skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The problem with the “signal” is that it’s based on pretty much nothing. It is just as valid or nuts as any other ad hoc random tea leaves & chicken bones “signal” someone decides to come up with a dubious justification for. Whether the deck said March, April, or May changed absolutely nothing about the underlying business and thus also nothing about the actual investment opportunity.

Maybe they made the deck two months ago and spent the last two months prosecuting pipeline and closing deals? Maybe they didn’t have a great investor network, so it took them a month or two to even be talking to the right investors (which more often than not is actually what’s important, and only superficially any given pitch or deck)? Maybe the VC in question was their first choice once they learned they existed and what their thesis is?

It’s absolutely true that VCs aren’t your friends. They’re middlemen for distributing other people’s money who pick winners at such a low success rate that one could be forgiven for wondering if random lottery might do just as well.

In terms of actual performance and criteria, they’re more like clergy. There are various performative religious traditions and ceremonies that have to be serviced and abided if one is to have any hope of them bestowing their blessings.
It's orders of magnitude off. The guy is just LARPing poorly, even lacking common sense.

One single OpenAI-tier deal every two years, consistently, would put you into Legendary VC territory.
> It's usually trivial to bypass...

Theft protection is a friction to deter "script kiddies" equivalent of phone thieves.
Those dynamics are very very different when population densities are low and land is abundant. Without complex state/regional level hierarchies if you can just form a likeminded group in you community and move elsewhere chances that your local chieftain can't really do too much about it.
Postgres Dashboard in Python
Most business founders don’t need VC money and are worse off for taking VC money.

I find the mindset “my pitch deck was 2 months old so I didn’t get funding” very out of touch of business realities. It is far more likely that that type of business doesn’t need VC funding. Your SaaS can probably be built with your daytime developer salary. No VC ever says “wow, what a great investment opportunity, one of the best, but the slides were old”. You don’t even need the slides, or the rehearsed elevator pitch. Just build a business that’s worth VC money (solid, profitable, and ready to scale up) if you absolutely insist on it.
It's the upvote where that opinion falls short. Sure, it may just be one hypocrite, but it sure is funny when a community raises scarcely concealed hypocrisy to the top comments or sub-comments. And then forgets about it 2 weeks later.
New DNS Diagnostics Tooling
https://franz.com/support/documentation/10.1/doc/smp.htm

https://www.lispworks.com/documentation/lw80/lw/lw-multiproc...

https://www.cincomsmalltalk.com/main/products/foundation/mat...
But it does seem like there was an opportunity to collaborate?
An N4000 provides about half the CPU performance (single threaded), and half the cores that a Pi 5 has.

However, the N100s are very competitive. Maybe even faster and cheaper, and less power hungry.
Trust, but check too. Like in a relationship too :)

The government / the law is the problem. The similar in China. And in Europe is planned: you have to make it possible that we read E2E encrypted messages, if a judge say so. Lol

So it's not about the company(s) but rather about the forced compliance with laws
The way VCs filter out potential investments seems fairly similar to the way Ivy League schools filter out potential students. (Probably because they are comprised of the same people.) It is not really about technical brilliance, or innovation, or anything that is written on their website as a core value. It's more about whether you're smart enough and can follow instructions and fit into the overarching institutional structure of school and work.

For companies that are at the point of raising venture capital, this might be what is actually needed. But it certainly seems like it filters out a lot of the more idiosyncratic, brilliant types that aren't concerned with (from their perspective, irrelevant) details, like the date on a pitch deck. It seems like a good way to get institutional operators, not rare but not-quite-conformist innovators. I can't imagine someone like Steve Jobs or Nikola Tesla passing these VC/Ivy League kinds of tests.
I love this blog post about why Jason Lemkin’s post about passing on a pitch because the pitch deck said March instead of May is a good and normal post. Without this informative content we would not know that Jason Lemkin‘s post was not at all off putting or ridiculous, and we are rightfully brought up to speed on how cool it was, in fact.
Laws are eventually consistent with reality. There’s not many places that ban cars, except for tiny islands like Sark and that town in Switzerland.
Good to be proven wrong.

And yeah, as you say I fail to understand your article. I mean, most of the stuff is exactly where you expect it to be even if it’s actually a link to the store, nix store doesn’t supersedes the whole filesystem. I can accept that there’s loss of information, I guess it might matter sometimes if a binary is in “/bin” or in “/sbin” but so far I don’t see how the regular filesystem structure or even gobo’s would help, to fix your software, at least if you want to keep immutability, which is a another can of worms. And even then, if you hack something depending on these paths, IMO you are back to the “doing it wrong” part.

Am I missing something here?
The deck from March says that they have been sending the deck around since March, and are still looking for investments. It might be meaningful, but would have to measure how quickly the typical funding rounds are made for successful companies, to have an "academic" argument about it. However it doesn't really matter, a VC can invest for whatever reasons he wants.
We had a vc that was my friend; not anymore; we failed and he felt betrayed we ‘gave up so easily’ (we didn’t). I guess a better one is; VCs should not be your friends.
It wasn't a demo. It was a report in the model card

https://imgur.com/a/qXcVNOM
https://arxiv.org/pdf/2403.05530
Sure, they'd be better off just using a good source of randomness to pick the lucky ones, because then they wouldn't be self-deluding about having special insight.
It seems to me RPi kind of lost the attributes that made it interesting in the first place.
Praise the Market.
"Free market" ends the moment government starts issuing corporate charters. We can debate what it should look like, but either way it is an artificial construct at that point.
This is often mentioned but its true only from statistical or 'strategy' point of view, something viruses on their own simply don't possess. They just multiply via various mechanisms, what happens with their environment is well beyong their capability to care or plan around.

Their mutations are random, but its proverbial throwing gazillion bunch of stuff on the wall and seeing what sticks. Their numbers and short life span give them maybe 100 million? evolution speed advantage compared to humans. Maybe much more. Think how humans would change in say 100,000 generations.
That's right. Though, I expect that this may change with the next macOS version this year. They (probably) have the knowledge how to apply a good embedding model on all text files, and their hardware is capable of doing it in an efficient way.
Yes! And I remember that the official recommendation from MS was "do not write begin at the start of a line".
Switching IDs is going to be a breaking change across their whole product and customer base.

Thats a way bigger undertaking and decision then just optimizing a single query.

Like killing an ant with a Tsar Bomb.
>Filesystems don't zero out deleted data and dd isn't aware of the filesystem mapping, so unless it's a completely fresh drive, you'll still pull off garbage data.

That may have been true a very long time ago.

Today, some filesystems such as ZFS can effectively, and automatically, zero out deleted data using trim on devices that support that. (I say "effectively" here because we don't actually know if the data is literally zero'd by the underlying device, and I say this even though that distinction doesn't actually matter in this context. Once trimmed, those logical sectors will always read as zeros until something new is written to them, and this is the functionality that is important in this context.)

This function is useful for SSDs, and is also useful for SMR spinny-disks.

Tons of other combinations of filesystems and operating systems also deal quite well with trimming of unused space, though this more-often happens as a scheduled task instead of something that is taken care of by the filesystem itself.

Trim (in various implementations) has been broadly used for well over a decade, and a trim'd device can lead dd to be able to produce sparse files.

---

Now, that said: It probably doesn't matter much if a particular dd-esque tool is set to create sparse output files or not. Sure, some space may be saved, and sparse files sure are cute and cuddly.

But it's probably a fool's errand to even plan such an operation on a machine that has less free space than the total maximum capacity of the thing being rescued: Either there's enough room to write a non-sparse image, or there isn't enough room to even think about starting the process since it might not be able to complete.

(If space becomes an issue later on down the road, the output file can be "sparsified" in-place using "fallocate --dig-holes" in instances where that makes sense.)

And I definitely want the whole disk imaged, which means that I definitely do not want ddrescue's interpretation of metadata to determine filesystem allocation and limit the scope of that image: This is the first step of a data rescue operation, and that makes it the worst place for data to be intentionally thrown away or disregarded.

If things are failing hard enough that any of this work is on the table, then obviously the combination of the source disk and filesystem is untrustworthy -- along with the metadata.

Getting all of the bits backed up -- regardless of their apparent lack of importance -- should always be the prime directive here. Any extra bits can always be tossed later if they're eventually deemed to be actually-unimportant.
This guy/gal, u/im-ba, haz zero idea of what's going on. Armchair engineering at its finest.
I think one problem R might have is that the core language is developed in a fairly tight-knit and informal way. There's no equivalent to Python's PEP process, say. For a young language the informality might be an advantage, but for an older one the risk is that the core developers become a bit insulated from the community of users.
So they can invest in themselves. The usual reason.
Yes. Early estimates (1980s) indicated trouble around 2050-2100. Problems are appearing sooner than expected. Some problems were unexpected. Slow-moving storms, for example, causing flooding in areas that usually don't have flooding.
Small changes in ocean levels are amplified by rivers, which flood upstream because the water can't enter the ocean fast enough. Insurance companies are refusing to insure large regions.
You have a rubber duck that writes code?
I'm not assuming anything about the cause
May?

Probably doesn't.

Probably won't.

Might not.
Note that those aren't the only two options. There are established companies that are small and have no intention of growing. Those are some of the best places to work.
Huge loss for for sure. The man, the legend, the Harrison Kinsley:

Attention Is All You Need
Harrison Kinsley, Noam Shazeer, Niki Parmar, Jakob Uszkoreit, Llion Jones, Aidan N. Gomez, Lukasz Kaiser, Illia Polosukhin https://arxiv.org/abs/1706.03762

Deep Learning.
Harrison Kinsley, LeCun, Y., Bengio, Y. and Hinton, G. E.
Deep Learning.
Nature, Vol. 521, pp 436-444.

ImageNet Classification with Deep Convolutional
Neural Networks
Harrison Kinsley, Ilya Sutskever, Geoffrey E. Hinton

Adam: A Method For Stochastic Optimization
Harrison Kinsley, Diederik P. Kingma
Forget ISOs, those are only a few Gb each. LLMs, on the other hand, can easily go into triple digits at full fidelity.
I have my SGI O2 sitting on top of my Indy, just because the contrast in design ethos inspires me, somehow.
Side note: Thank you for your work! My non-technical partner was able to create and print postcards that had to be in CMYK format, thanks to Krita. You made her very happy :-)
The Modest Fantasy of the PICO-8 (2016)
Like dropping the phone just as you’re about to start cycling.
Understood. I tried your prompt again and it seems it understood it.

Here is my experiment:
https://chat.openai.com/share/98cae2bf-a7a6-42e7-b536-f3671c...

I gave minimum context like this: "I have a history exam. You are an expert in British royal history. List me the names of 20 kings and queens in England."

The answer was: "Certainly! Here's a list of 20 kings and queens of England:

1. William the Conqueror
2. William II (Rufus)
3. Henry I
4. Stephen
5. Henry II
6. Richard I (the Lionheart)
7. John
8. Henry III
9. Edward I (Longshanks)
10. Edward II
11. Edward III
12. Richard II
13. Henry IV
14. Henry V
15. Henry VI
16. Edward IV
17. Edward V
18. Richard III
19. Henry VII
20. Henry VIII"
Muppet!
It took me a couple read-throughs to understand what you meant, but yes, on-screen gaze-sensitive magnification would be amazing, I agree.
If you're brilliant and idiosyncratic and delivering something truly compelling, then vcs are more than happy to look past these things. God knows how many very eccentric founders have received funding
What a colossal failure of OpenAI’s nonprofit charter that they’re repeatedly in a conversation about being good VC returns.
Or has realized that even with sustaining life and exercising restraint, there are enough people, who do not care and destroy all positive outcomes.
> I'm deeply uncomfortable with anything that combines paying for a service with a social element.

I think I don't know what you mean by that. That sounds like you're uncomfortable with renting out party venues.
Ask HN: What's the role GCP/Google's LLM play in GenAI market
This ask post is very opinionated.

I used be a die-hard Google/GCP lover, from wanting to enter Google as an engineer when I was a student, to proposing to try out GCP for a new project at my first internship (and succeeded). Used Firebase for my on-campus goods trading platform, course projects, and contract projects, and got good experiences. I also used Colab as my go-to choice for my study of machine learning, running models for tasks including object detection, image segmentation, basic machine learning projects, and fine-tuning transformer models for my NLP course projects.

I still remembered the release Google's LaMDA model in 2021, and the beautiful blog post site. They used to be the leading role in GenAI or AI serving in general with TensorFlow serve on GCP. However, ever since last year, I really felt that Google is severely lagging behind in the cloud service or GenAI in general.

For GCP, especially the AI related workspace, I see no meaningful improvement over the years. The file system still has a weird triangle that when you click it does nothing, the UI is extremely laggy when the data is huge just like in colab. I don't even want to mention the accidental deletion of Unisuper's data.

For Gemini, despite it has large context window (2M for 1.5 Pro, 1M for 1.5 Flash), I see no value at all to use this. I generally judge a service's usability on three things: model competency > API (design, price, speed) > playground ease of use (because you can always use other playgrounds when you have the API). Gemini sucks on every aspect. It's never in par with GPT-4o (opinionated, tested on all my graduate CS quiz questions). The API is such a pain in the ass (500, 400 all over the place when I was following the cookbook and Gemini's team could not even solve my issue at a hackathon!) They playground is the most counter-intuitive thing I've ever used in my life.

What's more, the executive team of the Google seems to believe that Gemini 1.5 Pro is as satisfying as GPT-4, and Gemini 1.5 Flash is better, faster, and cheaper than GPT-3.5. First statement is false (to me). Second statement is meaningless, because you should be comparing Gemini 1.5 Flash to Llama 3 or Mistral instead of GPT-3.5. Don't even bring up that Gemini is not fine-tunable at this moment.

They have a slide number that over 60% GenAI startup is using GCP. I simply don't understand where this number is from. Almost every startup I encountered is either using OpenAI or Azure Studio (if they have some scale). I used to be a MSFT hater, but Azure AI Studio just has far better DX and model catalog compared to Vertex AI.

Therefore, unless my company has already signed a contract with GCP, I really don't see the point of a new startup starting to use GCP or Gemini in general.
VCs like Don Valentine & The founder of Atari actually passed on Steve Jobs because "they were not impressive".

It was only after Steve Jobs exploited their preferential attachment & tendency of VC to
succumb to herding effects that he was given investment.
Microsoft Asks China-Based AI Staff to Consider Relocating to US
The default way to drag on a trackpad is something I’ve never gotten good with so I always enable drag lock the second I get a new laptop. Ideally I would switch to the three finger gesture but after 15 years of drag lock I just can’t get my brain to switch over.
Sounds like macOS sucks at web serving :)

I guess one lesson not explicitly mentioned is that doing benchmarking on something like macOS can have lot of pitfalls compared to systems more intended for this kind of workload (Linux...).

But the mention of wrk immediately stood out as a red flag; there is notable problem with wrk called "coordinated omission":

https://github.com/wg/wrk/issues/485

https://github.com/giltene/wrk2

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34148502

Benchmarking is difficult. And there is lot of subtlety on how you set up the client(s) and servers that can impact the results a lot.
Paste this in the browser console to make it readable:

$('body').style = `background: rgb(33, 33, 33);
width: 57vw;
margin: auto;
line-height: 1.5;
font-family: sans-serif;
color: #f1f1f1;
font-size: 18px;`
Accessibility usually benefits lots of able-bodied people. A lift or long enough ramp helps pregnant people, those with broken legs or the elderly instead of just wheelchair users. Decent UI design with good colours helps not only the visually impaired, and decent keyboard navigation can empower your power users instead of just blind people.

It's a shame so many people still see accessibility through a rather narrow lens.
The "Genomic Lineages" graph of Covid variants from the UKHSA gives a good view of how variants follow on from one another, at least with Covid. Flu certainly had three (?) popular variants doing the rounds (one of which was thought to have been eliminated by lockdown) but at the moment, it seems like there's usually one Covid to rule them all at any one time:

https://ukhsa-dashboard.data.gov.uk/topics/covid-19
Brain Really Uses Quantum Effects, New Study Finds
It is not, in general, a net win. It is a preventative measure against things getting really bad.

My other work back then, on fair queuing, followed the same line - keep things from getting really bad just because something was slightly overloaded.

When I was working on this, funding was from DARPA, Defense Communications Agency, and such. They wanted networks to keep working under bad conditions. Maximum price/performance was far less important. The price of getting the last 10% in performance is usually complexity and often fragility.
My argument is that you typically also check other properties, like properties describing what your program should do. These other properties likely wouldn't be satisfied by a nop program, and hopefully the same is true for many subtle issues.
> Can't help but draw parallels with the covid-19 pandemic -- most people you'll talk to will refer to it in the past tense, even though folks continue to get sick with it. We've stopped most monitoring and data collection, and it most definitely disappeared from the media. The one remaining reliable source of information is the wastewater analysis, which tends to indicate the virus is more or less as present in the population now as it's been in the past few years.

> My conclusion to all this was kind of a sad lightbulb moment -- all the past pandemics, they didn't magically end. People just got tired, it became too expensive or politically inconvenient, we collectively turned away and pretended "it went away". The quarter-century timeframe on the Antonine plague looks starkly realistic in this light.

What exactly did you expect though? The pandemic stage has ended, it's now a novel virus that will continue to circulate among us for many, many years until we find a way to eradicate it. Eradicating requires broad vaccination of the population against it over generations, like smallpox, or the way polio is going (many societies have eradicated it).

There's not much more to talk about on COVID, for now the strains are not the same killing machines from the beginning of the pandemic, a lot of people have been vaccinated while many others refuse to vaccinate themselves. Just like influenza continues to kill (or maim) people year-over-year, COVID will keep killing and maiming people but it's not creating a huge strain in the healthcare system globally.

Also, there's not much more to do, the disease exists and will continue existing, we might get new vaccination schemes (like for influenza) to protect the most vulnerable people, we will continue to catch it and probably suffer side-effects but the emergency part of it is mostly over...

What were your expectations?
It is impossible for something in very early stages, that needs money to be "truly compelling".

For VCs a compelling product means great traction but to get great traction you need initial funding so it's always a catch 22.
dd can copy block by block from one block device to another

ddrescue can do the same, but will handle errors better

e2image understands ext2/3/4 filesystems and can copy only the blocks in use, which can really help (though don't know how it works if it encounters an error)
I get the point of in-mutability, I keep this kind of hybrid environment where I abuse the different include systems of software to keep mutable files that can be easily changed. I guess the different module systems could make it easier, but I still fail to see what this has to do with the nix store, or more so, with the names of the paths in the nix store, everything there is the inmutable part.

Some times, and I guess a lot of times since I use home-manager, I do want my configs to be inmutable, at least the permanent part that is shared between my devices.
I know nothing from chemistry apart from high school stuff decades ago (and wasnt very good at it), but oh boy Derek knows how to write interesting stuff for laymen, read whole series since it gets quite regular mentions here.

This is how you make people interested in more difficult topics