skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: WWYD? Looking to take secondary, pre-Series A
I'm looking for some "What Would You Do?" advice from the founder and investor community. Generally looking for guidance on if the VC fund is correct.

Financial Overview

- Our only round, a year ago (seed investment) we were valued at £6.2M
- I own ~41% of the business, and so does my co-founder.
- We've doubled our ARR this year and hit $1.2M ARR
- We'll be looking for a Series A round in mid-2025 after being profitable

Personal Overview

- It's been ~3 years that I have been on this journey, bootstrapped with no salary for about 2 years and up until a year ago when I started closer to the market rate at £80K
- Currently, have a very small flat which is mortgaged, living in the UK
- I'm looking to buy a house for my partner and me to live in long-term

State of the Play

- Our Non-executive director (NED) is happy to buy a small stake from me, £250K, and £100K from the other co-founder. The NED and myself are very bullish on the business and its long-term future.
- The VC fund has said, "~5% at this stage will be a bad signal to VCs at this point" and "if you look at any Series A funds, they would see this as a red flag". They have pre-emption rights for any transfers but we are allowed share transfers.

My question stands: Is the VC correct, is selling 5% problematic? Could alienating our VC fund cause any issues downstream?

WWYD?
Thanks so much for this. I've been finding it hard to separate useful resources from the salesy/hypefilled pieces so recommendations like this are very helpful.

I've never had a problem with programming languages – I'd pick up a book, do the exercises, play around with the language and get a feel – but I find "cloud" hard to get into for some reason.
And therein lies the value of indexing huge amounts of data, which alphabet (google, youtube, etc.), Microsoft (bing, etc.), and similar companies have been doing for years now.

If it is legal to simply index a website, then why shouldn't it be legal to train a model in the very same data?

Of course, websites should have some option for declining data mining for ML/AI purposes, in the same way the can decline scraping/indexing in the robots.txt file.

But that ship has kind of sailed, unless the courts decide otherwise.
News to me. I've been making a living from a GPL'ed project since 2009. It currently generates about $240k/year.
each llm costs ($10-100) millions to train x billions of trainings data ~= $100 quadrillion dollars, so that is unofortunately out of reach of most countries.
Anonymous variables can be pretty convenient, like $0 in Perl and point-free in Haskell. Difficult to add debug prints though.

I also think it's bad to require explicitness when something's obvious - like if you have an array of `cats` then naming its iterator variable `cat` is a waste.
You can swap the batteries in some cars, but it’s still something to have a professional do.

For leaf info: https://github.com/dalathegreat/Nissan-LEAF-Battery-Upgrade
The typical hackernews opens hackernews while in the toilet searching for comments to downvote because of saltiness
Local Journalism Worth Reading from 2023 (USA)
If you look at the top supercomputers, US national labs occupy most of the top 10. But they aren’t enormously larger than the others. They are also built of out of standard parts. I’m surprised that they are recent, I expected the government to be slow and behind.

What do you expect US government to do with lots of computing power? I wouldn’t expect military to need supercomputers. Maybe the NSA would have a lot for cracking something or surveillance. But the big tech companies have more.
> They are not a crutch, they are a third leg.

I don't think a third leg would make it easier to walk if you already have two legs. But it is a good way to see it, some would love a third leg, but I think until it gets better balanced most people will avoid it.
> The difference is that in most other countries people don't use SMS.

The difference is that in most other countries people don't use SMS to talk to other people; receiving SMS messages from automated systems is AFAIK still very common everywhere.
No floaters until I was in my 50s.

In response to top of thread, retinal detachment does usually start with new floaters.

My first floater came with an unusually timed cluster headache ( like a migraine but usually with predictable timing ) so I had accompanying visual auras. Because I didn’t recognize it as a cluster I described it to the on call eye doc as new floaters and sparkles. That got me an emergency trip to optical ER and a slightly disappointed surgeon.
> should [they] be allowed to use this data in training…?

Unequivocally, yes.

LLMs have proved themselves to be useful, at times, very useful, sometimes invaluable assistants who work in different ways than us. If sticking health data into a training set for some other AI could create another class of AI which can augment humanity, great!! Patient privacy and the law can f*k off.

I’m all for the greater good.
>They are cheaper to maintain up until they need a battery replacement, then they are essentially e-waste. Will that happen before or after their bodies rust into dust?

Modern EV lithium batteries last a very long time. Tesla numbers are showing >80% capacity remaining on a 10 year old car. Yes there will be people who want to swap out at that point to restore their range. But the reality is that the degradation is acceptable for most people and still leaves you with plenty of usable range.
I imagine you'd be able to wear the same thing you do outdoors. Which is to say, i don't wear sunglasses outdoors.

But regarding the lighting itself, yes i do think it is similar to stage lighting (brighter, i assume). Thermal and power is a significant concern with the lighting iirc, but i'm not too familiar. If i recall correctly the post that advocated these as a video and had an explanation on the difficulties. It heated up the room significantly.

With that said i want to stress that this was some post i saw several years ago, and i can't seem to find the video anymore. Iirc the lights were insanely bright, though.
This article includes interviews from multiple experts, citing data from both retrospective and case control studies, plus the pandemic which effectively provided an even broader, country-wide study that again matched their data.

I’d love to understand why you would post such a dogmatic dismissal without so much as a citation. Are you an ophthalmology researcher yourself who is familiar with contrary and well-vetted research? Are you someone with a strong personal experience that you have a hard time squaring with the data? Or are you someone who forms strong beliefs, firmly held, regardless of whatever new information life offers?
Retroactively adding security to a system where security was not a design goal is hard, so I can understand why Wayland chose to also cover those use cases.

In the Desktop Linux ecosystem the added 'security' by Wayland is indeed marginal when every app can access the whole filesystem.
idk about anyone else but I have auto incrementing build numbers in several makefiles

That would seem to be the most obvious and trivial example and I just assume that there must be countless others without having to actually see them and agree that they are valid.

Wait, how could I forget the other most obvious example, comparing version numbers of requirements/dependencies?

The Vala preprocessor can't compare numbers and so I have to implement "if libfoo < x then add -D OLDFOO" outside in the makefile and can only have boolean #if OLDFOO in the code. (libs don't always provide good enough equivalents, maybe only provides a numerical value that you are assumed to be able to compare, or maybe provides nothing at all, or does provide a set of booleans intended to be used for this but they aren't granular enough, etc)
On the other hand:

By the time I was...probably about 12, my myopia was bad enough that I could no longer read without glasses (or without holding the book uncomfortably close to my face). Similarly, attempting to interact with a screen would've been impractical, because it's all fine detail.

Outdoors, however, most things that I would need to care about were large enough that I could see them just fine. I wouldn't have had much trouble, for instance, playing soccer without my glasses on, because I didn't need to care which face was which or even the numbers on the backs of the shirts—I just needed to see the colors of the shirts, and the position of the ball, well enough to maneuver between them. (Well, I wouldn't have had trouble due to my myopia. The trouble I had playing soccer was from a different source.)

...I have literally never encountered an amusement park where I couldn't wear my glasses. It seems to me that if there's really a danger, they should provide some kind of protection for you.
There's a big difference between a corporate executive with (say) $2m in the bank that keeps their head down and lets corruption ride, and a college professor with a family that keeps his beak out of things.

A really big difference.
Pluto, a Modern Lua Dialect
The headline is sensationalized.

They did a virtual screen of a large compound library.

QSAR / QSPR / Virtual Screening has been around since the late 1950s.

The secret sauce here was the large experimental dataset - on the order of 10^5 compounds - they generated to train the model.

Maybe the explainability part is kind of novel for a neural network based approach; but not clear that you couldn’t identify substructure classes better with a pure bioinformatic approach.
OK, let's say you were given a source for an LLM output such as "Common Crawl/reddit/1000000 books collection". Would this be usefull? Probably not. Or do you want the chat system to operate magnitudes slower so it can search the peta bytes of sources and warn of similarities constantly for every sentence? That's obviously a huge waste of resources, it should probably be done by the users appropriately for their use case, such as these NY Times journalists which were easily able to find such similarities themselves for their use case of "specifically crafted prompts to output NY Times text".
Operation Triangulation: What You Get When Attack iPhones of Researchers
This is the "re-live" of a video recording done today at the 37C3 CCC hacker congress currently running in Hamburg, Germany. Kaspersky would Malware on their IPhones and have reverse-engineered and published all exploits used there. One of them looks VERY MUCH like an intentional backdoor.

Abstract is here:

https://events.ccc.de/congress/2023/hub/de/event/operation_t...
I really appreciate how Bruce is approaching the reality of how the idea of open source played out against how technology has found itself used in the real world. I'm optimistic for a future where open source is less of a religion or a marketing angle [1], and more beneficial for those who share their knowledge for the world to use and receive fair compensation.

[1] - https://www.bramadams.dev/issue-39/
NYT sues OpenAI, Microsoft over 'millions of articles' used to train ChatGPT
so is lava then
No, but I'm a human and treating computers like humans is a huge mistake that we shouldn't make.
There are health resorts here in Poland where the whole reason is for them to exist in these particular places is because air there has a lot of iodine and other minerals from sea salt. I've been to one in Kołobrzeg as a child because of my asthma.

There are also inland health resorts where they build huge salt evaporation walls so that people don't have to drive all the way to the sea to breath sea air- for example in Ciechocinek. And it's not modern technology - they have been built in early 19th century already.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ciechocinek_graduation_towers

https://pl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ciechocinek#/media/Plik:Teznie...
You can see that sometimes in the landing footage, the legs are pretty flexible, and they get some help from RCS thrusters at the top of the booster. Plus, as soon as the engine has purged any excess lox/fuel, a robot slides underneath and tries to latch onto several points, which probably helps by bringing the center of mass down.

There's footage online of some of the early landings when the robot had not been implemented, where boosters slid across the barge in part due to landing at a bad angle.
now for them to make one against viruses
The NYT has been dying a slow death since long before ChatGPT came along.
It does feel different, but I don't think it's the bandwidth, or even the availability. A newspaper is high bandwidth and fairly inexpensive and ubiquitous but also fairly high latency. The evening TV news was only once a day until the 80s. One big change I noticed was 24-hour news. Suddenly, it felt important to know about things immediately.
The web was different because it was interactive--both in the sense that you could swiftly switch between information sources and then in the social media sense that everybody could participate, even if participation meant flame wars.

And historically, TV news isn't that old, especially the 24-hour variety. The Apollo landings and Vietnam War are often cited as landmarks in TV news, where for the first time large numbers of people watched things as they occurred. But it's only about 25 years from those events to Netscape Navigator, where the web became widely available (at least in the developed world). That's a long time in most people's lives, but I wouldn't be surprised if future historians will see TV as something like an early, one-way Internet.
I don't understand why we don't just create a genetically engineered cockroach that wipes them all out by outcompeting and then dying off? The same way they want to with mosquitos. Almost nothing subsists on cockroaches. It wouldn't disrupt the ecosystem at all, especially in cities like NYC.
Near Infrared (NIR) is affected by tissue type. It's light, different densities of a substance, along with what that substance may be comprised, will influence the rate of absorption of the light by a substance and reduction in light penetration.
Would you be willing to throw it into a repo with a warning that it is user-beware with no support?
Maybe not all, but I want to ban most advertising.

Ads in public spaces, such as on billboards, buildings, taxis, etc. should be illegal. Being in public is not an agreement to receive advertisement.

Any product or service that has advertisements should at least be forced to offer a reasonably-priced paid version. This goes for streaming services as well.

This also goes for things like TVs. Why does my TV try to advertise to me? By allowing it, we end up with all products trying to advertise to us, and living in an ad-filled hellscape with no escape.

Advertising may have existed as long as commerce, and there may be appropriate forms, but it's getting worse and worse.

I don't want to have to "drink a verification can of mountain dew" or keep my eyes open while forced to watch ads in my own room, as in that Black Mirror episode.
Robot.txt isn't about copyrights, its about preventing bots. Its effectively a EULA. Copyright law only goes into effect when you distribute the content you scrape. If you scraped New York times for your own LLM that you used internally and didn't distribute the results, there would be no copyright infringement.
Parents Used to Build Websites
For the record, my guess is that there is no copyright in a scan of a copyright-ineligible work, because a scan is not a work of “authorship”. Unlike a photograph, which requires various authorial choices that reflect the photographer’s expressive intent, a scan is a mechanical and often completely automatic process.
May have a reasonable price in countries where insulin also does.
It's likely not. Search for "the four factors of fair use". While I think OpenAI will have decent arguments for 3 of the factors, they'll get killed on the fourth factor, "the effect of the use on the potential market", which is what this lawsuit is really about.

If your "fair use" substantially negatively affects the market for the original source material, which I think is fairly clear in this case, the courts wont look favorably on that.

Of course, I think this is a great test case precisely because the power of "Internet scale" and generative AI is fundamentally different than our previous notions about why we wanted a "fair use exception" in the first place.
You forgot the battery breakthroughs ;)
Most of the time the engine on a modern car out lasts the body. At least an snowy climates
"Discovered" like penicillin? It irks me when it's presented as accidental, when it does go through testing after
How does AI compete with journalism? AI doesn't do investigative reporting, AI can't even observe the world or send out reporters.

Which part of journalism is AI going to impact most? Opinion pieces that contain no new information? Summarizing past events?
Calculus and more DSA. Also want to build something in Rust.
What happened to Aaron Swartz was terrible. I find that what he was doing was outright good. IMO the right reading isn't to make sure anyone doing something similar faces the same way, but to make the information far more free, whether it's a corporation using it or not. I don't want them to steamroll everyone equally here, but to not steamroll anyone.
> If there’s one language guilty of causing brain damage it’s surely JavaScript.

In its detractors, you mean? (This was a perfectly reasonable comment until you got irrational at the end; even people who understand Dijkstra's comment but feel that we lost something should be extremely pleased that the thing that took BASIC's place is a language that supports structured programming and is otherwise as nice as JS.)
We also need to architect the processes to cope with the preprint culture.

There's a lot being claimed without peer-review, and a lot of it is bullshit and wastes my time...
What? Especially the quality of videos. Show me at which streaming service I can view 50GB movies.
I know many tropical countries have successful stories fighting mosquitos by simply removing every single place that might contain water: ponds, flower pots etc.
barrier is basically a dead project now. The active members of the project forked it and are going to release when ready but

https://github.com/input-leap/input-leap

Keep an eye on that for anything new
> These stories are popular

I don't see them much, nor does my comment match this story, nor did I post it because of some popularity.

> they are (on average) less fulfilling than simply having any somewhat high-paying job that offers security for oneself and one's family.

That's a misleading comparison: If you hold all other variables stable, of course a higher-paying job is better. But all other variables aren't stable; we need to make trade-offs. Your argument so far is that somehow the choice you would make must be the choice that would make most people happier.

Also, you've provided no basis for saying that most would prefer or do better one way or another.

> a social formality we perform as polite society because we perceive it as needless to have people constantly reminded that they did not achieve as much as they could have.

They did achieve, but different things on a different scale. It's like a basketball player saying that a hockey player, not having a good jump shot, didn't achieve as much as they could have. They are playing different games.

People in 'polite society' - i.e., people who made choices like yours - tend to have the narrow-minded belief that theirs is ipso facto the preferred way. It's especially a bias of people following a social norm - nothing challenges their belief, the norm supports it. I can't read your mind, but that seems to be the basis of your argument.

Speaking as someone outside a significant social norm, it's as if one day I made a 90 deg right turn off the highway and hit the accelerator. I am going far and fast; people still on the highway say, 'they're not getting anywhere'. It's annoying and a bit isolating; it's a trade-off but that's the choice I preferred, and there's not a moment's doubt in my mind about my direction. In fact, I think many of them would benefit from joining me (or taking their own roads), but 99% can't imagine a world outside their social norms, they can't see there's anything on the landscape but that one narrow highway. What a fool I would be, what a waste it would be, to let their reactions dictate my life.
There’s also one more advantage: Nintendo games, in general, age much better over time. It turns out stylization doesn’t look dated nearly as quickly…

If you took a random segment of the population and let them try the top games on a GameCube versus a PS2 in 2023, I think the GameCube would win handily.
oh, sure. NYT could go, we could replace it with AI generated garbage with non-verifiable information without sources. AI changed the landscape. Google search would be working less reliable because real publishers would be hiding info behind the login (twitter/reddit). I.e. sites would be harder to index. There would be a lot of AI generated garbage which would be hard to filter out. AI generated review articles, AI generated news promoting someones agenda. Only to have a chatgpt which could randomly increase their price 100 times anytime in the future.

There was outrage about Amazon removing DPReview site recently. But, it would be a common practice not to publish code/info, which could be used to train the model of another company. So, expect less open source projects, that companies just released because they were feeling like it could be good for everyone.

Actually, there is the use case that NYT would become more influential and important, because if 99% of all info is generated by AI and search is not working anymore, we would have to rely on the trusted sources to get our info. In the world of garbage, we would have to have some sources of verifiable human-generated info.
I’m trying to grok the absolute coordinate issue.

Does this mean your solution would break if someone was playing a FPS/game?

And is the solution to use relative coordinates but lose the auto transition feature? Meaning that you would have to manually switch?
So you're advocating giving open AI and incumbents a massive advantage by now delegitimizing the process? It's kinda like why Netflix was all for "fast lanes"
Another: https://x.com/Hamaddabh/status/1739630849723646415?s=20
Xorg server will be security patched for as long as RHEL has to keep supporting it for RHEL 9, but it won't be in RHEL10. Xwayland and its dependencies are still maintained going forward.
1) Biden will preside over a resilient and growing economy and a long list of legislative accomplishments, many of which were promised by Trump and were never enacted.

2) Abortion rights will be a big part of the election cycle and 60%+ of Americans oppose the Dobbs ruling. Trump has made it clear that he takes credit for Dobbs.

3) Polls (with the caveat that I believe they are flawed currently) suggest conviction switches a non-trivial number of Trump-friendly voters into the undecided or Biden column.

4) Overall poll toplines are currently flawed, many only use registered voter screens, and seem to overstate the number of 2020 non-voters that will vote in 2024. In reality overall turnout will be much lower in 2024. Additionally, about 50% of voters appear to be in denial that the matchup will be Biden vs. Trump.

5) Trump seems to think he has this in the bag [0] and will make even more extreme and reckless statements as the election cycle goes on.

[0]: https://politicalwire.com/2023/12/26/melania-trump-to-step-u...

Tilt Biden, I'd give it a 75% likelihood.
I would suspect that in a case like Reddit's /r/buyItForLife/, other users who are interested in the topic will point out issues. Maybe the same thing could work here.
I don't know if it counts, but actually I will improve my physical skills.

Learning to lift heavy, improve balance and coordination.

In addition to that I want to become much better with my motorcycle handling in such as slow speed, dodging, balance etc.