skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Show HN: ControlFlow – open-source AI workflows
Hi HN! I’m excited to share ControlFlow, our new open-source framework for building agentic workflows.

ControlFlow is built around a core opinion that LLMs perform really well on small, well-defined tasks and run off the rails otherwise. I know that may seem obvious, but the key insight is that if you compose enough of these small tasks into a structured workflow, you can recover the kind of complex behaviors we associate with autonomous AIs, without sacrificing control or observability at each step. It ends up feeling a lot like writing a traditional software workflow.

With ControlFlow you:

- define structured tasks for your agents to achieve,

- assign one or more specialized agents to each task,

- then compose the tasks into a workflow for execution.

We've been working toward this for a while, applying insights from our work on Prefect (our workflow engine) and Marvin (our LLM framework). ControlFlow is our effort to bridge the gap between all those impressive AI demos and what we see B2B users actually trying to accomplish in production. More often than not, their goal is to sanely delegate a few steps of a workflow to an AI, not deploy a suite of end-to-end autonomous while loops.

This is ControlFlow's initial release and we’d love your feedback. We hope it's a refreshing take on making LLMs feel like software again! You can check out the repo here: https://github.com/prefecthq/controlflow/
Freeway driving is easier than surface streets. Maybe merging in is the hard part.
Waymo does have safety drivers, they're just driving the vehicle remotely when it's in certain areas instead of being in the vehicle. So it isn't "full" self driving either.

> Tesla, who use cameras only, have not demonstrated full self driving

There are entire youtube channels with hours of continuous video showing Teslas driving around SF, but also other parts of California, with no human intervention.
Noooooooo

The whole point of AI was to sell premium GEMMs and come up with funky low precision accelerators.
The only way to increase salary at anywhere close to the rate of inflation is to job hop.

You will never get the raises and promotions you deserve if you stay in one place.

For employers, it's cheaper to promote more expensive hires from outside than it is to fairly compensate current employees, because they correctly understand that most people are too lazy, too "stuck" in their mortgage, school system, social circle, etc. to consider quitting.
I believe GP was joking.
Does using ASICs mean something like using FPGAs? If so AMD should be well-prepared for this architecture ever since their Xilinx acquisition.

But isn't it the case that for LLMs what is really needed is lots of fast memory? ASICs can't help much there can they?
Drunk party goers on a Friday night, people smoking in the car on their way to Dolores, petulant teenagers…
> These cars are literally unsupervised.

Unsupervised in what sense? There's internal cameras that are periodically checked. Weight and seatbelt sensors that give alerts if a passenger is or puts objects in the drivers seat, or if too many individuals get in the car.

I'd be shocked if a similar or greater level of observability doesn't also exist outside the car.
Looks interesting! Will check it out!
The rise of academentia: Mere transgression being elevated above genuine insight
We still don't have proper digital preservation mechanisms. If you are an executor of an estate, and you have a website and a twitter account, what you do with them? You are surely not interested in running them by yourself. You can't just leave them alone - website support costs money, and also if left alone, it will inevitably be broken into and cause all kinds of trouble. You can't just sell it to somebody (at least not to somebody you'd want to sell) or donate it. There's no organizations dedicated to preserving such properties, as far as I know. So, what do you do? You shut them down, you have not other alternative.
Tyrian's what gave me inspiration to create a space shooter on mobile! Some of the special weapons in my game are direct inspiration like the Plasma Storm and Soul of Zinglon. Granted my space shooter game isn't a scrolling space shooter though, someday I will try my shot at making one.

Also, it looks like they've ported other older games to web: https://midzer.de/games like Jazz Jackrabbit, Duke Nukem, Quake. Very nice!
Most people interact with a computer only via web browser, office suite and maybe a few additional programs (zoom, teams). I think some of my family members almost wouldn't notice the difference if they were to suddenly start using Linux Mint.

Your idea of what a desktop OS should be feels subjective. I'm using Linux as a desktop operating system for 20 years, I've used Windows before, I use Windows sometimes even today (currently only in VMs dedicated to malware analysis and reverse engineering tools), and - to me - Windows is much more annoying. This feels like personal preference and not an objective statement like you did.
I think the country that imprisons the highest proportion of its own population in the world ought to qualify, but this list doesn't think so. Interesting.
Yeah, I’m all for monopoly busting, but I don’t understand what kind of criteria are in use here. I’ve yet to see a definition that would allow me to apply rules in a coherent way.

My own company uses office 365, and of all the included programs, I basically only use excel, outlook, and teams. I haven’t even opened word in years, all documents are shared as PDFs. As such, word has no more inherent need for “bundling” than teams.

It just seems arbitrary. I’d be more comfortable just stating that companies over a certain size can’t bundle at all.
Amazing! Now to get this approved as business critical software at work... :)
Retrospekt Keeps Instant Photography's Past Alive and Thriving
JEP 401: Value Classes and Objects (Preview)
This is why I visit HN! A fucking ball on my dock---this made my day.
Rather than going in to details why that doesn't matter, with relation to monopolistic power, I'll just let you extrapolate your reasoning to the following:

The EU population is quite literally a minority of the world population.
I don't have any hard proof but you can ask my wife, a few years ago I totally called that bonzibuddy was gonna come back in style. We're almost there
Ah. Still early days.
https://www.triplit.dev/docs/schemas/rules
Note that the architecture does use matmuls. They just defined ternary matmuls to not be 'real' matrix multiplication. I mean... it is certainly a good thing for power consumption to be wrangling less bits, but from a semantic standpoint, it is matrix multiplication.
This is the same paper (or an extension) — using ternary weights means you can replace multiplication with addition/subtraction.
Yes, but SF seems to have some truly reckless pedestrians, often presumably under the influence of substances. There are graduations between "cross at a red light when you think it's safe to do so" and "barge into a 4 lane street in the middle of a block because the voices in your head tell you to".
Geocities was not for professionals. It was for amateurs.
> The reason American apps penetrate the world usually is because America is a superpower that has almost colonised the web.

I live in the USA and EU, and the reason that I prefer a Samsung display in almost all cases is because it is the best product. Korea has not colonized us, but the product is often superior, so that is why I buy it.

Why is it that Korean software cannot do the same? I find it very interesting, and I mean to ask this in a very neutral/curious way.
With the caveat that caves that were coastal some millennia past may retained their integrity but no longer remain on the coast due to either sea level changes (SE Asia human coastal migration paths are now inland in jungle), and|or land forms rising with glacial retreat (the British Isles were once pressed down with kilometres thick ice).
They don't need to: https://i.insider.com/4e0b340dcadcbbdd35120000?width=750&for...
Density doesn't mean making spaces smaller, it just means making more of them. Usually this is accomplished with more floors. If you look at NYC, a huge portion of it is buildings are <= 12 stories. NYC is unique in its density and is certainly a model for other cities in the US, but in terms of fulfilling its own livability needs.. it will have to become denser through height. Even NYC must address its demand with additional supply within Manhattan -- up is the only way to go.

Instead what we see today in NYC is the same as what we're seeing around North America. NIMBYism, heritage protections, gatekeeping, lawsuits, FUD, political grandstanding, etc.
encrypted secrets are strictly an improvement over status quo of unencrypted secrets on disk - I dont understand why you make it seem like it is a bad idea?

like what is the alternative you propose? storing plaintext secrets on disk and hope that your runtime is secure and hardened enough and free from vulnerabilities??

as if directory traversal, path injection vulnerabilities, shell command injection, etc vulns that allow reading file from disk, don't exist?
In my opinion kubernetes is fundamentally hamstrung by the overly simplistic operator model. I really like the general idea, but it's not really possible to reduce the entire model down to "current state, desired state, next action." It means that an entire workflow ends up in the next action logic, but with so many operators looking at the same system state it's not really possible to know how the various components will interact. The problems with helm are a subcase of this larger issue.

By analogy, this is the same issue as frontend programming faces with the DOM. Introducing a VDOM / reducer paradigm (like react) would go a long way towards solving these problems.
Discussions

(33 points, 9 hours ago, 12 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40788749

(20 points, 6 hours ago, 7 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40790775

(54 points, 6 hours ago, 12 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40790842
It is such a classic issue with space travel. One way trip is relatively easy, return trips are WAY more difficult because of the reasons listed.

China has a plan to get an orbiting probe to Neptune but nothing about returning Mars samples. Highlights the different scale of the problem.
>these are all OS utilities

sorry, no, that shouldn't be allowed either. as someone who's working on a cloud task scheduler, OS's should be forced to unbundle thread management. Linux needs to be banned in the EU until it doesn't come with a default thread manager.
A Quantum Leap in Factoring
No, absolutely not. The West must be held to a higher standard and we have a duty to hold ourselves there, but too many are failing to understand the biggest threat to all the world’s freedom. Hint hint, it is the actual authoritarians.
Right, which is exactly why it's dangerous to allow foreign (that is, US) companies to control your citizens' data, particularly if that data is not safeguarded against those foreign governments (e.g. due to "national security" laws).
90% of macOS is legacy code and programs that worked well in OS X and even NeXT OS. It's insane that every once in a while, Apple decides to poke around those areas and make some "improvements". When I put that next to what Microsoft is doing with Windows, I can only ask:

Have we lost the art of OS design?

I mean, surely there must be designers and programmers in those companies who still know what a good OS experience is like. But are marketing and sales people louder in those companies?
You can individually remove the discs and use a compressed air cannister, but it's very laborious.
> Tesla is willing to sell to people who will pay $$$ for a self driving car

The very low take-up rate of FSD during the trial period indicates that most people are buying Tesla's because they are arguably the best EV with the best charging network.

Not because of FSD.
Do you think that killing swathes of civilians and children from helicopter is 'the nature of the world'?
...we think. well.. for some value of "we"

you would hope at some point, a high-net-worth site will yield a fragment of glass or metal or pottery which has traces of DNA they can cross-correlate to the modern plant stocks.

I'd love this to be true. It may be the best candidate yet. That it's related to fennel and similar doesn't entirely surprise me, because it was going to be in that family or the cruciferous ones, they have strong taste, which suggests complex plant polyphenols.
>But for whatever reason, when it is suggested, you get many people chiming in that "filenames should be dumb bytes, anything allowed except / !"

I guess the issue is not what filenames should be, but what filenames are. In general, when interacting with files, you have to expect everything but `/` and nullbyte. Even if you forbid it on your machine, someone may mount a NFS drive and open you to the world of weird filenames. And you never know who uses your code.

And the unicode itself is weird anyway - for example you may have normalised and denormalised names which may be the same or different string depending on how you look at them[1]. And I hope you are not planning to restrict filenames to some anglocentric [a-z0-9_- ]*, because the world is much larger and you can't pretend unicode doesn't exist.

[1] https://eclecticlight.co/2017/04/06/apfs-is-currently-unusab... and many other cases
The only reason our 2000-employee company switched to Teams was because it was cheaper for the decision-makers (who to this day only use email - seriously!) than paying for slack. It was the only reason. The calculus is not based on features, compliance, uptime, experience, or some NPS score. It’s money.

“No one ever got fired for buying IBM” now changed to Microsoft for the 2020s.
The relevant paper: https://arxiv.org/abs/2406.02528

In summary, they forced the model to process data in ternary system and then build a custom FPGA chip to process the data more efficiently. Tested to be "comparable" to small models (3B), theoretically scale to 70B, unknown for SOTAs (>100B params).

We have always known custom chips are more efficient especially for tasks like these where it is basically approximating an analog process (i.e. the brain). What is impressive is how fast it is prgressing. These 3B params models would demolish GPT2 which was, what, 4-5 years old? And they would be pure scifi tech 10 years ago.

Now they can run on your phone.

A machine, running locally on your phone, that can listen and respond to anything a human may say. Who could have confidently claim this 10 years ago?
I think my position is:

Native heterogeneous lists will often be convenient, and sometimes when you've used them they're going to turn out in retrospect to have been a bad idea but sometimes they'll be just fine, especially if they stay fairly locally scoped. I haven't done any serious work in a language that supports them for years, so I don't have a strong opinion about how often each of those cases happens.

But if you decide you want heterogeneous lists, but your language doesn't support them, so you try to implement that with a sum type, then that's basically always going to be a massive pain.
No, asics and fpgas are different concepts
> Instead, read secrets from a vault or from a file-system from _inside_ your process.

I’ve never liked making secrets available on the filesystem. Lots of security vulnerabilities have turned up over the years that let an attacker read an arbitrary file. If retrieving secrets is a completely different API from normal file IO (e.g. inject a Unix domain socket into each container, and the software running on that container sends a request to that socket to get secrets), that is much less likely to happen.
I've got a 36" in my office and it's a monstrosity. I need to vacate my office in the near future and moving it out is the part I'm least looking forward to.

Granted, I was a much younger man when I moved it in but I kind of can't believe I did it by myself with only the help of a skateboard and some movers' straps. It's a wonder I didn't kill myself or the set. There's no way I'm doing that again.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kurzgesagt
I don’t think VWs problem is technology. It’s very much pricing, look at the ID 4 and 3 in China vs Europe it’s half the price or less.

Yes there are differences in the models however the center console airbag doesn’t justify a 50% price bump.

Chinese EVs are eating the lunch of European manufacturers has nothing to do with tech. The MG EVs that are some of the best selling cars in many EU countries for example are objectively worse than any European competitor they are just substantially cheaper.

And unlike their Euro counterparts their base models are actually available for dealerships you can’t get a VW in the UK without tacking like 8-10K worth of addons onto it unless you want to wait for months.
Could two Alexas be put next to each other hailing themselves into eternity.
Already exists, but it's Nazis.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uX2cS8wvQHI

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iron_Sky
What I don't understand is why in the two most popular Unix flavors we have not got something like a json list output or something else that is parsable.

Is it really that difficult to add --json as a flag?
> Because maintaining 32 bit libraries when most of the world is 64 bit doesn’t make sense.

64bit code is the extension, not the base case.

32bit (x86) code just straight up runs on an x86-64 (64-bit) processor.

It's an artificial limitation that just doesn't make sense, and it can also be worse for performance too.

> This is not the same as apple actively forcing you into their ecosystem.

No?

Apple prevents 32bit libraries from running. This effected almost all the common cross-platform layers from running on MacOS.

In a single action, Apple eliminated the libraries that Steam games on MacOS used. Games would now have to be recompiled and were pushed to be downloadable through the Mac App Store, giving Apple their 30% cut.

> This is apple not supporting old technology.

If it's old then apple shouldn't support it? By that logic, we shouldn't be using ints in our code, we should only use 64-bit quaternions.

There is a difference between old and outdated. 32bit code is old. 32bit code is not outdated.
That's good news. One of the previous articles I read made it sound like it would be a pretty quick flash.
ASIC just stands for Application Specific Integrated Circuit. So, yeah, it is like an FPGA, but takes longer to turn around a new version because you have to wait for somebody to etch you some silicon but you may get higher density than with the FPGA. You can do (very) small volumes at old densities for cheap, but if you are trying to track the front of the technology wave with commercially viable shipping quantities, you often need tens of millions of dollars per generation. This means that these folks have room for 1-3 generations before their money is gone.

LLMs that are attached to normal CPUs need lots of fast memory because they are doing very large matrix operations with very few arithmetic units which implies a lot of data motion. Changing that architecture might save on the need to move so much data, but it isn't at all clear what these people are proposing.

It also isn't at all obvious why their stuff would be any better than an ordinary vectorized arithmetic unit (often provocatively called a "tensor" chip).
> is Tesla actually in a position to win here due to their manufacturing capability / current deployment of Tesla's?

Tesla has much lower costs. If they can beat Waymo on customer experience (better driving primarily, but also better in-car entertainment, better mobile app, and match Waymo's pricing) they'll win.

Waymo might have a regulatory advantage since a lot of politians don't like Musk.
I can't imagine anyone would anyone use this for a personal or a serious site.

Especially given the platform risk of not owning your content.

Any day Notion can shut down or deprecate this product leaving you no where to export your data.

You might as well use Wordpress at this point really.
Adding to the other peer reasons, staggering range of design styles and price points; executive class, cheap fun young cars, utility vehicles, etc.
CUDA is one area that Nvidia really nailed. When it was first announcement I saw it as something neat but could have never envisioned just how ingrained it would become. This was long before AI training/execution was something really on most people radars.

But for years I have heard the same things from so many people working in the field. "We hate Nvidia because they got it so right but are the only option."
My overwhelming experience is that people who are critical of Israel's actions in Palestine are also critical of Russia's actions in Ukraine and, back in the day, were critical if the US's actions in Iraq. This comes from a generally anti-war (or anti-invasion/occupation) political philosophy.

There are also a lot of people in the Republican Party who go the exact opposite way: They support Israel's actions and Russia's actions, and they were also in favor of the US's invasion of Iraq (though they shut up about that now). They have a very hawkish political philosophy.

Then there is a third group of people I've identified, who confuse me: they oppose Russia's actions in Ukraine, but they support Israel's actions in Palestine. (I do not know what their opinions were in Iraq because this is a group of people I have only encountered online, not in person.) I do not understand their political philosophy at all because it is seemingly self-contradictory; most of my attempts to understand it suggest that it is not really a philosophy so much, but more about nationalism or racism — they like Ukraine more than they like Russia, and they like Israel more than they like Palestine, and that's all the thought they put into it.
The problem with RADAR on the moon is there's an unknown amount of dust between you and the reflective surface.

Apparently cameras also have issues because the lack of atmosphere means everything is high contrast.

So basically, you don't actually know your altitude, and your visual systems may not be reliable.
Wow so you work at CDK. I wouldn't wish the sh-t storm you guys must be going through on our worst enemy.

I was talking with one of your clients today (we're not competitors) and you just don't realise how far screwed some of these companies are right now.

It actually made an instant upsell today of 'here's our additional cloud sync' feature. No questions, no umming and ahhing, it's just 'yep done, add it, turn it on'. Heck we probably undersold it by 10x.

I hope you guys start getting some sense of normality soon and get systems back online.
It's hard to imagine a modern head of state incapable of delivering that level of basic national mythology/history. There's probably the occasional counterexample but this is common enough to regularly pop up in available transcripts of national leaders meeting to this day.
GreptimeDB Community Report
I was confused by the claim in the headline but it seems that this is really the meat of the paper - they're looking for an architecture that is more efficient to implement and run in hardware. It is interesting. We know that computers must be wasting huge amounts of compute on something by analogy with a human brain and researchers will figure out why sooner or later.
Bonzibuddy, but with AI.