skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
SVT-AV1 2.2 Delivers More Performance Improvements
Wright designed many beautiful things, but was not really an Engineer. Many of them that got built, had significant problems.

We can all bless our lucky stars that this insane skyscraper was never built. It looks like it would blow over in a slight breeze.

"Pretty" and "genius" are no match for "Engineered", when it comes to mega-structures.
Fediverse and Feeds
> What might have happened if Google put its eggs in the Flip Video basket instead?

It seems that they could have done both? It could have been the perfect complement to YouTube really. (This was before the iPhone launched)
LitServe: Easily serve AI models fast
LitServe is a flexible serving engine for AI models built on FastAPI. Features like batching, streaming, and GPU autoscaling eliminate the need to rebuild a FastAPI server per model.

The examples featured on the litserve page include a range of applications such as large language models (LLMs), natural language processing (NLP), multimodal tasks, audio processing, vision models, speech synthesis, classical machine learning (ML) algorithms, and a media conversion API, demonstrating the versatility of litserve in deploying various machine learning models and services.
And also not part of EU.
I'm going to address your TLDR question. In order to get more money, the impact you have in your company needs to be higher. As a manager, you are a multiplier for your team - this is why you get payed more. In order to get that without being a manager, you need to be in a company that allows individual contributors to have independence from the managers, so that ICs can be multipliers for others. Those are usually very big companies, but with a dynamic way of communicating internally - ie. you don't need to go through "gatekeepers" to expand your scope. A place where the manager needs to approve you working on every single task, or a place where engineers report to "project managers" are not that.

Leaving that aside, if you want money go to places where you are on the critical path for the company to make money and become more important to the company by what you are doing there - either solving hard problems, or solving problems that no one wants to touch, or problems that only you know how to solve. The toxic way is to create problems and then solve them; please don't do that, because we have enough of those assholes.
I read The Right Stuff recently and it was a pleasure. Very full of life and colorful and he really was able to get at what made these test pilots and astronauts the tick.
I'd imagine the place that is going to run better on windows is GPU drivers... If the game is GPU bound it will probably always run better on windows. If the game has other bottlenecks perhaps WINE can out perform windows.
This sounds very interesting. And is tempting me to delve back into a game reverse engineering project I abandoned a few years back.

Do you have a fully worked example of how to use this and then how to make use of its output? Would love to see an end-to-end walkthrough.
Admittedly, P+R is only a (kind of) solution for people of suburbia commuting into the office towers etc of the city. Pretty common scenario around the globe, but maybe not in Texas. Escooters are nice to cover the last mile.
https://archive.is/Z6tAy
Yes, they're negatives of the printed LP; they can be played but require a special needle. There was a video where Jack White (of The White Strips) bought an old Elvis master and explained how to play it.

I never really thought about the awards and what they mean in an era where everything would have been digital (and that's a long time now). Of course a lot of artists do commission LPs these days (though has that gone out of fashion? - there was a resurgence there in the 2010's at least) so you can imagine that the masters could be handed out as souvenirs.
> Krazy Ken’s video above offers many more incredible details, including where Kaplan is now (it’s shocking) and what industry experts think led to the downfall of the Flip Video camera series.

I was thinking it was pretty cool to get a summary of the info without having to watch a long, rambling video, until the article abruptly stopped halfway through with this clickbait bullshit.

Anyone got a Tl;dr of what actually happened?
It would seem trivial to test that the album is probably fake by just looking at pics of the gold album and counting the tracks/widths.

There are 100's of pics of artists gold albums on the internet.
I use a combination of docker and remote explorer extension for visual code. This gives me an IDE that can control containers spanning multiple nodes.
I actually wouldn't mind refactoring old code, but I'm weird like that
Electrolytic refining of iron, all the way from ore. Gets rid of blast furnaces, allows far more precise control over metallurgy.
Because ground meat texture and taste is nothing great. It’s collagen and fat marbling .. and the refined cooking techniques that make meat eating pleasurable.

Plant based meat texture can be easily replicated with.. plant based dishes!
Launch HN: Arva AI (YC S24) – AI agents for instant global KYB onboarding
Hi HN! We’re Rhim and Oli, and we’re building Arva AI (https://arva-ai.com). Arva uses an AI agent to automate the manual verification that every banking/fintech does when they get a new business customer. This is called “Know Your Business” compliance (KYB for short) and it’s a royal pain.

There’s a demo video here: https://www.arva-ai.com/loom , and if you’re curious to try it out for yourself, you can onboard onto ‘Arva Bank’ and see what happens when you upload some fake documents: https://platform.arva-ai.com/demo (but please don’t upload any sensitive documents!)

What’s this about? When a business onboards onto a bank or fintech (i.e. applies to be a customer), a human analyst has to conduct extensive manual verification a lot of the time. This causes long onboarding times, and there are huge costs in maintaining compliance teams and in fixing mistakes—because human analysts often deviate from procedure.

I (Rhim) formerly led the FinCrime product team at Revolut Business. There were hundreds (!) of KYB analysts conducting tens of thousands of manual reviews per day! Turns out this is the same across pretty much all fintechs in all jurisdictions around the world, and it’s a problem that can now largely be solved by a combination of AI, data and business logic.

Most of the manual verification work falls into three categories: document verification (e.g. articles of incorporation); figuring out the business activities (e.g. does the business do things that are allowed); and communication with the customer (to make sure they provide the correct pieces of information).

Handling all of this for a customer is time consuming. It leads to huge compliance overheads from having a manual team, which can also often make scaling very difficult. Days of back-and-forth over email with customers creates a terrible experience, leading to drop off and hence revenue loss. In fact, in the US, slow customer onboarding costs fintechs $10B annually in lost revenue (https://resources.fenergo.com/newsroom/poor-customer-experie...)!

The interesting thing is that this domain is so highly structured and formalized that it turns out to be a good match for the current generation of AI tools.

Enter Arva AI. We've built a highly compliant AI agent that instantly handles all low/medium risk manual KYB work in real-time as a customer is onboarding, cutting reviews to seconds and ops spend by 80%. Arva AI’s agent can operate globally and can either be used as standalone KYB agent, or layered into already implemented compliance stacks. We focus on reviewing documentation, websites and social profiles in realtime and then communicating with the customer so that they can rectify bad information whilst they’re in the onboarding flow.

Check out (https://www.arva-ai.com/loom) for an overview and try it out yourself if you want, at https://platform.arva-ai.com/demo.

We’d love your feedback, especially if you’re connected to the fintech space, and we look forward to everyone’s comments!
We have a definition for open-source AI
Intel Further Speeds Up Strnlen() in the GNU C Library for Recent Intel/AMD CPUs
Dual 66MHZ 603 CPUs at first, and later dual 133MHZ 603e CPUs. For the time interesting, but hardly head and shoulders above the 200MHZ Pentium Pros of the same era.
Thanks for helping us make the product better! You can post any issues at https://community.sourcegraph.com. And you can also email support@sourcegraph.com (for customers or any private issues).

We will continue to have a free tier for personal use. Soon we will have a free tier of code search on Sourcegraph.com for private code.
Show HN: A CTF challenge that let's you attack an LLM-based agent
Hello HN,

given the recent interest in the security vulnerabilities of agentic LLM apps, we would love to hear everyone's thoughts on a Capture The Flag (CTF) challenge we built. The challenge is designed to test the robustness of LLM-based agent systems, showcasing how an attacker can extract sensitive information from the system.

The challenge is part of the Invariant Summer '24 CTF series, where participants can play the challenge and compete for a prize pool of $1000.

Let us know what you think and what attacks you tried. We are also open to any feedback on how we can improve with the next challenges.

CTF Details: https://invariantlabs.ai/ctf-challenge-24
Discord: https://discord.gg/dZuZfhKnJ4
Play the CTF: https://invariantlabs.ai/play-ctf-challenge-24
> for example in music there is clearly no art without a great deal of craftsmenship and skill.

You're missing out on a whole world of experimental and ambient music, which may or may not demonstrate great skill and technique (although much of it does). The most obvious and extreme example of such art is: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/4%E2%80%B233%E2%80%B3

Art and craftsmanship definitely have overlap, but I think a well accepted Anglosphere understanding of art is that it is expressive. High levels of skill and technical knowledge will naturally lend to an artist being able to be more expressive through nuance and variety. But they're neither separate nor identical concepts.

In any act of creation, both craftsmanship and artistry can be evaluated separately. I think very high levels of craftsmanship naturally lend toward raising the level of artistry, and vice-versa, but they're describing different features of the creation. Craftsmanship is largely about technical quality, choices of material/medium, soundness, precision, etc. Whereas artistry will describe how it feels to perceive the creation.
I think there are legitimate cases where a business has a product available at a price that is net positive to both the business (profitable) and customer (consumer surplus) but is having trouble connecting with consumers. What % of advertising this is versus pushing low quality trash, branding, status symbols, and scams, I have no idea.
Access blocked: Midjourney’s request does not comply with Google’s policies

Midjourney’s request does not comply with Google’s ‘Use secure browsers’ policy. If this app has a website, you can open a web browser and try signing in from there. If you are attempting to access a wireless network, please follow these instructions.

You can also contact the developer to let them know that their app must comply with Google’s ‘Use secure browsers’ policy.

Learn more about this error

If you are a developer of Midjourney, see error details.

Error 403: disallowed_useragent
There was a lengthy interview with Peter Thiel a few years back: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nM9f0W2KD5s

It's interesting and worth watching, but it becomes apparent that Thiel is a financier, and science takes place on a different timescale. Better seek advice from someone who was active when US science was still functional, let's say Roy Vagelos.
Scientists enable hydrogel to play and improve at Pong video game
And with a forked needle - not actually a joke.
> You seem to be assuming that a vectorized loop over an array of structs only ever uses one element from the struct and ignores the rest.

That is the worst case scenario of my concern with memory bandwidth.

More generally, I'd imagine that any good roofline analysis would need to consider this data-layout issue.

> but modern hardware prefetchers are so good that a vectorized loop that only looks at each Nth byte or whatever is actually much faster than one might think.

I believe you. I wasn't really thinking about how efficiently the processor can pull the correct bytes into the register lanes. I was just focusing on the fundamental memory <--> CPU xfer part of the process.

TL;DR: I'm trying to get better at using roofline analysis in my optimization efforts.
Apple to Let EU Users Delete App Store, Photos, Messages and More
Last time I tried to sell something on eBay, they wanted me to ship the product, BEFORE sending me any of the money the buyer paid. They told me the money "could be" released in 10 business days AFTER I have shipped the product and the burden of proof would be on me.

After I called them and told them I wasn't comfortable taking 100% of the risk, after having an account for over 20 years that is all positive, they refused. I asked to cancel the transaction, and still ended up being charged a $100+ fee they wouldn't refund. I disputed the charge with my bank but eBay even won that by sending the bank a printed out copy of their terms of service that went on for over 40 pages, and the bank just agreed with them I must have been in the wrong.

Never again I will sell or buy anything on eBay if I can avoid it.
A campaign to stop drilling would need to answer questions about the likely effect, not just about the intention. Since OPEC has cut production many times in the past 50 years, and generally other producers have increased their production to fill the void, what do you think the likely effect would be?
Which are much cheaper.

Are they? According to whom and compared to what --- the ad networks themselves? They control everything about this game.

It's possible for someone with deep pockets to build an ad network that operates in a similar manner and offers pretty much everything Google and Facebook do minus the privacy invasion crap.

The only essential difference being how the ads are targeted. Instead of targeting individuals, the web content they are looking at would become the target --- based on the blatantly obvious "metric" that the individual must have at least some interest in what they're looking at.

This should actually be easier/cheaper to implement and maintain (no personalized metrics) and thus the ads should be less expensive. The main reason this doesn't exist in a more popular form --- Google/Facebook have sold advertisers a big load of their own marketing hype and used this to effectively monopolize the market.
Microsoft in the DC area or somebody else like Raytheon?

I would expect Raytheon and the other contractors (i.e. Booze Alan) have raised entry level to like 70/80k but they're going to be much lower than Microsoft. As well as as you get promoted it caps out much lower. It's a bit better at non-contractors like Capitol One but still not quite the same as a "Tech Company".

https://www.levels.fyi/?compare=Raytheon,Microsoft,Capital%2...
We’d just need to write a Rust client for the daemon and load the weights in a way that is compatible with candle- we can definitely look into this since parts of what we are building is already in Rust!
On the art of resource conservation in software systems
DL libraries like pytorch are completely deterministic.
> > The real truth is that strong privacy laws would cause economic harm to flagship corporations.

> The real truth is that flagship corporations think this will happen.

The real truth is that flagship corporations want everyone else to believe this will happen. They want to do whatever they feel like unopposed, and what better way to accomplish that than making everyone think what’s best for themselves is to let the company do exactly what it wants.
Yeah, this is both impossible and outright silly. You're welcome to study the results if they interest you, but AI is a better flatter than it is a researcher. I don't know what it is you're talking about, but if it's related to quantum computing it's unlikely to even be something AI understands.
Why is this a research paper? HybridRAG = VectorRAG context and GraphRAG context
This is what they have to offer (authors from NVIDIA and BlackRock):

4.4 HybridRAG:
For the proposed HybridRAG technique, upon obtaining all the contextual information from VectorRAG and GraphRAG, we concatenate these contexts to form a unified context utilizing both techniques. This combined context is then fed into the answer generator model to produce a response. The context used for response generation is relatively larger, which affects the precision of the
generated response. The context from VectorRAG is appended first,
followed by the context from GraphRAG.
An unethical life pro would make a class group to discuss the consensus & the make a separate smaller class group of 'inside people' who'd use previous conclusion to adjust their answers .. then .. turtles all the way down with diminishing returns.

but everyone has to cooperate here, if a few guys go crazy and say some super outlandish number to shift the average then all bets are off. Hence my most common pet-peeve with data .. median not average.
Kind of a sore spot actually.

I think raytracing is fine, as Vulkan on Linux is phenomenally good & active, is seemingly the go-to spot for Vulkan as a whole. Proton turned on raytracing support by default 9 months ago, and it's probably not flawless, but runs many flashy games like Cyberpunk 2077.

Valve's Wayland compositor is called gamescope, and gamescope has kind of forged some kind of path to make HDR work. And that relies on kernel patches that dont seem intended for upstreaming. It's all packaged and works great on Steam Deck. I have tried and tried to get the same stack working locally with a rx580 but no dice, can't get gamescope embedded to run, to much chagrin & sadness.

Wayland and Linux both have been on a long sojourn to make good protocols & implement HDR. It's finally coming together; KDE is shipping something. I don't know if GNOME and Wlroots have actually started work but there are tickets. https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/HDR_monitor_support

Valve had the resources to cut their own path, and it's kind of awesome & excellent. They've made a Cathedral atop Linux. I want to think that if Wayland wasn't so new in general, if there was more bandwidth & focus & not tons of other necessary big work in flight, HDR might have advanced at a much more respectable rate. But who knows. I think it's important to have appropriate expectations, and this slow walk does show a weakness of the Bazaar model of development that Wayland embodies. But I really want to hope it's for an excellent end result, that HDR has well considered development path by the time it's really in the wild.

HDR soon! After a lot of puzzling it out.
Super cool to see this here. If you're at all interested in big systems, you should read this.

> Compounding this latency, hard drive performance is also variable depending on the other transactions in the queue. Smaller requests that are scattered randomly on the media take longer to find and access than several large requests that are all next to each other. This random performance led to wildly inconsistent behavior.

The effect of this can be huge! Given a reasonably sequential workload, modern magnetic drives can do >100MB/s of reads or writes. Given an entirely random 4kB workload, they can be limited to as little as 400kB/s of reads or writes. Queuing and scheduling can help avoid the truly bad end of this, but real-world performance still varies by over 100x depending on workload. That's really hard for a multi-tenant system to deal with (especially with reads, where you can't do the "just write it somewhere else" trick).

> To know what to fix, we had to know what was broken, and then prioritize those fixes based on effort and rewards.

This was the biggest thing I learned from Marc in my career (so far). He'd spend time working on visualizations of latency (like the histogram time series in this post) which were much richer than any of the telemetry we had, then tell a story using those visualizations, and completely change the team's perspective on the work that needed to be done. Each peak in the histogram came with it's own story, and own work to optimize. Really diving into performance data - and looking at that data in multiple ways - unlocks efficiencies and opportunities that are invisible without that work and investment.

> Armed with this knowledge, and a lot of human effort, over the course of a few months in 2013, EBS was able to put a single SSD into each and every one of those thousands of servers.

This retrofit project is one of my favorite AWS stories.

> The thing that made this possible is that we designed our system from the start with non-disruptive maintenance events in mind. We could retarget EBS volumes to new storage servers, and update software or rebuild the empty servers as needed.

This is a great reminder that building distributed systems isn't just for scale. Here, we see how building the system in a way that can seamlessly tolerate the failure of a server, and move data around without loss, makes large scale operations (everything from day-to-day software upgrades to a massive hardware retrofit project) possible that just wouldn't be possible in a "simpler" architecture. A "simpler" architecture would make these operations much harder, to the point of being impossible, making the end-to-end problem we're trying to solve for the customer harder.
Here’s a clip of Jon Stewart laying it out for you:

@11:00
> “And that, ladies and gentlemen, I present to you, is why we need courts. Whatever flaws the American justice system has, and they are legion, especially for non billionaire former presidents, it does appear to be the last place where you can’t just say whatever the fuck you want regardless of reality.”

That’s the energy I want to bring to congress.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=qmxzQJt80XI&t=660
Similar experience, except I have never worked professionally writing software as my primary task. I've always stayed in operations/systems roles or other periphery roles, and now am a PM. I am constantly amazed at how many "senior" engineers actually have no understanding about how a computer actually works. Once I went corporate I moved up the ranks on the systems side of things very fast, and was widely regarded as one of the best engineers in the company everywhere I went, and yet I can see absolute chasms in my knowledge and really try to ensure I identify SMEs I can work with to overcome my own gaps. It is really shocking though how little most working engineers actually understand about technology.
For me the graduation was significant because of how miserable the previous 4 years were, largely for the reason that you mentioned.
It hurts in so many ways.

I re-read How Google Works, Engineering at Google, etc. Kind of ironically, YT delivered these fantastic talks from 2011:

Google I/O 2011: HTML5 versus Android: Apps or Web for Mobile Development?
https://youtu.be/4f2Zky_YyyQ?si=rbKgYi7Rck-6y3qE

Or HTML5, CSS3, and DOM Performance, Breaking News at 1000ms with Patrick Hamann

This was and still is fantastic stuff.

The next step would be to drop the unofficial requirement that every manager be able to code. MBAs at Google: regression to the mean.

Old Google was inspirational; new Google seems to evolve into yet another drawing board MBA construct.
> I wish we could have another and bump the packet size.

That's why I'm in full support of a world ending apocalypse that allows society to restart from scratch. We've made so many bad decisions this time around, with packet sizes being some of the worst.
You can do monads without HKT but it is much more manual. You need to compose monad transformers yourself, for example.