skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I've only read partway, but some of these stories of elephant behavior are very touching. It's clear that elephants have very rich social and emotional lives. Given how similar elephants are to humans (long-lived, highly cooperative mammals capable of fine-motor manipulation), it makes you wonder how close elephants were to the kind of evolutionary breakthrough humans had (I'd offer the crude speculation that apes' vocalization-related anatomy was the edge that caused human cultural evolution to outpace that of elephants).

The author seems to be setting up a lot of human-animal binaries (humans choose, animals act on instinct) in order to ultimately cast doubt on them. I'm sure I'm not alone in finding these binaries quite implausible to begin with, and therefore finding those parts of the piece a bit tedious. But I am moved by these vignettes illustrating just how relatable elephants and humans are to each other.
Using Google Search to Find Software Can Be Risky
This is what I came here to find out. So it seems Apple will still get their cut. Seems they are nerfing things to make the existing App Store more appealing.

But I guess Tim Sweeney won in the EU. He gets his new AppStore so he can charge his own commission on gems and fake tokens.

And game streaming seems interesting I guess we will get Xbox streaming gaming on the Apple platform after all.
> if Roblox, Youtube and Netflix went Android only then I'd be replacing all of our iPads with Android Tablets post-haste

Sure. Most wouldn’t. YouTube and Netflix would lose tens of billions of present value overnight. Hell, Apple might capture a good fraction of that surplus.
Allowing users the ability to choose their preferred app store is dumb?
For sure. I agree with their whole post. There isn't any advantage whatsoever as a user to have Steam, Microsoft App Store, Epic Store, etc. All those stores take their pound of flesh and it is up to me to manage them all. It sucks.
I've got to say, this whole thing is... clever. I'm not defending Apple here, but I am saying that the way they seemed to figure out policies to comply with the letter of the law while making it seem pointless for a developer to switch to a third-party app store... well, it definitely does make Apple look smarter than the EU, that's for sure.
I've been working on the DuckDB-NSQL model on MotherDuck side. I fully agree that general text-2-sql, in the sense of "give me a question, and I'll produce you an arbitrary complex query", is a very tough problem and I actually believe that that's not the right problem to solve. Not necessarily because models are not (going to be) cabable enough, but rather because it's way too hard for humans to express in a single prompt what they actually want. Furthermore, it's simply not the right UX for most SQL users. A much better approach IMO is to keep the SQL analysts in the driver seat, and provide nuanced support wherever/whenever they need it most. The FixIt feature we recently launched goes into the same direction: https://motherduck.com/blog/introducing-fixit-ai-sql-error-f...

In that sense I emphasized in our Blogpost that users should think of it as a documentation oracle that always gives you the exact DuckDB SQL query snippet you are looking for, which is a tremendoues time-saver if you have an abstrat idea of the query you want to write, but you're just not sure about the syntax, expecially with DuckDB having so many functions and SQL extensions.

Here are a few exammples:

- create tmp table from test.csv

- load aws credentials from 'test' profile

- get max of all columns in rideshare table

- show query plan with runtimes for 'SELECT * FROM rideshare'

- cast hvfhs_license_num column to int

- get all columns ending with _amount from taxi table

- show summary statistics of rideshare table

- get a 10% reservoir sample of rideshare table

- get length of drivers array in taxi table

- get violation_type field from other_violations json column
in taxi table

- get passenger count, trip distance and fare amount from taxi
table and oder by all of them

- list all tables in current database

- get all databases starting with test_

[edit: fixed list formatting]
That one on paper I don't mind, I mean I don't particularly enjoy the idea of Google being able to have even more of a stranglehold on the Browser market by them pushing Chrome heavily on iOS.

But yes, that is a good change that should have happened a long time ago. Same with the game streaming one.
Of course it's not because of LLMs. This happens after every acquisition. Anyway do you think LLMs are magic or something?
Any chance you could expand on "In practice, they're both operationally complicated and an unreliable source of truth about certificate validity."?
I, for one, would quite like to see what sort of bizarre adversarial flailing technically counts as a perfect performance. If we can get one totally surreal Olympics out of it, I'd call it a win.
Unity didn’t have an App Store with 3B devices.
You actually made me go look (I have a droplet as a Wireguard VPN, that I too use only rarely):

$ uptime
10:40:45 up 654 days, 11:32, 1 user, load average: 0.08, 0.02, 0.01

I can't use it for getting to Streaming sites when abroad (they all blacklist DO's IP blocks), but it works for just about anything else and it's got really fat pipes.
My take is this will follow in the US IF a few large states make rulings on this and higher courts decline to hear appeals. Ex. GDPR -> CCPA -> most companies just did compliance anyway for the US because of California's size
This also means you can’t provide an app for free anymore if it becomes sufficiently popular. Monetization is the only way.
Did you get one of the Intel Mainboards or AMD? Im not trying to tell you that you are wrong or invalid or anything like that, just wondering.
It's not very good from prql devs to use artificially bloated (line wise) examples to show SQL is bad.

from employees
select {id, first_name, age}
sort age
take 10

vs

SELECT
id,
first_name,
age
FROM
employees
ORDER BY
age
LIMIT
10

Huh? For simple queries SQL is simple. You can't beat it on this field.
> A stable currency is a basic human right.

This is just a complete misunderstanding of what a currency is.
1. First of all, thanks for outlining how you trained the model here in the repo: https://github.com/NumbersStationAI/DuckDB-NSQL?tab=readme-o...! I did not know about `sqlglot`, that's a pretty cool lib. Which part of the project was the most challenging or time-consuming: generating the training data, the actual training, or testing? How did you iterate, improve, and test the model?

2. How would you suggest using this model effectively if we have custom data in our DBs? For example, we might have a column called `purpose` that's a custom defined enum (i.e. not a very well-known concept outside of our business). Currently, we've fed it in as context by defining all the possible values it can have. Do you have any other recs on how to tune our prompts so that this model is just as effective with our own custom data?

3. Similar to above, do you know you can use the same model to work effectively on tens or even hundreds of tables? I've used multiple question-SQL example pairs as context, but I've found that I need 15-20 for it to be effective for even one table, let alone tens of tables.
Firefox with uBlock Origin and NoScript on iOS!! Ahhh!! Yes!!
This only applies if these developers move to the new terms it looks like. So these large apps can stay with their existing setups and not pay the fee.
When I opened a Rust project I think the status bar said it was downloading Rust support, which supports your hypothesis. (Also it doesn't make much sense to bundle these things when they are all making new releases at different schedules.)
I wonder if the site is deliberately inconvenient as well, being so susceptible to an influx of requests (not functional atm). I appreciate the irony.
Yes, give me my uBlock and Tampermonkey! And many other miscellaneous privacy and convenience extensions that make the web just that much better.
I agree. I think full text-to-results (even bypassing text-to-SQL) is akin to L5 self-driving cars. It's easy to get to some reasonable level, say 90%. But to get to the point, where folks can fully trust the system and don't need a steering wheel (or know SQL) may take decades.

We at MotherDuck took an incremental approach. We launched something more akin to lane-assist. We're calling it FixIt - an in-flow visual aid to help you identify and fix errors in your SQL [0].

I think there's gobs of opportunities to improve the analytics experiences without resorting to "L5 self-driving" (e.g. full text-to-results)

[0] https://motherduck.com/blog/introducing-fixit-ai-sql-error-f...
And there won't be since Google just got caught giving Spotify a lower rate and now face anti-trust issues. That doesn't mean Apple doesn't give certain apps certain permissions. AFAIK, Apple gives Google special permission to enable VP9/AV1 formats decoding [0] and that's just what we know of.

Whether you like it or not, we're heading towards a future where Apple and Google choose who wins and who loses. A good app built on merit will never be able to compete.

0. https://github.com/yattee/yattee/wiki/FAQ
Yeah this is brutal for any truly free app that risks getting popular. The only exceptions are for "Nonprofit organizations, accredited educational institutions, and government entities", so I guess at least Mozilla will find a way to distribute Firefox.

https://developer.apple.com/support/core-technology-fee/
Yeah apparently they will be according to the article…

“ iOS apps distributed from the App Store and/or an alternative app marketplace will pay €0.50 for each first annual install per year over a 1 million threshold.”
> This model completes tasks like code generation more thoroughly than the previous preview model and is intended to reduce cases of “laziness” where the model doesn’t complete a task.

How does one solve for this? Wrangling the prompt with "please don't be lazy", or are there inference tricks like running thru the weights differently/multiple times?
Ask HN: Is This the End?
Hearing some real horror stories out there, particularly from the folks who remember the dot com bust. Seems like the entire industry was built on zero rates. Not sure where we go from here.
Well, that's why America's greatest living novelist, Chuck Tingle, has been shafted twice.
You tell the user what entitlements or permissions are being requested at the point of the app trying to use them, stop treating the users like stupid children and let them make an educated decision about how to use the hardware that they own.

There are limits on Android anyway, what your side-loaded apps can do without you using a custom ROM or rooting the device is restricted somewhat.
Pictures can be found here! https://x.com/zellic_io/status/1745874206695596427?s=20
Metal Gear Solid 2, to be specific. A game shockingly ahead of it's time.
Animals do not have a soul.

Genesis 1:26 "Then God said, “Let Us make man in Our image, according to Our likeness; and let them rule over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the sky and over the cattle and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creeps on the earth.”"

It is a great article describing Anthropomorphism though.
I vastly prefer them over thick gloves. You can wear a thin glove and work the shifter/brakes more easily.
Not totally clear to me what "first annual install" means
Yes, and more importantly, EU forcing Apple to do it is also dumb.
yeah, this was ultimately the problem

it turned out that AI research required $ billions to run the LLMs, something that was not originally anticipated; and the only way to get that kind of money is to sell your future (and your soul) to investors who want to see a substantial return
> This criteria seems arbitrary

That's the point, but they sound nice
Android (Pixels specifically, so not a derivative of Android) does this and platform is just as secure
I mean, if a company is being mandated to do something dumb or bad, I think it's fine for them to say so publicly. They are complying with the law, they don't have to like it, and we don't have to care.

The alternative is PRISM stuff where they were mandated not to disclose any of the regulations they were being put under and society largely suffered for it.
What ChatGPT missed here is that when bubbles collapse, the damage can extend beyond its edges. So even some perfectly viable AI use case that doesn't require the bubble's financial largess may suffer damage from the pop whether it is "tangible value creation" or not.
Wish list:

A push notification app that allows users with self hosted stuff to send push notifications for free without Apple’s blessing.

Open source browser with ublock origin
That's not how global free trade works, these laws weren't already established they were added to specifically target American companies which must be in violation of several WTO ordinance.
Orion supports WebExtensions on iOS.
Game consoles are often used as examples of special-purpose computers, in contrast to general-purpose computers.
I wonder if side-loaded apps with have green icons.

Seriously though, I expect Apple to do something to differentiate them.
Curious what embedding compression technique they're using since it allows for dynamic dimensionality reduction. Or maybe they trained a different projection for each conceivable dim argument?
Yup. I got asked to block anyone from the EU from using a specific university software. Hope you’re not an exchange student on holiday!

Fortunately, they aren’t in business anymore. (For unrelated reasons.)
Which cultures don’t have improving GDP, or more accurately, becoming wealthier, because GDP is just a metric to measure wealth (and an unfortunately inaccurate one at that) as a goal?
Finally, a reasonable output dim size. 1536 was just nuts, and added 4x the cost of HNSW in RAM compared to something like the e5 small models at 384 dims.
Questioning "The Value of Open Source Software"
Unity also announced that it would retrospectively apply to all developers who already publish games. Apple is apparently going to let developers remain in the current model or opt into the new one, and if that is correct, makes a difference here.
Yeah, agreed. I am especially upset at the custom browser rendering engines, as I really do like Safari and I'm not at all excited about my favorite apps stuffing a Chrome instance inside of them (electron for iOS now??)

I hope user choice is prioritized, and it seems like the way Apple has it set up, apps won't be able to get a significant following by distributing outside the App store.
As an aside, look how clear and well-written this web page is. I'm always blown away by how well the whole Apple ecosystem (even the the developer documentation) is designed
Good to know you can disable delivery completely once signed up, I haven't used mailman in ages! I will sign up in this case. The signup page only lets you switch to digest, which can mislead new users.

BTW mailing lists can work great for guest visitors who don't want to subscribe.
They can also work great for teams who don't want guests.

The problem is openjdk mailman allows guest posting and lies about guests posts awaiting moderation.
Had they simply disabled guest posting and said up-front that you must subscribe and send rejection notice to guests I would be perfectly fine with that.

Mailman sucks worse than even Google Groups and in this case it's also poorly configured.

PS. To add to frustration, LastPass (I know it's shit but don't have time to migrate) somehow can't deal with Mailman signups - it will generate but won't save passwords.
Pleeeeeeease fix the letter spacing on the blog, my eyes are burning
My understanding about SEO is that it has 4 tiers. This is due to how search engines rank results. They want to relevant results first, but they also want results that seem high quality (i.e. authorities in the subject) first. They have algorithms to judge relevancy and authority based on e.g. keywords and number of links. The idea is that organic results should be on top, but when you think about it there is no way for that to happen.

So the 4 tiers are:

1. Pages that don't optimize keywords and don't get links. This is most pages.

2. Pages that optimize keywords but don't get links. This is some introverted nerd who knows SEO technically but sucks at marketing.

3. Pages that don't optimize keywords but get links. This is a real product or service or thing that is popular made by someone who has no idea about SEO.

4. Pages that optimize keywords and get links. This is some serious internet marketing stuff.

"SEO spam" falls into the 4th tier. Optimizing keywords only gets you in front of unoptimized pages that nobody links to. A real SEO strategy includes getting as many links as possible somehow and, in some cases, by doing "black hat" SEO by buying links or spamming links in comments of Wordpress blogs and so on. Essentially, genuine 4th tier SEO means establishing a presence on the web.

But this is why the whole idea is fundamentally broken.

Imagine someone is a nobel prize winner who writes extremely technical posts on their blog. They are the authority of all authorities in the subject, but their content is by no means popular. Only a handful of people in the world could appreciate what this multi-PhD monster of knowledge is talking about. Their posts will never get links and their keywords probably sound like made-up gibberish for Google.

Basically, if your job is being an authority on something, you are not going to waste your time building a presence on the web. It's like search engines constructed such a high bar on "quality web results" that it will never get cleared by actual quality results that aren't deliberately trying to clear that bar.
My point is the fax protocol is analog. How do you do analog over 4G/5G? Any solution is going to involve some sort of central server.
Alabama — Always at the forefront of new technology! ;)
You might be interested in Orion Browser [0] which is WebKit based and can install Firefox and Chrome extensions.

[0] https://kagi.com/orion/
Did your PC ship with Steam installed?
When are we going to find out that 85% of those were the playstation port people
IANAL but I speculate that having explicitly rejected competition could hurt Apple in certain legal proceedings?
If you don’t have a way to enforce it then you pretty much have to assume that law enforcement will come after it sooner or later.
To compare with the MTEB leaderboard (https://huggingface.co/spaces/mteb/leaderboard), the new embedding models are on par with open-source embedding models like BAAI/bge-large-en-v1.5, not a drastic improvement if already using them. Obviously, a cost/performance improvement is still good.

I've found evidence that the OpenAI 1536D embeddings are unnecessairly big for 99% of use cases (and now there's a 3072D model?!) so the ability to reduce dimensionality directly from the API is appreciated for the reasons given in this post. Just chopping off dimensions to an arbitrary dimensionality is not a typical dimensionality reduction technique so that likely requires a special training/alignment technique that's novel.

EDIT: Tested the API: it does support reducing to an arbitrary number of dimensions other than the ones noted into the post. (even 2D for data viz, but may not be as useful since the embeddings are normalized)

The embeddings aren't "chopped off", the first components of the embedding will change as dimensionality reduces, but not much.
In case anyone wants to actually read the bill:

https://www.congress.gov/bill/118th-congress/house-bill/7024...

I'm confused, though - the same wording regarding software development in Section 174 also exists in this bill. How is it fixing the problem?
To get sensitivity you actually need collection area.
> The DMA introduces zero risk.

This is just not true.

Maybe for experienced tech people like on HN.

But the worry here is that you can be tricked into installing all sorts of dangerous malware. Especially now that casual users have been trained to believe that apps are safe.

The DMA absolutely opens up all sorts of new vectors of attack. The question is ultimately a philosophical one -- whether you think the increased freedom is worth the increased risk. Not just for yourself, but for the average non-tech-expert consumer.

You might think the tradeoff is absolutely worth it, but that doesn't mean that it still hasn't significantly increased security risks.
"useful" is too coarse a metric.

It includes the concept of what you can build or create with a device. A personal computer wins that by a long shot.

It includes accessibility- pre-literate and illiterate people can use an iOS device.

It includes the risk. How many iOS users have suffered viruses/malware vs laptop users?
Seconded. I'm not even American but someone kind of sane and normal would be good. I'm not sure what Biden is thinking with the southern border issue. If it keeps like it is then Trump will win.
Imagine how much money they missed out on by not charging $0.50c for every install of those government COVID tracking apps all over the world.

Apple is a scumbag company. Any developer who continues to support Apple by building software for their ecosystem is a bad person.
He didn't tell a friend, he sent it to a group of friends. Any of which could have forwarded it to the authorities or told.
Fenix didn't die in LotV.

Does every new harry potter book or movie that comes out reset the timer on spoiling that dumbledore dies?

This isn't mickey mouse and disney extending copyright law into perpetuity, this is a nicety among people to not spoil things until people have a change to experience it themselves.
Yes, sure. But it gives helpful guidance. It means that if you wear a mask through the airport, and before takeoff and after landing. Taking it off for meals and the like is a much lower risk then not wearing a mask at all.
> That's like claiming only mechanics are interested in what engine a car is running - regular users only care about the seat and steering wheel.

That's probably true for quite a lot of people in those categories.
The EU has a law called the Digital Markets Act.

https://commission.europa.eu/strategy-and-policy/priorities-...

The EU's position is that a company is large and influential enough, with an entrenched market position, it does not get to "do whatever they want" because of the harm that causes to the economy overall. A monopoly is not a criteria for this.
What pain? What is "this situation"? Layoffs? Having our jobs outsourced to third-world countries? AI replacing coders? You're going to have to be more specific if you want a useful response. But maybe you're just venting.

Anyway, my suggestion would be to get some perspective. Obviously I don't know your personal situation, but tech workers in general still have it pretty good. You will get through it.
Why do we keep pretending PCs are comparable with phones? They compute, that's the end of their similarities. They have completely different use cases and are needed for different reasons. Things that are good on a PC might not be good on a phone.
On climbing the stat arb leaderboard, comparative advantage, and careers
Right?! It's a masterclass in being petty. They seem to know exactly what screws government's won't turn and built the "not-app store" on top of them.
Well it does count updates. So this is just bullshit from Apple.