skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Thats interesting, wikipedia is not on the first page for me, my first hit is Cambridge dict: (and then a bunch of other dicts) - Im flying right now but IP geolocation puts me in the US

Meaning of n/a in English
written abbreviation for not applicable: used on a form to show that you are not giving the information asked for because the question is not intended for you or your situation: If a question does not apply to you, please put N/A in the box provided. COMMERCE.

TIL
I hear it should be dropped this summer
Thanks a lot, didn't know about this one! Seems a lot more helpful than the default, full of very similar ones.
> In contrast, the timing of virtually any email operation is not dependent on the contents of the email, other than the size.

What about spell checkers etc? Or even just whatever runs to figure out where to break the lines?
Nope, the map is built atop the Open Australian Legal Corpus, which is the first open database of Australian law (you can read about how I built it here: https://umarbutler.com/how-i-built-the-largest-open-database...). Unfortunately, AustLII is free but not open-source (as in licensed under an open-source licence: https://austlii.edu.au/copyright.html).
I've tried to apply it to parsing HTML as this article into a pretty long pipeline. I'm using DeepInfra with Mistral 8x7B and I'm still unsure if I'm going to use for production.

The problem I'm finding is that the time I wanted to save mantaining selectors and the like is time that I'm spending writing wrapper code and dealing with the mistakes it makes. Some are OK and can deal with them, others are pretty annoying because It's difficult to deal with them in a deterministic manner.

I've also tried with GPT-4 but it's way more expensive, and despite what this guy got, it also makes mistakes.

I don't really care about inference speed, but I do care about price and correctness.
No because your boss still wants you to do some report in Google Docs (and no they can't use that neither) or work with a spreadsheet in Excel, or how to print a pdf etc
Why tough? To me, it seems more prone to issues (hallucinations, prompt injections etc). It is also slower and more expensive at the same time. I also think it is harder to implement properly, and you need to add way more tests in order to be confident it works.
Here in Singapore, everything that Apple does costs less than any car you could buy.
> Maybe. If technology costs are lower than the costs of discarding half of the chicks, it will be successful just because it is economical. Moral outrage won't change a lot.

Killing male chicks after birth has been forbidden in France since 2022 though, eggs must be sorted before birth.

Moral outrage is supposed to turn into law and then it has to be done, economical or not. It can work, not everything has to be seen through the lens of money.
Deterministic? No.
If you need a perfect score, don't use LLMs. This seems obvious to me, even given the state of the art LLMs. I am a heavy user of GPT4 and I wouldn't bet $1000 bucks on it being 100% reliable for any non-trivial task.
iCloud E2EE ("Advanced Data Protection") is far from perfect:

- hashes of files and photos are not E2E encrypted even with ADP on, and are accessible by Apple, "so Apple can perform deduplication". It also means they still know if you have a given photo in your photo roll.

- file type, file size, modifid/created timestamps (Photos/Drive) are not E2E encrypted even with ADP on, and are accessible by Apple

Apple says these are due to technical limitations and they're working on it, but be aware of these limitations.
It means all of these.
Maybe.

But how do they decide when to expand a datacenter or build a new one?

The demand is priced in quotons but the costs are in dollars.

Somebody somewhere at google must be maintaining a quoton/dollar exchange rate. It's weird that it's hidden from the rest of the company.

> so internal teams can be compared with a common currency

What's wrong with comparing them using dollars (or euros or whatever) as the currency? That's what Google's revenues are measured in terms of. If the price of electricity doubles (like it has in the EU) a team with euro-constant revenues could swing from being highly profitable to a massive loss... and nobody would notice because quotons conceal the cost of electricity.
FHE is unusably slow even for the simplest operations, and there is no reason to be sure it will ever be fast enough for any normal computing.
According to Sam Altman in a podcast with Lex Fridman this week, there is no real indication that it will be dropped this year. They will release a new model, but it might not be GPT-5
If I ask an LLM a very complex and specific question 500 times, if it just doesn't know the facts you'll still get the wrong answer 500 times.

That's understandable. The real problem is when the AI lies/hallucinates another answer with confidence instead of saying "I don't know".
Generally these stereotypes about various generations are highly questionable (as any stereotypes, of course). My nickname includes my birth year, so I'm even older than you, but I still grew up with computers and know more about them than many of the kids whose parents put an iPhone/iPad in their hands as soon as they could hold it...
> C/C++ can’t be parsed accurately if only because of the pre-processor

Yeah, decided to check this out to see if it could help review in our massive C-based project. Unfortunately, in a recent patch, of the 90 "hunks", 88 of them had fallen back to "normal diff" because "$N C parse errors, exceeded DFT_PARSE_ERROR_LIMIT").
They'll get better. Humans are far from perfect, and I have no doubt that LLMs will eventually outperform them for non-trivial tasks consistently.
As long as we are talking about specific markets, I have a couple of stories.

In the United States, postal services have access to clusters of mailboxes and some common areas where mailman can leave mail and parcels, which can be entryways or some kind of storage rooms in them, for example, so that the owners can pick them up when they get home. These rooms are locked with padlocks made by several local companies. Once a key is inserted and turned in the lock, it can only be retrieved by turning it in the opposite direction to the default position, but even then they manage to forget them in the locks.

A customer from the USA came to us and asked us to combine this padlock with an intercom system we are developing to signal the administrator that the letter carrier came, opened/closed the lock or forgot the key in it. Nobody wants to switch to RFID, of course, or else the employees of the lock manufacturing company will have nothing to eat, so we had to enlarge the intercom vertically in order to build into it a lock whose transom will close a group of contacts on the panel, letting us know that something is going on. On the edge, lmao.

https://imgur.com/a/63GoaTB

In the UK, mailmen are treated very differently - the intercoms have a special button on the intercom which, when pressed, will open the door so that the mailman can enter and drop off the mail without having to carry keys or RFID identifiers. Normally this button is set for some working hours, for example from 9 to 5 and of course anyone can press it and get into the premises.
It's quite difficult to write require() to `await import()` due to the introducing of `await`... Now everything needs to become async
After decades of picking up new technical skills as needed I have confidence in my ability to learn new things so I don't waste my time learning any technology for which I don't have an immediate need. Most employers, not all, seem to primarily focus their hiring decisions on 'what do you know' versus 'what have you done'. Naturally, that negates the primary advantage that more experienced workers will have.
US global taxation applies only to income, though.

This is a wealth tax.
I think there was a sweet spot when your home computer didn’t have internet. You’d “use” the computer and there would be very little to do other than snoop around, fiddle with settings and try to make it do something interesting. When my computer is internetless today it’s useless. It was the same then but somehow I spent hours fiddling with it. It was the same for even less curious people. If you got a CD with some software and it wasn’t working right you had to just fiddle with it until it did. You couldn’t google the answer. You learn a lot through trial and error.
My guess is that the WindWing requires much less labor. Even by the standards of the 1700s and earlier, working on a sailing ship had a reputation for being dangerous work that chews through sailors, and kidnapping people and not letting them leave the ship was a common way to "recruit" sailors. These days, when kidnapping is no longer in the Overton window, and even unskilled workers have more options than the workers of the 1700s had, it would be cost prohibitive to staff these sailing ships you propose, I am guessing.
Everything that happens is cancelled out by the entropy increase generated for it to happen. And it will also degrade over time due to entropy seeping into the enclosure where it happened.

Nothing ever happens[0] indeed.

[0] Without costing something else coming undone. We can only pump low entropy around, we cannot generate it.
My binary vector search is better than your FP32 vectors
All your bases are belong to us! (yes I'm that old)
Thank you for writing the article on the various models.

But, I think your HN-comment parent is spot on regarding vertical models vs general purpose.

It would be awesome to see an article about when to try to use general-purpose models vs vertical.

The ability of LLM models to serve as FAQs and chat-bots and everything in-between, is super powerful.

But what are the pros and cons of using vertical vs general purpose LLMs for knowledge bases and chat-bots?

I'd love to see an article that addresses how to create these models, and should they be large-scale general LLMs that are tweaked lightly, or vertical models with baked-in understanding of the vertical they are trying to serve.

An article on this might be very useful to many people.
> Where possible try utilizing HSMs, yubikeys, secure enclaves - any specialized hardware that has been hardened to protect key material.

Are there any circumstances where this hardware is accessible in the browser? As I understand, it is not generally available (if at all) for any cryptography you might want to do in the browser.
They already have superhuman image classification performance.
Ah yes the EUs dreaded regulatory environment where robber barons aren't allowed to exploit the workforce and consumers.
You are the creator? Thank you for what you do! I've used it with pleasure for many years.
Older data scientist; let's call it 20+ career years and I started late.

I can look at a situation and usually almost instantly see the right approach. Couldn't do that when I was earlier in my career; at least not with the same level of confidence (which is supported by my results working in practice).

I can mentor my team-mates to be able to do the same. Work with me for a few months and your skills will certainly improve. I can spot errors in thinking as well as errors in code; correcting the errors in a person's thought, in how they approach a problem, can have profound results fast.
> Actually I have been wondering why we need so many general-purpose models? People in this world come from different industries and what they need is targeted solutions. Vertical models can address nuanced problems that general-purpose models might overlook due to their broad training.

It is because the real way to make money from AI is to use it to distract, brainwash, confuse, and make poeple think they need something when they don't. So, everyone wants a slice of that pie. Plus, large corporations know that if they create a general-purpose AI then it will be the perfect drug to further distract us from their unsustainable practices.
There is a disturbing number of young software engineers who have never installed or used Linux, and who don’t want to learn Python or Powershell for their job.

They stick to what they know (usually C# or Typescript) and they have problems if they need to use a new tool or language.
I'd like to make a pitch for Openlibrary.org the free online library from Internet Archive that includes a fulltext search of millions of books.

I've been volunteering with them on and off for several years and it's always a lovely experience. Their backend is python and frontend mostly from python templates and some Vue for librarian stuff.

Every Tuesday they have a call on Zoom that everyone is welcome to join to share what they're working on, ask for help, and generally chat a bit. It's a great time.

Depending on what you're interested in there's a lot to do from helping build import pipelines for more book entries, writing bots to cleanup data, Performance improvements, better documenting public APIs, etc

I'm currently slowly working on a wikidata integration for their authors page. We also could use some help upgrading to Vue 3, mentors for Google summer of code would be helpful, find of ML projects needing help, moving away from old jQuery libraries, etc.

They can be quite responsive to PRs too like I blogged about here: https://blog.rayberger.org/idea-to-merged-in-less-than-30-mi...

For example, here's a small issue that could use some help on the python side: https://github.com/internetarchive/openlibrary/issues/8928
Can somebody explain why this Grok is more performant than Microsoft infrastructure ? LPU better than TPU/GPU ?
That is a nice paper, but it is a hypothetical proposed by a researcher. It doesn't claim to describe what google is actually doing.
The Froghurt is also cursed. Which also is a fancy narrative. It's fancy self-referential narratives all the way down.

(Good point and agreed, but who am I to pass up meme potential. ;)
"most improved awards" are exclusively for special needs kids

highly regarded, or not. depending on how you read that.
could you just use sodium nitrate to salt your food? Like once a week or so?

edit: need=use
Personally when I am parsing structured data I prefer to use parsers that won't hallucinate data but that's just me.

Also, don't parse HTML with regular expressions.
"The study was constrained to 20 participants due to funding limitations" is definitely not enough, and they were only paid a $50 Amazon gift card.. weird they couldn't get more than $1k in funding.

I've integrated a treadmill with my standing desk at home, aiming for at least an hour of walking daily to achieve around 5k steps, with a weekly goal of at least 40k steps. Typically, by the time I get home around 5:30 pm, I've barely clocked 1k steps, but using the treadmill often boosts my count to over 6k by day's end. However, I haven't noticed any significant changes in weight or other health benefits. While it feels good to stay active, especially during passive activities like watching YouTube, I'm not convinced the benefits are as substantial as some suggest.
I have some open source Python projects that could use some help.

I have been working on a static site generator which uses Flask.

https://github.com/siecje/htmd

I have been learning trio (async Python library) by implementing beanstalkd.

https://github.com/Siecje/beanstalkd-asyncio
I initially thought the blog post is about scraping using screenshots and multi-modal llms.

Scraping is quite complex by now (front-end JS, deep and irregular nesting, obfuscated html, …).
I'm aware

The anecdotes masquerading as enlightenment are frustrating.
It makes much more sense to me to have the LLM infer the correct query for extracting data on the page. Much faster and reliable and it wouldn't really be a problem to have a human in the loop every now and then.
Yes, but of course, that takes more data without their compression and one eventually has to pay more for storage as expected, but at least that option is there.
The Mistral Mixed Expert model has way fewer parameters active during inference and Groq has special purpose hardware (and probably less concurrent demand).
>Cue FAAMG being repeatedly beaten to submission.

Is this really true though? We hear about fines that are less than 1% of the revenue of these companies even after repeat rule violations. Also we only hear about the fine amount BEFORE collection. By the time push comes to shove I'm willing to be they (ab)used the legal system to knock down even that small amount to something even smaller.
That's not a problem with unions. That's a problem with the capture of labour regulation by greedy capitalists. It's just another manifestation of enclosure. Don't blame the symptoms for the problem.
I too am a big fan of having my computer hallucinate incorrect information.
TIL. Not sure how I missed this on my trawl of Hugo Winners/Seminal 20th Century Sci-Fi.
I can't tell if this is sarcasm or not, but assuming it's not...

How many levels of abstraction do we need to run software reliably? The fact that browsers have effectively become operating systems should be worrying enough.

No wonder we have all these fantasy projects that take us back to when our computing environments were actually pleasant to use. I would partly blame the invasive tracking and needless complexity of modern OSs for that, but the ever growing software layers around hardware makes no sense at all. We should question any such design decision, and strive to simplify this ball of complexity instead.
AI Takes on India's Most Congested City
As usual nobody cares about the "Average users". This is a flaw, this is a very high risk issue for everyone and should be threaded as a big problem by Apple but as the "average user" is not important anymore...
Maybe so, but at this stage I wouldn't be betting a business model on it.
It was always so.

24 years ago, I had to do my computing A-level[0] in Visual Basic because that was the only language the teacher knew.

[0] UK thing: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A-level
Wonder how it would manage with TLS everywhere …
Might be a silly question, but if you want determinism in this, why don't you get the LLM to write the deterministic code, and use that instead? Interesting experiment, though!

In fact, what about a hybrid of what you're doing now? Initially, you use an LLM to generate examples. And then from those examples, you use that same LLM to write deterministic code?
From what I understand, the problem is that algorithms which should be constant time are actually taking a variable amount of time depending on the data. If I have some server software whose security depends on those constant-time algorithms actually being constant time, why shouldn't this be exploitable over the network?
E-waste is growing 5x faster than it can be recycled
All legal risks are theoretical until you get sued.
Yes. Happy you like it!
India Pulled the Plug on TikTok
I remember talking to a radiologist who said he was sure something like this was coming like ten years ago where instead of a radiologist looking at scans manually, a machine would go through a lot of images and flag some for manual review.

We haven't even gotten there yet, have we?
Aaaand the moment for the Godwin's law to kick in has arrived! And it's not even wrong in this context, I'd say.
> A computer is not a box made to be cozy and support creative, limited programming work.

That's a pretty hard line you have drawn there. There is no reason why it cannot be that. There are several open source window managers which tried to have a vibe. KDE had a cozy vibe. We have a Hanna Montana Linux, which was definitely awesome as a kid. I find it obnoxious that society has decided these infinitely flexible machines will have the personality of an iron smelter.
Replacing Disqus Commenting
Until a single pixel makes a cat a dog or something like that.
It's a totally different approach for interference

In short:

Groq - Ai Chip
Microsoft etc. - Nvidia Gpu
C-like and S-expressions? I guess my definition of a C-like language is a bit off.
> your boss still wants you to do some report in Google Docs (and no they can't use that neither) or work with a spreadsheet in Excel, or how to print a pdf

This is in a different category from printer debugging or launching a terminal.
Redis changes license from BSD-3 to dual RSALv2+SSPLv1
> If I ask an LLM a very complex and specific question 500 times, if it just doesn't know the facts you'll still get the wrong answer 500 times.

Think the commenter meant use another model/LLM which could give a different answer, then let them vote on the result. Like "old fashioned AI" did with ensemble learning.
Perhaps those could be attacked. It's possible though that it's not feasible, that the possible inputs leading to a certain timing signature are just too many to get any data out of it.

Consider that those programs are not making any effort whatsoever to run in constant time, and yet no one has shown any timing attack against them. OpenSSL has taken great pains to have constant execution time, and yet subtle processor features like this still introduce enough time differences to recover the keys.
Ask HN: What are some of the best user experiences with AI?
Hi all,

I'm currently researching unique, cutting edge and honestly kick ass user experiences that just work with AI. This can be a feature/service from open-source to mainstream.

Keen to see the best
Amazing work. As someone doing self-funded web dev, how do you find the time to work on this? Is this a resume booster, a product/prototype, or just a passion of love? To say the least this is groundbreaking.

I love your technical explanations, even tho I started skimming there. It appears this is all built on modern embedding algorithms, plus traditional ML clustering magic. Now that you have the basic data, have you thought about using full generative models for semantic analysis? Ie “write summaries of this subset of cases and tag them with specific situations or intricacies”, and then do clustering on that? I feel like that’s the natural next computational step, and surely (hopefully?) what the many millions/billions of dollars worth of SWEs that were put to work applying LLMs to case law over the past year in America are up to.

The very best projects on here are ones where I’m tempted to ask to collaborate, even though I know I’m already booked up with work through the horizon! I’ll have to console myself with a comment and a very prestigious place in my “inspirations” bookmark folder :)
> The Unix Programming Environment

How does this compare to The Art of Unix Programming, if you've read both?
Contrary to you, I only have a subjective opinion on the matter. In the 12 years that I sometimes use SMS on iOS, I never missed anything. What is it that I am apparently not intelligent enough to miss?
Amiga was a startup that was I understand set to work around the lack of a product development pipeline in Commodore and it was the founder of commodore left to try to repeat his success by reviving Atari. Basically commodore corporate was a big hot mess and both of these entities spun out of that. Atari was essentially otherwise a dead duck already. The acquisition of Amiga wasn’t enough to keep C= afloat and ultimately the product line was taken on by a German vendor …
A family member is a doctor and spends a great deal of time on continuous professional development (mostly reading journals to stay up to date on new approaches and best practices).

I assume as he gets closer to retirement the ROI for this effort will diminish.
This is an article about subjective artistic taste and how its not subjective at all

all can be quantified and everything else is a convenient lie. our inability to quantify something is a deficiency we have in our data processing abilities.
> Phones today have almost no configurations

My friends’ kids are plenty hacky on their phones. Not in an 80s sense. But in the configurations, with knowing various apps and websites through which to uniquely interact with the world, et cetera.
Because the timing difference is extraordinarily subtle, far too small to measure compared to regular network timing noise.