skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I am not an expert here so I may be mixing terms and concepts.

The way I understand it, there is a base model that was trained on vast amount of general data. This sets up the weights.

You can fine-tune this base model on additional data. Often this is private data that is concentrated around a certain domain. This modifies the model's weights some more.

Then you have the context. This is where your query to the LLM goes. You can also add the chat history here. Also, system prompts that tell the LLM to behave a certain way go here. Finally, you can take additional information from other sources and provide it as part of the context -- this is called Retrieval Augmented Generation. All of this really goes into one bucket called the context, and the LLM needs to make sense of it. None of this modifies the weights of the model itself.

Is my mental picture correct so far?

My question is around RAG. It seems that providing additional selected information from your knowledge base, or using your knowledge base to fine-tune a model, seem similar. I am curious in which ways these are similar, and in which ways they cause the LLM to behave differently.

Concretely, say I have a company knowledge base with a bunch of rules and guidelines. Someone asks an agent "Can I take 3 weeks off in a row?" How would these two scenarios be different:

a) Agents searches the knowledge base for all pages and content related to "FTO, PTO, time off, vacations" and feeds those articles to the LLM, together with the "Can I take 3 weeks off in a row?" query

b) I have an LLM that has been fine tuned on all the content in the knowledge base. I ask it "Can I take 3 weeks off in a row?"
Do you have any recommendations for a carrier?
I’ve got 2 rPI’s thats been running for 4+ years each. Only thing I do is update them once in a while. Both have workloads running 24/7. no issues. I have however experienced issues in the past but those were due to a faulty power adapter not keeping voltage within spec.
In "clinical testing for safety-monitoring or marketing purposes", "marketing purposes" doesn't mean spending money on ads and stuff like that, it means doing clinical trials to see if a drug works for a certain disease or population, or to compare their drug against a competing drug, or whatever. This is the insanely expensive research that pharma companies do to see if drugs actually work, that everyone likes to ignore when talking about greedy pharma companies.

Results of clinical trials (if successful) can then be used in ads, but that would not be R&D expenditure.
Microsoft bets on Germany in €3.2B AI push
Emacs: Gap Buffers Are Not Optimized for Multiple Cursors (2017)
>They all saw Twitter cut 80% of its staff and yet is still online.

Maybe its a bit more complicated than that? If software is built around the business and if the business is no longer changing much maybe they simply don't need as many people around? After all, software can run hands off if you don't mess with it much.

IMHO it should be possible for musk to run Twitter singlehandedly all by himself if He has no intention to change anything. It should run fine until it needs something fixed due to a bug, a legal requirement or a partner change(some provider of some service changing something about their service).

Its kind of obvious that we are no longer in the age of Internet exploration, things are quite stagnant for some time and you don't need much explorers and sailors to do the same things. Know How is there, tools are mature. The average techie jobs have been automated to great extend, be it through tools they created or AI that can take care of busywork or understand legacy codebase without the need of retaining the people who built it.

The interesting things are happening in the AI, robotics and other areas but your average "tech" worker is not equipped to do these things.
Show HN: AI Generated (Not-Real) User Avatar Images for Development Needs
Hello,

There are many services that return fake avatar images, but it can be hard to get consistent names and faces.

In this service ChatGPT was used to generate a list of users with various characteristics and Dall-E to generate their avatars, based on those.

You can get a random avatar image like so:
https://avatars.tzador.com/face

Or request a specific size, like so:
https://avatars.tzador.com/face?size=250

You can ask for specific gender, like so:
https://avatars.tzador.com/face?gender=female

Also you can pin point with id param to get back always the same image:
https://avatars.tzador.com/face?gender=female&id=0987654321

If you need a list of fake users with their names, usernames and avatars, you can get it in JSON here.
https://avatars.tzador.com/faces

Hope it helps someone, runs on CloudFlare, so should be fast, built using SvelteKit.
I has always assumed Program Manager's window decorations were inspired by
Motif but apparently it was the other way around, regarding
Presentation Manager; Program Manager's ancestor.

"Motif was directly inspired by the look and feel of the Presentation Manager interface"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Presentation_Manager#Presentat...
Seems like a recipe for motion sickness.
In addition to /var, tmpfs should also be used for /tmp and similar. That should lengthen the SD card's lifetime immensely.
A vision of a multi-threaded Emacs (2022)
OpenAI's Video Tool Sora Is Shrouded in Mystery
Your logic doesn’t hold up.

You’re forgetting that this data is where the drugs come from not who developed them.

100% of approved drugs were developed by pharma.

And that’s the most expensive part. Spend $5M on early research is great, but all the academics out-license because the government isn’t going to bankroll the $100M-$500M cost of actually shepherding it through FDA approval.

Hence most of the financial risk is borne by the pharma companies. And you’re right, this doesn’t include the billions spent by pharma on failed projects.

It’s a great deal for society. Let private money fund development. Let them pay for the 90% failure rate.

And in exchange, they get ~10 year of patent protection, so the winners pay out a 10-100x return (to make it worth while investing at all).

Then after the patent runs out, the price falls 90%+ and society gets to pay pennies on the dollar for innovation.
You seem to describe using BMI in casual conversation or as a personal goal but there are other issues.

Doctors use BMI as a filter for medications, surgery and such. With increasingly tele-medicine, I only get to fill my height/weight in a box and not treat a doctor to the gun show.

I don't know what other uses it has - insurance maybe, medical fitness standards for jobs etc.

Other criticism is about not capturing the variation between different ethnicities or builds so applying a numerical limit can be quite prejudicial.

On the otherhand, in some cases, weight is weight. There are some things where body-mass, muscle or fat, increases the relevant risk.
I like that.

What I also do, is ensure test coverage is over 100%¹ for important parts. Important is designated through churn (if a file or class os changed on every second commit, it must be important) and through domain knowledge (building a recipe app, then likely the Recipe is important).

¹ covered by unit tests, AND (partially) covered by integration AND by E2E tests.
Modern Java projects either use records, org.immutables or Lombok. Manual getter/setter creation is the exception nowadays.
> Politically-motivated forks by non-developers have happened in the fast

Sure, but is that really what Codeberg/Forgejo is? As far as I can tell, the contributors have demonstrated they have technical capability (look at Woodpecker or Codeberg.org itself for examples), so they're not non-developers.

And the fork happened as a way for them to protect codeberg.org, as the main software they were using for codeberg.org seemed to have volatile ownership, so it's a move to avoid any potential issues, not just a "politically-motivated fork", but a "organization survival fork".

As a counter-example, look at iojs, which was also a fork of nodejs, because of disagreement of governance. Eventually, nodejs conceded and eventually the two projects were re-merged with each other, with changes from iojs being accepted into nodejs.
it's still because of overhiring. Can't trust whatever a CEO of a public company says, there are simply too many stakeholders. There is just less money floating around in couches. Ad spent is down, and will probably go down significantly once AI tools browse the web for me, negating any display ads. A lot of companies with no clear vision are booting employees since the unlimited money train has slowed down.
ChatGPT but It's in 2006 [video]
"Stolen" radio tower missing for at least a year
Isn't this (tmpfs for /tmp) the default setup for most OSes, and surely raspberry's homegrown OS too?
Ah right, I tend to think the tech bubble is the default context for stuff posted on HN, but of course that's just my bias.

I think staff engineers are slightly more common than first level EMs, but senior EMs are slightly more common than senior staff. Beyond that, it's small numbers and hard to draw conclusions. The nuance I've felt is that promotions to staff and up on the IC ladder are more in your control, while EM promotions are very much about being in the right place at the right time, in addition to being ready for the role.

I have worked at "normal" companies as well, and I think the EM role there is slightly different? To me it seemed like it's people management + technical, while in the tech bubble, that would be called "TLM". "Pure" EMs are mostly doing people management only, with strategy and XFN alignment. Does that sound correct to you?
HRESULTs are well intentioned. They originated in OS/2; but Microsoft always seemed to use them half-heartedly.

Users should not be seeing "08CAE5D012" error messages. They should be seeing "Connection refused. (08CAE5D012)" messages, or "No connection. (83255321)" messages instead.

There's is a non-trivial protocol for translating HRESULTs into error text; but it is often not supported properly by Windows applications, or Windows OS components.

e.g. DirectX which returns generic 0x8004005 E_FAIL errors. Or the WinSock APIs, which return HRESULTs, but don't provide text message translations; or Microsoft Installers that report raw HRESULTs with no attempt to capture the associated error text.

With discipline, the entire system could have worked. But there wasn't, and it didn't.
It was some kind of opt-in option (which I wasn't even aware of), now it's on by default / rolled out to everyone.
That's certainly true of both the UK and Germany (and many other countries) where the majority of the population found themselves Born, Never Asked [1].

Is there a reason you'd make such a banal generic point specific to the Torres Strait Island or Tiwi Islands?

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A0ltGjJ7_U8
This is a nice and easy-to-use tool, it's a shame your submission died!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Half-precision_floating-point_...
Did you had a look at contabo?
That’s true we do all share a lot of genetic code. And even then, better choose a life you’re happy with.
Typing 'ma<Tab>' is the same in both cases. I don't like the change because the reason behind the change is political. Give an inch take a mile etc, it's getting out of hand. But I don't care enough to stand out.
No, I specifically meant if your passion was to plow the field by hand. All I want is not to put an equals sign between something that takes years of formal education and years of self study and development, and something you can master in a week or month. Being and engineer or doctor is who you (partly but permanently) become. The tractor didn't rob anyone of their farming passion. It did make plowmen become factory workers and if that was someone's true passion then an exception must be granted, but I really think the 1 to 1 comparison between something that can be mastered in a week vs years doesn't do anyone proper justice.
Hmm, thanks. Now that I search more, I am not as sure of my original point.

However, could we agree that DTC pharma advertising has very controversial benefits for patient outcomes, at best?
What’s even funnier is this apparently powerful lobbying arm didn’t stop Congress from passing a law..that allows Medicare to negotiate drug prices.

https://www.cms.gov/inflation-reduction-act-and-medicare/med...
I understand why this is happening, but the current technical problems of twitter are way, way overstated. Twitter has always been very buggy. It is indeed correct that for the longest time every time you clicked a twitter link and it opened in your browser you had to refresh the window to see it. This was pre-Musk.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20471601

If this happened now you would see dozens of articles saying that twitter is melting down. But now, it turns out Twitter ran perfectly before! I can't help but scoff.
It's a really odd system at first blush. People pay taxes. Taxes fund research. Research is then developed by private corporations into products that are sold back to the people.

It does solve a few key problems though. If universities and other research institutions were encouraged to bring products to market, they'd change what they work on and how. Basic curiosity driven research would give way to commercially oriented research. Moon-shots that might take multiple decades to develop would be replaced with things that can be brought to trials in just a few years. Brilliant researchers that might have made multiple earth-shaking discoveries over the course of their careers might get bogged down bringing one product to market. There's a lot to be said for insulating academia from quarterly reports.

However, things go awry when corporations that turn government funded research into private profits start lobbying too much and regulatory capture occurs. Even if it takes a decade to turn novel research into something you can buy at a pharmacy, the debt pharma companies owe to taxpayers should not be lost sight of. There should be stringent regulations on how drugs based on public research are priced. Yes, pharma company investments, market size, projected sales, and all that should be factored in, but drugs based on public research should be made available to the public at reasonable prices. That's not happening in the U.S..

Bottom line, public money must come with strings attached that serve the public interest. Pharmaceutical companies should be under heightened scrutiny and regulation because of where they get their IP.
He had nothing to do with the investigations, he just made a youtube video about
them. Join any OSINT initiative and you'll see that he brought absolutely nothing to the table - all his vlog did was to show things that were known for decades. More importantly all that "investigation"/vlog did was to outrage the non-russians. There are plenty of interviews with average russians who openly say "well yeah, of course putin has big and expensive mansions - he deserves them". And you can clearly see they truly mean what they say.
>IMHO it should be possible for musk to run Twitter singlehandedly all by himself if He has no intention to change anything.

Not sure if this was a Freudian slip, but love the capital "He" here as if Musk is on the same level as God.
> https://github.com/jawerty/query-hacker/blob/main/background.js#L10

Did you really mean to commit this instead of making it a user config? If yes, then cool, just askin'
Sure, I don't think the likelihood is high.

I think it's unlikely we'll develop an AI any time soon which can consistently solve critical thinking problems that even a junior developer can solve. LLMs exhibit very little of that problem solving behavior. They synthesize information from existing information and often what they produce is nonsensical. When people have argued that there is some kind of reasoning going on there, I haven't found it convincing. I use an LLM every day, it makes me more productive, it speeds up a lot of tasks. It doesn't replace the executive thinking that I hire people for (even pretty junior people), like delegating a problem, having them go off and think through various angles and come up with a really good conclusion... an LLM won't ever do this on its own, it can assist the person who's doing it though.

I can see a scenario where everyone working for me becomes twice as efficient with an LLM (me too) and it translates to a dev hiring freeze and a tougher job market, maybe for years even. As I mentioned in another comment I think devs who don't stay on the cutting edge will be at risk of losing their jobs. But fundamentally there's a lot of room for software to be solving more problems than it is today, grow the supply and the demand will likely grow with it, so the "human developers will disappear so quickly I shouldn't have a child" scenario is hyperbole and kinda toxic tbh.
i took a different opinion after the article — i was of the same opinion before it but the article gave me some ideas i’d actually like.

i’m very much so a bit easily distractable and i do tend to wander and move locations while i work at home. i actually has thought the vision pro was tethered completely and 100% dependent on another apple
device but i guess not entirely? that would be appealing for me to have very light work space that moves
with me for similarly light work (chats, emails, etc)

looks a bit too goofy for me for public use but i’m just shy) but the article did help me see a vision for using the vision pro. better than apples ads
Think "cheap relative to glass making" - which is a small high value operation compared to say, concrete production. (or put it this way: 1 ton of sand costs me about AUD$79 / ton and volume would make that cheaper).
This is a logical fallacy in their arguments.

Compare the list of biggest pharma today versus 20 years ago. A bunch were acquired or merged because they couldn’t sustain profitability.

Take a look at the return of the industry as a whole. It’s not that great.
It’s Official, Apple Kills Web Apps in the EU
More like autocorrect :)
Are more people individually less happy better than fewer people individually more happy? Do you just multiply the two together to decide which is morally better?
> treemacs

Try C-x d in Lem (Alt-x filer) https://lem-project.github.io/usage/usage/#filer---project-e...
> I do realise that it is a lot to take in at once,

Job #1: Shed the cognitive load. Feeling overwhelmed is why people despair and never get started.

You don't strictly need a psychologist or a psychiatrist (goodness gracious!) or a team of professionals for help. Not even a nutritionist. Stop reading about hormonal imbalances.

You don't need a complicated plan to start. Go. For. A. Long. Walk. Everyday. For. A. Year. It. Works.

That's the easiest most minimal change a person can make. No equipment, no plan, no procrastinating. That and switching to only drinking water and black coffee with no sugar.

Those two things are guaranteed to be enough to start the weight trending in the right direction and yet most people can't adhere to them consistently so anything more complicated is irrelevant.

You can always add more stuff on top later. To increase the likelihood of permanent adherence it is best to find the smallest most minimal actionable change and make it automatic so it doesn't cost you willpower.

As for exercising in water vs walking vs running vs anything - humans move incredibly efficiently in water and proper running technique is economical. You can walk for 2 hours or sprint for 10 minutes or run 5k in 30 minutes or splash around, the end result is the same.

You don't need experts or internet strangers, collect data on yourself experimentally:

Eat the exact same portioned meals every day and switch up these activities every two weeks to compare how many calories per minute you burn doing that particular thing your particular way.
It's worth noting that SD card firmware is usually optimised for the FAT32 filesystem, which has a very predictable access (specifically write) pattern, and using filesystems that have a more "free-form" layout can lead to lower performance and higher write amplification:

https://lwn.net/Articles/428584/
Speaking of Blender, does anyone know some good tutorials?
Why Do We Age? DNA Damage a Likely Cause
This covers the readonly filesystem, but doesn't cover the write protect flag that you can set on the microSD card itself[1]. The flag will configure the card's controller to drop any writes, and is thought to resist the corruption issues that can still occur even when the filesystem is readonly.

Also, creating a readonly root out of an existing disto is a bit of a pain, my preference is to use a distro (like TinyCore) that's already a readonly root.

https://github.com/BertoldVdb/sdtool
I think the future predictions miss one major possibility: That ubiquitous/powerful AI is available only to very few people (super rich and corporations) and everybody else is pushed back to basically subsistence living, where they have nothing of value to offer the other side of society because everything has been automated away.

So maybe sharpen your kids on their manual labour too
Use a cheap dock to plug/unplug your devices into 5-10 times per day, and change that when the USB port fails?
Nobody claimed otherwise…
Sure. Still doesn’t make it any better. Physical green is not as eye-watering as CRT green. There’s no excuse.
This has been my favourite approach as well. Once you label something, you get discussions about what is and isn't the label. Once you label something, the debate on semantics starts and the discussion of the problem stops.

At the same time, unnamed things exist in a state where you can't even think about them without thinking about what it really is. You don't have a word for it, so you have to use the description.

And that makes it easier to change too, if it doesn't work or when circumstances change.
For the case of Syria, it is damned if you do and damned if you don't. Red lines were crossed (chemical weapons) and it was only when ISIS emerged that there were boots on the ground.
All my home Pis network boot, so there is no card to fail. You can also change what OS they boot into by just renaming a symlink on the server and rebooting them. Very convenient.
Noone has to be harmed for it to be graceless, its just an opinion
And be happy and fulfilled in either position.
What's a carrier in that context ?
Classic scaling problems.

Most people aren’t entrepreneurs, most people are risk-averse, cynical big company worker drones.

The worker drones have way more time to spend on hacker news, since any job at a big company is infinitely easier than being an entrepreneur.

Hence why the comments on every Show HN post for the last 7+ years is dominated by low stakes nitpicks. The type of things you hear in big meetings at big companies. “I would rephrase this on the landing page.”
> I am entirely done with Apple and will not be buying any more of their products, but I look forward to the competition that AVP will foster.

What is your reason? I am genuinely curious. I used to think that using open devices (Linux, GrapheneOS) gives me the convenience of being able to do everything I want. But over time I came to realize that Apple optimizes their devices for one happy path they envision, and if you don’t stray off that happy path (e.g. on iPhone you cannot sideload, can’t have background jobs), the convenience can be even greater than the possibilities an open design offers (native terminal, root access in Android). It is a local maxima. Thus I own an iPhone. On the computer side I own a PC, but that’s because Linux isn’t yet fully supported on Macs. What is your reasoning?
The main problem with using ordinary monitors outside is that they are never bright enough.