skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: How many users does the average YC founder cold call/talk to?
I'm implementing the talk to users write code approach. I'm talking to as many users as I can find (without losing too much quality in the interactions) while also coding and improving the product a little bit every day.

I'm curious about how do YC top performers do on these stats? So that I might improve myself.

Thanks in advance,
Santy
You clearly never actually looked at Sourcegraph OSS. The OSS version died a very long time ago, the vastly majority of Sourcegraph most valuable features were never OSS, and Sourcegraph has always been very transparent about this.

All that’s changed here is that a non-OSS, but public codebase, is now private. From a customers perspective, nothing material has changed. Only those who want something for nothing are seriously impacted by this.
OpenAI has a mysterious reference to caching in their guide to latency.

> Maximize shared prompt prefix, by putting dynamic portions (e.g. RAG results, history, etc) later in the prompt. This makes your request more KV cache-friendly (which most LLM providers use) and means fewer input tokens are processed on each request.

source: https://platform.openai.com/docs/guides/latency-optimization
I would have expected fine-tuning to be good at imparting knowledge. Pre-training is often done for a single epoch only and models soak up the knowledge like crazy without multiple passes so why would fine-tuning be any different?
> Disney says it is in the process of submitting a filing to the court to withdraw its call for arbitration.

If all that's changed is their PR situation then it seems like it's a further abuse of process to do even this. The judge should rule on their legal position regardless.
This is impressive! We use Metabase and I've been wanting this exact user experience for quite some time. So far, I've been dumping our Postgres schema into a Claude project and asking it to generate queries. This works surprisingly well, save for the tedious copy-paste between the two tabs. The Chrome extension workflow makes perfect sense.

Is there a way to select which model is being used? Anecdotally, I've found that Claude 3.5 Sonnet works incredibly well with even the most complex queries in one shot, which is not something I've seen with GPT-4o.
How do you know it's not prompt caching in the backend?
The 6th reason is being smarter than the other two guys.
It's definitely arrogant. But after much experience trying to explain these things to people, I'm more and more convinced it's not just "if you just put it the right way they will understand". Sure, they will nod politely and pretend to understand, and may even do a passable job of reciting it, but once its cast in a slightly different light they are just as confused.

Much as with reading and writing, I think it takes an active imagination and a long slog of unlearning to trust logic (the "ought to" thinking that shields one from reality) and coming to terms with the race not being to the swift, etc, and that these effects can be quantified.

It's not that some people are incapable of it. Much like literal literacy has reached rates of 99.9 % in parts of the world, I'm convinced statistical literacy can too. But when your teacher is not statistically literate (which I hypothesise they are not, generally speaking), they will not pass that on to you. They will not give you examples where the race is not to the swift. They will not point out when things seem to happen within regular variation and when they seem to be due to assignable causes. They will not observe the battle against entropy in seating choices in the classroom. They will not point out potential confounders in propensity associations. They will not treat student performance as a sample from a hypothetical population. They will not grade multiple-choice questions on KL divergence, although that would be far more useful. I could go on but I think you get the point.

Yet to be clear, I'm not talking about just applying statistical techniques and tools. I'm talking about being able to follow a basic argument that rests on things like "yes I know they are a fantastic founder but startups fail 90 % of the time and so will they" or "if the ordinary variation between bus arrivals is 5–15 minutes and we have waited 20 minutes then there is something specific that put the bus we are waiting for into a different population." These are not obvious things to many people.

This is not a personal failure – it is a lack of role models and teachers. I wouldn't have considered myself statistically literate until recently, and only thanks to accidentally reading the right books. I wouldn't even have known what I was missing were it not for that!

I suspect it will take a few generations to really get it going.

If someone would donate me large amounts of money I would love to actively research this subject, come up with reliable and valid scales to measure statistical literacy, and so on. But in the meantime I can only think in my spare time and sometimes write about it online.
Previous discussion (12 years ago):
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4808816

Also, Lynch's co-defendant (and former CFO) was hit and killed by a car a few days ago:

https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/article/2024/aug/20/step...
It's clearly slop.
> The Internet was built off of a deal between companies and customers, one that we ought to understand. Companies provide a cornucopia of free, or almost-free, content and services, but in exchange we provide companies with data that helps them direct tailored advertisements to us.

There's something about the subtext or tone here which raises my hackles: I get the feeling this is implied to be a morally-sacred "Deal" only when I'm annoyed at data-brokers cross-referencing all my purchases with all my pseudonymous social media posts... yet somehow it'll shift downwards into "merely an accidental status-quo" the moment a company decides it "needs" even more data or ends up distributing malware and scams.
No, actually, it's because Posthog explicitly recommends that as the way to do it, makes their standard npm package unpinnable (as it will always lazy load the most recent version of its modules) and calls version pinning via npm as an "advanced" installation[1].

The ecosystem has plenty of versioning and best practices, but they do jack squat when you recommend to your customers to bypass them and trust that you'll never break your latest build.

[1] https://posthog.com/docs/libraries/js
Author here!

You are 100% correct. Language like this can be super harmful.

I'm generally a believer that stupidity is something that you DO, not someone that you ARE.

[1] https://qz.com/967554/the-five-universal-laws-of-human-stupi...

Unrelated to IQ, I think at any given point in time, half of us are (by definition) doing more stupid/reckless things than the other 50% of people.

I earnestly believe the world would be a better place if everybody assumed they've accidentally put themselves in the stupid cohort and work to get out of it :)
If you look at how PCs were used in the 1990s some of it was pretty trippy, so you could also say "PCs were on LSD." Take Andy Warhol's Amiga: https://www.wired.com/2014/05/watch-andy-warhol-computer-art...
Censorship in western countries rising significantly and was alarming during 2020-22.
Calling current AI output “quality” belies a limited understanding of the requirements people have of generated images.

The technology in its current state just has no practical relevance outside of a narrow slice of the most low-requirement image needs. Stock photos for blog thumbnails, Kinkade-ian “whatever the tasteless client wants to pay for” slop (minus any claim to distinct style), plus a certain class of fungible Photoshop tasks (change the color, remove the object, and some subset of photobashing).

It lacks the consistency and fine-grained control to support works where the primary goals include artistic expression - you cannot express what you cannot specify. Or worse, prompters don’t even realize how many artistic decisions they’ve delegated to noise.

The same limitations also prevent it from being competitive in the most labor-intensive image-making fields where any assistance would be appreciated, like comic panels or videogame sprite sheets. Any attempt to leverage it for such tasks requires too much hand-holding, compromise, and retouching to provide a real alternative to human labor.
If you follow [3], yes, even learning to read and write is a form of learned helplessness, as Thoth and Socrates conclude. Now, you might not thing that affects our day to day world, but it does; because imagine if we could not read nor write, what sorts of hypotheses we might come up with, now extend that to what we say about LLMs. To those that say those are inequal circumstances, I invite you prove why. Thoth and Socrates know a hell of a lot more than you ever did, to be frank.
The problem with linear/affine type systems is that they have an incredibly high barrier to entry. Just look at ownership semantics in something like Rust. They're not impenetrable (especially with experience), but they're severe enough to be the number one complaint for learners.
> It works completely in hardware

No, it works completely in software, it's just on a different CPU. Still neat though!
"An example of this is DeepSeek-Coder, which can essentially be considered a fine-tune of a fine-tune of a Mixtral model"

I've not heard that anywhere else. My impression from https://huggingface.co/deepseek-ai/deepseek-coder-33b-base was that DeepSeek-Coder was trained from scratch.
There wasn’t really a pullback in 2014, AI tech just kept getting better afterwards and the companies were still dumping a lot of resources into AI.
I have recently been wondering how it is possible that they can make features like that, and provide closed captions, but that they continue to insert ads halfway a speaker’s sentence.
It should still highlight it to clarify which button they're referring to
> And it must do this based entirely on context and how likely one is to appear in the same place as another. That takes a massive amount of data in practice and could be one reason why humans appear to learn from much sparser data and faster.

That, and another thing: A LLM fundamentally boils down to a statistical repetition engine. That means, if it has never seen the input - say, some random large numbers -, it will hallucinate garbage if you ask it a question ("multiply 245358943543548 by 438574589675486789654"), whereas a human would recognize where the boundaries of the numbers are and plug it into a calculator (or, some particularly big brained people would actually do it in their mind) to figure out the result.

Some AI or pseudo-AI (dunno what Wolfram Alpha uses under the hood) has to have a "front" AI to recognize such questions and redirect them to a calculator, but in my eyes that's just cheating for a very specific case and not enabling general intelligence.
Hard to imagine writing this article with zero references to Nyquist.
Just catching up the phrase of marketing "this is just the start ...". Isn't this overused?
Why not both? A message log can always be consulted later, but it doesn't give you a live feed of things that are happening.

I'm also ADHD and, like OP, I appreciate having the stream of toasts that lets me know what the software did. It's saved my butt a bunch of times when I accidentally do something I didn't mean to (deleting instead of archiving, for example). A message log would just get ignored, but toasts help a ton because they're visible.
Isn't that at odds with the article? Quoting, "The reason is that there are (of course) more students in the larger classes, and so you oversample large classes when computing the average experience of students." This leans on the experiences of the students, which necessarily leans on the population. (Granted, this is more clearly a different question/scenario.)

I'll try and play with the simulation some. And to be clear, I don't disagree with your statements. I just feel these are still different questions/statements. How long I expect to wait at a given trip/stop is not the same as how long I expect I have waited at that stop over the days.
This is about transmissions.
Youtube Music have no lossless, its "tracks" have no metadata and are stored in pesky format with a lot of stupid limitations about receiving them. Seems you just do not know what is a good music and how it even looks on your filesystem. And good luck about acknowledging (not even receiving) every existing recording of your favorite artist; discography.
Before I became an engineer and I was doing odd jobs, I got hired by some rich guy (whose name was basically Donald Duck) as an assistant to do some data entry, but really the first task he gave me was to photoshop some photos he took of him and his son after they finished climbing a local mountain. He had me remove people behind them, and had me whiten his teeth.

I think there's a big publicity cycle going on currently due to the AI backlash, but in actuality, no one cares about any of this. People just want nicer photos. They're not sitting around philosophizing about 'what is a photo'. 99.99% of people would say the edited photo in this post is nicer and would prefer it. But if you show it to someone who is all excited about hating AI technology, of course they'll wail that the original was so much better.
cofounder here -- happy to answer any questions :)
That bus with more riders on board also has a higher probability of needing to stop to let people off at each location as well, slowing it down even further!
There are two factors. First, any missile with inertial guidance needs to have a precise angle reference as a basis for the guidance system. If the guidance system starts off slightly wrong about which way is North, it's going to miss the target. Second, the guidance system in Minuteman I could only turn about 10 degrees from its initial angle before the wires would get tangled up. The solution in Minuteman I was to use the launch azimuth as the reference angle, so it was precisely lined up against this angle. Most of the alignment was physically rotating the missile, but the last bit of alignment was by constantly rotating the stable platform for alignment with the light beam from the autocollimator.
It's not a complete mitigation, but you can pause your video history which may decrease the amount of information Google retains over time from this sort of analytics. I haven't dug into the privacy policy and I'm not sure it mentions if this feature affects backend data collection, however.
Asking people to watch a 30m video in order to understand your comment isn't reasonable - can you summarize the point from the video that you're arguing here so people can respond to it without putting in all of that extra work?
After some more looking around I found it, Puck's orb gained 1 movement speed in 6.87 [0] after the markov chain notes for the patch [1]. Though I think the techies one is a similar joke.

[0]: https://www.dota2.com/687

[1]: https://old.reddit.com/r/DotA2/comments/4fw6gm/how_687_would...
My older parents here in the southern US are both dealing with skin cancer of various forms (melanoma and squamous cell carcinoma) because of accumulated sun exposure from when they were younger. Neither one of them were tanning fanatics/sun bunnies/whatever but they would very occasionally get mild sunburns from working outside without adequate protection.

I myself try to avoid prolonged direct exposure to the sun as a matter of principle to try and avoid having to deal with that stuff when I'm their age. If I'm going to be out in direct sunlight for a prolonged period of time, I'm going to be wearing sunscreen and a hat.

It's really hard to know where to draw the line between "too much sun" vs "no sun".
I just block it entirely with uBlacklist. I don't think I have ever received 1 useful piece of information on that entire site.
All foreign made cars have a 10% base tariff in Europe.

The 9% is the additional tariff due to Chinese subsidizes for Tesla.

Most other Chinese manufacturers are getting hit by a 38% additional tariff because they are directly owned by Chinese governments (local or federal) so subsidized at a level beyond a private player could expect.
How do y'all deploy fine-tuned models? I have separate projects for staging and prod, but it doesn't seem like a fine-tune can be shared across projects.

Am I wrong to split projects by env? Am I expected to run fine-tunes separately per env (surely not)? Am I missing an option to share fine-tunes across projects?
If they're running Node, that probably means it's not in the browser.

If it's a server on the internet that browsers connect to (like a standard web app), it already knows all the connecting IPs from the HTTP requests.

If it's some sort of wrapper running Node locally on client computers, well, presumably it would communicate with your server anyway (or else what good are the analytics)? In that case your server would still have their IP address.

You don't need to use a third party like whatismyip.com unless for some reason you didn't want your server involved at all, you just want to find their public IP and then store it locally (for some reason) on that same computer. Hard to imagine why you'd do that unless you're building some sort of malware or long-term user tracking.
I've been investigated. They did the mandatory interview and closed it, but still annoying.
If u are from a small country and you travel a lot it absolutely throws google off.

I never get any relevant ads or videos for me :(.
>How else do you think the "up next" and "recommended videos for you" feature works? Did you think they were serving up relevant videos purely out of chance?

It is absolutely possible to serve recommendations in a content agnostic way based on other user behavior. That is how the Youtube's recommendations worked at least initially. It should be obvious that they didn't have this ability to analyze content when Youtube started almost 20 years ago.

And even in a content aware system, there is a difference between matching up keywords and understanding what those words mean. That is why an automatic transcript feels more neutral. That just transcribes what is being said. There is no implication of any analysis on the meaning of what is being said.

>If anything a dumb rule like "highlight the subscribe button if the transcript mentions it" is much more benign then a recommendation engine that can somehow always serve you a relevant video.

I'm not saying this feature is scarier than the recommendation engine. I'm saying Google revealing how much they know about the content of the video makes everything they do, including their recommendation engine, a little scarier.
So how do you explain the reduction in cancer mortality with sunlight?
I brought the game directly and was able to play and receive updates. I can no longer do this because I do not use steam.
Are you talking about fine-tuned models that you host yourself, or fine-tuned models from a hosted provider like OpenAI?

What do you mean by an "env" here?
That ship has sailed. People can and will just play on old versions if it comes to this. They already do for older versions that have better mod support.
You've never found a single content creator that put out stuff you liked so much you wanted to see everything they did? Not a single one? Do you prefer TV instead?
Hard to say, as a native speaker eloquence here doesn’t seem to refer to the authors own eloquence but rather the amount of words and roundabout explanations they’ve dedicated to the topic. Ie, in contrast to a simple explanation for the obvious things. If anything it reads a touch self deprecating.
> It's important not to sweat it, because a company does not care about your sleep or mental health. It will push you as far as it can.

One time a few years ago, a coworker called me to tell me the stress we were under was causing her hair to fall out. I mentioned I'd lost significant weight and wasn't sleeping well, especially since another coworker had quit and now I was shouldering his responsibilities (programming and managing a junior). She said she was going to quit. I wished her the best. Around six months later, I had to quit too. It took around a year for me to get back to normal sleep patterns and for my heart to stop racing in the night.

Oh yeah, another guy from that team had a "cardiac event" due to stress and had to take a month off.
I've only noticed this a couple of times, I guess because it needs to specifically be that phrase about "smashing" the button.

The thing that I do see on every video that reminds me to hit the like button is seeing the counter move. I'm way more likely to see that and think "yeah I do like this video, I should hit this button" when I see the counter change than I am to have a similar reaction when explicitly told by the person in the video to do it.
That doesn’t work very well when the average number of winners is much less than 1. The math might work out that the “expected value” is more than one winner but in a realistic lottery you should expect to be the only winner.
So I think now we can now say that the Lindqvist 2016 paper wasn't just a fluke. This is a real finding.
You're both right! This is where the subjective Bayesian framework helps clarify things. The passive-voice term "expected winners" leaves ambiguous a key idea: Expected by whom?

The number of winners you expect depends on what information you have, namely, whether or not you know that you are holding a winning lottery ticket or not!
One of the things I love most about HN - you think of a hypothesis, and right after you see someone else who has already posted it. Very curious about this one as well. Though I don't imagine it being the "actual cause", just a big cofactor. I'd still put some money on the direct effect of sunlight absorption by your skin in itself having additional positive benefits (in appropriate doses).
Is this more vitamin D evidence or is there something more going on?
I have noticed multiple YT content creators just casually mentioning things like "like and subscribe for the algorithm" and even "leave a comment for the algorithm", which people do, sometimes just saying "comment for the algorithm". One creator I remember did a "if you watched until the end comment 'boat'" or similar, which of course is again just baiting more comments. It also nudges recurring viewers who know that spiel to watch until the end, because they get to enjoy the dopamine from being one of the people who can comment the word. This increases watch time, which apparently is again one of the things the algorithm uses.

Maybe I have just become more attentive to these things or they have become more prevalent, but I notice this blatant optimization for the Algorithm(tm) more and more. I guess this is the meta you need to play in order to stand out/make it in the torrent of content that is YT or social media in general. I also see this as an example of Goodhart's law as creators try to optimize for reach and thus likes etc. while the original intention of the YT Algorithm(tm) was (or should have been) to serve you content you will enjoy.
I wasn't made aware that I'd eventually be required to use a third-party store to use what I paid for. Since I don't use steam I no longer have what I paid for.
It's wild how quickly the AI landscape shifts. Just 6 months ago, I couldn't go a day without using ChatGPT. Now, it's like finding an old flip phone in a drawer. I've gone full Claude convert. Wonder where I'll be six months from now.
Most governors of US states can grant pardons or clemency for violations of state laws [1]. I don't know whether a pardon can provide a pathway to removal of a false charge of guilt.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pardon#State_law