skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Hello everyone!

Back in May, I had a business idea to help restaurants improve their presence on Google My Business. But, things took a different turn. As I explored the restaurant world, I realized they had a serious issue. The reservation platforms they used were eating into their profits with high fees.

That's when I decided to create a solution. I realized the immense potential of creating a SaaS solution that would help restaurants not only manage their reservations but also streamline their communication with diners and maintain their customer databases. This journey has been a rollercoaster ride, complete with late-night no-coding, relentless learning, but here we are.

The result? Plazn - a platform that empowers restaurants to define their table configurations, operating hours, holiday schedules, and exceptional closure days. It provides the flexibility to personalize their reservation widget, which can be seamlessly integrated into their websites or Google My Business listings. Restaurants can also sends booking confirmations, day-of reminders, and even asks customers to leave Google My Business reviews.

The potential for this software is boundless. For the future I visualize the integration of reputation management for Google My Business, streamlined customer payment processes, order-ahead capabilities, and even dynamic menu modifications. The vision extends to diverse business verticals beyond restaurants, including salons, yoga studios, or any space requiring appointment-based services.

Plazn is multilingual, available in English, French, and Spanish. And I would like it to become a all-in-one tool that's transform the way businesses manage their bookings and interactions with customers.

You can give it a spin for free! I'm super eager to hear your thoughts and feedback, so feel free to let me know what you think about the page and the product: https://plazn.com

Oh, and one more thing – this Saturday, Plazn will be featured on Product Hunt, and I'd be thrilled if you could hop over there and give us a vote. Just set yourself a reminder with this link: https://www.producthunt.com/products/plazn

Best,
Kevin
> do we have stats for sales in the 1980s etc.

Not really. The earliest cumulative estimate I've found was the 50m number for 2003.

There are some earlier numbers:

First edition of the Fellowship of the Ring was printed in 1500 copies in the US, 3000 in the UK. Return of the King up to 5,000 in the UK and 7,000 in the US.

It's worth noting that those were good sales number for fantasy hardbacks, and still are. The vast majority of authors can only dream of selling even a few thousands hardbacks for genre fiction.

In the 1960's Ace published an unlicensed paperback copy of LOTR due to an issue with the US copyright that reportedly sold a combined 150k. Ballantine's subsequent authorised paperback supposedly sold at least 100k. Those numbers were astounding for fantasy, and still are.

Someone from Houghton Mifflin said the 2001 edition was their second book ever to sell over a million, with the 1977 edition of The Silmarillion the only other one in decades of publishing. It's pretty reasonable to assume there must have been quite a few million copies of LOTR out for there to be enough of a market for The Silmarillion to sell over a million in a US edition.

So by fantasy standards it certainly was one of the biggest successes ever already at that point.

I really want to know what the worldwide sales were for the last few years before the movie marketing started and from they were launched and until 2003, though. It's clear the movies effect were massive, but it'd be interesting to see just how massive.
Yeah, so closer to $20k/month
AI Powered Ethical Hacking Assistant
Nebula is an innovative ethical hacking tool designed to bridge the gap between human linguistic expression and the technical intricacies of widely-used cybersecurity tools. It's built for both seasoned security professionals who want quick command generation and newcomers who are still familiarizing themselves with command line syntax.

Core Features:

Natural Language Processing (NLP): Translate natural language descriptions directly into precise commands for a growing list of supported tools, including:

nmap
crackmapexec
zap
nuclei
...with a roadmap to extend support to many more in the future.

Initial Scan Suggestions: After performing an initial nmap scan, Nebula can provide actionable suggestions on potential next steps and commands to run based on the discovered services and vulnerabilities, assisting in more comprehensive penetration testing.

Autonomous mode: Once activated, Autonomous Mode takes over the penetration testing process by intelligently deciding the sequence of tools and commands to run based on previous scan results.

User-Friendly Interface: Designed with a clear and intuitive UI that allows users to seamlessly switch between natural language input and traditional command-line interfaces.

Education & Training: For those keen on learning, after translating natural language into a command, Nebula provides a breakdown of the command's components, helping users understand the underlying mechanics and gradually become proficient in manual command creation.
Mptcp: An overlooked new feature in Go 1.21
The general idea is that you have a particular task & dataset, and you optimize these vectors to maximize that task. So the properties of these vectors - what information is retained and what is left out during the 'compression' - are effectively determined by that task.

In general, the core task for the various "LLM tools" involves prediction of a hidden word, trained on very large quantities of real text - thus also mirroring whatever structure (linguistic, syntactic, semantic, factual, social bias, etc) exists there.

If you want to see how the sausage is made and look at the actual algorithms, then the key two approaches to read up on would probably be Mikolov's word2vec (https://arxiv.org/abs/1301.3781) with the CBOW (Continuous Bag of Words) and Continuous Skip-Gram Model, which are based on relatively simple math optimization, and then on the BERT (https://arxiv.org/abs/1810.04805) structure which does a conceptually similar thing but with a large neural network that can learn more from the same data. For both of them, you can either read the original papers or look up blog posts or videos that explain them, different people have different preferences on how readable academic papers are.
> The UK is very worried about Scottish Independence. Mr Murray is a very vocal supporter of that, and an active figurehead in the independence movement.
>
>I don't know, but I'm assuming that his support of Hamas is a nice pretext for the British Establishment to have another pop at him.

Murray is also a crank and conspiracy theorist, who has been a vociferous supporter of Bashar al-Assad and the Syrian regime.

Saying this is about Scottish independence is hilarious.
> At its heart, capitalism is a (greedy) solution to a planet-scale resource allocation problem, and there are no viable alternatives (give or take some modifications/variations).

I am pretty certain we had economics for millenia before capitalism has emerged about three hundred years ago.
I made a similar mistake in France, the system decided to call me Firstsecond Last.
Im relatively new to C and I struggle to understand why C std lib sucks so hard

Why ppl need to write such a fundamental stuff like this?

>void *vec_safe_at

>return (t_index >= vec_length(self)) ? NULL : vec_at(self, t_index);

Ehh, sadly we dont have generics in C and some improvements over NULL oriented programming
Articles like this just spend a lot of words explaining complexities, but neglecting to say: "... and that changes 'calories in'", or '... and that changes 'calories out'".

The article headline even said so: "more complex than at first glance". And every example they give does nothing more than adjust calories in or out.

Is it way harder to calculate calories in/out than it would seem? Absolutely! But that does not make the statement false.
> For a country hitting 2/3 of adults being overweight and obese, it may be a perk that public transport doesn't provide A-to-B delivery and instead people get a 5 minute walk somewhere in their day.

5 minute? It’s 4 miles to the nearest Caltrain stop from where I live.
The Judas story marks the biblical transition from the Bad Drunk god that was violent, arbitrary, and demanding of human sacrifice (eg. Isaac, Jesus) into the Feudal Manor Lord god that bestowed the divine right of kings. Many a Roman empoeror or medieval European king gained a throne through the betrayal and sacrifice of others following that model and it was justifiable because it had divine precedent.
I don't. It's clear that if there's no legislative push to make them comply with common sense they'll just keep using the systems they set up in the 60s forever, regardless of the incompatibilities or security risks it poses. Upgrading to a new system costs money, aka the only thing they care about. So having some heavy fines ready to incentivize complying as the cheaper option is required.

Customer choice won't make any a difference on this sort of issue since it only affects rare cases. Especially when this sort of news is published with them being called "bank X" and no way for anyone to know which scumbag bank this is so it can't be boycotted.
It might also be an issue too, but it’s not actually a hard blocker.

Just ask the author for a proper onetime invoice. Maybe not all OSS authors will do it, but I woud be happy to make a quick PDF for a nice buck. :)

Now the real reason that doesn’t happen more often: Our financial departments and/or bureaucracy inside the org are actively hindering frivolous acts as being nice to others.
This is fantastic and so important!

If your company uses open source software, please contribute back, financially. For large projects, there are foundations, for smaller projects there are other ways (like Github Sponsors).

There are some ecosystems where this is becoming commonplace (I mostly live in the Clojure world), which is a great thing!

This matters, even if the amount of money isn't huge. What is important is for it to be recurring: a subscription. If you use the software and rely on it, keep contributing to ensure continued maintenance and development. Far too many people associate "open source" with "free".

I have been trying to do this for the last two years, and while the amounts are not huge, I try to increase them along with my SaaS revenue growth.
In most cities in the US it's already too late. Urban sprawling and single-family-zoning lack the density for any public transport.

Technology won't be enough, this is a political problem.
Can the Destinations also natively be used as Sources?
It is used _in the book_ as a pejorative. That is the explanation from the definition that I link to.

The problem when a prominent wealthy company attempts to run its business on the basis of meritocracy is illustrated by the existence of projects such as GNOME, systemd, Wayland, and Flatpak.
yup. it was not a flop by any means. i think it sold over 10mi copies.
It is (sometimes) one letter culturally speaking and in lettering. A Dutch alphabet as taught to children used to end in 'X IJ Z' instead of 'X Y Z', although this is no longer the case ever since people started eating 'yoghurt' in the twentieth century. In capitalisation of words too it is treated as a single 'letter' (e.g., 'IJsselmeer' for the lake; note the uppercase 'J').

If you dig deeper on the Unicode website you'll find that the reason those codepoints are included is compatibility with 'certain very rare legacy (non-Unicode) character encodings'. They are not 'deprecated' as compatibility characters for those old legacy encodings, but 'deprecated' as suitable for rendering Dutch text unencumbered by those early code pages.
Exactly. See for example https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Midgley_Jr.
I have very fond memories of the McDonalds near my childhood home
No, but I have you seen the Beijing metro:

https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=Beijing+metro

and it sounds like it got a lot better than car transport during the same period.
I'm amazed at how autoencoding actually works, despite the simplicity of the approach. I've dabbled with this stuff quite a bit, but I tend towards stuff I can run on my own computer, rather than trusting any service to remain stable for years or decades.

Are there any good document embedding models I can run on my own hardware? Word2Vec is interesting, but I'd like to also try out cross-linking blog entries, etc.
turns out that compared to lugging a living room around for every (average car occupancy of) 1.5 people on the road, a bus system has an extremely low efficiency bar to cross.
Thank you! I hand coded it with just HTML, CSS and JavaScript and put a lot of effort and love into it. The code is not the prettiest, but the implementation is straight forward if anyone wants to check it out https://flawless.dev/js/how-does-it-work-animation.js
This reminds me when my DB broke down on the way to Zurich just past the border and I had to change trains, though I believe in that case it was a swap from broken DB to not-yet-broken DB. The scenery was great so I didn't mind terribly.

Sorry for the pointless post but got to reminiscing.
That is a very narrow view. You assume that your set of characters is appropriate for representing names in the entire world. Why this specific set of characters? Cyrillic or greek could work just as well, they have a limited set and no diacritics.
So it's good enough - the mantra of software development that explains a lot of what he's talking about. He's not entitled to being able to "just put pixels on a screen" while also distributing his games to be ran on his users' computers. He could develop his games for MS-DOS, but he has chosen not to.

Look, I complain about software quality probably more than most, but it's good to remember that it's more of an emotional issue rather than an objective one. I did not find his arguments about programmer productivity convincing. As a whole, software is doing what it's supposed to and, besides, it could have always been worse.
It makes sense to me. We tax companies on the money they make in excess of what they needed to spend to operate, and deciding not to make a donation would have no impact on their income. I would not expect it to be considered an operating expense.

In personal income taxes, I have always seen the deductibility of charitable donations and (in the US) mortgage interest as being a form of social engineering -- donating to charity and home ownership are individual behaviors that the government wants to promote, so it effectively subsidizes them for most people.

Businesses are generally run to maximize profit so you could assume a deduction for charitable giving would be immediately weaponized by creating a charitable arm of the company and donating most profits to yourself, or something equally repulsive.
The need for creative and effective app production solutions is more than ever in the quickly changing digital ecosystem where apps have dominated our everyday lives. With their AI assistant Natasha, Builder.ai, a pioneer in the software development sector founded by visionary entrepreneur Sachin Dev Duggal, has upped the ante and changed how apps are imagined, planned, and developed.

Natasha is a ground-breaking tool that uses artificial intelligence to streamline and simplify the app development process. Natasha is not your typical AI assistant. Here is how Natasha is changing the way apps are made in the future:
That’s assuming they didn’t develop the database in-house. If they concocted their own system, it very well could be that this data is in fixed-length records without much room for a quick fix.

Regardless, it could eventually be done.
Show HN: A note-keeping system on top of Fossil SCM
This was a wild read, thanks for sharing!
In this situation, the employer doesn't live or die based on one skills of the employee. They understand that they're taking a risk.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kapo
China has built out both while the US has let both crumble.

The Netherlands also has both amazing public transit and amazing highways.

The US would rather argue over slashing the already meager social safety net and buy some more fighter jets, nuclear aircraft carriers, and modernize the obsolete ICBM force than invest in infrastructure these days.
I think in premodern times the Chinese character set was not as centrally regulated as it is now, and therefore there should be quite many instances of independent/local character invention.
People seem to have an intuitive understanding on what matter the most to a ramen shop. Have ramen, get eaten, happily, in that order. And then we can talk about decor, hygiene, side dishes, etc. It is so muddy when it comes to software. People spend endless energy debating a lightbulb of a ramen shop. "What is your ramen? What is OUR ramen?" is something I try to bring up to the team with varying success. Sometimes it is more effective just telling people what to do. If we see people as code, then some of them are of single responsibility with simple interface. It really depends what kind of a team we want.
That's interesting, I wonder if there's a Hawthorne affect with working from home.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hawthorne_effect
The mental model I have for embedding in languages has many points in multiple locations as if in an extremely high dimensional space.

Kind of wish we could have visuals describing that.
I have seen plenty of examples of urban planners talking about The Future of Transport as if self driving cars will take over any day now.

Meanwhile the actual future of transport, absent public investment in transit systems, is electric micromobility devices.
>If you don’t know linear algebra, the code is inscrutable

Whether you do or don't know linear algebra, code is self-explanatory. Dot product is just the sum of element-wise products. But what the heck are dot and norm to someone that doesn't.
Show HN: ArtistAssistApp – a web app to paint better with ease
Hey HN!

I want to show my new open-source project ArtistAssistApp.

ArtistAssistApp - the web app to paint better with ease.

Tools for realistic color mixing based on real paints, tonal value drawing, simplified sketching, and more.

Import your own photos, select any desired color directly from the image, and learn how to mix it with your paints.
The web app provides a step-by-step guide on how to precisely mix that color using your own paints using atomic or optical mixing.
Atomic mixing is the physical mixing of colors together, while optical mixing is the result of placing a transparent layer of color over another color (glaze technique).

Save instructions on how to mix your favorite colors from the paints you have for quick reference.

Smooth your photo to reduce detail and focus on the big shapes and proportions of your subject, and learn how to simplify and abstract your paintings.

Use tonal value sketches that capture the light and shadow of your subject to learn how to create contrast and depth in your paintings.

Works on desktops, laptops, tablets and smartphones.

You can try it at <https://artistassistapp.com/>. No login or registration required.

The source code is available on GitHub <https://github.com/eugene-khyst/artistassistapp>.
I'd bet this has a significant impact on the community. From what I've seen - experimenting with an AMD card that crashes and sends me to bed early after a bit of stable diffusing - there is a power distribution of graphics cards out there. Models that play nicely with less memory and slower cards get more attention from the hordes of anonymous copyright infringers who power the llama-wearing-tophat LORAs and checkpoints.

SDXL isn't there yet but we're getting mighty close. SD1 felt a lot like shouting words at an idiot savant to try and inspire something good. SDXL gives me the impression I'm explaining what I want to a talented but verbally challenged painter who will attempt to draw what I want. The trajectory seems to be that we'll reach something close to natural English in maybe 2-6 years and if AMD could please keep fixing crashes that'd be lovely.

But seriously, halving the model size and doubling the speed will mean a lot more people can use it. That is a big deal because some of them will spend time training in more data for specific applications and setting up tooling to work around limitations.
Liked this paragraph:

In 1666, at the age of 19, Leibniz wrote his Dissertio de Arte Combinatoria, from which comes a famous quote describing the way in which he believed the world could be in the future: “If controversies were to arise,” said Leibniz, “there would be no more need of disputation between two philosophers than between two accountants. For it would suffice to take their pencils in their hands and say to each other: ‘Let us calculate.’”

Can it be done? Or is it impossible? No need to argue!

Do the math!

If I'm not mistaken, this was actually a profession at various times in history? A person you'd go to with whatever you needed calculated, and they would work it out for you, using pen/paper/abacus/bones/seashells or whatever was in fashion.
What do you mean by this? Im confused
I don't really care how I'm identified, provided I know it's me.

But the security problems are real and very annoying, even with a "normal" name. For some silly historical reason, my middle name has two different spellings depending on which official document you're looking at, which causes no end of problems. Conversely, I know people with very simple, common names, the kind where two people born in the same city on the same day have the same name, that suffer a load of different but equally frustrating issues.

These problems, however, aren't just limited to computer systems [0]. Border officers, bank clerks and government officials and other general bureaucrat types are all just as bad as a strict strcmp implementation.

The issue is that many people operating in an official capacity seem to work under the assumption that a name is a globally unique identifier that has exactly one representation, but that's not how names work in any culture.

On the other hand, if not names, then what? Combined with birth dates, it's the closest thing we have to a globally recognised unique immutable identifier, and any better alternative is going to feel invasive and face a lot of opposition on privacy grounds.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nq-dchJPXGA
> Where the wait equation has relevance is the fact that a generation ship, once launched, is likely unable to reconfigure itself to take advantage of new technologies invented while it is underway.

Given my experience with complex technology (software), I think it's rather likely that a generation ship will reconfigure while traveling.

Maybe we will build a ship that's just enough to bring them to a place with lots of resources. Then, it will be rebuild with those resources for the final journey. Or even new ships might be build out of existing ones to adapt for varying conditions.

Similar to biological life on earth.
Rsync.net: discounted "borg accounts" for technically proficient users
https://support.mozilla.org/ko/kb/how-disable-enterprise-roo...

Apparently this was done to please annoying AV softwares [1].

[1] https://static.googleusercontent.com/media/research.google.c...
> Profit drives innovation

Yeah, like US cable and telco companies like to remind you every time they do an anticompetitive move.
It goes lower down the food chain. If tesla can't get spare parts for their service centres, can't get cars delivered to sales, can't get repairs to sold cars...
why do these sites all look like reddit?
I like that model. Seemingly, some companies like Palantir are special on more than one of your dimensions - but those are likely super rare in practice.