skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Is it possible that the team responsible for this isn't even in the US, so that maybe their position with their job isn't as tolerant of the coders doing anything but banging code?
The instruction fine tuning is what manifests knowledge and reasoning.
If I was going to re-brand a great idea with a legitimate tweak in emphasis it would be “dogfooding”: the denotational semantics are almost right, but the term combines the wrong emphasis (force yourself to use something intended for others, almost never a recipe for great work) with a mental picture that is less than appetizing.

pg has written about this so extensively and effectively that it would be a waste of any readers time for me to footnote: go read all his essays with an emphasis on the earliest ones if you haven’t: they’re great.

I’m not the writer someone like pg is by a long way and so I’m both making the argument less well and don’t have a great alternative proposal, but I bet someone on HN has a good name for this.

Instead I’ll share a memorable quote from a world-famous chef that stayed with me: Thomas Keller has two restaurants in Northern California: The French Laundry and Bouchon. He’s quoted as saying that “The French Laundry is where I create meals I like to make, Bouchon is where I make meals I like to eat.”

What’s an alternative to “dogfooding” that describes the process of building some simple, lovable, and complete by building something that you yourself prefer to any existing substitute or alternative?
Tech companies sure love to run the domestic abuser's playbook:

* I want to know everything about you and who you talk to (privacy violations)

* I can change deals unilaterally and do whatever I want without your say-so (disrespecting user agency)

* You can't leave me (vendor lock-in)
No, productivity and wages climbed in lock step until the 70s.
After that productivity kept climbing and wages went flat.
You may be amused to learn about these, then:

U+2012 FIGURE DASH, U+2013 EN DASH and U+2212 MINUS SIGN all look exactly the same, as far as I can tell. But they have different semantics.
Nevada Nuclear Test Site Monthly Community Public Tours
Apparently this works very well, except for a single letter, Turkish I. Turkish has two version of 'i' and Unicode folks decided to use the Latin 'i' for lowercase dotted i, and Latin 'I' for uppercase dot-less I (and have two new code points for upper-case dotted I and lower-case dot-less I).

Now, 'I'.lower() depends on your locale.

A cause for a number of security exploits and lots of pain in regular expression engines.

edit: Well, apparently 'I'.lower() doesn't depend on locale (so it's incorrect for Turkish languages); in JS you have to do 'I'.toLocaleLowerCase('tr-TR'). Regexps don't support it in neither.
I mean it really depends on what your doing.

If you’re just serving static content then of course you can get away with one small box.

If you have user content that’s being constantly updated and inserted you need a lot more.

You need databases, caches, and in our case elastic search (with ~10 billion documents). The data needs to be indexed 16 ways to Sunday to make sure that a user hitting the page with this filter or that sort selects just the right records.

If you care about reliability you should have read replicas of your DBs as well.

Where are your logs going? I’d expect servers for that as well.

Now alternative to a bunch of this you could just use SaaS products but that costs an arm and a leg.
The break was too hard, because not only it was a hard break, they kept messing the development experience, to this day now with WinUI 3.0/WinAppSDK, still quite far from Win32/Forms/WPF/MFC.

Every reboot of WinRT tooling required a rewrite, and some tooling was left behind.
This is hilarious, I'm changing all my websites to have "Made with cold indifference by $NAME" in the footer now
I've had gigs where it felt like the company was spending more time fighting self-inflicted consequences of their "best practice" "cloud-native" architecture than developing actual revenue-generating features.

So many problems they were dealing with would magically disappear if all the services were running on a single high-end physical machine (the scale didn't mandate anything bigger than that) with a standby one sitting in a different DC for redundancy purposes with incremental DB snapshots shipped to it every 15 mins.

The cloud-native, "modern" infra became a liability and impediment to business but too many people would lose face to admit it.
What kind of systems are people imagining when they picture 'the majority of web apps'?

In this thread, I see people citing HN (a simple bulletin board system); or sites that will get linked from HN and have to handle load - so, presumably blogs, or CMS-backed marketing sites, maybe with a sign-up form or a single product ecommerce storefront?

Sure, I can buy that you can run a pretty robust bulletin board or CMS on a single server. PhpBB and Wordpress with a Postgres backend will get you a long way.

But if you think that's what all web apps are like, you're not thinking anywhere near big enough. "I've seen some stuff that's over engineered" is not evidence for "everything is over engineered".
Couple things no one's mentioned yet. In Aegis you can add icons to token slots, and manually sort them (alphabetically). This, plus searching, helps a lot in finding tokens quickly. They have pre-existing icons for most of the common sites.
That might be true for finetuning ChatGPT 3.5, but if you can finetune a small model (7B or less) to perform on par with GPT-4, while being faster and private, that’s a different story.
Suspect you're getting downvoted because of the last sentence. However, I do sympathise with MacOS tending to mangle standard (even plain ASCII) text in a way that adds to the workload for users of other OS's.
The USSR had the same strategy. It didn't work back then because the goal posts moved faster than they could march toward them.
The benchmark is Sora or whatever Open AI is working on right now or next, not trying to beat the model released a year ago and still failing

so when looking at it that way, the real question is what do you need? all I need is Mixtral 7x8B Q5 in an 8,000 token context window, at the moment

I think there are plenty of other people that can design their applications and problems around lower fidelity tools, or just pursue something else
Not available on Firefox.
> The root cause is the decade of zero interest rates which led to companies intentionally overcomplicating their stacks to justify neverending VC rounds.

Extended hot take: the true customer of a company are the current and prospective holders of capital, whether VC, private investment, or public markets. Keeping them happy is the main goal of the exec.

If your owners' portfolios include real estate, you push "back to the office". If it includes container startups, you deploy on k8s. Your "strategic partnerships" are determined by how much your owners care about propping up investment A investment B.
> Similarly, other applications I built so far all also run under five euro VMs. There's no denying you might need more because you have serious peaks in traffic that you cannot handle with only one server, but do the accounting.

A simple proportional-integral-derivative controller equipped onto your server resource can help you see if future traffic spikes are occurring. The question is, what kind of person is able to have that kind of perception ability and is willing to integrate that into his daily life? Not the average software developer, we can definitely say with great confidence.
contrarian view - how these models actually operate at runtime is not understood.. the formal research papers repeat that over and over again. Therefore, there will be new twists and turns as these models evolve. With current technology stacks, the "bitter lesson" is looking good, yes. Will it always be so? no way to know it.
They went hard with ARM, while developing RISC on the side. So perhaps something like this: https://www.tomshardware.com/pc-components/motherboards/firs...
One would think from far away perspective or first principles, that we have passed the point of liquid cooling being way more optimal in the datacenter a long time ago already (if you're actually doing computing and not idling).

But everything's so slow and path dependent.

I wonder how much you could do with a single rack if you got really serious about it. Cooling, power, networking etc.
running etcd on a single node is wild
>The spin is on how it might be best for any species to simply launch some planet killers in the direction of anything that makes noise. Of course I don't believe that.

I had the same question, but more so. Why not just pre-emptively fire everywhere, all the time, 24/7, regardless of whether stuff makes noise? It seems like that would make just as much sense from the dark forest principles. If you wait for noise you're possibly leaving yourself open to existential danger.
> Yeah they will work, but they will also be unnecessary. You will also bake all sorts of logic into your application that will be solved natively on the stronger model.

I think that a whole lot of what I do in prompt engineering is what's necessary to fully specify the output that I want.

A newer model may be less finicky, so I have a higher chance of getting it to work on the first try (and it's more reliable afterwards), but it's hard for me to imagine it needing a whole lot less prompt.
Seems like the bitter lesson is still right: http://www.incompleteideas.net/IncIdeas/BitterLesson.html
Based on the sheer number of users, never.

Let's apply a bit of logic similar to the Drake Equation. In the total number of Windows installs, how many of them have users that are even aware of any of this? of that number, how many of them are technically savvy enough to care? of that number, how many of them take the time to do anything about? of that number, how many of them do not read this forum?
Claude Opus (largest v3 model) consistently outperforms GPT-4 for me. Better at following prompts, _feels_ much better.
its[sic] 2024, and we are still grappling with Unicode character encoding problems

More like "because it's 2024." This wouldn't be a problem before the complexity of Unicode became prevalent.
And who needs more than 640 kilobytes of memory anyhow?
If it helps you feel better, I know people who were lifting heavy for years, even competing in bodybuilding and threw out their back moving an empty bar because they didn’t think of it as a deadlift and used poor form
It is bizarre.
If you look at the "Selected readings" and "comments" sections you'll have a better idea of the sort of discussion I had been hoping for when submitting this link to HN.

(some nutty ideas mentioned, yes, but nutty ideas about things that happened thousands of years ago...)

Вибачте.
Gonna throw out an anti-cirlcenjerk take:

We know. Absolutely no one has ever said that your super basic webapp that has the latency requirements of "make sure it works", an SLO of "it's fine most of the time", and a code base under 10k lines of code worked on by one guy, needs these super complicated systems. Even FAANG will run internal services and dashboards on a single binary, but when every second of downtime can be translated into lost money, then you begin to care.
"Publish -> people find insight and try to pick it apart -> You either have flaws or you get reproduced... Only then should your paper be of any worth to be quoted or sighted from."

This is already how it's supposed to work. The review before publication is a fairly superficial check that just confirms that what you describe follows basic scientific practices. There is no validation of the actual research. A proper reproduction is what's supposed to come after publication.

IMO the real problems are that
a) there isn't much glamour and funding for reproducing other's studies and
b) "science journalists", university PR departments and now in part people on social media are picking up research before people on the field looked at it or misrepresent it. Suddenly the audience is a lot of folks who never were the intended audience of the process.
I happened to get invited to friends of my in-laws who own a vacation property on the Oregon coast for the 2017 eclipse. Of course, the Pacific coast is dicey at best, so we were crossing our fingers. When the time came, the stars lined up and we had that magical moment, except right at that moment, the waste truck came through picking up the bins. If you have the opportunity, GO. The worst case is you don't see it. The best case is one of the most memorable experiences of your life.
Kangaroos use their tails as a fifth leg - https://phys.org/news/2014-07-tale-kangaroo-tail.html
I lead AI teams at my company. I've advised leadership against any kind of training / fine-tuning anything.

We're not in the business of training models. We will never be as good as OpenAI / Anthropic etc.

Where the real value in applications is smarter prompting techniques and RAG. There is a lot of room at the bottom in doing "dumb" things and simply feeding models with the right context to deliver customer value.
Just because they are ethnically Chinese doesn’t mean they are Chinese citizens. Please research before making that claim.
I don’t think so?

https://www.w3.org/TR/2008/REC-xml-20081126/#charsets

XML 1.1 says documents should be normalized but they are still well-formed even if not normalized

https://www.w3.org/TR/2006/REC-xml11-20060816/#sec-normaliza...

But you should not use XML 1.1

https://www.ibiblio.org/xml/books/effectivexml/chapters/03.h...
I don’t know what the people who say Claude 3 is better than GPT-4 are using it for. It’s been consistently worse for everything I’ve thrown at it.

Debugging a Python function this morning. Claude 3 Opus failed completely. GPT-4 found the bug, as well as two others I hadn’t even been looking for.
I have been running multiple web apps with decent traffic (each ~10K requests per day) at no cost at all. Oracle Free Tier [1] for backends with Cloudflare tunneling [2] and pages [3] for frontend integration. Works fully seamless.

[1] https://www.oracle.com/cloud/free/ (4 cores, 24 GB ram for free; switch to PAYG to avoid idleness shut down, but you still pay nothing)

[2] https://www.cloudflare.com/products/tunnel/ (protects from attack and automatically connects your backend IP into your domain, e.g. https://domain.com/api will redirect to your backend)

[3] https://pages.cloudflare.com/ (easy static page hosting, very fast deploys)
UOS reportedly supports Loongson as of 2019 https://cntechpost.com/2019/12/16/china-made-operating-syste...

Though I found this post from last month https://bbs.chinauos.com/phone/zh/post/17586 where someone complains that UOS isn't updating to Loongson ABI2.0 quickly enough.
They don’t necessarily look the same. The distinction is typographic, and only indirectly semantic.

Figure dash is defined to have the same width as a digit (for use in tabular output). Minus sign is defined to have the same width and vertical position as the plus sign. They may all three differ for typographic reasons.
How does this compare to systems like Ray and Dask?
kubernetes is also a static go binary (kubelet) deployed with systemd!
Great article and I very much agree with the message, but I feel the need to point out that you are misspelling the name of Richard Wiseman as "Wiesemen" throughout!
Prompt engineering in general is necessary because LLMs optimize for the average output, and average output is not good. So LLMs need a slight nudge.
I'm using Bitwarden, for passwords, but I always felt uncomfortable with the idea of having my 2FA on my laptop too. It feels a little silly - if Bitwarden has both my password and my 2FA code, it's enough to hack my Bitwarden and all this "multi-factor authentication" isn't very "multi" anymore...
I'm equally confused, but in the other direction!

He was acting without any special knowledge, so the only thing he was taking advantage of was the gullibility of the general public. That's usually legal, no?
I will always pronounce the umlaut in Motörhead. Lemmy brought that on himself.
Luckily, I don't have to go. It's coming to me. It was even kind enough to respond to my RSVP.
>Do most of your customers expect close to 100% uptime? Yes.

I think this is mostly a self imposed requirement. Banks regularly have overnight technical breaks. My country national rail has 30 minutes of downtime every night (!).

Unless your product is already global, most people won't have a problem with occasional overnight scheduled downtime.
Well, the question is do you think something gets better occasionally?

Windows XP was good for its time. Vista was a disaster but I understand its necessity. Windows 7 was actively good. Windows 8 was a disaster. Windows 10 has been just okay. Windows 11 is an unmitigated disaster.

Windows is now such a disaster that it is permanent VM bait, and I never see that changing ever again.
I think that the $5 tier is a little tight for a web app as opposed to a crud app, but 2x $40 tiers is enough for a decent amount of traffic, with one as a failover.

The problem is that containers are excellent, and IMO there's a gap in the market between "I want to run one container" and "I want a fully managed k8s cluster"
The vibram ”5 finger” watersport model is brilliant shoe for swimming in natural lakes summer & winter (works even for ice swimming) but running in such a shoe is not something I would consider.
Formative
Every Tangled Cord in Your Junk Drawer Ranked
It’s been a long time since I wrote this, but I think the issue with that approach is the possibility of one character being confusable with more than one letter. I.e. there may not be a single correct form to reduce to.
Globalization. There’s people on the planet who get paid a lot less to do a lot more. Not necessarily bad for them. But definitely bad for US workers.
No one's gonna promote you for proposing to build a monolithic app with the DB and queue on the same machine. Gotta have microservices built in Rust talking to micro-frontends built with the latest and greatest JS framework, all orchestrated by K8S running on a fleet of machines to seem hip!
He used a relatively high level macroassembler. It's not HLA, but it could do things like dereference struct fields and reference various (global?) variables. See here, for example: https://lifeandtimes.games/episodes/files/28
> That is sooo much hassle just to install a plain update. At what point does it become enough of a distraction for people to abandon windows?

Or, alternatively, at what point does it become enough of a distraction for people to abandon automatic updates, or updating software in general? After all, if you don't update, you won't have to suffer any of these distractions (or, at least, any new distractions).

For us, it might be easy to say "just switch to an alternate operating system", but keeping the same operating system and blocking all updates can be less hassle for a lot of people.
> I'd rather be poor in Miami Beach or NYC than the EU. It has much better benefits than Romania.

Sorry I couldn't help it. Comparing an EU member state to the US is akin to comparing a US state to the EU. These are big places and Paris and even France are a very, very small part. Europe has some real, real crappy places that really, really mess up Europe's statistics. Once places like Bosnia and Ukraine get in, the stats will get even worse. I doubt Romanian and Ukrainian social spending is very high. Compare to US states and cities in you're comparing EU states and cities, and comparable ones.
Is there a search engine for search engines yet?
CHOOSE A REASON TO QUIT ONEDRIVE
You're not wrong.

K8s, containers in general, aren't solving the problem.

Developers write apps, engineers write software.

One is installable, it respects the system it lives on, It can be tuned to use the hardware it has or share.

The other, the other is a bucket of shit in a bag. The bag protects you and everyone else from it contaminating everything it touches.

Containers dont solve the problem they just enable it.
1. Define a popular term or process in a very restrictive way.

2. Explain why it doesn't work.

3. Coin your own acronym to describe how most people actually understand the original term.

I call this the R3 pattern, for Restrict, Reject, Rename. :)
Show HN: Automate your WordPress blog in less than 5 minutes
someone here is writing such a book in public, here's the thread with the discussion

"Implementing a ChatGPT-like LLM from scratch, step by step"

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39156778

you can view the github for the book as they work on it
https://github.com/rasbt/LLMs-from-scratch
Ask HN: What do you use for C/C++ documentation generation?
Would love to know what you use for C/C++ documentation generation (i.e. comments extraction and documentation for classes and methods)
I've been thinking about this a lot while building my MVP. Initially I wanted to make a product people can love, then I remembered someone saying that people use software as if it were a toilet: you use it and forget about it, it's not there to be admired. No one cares that "it's made by a passionate team of dreamers."

So my goal is to create an efficient tool that gets out of one's way, rather than a hipstery "software that you want to cuddle with" or other nonsense. I am designing a toilet. I couldn't even tell you what my actual toilet looks like, but it gets the job done.
For many of use this kind of overreach in power has existed for our adult lives but it was not always so:
https://www.sltrib.com/news/2021/09/13/utah-librarians-talk/
Also, it won't be long before ChatGPT or similar models will do the same thing. A specialized text-to-diagram generator is a pointless thing to work on, IMHO, except for the fun of it.
If the 8th is anything like today then 50% of the eclipse path would be covered by the clouds. You'd have to drive 600+ miles to get out of the overcast.
Well, there's no expectation in unicode that something viewed as a letter in its own right should use a single codepoint.
I'm not sure that's true.

Firstly because countries like the US are home to many native English speaking people with non-Saxon names, and countries like Ireland in the old world speak English while retaining their native names.

Secondly because many people who learn English as a second language grow up be fluent and can write with ease. I look to places like the Netherlands where students from all over the world are writing theses for their higher education completely in English.

It's not that hard to write in your second language, certainly not to the point that your name could be in any way an indicator of your skill level.
A lot of resources go to scaffolding for containers, runtimes, caching, etc. 4gb would make for a chugging experience if you run a Java spring boot backend for example. But an old school php + postgres stack would be fine, or modern dotnet, rust, etc. And honestly I'm not sure it matters since ram and compute is cheap for most small-medium sites (at worst maybe $30-50/mo vs $10-20/mo).

VPS services are pretty cheap these days. Hetzner, digital ocean, genesis, etc. Or you spend a couple grand to build a dedicated machine in raid6 and only pay utilities.
Note that the benchmarks used for comparison are basically measuring the model’s ability to understand financial content. In other words, reading comprehension for English, just in a specific domain. It shouldn’t really be surprising that a strong generalist model performs well here.

On the other hand, GPT-4 actually did worse on the NER task - labelling and tagging terms used in the text - vs their finetuned model. I assume the finetuned model was better at using the specific labels they were targeting.