skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Show HN: Retrieval Augmented Generation for LLMs from APIs with Function Calling
Dear HN, we'd love your feedback on a different approach to Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) for LLMs that uses function calling to retrieve the most relevant data from APIs. It aims to solve the problem of connecting LLMs with your data so that the LLM can pull in the context it needs to provide high quality answers to user questions. We are calling it "apiRAG" for now (yes, very creative ;-)

You can run the examples in the GitHub repository or watch this video to see how it works:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mx-slh6h42c

We developed apiRAG because we found that existing RAG approaches (text search, vector based, FLARE, etc) don't work well with structured and semi-structured data.
apiRAG can efficiently augment from structured and semi-structured data by translating user questions to relevant API requests and then presenting the result data to the user. It supports textual presentation (with Markdown for tables and such) and visual presentation by charting data when appropriate. Check out the IoT chatbot that can answer questions about collected sensor data or the credit card example that gives users a customized spending analysis (shown in the video).

Unlike RAG approaches that use text or vector search, apiRAG uses the LLM to determine what information should be retrieved and augmented into the context via function calling.
That means, it often does a better job at identifying relevant information by pushing down filters, like when you ask "Who appears in the third episode of season 2" in our "Rick and Morty" example.

apiRAG also works great for customer sensitive data, like in our Nutshop and banking examples where customers can ask questions about their past purchases/transactions and the LLM can answers those effectively by pulling in the relevant data from the API while being "sandboxed" to only access a particular authenticated customer's data.

Most importantly, apiRAG is really simple. Just a lightweight library configured with a single JSON file that specifies the API endpoints (you can reuse existing APIs). All the heavy lifting is done by the LLM.

Let us know what you think of apiRAG and if you'd find it useful for building generative AI applications. How could we make it better?
See https://www.theverge.com/2024/1/25/24049050/microsoft-activi... for the latest example.
I stopped bothering cellar spiders I found in my house after one morning a fly woke me up and proceeded to land on a spiderweb behind the radiator. They are welcome guests now.

The larger ones though I politely but firmly invite to leave.
But he never wrote a novel providing a depiction of the pitfalls of corporate capitalism or right-wing ideology.
That’s fair, but he’s not in a mountain range, he’s in a small flat part of the UK
Roughly 40% of the United States is public land and there are national parks larger than some European contries. Sure, it's not freedom to roam, but you still have access to significantly more public land living in the United States than you would living in the UK.
I've edited it, thanks for letting me know.
Isn't the measure already the target?
Ask HN: Is DoD worried about Boeings military contracts due to civilian issues
The civilian side of Boeing has been going through a long set of
serious to catastrophic quality / maintenance / design issues
for at least the last 3 years.

Unfortunately, it appears that there is still more to come.

Should / is the DoD concerned about the military side of Boeing also
experiencing serious quality / maintenance / design?

I have not read about any Boeing military aircraft problems
but I might well have missed it.

As far as I understand it, a lot of the military aircrafts
are versions / adaptations / variants of civilian aircrafts
and they might have started life in the same manufacturing
process as the regular civilian models?
Tangential question, has anyone actually noticed bandcamp get worse? We know they did big layoffs (along with uh... EVERYONE ELSE) and we know they axed a bunch of paid journalists (again, hardly uncommon), but as a frequent user I have not seen any negative change to me personally. Not saying they won't, lot's of acquisitions kill the golden goose, but so far I haven't noticed anything. Curious if others have.

I also really don't understand all the comments online as if the sale from Epic to Songtrader was a sale from the boy scouts to darth vader. Didn't Epic buy them as a pawn in a legal battle? The sale people should be grumbling about was the one to Epic... and the people they should be complaining about are the founders who sold. :-/
They sold almost 2 million cars in 2023. It's not a niche thing. Furthermore there is a clear path to higher demand in building out the charger network, an area where they are already in the lead. That's what is keeping me from buying one now.

And no, not everyone, or even most people, are going to like it or buy it, but that is true about every make and model of car ever made.
And you have not even bothered to specify anything beyond "it asserts null", which I addressed and an otherwise unsupported and unspecified "you are wrong".

I'm happy to have a discussion, but not engage with zero-effort passive-aggressive empty assertions. Say what you mean, with some specificity, or go away. Have a nice day.
Can't help but imagine a passive-agressive lander AI...

'Ha, they told me a million times exactly _where_ I should land, but they never specified _how_ I should land'
I actually thought about both of these as I was making this post.

Safety razors aren't a direct substitute for a modern standard shaving razor, even if it's arguably better.

Brother printers don't have DRM (yay!) but the toner cartridges are definitely being sold at a huge markup. That's OK because the price is fine with me, but they're still using the same "cheap product, expensive consumables" pricing model as everyone else. How could they not?
This is a very attractive product for me, but my problem is that android is as close to a mainstream operating system as I currently get. My personal devices all use some weird form of linux, so when I need to interact with the world, well I'm not sure I can afford to be too weird in every aspect of my technology choices.

Like my job (which is very friendly to my weird tech choices) had to go with a strange ISP since we're in a historic properties building, and the only way to interact with that ISP's router is through either a windows machine or an android/ios device.

I suppose the answer is to use VMs or something, but still, that's what's keeping me from using strange android devices like this.
Around Ithaca, NY the local government is thinking about defunding the daily "paper of record" (which gets paid to run legal announcements) because it has been superseded by weekly papers and online local news. The Ithaca Journal seems to get thinner every week and, besides those legal notices and the spam want-ads to recruit you to cash checks for money laundering, is mostly full of syndicated news. 20 years ago I would always run into reporters from the Ithaca Journal at public meetings but now they are absent.

The good news is that there are two weekly print newspapers

https://www.tompkinsweekly.com/
https://www.ithaca.com/

and at least one pure online play

http://ithacavoice.org/

not to mention another weekly paper oriented entirely towards entertainment, culture, dining and stuff like that.

If you accept the idea that the generation rate of local news in a small city is too low to justify a daily paper than the transition from daily to weekly which improved economics is a good thing. Seen that way we're in a golden age of journalism in Ithaca. I've seen weekly papers be successful in many other locations but usually in the form of the "entertainment, culture, and dining" paper. Here in Tompkins though our weeklies are so good who needs a daily?
HN is not a social network
> Sonia worked with the Information Research Department (IRD), a propaganda department of the British Foreign Office, which helped to increase the international fame of Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four. With her support, the IRD was able to translate Animal Farm into over 16 languages,[3] and for British embassies to disseminate the book in over 14 countries for propaganda purposes

> Sonia is believed to be the model for Julia, the heroine of Nineteen Eighty-Four.[1][2]
Very. Much more secure (respectfully!) than this is.
Here's the problem I see with tackling "cybercrime", most of it happens outside the jurisdiction of western countries. When it comes to things like hacking, selling stolen data, scams you name it, most of it happens in countries where enforcement is either lax or just non-existent.

And "access" here is completely asymmetric, if someone opens up say a scam store in London that victimizes it's visitors in some way, the authorities have access to the business just like the business has access to the residents of London, here the "access" is symmetric as the authorities can just show up and shut down the business and throw the criminal org running it in jail.

With cybercrime though, the criminal has access to the victim, but the authorities do not have access to the criminal. The criminals can victimize folks all day long but besides stern warnings to potential victims, there's nothing the authorities can do. The criminals know this and this is why most of your online scams and cybercrime occurs in places outside the jurisdiction of western states / states that care about this stuff.

A cybercrime bill like this will inevitably be kneecapped by virtue of it's jurisdiction. As a result they won't have any "real" crime to go after and will increasingly go after lower hanging fruit that one could interpert as "crime". So expect the real criminals will still be in business while these agencies will go after folks for saying mean things on the internet that could be construed by a court to be a "crime"
It would be nice if it had a scroll wheel, like the Rabbit R1. To me, the scroll wheel seems like a more useful innovation, however, the physical keyboard makes sense for e-ink device because it reduces the screen refreshes necessary for typing (i.e., not having to show a keyboard with an animation per character input).
FWIW, ISAS Director General(the "faculty" president, also a PM in another probe in the past) Hitoshi Kuninaka scored it at 63 points, with 60 for the landing and bonus 1 point each for scientific camera and two payload probes, you could say he's more based or whatever.

OTOH, in defense of the PM, the lander showed exceptional robustness against loss of an engine, so he'd have a reason to be proud of an explosionless landing.
There are two sides of the law.

What is written in the books.

What is practiced by law enforcement and the judicial system.

So while dropping your wallet in the street may technically be a crime, the idea that law enforcement is going to go about seeking justice for the infraction is pretty much laughable in the vast majority of situations unless there is a large amount of corroborating evidence.

>(Also, I don't think anyone would consider it "finders keepers" if the thief started using the credit-cards!)

I mean, that is its own separate crime, and the only one likely to be punished as there is a direct evidence chain where you're accessing an account without permission and performing the act of theft.
They might have included them in the published policy, but it seems they aren't in whatever policy they're actually following.
> only 5 lines of javascript in the whole infernal thing. No thanks, I won't be having any of that in my program

I feel exactly the same way. HTMX is a godsend. That and a Tailwind UI purchase can make anybody very dangerous at frontend. I'm curious for other viewpoints though: what exactly about js gives that icky feeling. For me it's just the inconsistent syntax. With TS, on the other hand just seeing a node modules folder makes me nauseous. The whole thing gives me a feeling of a lack of control over what's happening and has thrown me off front end for many years until now
Croc is an iteration of the magic wormhole design. Magic wormhole is more popular. Either is fine.
Now you get to combine the two when you start taking the family on some of those trips to share with your kids the perspective and situations of other people and places.
I’m not usually reading a Gizmodo article with my screen locked and my phone in my pocket as I walk around the city, with the article able to determine (at a minimum) my IP address, which can tell them whether I’m at home, work, the mall, or the doctor etc.
Yes. They sold to NYT because they didn't have a path to profitability or IPO. They were looking at a possible closure before the sale and lost $55M the year before the sale.

Since the sale, things have been a little less clear because NYT is more opaque about it. Regardless, they had layoffs last year and ended their entire beat reporter team because it wasn't drawing national audiences enough. There have been various reports over the last year that NYT is struggling to turn the unit profitable as well.
I subscribe to The Economist in print and haven't even bothered to create an online account paired to my subscription.
Pretty sure it's not an approximation, at least for interest rates compounded continuously. The real interest rate is simply the nominal interest rate minus inflation. The algebra is

e^(realt) = e^(nominalt) / e^(inflationt). Left side is your compounded real gains, first factor is on the right is your compounded nominal gains, and the divisor is the cumulative price rise to go from nominal to real terms.

e^(real t) = e^(nominalt - inflationt), by quotient rule for exponents.

e^(real * t) = e^(t * (nominal - inflation)), factoring out t.

real * t = t * (nominal - inflation), taking natural log of both sides

real = nominal - inflation, dividing by t
Yep exactly, that's what I do too. Download a lossless version and then use Bandcamp if I ever wanted to stream it. However I also host Navidrome (OSS streaming with a web-app) so use that 99.9% of the time I want to stream.

Even if there aren't labels requiring artists to hide or delete music from Bandcamp, you never know if Bandcamp could just go down one day for financial reasons and then you're screwed.
>It blows my mind that many people worked there, only 8% of Microsoft Gaming?

The difference between AAA and the rest is not so much in quality these days, but sheer quantity. Quantity of NPCs, artwork, music, items, skills, vehicles, levels, etc. etc. And it takes a small army of artists/designers/PMs to do all of that stuff, not to even mention the actual dev team.
I don't follow. We absolutely have scaled that simple line of reasoning.

And I strong argument can be made that world is more peaceful in part because of the threat of violence (and the potential for violence to be more expensive than diplomacy).

Ans yes, the threat of nuclear armageddon is real.. but there is also good reason to believe that violence is declining (see Better Angels - Stephen Pinker).
NYT: "Let me state as clearly as I can: My father was not involved in my business."

Hunter: "Let me state as clearly as I can: My father was not financially involved in my business."

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/12/13/us/politics/hunter-biden-...

---

The NYT only corrected the story because of being called out for flagrant propaganda.

It's a shame I cannot legally say what should happen to these people.
https://ototoy.jp
Apple with its current incentives will never do this. I’m sure they know quite well which % of their services revenue comes from enticing push notifications from casino games.

But with all that said, don’t kid yourself with any thoughts that the “we” in your sentence refers to anything more than a practically immaterially small contingent of nerds. Poll 100 people off the street and for the vast majority of them, a more “open” mobile platform is—at best—some nebulous advantage of owning an Android phone that some dweeby family member ranted to them about. In reality, they are reality not directly making use of any of that “openness”, instead just using a worse, malware-infested iPhone alternative.
> I see it as a net positive, you have a decentralized distributed group of investitive journalists who are directly reliant on their subscriber base rather than the political whims of the institution. So they are more incentivized to do good work and are harder to silence when the go against the powers-that-be.

The problem: with a massive media powerhouse such as the NYT backing you, you can go against large international conglomerates - their lawyers will have your back, and you won't have to pay out of your personal pocket in case of the other side winning in court.

Once you go freelance, that protection vanishes.
25 years ago everyone was singing the praises about Google the search engine, and then a few years later, Gmail. At one point you'd see Ad Sense on many tech blogs.

The phenomenon you describe is hardly new, it's just easier.
That might be true, but is the revenue from that use offsetting loss of revenue from linear TV advertising (from pre smartphone years)? I doubt it, but I would be interesting in being shown that I’m wrong.
>This was a good post without the last paragraph.

A fair point. And thank you for your observation.[0]

However, GP made an assumption that wasn't supported by, well, anything in anyone's posts or any of the supporting data in an (apparent) attempt to justify their point of view.

I just said the quiet part out loud and gave GP license to continue using unsupported assumptions to justify their views.

If pointing that out is considered inappropriate by some, then so be it.

[0] I want to clarify that I really do appreciate your comment and am absolutely not being snarky or sarcastic when I say so.
This comment should be way higher, the details by Levine reveal much more about the situation.
Six(6) Deaf Children Can Now... (I'd guess that HN auto-truncated the title)

It's experimental gene therapy, with very small n, and only looks applicable for certain types of inherited deafness.
Let's also not forget BLM land, where Americans can and do load up a F150 Raptor and run 90 mph across the desert, camping anywhere they want, shooting semiautomatic rifles into the air freely, living out their freedom fever dreams. Try doing that in the UK.
Activision Blizzard reported 13,000 employees as of Dec 31st, 2022
> Increasingly difficult to find anybody with the ethics and resources interested in reversing — or even combating — the trajectory.

This is a pessimistic view. Media has never been richer. Facts can no longer be hidden.
Definitely, those and other forms of the "missing middle" that traditionally dominated cities.
"The results were remarkable. Similarity shaped success. Employees whose linguistic style was more similar to their coworkers’ were three times more likely to be promoted. They received better performance evaluations and higher bonuses."

While not knowing about the details of the stylometry used, there is a severe confounding factor here; an organization in which one works presumably affects the style of communication, leading to similarity in the long-run.
I have a similar usage pattern where there might be days at a time where I don't boot up my personal laptop. With an 11th Gen and Fedora I set it up with a swap partition and force it to hibernate after 30 minutes. So far it's worked well.

It can take 10-20 seconds to boot up but battery drain while not is use has dropped to maybe 2% for any extended periods of non-use. As an 11th gen user, it exacerbates the CMOS problem I mentioned earlier but that hopefully shouldn't be an issue with the 12th gen mainboards.

This is a guide I've seen recommended:
https://community.frame.work/t/guide-fedora-36-hibernation-w...

Hope that helps.
Will the next Call of Duty be impacted?
You can in Scotland: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scottish_Outdoor_Access_Code

In the rest of the UK, it's a little more complicated (for now): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freedom_to_roam#England_and_Wa...
Sure, but this doesn't even modulate inflation. Negative real interest rates = an incentive to take out credit = private sector monetary expansion regardless of what the central bank does. It's a positive feedback loop that doesn't stop until you get real rates positive.
yeah. i am optimistic about it though. i mean just look at falstad's circuit simulator; it's not that far behind LTSpice. this is a (former) professional piece of software compared to a dude's pet project. imagine what we could do if we got some serious work into it.
I've seen a lot of these generic GIS tools.

the problem is ArcGIS is so prevalent and invasive in work flows that the remaining work and workers simply aren't substantial enough.

a product like this needs a ecosystem and a "killerapp" to really thrive.
Kinda?

Looks like I can buy albums there. Check. Can I listen to a full album? It seems like you only get samples.

It also is very sparse and doesn't really give a great band presence. I'm guessing the selections are populated by labels rather than artists?

It doesn't do much at all for recommendations.
The nice thing about brands is it (used to be) a good standin for quality.

Costco is still sort of like this for me. If I need $thing, I can just go get whichever brand of thing Costco is selling. There are usually only a couple choices, and they're generally pretty decent and good value.

In the absence of branding like this, I need to go make an informed decision on every purchase, in product areas I'm often not particularly familiar with or qualified to judge. The dazzling array of widgets available in whatever category doesn't help if I can't tell a good from a bad widget, can't trust online reviews, and can't take "made by $brand_i_know" as a badge of it probably being fine.

I agree we've lost this to a large degree, but I do think it's more of a shame than you seem to be suggesting.
No extra content-filtering but I think the fine-tuning might have some.
My pain points were the idiom of passing giant wads of data around in an unprincipled untyped fashion, and then rooting through them like a boar for nuts in the forest later.

"Write tests!" and "use spec" were not great suggestions at the end of the day.
> not because it “thinks” but because the way it’s wired it’s inevitable that it will react to a human stimulus in a predefined way

This CPU analogy of yours doesn’t comport very well with the article we’re commenting on, which detailed some specific experiments that show cells are not reacting in a predefined way that is due to their ‘wiring’, contrary to previous and maybe incomplete understanding of how cells work. I don’t know if the RAM analogy helps since the surprise is that non-brain cells do have memory and do cooperate with other non-brain cells to solve certain problems, and these collections of non-brain cells can apparently remember solutions to problems over time. So yes, memory can help with anticipating events, but that really supports the idea that cells are dynamic and doing some non-trivial processing vs the possibly outdated notion that they’re hard-wired and deterministic.
There's a lot of weird criticism of MS there but this is the first time I've seen them criticised for not doing EEE?
I'm so sorry to hear that. It took about a year to get back in the saddle. Unfortunately any harm from the vaccine became so political at that time, so it was hard to talk about with people (we couldn't even convince doctors to submit a VAERS report).

She was down to 4 ingredients when we first met (5 if you count salt), but she's up to a fairly standard diet now. Lots of stress reduction, and she worked really hard to test out one ingredient at a time. At this point it's avoiding a blacklist rather than sticking to a whitelist which is such an amazing shift. Things can improve, even with extreme cases!