.

The thing that caused me to ragequit the AMD ecosystem was when I took an OpenCL program I had been fighting for two days straight and ran it on my buddy's Nvidia system in hopes of getting an error message that might point me in the right direction. Instead, the program just ran, and it ran much faster, even though the nvidia card was theoretically slower.

In terms of quality, I expect the competition to catch up in a generation or two, but then there is still the decade+ of legacy code to consider. Hopefully with how fast AI/ML churns that isn't actually an insurmountable obstacle.
Builders have gone back to 2x4 in cold climates. They put 2 inches of foam outside. The wood of studs is r5 even though the insulation is r19, so the continuous foam is better.

And in warm climates there were going to 2x6 as well as air conditioning needed the r value.
I'm always somewhat amazed that Chamath Palihapitiya doesn't have a much worse reputation:

1. My understanding is that he was the primary initial architect of "A/B testing for engagement" at Facebook that turned social media into a tribalistic, outrage generating machine (nothing engages like hate), and that the rest of SV essentially copied. I think this trajectory would have happened regardless, but he was first, so to speak.

2. He was the primary booster of selling the shit sandwiches known as SPACs as filet mignon. I'm sure he made out, any downstream investors not so much.
I think you’re conflating the SPAC sponsors and the owners of the public equity. The owners of the equity get their money back (plus interest) if the SPAC doesn’t find a target. The sponsors are out whatever money they put up to form the SPAC, take it public and search unsuccessfully for a target. The sponsors do typically have very rich upside if they find a deal - like, 20% of the post-merger company - but it’s not a risk-free thing for them.

Don’t get me wrong, I think SPACs are fucking stupid and bad for retail investors and I would never want to be involved in one, but the pre-deal owners of shares of the SPAC are actually fairly decently protected (opt-out rights, money held in trust, not liable for SPAC expenses).
Executable stegnography.
Free egress sounds pretty cool? It means you can test backups for zero extra cost. The egress for testing my backups before was well over the yearly cost of storing my data IIRC.
I don't understand that why only 1% publicly available stock is allowed in the market. Scam. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37148125
I mean, I wouldn't like it either, but if I really had to I would buy it again seeing as I use mIRC every single day. The RoI on that is massive, certainly better than just buying another game on Steam.

Incidentally, when did he nix the lifetime licenses? I bought one over a decade ago and I used it to activate mIRC on my Windows 11 machine last year just fine.
I follow your logic but I am not sure it really works.

Agree levels.fyi is a great resource under the right conditions. EG, if Facebook wants to interview you as an E5 engineer, it's great to look up the range for that.

But if you are say a "senior developer" working outside of FAANG, what does it mean for you to know the E5 comp when you have no idea how that lines up against your profile? How would you know if FB would consider you for an E5 or even an E3 unless you interview and see how close you can get? The only other way is if you're already in a FAANG with very comparable levels. Otherwise, what's a "senior engineer" in one place may not pass the resume screen for a "junior" in another.

I agree with you that it obviously takes multiple hours to go through an interview, I am calling out that it's often well worth it, because: you may actually get an offer at the end, which you may take or use to negotiate with another company, and even if you constantly fail interviews there's a very actionable signal in that too. So the return on investment for those hours - ultimately being able to get a better/more lucrative job, seems like a good use of time.
Well this works well until it doesn’t. My elderly father doesn’t carry cash, only card, but yet it would look like he has a large wad of cash in his front pocket. It is in fact a legally concealed handgun however.
Sure, but has the cost to own a TB dropped? Power, cooling, rack space, internet bandwidth, DC rental, tech time, health care, janitor, HR, etc. etc. etc.
It’s worth noting that the reason nothing “useful” can be done with genetic information in the United States is the Genetic information Nondiscrimination act of 2008.

This prevents insurers from denying coverage or increasing premiums based on genetic information. It also prevents employers from making hiring or promotion decisions based on genetics.

These are the most straightforward ways in which companies could profit off your genetic information. Basically denying insurance coverage or employment if they think you’re likely to get ill from a genetic disease.

There’s also a much murkier aspect in which employers could try to guess your intelligence based on genetics. I’m absolutely certain employers would do try to do this despite it having virtually no utility.
Oh, sorry if I was unclear, I wouldn't do that. I was just suggesting that it was closer to the original log message design. :) I'm a massive structured logging fan and have used it for quite a long time. In go I've used zerolog mostly, but I bring structured logs to whatever language I'm working with.
Add-to-Homescreen Mobile Websites: A Viable Option for Startups in 2023
In past startups, I've made a mobile website in lieu of releasing a native app, and it was a good choice in retrospect. Turns out some big companies do this too. I've written up some thoughts on when/why startups should consider this.
https://medium.com/@philipfung/add-to-homescreen-websites-an...
Helping the community...
> they've been working on the new Dragon Age game for something like eight years at this point, and it's still nowhere near release

This is especially worrying in light of Andromeda's development.

The devs (allegedly) wasted years making tools and systems that didn't work, then rushed and cobbled the game together at the very end.
> Customer support. I've never seen so many people get up to speed so fast on something. It's unlike anything ever.

Are you saying that you've seen enterprises developing, training and running their own in-house LLMs from scratch directly on large (i.e. 100s to 1000s) GPU clusters, whether on-prem or cloud, for this to be relevant to Nvidia?

Pardon my skepticism but it seems odd that a generic Fortune 500 co has the in-house talent and will-power to manage large distributed training runs when much easier and cheaper alternatives like OpenAI/open-source models or one of the Google/MS/AWS MLaaS options are available.

> With the relevant audience, Nvidia is the brand which is the strongest. Google could just drop support for TPU, AMD isn't viewed as currently credible for people doing the work, nor Intel.

I think we're confusing some things here. Right now, there is no good alternative for anyone requiring H100s for loyalty to even matter, this could very easily change with the next generation of accelerator chips.

Intel had the strongest CPU "brand" for a while and enterprises/datacenters readily switched to AMD when it became the better option.

> You may be right, only time will tell. I've been involved with GPU use for general purpose workloads since Cuda was launched. At every step of the way there was apparently credible competition at different layers of the stack just around the corner. That's over 15 years. OpenCL, ASICs, FPGA, Intel this that and the other, AMD this that and the other. TPU. Others I've forgotten.

The TAM, and profit margin, for enterprise-grade GPUs (or accelerators) is several orders of magnitude larger than it has ever been including the crypto craze.
This was years ago when I had database backup files to be SFTP from New York data center to California. The backups were half a terabyte or more. It was quite an ordeal back then.
There are so many holes in this, but to pick just one:

> for example your buggy BigGAN implementation

The bug was that the batchnorm gamma was initialized to zero instead of one, so all the model params were being multiplied by zero instead of one. Literally any model that uses batchnorm is susceptible to this bug, and it certainly has nothing to do with GANs.

I think it’s too easy to spout dogma, and calling gwern delusional is something I’ve learned from experience will prove foolish as t approaches infinity.
I don't think it is the same series. The Perisher series focused almost exclusively on the candidates and The Teacher.
"Money" is as productive as the underlying system of production it sits on. You and I can invent foo and bar, with some creative financing sell it to each other for a million dollars, and have a million dollar net worth starting from zero while not producing anything of value. A lot of modern day financial "inventions" seem to be of this kind of "money productivity" with zero net value added to the world.
There also may be some timing bias. The SPAC craze coincided with the apex of late stage money losing “startups”. Anecdotal evidence indicates that the private markets have done a major repricing of private firms in the last 2 years.

It’s intrinsically difficult to value money losing firms. Apple was famously 90 days from bankruptcy, and Uber is now suddenly profitable. Sears is bankrupt, and GE is on the same path.

There was certainly exuberance in 2021, and that likely lead to a number of bad deals.
Yeah. NVidia was a docile looking company and in 2012, they were merely a gaming oriented hardware shop.

These companies exist today. Which small or ignored companies do you think have a bright future?
It will make the everybody’s life a lot easier.

Sorry had to fix that.
3%? That's like a minor 'I want this to be done now' or someone else is coming for a second viewing tomorrow type bump, if that's even statistically significant, frankly that seems fine?
The smart contracts are immutable nobody can change them including the devs. When prosecution says "did nothing" they should probably mention that it was not technically possible to do anything productive.
Apologies for it sounding like that, will do.

Okay good idea, will do!
I was thinking that might be it, especially since he kind of trashed Chinese and Russian marketplaces.
It could only restrict that company, though. Anyone else in the world could relicense open source code under any license that is more restrictive than the original. Any of their employees could start a company, and turn the product completely proprietary (as long as they adhere to whatever attribution clauses are in the open source license.)

The point of open source is to allow people (giant corporations) to take the code and do whatever they want with it.
As a Mac person that also used Windows NT in my day to day work, I never liked Windows 95.

From a purely subjective perspective the design wasnt to my taste.

But the worst thing was the Viruses!

Windows 95 was a hellscape of security issues.

It felt like I never encountered a Windows 95 box that actually worked like it was supposed to. And it seemed like everyone was always reinstalling Windows 95 to get it working again.

In the late 90s I had an NT4 box that I never had to reboot. My Mac was getting rebooted multiple times a day.
Better to say nothing and risk being thought a lizard brain than to say "A group of males locked up and isolated without sex for three months but still in the tempting presence of women isn't natural", and remove all doubt.
For some context, looking at traditional IPOs during the same year[1], the median return was 3.3%, the mean -22%. Like SPACs there were a couple outlier that gave high returns. Around 45% of IPOs gave small positive returns, while only 4% of SPACs did. Around 35% of IPOs lost half their value or more, while 80% of SPACs did.

[1] https://stockanalysis.com/ipos/2022/
and there are more than two clearly distinct ways to articulate a finger, so you can bump that up to at least 3^5, not that it would be in any way convenient or useful to do so

assuming you have the dexterity to hold each of your 10 fingers in one of 3 different positions—e.g.: up, down and crooked—you could technically count up to 3^10 or 59,049

if you mastered that, you could add a fourth or even fifth position. 4^10 is just over 10^6, so you could hold any 6 digits, and 5^10 is just under 10^7, so almost any 7 digits

you can compress really heavily using high bases, but for it to make practical sense the atomic medium of storage has to have that number of states

if you just convert binary to a high base and back again, unsurprisingly the space used works out exactly the same, as the number of symbols used to represent a number may be fewer, but the length of the symbols themselves balances it out exactly

e.g. in base 1000 you may be able to represent the number 999 with a single symbol, but you need 1000 unique symbols to show every number up to 999, each of which of course takes up significantly more digits than a bit; however, if you had a storage cell that could reliably store and display 1000 unique states, then it would be a different matter. whether that's possible or would/could even take up less physical space than ~log_2(1000) binary cells I do not know
My wife is an RN and asked it some medical questions and pronounced it "pretty neat" and also said "We're going to get so much better doctoring in the future."

She did find that some of the follow-up questions seemed to lead it down the wrong path, where the follow-ups seemed to be much more important than the initial messages, and she got better results by taking the original message and follow-ups and combining them into a new message to submit to a cleared session.
How do you do the initial query -> possible schema matching? Also, how do you control token counts?