skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
My experience has been that there are typically two types of engineers: those who have worked on billing systems before and those who haven't.

I think a lot of the issues arise from the difference between payments and billing [0]. When just starting out and signing up your first customers, you primarily care about collecting a few (recurring) payments - and it's really easy to set that up with Stripe (or even just manually invoicing your first customers).

However, over time, more billing requirements gradually sneak in, such as more complex entitlements, multiple plans, grandfathering, and eventually enterprise/high touch sales customers (where the money is!) who need custom billing cycles, terms, and entitlement provisioning. Since billing is never a technical focus, numerous additions and small hacks accumulate over time, taking engineering resources away from the actual product. Eventually, this turns into an unmanageable mess that can significantly slow down the sales process or limit what you can sell.

The complexity of billing is riddled with hidden pitfalls and edge cases, and it has become even more complex now that most plans include many different limits and usage-based components and that most SaaS companies sell globally. Many later-stage companies have teams of 15+ engineers working solely on billing. I fully agree with the author that, unless it's at the core of your product, no organization should build a billing system themselves (Disclaimer: I'm the CTO of Wingback, a SaaS Billing Platform).

[0] https://www.wingback.com/blog/saas-payment-vs-saas-billing
I am right handed but I use phone almost exclusively by left hand (when I use only one hand to hold and operate phone, like reading HN now), I am using right hand only when two-thumb-writing (like now)
It's a lesson in putting things into personal perspective. When you stop to look there are always someone worse off than you and likewise better off. Be happy with the little coincidences that makes up life.
It's really not a register page though. There are all sorts of operations that you can do on the real registers that you can't do with a zero page address, at least not directly.

It's just a shortcut addressing mode.
Yes and each of those costs between half a million in pure compute to a few hundred million for fine tuning/training.
Now do Gemini 1.5, which can actually fit the entire book into the context length.
it happened by a guy who had literally previously done it and i think at that same airport. i hope they took his license after that last one.
Looks great, and I wish this existed 2 years ago when I started building a HIPAA compliant product!

But I immediately had a few questions and am hesitant to book a demo (I'm quite time poor):

1. What clouds do you support?
2. What does the infrastructure look like, what services does it use?
3. Do I get locked into a particular orchestration or deployment setup? We prefer k8s for example.
Beautiful work
Disappointing that they are not open. I'm considering using ai for a project and relying on something like Google Gemini is not very attractive, same for Mistral, I don't know them. If it was open source you know if they go down at least you can run the models somewhere else.
Wow. You've made my month if not my year. Finally I can read articles again! Thank you.
It's also amazing how once you factor out some things, tanks are armored cavalry and perform quite like cavalry did/does.
New brain stimulation technique shows promise for treating brain disorders
> the bottom 40% of Americans are in debt

That this somehow reads to you as totally normal and not at all anything to worry about tells me a lot about your perspective.

edit (addendum):

> "Joe Biden owns more cars (3) than the bottom 30% of the US SUMMED (0)"

Fairly certain the bottom 30% owns more than 0 cars in total.
Spears, true, those aged incredibly well. And shields, used by police forces to this day, either for crowd control of tactical interventions.
When I look at all of the topics of discussion and concern around AI I can't help but make assumptions about the moths fluttering around this particular candle. If the first thing someone does with this weird new tool is test the edgy teen filter I'm going to draw conclusions from their behavior.

This conversation feels like the tip of the "your viewpoint doesn't actually exist in my AI" iceberg. I think a lot of the folks who talk about logic won't enjoy being forced to rely solely upon it. I know I won't.
Any tips on how to do the same for EC2 instances? Am aware of one that’s allegedly joined to our domain but can’t find it in any owned accounts
If you think that's crazy, think again. Just yesterday was trying to learn more about Chinese medicine and landed on this page I thoroughly read before noticing the disclaimer at the top.

"The articles on this database are automatically generated by our AI system"
https://www.digicomply.com/dietary-supplements-database/pana...

Is the information on that page correct? I'm not sure but as soon as I noticed it was AI generated I lost all trust. And that's because they bothered to include the warning.
> the bottom 40% of Americans are in debt

It's not clear how that makes inequality sound any better.

> For most of the population, their actual worth is stored in their human capital.

What does that even mean?

> Cars is such a weird dimension of inequality.

How so? Cars are freedom. Almost everything in life is more difficult without a car. It's difficult to shop. Difficult to find a good job and commute to that job. Difficult to move to a better city with more jobs and/or housing.
Apps Script seems to be completely down all day long, disrupting one part of a client's workflow.

The silver lining to this is that I've been able to convince said client that further extending their legacy workflow inside Google Sheets is risky and that we should boost the efforts towards migrating to a dedicated app currently under development.

Perfect timing, thanks Google!
Not sure if it’s an axiom of civilization, but it’s the second law of thermodynamics.
Ok, I'm getting it now. AI spam is really becoming a problem. I think the page should be much more upfront about the content being AI generated summaries.
As an eventual-athiest I spent a long time trying to uncover a "purpose" for my life and failing hard. People would say I had to "make my own purpose", but I was cynical and felt the world was filled with mean-spirited and incompetent idiots on a path to inevitable worsening scenarios and eventual extinction.

For many years I lived a very hedonistic lifestyle with the idea in the back of my mind that I would just off myself whenever life got too hard or I just tired of it.

Eventually, like many others here, I came to the logical conclusion that the purpose of life is to propogate itself. On further reflection I began to notice more positive traits of humanity. I stopped reading the news and started spending more time on local interactions with individuals. I decided humans, though flawed, were as good a candidate to replicate their form across time and space as any other.

I enjoyed interacting with children, but I didn't want to bring a new life into a world of suffering and I was not in a position to offer a stable upbringing so having a kid of my own was off the table. Instead, I focused on other ways I could improve the odds for team human, helping those around me reach their own goals and lead more fulfilling lives; and working on structures to help overcome and minimize the inherent flaws of humanity.

As I worked to help others, more rewards (both material and psychological) flowed back to me personally and I gained a more optimistic outlook.

Eventually I found myself in a place where I could reasonably expect to offer a secure life and a healthy upbringing so I did have some children of my own. This cemented my newfound perspective even more and since then I have found meaning in working to ensure their future and to instill in them a sense of meaning and civic responsibility that I hope will benefit humanity in the long run.

It sounds like you don't want to have children and I definitely don't recommend doing it just to "find meaning," but consider what you can do to help create a fair and prosperous future for your species.
Great! We both agree that there’s no way to stop the climate from changing then!

With that out of the way, the obvious next step is to prepare for the changes that’ll come and learn to live with it, instead of pretending like it can be stopped or even reversed by enacting more bullshit taxes on stuff, or by never eating steak.
The last All in Podcast had an interesting take on this:

Most of the R&D and Capex going into LLMs/GenAI is speculative. The investments haven’t translated into real revenue yet. The expectation is that there will be a large pot of revenue at the end of the road, but we haven’t seen the killer apps to substantiate this. This makes for a perfect bubble if the promise doesn’t pan out.

Relatedly Nvidia’s revenue - as impressive as the recent growth has been - is fully exposed to this risk.

Of course it’s possible (likely?) that there will be major wins from this tech, but the fact that there isn’t definitive proof (in the form of revenue) yet represents real risk.
Most armor throughout history was not tailor made so. It was mix and match.
Sonus Microsystems pre-seeds $2.1M for new ultrasound tech
It takes 15-24 hours for CME to arrive at the Earth after solar flare. The particles are much slower than the radiation which arrive immediately. We have pretty good prediction if CME will hit Earth.
There's a lot more to it than that and I'd encourage people to form their own opinions. It maps fairly close to our current reality, even if that mapping is uncomfortable for some to read. Considering the publication date, you can use abductive logic to say "yep, all of this chaos was intentional."
>But then, we literally demanded Google and Facebook to become arbiters of morality - so what outcome were we hoping for?

"We", as in "some unidentified vocal group, amplified to max by certain journalists", but definitely not me. I was never asked and I have never voted for anything like that.
Define close to home. The other responder noted 25 miles. Having lived in cities most my life, I don't think I have ever lived farther than 25 miles to a major airport. But a quick google search: you have somewhere between about a 1 in a 101 to a 1 in 15,000 lifetime chance of dying in a car wreck in the USA and about a 1 in 11,000,000 to 1 in 821,000,000 for lifetime chance of dying in an airplane crash. Even if you take the best odds for cars and the worst odds for airplanes, it's still multiple orders of magnitude...
And devv.ai itself is a blatant clone of phind.com
Astronomers spot white dwarf star with metallic 'scar'
I don't know whether the journalist who write this is aware of the idiosyncratic usage of "metallic" in connection with stars.
> For better or worse, the quality of output LLMs can produce based on such publicly available data appears to be peaking. Recent work has documented that GPT, for example, has begun to exhibit declines in the quality of its output.3

It suggests no such thing, and the problems with citation 3 (https://arxiv.org/abs/2307.09009) have been extensively discussed.

> It has been suggested this decline in performance is the expected result of a feedback loop, wherein data collected for training is increasingly contaminated by GPT itself, as users leverage the technology to produce and post content online.12

And the reasons why #12 (https://arxiv.org/abs/2305.17493) are totally inapplicable to the real world, as opposed to their artificial toy model where no kind of curation or selection whatsoever is done as synthetic samples approach 100% of the training data, have also been extensively discussed.
It's not that he can't fire me. It's that facing (mocked) death gives perspective to the actual threat of being fired. At least in my life and circumstances being fired is not an existential threat. Sure my comforts may be threatened, but at the very worst case I can have a bed in a shelter and food from a kitchen. It's not what I want, but it's also not as dire as others make it out to be.

The fear of being fired gives them more power over you. Remove the fear and take your power back.
I had "a proper server", and found that it ended up being a complete hassle. I'm much happier with the current setup and I've had less data incidents.
but it is in many, many places where you don't live.
Yup, HN overloaded it! I upscaled the deployment. Do I need a CDN already? :D
Digital Ruination and the Death of Adobe Flash [pdf]
I made a bot Xwitter account to AI-summarize book reviews (scraped from GoodReads)

https://twitter.com/BookReviewAi

I find the results very interesting. Like this "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy" one.

https://twitter.com/BookReviewAi/status/1758162004529885573
Airbus has factories in the US and employs a lot of Americans.
This simply isn’t true. It’s true that they’re not great at doing this, but they can and do do it and easily demonstrated by chat gpt actively telling you about things it does not know.

It does not have cognition. And yet it can do this. Ergo it does not need cognition to do this.

LLMs have easily demonstrated reasoning capabilities. The encoded meaning is very clearly explored by the model through its tuned framework and I think it’s ridiculous to pretend otherwise.

It’s not stepping through reflection steps in a way that is familiar to humans, but it absolutely is running through semantically defined pattern processing steps. And “known” vs “not known” is one such pattern.
Not, generally, in the late middle ages and renaissance
a single sentence convinced me: "When Monty opens the door, he reveals information about the state behind the doors".
A per-chapter summary would be great.

The sentences could be longer if that helps.

Great little tool!
Well that happened really fast

https://www.ft.com/content/d2f7328c-5851-4f16-8f8d-93f0098b6...
The production challenges seem daunting: how many cameramen are we prepared to lose filming the fights?

"Smart camera drones" ha ha. you seen the unions around the entertainment industry?
Are there better alternatives?
>It's hard to really understand why it matters that the previous rounds occurred at all

It's not hard at all. Humans are not perfectly rational beings. It's not purely about odds, it's about emotions and psychology. In a version where there's no previous selection and it's 50:50, than I pick one and live with it. In the canonical example, the previous selection means that the contestant has already staked their claim, and changing it to the loosing door would have a different emotional response than a simple 50:50 shot with no previous selection. There's a reason why Roulette shows you the last X spins and whether they're odd/even, red/black... because humans make the assumption that the last disconnected data point somehow impacts the current one.

You're also glossing over the fact that there was a 1:3 chance you picked the right door to begin with, and 2:3 chance the "other" door was right. The last round isn't 50:50, as you so claim, because there was prior information

This is the same reason why the 1000 door example helps explain things; because the math is fundamentally the same, yet significantly more imbalanced. We can also think about how we'd feel about our selection in the 1000 door version, which is likely significantly less confidence, and therefore more likelihood of switching. Whether it's 3 doors, or 1000, the math still say switching is optimal, and our psychology and emotions deal with the choice of switching different in each case.
I don't think it's "better" or "worse" to "say" anything, LLMs don't have 'speech' or 'moral opinions' they're just text-generators. As I said above, it's not a question of the existence of moral truths, it's a question of getting the LLM to execute syllogisms consistently in a context that people are very touchy about (as you so helpfully demonstrate over and over again). If you're expecting LLMs to be universal truth generators I think you will be disappointed for a very long time. If you want LLMs to demonstrate perfect moral clarity likewise. Seems like getting mad at a hammer for hitting your thumb, personally I'd prefer to just hold my hand farther away from the nail and sidestep the problem altogether.
Aha! This is the first explanation that reveals the most common error. The fact that the reveal isn't just a random door. The host must not reveal the car. That changes everything. I believe that's what most people are missing. But if you actually stated that explicitly, you would give away the answer and the problem wouldn't be fun anymore.

The fun is in not explicitly stating every unconscious assumption you have about the problem.
Why did they previously think they where less cognitive?, just because they looked brute?
The unspoken premise here is that profit correlates to value creation, so it may be more rational to allocate resources to people who can generate value regardless of the form it takes (that's kind of Friedman's idea if you dig a layer deeper).
Losing power isn't really an issue as long as those who had it don't lose status. The defining property of situations like the Janissary one is that the group coming into power is exempt from status.
Oh, easy: they'll say the LLMs have learned to "code switch"
Also regardless of whether she's a woman or she's known for intelligence, a response in which you say "You're wrong" needs an extra second's thought to consider whether, in fact, they are wrong, or maybe just their understanding is different from yours and you need to reconsider with their context.

Some time back in an HN thread about programming languages I read a response in a thread about inference which said that a particular feature doesn't really save on typing. And it seemed ludicrous. Until I realised the author of the comment has seen the word "typing" (which everybody else in the thread is reading as "The thing you do with a keyboard") and they're interpreting it as "The thing the compiler does". And yeah, with that perspective of course inference isn't saving typing, all your variables still have types, we were just happy because we spent less time operating the keyboard to write a program. Their comment was not wrong and we weren't correcting them, we'd just understood things differently!

Edited to add, link: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36593110
> In the US, I believe the overwhelming preference of the public (the "obvious layman view") is that prison should be punitive

"There are five main underlying justifications of criminal punishment considered briefly here: retribution; incapacitation; deterrence; rehabilitation and reparation" [1].

Deterrence and retribution are the punitive elements. To my knowledge, no model that excludes any one element works.

> Other cultures seem to find success with more rehabilitation-focused approaches

The problem is we're in the middle. Not as harsh as Middle Eastern and Asian models. (Counterfactual: Latin America.) Not as rehabilitative as the Nordic models. (Counterfactual: Europe.) We're good at incapacitating criminals.

[1] https://www.unodc.org/e4j/en/crime-prevention-criminal-justi...
Hybrid search is definitely worth exploring (e.g. adding in TF-IDF). I believe there is such an implementation out of the box with Weaviate.

I have tried many techniques and seen others try many different techniques. I think the hardest part is selecting the RIGHT technique. This is why it is somewhat easy to deploy a RAG pipeline but very hard to optimize one. It's hard to understand why it's failing and the global implications of design choices you make in your ingestion / embedding process.
This doesn’t go into any detail, not even saying what counts as a “memory safe language.” Are there any practical implications? Will the government change anything it does?
Zalgo Text Generator
In my hypothetical future, at least the people who create the content used to train the models can get "training royalties", which they aren't getting now.

There is still also money to be made in producing physical art or performances, even when AI can produce amazing digital works.
Not on macOS, but if you want run NixOS in a VM or on bare metal you can use nix-impermanence. Recreates your system/state from scratch on each reboot.

https://nixos.wiki/wiki/Impermanence
Final destination the Netherlands
Sorry but the analytically minded crowd is probably the worst place to look for advice on meaning and purpose.

Here's my take: meaning and purpose are akin to solar flares. They are the byproducts of the engine at work. Without the engine there are no flares. So burn yourself up, create heat, the flares will follow.
Agreed. I'm actually receptive to the idea that persistent storage is a privacy issue, but the solution is to ask the user, not delete their data after a week of inactivity. This policy actually creates a perverse incentive for PWAs to store user data on the server where privacy is even more of an issue rather than store it locally in IndexedDB/localStorage, since the local data is ephemeral. It would be akin to native mobile apps having their data removed after a week of inactivity, and them responding by storing all user data in the cloud behind a login wall.
I'm not outraged, I'm just pointing out that Gemini is clearly not fit for public consumption at this point.
Only true if they use the same accounts for both production and development. This would be another reason not to use the same accounts.
> There is only one right answer to that question.

Yes, I agree. Where did I say otherwise?

But if you ask the question of a bag of shuffled Scrabble tiles and it spells out "I DONT KNOW THEY SEEM ABOUT THE SAME TO ME", then what do you get upset at? The bag? The hand that drew the tiles out? The person who threw tiles into the bag in such a proportion that the above answer was a bit more likely than other answers?

We'd better ban bags of tiles that contain a lot of E's, they're way too woke!

LLMs are not people. They do not compute opinions. They do not weigh the harms of A vs B and reason out an answer, even though they (frequently!) produce responses word for word identical to someone doing exactly that. They are designed and programmed to produce responses that appear to be coming from reasoning humans, because they arise out of human-reasoned input and their various tunings and reinforcement learnings and things are adjusted to sound plausible—a word which here means "appearing to have come from a reasoning human".

Perhaps the problem is that we cut & paste just the text of LLMs' output. If every output were in the form of an image of a speech bubble coming from a robot holding a human mask in front of its face, then perhaps people could better grasp what is happening and how to interpret their answers?
Meta drops lawsuit against web-scraping firm Bright Data that
Huawei has created the “ascend” series ai chip. Reportedly it has 80% of A100 in theoretical performance.

Rumor is that they had trouble selling it against A100 due to worse price to performance and worse software integration. But the US sanction has now created a huge market for it.