skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Something I've been noodling on for a bit is that adding RAG - which should be a pattern most applications do - increases accuracy and reliability of an LLM while also making the whole system harder to understand and wrangle without good diagnostic data.

Without RAG, you're really just iterating on a prompt that you might parameterize with a few pieces of data. When you see user activity or get a report that something isn't working right, you can iterate fairly easily to get a desired outcome.

When you add RAG, now the behavior of the whole system is dependent on decisions you make upstream. Sure, if that's just one single call to dot(a,b) on a set of vectors, that's easy enough. But what if your RAG system involves calling out to several different databases? What if it pulls in other components that are specific to a user and might be unique per-request, all in the name of improving accuracy? Little doubt that it will improve accuracy, but now you've got a more complex, perhaps very distributed system that you can't just pull down locally and start reproducing behavior with.

This is why I really do believe that a lot more developers are going to have to embrace tracing as a means to understand their applications. My understanding is that LlamaIndex already has a tracing model of sorts internally. Being able to get that data out as OTLP and correlated with the rest of an application would be rad.
He said "no taxes." So that was wrong, wasn't it?
To have robots do all the work.
What does that mean in practice though? That both parents should stay at home until the kids are 10?
Yes, after each update.
The only way to make public schools good is to to force them to be (*-)integrated so wealthy parents put the proper pressure on the state. (Karening for good)

The "buy in to the school district" school apartheid-lite we have in the United States is disgusting failing race to the bottom.
"no longer free for all" implies that it was "free for all" and the change is making it no longer "free for all". In other words, the title is presenting information to the reader that is literally not true.

For your personal reference, here is how the dictionary defines the word "misleading". (Cambridge and Merriam Webster, respectively)

> causing someone to believe something that is not true

> to lead in a wrong direction or into a mistaken action or belief often by deliberate deceit

> to lead astray : give a wrong impression

I would say that the title manages to hit on all 3 of these definitions, with a possible note that perhaps the author "misspoke" rather than intentionally creating a deliberate deceit.
Agree, Erlang will never win any performance benchmarks, but that is mostly due to other aspects of the language: big integers, string handling, safer-rather-than-faster floating point, etc.

[Elixir is a little better, supporting binary-first for strings, rather than charlists - Erlang is very good at pattern-matching binaries.]

Share-nothing and thread-per-core are good for many reasons, including performance, but they also feed into the main philosophies for Erlang development: resilience, horizontal scalability and comprehensibility.

As Joe Armstrong said:

“Make it work, then make it beautiful, then if you really, really have to, make it fast.

90% of the time, if you make it beautiful, it will already be fast.

So really, just make it beautiful.”
Fifty Years Progress Index
Although SoftBank still owns 90% of the equity, they’re now back to being public and since their headquarters is still Cambridge, I’d still call them a UK company.
Why would what was described in the article be of any use to these devices you describe?

If it's built by distribution -- the article is irrelevant. If they use prepackaged container -- the article is irrelevant :|
If you can actually reliably beat S&P, you would never open access to others. Especially not for 20 dollars for month.
This is a confusing way to present this argument. We can’t say, by assumption we used up all the primes, so the new number must be a new prime - this doesn’t make sense. And you might as well say the new number has some new prime divisors (could be the number itself, could be new primes smaller than the number), which is at least slightly more correct.

The actual proof is by contradiction, and goes something like this:

1) Let’s assume there’s a finite number of primes

2) Multiply them all and add one

3) Since we assumed 1), the result in 2) must have a divisor that’s one of those finite number of primes

4) But that’s not the case since we always get a remainder of one

3) and 4) is a contradiction, therefore 1 is false. At no point it follows that the number in 2) is a prime.

The misconception also often causes people to assume that any first N primes + 1 is a prime itself, which is not correct. Someone will use this to make an insecure cryptographic system eventually :) Just kidding, but you see my point how it’s not just a technical detail.
You have to also include massive inflation during their retirement years too. If there are very few workers available the cost of everything is going to skyrocket.
Yes but no. Algorithm for BB numbers and halting problem can implement each other, but both provably don’t exist in the first place, so that’s a bit like proving 2 is odd implies 3 is even and vice versa.

Anyway, the point is that the halting procedure in its full generality cannot exist, while each individual busy beaver number can be solved in theory (even if there’s no algorithm that can list them all).

In other words, busy beaver numbers admit countably many theoretically tractable sub problems. It’s in a way the most natural way to break the halting problem down into tractable pieces.
And while we're on the topic (Getty Images created a generative AI that gives credit to the source images)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37793579
Why should people who don’t own cars pay for highways?

Why should cyclist have to pay for public transportation?

Also children now will be your future doctor, nurse, bus driver, scientist, plumber, etc. so probably worthwhile making an investment in public goods that support their development.
I’d agree this kinda defeats the purpose of using custom domains and aliases. Because ideally no one should be able to get to your original Fastmail account. I saw this too while snooping around in the headers, not sure what to think of it but it’d be great if this is completely hidden from outgoing emails.

Just to clarify, in Fastmail, you have the option to add alias email addresses to your Fastmail account. It's like in Gmail where you can add a "+" or "." after your primary email's local part, and it will still get delivered to your original Gmail inbox. This is like that but you can assign any addresses to forward to your original Fastmail account. They even advertise this as a privacy feature[0] (though I'm not sure if they have different treatment than Aliases[1])

What OP was saying is that Fastmail internally adds an email header that reveals your original Fastmail account during a process to route your emails. This header will be presented if you then reply to an incoming email sent to an alias or masked address, thus leaking your original email to the receiver.

[0]: https://www.fastmail.help/hc/en-us/articles/4406536368911-Ma...

[1]: https://www.fastmail.help/hc/en-us/articles/360060591073-How...
Fun anecdote: I walked into a Capital One (BANK) where they have a Café, and the gimmick is that if you pay with your Capital One card, you get a reduced price.

They said their payment terminals were down so they could not take credit cards. I said oh... I don't have any cash, oh well no coffee for me.
They said well... we can comp you one drink per person if you don't have cash.

Neither I nor they considered the option of me walking over to the nearby bank ATM and withdrawing cash.
Great more detailed yet succinct explanation of what I was trying to say
Agreed!

I’ve noticed there are two kinds of policy advocates.

Agenda advocates: no matter the problem, they push their agenda. Anti tax people are in this category. Down economy? “Lower taxes!” They shout. Up exonomy? “Lower taxes to keep the momentum!”

Issue advocate: these people are creative and will propose the best solution given the day’s issue. The solutions they propose change over the years because conditions change and new solutions appear.

The comment you rape replying to is from the former. The world needs more of the latter.
So I'm confused. If some specific relatively small devices (relatively to the size of the Earth) managed to pick up several of these over the years, surely some of these are hitting people? Are people randomly feeling like they got impacted (if not punched, as per a sister comment) out of nowhere? Apologies if this is a ridiculous question; physics was always my weak suit.
Why are windows hard to manage under macOS?
You are correct in general, but all bitcoin data structures are self-synchronized, so length extension is not possible.
I prefer a single display and use virtual desktops to seperate tasks/apps which each fill most/all of the screen realestate
Can you spell out how processing a large message would result in a bigger system slowdown with thread-per-connection than with async?
Why Vitalik Buterin Built Zuzalu
> As an adult in a scientific field, what actually matters to me is having original scientific ideas conveyed to me in an efficient manner. I'm not really interested in applying arbitrary elementary-school rules on authors, as long as they aren't stealing ideas and text from other people.

The elementary school rules, at least the ones I weas taught decades ago, are pretty much “don’t steal ideas and text from other people”. Like, literally, other than for formatting, there were exactly three rules avout plagiarism I was taught on this in elementary school, and only one of them becomes slightly fuzzier outside of that context:

(1) if you use exactly wording from someone else, put it in quotes and cite the source,

(2) if you use an idea from someone else, cite the source but don't ise quotes, and

(3) if an idea comes from three or more independent sources, you don’t need to cite it, it can be treated as “common knowledge”.

Outside of elementary school, yeah, whether something is genuinely common knowledge or should be cited to multiple sources is fuzzier and context dependent, but the other two rules apply pretty directly.
I don't think they were a cryptographer exactly but someone very familiar with cryptography tools. One of the most interesting aspects of the original code to me is how they lifted the sha256 algorithm from the CryptoPP library when the project already had an OpenSSL dependency.
You know your parents were "breeders" right?
No, sorry, that will be the premium tier above the paid basic ad subsidized tier. Today they only offer the basic ad subsidized tier with a subscription period of their support window.
The article also gives the example of the phrase "as an AI language model, I..." being found in published papers.

The fact that this slipped by the paper's author, their editor, *and the journal review* is not benign.

I agree with the author here: is no one reading these papers before putting their names behind them? Is the entire journal system entirely fraudulent?
If anything bad happens, I'm sure the Rigel will bail us out. This time for sure
One in five Silicon Valley office buildings is vacant
AMD may get across the CUDA moat
Well they could just not allow prompts that seem to participate in blogspam. If they wanted to stop it they definitely could.

Their argument is that since it's centralized, things like that are possible (while with llama2 you can't), they do "patch" things all the time. But since blobspam are contributing to paying back the billions microsoft expects they're not going to.
Agreed, but that is clearly not how Google is positioning "Magic Editor":

"Magic Editor in Google Photos is a new experimental editing experience that uses generative AI to help you bring your photos in line with the essence of the moment you were trying to capture."

Then here is the example video they show of a sample photo edit: https://storage.googleapis.com/gweb-uniblog-publish-prod/ori...

After all, why take a picture of your family when your kid is making a silly face when you can instead "fix" him so that you now look like the Stepford-family, JC Penney ad that God intended.
Very good visualizations
who are these “most people”?

Everyone in Iran, including the Shah, wanted Iran’s oil nationalized. It was the economic consequences that tempered others. The Good Dr. had to go hat in hand to US and beg Eisenhower to aid after oil revenues stopped. That was his bright idea.

Also your story is not the propaganda narrative that is repeated. This is the single paragraph story:

Iran did have a democratic government, but because the PM nationalized the oil, US did a coup and installed a dictator, the shah.

And that is entirely different from your “US helped in the process”. That would be accurate because that is all it was: in the main political support. Then, we in fact had a decade were Generals were powerful, until the Shah, finally in 60s (without CIA and to the great annoyance of the Kennedys) assumed all the power after having disbanded the Communist party and defanged the National Front. The “dictatorship” began 10 years later and it was far more benevolent than say a psycho killer like Mao who murdered millions. But Mao was a “great man” and the Shah is a “dictator”. Go figure.
> whatever homebrew gets me

Then you aren't using what's described in the article.

> On Windows

I've already commented on this. This is not a serious deployment. It doesn't matter if it's done with more supervision or less. It's for "recreational" use.
The 2nd (or 3rd?) one was outright sadistic-- whichever one teased you with the "save early, save often" mantra. Every two steps there was some instant death trap. It just felt like the devs got lazy, since so much of the total playtime was just replaying shit you failed to save after completion.

It was more aggravating than Dark Souls. No amount of possible VGA-rendered porn was worth putting up with it.
Almost all of the AI computers being built now are relatively modestly sized compared to a supercomputer. All but the biggest ones are at or under the low hundreds of nodes (low thousands of GPUs). The only real exceptions are the few AI hyperscale companies that want to sell GPU computing to others.
There are subjects were shows that HN is not onpy skewed towards male, but also wealthy, priviledged and mostly white male. With a very healthy dose of SV bubble techbros thrown in the mix.

HN still is one of the last places on the internet one can have interesting discussions. Sometimes so, it feels like is changing...

(I know this change is a age old HN meme)
Why is that the goal? Who decided that it is an appropriate goal? This whole argument is silly for a lot of reasons, but honestly it's a bait and switch amongst other things: "Oh we'll eventually get to reduced hours, you just need to both start working now and let someone else raise and watch your children." Sounds like a scam to me.
""I heard it was like the Coachella of tech for women. It's supposed to be fun and collaborative," she told NPR in an interview this week. "But the vibe was so different. You could feel the cutthroatness in the air.""

"With some 30,000 annual attendees, that career expo was already a competitive space, according to past participants."

Any event with 30.000 attendees (any gender) would make me uncomfortable. I've never been to such a large career event, isn't that already crowded and competitive?
The motivation? It clearly has roots somewhere in the cypherpunk crew, which was already obsessed with privacy, secrecy, etc.
Does the state force people to maintain their children?

I believe you can always give your children up for adoption so long as all guardians agree to it.

It's not commonly desirable but it's what one would recommend for extreme circumstances like you stated.
A friend once told me it was probably a government agency, and according to him it was probably Japan (and not only because the name sounds Japanese)
Why No One’s Going into Accounting
I just got a steam deck and I have to say, it’s amazing. Not only that but it’s driving Linux support for AAA games. So, my advice, if you want to drive a nail into windows gaming, get a steam deck as the metrics report back to development houses and form product strategy.
> The argument no one has brought up yet: why should society have to pay up even more for breeders' personal choices?

Because "breeders" are the foundation of society. The most fundamental part of an on-going society.
I audibly groan when I reboot from Fedora to Windows to play a AAA game.
That might be true, but it's largely irrelevant. When SA embraced civil rights, it became Western.
In general, being a good engineer means being able to cut through the hype and just deliver real solutions that solve real problems.

So you don't need to keep up on everything to be a good engineer. On the contrary, the best engineers I know stick to one thing long enough to know it deeply, while keeping a light eye on what is new in order to understand when it is worth learning a new skill. It is OK not to do everything. And best practices are not as clear as that term makes it seem - "best" is subjective. Different projects have different needs, so it is good to know what worked for others, but you still need the deep knowledge to make your own decisions.

I don't think the work is any harder now than it was a couple decades ago. But there are a lot more distractions now, so being comfortable with prioritizing where you want to spend your energy is a bigger task that it used to be.
The largest stream of charitable donations in California come from the most IP-paranoid hedge fund I know of.

If you have negative opinions of the finance industry in general, I can't do much but remind you that it's a large and varied industry and that your opinions are priors you should expose to relevant data.
Yes but what is the right price for a one-time payment of software ? If you're going to use maintenance, updates, all the work that comes after you paid, what do you consider is a correct price to pay in advance for all future changes ?
You need to install a 3rd party tool to switch between windows in macOS, like alt+tab provides in Windows and most linux desktops.

macOS of course has cmd+tab, but that switches apps not windows.
> there's a lot of factors that may or may not help encourage childcare facilities

This is always true. Even if you give a cash bonus to the childcare facilities, it may only help management, or may only help customers if it results in facilities competing by offering sign-up bonuses and lower prices, or it might circle back to landlords through increased rents if the supply of childcare-compatible real estate is constrained.
> “The problem with work-stealing is that it means a task can run on one thread, pause, and then be started again on another thread”.

The article explains how work-stealing is a way to solve tail latency. I understand tail latency to be caused by tasks that yield (by themselves) after an unexpectedly long amount of time. This cannot be know in advance. The article explains how work-stealing results in cache misses and extra developer constraints like Send, Sync and ‘static.

What if the executor only moves a task to another thread after a timeout period has expired? This should result in no latency penalty if things are running smoothly and a constant, low, extra latency when tasks need to be stolen now and again. This would mitigate cache miss issues but alas not the developer overhead of all those multithreaded constraints.
Natural nootropics are found in nature and have been used for thousands of years to help boost brain function.
Today, you don’t need to eat plants or herbs to get the brain-boosting benefits of nootropics.
Coincidentally I just listened to this episode a few hours ago on a long car drive! It was really good, though if you don't know what a RAG is, you'll want to study up on that first (or just read up to the transcript on that page) as they don't really describe the concept in the episode itself. Enough intelligent insights popped up for me to keep rewinding certain bits for further thought though.
The key phrase here is “regardless of household income.” There’s a very simple way to make sure rich people don’t get free shit, and that’s capping stuff like this so that rich people don’t get to take advantage of it.

I’ll give you an example: there is no universe in which I personally ought to have had my student loans forgiven. My household income tipped into the seven figures during the pandemic. But some debt forgiveness advocates insisted on cancelling “all student debt, no exceptions.” Absolutely not!
Ask HN: What tools are you currently utilizing for public static documentation?
No, I haven’t written it down anywhere.

Was a developer for many years, but I transitioned to more strategic roles after I took a bit of a personal detour in 2026. I got involved in a major environmental movement and ended up in a grassroots leadership role. That lead me to doing meetings and presentations with a number of local, State and National politicians and their staffs, along with senior folks at certain state agencies, like NJ DEP. That helped me to think more strategically, to be flexible and be able to think on my feet, and how to talk to some very senior people on complex topics.

That experience translated into the ability to speak to large crowds on technical matters, to converse candidly with C suite folks (technical and not) about their products, and still be able to chat with front line developers, QA folks, support and the like, and how to craft visuals and presentations to convey complex technology decisions to different kinds of stakeholders. I am a mix of developer, solution architect, Enterprise Architect, product strategist, and marketing/sales rolled into one.
It just requires an app on Mac versus windows key + arrow to move windows around. It's a non-issue.
This is basically a govt created turbo tax tool but for every govt form ever.. nice.
I disagree somewhat. I don't think it was that messy. It wasn't the most modern C++ code but it was written by an experienced programmer and IMO not likely an academic. Most academics would be likely to code for a Mac or UNIX environment while commercial coders would be more likely to work in Windows.
I wonder if it would be possible to artificially introduce genetic diversity in the species, so any individual transmissible cancer would seem more alien (and more immunogenic) to most of the population.
A few things I have learned over the years and in particular launching and growing my latest project[1]:

1) Track everything including errors. Know what users are using and what they aren't. Remove or rebuild less used features.

2) Find out who your users are and what they value. Ignore non-payers.

3) Economize, market, and document features. You not only need to develop and deploy features, but also to price them in appetising business model, market them on social media and SEO and describe/show how to use them.

4) Keep it super simple. You only get the users' attention for a few seconds, use them wisely. Nobody will read long documentation or use illogical/complex UI.

1: https://aihelperbot.com

Edit: Why not add some AI features for like pdf.ai? Would make your product more attractive and easier to sell.
Distortion is the desired effect, no?
Ref, https://evanhatch.medium.com/len-sassaman-and-satoshi-e483c8...
Have to agree. I regularly use Windows 11, OS X, and Debian-based desktop distros. Nothing comes close to the built-in functionality of Windows. Such a shame it's subject to advertising and aggressive telemetry.
Yes, we are just getting started, and so we are MacOS only for now. We definitely plan on releasing for more platforms.

What platform are you interested in?