skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Yes, sadly. If you read between the lines and take his advice more as "understanding the psychology of VCs" rather than as actual advice, his essays are very useful. He has long passed the phases of a manager's life where he has to be right - he is surrounded by yes men who tell him that he is right no matter what.

Matt Levine, as usual, has a great take on the phases of life of a partner/founder of a hedge fund (which a VC fund basically is), and PG is deep in phase 3: https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2023-11-07/bridge...

I will say that unlike GPT-4 he is an objectively good writer (ie has very good style) most of the time, so the essays tend to be somewhat entertaining to read.
People in developing countries are better off with capitalism than without it... speaking as someone born and raised in a developing country. No, capitalism isn't perfect, but then again nothing is

Speaking of Brazil specifically since that's in your nickname, the deforestation of the Amazon to make room for cattle isn't caused by developed countries running LLMs. It's caused by Brazilians who are negligent, complacent, happy, even, with that choice.
I'd rather take my chances with different humans at different companies vs. one AI product (with strong baked-in biases) used by all of them
Well, up until 5 minutes ago his bio explicitly mentioned "anti-capitalism" so I put 2 and 2 together
I am so looking forward to this. You are 100% correct about the SObject model. Get that right and everything will fall into place.

I wouldn’t get too distracted by reporting - SF classic had the absolute worst reporting engine for decades and they still sold millions of licenses all for the ability to click-to-configure. Pure sales teams use listviews more as a ‘who do I call today?’ list based on rankings and last interaction dates. Serious CRM enterprises have their own report infrastructure and don’t use the built in.

Congrats on the launch! couldn’t login to the demo on mobile but will try from a desktop. All the best.
The prompt "summarise this in 2-3 sentences in the least charitable way possible" returned the following on chat.mistral.ai

>Inflection is changing its business model again, now trying to sell its AI services to commercial clients after realizing people can't replicate their AI model. They're losing two co-founders to Microsoft and bringing in some new CEO to run the show. They claim nothing will change for users, but who knows what will happen with all these changes going on.
It is a problem of government funding, though? Isn't it more of a legal and political problem?

Incessant NIMBYism is a grassroots phenomenon all around the West and stops or at least enormously increases costs of many projects that could otherwise be built cheaper and quicker.

We are still paying the price for the 1960s, when highways were built right through residential neigbourhoods without asking the locals. Now, as a consequence, every construction project gets analyzed and litigated to death.

Plus, people in the US don't seem to want new passenger railroads that much. It might be a vicious circle - no decent railroads, therefore no experience with decent railroads, therefore no desire to build more decent railroads, therefore no decent railroads. But the initiative, or lack thereof, still seems to be emanating from the people.

Space is trivial in comparison. No one lives there and if you can overcome the technical problems, you can build anything anywhere without facing environmental litigation from 30 different groups.
Intermittent fasting linked to 91% increase in risk of death from heart disease
The problem is not patents, as such. The problem is the recent spate of patents of ideas, rather than inventions.

How patents are supposed to work:

You come up with an idea for a novel device. You spend time, money, and effort figuring out how to create your novel device. Once you actually have it working—or at least a detailed schematic, if building a prototype might be cost-prohibitive—you file a patent. That patent does two things: First, it ensures that, for the duration of patent protection, you have sole rights to produce the novel device. Second, it ensures that once that duration expires, anyone with the resources to obtain the raw materials and manpower can create as many of your novel devices as they want.

Then in comes the information revolution. There's much less demand for novel devices that do specific things; now people just want software that can run on general-purpose computers. Software is already protected under copyright law, so there's no logical reason for it to be patentable—but some people still want it to be patentable too...with a twist. They don't want to just be able to patent a specific implementation of an idea in software. They want to be able to patent the idea itself, so all they need to do is come up with a thought of a kind of software you could write, translate that thought into patent language, and submit it to the patent office.

This is how you end up with idiocy like saying you own the sole rights to "selling people stuff by adding it to a digital shopping cart—over the internet!"

TL;DR: Don't throw the baby out with the bathwater. Get rid of software patents, and the whole concept of "patents on ideas", but keep patents on novel devices.
Internals of the async/await pattern from first principles
That's not correct and very misleading. The wattage is the max amount of power the charger can output. It's up to the device being charged to negotiate and pull the right amount of current and wattage. This is case with modern charging protocols and even older 5v usb chargers. This is similar to how you might have a 15A rated outlet in your house, but that doesn't mean it's going to "force" 15A though whatever device you plug into that. It's the device that determines how much power it will pull.
Not if it kneecaps a key competitor.
Why would Lightning make any difference here? The charge side of the cable is, and has always been, USB, the charger doesn't know the difference.
Full Speed to me means as fast as the laptop will allow, not as fast as the one that came in the box.
If you assume neutrinos are interesting but the Higgs is boring you want a muon accelerator

https://www.osti.gov/servlets/purl/1572287
If the answer is "yes", would you not let your children play with the other unvaccinated children?

I'm curious about your risk tolerance.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japan_Post_Bank
Right, and from all my friends who did take VC money: it's an incredibly demanding period of your life, a large proportion of which isn't about delivering on your vision. You're gonna learn a lot about office space leases, accounting, fundraising, customer pitches, etc. You're gonna have impatient VCs on your board, with the power to fire you, breathing down your neck. You won't be relaxing much and won't be spending that much time with family and non-work friends.

It's a valuable experience with a lot of potential upside in the long haul - but let's not pretend that it's less taxing than a cozy 9-to-5 tech job where your boss might ask you to update your OKRs once in a while.
Hopefully 2 Stanford CS PhD students hacking on their project would be funded by YC today :)

You bring up a good point about starting from the tech rather than the problem. Usually the advice from VCs is to start from the problem and iterate on the tech until you solve it. What was very fortunate for Google is that the tech translated into a great business problem. Open up any CS textbook and 'Search' is always a major section. It was also a great business because the problem is important, frequent, and had not been properly solved by the big players in the mid 90s.

"And then we realized that we had a querying tool..." (Page)
Ask anyone who has ever failed at a startup before, how easy it is to get funding again. VC's would rather take a chance on someone they don't know vs. rip open old emotional bags with a failed founder.
I felt like this is an important article that relates to employee safety in some of the biggest technology companies in the world
> makes sense to have physical gold like a secondary savings account

That’s fine. That’s a store of value. Stocks and bonds aren’t currencies either.
Hi! Full disclosure - I work for LaunchDarkly. I looked after our Developer Experience team previously and now I look after our Product Incubation function, working on some of our new initiatives, AI being one of them.

We have quite a few developer teams using us for many of these use cases today. Couple of examples are concepts like controlling model functionality via JSON configs, pushing config variables in via string flags, prompt configurations, all that kind of stuff. Beyond that, teams diving into using targeting to add a layer of control over who's receiving those configurations (the beta opt in example comes up a TON).

Gap today is the "help in crafting the prompt" side of things. We're having some really cool conversations around ideas for this internally and how to make that better. Its totally doable today - the UX could just be better.

Another one that you didn't mention that comes up A LOT is measurement of the changes, and how effective they are (this is coming up A LOT with financial institutions). I.e. "If I roll out this new model, is it performing better? Are we getting better results from the new prompts we built?"

Shameless plug - I did a video on this with Amazon for Bedrock, but we did another one using LD for multiple different model providers too. Here's the link - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dTyxRnuI3FQ

If you have any questions, feel free to drop me a line. Happy to jump on and show you live a bit of it and answer question. It's such a great time to be building software. Can also DM me on Twitter (X, whatever) @codydearkand
Fifteen years ago vaccines were not seen as profitable by the drug companies. Then Gardisil was released and the pharmaceutical lobbyists went around urging governments to require this vaccine. Regardless of its effectiveness, it was a drug the pharmaceutical companies were telling government's that it needs to be mandatory, and coincidentally guarantee profits.

My concern has always been the capitalist conundrum with vaccines. If you are a drug company and create a vaccine, the natural business question is "how can we make this vaccine a requirement" to guarantee profits? We should NOT want drug companies to view vaccines as a profit generating drug, because then they will find ways to make them mandatory, regardless if they are effective or even needed.

There is very little to stop a drug company from creating a vaccine out of thin air, regardless of its efficacy, convincing government that it must be mandatory, and then sitting back as the profits roll in.
Not a problem. You don't need work-life balance when you are living in a garage in San Francisco eating ramen on debt that you got from vulture capital.
If you're looking for something more enterprise focused then https://www.pigment.com/ might be a good fit
Aligning GPTRec with Beyond-Accuracy Goals with Reinforcement Learning
I am not sure why you are being down voted. Track record matters.
> startup culture injected into Microsoft is a good thing

Companies like Microsoft have consumed countless startups and startup employees over the decades and are practiced at digesting them without being changed all that much.
Show HN: Tasty.li – A New Way to Explore Culinary Experiences
Show HN: Tasty.li - A New Culinary Exploration Service Focused on Dishes, Not Venues (Proof of Concept)

Excited to share with the HN community a proof of concept for a service I've been developing: Tasty.li. It's a unique platform dedicated to enhancing culinary experiences by allowing users to explore, rate, and discover dishes rather than venues. Our aim is to cater to different personas - from Experts and Explorers to Guests with dietary restrictions, helping them craft expectations and share their feedback on individual meals.

Key Features:
- Rate dishes and explore top-rated meals in any restaurant.
- Discover meals that match dietary restrictions.
- Recall personal dining experiences.
- Advanced communication tools and analytical insights for restaurants.

Current State:
Tasty.li is in its early stages, with our database currently focusing on establishments in Portugal. While we're enthusiastic about the concept, it's important to note that the platform is not yet fully operational. We're still working on expanding our database and improving technical readiness. Thus, Tasty.li is more of a proof of concept than an MVP, with limited functions and known bugs.

We're keen on receiving feedback, insights, and suggestions from the HN community to help us refine and enhance Tasty.li. Your input will be invaluable as we work towards making this service more robust and comprehensive.

Please note that while Tasty.li is playable, its functionality is currently constrained, and you might encounter some bugs. We're dedicated to improving the platform and eagerly anticipate your constructive feedback.

For those interested, please explore the service at [https://tasty.li](https://tasty.li) and let us know your thoughts in the comments. We're here to answer any questions and discuss further.

Remember, Tasty.li is all about helping you find the best dishes, not just the best restaurants. Whether it's the top Bacalhau in Porto or the best Tom Yum in your city, we're here to guide your culinary journey. Let's make dining out a more memorable and personalized experience together!
I've been trying to figure out how LLMs learn logic/reasoning. It's just not intuitive to me how that works.
Yes, if you offer something useful, people will jump through hoops to get it.

Remember all the original Download/Porn sites. Those had a11y issues even for regular users, yet it was popular. a11y matters only for useless websites because they can't afford for users to leave
My Firefox doesn't complain both on Linux (123) and on Android (latest Nightly)
Precisely. Keynesianism and Austrian orthodoxy are not the same as economics.
Maybe my favorite feature in this release:

https://openjdk.org/jeps/463

Finally solves the inscrutable Hello World program!

Yes, it's just ergonomics for early beginners. But could be the difference in whether or not someone new to programming sticks with Java or not.
Full pub is up on arXiv here:
https://arxiv.org/pdf/2212.13881.pdf

My 2c:
The phys.org summary isn't great. The authors are focused on a much narrower topic than simply "how NNs learn", they're trying to characterize the mechanism by which deep NNs develop 'features'. They identify a quantity which is definable for each layer of the NN (outer product of the input weight matrix), and posit that this quantity is proportional to the average derivative of the layer with respect to its inputs, where the average is taken over all training data. They (claim to, I haven't evaluated) prove this formally for the case of deep FNNs trained on gradient descent. They argue that, by treating this quantity as a measure of 'feature importance', it can be used to explain certain behaviors of NNs that are otherwise difficult to understand. Specifically they address:

* Simple and spurious features (they argue that their proposal can identify when this has occurred)

* "Lottery ticket" NNs (they argue that their proposal can help explain why pruning the connections of a fully connected NN improves its performance)

* Grokking (they argue that their proposal can help explain why NNs can exhibit sudden performance improvements, even after training performance is 100%)

Finally they propose a heuristic ML algorithm which updates their proposal directly during training, rather than the underlying weights, and shows that this achieves superior performance to some existing alternatives.

Overall I would say that they have defined a nice tool for measuring NN feature importance, in terms of features that the NN itself is defining (not in terms of the original space). I can definitely see why this has a lot of value, and I'm especially intrigued by their comparisons of the NFM to testing performance in their 'grokking' case study.

With that said, I'm not really active in the NN space, so it seems a little surprising that their result is really that novel. The quantity they define (outer product of the weight matrix) seems fairly intuitive as a way to rank the importance of inputs at any given layer of the NN, so I'm wondering if truly nobody else has ever done this before? Possibly the novelty is in their derivation of the proportionality, or in the analysis of this quantity over training iterations. I'd guess that their model proposal is totally new, and I'm curious to try it out on some test cases, it seems promising for cases where light-weight models are required. It also seems interesting to point out how both training performance AND the development of feature importance both jointly influence testing accuracy, but again I'm surprised that this is really novel. I also have to wonder how this extends to more complicated architectures with, eg. recursive elements; it's not discussed anywhere, but seems like it would be an important extension of this framework given where genAI is currently at (although first draft was pub'd in '22 so it's possible that this just wasn't as pressing when it was being written).
Underemployment historically low right now, your anecdotes are meaningless against the real data.
Don’t put thoughts in my head. I could understand his comments perfectly.
AI brings existential crisis for Apple, Salesforce, old tech: Partner or perish
AI safety and ethics are a big deal. Nobody wants to buy a big heap of linear algebra. A big heap of linear algebra that is so close to becoming sentient that we have to plan what its ethics should be? Where do I put my money?!?

If you ask engineers to sell linear algebra, they invent things like control systems, which are too tricky to sell.
Do you have Things for Mac? I loved Things on my iPhone until I saw the Mac version is another CAD 70.

Now I use vanilla Obsidian with checkboxes - super simple, and I own the file.

There's no snoozing though - you have to cut-paste a task into a different todo list if you want to move it.

I'm sure there's also a plugin that would make it more org-mode-ish.
Japan's universities fail to make the most of intellectual property
To me, it's more that invalidating the cache without it requires knowledge of implementation details (i.e. where the cache is stored, and how the cache files are named) that ideally shouldn't have to "leak" for the cache to be generally useful.

(Buy hey, we are talking about what is famously one of the hard problems in comp sci, so (respectful) disagreements on how best to do it should be expected :-)
Absolutely. Mass reporting for content violations to attack someone has been a tactic decades.
“requires”
Maybe I'm a dinosaur, but if the product you're building is so complex that it needs such a complex (and Turing complete!) description for how it needs to be built, maybe the problem is that product's architecture. Creating a meta build is fixing the symptom and not the problem.

Yes, it is unfortunate that "make" syntax is a bit odd. But if you can't describe the hierarchical DAG for how your product comes together, that ought to be the problem to tackle rather than building a Turing complete language to try to describe how you think maybe your product might come together.
Nvidia: What's so good about the tech firm's new AI superchip?
I don't think the average software developer in the US is paying anything close to the average rate for rents or mortgages, so I'm not sure how you think UBI would help keep them afloat in between jobs.
Kryptor: Simple, modern, and secure file encryption and signing tool
And at a significant cost at that.

Windows has become a hodgepodge of code bases from a variety of time periods and philosophies, some of which leans on some ancient stuff that can’t be touched.

Hell, they had to skip Windows 9, just to prevent breaking 95/98 software from braking.

The average SW engineer here in HN wouldn’t know how fast they’d get to a keyboard to complain if they were to find a codebase like that at their job.

That’s not to say it’s necessarily bad, even if it can be cumbersome, it’s just to highlight the cost of maintaining that compatibility and a difference in philosophy.
It seems like Apple just prefers that companies release software that they will actually maintain, instead of relying on Apple/Microsoft to bend over backwards to maintain backwards compatibility from now until the end of time.
“Learn to code and surround yourself with smart people” is good advice, but it’s kind of funny that Google was used as the example of peak success for a group of 15 year olds. I’m fairly willing to bet that most of them think of Google as boring and old, and not exciting or innovative. How to start TikTok or Minecraft would have probably been a more inspiring example.
>the bottom 50% hold a larger share of the total net worth than they have since 2003

>while 50% are worse off.

Well 2003 is a long time ago so these are not supposed to be exactly simultaneous.

But when you do the math, statistically there is very little chance of either of these statistics being 100% accurate ;)

But the numbers are right there in the most plausible ball park, why else would anyone ever lacking prosperity been envious of "how the other half lives"?

So might as well take the figures at face value anyway.

Well what it tells us is that the bottom 50% is getting a marginal amount more trickling down, which obviously isn't doing any good since it's far too little too late and the full amount they were getting wasn't even enough to give them the economic ballast to keep the ship from capsizing.

Maybe more accurately said to keep the ship from being able to capsize.

One could only hope.
Great work! Keyboard wise, it works really well. I found the onboarding panel persisting there the whole time kind of annoying. I wanted to dismiss it but could only minimise it. It sort of forces you to go through every feature upfront, rather than progressively disclosing features to you.

Nitpicks, but some of the ways in which it doesn't behave like a mac app I don't like. I don't like the non-native looking font. The sidebar isn't collapsible or resizable like a mac app, but I guess you could add an editor-style shortcut to toggle that. If you have a mouse plugged in you get scroll bars everywhere. It seems to maintain its own undo/redo stack? The shortcuts for undo/redo work but the menu commands for them won't.

Edit: typos
> How do you suggest one might fix that issue? Also pin the cache to a hash of all dependency versions?

Pretty much. Recursively collect dependencies by analyzing the AST of the code.

> And then if one minor update And let's say the dependency did change, but it's generally inert (more error handling around edge cases, for example), how do you factor that in? Blow up the whole cache?

You're saying that like it's some kind of ridiculous ask, but yes. The current implementation is already "Blow[ing] up the whole cache" whenever the code for the decorated function is changed anyways. I'd guess that additionally handling dependencies recursively would only modestly increase the rate of "Blow[ing] up the whole cache".

> Your example isn't really a problem with OPs utility...

Whether or not this is a problem in practice obviously depends on your use case. Maybe you don't generally care if functions return the correct result, but many do.

> [This is] a specific example of a broader dependency management problem that affects just about everything.

Dependency resolution is not trivial per se, but it's a pretty common problem. Every single package manager, build system (make), etc. have all solved this.
Hear, hear! There is a market for a no-bs-happenings.com.