skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'm one of the co-founders of PowerSync [1]. We did a Show HN last year [2]

PowerSync is a Postgres<>SQLite sync engine. We spun it off from an industrial app platform where the core sync system has been in production for more than a decade and is in daily use in heavy industry. We reached the v1.0 milestone of the PowerSync stand-alone product late 2023. Details on consistency can be found in our docs [4]

We recently opened the source code and made the system self-hostable for free [3]. We also have a cloud-hosted/SaaS option.

I believe there's a few users of ours in the HN community. Happy to answer any questions.

[1] https://www.powersync.com/

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38473743

[3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40535295

[4] https://docs.powersync.com/architecture/consistency
I feel like they're in a worse spot because of how many Android competitors they have now. Back in 2010, they were the main 'alternative' to an iPhone, it was basically a duopoly for a few years - Apple vs. Samsung. Now there's the Google Pixel and a million Chinese phone makers so that Samsung doesn't stand out too much. They seem to be leveraging connections with carriers to push Samsung phones, which seems to keep them afloat.
SQLite encodes integers in a variable-length format, so it can be very space-efficient compared to always storing integers in 4 or 8 bytes.
My understanding is that the BEAM vm already has some (optional) runtime typechecks in the form of guards, which this new typesystem will also add for you automatically. And that these guards are actually used to speed things up, for example by JITing more optimized code.
A Long Covid Definition
this is all fine and well until greedy people start selling snake oil remedies which will absolutely happen
Both the Elixir and Gleam type systems run at compile time (and whenever you recompile during development)

There are no plans for runtime checking AFAIK
Yeah, honestly I have become pretty disillusioned with the entire ARM SBC market.

For awhile they were super cheap and so it was easier to justify, but when they’re getting into $200+, at some point I feel like you’re going to get a better deal with a mini x86_64 PC, with considerably better performance (if not per watt, at least total performance).

I had some used thin clients with AMD CPUs a few years ago. They were $50 each, and only ate like 10W of power, even under load. No, there wasn’t GPIO built in, but even three years ago there was USB 3.0 and it blew the Raspberry Pi out of the water at the time.

I was running a full rack mount server for a few years after that but since cheap mini gaming PCs have been coming out on Amazon semi recently, I bought one of those to save power usage, and I have extremely happy with them. They have a GPU where I have been able to VAAPI transcoding fully working and they have a considerably faster CPU, and since RPis have gotten so expensive with spiked demand, it wasn’t even that much more expensive for a home lab.
You can make that argument in both directions. Better be careful what you are arguing for. The same arguments for 'States' to have the right to legalize pot is the same arguments the South uses for slavery.

Texas could secede and enslave Mexicans and remove women's rights. That would be 'taking control' as they desire it.

California could secede and give everyone free pot and mandatory beach days. That would be their 'taking control' as they desire it.

If everyone is allowed to do their own thing, all states go their own way, all counties, all people. It's just anarchy.
If you are early and they not sharing the cap-table it's a red-flag.
It's a gradual type system that they're rolling out gradually.
> The Android platform has zero cultural footprint

Who the fuck cares about "cultural footprint"? A phone is a tool, you get the best one for the job, not based on its cultural footprint or how attractive it makes you to superficial people.

> it’s unfathomable why a middle to upper class person would buy an expensive Android

I can answer that as a person in such a position. Android phones from reputable phone vendors are better than iPhones. Better for me, the one making the decision. The fact that in 2024 it's still impossible to not have all your apps plastered on the home screen, at best in folders, is a mind boggling missing feature in iOS. Every time I see someone with an iPhone try to open an app, it takes them a scroll or two to find the correct screen, and then hesitation with the finger moving to find the correct app placement. How I open apps? I have the main ones on my home screen, and for everything else I double tap the home button, and type (the start of) the name. I've been doing this since I first got an Android with Nova, I sure as hell am not going to retrain a decade of muscle memory to rely on apps not changing their icon or having to remember its exact location on the home screen.

Edit to address all the comments regarding this particular feature: Cool that there's some flexibility, but it's still nothing compared to being able to install whatever launcher you want like you can on Android devices.

Oh, and there's actually choice in terms of sizes and features, and associated price. You don't care about waterproof? You want to keep a fingerprint sensor instead of a camera unlock? You want a foldable phone? There are options. And I can choose if I want to use undiscoverable gestures, or keep virtual buttons. And on and on and on.

I have a work issued MacBook Pro and iPad, and both have cemented my desire never to own Apple hardware for myself. UX is for kids, hiding everything from you even if it doesn't make sense - on the iPad I was downloading an app with in-app purchases, and it was just stuck loading, with zero feedback on what's happening. After some Googling it turns out you need to set up a payment method first, before downloading, even if the app can be used for free. Awesome UX there, I'm glad it costs thrice the competition!
Yep, this is what I ended up doing as well! With how the game generate boards, the player that goes first always have a ~5% advantage. Since players switch hands each around they should have 50% win rate if both play optimally.

In practice, playing against author's AI I barely get ~60% win rate (small caveat, I count ties as 0.5 to both players). What about yours?

Edit: nvm I saw you did the same with ties.
Yes. Say you want to get all sales for a list of 75 products out of the 30,000 products that you sell in a list of 125 stores out of the 4500 stores you operate. Self-serve is perfect for this. So long as you can paste lists and not require people to search for things and click checkboxes.
How do you imagine such a system would work and how do we know that it's actually fair?

Maybe an incremental approach would work if you managed to create an ultra-prosperous society with amazing scientific advances, and you gated sharing of those scientific advances through peace treaties or something like that...

There's a lot of inequality between countries, and it doesn't seem like an AI would be able to magic away the problems.
> If your tests only run as part of deploy, you've already lost.

I think you got things in reverse.

Deployments happen at each pipeline run. At each pipeline run, you run tests.

Continuous deployment.
I’ve been using Omnivore (a “read it later” app), which I otherwise love, but even though it’s an iOS app, offline support is one of its biggest weaknesses.

As far as I know, it’s using some caching library at the HTTP level (as opposed to handling its own persistence at the application layer), and in falls apart every time I have a poor connection, remaining broken (even after fully going offline) until I’m back online.
EU threatens China EVs with tariffs of up to 38%
Saying they find some “average” is an easy way to explain to a layman that LLMs are statistically based and are guessing and not actually spitting out correct text as you would expect from most other computer programs.

That’s why it’s repeated. It’s kind of correct if you squint and it’s easy to understand
Absolutely a bishop to me too but hey, who knows.
I did. No regrets. They supported it as long as our company wanted to use it. By sunset date we had already decided to not renew the license.
The flipside is that the AI-written code I've seen at work is usually painfully obvious upon human code review. If you need a tool to detect it, either it's good AI-written code, or you have particularly inept code reviewers.
Nothing wrong with it until it's time to make music and you need a normal guitar.
Previously: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26203853
Exactly. And this absence has never been as debated as masks, showing the huge biases in the public debate around the means to control the epidemic.
I've seen it happen too. No amount of "don't" was enough to convince them...6 month later they had a weird hacky solution that solved their problem and was used across the company and on the whole seemed to do what the relevant people needed it to do.
Yeah, that’s the default assumption. But nowadays media is so fragmented, bubbled, and algorithmic; you can have a whole YouTube or TikTok ecosystem around building an alternative narrative.
The regular approval process takes years. We'd still be waiting for it. Yet everyone is in here splitting hairs over what amounted to a few weeks. I know healthcare workers that got the shot in December, the election having been in November.

So if the people that literally couldn't wait to get their shot, got it 4 weeks earlier, that would have been deemed rushed and too early to be safe? But four weeks later it's perfectly safe?

No, this is about political tribalism and not actual vaccine safety.
Betteridge's law of headlines supports this: adding 1/8 cup non-toxic glue will surely bring peace and prosperity.
(Sources: made it up myself. But if I just had made it up using a large language model, suddenly it would have been workable. (NB the similarity to late 19th century technooptimism: "with wireless telegraph, surely no more wars are necessary!"...a wild World War I appears))
If text generation was done with an adversarial AI, it would be impossible to detect with AI by definition, but still not necessarily at a human level of quality.

In that sense only a human is able to detect writing that's not at human quality
The author of this piece, Steven Koonin, is deeply embedded with climate denial organization "CO2 Coalition".
Yeah, I mean that was the time where Android had a notification tray and iPhone didn't right? Perhaps they have such a document at apple and that's where their tray came from? Was copy/paste possible on the S1? I guess so right? Took a while on iOS.

Anyway, props for Samsung for making such a document internally.
> As for employees? They are typically not calling the shots about company direction.

They can be motivated or not, knowing that the founder made big bucks and they made nothing is bound to lower motivation. Thus the title of the article, founder's liquidity is a well guarded secret.
And what do you think I have never shipped a single line of Flutter except having toyed pretty decent apps as side projects? The company that can kill Stadia (had AMD GPUs and servers, had its own hardware controller, bought studios, planning to launch its own titles and what not) can surely kill a mobile SDK for sure without giving it a second thought, like at all.

Only things that should be considered constant at this point are the Google's ad business and everything it gets injected into.

Rest is all mortal.
There's still some typicality defined by the prompt though. If you ask for a proof in the style of Shakespeare, you're going to get some "average" Shakespeare. It's kind of embedded in the task definition; you're shifting the reference distribution.

If a LLM returned something really unusual for Shakespeare when you didn't ask for it, you'd say it's not performing well.

Maybe that's tautological but I think it's what's usually meant by "average".

I'm sure LLMs with something different is on the near horizon but I don't think we're there quite yet.
If you like watching water flowing uphill, I highly recommend paying this spot in Taiwan a visit [1]. It’s a very clever and convincing optical illusion.

1. https://eng.taiwan.net.tw/m1.aspx?sNo=0002016&id=A12-00284
I know it's an anecdote, but I found out about them bundling the Zero with a Raspberry Pi magazine here in the UK few days after it launched, and I was able to pop down to my local tesco and grab a copy(and it wasn't the last one either). Since then I bought a dozen more for various projects around the house and it's never been a problem, Pimoroni or the Pi Hut always have some.
> Having a competent clone is a strong preventative.

This causes a similar problem: people don't buy from the innovator, who needs more money to carry on innovating. They buy from the clone, who mostly only copies the innovator.
Medical tourism? I'm guessing whatever procedure you needed wasn't offered in Canada, and I assume the Canadian government doesn't want to subsidize a different country's medical industry.
Dynamic linking seems to work fine for Windows or OSX. Maybe it's open source + dynamic linking that's the problem.
But nowadays with TikTok and YouTube, Dale Gribble can become an influencer, and at home video editing is so good that he can have his own green-screened newsroom with all the accoutrements of respectability. Or he could just start a podcast.
> in a way that is often identifiable (by humans) as not having been written by humans.

You should check out reddit sometime. It's been nearly twenty years (not hyperbole) of everyone accusing everyone else of being a bot/shill. Humans are utterly incapable of detecting such things. They're not even capable of detecting Nigerian prince emails as scams.

> not because AI writing is reliably passable.
"Newspaper editor" used to be a job because human writing isn't reliably passable. I say this not to be glib, but rather because sometimes it's easy for me to forget that. I have to keep reminding myself.

Also, has it not occurred to anyone that deep down in the brainmeat, humans might actually be employing some sort of organic LLM when they engage in writing? That technology actually managed to imitate that faculty at some low level? So even when a human really writes something, it's still an LLM doing so? When you type in the replies to me, are you not trying to figure out what the next word or sentence should be? If you screw it up and rearrange phrases and sentences, are you not doing what the LLM does in some way?
The tests are only playable by people with normal color-vision.

Is there a "color-blind friendly" mode?
> Honestly VC-funded startups seem like a cake walk compared to actually starting a small business.

Make this about any brick/mortar businesses and the stresses multiply by another factor. If they're in a federally regulated biz (compliance) or an insurance dominated state (rates, inspections), then multiply again.
Samba: Simple Hybrid State Space Models
>“In the Middle Ages, chess was one of the seven skills that a good knight should master,”

Where is that attested in writing of the time?
It is still tied to your phone number though.
Thank you for bringing this up! I updated the title accordingly
For me, right now.

Not going to use it because your comment is too real.
> But isn't this a product aimed at hackers and tinkerers?

It was, but The appeal spread outside of that, which is why they are now going public and abandoning the precious niche mission and are instead aiming at mass market appeal.
Really wish you could filter by dataset attributes like language, number of rows, number of columns, etc.
Hiring, firing, layoffs, making the wrong decisions with limited information and not finding out they were wrong until years later, huge shifts in the tech market around you undermining your business, competitor actions wrecking your business, pressure from investors, pressure from your family to earn more money, uncertainty about whether the business will ever succeed, and an endless list of other things.

> You don’t lose any money if your startup fails.

Except all the money you lost by not having a proper job along the way. Also it’s not uncommon for founders to float the company at early stage until investment is raised, and they don’t always get a refund for this.
Not sure how this is a new launch when it's been out of beta since 2020 [0], though good to see it get more visibility as I imagine it's not currently heavily used.

A comparison between Google's dataset search and OpenDataNetwork (which focuses on public data portals)

https://www.opendatanetwork.com/search?q=salary

https://datasetsearch.research.google.com/search?src=0&query...

Google covers more sources, though usually in the case of public sector info (e.g. salaries) I'd prefer just to see the actual sources and not a bunch of Kaggle matches thrown in.

[0] https://searchengineland.com/google-datasets-search-is-out-o...
The 3M "Aura" masks with their origami-like folds are really good in terms of fit and comfort. I switched to them also when sanding wood.
Well, to err is human, to truly screw up you need a computer.

We're going to be blasted to smithereens with LLM-generated "80% should be good enough" garbage.
I did some research on this in March and developed an opinionated POV, which I'll paste here for anyone interested.

TL;DR: Detecting AI generated content is hard – really hard. The models available today cannot be trusted and should not be used to make important decisions.

In fact, OpenAI took down their detector down last year because they couldn't reach an acceptable level of accuracy:

https://openai.com/blog/new-ai-classifier-for-indicating-ai-...

One open model trained on open data is Hello-SimpleAI's chaptgpt-detector:

https://huggingface.co/Hello-SimpleAI/chatgpt-detector-rober...

https://huggingface.co/datasets/Hello-SimpleAI/HC3

However, that model is not robust and can be tricked by trivial changes:

https://arxiv.org/abs/2307.02599

I verified this result using the playground on hugging face. For example, it is vulnerable to the “one space character” attacks mentioned in the article, severely limiting the usefulness of trying to detect AI content in an adversarial context.

This ridiculous piece of "research" from Forbes has been causing problems:

https://www.forbes.com/sites/technology/article/best-ai-cont...

The Forbes article is credulous and uncritical, beyond mere naiveté and approaching journalistic malpractice, reporting the sales stories and self-reporting benchmarks of self-interested parties as fact. Nevertheless, I've seen several people share it as "insightful" so it's floating around, doing more harm that good IMO.

While all detectors are terrible, Sapling AI has one of the better ones, if only because they are completely open and honest about it's limitations:

https://sapling.ai/docs/api/detector/

https://sapling.ai/ai-content-detector

Sapling AI also wrote an interesting blog post on GPT SIPs (Statistically Improbable Phrases.)

https://sapling.ai/devblog/chatgpt-phrases/
It used to work for low migration societies but it falls apart when you have huge influxes of migrants with their friends and families that did not contribute to the government for years. I see it all the time in Europe these days - medication quality goes down, queues are getting longer yet insurance, taxes and stuff are not getting lower.

Because there is no way to offset a family of 3-4 people's full expenses. Especially when the migrants themselves do not contribute much themselves - having low paying jobs, no jobs and so on.
This won't work, as local AI (the one I can run on my budget-friendly laptop without any Internet access) exists today and even beats GPT3.5 in some benchmarks.
This is true for a lot of families in Somerville/Cambridge MA, one of the major reasons I live here. I can exist without a car
I caught my employee working a second remote job. Here's why I fired them
I never understood the appeal of iTerm2. The built-in terminal app can do basically all the same things except tiling, but there’s always tmux if you need that.
> A few months later, WritersAccess kicked her off the platform anyway. “They said my account was suspended due to excessive use of AI. I couldn’t believe it,” Gasuras said. WritersAccess did not respond to a request for comment.

I think the unfortunate subject of this piece is based in the USA*.

Americans would benefit here from legislation similar to GDPR — it's not only about getting consent to process your personal data, it also gives people the right to contest any automated decision making made solely on an algorithmic basis.

* there is a Kimberly Gasuras who is a freelance writer in the USA, but if you Google me you'll find a director of horror films and at least one other programmer besides myself
Can you, though? I thought LLMs just by virtue of how they work, are non-deterministic. Let alone if new data is added to the LLM, further retraining happens, etc.

Is it possible to get the same output, 1:1, from the same prompt, reliably?
Every company does do it. I'd like to see Apple's 2010 version for comparison. Something like:

1. Samsung has copy and paste
I'd say take a startup. Those early companies don't have a lot of staff so you can try lots of things, wear lots of hats. Good experience. Take cash, don't get played by options/equity. When you find the hat you like move into a more stable role.
Good. I want nothing to do with the trash that is AI.
It seems that since it was first reported, there is now an exception (in this instance at least) for those protecting themselves from communicable diseases.
This was also discussed in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40458135 (19 days ago, 104 points, 141 comments).
iOS 18 and macOS Sequoia have a killer new feature to thwart tracking
What alternatives? GIMP? It's hot garbage
I didn’t comment on whether it was a good reason or not. My comment was just highlighting some of the complexities in what the blog author was hoping to achieve.
One advantage is that you can define arbitrary margins for your terminal. Thus, you can make your terminal full-screen and write in vim with nice margins, instead of super-wide ones like in the default. Super-wide margins for text are ugly.
It was never opt-in in the previous build. You had to explicitly enable and add the OpenAI API key.

Vocal minority of users was hostile to the idea of integrating so the developer switched to a separate plugin model.

Security theatre imho but understandable in some enterprises
This is one of the best examples of why shoving AI everywhere is totally the wrong idea.
The one thing I miss in the normal Terminal app, coming from iTerm 2, is being able to cmd+click paths and open them.
They're not "absolutely humongous" but merely two times as large as a 64-bit number. That's nothing. They're not even that bad for performance, assuming you have random writes regardless. UUIDs work incredibly well.

Where they don't work well is when they're stored in textual encoding (base16 with dashes) which I've encountered far more than I'd like. They also don't work (random) for append-only insertions like events, for which ULID (or newer UUID variants) are more appropriate.

But for primary keys? Totally fine.

> extremely good at generating and optimizing PK sequences (You're taking away all that optimization just because you want an enormous random number to be the primary key).

Please share the benchmarks to back this up. UUIDs optimize down perfectly fine.

If you're trying to squeeze every last ounce of performance out of the database then certainly this is a yak you can shave. But most Postgres users have 1001 problems that are much bigger than UUIDs. If you've managed to avoid folks writing shitty queries and this is the bottleneck you're facing then I salute you.

Otherwise, don't worry. UUIDs are fine.
Anecdotally, my local school district decided to do what the GP post says, and they're the last district I would expect to do that. I've never seen $450/unit, though.