skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Show HN: MonkeyPatch – Cheap, fast and predictable LLM functions in Python
Hi HN, Jack here! I'm one of the creators of MonkeyPatch, an easy tool that helps you build LLM-powered functions and apps that get cheaper and faster the more you use them.

For example, if you need to classify PDFs, extract product feedback from tweets, or auto-generate synthetic data, you can spin up an LLM-powered Python function in <5 minutes to power your application. Unlike existing LLM clients, these functions generate well-typed outputs with guardrails to mitigate unexpected behavior.

After about 200-300 calls, these functions will begin to get cheaper and faster. We've seen 8-10x reduction in cost and latency in some use-cases! This happens via progressive knowledge distillation - MonkeyPatch incrementally fine-tunes smaller, cheaper models in the background, tests them against the constraints defined by the developer, and retains the smallest model that meets accuracy requirements, which typically has significantly lower costs and latency.

As an LLM researcher, I kept getting asked by startups and friends to build specific LLM features that they could embed into their applications. I realized that most developers have to either 1) use existing low-level LLM clients (GPT4/Claude), which can be unreliable, untyped, and pricey, or 2) pore through LangChain documentation for days to build something.

We built MonkeyPatch to make it easy for developers to inject LLM-powered functions into their code and create tests to ensure they behave as intended. Our goal is to help developers easily build apps and functions without worrying about reliability, cost, and latency, while following best software engineering practices.

We're only available in Python currently but actively working on a Typescript version. The repo has all the instructions you need to get up and running in a few minutes.

The world of LLMs is changing by the day and so we're not 100% sure how MonkeyPatch will evolve. For now, I'm just excited to share what we've been working on with the HN community. Would love to know what you guys think!

Open-source repo: https://github.com/monkeypatch/monkeypatch.py

Sample use-cases: https://github.com/monkeypatch/monkeypatch.py/tree/master/ex...

Benchmarks: https://github.com/monkeypatch/monkeypatch.py#scaling-and-fi...
I don’t see what ESL has got to do with that preference.
What if I want to write apps for myself that solve random niche issues I run into that would be worth it just for me to learn to resolve and pump out a solution for that so, at the very least, I (capital i) solve one of my own problems (craftmanship?)

I feel like we're not saying terribly different things here. That is one of (if not the greatest) motivator. I hate the idea any app fev can shittify their product and take away a foundation you rely on cuz #reasons.
I believe what's holding google back isn't lack of cash, but lack of innovation. It's full to the brim with highly paid engineers that aren't really invested in change.
It needs to be recoverable if it's the actual fuel rods that you're storing. Only a tiny fraction of the total usable energy in those is used in the currently deployed fission reactors and the "spent" fuel rods can be reprocessed and used in other reactor designs. Putting them somewhere we can't get them is just throwing away usable uranium.
I find it useless to dive into a discussion on whose interests are the collective interests. Let's hope that we will get rid of those who's interests are not aligned with the collective interests.
VBA can call executables, but I can see some places locking things down such that that would not fly.
Debian's internal procedures are arcane for sure, I'm not involved so don't see it as issue. It's having a single authentication provider which is Microsoft that I'd object to, and that would put me off using crates.io at all.
1% like running Windows 3.1? :)
> I guess these payments make sense if you believe you can't effectively deliver something good with that money.

Or, if you believe that your product is already as good as money can buy (i.e. the brightest and highest paid engineers, with an unlimited R&D budget, and the law of the Mythical Man-Month as an upper constraint on team size), then the money is better used elsewhere to help the product. I don't know if this is what they believe, but it seems quite plausible to me.
I feel you. My wife and I realised the true value of drive-thrus after having our first baby 4 months ago. Grabbing a meal on the road is so much easier when you don't need to get the baby out of the car, figure out how to carry it, and potentially deal with it crying while trying to order and eat.
Out here in Data Center Alley, AKA Ashburn VA, Raging Wire is a large and reliable player in co-location hosting.

https://www.datacenterfrontier.com/site-selection/article/11...

Raging Wire is pretty open about their co-location business, and even has big advertisement signs placed outside their data centers advertising to new customers.
Author here. Yes, the grind is monotonous and borderline depressing because you are playing a zero sum game. Regarding the money, after you do that for a couple years, money has very little meaning and value.
Joke cannot into brain.
If only Perl crowd focused on stuff like JIT improvement and cross compilations, rather than Raku madness, the lang could've been running strong in 2023. Hate to admit it, but rubyists got this all better.
It's not technically "learning", it's cellular adaptation.
My understanding is that this is an example of last mile costs increasing non-linearly i.e. Google has something like 95% of the mobile search market and profits $30b from it, and the cost to acquire that last 5% is >$30b.
ClickHouse just reads the values from the one column being summed: https://www.markhneedham.com/blog/2023/11/15/clickhouse-summ...
Feather meal, animal feed, disposable diapers, and fuel for incinerators to heat/power plants are the existing uses that I know about from just Tyson Foods.

Food production is super highly optimized; I have to imagine this exists already in most plants.
> Greta is not pro-nukes. Most of the environment activists are not.

And we're reaping the "benefits" of the same people in the 70s campaigning against all forms of nuclear back then. So we built oil, gas, and coal power stations to meet our energy needs instead. slow applause for the activists

The road to hell and all that...
This isn’t accurate. Holding down a job is not a criteria because people learn to compensate.

But those compensation mechanisms eventually stop working and I guarantee that persons life outside of their job is a complete dumpster fire.
KubeBlocks- An open source messaging and streaming(Kafka/pulsar) alternative
Just goes to show the modern tech game is completely exploited. It’s not even worth it to try.
Exactly. UNIX time, GPS time, and TAI are a fixed offset from one another. They're a variable offset from UT1 (based on earth's angle with respect to some distant quasars). If you care about things like where the stars are, use UT1. If you want monotonic time, use TAI or one of the time standards that's a fixed offset from it. If you want to plan a spacecraft trajectory through the solar system, use barycentric coordinate time (TCB). If you want something that approximates UT1 but otherwise works like TAI, use UTC.

If you're dealing with human activity, UTC will usually be the easiest choice. If you're just dealing with computers, TAI (or one of its fixed-offset variants like UNIX time) will usually be the easiest choice.
the first time I tried antidepressants I had this effect. I even knew about the placebo effect, and I knew they take multiple weeks to do anything. but yet the day after I took the first pill I started wondering if things were getting better and I was trying to deny it, but it felt like a change. (spoiler: it had the opposite effect and once they took effect I could barely get out of bed lol). It was just incredible knowing that it was placebo but still feeling the effect.
I recently installed Windows on my machine and in attempting to download chrome and make Google the default search engine, the OS tried to persuade me not to do it at least 2-3 different ways.

I think we can and should be upset at these deals but Google is not the only person pushing their own stuff.
I know this is all old gear and that in today's world, we could have 100 times the processing power in something the size of a fingernail. That's all great and super-cool.

I do however miss the big iron days. They felt more like pillars of processing than just machines. Green/Orange Screens. Serial connections.

Yes, we've come a long way and I appreciate that, but sometimes, I miss the days of the Data Priests and our arcane words of power. :)
I’ll give this a try when it undoubtedly happens to me later today while debugging something ;)
That's based around a contrived problem that was posed to him:

> Insert a sequence of random integers into a sorted sequence, then remove those elements one by one as determined by a random sequece of positions: Do you use a vector (a contiguously allocated sequence of elements) or a linked list?

The key is that the sequence is sorted; and is kept sorted throughout the insertion process.
So much of the effort put into web development is in presentation. You're right - if you just need the data, it's hard to improve on the spreadsheet.
IPs are a central concept as well but nobody advocates for making them more visible (and colorized, etc) to users.

> Hiding it from users goes against the main usability principle that the user should understand what's going on.

The main usability principle is that the user should understand what matters for them. Seeing the path of the URL is completely useless to 99% of web browsing. Better hide it by default and let power users see it if they want.
There doesn't seem to be a single canonical MIT licence, but rather several co-existing variants of it. The part you quote is a standard part of the X11 variant [1], while the Expat variant does not include it.

[1] https://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.html#X11License
Some of the worst code I have ever seen, anywhere lol..

A single model file with 3000+ variables was where I drew the line, and started looking for the next venture.
At that point why not just lick raw chicken? I mean if you stick your finger in an electric socket you'll get hurt too.

Just suggesting a basic level of hygiene.
was, will be. things get a bit timey wimey.
Author of the post here. Your software is literally the reason I made any money in Poker. Must have studied using your software for more than a 1000hrs haha.

On a related note, I made a small tool for PLO folks to study their preflop game. Check it out here: https://rnikhil.com/2022/06/15/gtoinspector-startup.html
BeOS could have been OS X :)
"In exchange for a salary, they promised not to work for anyone else."

Is that legal? It's certainly not 'the market' at work, or working well, but simply corporations monopolizing peoples productive hours, even those not actually part of the job, with an 'exclusive contract'.

'Employment' is a bit of a racket IMHO, so any way of getting out from under the thumb should be encouraged.
But unfortunately microsoft didn’t invest into VBA in 20 years, other than keeping the light on. And it lacks so many modern features.

There was an attempt at a .net version of VBA (would have worked the same way, with a mini visual studio embedded in Office), called VSTA. But it was killed. So the cattle (business users) is stuck with 1990s technology.
Jupyter style notebooks are already becoming the next VBA in some fields. And this is not a good thing.
Took me a minute to catch that by "medievalists" you meant people living in the middle ages and not its contemporary meaning of people who study the middle ages.

Anyway though I don't think it's true even adjusting for that. Good vs evil is a model of causes, but not mechanism. Even if you orient in terms of it (which people still do!) you must identify causes and act on them, which also middle ages people did.
Subjective I suppose, just doesn't seem like anything to me. He's excited sure, but just reacting like any excited sports fan, he doesn't say something amazing 'off the cuff' or any extraordinary quick wit or something like that, he just reacts, and fumbles it in his excitement at that. (It wasn't 'have you seen' as you quoted, but 'did you seen [sic]' as I did - a blend of the former & 'did you ever see' I suppose.)
Agreed - it's counterintuitive, but OpenBSD works really well on laptops. Wifi, sleep, graphics all work out-of-the-box on more popular oldish models.

They encourage you to mail the system dmesg [1] with the make/model of the system and any known issues to help improve compatibility as well.

1. https://www.openbsd.org/faq/faq4.html#SendDmesg
> when the EU it self

The EU doesn't have security services. What you're referring to is what (primarily) the member states want and they try to get it at the EU level so they won't be in violation of EU laws

In any case this specific request is about adding additional safeguards in a new act, not about stopping an ongoing practice or blocking a regressive proposal like the chatcontrol issue
Excel is arguably the best end user IDE ever invented.
Is ADHD a real thing? I see too many SV engineers diagnosed with ADHD to the point that it feels like a large scam run by psychiatrists that they lowered the threshold of the actual ADHD.
They might be generating programs that they know will halt. Like: applications with finite loops and such. There are not enough details.
https://archive.is/AGrqi
DNA methylation analysis of brain tissue from temporal pole in suicide decedents
Funny that the way to compete with Apple seems to line up with copying their strategy for making more money. I used to be able to buy eBooks direct through the Kindle and other apps until Google decided to force all payments through them. That was a great feature of Android I liked.
This is consistent with my understanding that everything that can be sold out of an animal processing plant already is.
iMessage already interoperates, though. An application is free to offer a non-interoperating protocol in addition to the interoperable one.
Something something dead internet theory.

But also yes, I can't believe how many great, small blogs and other useful websites I've found only from HN
But *postmodernity* is a good term. Confusion arises because a lot of self-proclaimed intellectuals from our age used this term and *postmodernism* itself to beat the straw-man and make an impression of profundity.

*Postmodern* thinkers didn't have that much in common, except for a fact that they made predictions about the trajectory of our culture. What they described in their writings was labeled as *postmodernism*. And if you take a look at those trajectories, we indeed live in a postmodern world, or at least we are entering it.
Reminds me of this: https://jacobshapiro.substack.com/p/teaching-at-the-brains-t...
> since the unsigned format is backwards compatible with the current signed one in its current usage (positive numbers).

For existing binaries (many of them burned in ROM) it is that much compatible that it will also break at the same time as the current system.

So, you need new binaries. If you do, why limit yourself to 32 bits?

Also, I’m not sure all current usage is for positive numbers, only.

Using time stamps for datetimes isn’t what you should do, but chances are older software does it, anyways, because memory was expensive up to the 1980s, and those dates may have been before 1970.
If you've been reading the orange site for longer, you're probably familiar with the kinds of shenanigans people have been getting up to with video codecs.

US law has relatively recently been amended to reduce the scope and scale of the shenanigans people can get up. But it has certainly not been historically true (within this century) that everything is disclosed, certainly not within the USA.

Also, if you've read a few software patents, you'll probably see pretty quickly that disclosure alone doesn't mean much in this particular field.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Submarine_patent
The real issue here is that people stick to the word "Chancellor", not the "acting" as such.

There is no named role of "Acting Chancellor" created in the basic law, instead someone is just tasked with performing certain duties (and people might sometimes call it "acting Chancellor" or whatever). However, the position "Chancellor" is a well defined & special role (unlike perhaps PM) and whatever that other "acting" role is, it isn't a Chancellor. It is a bit like adding Oliver Cromwell to list of English Kings or Kamala Harris to the list of US Presidents - you can do it but you then move beyond the "standard" definitions.
Also, can we fix the capitalization in "Receives" and for added clarity put "Wonderfully Welcoming Award" inside quotes?
Totally agree with the author here. But I'll go one step further.

Anywhere a time or date is shown, it should also show corresponding time zone.

It's maddening to see a time in any UX and not know what time zone it's in.

And YES, a date shown on its own needs a time zone!
So let's see what happens when they are threatened for the first time by Microsoft and OpenAI if Google can afford to spend even more money to prevent the likes of Apple, Samsung and Mozilla from moving from Google to use Bing with GPT 4.
I'm not an accountant, but I've been on the company side before. You do have to disclose a lot of stuff when you're a public company, but you don't have to itemize in detail. They could probably have simple classified all that money as "Search" or "Search promotion" or something very broad.
RCS has an E2EE mode
KR Autonomous Flight: open-source Flight Stack for GPS-denied UAVs [video]
> From a purely technical standpoint, the Prius has a 3.2kWh battery, and the Prius Prime has a 6.8kWh battery. The Prius Prime has a rated range of 44 electric miles, so presumably if you charged the Prius up to the max, it would get 20 miles or so.

Is that right? The numbers I’ve seen are that the PHEV has a 13.6 kWh battery and the HEV has a much smaller battery, like less than 1 kWh.
It should also be inevitable that people develop tech for defending themselves as a response. Face masks / face paints might become more popular.
Is the claim (that there are interesting small websites that are impossible to find on the major search engines) true? I mean, it feels true, but how would we measure this? How would be detect whether things had got worse, or was getting better?

As I say, I am sympathetic, but I would like to have more confidence in the claim, and better ways to test proposed solutions.
Here’s another: - ChatGPT is well-trained on VBA.
An absurd counterfactual. This was assuming a scenario in which Fukushima released a ridiculously high level of radiation, which it didn't, that would necessitate other nuclear power plants to be immediately evacuated with nothing done to shut down their reactors resulting in a "chain reaction" of other plants releasing radiation presumably from the engineers just running away and letting a meltdown take place. Absolute FUD and bullshit since this would be an incredibly irresponsible thing to do and the Japanese people are far too competent and conscientious to enact such a hare brained evacuation.

Stop spreading disinformation please.
Paul Graham is (was) a lonely nerd who felt different than other people. The smokescreen is maintaining this self- identity when his practical situation changed.

Reminds me of Kanye, who has been keeping his embattled underdog act up the entire time.

EDIT: not to criticize too heavily, the post is very good
ChatVault – store your WhatsApp messages
Surely this will happen at any point in the next 50 years. Even more degenerate society will elect even better and more competent people into office and they will surely look out for the common people. The outlook makes me sad.
I tend to think these articles which have become common come from a good place but say more about someone's internet habits than about the internet. I find most social media have a profile section for "personal website". I find many such personal websites by following people's github profiles from interesting repositories or PRs. Sometimes they link to other websites. I do the same in HN, snoop around to see if an interesting comment has a link to a website in the profile. Many articles are posted on HN from personal websites, which again usually link to other websites. I don't know I feel like, if I wanted I could spend all day doing this and would have no problem finding more than hours in the day. So are we complaining about the internet or that we got stuck in the walled gardens of youtube and tik tok and so on and kind of wish we would spend more time on the "old school internet" but don't because the other part is so addictive?
I don't understand it. My company is fully remote but they are absolutely horrendous at async comms. I was trying to walk someone through adding a docker build process to their CI and.... he just couldn't communicate/understand it through slack and he wanted to schedule a meeting. Great, now instead of being able to respond while working on other things I have to cut out an entire hour of my day just for you.

Thanks.

Beyond that I refuse to do daily standups. I'll quit a company if they won't let me do async or communicate through slack. I'm not logging in and the start of my day being a meeting every single day. Absolutely not. I've been there before.
Paradoxical effects are not uncommon. My DNA is weird. I have lots of them.

One example, is opiates make me MOVE. Most people they zonk out, not me. I'm ready to move your house, one brick at a time, with my bare hands and feel like I could knock it out in about an hour.

Proton Pump inhibitors are common meds for acid reflux. About 10 years ago, I did a genetics study (I worked at the lab, and my data stayed mine) and learned that of the 7 classes of PPIs available, at that time, my body only works with 1. The others either have little/no effect or similar.
GNU and GNU/Linux are the only systems which respect user privacy and freedoms, this is a classic and practical precedent where adherence to ideology and principles (of commons) clearly demonstrate a resistance to crony capitalism (of big tech, et al). Society, in general, should start moving away from proprietary systems to Linux distros like Debian, Ubuntu, etc. and this change should start from the OEM or manufacturers themselves.
More than defeatist, its relativist. Minimizing the trusted computing base is an important tool for higher security guarantees. It's obvious that whatever the size of your TCB, a bug is a bug. In any case, i believe TDR's rant was specifically about x86 and not about virtualization or any kind of low level isolation per se.
If you've ever heard a pig scream you know they're complaining. Doesn't leave much room for doubt.
Even more irony:

- "Forgetting" to look at the calendar, or to-do list, or your phone reminders, or a list written in large letters on a whiteboard behind your desk.

I seem to have a cognitive equivalent of an ad blocker, my mind will literally erase any task list from existence, the moment I start getting even slightly anxious about it. It's like a magic spell - I can put the list in front of my face, and my eyes will just keep glossing over it, like if it was a tear in reality.
Targeting services with the router doesn’t work against downloaded content. The OS sleep times can be bypassed by changing the system time and disabling wifi. There are also the free web proxy websites that let you bypass a whole lot of other things too.

I encourage this hacking spirit in them though and let them have a whole day if they find a new workaround. Right now, I have the unlock code set to all-zero but they haven’t figured that one out yet!

Best advice for getting them off devices I have is to take them away. If you need them distracted for a bit, a larger screen like a real TV or desktop doesn’t seem to hold them as tightly too.