skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
How to improve OpenAI embeddings in your RAG pipeline?

At Vectify AI, we have developed the Fine-Tuning Augmented Embedding (FAE), a method that can "fine-tune" the black box OpenAI's text embedding model on your data and boost retrieval performance.

Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) is a notable framework that bridges Large Language Models (LLMs) with external knowledge. While a general-purpose pre-trained embedding model is commonly used for retrieval, it might not be optimal for specific domains.

A recent blog post from Llamaindex introduced a method for fine-tuning the embedding model on domain-specific documents without labels and achieved impressive performance boosts with the lightweight BAAI/bge-small-en model. While the fine-tuned model shows promise, it doesn't outperform the OpenAI/text-embedding-ada-002 model.

Ideally, we'd directly fine-tune OpenAI's embedding model on domain-specific data. However, it's served as a black box, with no dedicated fine-tuning API available. We introduce the Fine-tuning Augmented Embedding (FAE), which augments the OpenAI's black-box model with a tunable model. By fine-tuning just the trainable model component with domain-specific data, FAE can consistently outperform OpenAI in retrieval performance.

More details can be found in our blog post. Also check out the open-sourced implementation of FAE in Vectify AI's Github repo.
the friends list didn't work for 5 or so years and neither did the download limiter (not a big deal these days, but on dialup... yeah)

the UI was exceptionally slow and it took forever to do anything

this wasn't a meme for no reason: https://imgur.com/a/bpGpe0o
Working remotely can more than halve an office employee’s carbon footprint
Might be referring to “Tailored Access Operations” which was an NSA office
> My TV provider allowes me to store up to 2000 hours high definition TV in the cloud.

That you are free to watch until you stop paying for their service. Those movies do not belong to you.
For one off trips the advantage is you don't need to deal with airport security or feeling cramped in a cheap airline seat.

They are also offering commuter and family passes that offer wifi access and bring the price down to $6 or $14 per ride (that might not be the Orlando price specifically). The family pass let's you share it with family members as well which is nice, living near Orlando we are a popular travel destination for family (Disney World + free tickets bc my wife works for Disney).
I don’t think he’s talking about people that tweet a couple of things about new tech. More of a people who on a daily basis come up with content like “here are 5 ways you can use AI to enhance your life” or “10 cryptos that will forever change the world as we know it”.
I used to follow a lot of communities, but many of them have died out over the years for various reasons.

One of the things I've been trying to do recently is to get out and attend local meetups. The resolution and depth of the discussion IRL can be much deeper. And it makes me realize that most people aren't on Hacker News!
Java 21: The Nice, the Meh, and the Momentous
You should definitely look at what happened to ScaleFactor and try not to repeat their mistakes.

I personally will never use an AI accountant, mistakes are far too expensive, and we know AI is not failproof
Just to clarify, Steam came out in 2003 and GFWL in 2007.

Initial Steam was a horrible horrible experience, it also didn't have a store, and it was mainly just something you had for Counter Strike. Now, CS was MASSIVE, it still is, but that was enough to get a whole lot of people experience Steam.

It didn't help the internet connection back then was, to put it mildly, shit for most people, so a constantly disconnecting program wasn't a shocking outcome in hindsight, remember, this is 2003-2004.

It also felt unnecessary, you bought the game off Steam, Steam didn't let you buy anything and then anything not-made-by-valve, so why couldn't you just play CS directly, why did you have to install an additional app on your limited hardware?

And then things have changed. It's my go-to shop, and their contributions to the Linux ecosystem is much welcome. There's self interest, since operating a shop on Windows comes with inherent risks, but I don't see the same interest in other parties, so I'll take it over anything else today.
Yes and no. Yes, you're spot on.

And yet I find that my favorite posts & comment threads here are the ones that *aren't* about tech, startups, etc. And I'm always amazed at how no matter what the topic there's always someone who seems to know what they're talking about. Of course there are always many people who think they know what they're talking about :)

Perhaps it's less "Community about X" but rather "Community of people who are interested in X" as there's more likelihood that you'd have other shared interests? Not sure.
My personal Steam customer support 'win' was several years back when I decided to start building a game library for my son. I had purchased Conan and Elite Dangerous while they were on deep discount and gifted them to my son's account. At the time I was unaware that gifts can expire and be refunded. So, at some point the gifts expired and they refunded the purchases, but the game were no longer on that deep discount. I was fairly upset and contacted customer support. The initial customer support agent was unhelpful and I sent a follow-up contact to Gabe that expressed my discontent. I explained that they'd managed to alienate a user that had been on the platform since 2005 and who had a massive library of purchased games at that point. I told them I would no longer be using the platform and would not be using it for my kids either. This email elicited a response from one of the Steam devs and they agreed that my initial interaction was not what they wanted the experience to be. He sent me copies of the games that have been refunded and he sent me to codes for "all present and future Valve titles" for me and my son to be able to play together. In the end he turned it around fully and only increased my appreciation for the company and platform.
You can do this by just implementing From<u8> and Into<u8> for your type - using the enum representation only for assignment or pattern matching. The more principled solution AIUI would be to have "patterns" as a first-class citizen within the language.

Storing the tag 'out of band' is something you can only do as part of some larger object, in which case you can similarly have getters and setters that take or return enums and do the appropriate conversion.
Failsafe-go: resilience patterns for building fault-tolerant Go applications
We use Unleash. There are many things you can do with feature flags and Unleash helps with a lot of them. However, my feeling is 80% of the value comes from 20% of the features. Even a much simpler system provides a ton of benefit. For me, it is top of the list after having automated tests and automated deployments.
I don't know if this is accurate, but IIRC, if you're banned, you lose access to even the single-player games in your collection.
It seems like any product named "X for Y" is terrible enterprise-y drivel. It means the project is part of some umbrella corp, which ofc means they can't possibly actually care about anything by profit, move slow, and are un-responsive.
For those interested in trying this on their own as a learning experience, I've really loved the early material in this book: "Web Browser Engineering." (https://browser.engineering/) It was posted here a while back.
> you wouldn't be caught dead wearing Common Projects and would be embarrassed for someone wearing them

Y'know, you seem more focused on logos and their importance than anybody else here. I would never been embarrassed for someone wearing a certain kind of shoe. I'm not judging people based on logos, since what brand of shoe someone else is wearing has absolutely no impact on my life.

For athletic shoes, I wear Mizunos. Went to a good running store once, spent an hour with the old grizzled guy there until I found a shoe I liked, and I've stuck with the brand ever since. They've got a big logo on the side, but again, I don't care about that; I care about the fact that I know the shoe will be high quality and fit well.

> No need to rely on logos, which is weakly correlated to quality.

No, that's a made up fact that is wrong. Brands tend to be pretty consistent in their quality over time, especially those that have been around a while.

> Check this channel: https://www.youtube.com/c/RoseAnvil

I'm not going to check that channel because, again, the point here is that I don't want to spend a bunch of time learning about how shoes are made. I just want to buy a good quality shoe (or short, or whatever) and brand is a fine proxy for that. The amount of money I spend buying a reputable brand is well worth it given the time I save by not watching videos like whatever the one you linked is.
The most popular flavors, by definition, benefit from advertising the most. The goal isn't to achieve equality of popularity between every product you sell. It's to sell the greatest number of products!

The advertising costs the same whether you advertise popular flavors or unpopular ones, but you'll get a lot more sales by advertising the popular ones.

Go check out a grocery store, see whether the aisle caps slant towards popular or unpopular product varieties.
Something hippies and cab company owners have known for decades. Very cool.
That sums up my feelings with smartphones, and a lot of other areas that used to be exciting in tech.

They’re “finished” products. I don’t expect massive innovation going forward, just slow, incremental changes.
I'd note that I've seen cases where the V8 JIT was sufficiently good that thunking to C++ and back meant that the performance difference was minimal.

But that was for 'js library backed by C++' shaped cases whereas for performance critical app-specific code you probably want 'C++ library that presents a JS interface at the top level.'
> Moz didn't want to have to "standardize" one specific dictionary

You could have multiple sources of dictionary identified by something like a hash, and cached in the browser. For example you could have a general-purpose HTML dictionary, a general-purpose CSS dictionary and a general-purpose JS dictionary, have canonical/official versions of these hosted somewhere (say, on Github) and distributed wherever, and update them on a semi regular basis (at the cost of re-compression of the associated data); and in turn these could be overrided on perhaps a site by site basis with site-specific versions of these. You could basically associate an overridable but defaulted dictionary specification by MIME type (or none at all in the case of already-compressed data).

Every file would have to be sent with the hash of the dictionary that was used to start compressing it, which would then be retrieved and cached somehow.

I could see this resulting in some fairly significant byte savings, especially for retrieval of many smaller files.

I bet this would also be useful potentially for email clients/servers.
cockpit does offer lots of admin including a web shell (port 9090 by default)

meshcentral has a web shell too.
As someone not versed in Rust I understand the point of the article is showing the Enum construct is powerful, but if you are worried about self-documenting code and want to avoid illegal state transitions, isn't it as simple as defining a map of (pseudocode here):

{Active -> Inactive,
Inactive -> Active,
Active -> Suspended,
Suspended -> Active,
...}

And then having only _one_ function that mutates and checks for the valid transitions? In the author's implementation you need to read a lot of code to derive the state machine from the method's implementations instead of it being immediately obvious from looking at a data structure. I understand there's a benefit of the implementation being checked by the compiler in this way, but at the same time it seem to spread logic across many methods. Is there an alternative middle-ground?
Awesome, thanks. Was looking to pay for a provider, and this puts Proton back in the running.
If I want to know what movies are playing, I can ask the cinema. This is far more effective for the both of us.

If I want to know who is running for election, this is similarily available.

As for social issues? Being able to afford to make noise has proven a drastically inferior barrier than I need.
Doesn't this need a "has my cat got fleas" for comparison? Surely all Google searches have increased over that period.
Apple and Chrome specifically matter here because those where the targets being exploited in the wild, and have the most direct attack surface with the largest number of users.

The author mentions that many other systems need to patch as well. However, wow many of those billion Python docker pulls are rendering untrusted WebP images? Same for Node, etc. These should also be promptly patched, but they're not in the same ballpark here as iOS/Android/Chrome.
I don't think this is possible, at least not directly. My understanding is that there's a special optimized path for CameraConstrainedHighSpeedCaptureSession recording to MediaCodec surfaces backed by a hardware encoder. If you capture to a different type of surface, the frame rate will likely drop to 60 or lower (assuming it's even allowed--I have not tested).

I'm not too familiar with image analysis, but if it's acceptable to work on lossy frames and to take a small hit to latency, you could record to a MediaCodec hardware encoder and then immediately send the output to another MediaCodec instance to decode it.
Not sure if you can really find something like HN for other topics. HN works as it works exactly because of the topic and audience. Same structure might not work for other things
Magic and Loss, Part 2: Magic on the Screen
No. Pretty much every business works like this: you BUILD something people (will) want and sell it to them. Even if you are a retailer, you still build a shop from shelves, showcases, cashier desks and so on and you build a logistic system to supply it with goods.
The main thing everyone always wants to know is whom to blame. Who added this store? Who changed the name of this store? Who deleted this store? The last one is particularly tricky - keeping audits of deleted things. Do you just soft delete everything?
I don’t mind being candid about sales - I always found it really interesting reading about others

So for 2022, this app was a $5 up front price, and made $200. I have a similar one for MP3 playback - also $5 up front - that made $900. Then you used to be able to buy both together for $8, which made $130

A month ago I moved to in app purchases and subscriptions - and since then I’ve only managed to get one subscription and zero IAPs. The downloads have also been terrible - with about 5 a day

The level of marketing before has been having a good store listing, and some effort into keywords, but no active marketing (self promotion or ads etc.)

Focus now is on marketing. The nice thing about it being free to download is it’s easier to get interest from posts like these. That was much harder to do before
This is very neat. I found a new homepage to use it seems!
Yeah $10 a month is crazy for a search engine, I would expect a lot more for that price! I an happy with searx and similars in the meantime.
Do you think Mac gamers would ever see similar love, like Game Porting Toolkit integrated into Steam?
> "the center" in the US (and some other Western countries) is now so far to the right

Can you give an example? I can think of plenty of thing where things have moved very far to the left in the US.
The Blue-Ridge Mountains vs a concrete jungle? That's a no-brainer.
I agree and this is a good approach - and how we power the activity feed in our app. But it doesn’t solve the issue of “pushing the changes” out. Of course, you can always listen to the audit table WAL changes - best of both worlds.
In this case Netflix followed the other ad supported networks.
it wasn't a serious question looking for an answer.
I _knew_ there will be Rust at the end.

Sorry, not interested. I can’t think in Rust. Tried many times. Things like dynamically updated graphs are nearly impossible to write in Rust, and concurrency is less than pleasant. Fighting the borrow checker is not my idea of a good time.

I don’t understand why everyone is so fascinated with Rust. I am like 3 times less productive there, and there is absolutely no pleasure for me in writing Rust code.

I’ll stick to Python and C++, thank you.
I'm working on a project to revive old QTVR movies[1].

After writing a couple of python decoders [2] for movie encodings from the 90's it got old quickly.

As luck would have it, FFmpeg has support for almost all video encodings under the sun. For my usecase I wanted to send one frame per time to FFmpeg to decode.

Luckily I found PyAV[3]. It's a Cython project which binds to FFmpeg.

Which brings me to the article. It reads more like a C bad, rust good.
Cythons tag line is: 'Cython gives you the combined power of Python and C`

Just wanting speed and less memory bugs, then rust will fare better. If you want to have the combined power of Python and C then Cython is
pretty cool.

[1] https://github.com/rvanlaar/QTVR
[2] https://github.com/rvanlaar/QTVR/tree/master/qtvr/decoders
[3] https://github.com/PyAV-Org/PyAV
I recently went down the fighter plane dogfighting rabbit hole. I guess I used to think that dogfighting was just about reaction times and handling the plane. But because of the subtleties of airplane performance parameters and how they interact with energy management, it’s much more tactical than that. And while the pilots are calculating tactics they might be putting in 6+ Gs.

https://youtu.be/kV391POGaV4?si=__YKqs4OdYzt1BgK
Predicting the sustainability of a future hydrogen economy
Parallels to Craigslist. Lots of value, profitable, not beholden to the ghouls who would squeeze everything good out for every last dividend or share buyback.
> One best practice that I'd love to see spread (in our codebases too) is always naming the full feature flag directly in code, as a string (not a constant).

Can you elaborate on this? As a programmer, I would think that using something like a constant would help us find references and ensure all usage of the flag is removed when the constant is removed.
why not just use numpy which is already in C?
> Make feature flags short-lived. Do not confuse flags with application configuration.

This is my current battle.

I introduced feature flags to the team as a means to separate deployment from launch of new features. For the sake of getting it working and used, I made the mis-step of backing the flags with config files with the intent to get Launch Darkly or Unleash working ASAP instead to replace them.

Then another dev decided that these Feature Flags look like a great way to implement permanent application configs for different subsets of entities in our system. In fact, he evangelized it in his design for a major new project (I was not invited to the review).

Now I have to stand back and watch as the feature flags are being used for long-term configurations. I objected when I saw the misuse- in a code review I said "hey that's not what these are for"- and was overruled by management. This is the design, there's no time to update it, I'm sure we can fix it later, someday.

Lesson learned: make it very hard to misuse meta-features like feature flags, or someone will use them to get their stuff done faster.
I'm a bit too tall for airplanes so I would love a business or first class seat purley for pain avoidance. Especially on an overnight flight - I cannot sleep in a coach seat without causing myself harm. Outside of that, I totally agree. And on any short flight (< 4 hours) I could stand for all I care.
I think this is part of the equation, no investors means enshittification hasn't come knocking.

But there also seems to be an element of vision at Valve that's been allowed to flourish. Where other companies would produce an MVP and walk away if there's not enough money being made, Valve seems to have consistent enough resources and vision to dedicate itself to long term research, development, and planning. In a sea of public companies that are always getting greedier, Valve appears to have made the open source world and maybe the world at large a better place.
Sensible $WORDCHARS for Most Developers
Yeah, but it sill isn't your money, even with 100mil of valuation/investment you are rich on paper, but until you move your ponzi/AI magic to other investor/IPO, you don't have much.
Since when is 125mph high-speed rail?
But Jonny Greenwood can.

I completely agree with your point though, sheet music is an element from Western "Music Theory", and has nothing to do with being able to make music. It definitely does help if you want to have musicians trained in that Western cultural practice to play your music, but not everyone cares about that.

Edit: my point about Mr Greenwood is that he is a huge part of the sound of Radiohead, as well as the other members.
I keep seeing "two hours north of AB Charleston." By what? Foot, plane, car? I'm assuming car based on the maps I've seen.
IME "big picture folks" suddenly care about the details when their big picture fails to solve for the details.
The IPv6 version of this would be ...

1. get list of customer netblocks

2. setup "internal" service(s) for customers

3. setup firewall rules to allow customer <-> service allow list

4. setup DNS records

5. tell customers DNS and API targets
Somewhat to my surprise, these appear to be getting very little traffic

https://www.similarweb.com/website/devurls.com/#ranking

although I don't know how similarweb gets its data
He didn't get rich from being charitable! He got rich from being greedy and IMO stingy.
two years passed, not sure if it's doing upstream-first in real yet.
A few were, definitely. LG stands out as the biggest innovator to leave the market. Less competition in the android market is a problem, in my view. Most people's interests are covered between Pixel and Samsung, true. But what happens when google gets greedy and decides to lock the Pixel bootloader? Where the hell will people who want a privacy oriented phone go? stuck with pinephone or fairphone?

Even Samsung has been way more cautious and tame with their designs, excluding the Folding devices which are true innovations.
That makes me feel a bit pessimistic about space travel. If we didn't even manage to colonize our own oceans, despite it making some economic sense, given ludicrous prices charged for houses/apartments/dwellings at land, how can we realistically hope to settle other worlds?
> you can still buy service at 2x the price in first class

Writing this demonstrates you don't know what you're talking about. Plenty of people would happily pay double for a first-class seat but that's not nearly enough. At best paying double gets you into premium economy.

Most domestic (USA) first class tickets are 3-5x the cost of an economy ticket. For international flights, business tends to be 3x and first class is something like 7x-10x.
I don't see how you love something that makes you jump through these hoops:

> In this particular case, it took me 4 separate commits (and 4 failed releases) to debug the various small errors I made: not using ${{ ... }}5 where I needed to, forgetting a needs: relationship, &c
Per legend, it’s past the Mediterranean, past the pillars of Hercules and towards the apples of Hesperides.

Well, Plato clearly thought it was in the Atlantic Ocean, but the legend came via Solon from an Egyptian priest. The whole point of the story was that Athenians didn’t know their own history— as they fought off the Atlantians.

There are a few reasons to believe that it refers to the pillars of Hercules in the Black Sea— and the apples of Hesperides are in the East (first stars seen at night) by the mountains where Atlas held the earth (Caucasus mountains).

Just saying, underwater archaeology in the Black Sea is going to be very, very exciting.