skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Not a dig at Obsidian or Karpathy here, but I have a controversial opinion about productivity apps (particularly pickiness over note taking apps/systems).

The worst, least effective guys I've ever worked for were the loudest "productivity method / app / system" hardos I've worked with/for in 20 years. I don't know which direction the causation goes 1) guys who know they are ineffective search out an app that will magically solve it or 2) obsession with method/app causes some amount of the ineffectiveness?

Obsidian had the misfortune of coming highly recommended by most of these guys. I assume there are far more effective people quietly using the app who represent 90% of the user base. All this is to say, don't go too far down the rabbit hole with any of this stuff.
There's another comment in this thread that mentions the book Declare by Tim Powers. St John Philby is an important (offscreen) character in that book, and certain details from The Empty Quarter are cast in a different light by the plot of the Powers book. I also just love reading travel narratives, so it wasn't too much of a stretch.
Our comments rhyme I think...
Your original statement was "I don't believe there is any pressure whatsoever." Maybe you meant that in some limited range, but it's hardly nitpicking to think you meant there was no pressure whatsoever.
Oh, I’m huge on doing the opposite of this.

When I write JS (not TS), I prefer as much as possible to use destructuring in every function definition. Named keyword arguments.

Try to change the name of something as little as possible even as it gets passed around. It’s more powerful than a type system in some ways. Not always doable, but just try it sometime; it’s fun.

I call it nominative programming.
Lmao could very well be.
Also no mention of the outlier downsides. More research geniuses also means more psychopaths and rapists. The question is whether one's positives outweigh the other's negatives.
The only thing you achieve by doing that is making your own life harder but principles right?
Complete AI layman here but it seems to me that the human mind's architecture has an overarching "executive" module that is involved in managing the numerous "expert" systems that do other stuff for us. (split brain experiments demonstrate multiple "minds" in the brain)

Based on what we know about different systems in the brain it might be a stretch to expect hallucination free AGI, using only a single LLM.
I'm curious about views from the crowd here on how to apply the recommendations from this article in the context of a startup

I've worked in both heavy industry (mining /metals production) as well as my own startup for the last 7 years

I definitely empathize with the view that diligently investing in people, and taking time to build sustainable processes that focus on the mid to long term is the ideal way to go... But when your runway is weeks, not months, and it's ship or die, seems hard to justify such a Rosy ideal

Let the debate begin!
When I hear people say that they will have kids [today] because of [reason], it reads as fake virtue signalling. Meaning, the desire to have kids was very strong or 1, so coming up with any excuse [reason] is a self superior moral decision, aka signaling.

I'm pretty sure you can apply this logic to any human decision. Honestly, I've come around to thinking that children are mostly status symbols within some communities (religiosity correlates about as highly as anything), and most reasons are post-hoc rationalizations of that.

That said, I'm pretty scared of climate change, and I'm probably not quite halfway through my lifespan. I can't imaging being a young child and facing down decades of this stuff. No thanks.
Why not `find -name '*.fi.md' -exec less {} \;`
It's not about "hot singles" lol. It's certainly open to hot singles, but there's already a plethora of apps for that.

This is about catering to those of us who are poly, ENM, queer, etc., who want a place where can find both community and dating.
This is an absolutely terrifying perspective. The planet can realistically support about one billion human beings. It was only the Haber–Bosch process in the early 1900s that made it possible to grow enough food to maintain the 8 billion humans we have today.

At the time, it seemed like an incredible humanitarian advance, feeding so many more people than before, and providing higher profits for farmers, boosting the world economy. But the unintended consequences were devastating. Resource extraction has been catastrophic, of course, as has the destruction of natural habitats that come from population explosion, the accelerated extinction of animals, and the potentially apocalyptic global warming that has resulted both directly and indirectly.

Demographers predict a population collapse (https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2023/09/18/opinion/human...) that could see the world drop under 2 billion again, but without help, it will probably come too late to save the planet as we know it now. We should be doing everything possible to discourage birthrates and get the only habitable planet in our known universe back to a sustainable equilibrium.
A Prelude to Speech: How the Brain Forms Words
I heard they are all quacks.
I think language simplicity is a blind spot for most developers. Programming languages shouldn't be judged just based on their performance (otherwise assembly language would be #1) but also how simple they are. The simpler the better.

Go is simpler than C# and that's giving it the advantage over C#.
My observation is that comments similar to GP come from the constant anthropomorphizing of things by marketers and without realizing that this subtle influence on language can alter one's view on what "I" means. The first time I really noticed this was when someone using Siri produced a response from Siri that included "I". Ever since I am acutely aware of this every time I hear or read it.
No, I'm proposing erring on the side of consistency. I think it's likely that this strategy would result in less "censorship" in some cases, and more in others.

What we have now is a system where, on many platforms, moderators often put their thumbs on the scale and decide that certain groups need more protection than others. Generalizing about or disparaging certain groups is ok, but the sensitivities of other groups are considered sacrosanct and must be deferred to.

Like I said, draw the line anywhere you like. If it applies to everyone equally, I am happy. I am fine with things that require subjective judgment, as long as that subjective judgment is behind a screen that conceals identity.
Which might explain the evolutionary reason for dreaming: it prunes hallucination. Might it make sense to interleave training and dreaming?
These are shallow arguments built on the good old techno-optimist view that technology will solve all our problems by perfecting resource extraction.

"With novel technologies like precision fermentation and vertical farming, we could further shrink our “foodprint” by at least three quarters, thus freeing up more space for nature to flourish."

That is just silly speculation. For example, vertical farming may just be a vehicle for impact investors in silicon valley to diversity their portfolio into the new hot mega trend of saving the planet.

Its hard to justify a high-tech intensive verticle potato farm as net effective than just having half the mouths to feed from a traditional potato field.
The OA paper:https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-023-06982-w
Primate 0.30: Windows support, new path parameter style and other improvements
I actually want learn to build every one of the non-CRUD programs you mentioned (I actually enrolled in a Compilers course once but had to drop out last-minute). I don’t __want__ to spend the rest of my life building CRUD apps exclusively, they’re just my forte, and bread and butter, in the present.

With that said, some things that seem boring to you may be interesting to others. And I don’t see how tech stack is relevant; if building CRUD-ish apps, I want the best possible DX. Of course, if/when I venture out of my comfort zone I will need to learn a new stack, but React and Vue become even less relevant for me at that point.
I paid for school myself. No help from my parents.

If it is paid for by others, will they really value it? A lot of children just don't value what is handed to them.
That is making sure that things that worked on an old version work on a new version. That's not the same as making sure something new works on an existing version of the OS.
Sometimes hallucination is sort of a feature instead of a bug. For instance, if I ask it how to do something and it hallucinates , usually it is perfectly logical for it to work the way it suggests, even though it is wrong.

In other words, it can be a good feature request or idea.
Love Obsidian. Yes, it causes you to tinker a lot, because it’s so flexible, but you can mold it to do most things and you own your data. Really hard to beat that.
> off-putting mixture of slavish subservience, patronizing familiarity, and appeasing corpo-speak

This is why chatbots suck for customer support.
Why write this up but not explain it? This command is a combination of several commands used in Unix-like operating systems, connected together using pipes. Let's break it down:

fd '.fi.md$':

fd is a program similar to the traditional find command but with a more user-friendly syntax and faster performance.
'.fi.md$' is a regular expression. It matches files whose names end with .fi.md. The dollar sign $ in regular expressions signifies the end of a line or string, so this ensures that the command only finds files that exactly end with .fi.md.
|:

This is a pipe. It takes the output of the command on its left (the list of files found by fd) and uses it as the input for the command on its right.
xargs -I _ -- batcat --paging=always _:

xargs is a command used to build and execute command lines from standard input.
-I _ tells xargs to replace occurrences of _ in the initial arguments with names read from standard input (the list of files provided by fd).
-- is used to signify the end of command options, after which only positional arguments are accepted.
batcat --paging=always _: Here, batcat is likely an alias or a symlink to bat, a command that provides syntax highlighting and Git integration for a variety of file types, and it's an improved version of the cat command. --paging=always ensures that bat always uses a pager (like less) to display the file content, regardless of the size of the file.
_ is replaced by each file name from the output of fd.
Putting it all together:

The command finds all files ending in .fi.md in the current directory and subdirectories.
For each of these files, it then calls batcat (or bat) with the --paging=always option, effectively displaying their contents with syntax highlighting and paging, allowing you to scroll through the content if it's longer than the screen size.
It's never that easy. You'd be surprised the number of homeless folks being in that situation because of things like addiction, mental health issues, etc. Just giving them the money is mostly not helpful.
https://prose.sh was inspired by obsidian. It’s not a note taking app, but ensuring the user’s markdown is local first was a big motivating factor.

So many blog platforms have to build export functionality and it felt totally unnecessary especially considering many are all markdown anyway.
I am pretty sure when i search "lord of the rings review" or "the hobbit" there are least a 500 different blog post reviewing and i would like to have option to choose to read as many review as i want and not be limited to to 10 or 50 search results.
Typically the domain name of the service is related to (i.e. the fingerprint of) the public key being used. This is unfortunately painful to use, so I don't know anyone using it at scale outside Tor's onion services.

https://community.torproject.org/onion-services/advanced/htt...
Maybe keep your suspicions to yourself unless you have evidence to the contrary? The guy's not asking for handouts and your negative posts my get in the way of someone being able to offer some real help.

#1 reason for becoming homeless is not asking for help when you need to.
> Surely learning an algorithm is memorization?

Yes. In a sense, every algorithm can be reduced to memorization, where you precalculate all possible inputs to all possible outputs and store them in a giant lookup table.
> Your notes are simple plain-text markdown files stored locally on your computer

That’s true, but with the canvas feature they broke the promise of your notes just being directories of markdown files and attachments. I really, really like Obsidian for its core functionality and I worry that they are going to keep adding features and end up ruining it.

For me, the best news would be them announcing it is feature complete and switch the project into maintenance mode. Bug fixes, performance improvements, and platform updates.
He's articulated something I've been trying to put into words for a long time. It seems like with every app I use, I'm being asked to sign-in, sell my data, collaborate in real time with other users, and be in awe at the cutting edge AI experience.
Ask HN: How do you handle personalization in a SaaS?
In a SaaS project, how do you handle personalization? Is it easy? Does it contribute to your sales? I'm not talking about marketing personalization.
So the author mentions a sustainable population level but does absolutely no research into what level is sustainable, nor talk about it at all in their own argument.

And of course we see no mention of obvious counterpoints. More geniuses, ok. But how about more psychopaths? Not just from a pure numbers perspective, but higher psychopathology rates correlate with higher living densities, which are sure to increase when increasing the population significantly.

Arguments about more people meaning more cuisine need much greater support. It seems much of the culinary development flourished because of isolation first followed by globalization. What we've seen more recently seems to be less new styles or dishes and more homogenization of existing styles. Much of the exposure to other cuisines is actually from negatives like war and famine, both from occupation, refugees, and warriors returning home with newly acquired tastes. And of course many of these conflicts were around scarcity of resources especially during transitional times when switching from one resource/tech to another.

Like they say in the market, past returns are not indicicators of future returns. Blindly relying on benefits of infinite technology growth exceeding the rate of population demands is not a compelling argument.
> For all the faults of ActivityPub, the extremely “gated community” like approach provides the social incentive for users to feel a sense of belonging to a server, and for the server owner and moderator to feel a sense of pride and ownership over providing service to their users. Being within a valued community also incentivizes people to donate to pay for server cost and moderation effort.

are social incentives going to be enough long-term though?

I keep looking at this and thinking of three things: trust, security, and Reddit. These are actual questions, not arguments, I'm genuinely curious.

Can you trust an admin to host and police your social network? Moving servers isn't hugely difficult iirc, but it could be very disruptive and drama-ful. It would have to get pretty bad before people start to overcome the network effect inertia and actually move.

What is there to hold hosts accountable for security? The threat of reputational damage doesn't seem like it is going to mean much to pseudonymous volunteers, so what can be done to ensure hosts are properly protecting the system from promise?

Reddit moderators are, by and large, reasonable but there's a non-trivial minority who will do things like stage a coup against the other moderators, start arbitrarily banning or harassing people, or just straight up ghost the site and never follow up on the rules. same as above, what mechanisms exist to prevent or reverse or take over the actions of an rogue/absentee mod?
Definition 2 (Large Language Model). Let S be a computable seta of all the finite-length
strings of alphabet A and (s0, s1, . . .) be an one-to-one enumeration of all the elements in S. A
large language model, denoted h, is a function that completes the input string s ∈ S using the
function’s predicted tokens h(s), in a finite time. Function h is attained procedurally using a set
of training samples of input-completion pairs.

For an arbtrarily large duration and an arbitrarily small error with respect to any definition of error you choose, there exists an LLM in the above sense which models the dynamics of your brain with that small error.
I felt this one.

The #productivity and #obsidian channels on company work slacks have always been the same people who other people joke (behind their back of course) about as nobody understands how the hell they have so much free time to talk about productivity all day. It’s always this group of bunch of vocal, combative, and narcissistic chatters who seem to round the bunch up.

Personally? I just want to get work done and not really talk about getting work done while at work. I’ll save my mindnode tree for deciding how I want to build my backyard shed.
Unrelated but somewhat still maybe interesting...

In 1999 Larry Page and Sergey Brin tried to sell Google: "...They went to Excite CEO George Bell and offered to sell it to him for $1 million. He rejected the offer. Vinod Khosla, one of Excite's venture capitalists, talked the duo down to $750,000, but Bell still rejected it..." - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Google
Ok, but LLMs are just tools, and I'm just asking how a tool can be made more useful. It doesn't really matter why an LLM tells you to go look elsewhere, it's simply more useful if it does than if it hallucinates. And usefulness isn't binary, getting the error rate down is also an improvement.
A bit late to respond, but this is not an user error. From the bug description it SEEMS (because there's still zero feedback from the dev's front) that it's Element itself failing to send the keys in the first place, probably due to a mishandled connection/transmit error and not attempting to retry. It's not a protocol error, unless you count the fact there isn't a mechanism in place to ack at least asynchronously that decryption is ok.

This is compounded by the fact that there seems no mechanism to recover for the receiver. The receiving client is just oblivious, it will _never_ be able to decrypt the messages and thus also never be able to backup the session keys if none of the clients associated with the account ever received the keys.

The suggested work-around is forcing the sending client to rotate the session keys earlier and thus fix the _following_ messages only.

I've been in situations where two element clients (both sending and receiving) failed to decrypt each other's messages.

This is a pretty damning issue for a client that enables encryption by default.
What about a genius-psychopath rapist? (Have to be careful of the grammar there because I want to be clear that I mean a rapist who is also a genius and psychopath, not a genius who targets psychopath rapists).

I kid, but a lot of the top Nazis were geniuses by IQ; I don't know that there's any reason to believe that virtue and genius are correlated, which is only one of the reasons I think this whole conversation is a bit goofy. It honestly feels like yet another weirdo billionaire rationalization for why the line must always go up.
The core argument in this paper it seems to me from scanning it is that because P != NP therefore LLMs will hallucinate answers to NP-complete problems.

I think this is a clever point and an interesting philosophical question (about math, computer science, and language), but I think people are mostly trying to apply this using our commonsense notions of "LLM hallucination" rather than the formal notion they use in this paper, and I don't see an obvious connection, since commonsense hallucinations (eg inventing chapters of a novel when asked to produce summaries, inventing specific details when asked) don't seem to be NP-complete problems but rather are hallucinatory for some other interesting reason. (I apologize if I have not captured the paper correctly and would welcome correction on that, I read it quickly)

The statement that the formal world (the world of math and logic and formal grammars) is a subset of the "real" world (or perhaps, the world of natural language) is really interesting to me as well. Most humans can't solve formal logic problems and parse formal grammars but don't suffer from a (strong) hallucination effect, and can work in natural language in great proficiency. Is hallucination inevitable in humans since we also can't solve certain NP-complete problems? We have finite lifespans, after all, so even with the capabilities we might never complete a certain problem.
The Terrible UX of Spreadsheets
Nuxt releases Nuxt UI Pro v1.0
> Based on what we know about different systems in the brain it might be a stretch to expect hallucination free AGI, using only a single LLM.

Based on what we know about brains, it might be a stretch to expect hallucination free AGI. I’ve yet to meet a general intelligence that doesn’t hallucinate.

Lots of fun examples from chickens who turn off when they see a straight line to cats who get spooked by cucumbers and the endless fun cognitive biases humans fall for.
Except I think endisneigh is being sarcastic. https://www.youtube.com/@AndrejKarpathy; https://www.linkedin.com/in/andrej-karpathy-9a650716/;
I am a big fan of your channel for quite some time. Thanks for your content! I wish I had the practical talent and your patience when it comes to repairs and restorations.
>> it is likely that we'd be in the middle of a Nazi new world order.

Ask people born in a former soviet union country who they thought "won" WW2. It is not likely in any scenario that the US would be in the middle of a Nazi world order if Pearl Harbor wasn't attacked, calling it a miracle is disgusting.

Fwiw I have direct family that fought in WW2 in the Pacific.
Just a note from my own experiments with Ollama—it's tempting to use LangChain as a sort of unofficial Ollama client library because it's so easy to set up, but be warned that because LangChain abstracts over many providers it doesn't actually give access to the full power of the Ollama API, so for anything other than very simple toy demos it's not a great choice unless you actually want to use the other LangChain abstractions.

The first pain point you're likely to run into is that Ollama provides a running binary context that represents all the processing your GPU has done in the conversation so far, but the last time I looked into LangChain they wanted you to build up a plaintext context on the client and ask Ollama to re-process it on every request. This works well as part of the wider suite of LangChain tools, but isn't great if you really just need Ollama.

For JS/TS and Python, Ollama now provides an official client library which presumably does take advantage of all Ollama features [0]. For other languages, the Ollama API is actually very simple [1] and easy to wrap yourself, and I'd recommend doing so unless you specifically need some of the abstractions LangChain provides.

[0] https://ollama.com/blog/python-javascript-libraries

[1] https://github.com/ollama/ollama/blob/main/docs/api.md#gener...
Show HN: Hacker News Reader Built with Next.js App Router
OSINT should be all caps in the title link here on HN. Pedantic, but necessary.

Other than that I'm concerned the list contains an item from Kaspersky. Any current or former US intel personnel would urge you to be skeptical of Kaspersky—if not to avoid it like the plague. Kaspersky is alleged to be a Russian state actor or at the very least too close to the Russian government (FSB?). Any of the Five Eyes agencies would likely concur. As would any European agency, or Mossad, etc.

Kaspersky software is banned from US government computers and devices. Tread carefully.