skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Since this is a topic that’s near and dear to my heart, going to quickly plug my own startup that’s doing exclusively this: www.sentineldevices.com. We make industrial equipment smart enough to self-monitor and self-report issues using AI, but we are specialized in making AI that does EVERYTHING (including training) on embedded devices (think something only marginally more powerful than an RPi 4) so we never call out to a server. As the article notes, a big challenge has been making the AI and all support software resilient and able to “bounce back” from random occurrences in industrial environments (which can be extremely unpredictable and unique). Also as the article notes, this pretty handily opens up the Defense market since we don’t need to clear a cloud component.

Feel free to reach out at forrest@sentineldevices.com if you’d like to chat. We’re building and trying to take people on part-time if anyone’s interested in this space! Also if anyone just wants to talk about challenges in the space I’m happy to, HN usually gives really great conversation partners.
I got Pi as a score (314) on my first run-through. I've played simulators like this in the past, this is the first one that required interacting between multiple parameters interactively like this, well done!
The source to Signal is open to analysis if you doubt its security. I suspect they C&D forks because they don't follow coding/security practices as upstream does, and it would be too hard to ensure they would if they just let anyone fork it.
Apple doesn't sell me 5 consecutive ads in a row on YouTube.
What if we could pool together individual's resources into training our own free-software (not the training algorithms but the resulting data) LLM? I assume that big tech could run with it and make improved and more functional derived tech, but, if we could license it with an AGPL-like license, that makes derived and tuned models also free, we could counter that and create a freely-available model that could be used by anyone.

Any takers?
I have a personal instance of Nextcloud running on a Raspberry Pi. As for self hosting other apps/tools, I'm just a bit too lazy to do that.
Debatable whether that was the workers and the extent to which material conditions improved. Certainly, the political conditions were atrocious, and there was the whole Holodomor thing that pro-Soviet narratives like to leave out. Was killing millions an improvement?

And then Russia today has very low social trust, which is less surprising when you look at them being a totalitarian dictatorship for so long.
Reactions to "Please be dying, but not too quickly: On clinical trials"
Would love to compare notes, drop me a email at dshersh at umich dot edu if you'd be interested!
Location: Latam
Remote: Yes
Willing to relocate: No
Technologies: React, Vue, Express/Node, Mongo, Mysql, AWS, Laravel/PHP, Jest, Cypress, Shopify
Email: me+hn @ segoviacristian dot com

Looking for Contract or Part Time work
Have 5 years of experience working at US based startups and small companies. Looking for full stack roles with a bit of AWS(or more), though open to frontend or backend roles as well.
Yeah, but it's email without spam protections of any kind. I ran a homeserver for a little while and didn't want to store the kind of content that came flowing in through the federation endpoints from the moment I interacted with another server.

I'm not sure exactly how Mastodon/Pleroma crawl remote homeservers once they're discovered, but I saw a lot of objectionable content on the "Known Network" view from users I did not follow and that I did not want on my machine, nor did I want to wade through and delete things.

I uninstalled.
But if you’re at something like 600 miles that’s basically the maximum most anyone is willing to (or should) drive in a day (10 hours at 60mph average), so that means you can use destination AC charging instead of DC fast charging because you now have 8+ hours of sleeping time instead of wanting to keep your break time under 20-30 minutes or so.

This is why I want my first EV to have a range like that. I’ll be able to the next place I’m sleeping without having to worry about whether I am going to encounter a half-broken Electrify America station that’s going to keep me sitting in a Walmart parking lot for 45 minutes of my day.
Dynalang: Understanding language via prediction in a multimodal world model
At first, sure. In ten or twenty years of iteration? Not so much.
Yeah, as someone interested in this kind of thing, I've been hoping someone else would put something together that would work, but I think I share your assumption that this is probably not something that can be made into a product profitable enough to finance a company on.

I will say that, for the most part, these companies try a kind of "lock you in to our product which uses open source" scheme that could never possibly work. And, further, that no one has ever implemented the kind of system that I have in mind that I've seen. But that's not because it's unique or complex, just that it isn't a good path to a minimum viable product, so it isn't a good way to spin up a company quickly.

But yeah; aside from burning through cash in order to build enough coverage (maybe a year of dev just on this; no product dev yet) for a product that you will never actually profit from, I don't see how anyone could bring something like this to market.

All of that aside, a product that can sustain a company is not the only way to have a product exist. Modular productization and loss leading are a couple of ways to envision this. But I'm betting some kind of fractional componentization starts happening that makes this kind of stuff more maintainable. YMMV, though!
> A freedom that I desire more greatly is a durable liberation from having to see any more Cory Doctorow articles.

You know, it's really easy to just ignore articles that you're not interested in. Yet you chose to respond. Why?

And your accusation - he was wrong about something 20 years ago - even if true, so what? I've been wrong about a thing or two in 20 years. And, while I know that pretty much everyone else also has been, I don't keep track of what people said 20 years ago so that I can point to it to show the world how wrong that person was.

This almost seems like it's personal for you. If so, why?
All right, here is a theory: LLMs contain "latent knowledge" that is sometimes used by the model during inference, and sometimes it isn't.

One way to "engage" these internal representations is to include keywords or patterns of text that make that latent knowledge more likely to "activate". Say, if you want to ask about palm trees, include a paragraph talking about a species of a palm tree (no matter whether it contains any information pertaining to the actual query, so long it's "thematically" right) to make a higher quality completion more likely.

It might not be the actual truth or what's going on inside the model. But it works quite consistently when applied to prompt engineering, and produces visibly improved results.
> Many of our criminal laws are written with the implicit assumption that it takes resources to investigate and prosecute a crime,

I think this depends on the law. For jaywalking, sure. For murder and robbery probably less so. And law enforcement resources seem scarce on all of them.
On prem is easy if you are willing to pay 100K a year. Once 6 figures come into play, any SaaS company would be willing to do on-prem. I find that those complaining about on-prem are mostly small business customers that are more trouble than they are worth. Serious B2B companies won't blink at those prices.
Personally, for communication I never use a device platform specific/locked app/service. Maybe you could keep using the app(s) whatever you were.
The shame is we need to focus on both. We have to elevate those in a position to take advantage of it while also providing a solid baseline we need everyone to reach. I sympathize with the peers helping peers aspect. I know one way to learn a lot about a topic is to teach it, so there’s potentially value to both the more advanced and less advanced students. But what would a program like that even look like?

I probably would have failed out of high school instead of almost failing if I didn’t have access to AP classes. And I’m fortunate AP classes were based on test scores and not grades for that school. Those classes were the only interesting classes for me. So I hate the idea of them not being an option. But I also would have benefitted a lot from being put into a position to mentor another student on a topic they didn’t understand. Hard to say which would have benefited me more.
> Public markets cannot exist without regulation

How are you defining a public market? Because it seems quite clear to me that a public market can exist without state regulation. The original discussion point was:

> public companies only exist due to licenses from the state.

Which seems pretty clearly false to me unless you are defining a public company as a company in which it "has a license" from the state, but then that falls flat on its face because the vast majority of businesses have to have some licensure of some sort to operate. That could be a restaurant being required to pass food safety inspections, it could be a hotel and requirements to be ADA accessible, or various other "licensures", let alone the actual business licenses needed to be filed either at the state of federal level in order to operate.

To bring this back into focus, being irate at "big public tech companies" because they "have a special license from the state" as was implied is quite silly.

> States are parasocial, not social. It might feel like state officials are your friends, the president is like a father, and your representative is like a respected community leader you’ve known your whole life. But those relationships aren’t based in natural social human behavior; they require a media ecosystem. Arguments that humans are social and therefore statist doesn’t hold water.

I think there is merit in arguing that states work because of a shared fiction, in which a media ecosystem is, while not necessary, certainly of great benefit, but I think the key point here is one of scale, not form.

I don't draw a sharp distinction between a 25 person democracy and a 25 person tribe or community. Whether that should change as you scale to 25,000,000 people is a more interesting discussion I think.
Would love an update for what you had to do to make it "smoother" under the HN load!
> There are super strict requirements that support personnel must be US citizens on US soil

That's not unique to either on-prem or the government, alas. Get involved with HIPAA, SOC2 or a few other funny acronyms and the restrictions around who may access production data or servers gets very tight indeed, even if you are a SAAS company.
Filling out your 1040 is "hard" because people don't understand what the words mean, there's a 100 page instruction manual that defines the terms, and it might require filling out other forms too (which you might just need to know somehow that you need to fill them out too). Other than that, the actual UI design is straightforward. You write/type numbers into numbered boxes, top to bottom, occasionally referring back to numbers you've already completed. You could progressively enhance with automatic calculations for relevant fields, but hand calculations work as a fallback.

Reliability is unrelated from UI, except insofar as simple UIs are easy to build, and therefore less likely to break. A paper form 1040 is perfectly reliable; it's not going to burst into flames when you're filling it out. As I said above, I couldn't even fill out my payment form on a modern site. It did not work at all. The form did not appear. That is not reliable. It also makes no sense if you know the page is ultimately using HTML, and that HTML has forms built directly in, and they always work fine.

And yeah, when I'm doing something like making a payment, setting up a transfer, doing my taxes, or even ordering a pizza, something like a slightly advanced paper form (e.g. with drop downs for options) would work great on my phone or desktop. Have a special request for your pizza that's not on the form? Put it in the free-form instructions box.

The "progress" we've made in the last few years is that I can't do bank transfers without switching browsers, which requires selecting a "to" account from a drop-down, a "from" account from a drop-down, and typing an amount. I don't see how something so basic can be so hard to do correctly. There's literally no need for any javascript at all. I don't see the usability gain from whatever they're doing.
Right. How did that famous adage go? "The best way to predict the future is to invent it."
This highly depends on the industry… I worked on projects for large F500 companies who had neither ops nor where willing to spend resources… as I mentioned in another thread, on prem can be a world of pain… but it can also be a lot of fun if you have customers like you mentioned
Both railways and population registries were blown up by anti-nazi sabotage and resistance groups during WWII.

So place your data like your railways, where you can blow em up when circumstances necessitate it.
How Jessica Lessin's The Information has survived a decade of media tumult
In case anyone is confused, the problem is that dates loop, such that moy=1, dom=1, year=2023 will not match despite being greater than Sept 1, 2022. Technically, then, if you wanted this logic to work you would have to add a second “or” clause that handles the edges missed, e.g. (moy >= 9 AND year = 2022) OR (year > 2022) though you would need a different edge case if your dom wasn’t 1. The easier approach, of course, is to just compare dates or timestamps directly.
Sorry I have absolutely no interest in a system where the government owns all the land and I just rent it.
Gatekeeping cuisine is utterly tedious
I'm not saying that it's impossible, but it's the sort of thing that requires a technical cofounder with a fairly clear vision of what they want to achieve and with the knowledge and experience doing so.

I worked until recently at a traditional engineering industry focused startup company which decided to deploy a Python application on-premise to a big customer. From the use case it was very clear to me that an on-prem deployment of the software was likely to be on the cards, but there was nobody there in the non-technical leadership to say at the beginning "wait a second, maybe we shouldn't write this in Python for this use case".
Show HN: Dropbase – Build internal web apps with just Python
Hey HN, I’m Jimmy, co-founder of Dropbase (https://www.dropbase.io). We are an internal tools builder for Python developers. All you have to do is import any Python scripts/libraries, declare UI components, and layer app permissions so you can share them with others.

We’re a middle ground between Airplane and Retool—simpler UI creation than Airplane, more code-centered than Retool. UI building is declarative and you can bind Python scripts/functions to UI components. You can write Python scripts/functions using our App Studio with support from a Python Language Server Protocol (LSP) for linting. Since the self-hosted worker directly references .py or .sql files in the filesystem, you can even write them on VSCode directly or import any other Python script or library.

Our app layout is highly opinionated to speed up app building. Instead of an open canvas for UI building, we just give you a main table view and a widget sidebar. This approach significantly reduces app-building time while still covering what most tools need: see some data and take actions based on it. It’s not flexible enough to do absolutely anything, but that’s the point—there’s a tradeoff between flexibility and speed. Dropbase gives you most of what you need, plus speed!

A neat feature we are experimenting with to build admin panels fast is “Smart Tables”. We convert any SQL SELECT statement (even across multiple joins and filters) into an inline editable table, like spreadsheets, without any additional code.

We have a hybrid hosting model that combines a self-hosted client and a worker server, with a backend API for app/component definitions hosted by us to simplify pushing feature updates. The worker server sits in your machines so your sensitive data doesn’t leave your infra.

We’re Python-centric for now, but plan to add support for Rust, Go, and others later.

We made a few demo videos building common tools:
- Customer approval tool: https://youtu.be/A1MIIRNkv3Q
- Data editing tool (with Smart Table): https://youtu.be/R1cHO9lMRXo

To try Dropbase, create an account at https://app.dropbase.io and generate a token, then follow these instructions for local setup: https://docs.dropbase.io/setup/developer.

We are very early so we're really excited to get your feedback, especially on our approach to tools building with Python! My co-founder Ayazhan and some of our teammates will be around to answer questions.
Just to be clear, I wasn't toxic (although unclear what the definition exactly is), I just vigorously called him out on his bullshit.
Show HN: Open-Source JSON Schema Enforcer for LLMs
this has been true for a long time. most data is garbage, so the data collection phase of mass surveillance punched below its weight in terms of consequences felt by the surveilled. AI is one way to extraction actionable meaning from that data, and when people start feeling the everyday consequences of all that collection + meaning extraction, they will finally understand.
I am genuine in believing few would want this. I do not yet have a theory as to why, it's only my intuition. I want them to want that. Desperately so.

I don't think payment helps. They'll take your money and abuse you anyway. One phenomenon I've recently clued into is that of the "market-hostile business". Now that I understand that it is a thing which can exist, I see it everywhere.

There are businesses out there which have changed hands many times, and not just new owners purchasing them from the last. New boards of directors, new vice presidents hired, new managers. Just constant churn. And at some point in the (not necessarily recent) past, the people in charge were those that truly hated their customers. Hate of the "burning, eternal rage" variety. But they couldn't kill the golden goose either.

They still sell the stuff their customers want to buy. But they poison it. They fill it up with garbage. They make it worse in every way possible, right up to the point where this is still a deniable phenomenon. See it alot in media... there's some show or franchise or genre that you like. But the people producing the show hate it. They think it's low-brow. They give the laziest effort possible. They fight with the few on the production crew who enjoy it. In many cases, getting them fired.

Many other brands and products are like this though. And if you pay them for it, they don't love you for being a loyal customer. They resent you for being a chump. And there's nothing to be done about this.
Seems impossible to make it meltdown and explode. Shutting off the coolant just makes it automatically SCRAM. No incoming tsunamis threaten to swamp your diesel generators, no xenon pits to slowly climb out of. Booooring. ;-)
I miss Gerrit from my last job. Stacked PRs on Github are horrible. Lots of problems stem from that: because stacked PRs are painful, people make large PRs, because the PRs are large, they take a long time to merge, because they take a long time to merge you need more rebases, needing more re-reviews etc.
Aren't a lot of base models fine-tuned with (Q)Lora on instruct-based datasets with good results? I thought this was a very common practice?
I said it in jest, sorry. I wrote a bit of PostScript because I absolutely had to and it was painful, even though I was thrilled to eventually push through.

But I'm very particular about syntax, so the reverse polish notation was enough to upset me. Needless to say, I appreciate Lisp for its power and conceptual simplicity but would never choose to use it.
The trick with Apple's advertising is that it's kinda opt in. If you don't want to deal with apple's advertising, don't buy an apple product.

If you don't want to deal with Google's advertising, good luck
Yes, this is me. I deeply dislike the Apple Way and as a result I don't use Apple stuff. This means I rarely actually complain about Apple's approach, because I'm not the sort of customer Apple wants.

But one thing that's different is that Apple -- once the Mac was released -- made it very clear about the direction they wanted to take things[1] and have stayed true to their statements. There was no bait-and-switch aspect to any of it.

[1] But hoo-boy did I complain when the Mac was released. It was a slap in the face to the hobbyist community. Then they added insult to injury with their gaslighting "1984" ad. I'm still grumpy about it to this day.
There are certainly non big tech jobs that pay well, give people tons of autonomy and have a great work environment, but do you really not understand why many people who write software would want to work at places where:

1. Their software gets used by millions of people
2. They are paid incredible amounts of money
3. They have wonderful working environments and perks
4. Are generally given more autonomy than non big tech companies?
Ad blocker built into mobile FF.
A 1000km EV range is not news. Aptera is winning the 'range war' with a 1000 mile (1600 km) EV. And recent battery news should be taken as 'new ice cream flavor discovered' announcements. What is the actual interesting bit of news here? Their proprietary BMS doing DC to DC seems somewhat trivial.
TIL. I think it's a common mistake due to overcorrection; people tend to use singular words in compound adjectives (e.g. two-year contract).
Walking away from Social Media does not necessarily mean walking away from friends and family. Family/social connections existed before S.M. and they will exist after it’s gone. If your friends are not even willing to keep in touch unless it is over a specific BigTech-mediated advertising platform, well, that probably says more about them and about the reality of your relationship.
If I understand correctly this theory would manifest itself as variation in measuring the same standard kilogram over and over (to a precision beyond what we are currently capable of), whereas divergence between different standard kilograms could have other unrelated causes.
> Someone does not want these problems solved.

I don't think it's a conspiracy; I think the people who don't want these problems solved are typical email users, for whom the increased security would only increase complexity without solving any actual problems they have with email.
like others who are complaining here about spam from this project I too just got a spam email from them to my personal email...

SuperDuperDB fernando@superduperdb.com via sendinblue.com

and "Fernando" is Fernando Guerra, their "Business, Marketing and Growth"

not cool and immediately put me off
> That's net positive for almost all private persons, right?

If one buys an expensive premium car and has lost resale value fast, that's probably not positive for anyone who buys a car.
Just bear in mind the kind of enterprise customers that tend to want on prem software _do not_ want to spend a lot of time deploying or maintaining it but the _do_ want you to support the old version that they're running (meaning security updates and probably fixes for major bugs). It's a very different world from your typical CI/CD SaaS product that deploys frequently and only supports the latest version of the software.

The company I'm with supports our releases for two years, most of our products release quarterly, and many of our customers are kind of annoyed because we release too often (in their eyes). We're looking at getting out of supporting the on-prem game, but personally I think it's unlikely because many of our clients are in government and defense.
> and some more recent pharma-related topics

I'm kind of curious now, what are the topics?