skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
That seems weirdly restricted and circular.

To illustrate: I can get drunk or fall asleep or get hit on the head, then I'm still a person, but I can't understand. You can get a hint of that, by trying to talk to me, and figuring out that I don't make much sense.

Similarly, someone might figure out how to talk to dolphins or even aliens. If they give sufficiently sensible sensible replies, we will surely declare them to be sentient enough to 'understand'.

Another example: we've exchanged a few messages here. You seem to be smart enough to understand some things, but I don't know whether you are just an exceptionally advanced LLM (and the same goes vice versa for your opinion of me). Yet, I make the judgement that you probably 'understand'. But that's purely based on observed interactions, I did not probe whether you are 'people'.

Perhaps you (or me) are just simulating the effect of understanding? How would we be sure, if the simulation was good enough?

We agree that contemporary LLMs ain't good enough to have a good 'simulation of understanding'. But once the simulation becomes good enough, I don't think it makes a difference whether it's 'just a simulation' or the real deal.

(I don't know whether a straight-forward enlargement of contemporary LLMs will be good enough. But that's an empirical question to me, not a philosophical one.

I suspect if you go insanely large with insane amounts of training, the architecture of contemporary LLMs might be enough; just from pure brute-force scale. But I also suspect that that in practice we will first find success with more economic use of resources via more interesting techniques.)
(I'm not a dev)

This feels to me like a "in other news, water is wet" kind of story. Maybe it's just me, but based on the other comments here CTEs seem to be common knowledge. I went on a SQL trial by fire this year after landing in a role that required massive amounts of weird querying for ad-hoc reporting purposes. Before this my experience and knowledge stopped at different join types.

I naturally discovered CTEs over time after seeking solutions to my problems on the usual online resources. For me the use is two-fold. 1/ I use it to create ad-hoc lookups on data, where the lookups are not available in the DB in the first place. And 2/ In complex queries with lots and lots of conditional joins, I can use a CTE to basically build up my temporary base table, getting all my data in one place, then my main `SELECT` becomes a lot cleaner and easier to read.

I've not looked at recursive CTEs yet, supposedly they can be quite handy. Not sure for what though.

We recently migrated from MySQL to Postgres, and the data reporting went from direct-db querying to Snowflake. And CTEs work on for me on all 3 platforms, so this does not even seem like a Postgres only thing.
Here's just a little silly story from my own life of unfinished projects. I wanted to make a sort of shazam where I could hum the tune of a classical piece of music and find out what it was. I hacked together an enormous midi database of classical music with a couple of libraries to take a hum and turn it into midi notes in order to find the pattern in the database based on the difference between each note in a melody of a classical piece as an identifying key (pun intended). As a really bad singer, I couldn't hold a note, but you can imagine the work required to get this to actually work.

The amusing part was that I told a prospective software development employer about the project because it was consuming a fair part of my life at the time and showed an interest in software development in my spare time. They asked, "Did it work?" I said, "Nope"

I didn't get the job but we both had a laugh about it during the interview.
I owned two separate small sized Nissan trucks and they were great for hauling. When I needed to haul full 4'x8' sheets of stuff I used a little box frame I made from 2"x6" lumber that I put near the tailgate so that sheets rested on that and the wheel wells.

I don't own a truck anymore and now my "hack" is to remove the middle seats from my minivan and fold down the back row seats. That creates enough room that I can fit full 4'x8' sheets in it (with zero room to spare). I've hauled drywall and plywood in it with no problem. I sometimes get weird looks from folks when I roll up to the back of my minivan with a cart of plywood at the big box store.
We don’t need those investors: https://youtu.be/kKAue9DiHc0
Correct. That's just focused on the zero click scenario of unfurling.

The tricky part with a markdown link (as shown in the Slack AI POC) is that the actual URL is not directly visible in the UI.

When rendering a full hyperlink in the UI a similar result can actually be achieved via ASCII Smuggling, where an attacker appends invisible Unicode tag characters to a hyperlink (some demos here: https://embracethered.com/blog/posts/2024/ascii-smuggling-an...)

LLM Apps are also often vulnerable to zero-click image rendering and sometimes might also leak data via tool invocation (like browsing).

I think the important part is to test LLM applications for these threats before release - it's concerning that so many organizations keep overlooking these novel vulnerabilities when adopting LLMs.
How to Scale Payment Systems with the Saga Pattern
The cloud integration is the main technical issue.

Rather than a UDP packet going to my speaker next to me in <1ms, it now requires an authenticated encrypted round trip to the other side of the world and back.

The mDNS is an implementation issue that could be resolved without such a significant, noticeable, irreversible effect on latency as with the cloud integration.
This reminds me how one of the most insane things in the world, it seems to me, are democratically elected judges and prosecutors. While handing down judgments and deciding whether to prosecute a marginal case, they have to ask themselves: what will win me reelection in n years.
Does it actually make economic sense to run a cable large enough for that kind of power from Australia to Singapore?

I would have guessed there must be enough domestic customers or in Indonesia that would make more sense.
Looking at the UI, I see consistently applied patterns in a pretty normalised layout. I don't know how to use any of the controls, but that's because I don't know how to steer a warship, not because the UI is bad. Had I known what "gang" means in this context, the problem would've been clear from the very first screenshot. Yes, the UI is ugly as sin, but it doesn't need to be pretty.

A barely trained 18 year old on months of sleep deprivation couldn't figure this out, but that's an impossible standard to design for. The entire ship was designed to use computer aided navigation anyway, but apparently that's being disabled by default.
> Your LLM on the other hand, has no context in which it shows such a level of cognitive capacity

Yes, it will be confused as well, and for all outwards observable signs will fail to make sense of the stimuli, yet it will "aware" of its inability to understand, much like a human brain would.

If you doubt that, open a new session and type some random tokens, you will get the answer that it's confused.

Any other statement as to "consciousness" verges into the philosophical and unanswerable via empirical means.

And ah, to frame it as an appeal to authority when the topic is precisely the subject of a neuroscientist's study.

Sounds like you know a thing or two about nonsense and emotional attachment to bad ideas.
Agreed. I work at Mozilla as an engineer for Firefox, and I'm generally happy to see this.

I currently work on tab groups, and I'm curious to see what their implementation will look like or whether they'll try to fast-track our work-in-progress once that's somewhat viable.

For the sidebar and vertical tabs, they seem to have implemented their own thing rather than using what our team has been working on. At a first glance, the results look similar. I wonder if they'll want to ditch their implementation once we've released, as forking this stuff long-term may not be super cost efficient.

Their claims about performance do seem dubious. Mostly they seem to tweak a bunch of Firefox prefs, but more often than not there are good reasons for Firefox's defaults, and changing them may come with a tradeoff.
It's worse formatted than dang's stuff, but ya tried
Ask HN: What Roles Does a LLM Startup Need?
As titled. I plan to build a LLM startup that likely focus on dev-tool. I'm actively meeting more people in the space and want to get opinions what kind of roles should socialize more with. For background, I'm an AI software engineer. Thanks in advance!
That depends. It could be that they use aluminum instead. Apparently that's quite common in HVDC cables and interesting for cost reasons.
I was hoping for something a lot more silly like NASA tapping over the Moon landing tapes. A sort of "We cannot get the old app back because we don't know where it is".

Instead it is the usual case of development in search of a new horizon.
This post was written for juniors
Green and Golden
What If Your JavaScript Package CDN URL Goes Missing?
I am quite skeptical of item 6 in this list, but otherwise it looks pretty good:

> Cheating effectively is indistinguishable from debugging skill.

If you know the code or problem ahead of time and how to fix it, you can certainly be convincing in your walk-through of how to do it.
Try something like maestro which uses agents and orchestrator. The looping quality checks have been very helpful. Claude-engineer from same developer is also good to experience how superior that ia to regular chat.
So here's what I was thinking:
- It's a web-plattform where you can put in your website url
- Then you can simply open your website (in production) and you will see a toolbar floating on top of your website
- You can use this toolbar to select HTML Elements on your own website (similar to how the select cursor in chrome dev tools works)
- By selecting elements you can create "User Actions", which simply is a sequence of clicks in order on specific elements on your website
- Now, after saving, every time a user on your website does those specific "User Actions", you will receive a webhook to your system
- You could pass any user properties you wish on to that webhook call
- You can use the webhook call for whatever you wish (triggering emails, analytics, support, etc.)

Does that make any sense?
'Heart-in-a-box' better than cooler for heart transplants
The alternative (of an entirely incompatible hardware evolution) would have been much more suicidal though. The whole point of computer hardware is to run software (and mostly quite boring office or some process-controller software). And by cloning the hardware you save the software development cost (e.g. most East German productivity software were pirated copies with the trademark strings sloppily replaced).
phrack has always had this kind of article. i'm sure if you grep for "A hacker is" or "the hacker ethos" you'll get a hit for every phrack issue going back to the 80s.
The argument that we are going to see massive progress soon is weak in my view. It seems to be:

- we had some big breakthroughs recently

- some AI “godfathers” are “really worried”
I'd go one step further and suggest that one of the few things LLMs are good at is acting as astroturfing agents for themselves. I must be crazy to not be completely changing my workflow and job title with [THE_GOOD_ONE] and not that other one, and wow so many other people vocally feel the same way on every other forum that's extremely easy to manipulate.

Fwiw, I've had some helpful successful prompts here and there, and in some very narrow scopes I'll get something usable, like parsing JSON or scaffolding some test cases, which is real saved time, but I stopped thinking about these tools long ago.

To get real value out of something like your example, I'd be using it as a back and forth to help me understand how some concepts work or write example questions I can drill on my own, but nothing where precision matters
Australia is going to have make it Rd2 of being an energy commodity superpower. 40 years of exporting coal to China, it can look forward to 1000's years of export solar to APAC.
How does it work offline then ?
See the answer above, I just posted a reply which may give more context.

As for what the webhook contains:
- Some standard metadata about the session (location, host, referrer etc.)
- Any user property (email, userId etc.) that you can add at that specific point in time in your app

Does that make sense?
As much as I like the ideas behind the semantic web, JSON-LD feels like the least friendly of all semantic markup options (compared to something like, say, microformats)
Here is why I did not answer: I don't think you are genuinely interested, I think you just disagree and were trying to argue that it was not a "word salad". Which is valid, it's okay to disagree with my subjective opinion.

For the sake of the argument: I say "apple, pear, avocado... that's a salad!" and you answer "Why would you say that an apple is necessarily part of a salad? How should I call an apple if I don't want it to sound like it is part of a salad?"

What makes a salad is the aggregation of multiple ingredients. Of course "stakeholders" is not a word salad.
Aluminium is almost as good by cross section, much cheaper, and the global (mainly Chinese) production is sufficient for a global (40 megameter) multi-terrawatt power grid every 18 months or so.

And yes, I did do the maths; and also yes it's really just China at the "global terrawatt" scale (they've become a dominant aluminium supplier), but a much smaller distance and power rating is probably fine even if China doesn't sell you the metal.
The render of the planned solar panel array looks like sci-fi art. Very cool (hot?).

Maybe there are already vast fields of solar panels like that, and I just haven't seen it before?
loquacity was the right word
I used to also use i3 and later sway and I noticed I only ever tiled my terminals. I don't really remember why but I started using tmux (with tilish) and I liked that I can detach and reattach to sessions later. But at that point I'm just full screening windows so now I'm on gnome and use a single terminal window with tmux :)

Edit: my journey of text editors has been vim -> neovim -> helix so I just have them open inside the tmux sessions.
Good points, I guess what you're saying is to build a small momentum and just keep it going (without overdoing it)?
I would also cast my vote for sublime text. The performance is amazing, the defaults are great and the extensions cover a lot of the use cases
I'm unsure about Indonesia, but domestic customers in that region would be pretty limited. The closest major power users would be in Queensland (>1000km) away.
Agreed. System 2 strategizing may simply be the recursive application of symbolic System 1 tooling. An LLM is entirely capable of reading a problem, determining the immediate facts and tokens (fast and intuitive system 1) and determining the ideal algorithm to resolve them (logical analytical system 2). The execution to do all those steps at once is lacking in current LLMs (debatably - they get better every month) - but any basic architecture breaking things down into component sub-questions clearly works.
Don't Fear the Reaper (2017)
Same here, in the last 2 years, my eyesight has gone down a lot (combination of astigmatism and presbyopia is not great). I used to love the growl style notifications from macos, now I always miss them (and often miss the alert that I only have 5% battery left).

The issue with the not seeing toast notifications is that in some apps it’s the only true notification that the request went through to the server so missing them when they failed for whatever reason is rather annoying
I recognize it's useful. I don't think it justifies the cost.
The reason it works in asia is because people drive slower - by necessity. You can’t barrel down one of those chaotic streets at 30mph, you’ll kill someone. You need to slow down to deal with all the chaos.

We can have the same advantages in the west while still keeping the rules-based system, by making roads narrower.
Here's another less extreme example:

https://www.examinerlive.co.uk/news/real-life/half-lorry-dri...

What else do you think it could be caused by? The sun is the obvious explanation and we know the sun damages skin.

Another easy source of proof is women's skin damage patterns. Look at any old woman's naked body (if you dare) and their face, and frequently upper chest will be much more damaged than the rest of their body which has been covered by clothes their entire life.
>Also, each of your examples had at least one error, did you not see them?

I didn't could you point them out?

>There are countless existing, human-vetted, designed on special purpose, bodies of work full of material like the stuff your chatgpt just "created". Why not use those?

As a classroom teacher I can tell you that piecing together existing resources is hard work and sometimes impossible because resource A is in this text book (which might not be digital) and resource B is on that website and quiz C is on another site. Sometimes it's impossible or very difficult to put all these pieces together in a cohesive manner. GPT can do all that an more.

The point is not to replace all existing resources with GPT, this is all or nothing logic. It's another tool in the tool belt which can save time and provide new ways of doing things.
Would love for others to share non-technical questions that can filter bad candidates!
I'm creating tools on top of AI that can which is my point.
Japan used NTSC-J, not PAL. Apparently it's close enough to American NTSC that they are basically compatible.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NTSC-J
It's ghastly to me that Google seems to have just given up. There were a bunch of portable speakers coming out with Chromecast. JBL Link in 2017, for example. I have some Sony gear from around the same time (fine speaker, fine Chromecast, but some truly godawful bad wifi connectivity).

But now there's almost nothing coming out. Chromecast Audio feels like an ever shrinking ever less available technology. And there just aren't any alternatives in the running!
Docker and OCI Hardening
Bringing an LLM into the picture is just silly. There's zero need.

The author (and much of HN?) seems to be unaware that it's not just thousands of websites using JSON-LD, it's millions.

For example: install WordPress, install an SEO plugin like Yoast, and boom you're done. Basic JSON-LD will be generated expressing semantic information about all your blog posts, videos etc. It only takes a few lines of code to extend what shows up by default, and other CMSes support this took.

SEOs know all about this topic because Google looks for JSON-LD in your document and it makes a significant difference to how your site is presented in search results as well as all those other fancy UI modules that show up on Google.

Anyone who wants to understand how this is working massively, at scale, across millions of websites today, implemented consciously by thousands of businesses, should start here:

https://developers.google.com/search/docs/appearance/structu...

https://search.google.com/test/rich-results

Is this the "Semantic Web" that was dreamed of in yesteryear? Well it hasn't gone as far and as fast as the academics hoped, but does anything?

The rudimentary semantic expression is already out there on the Web, deployed at scale today. Someone creative with market pull could easily expand on this e.g. maybe someday a competitor to Google or another Big Tech expands the set of semantic information a bit if it's relevant to their business scenarios.

It's all happening, it's just happening in the way that commercial markets make things happen.
AI could help with this. It could pull the version history for a chunk of code you have highlighted, pull up the related tickets, sift through them, and then try to summarize from commit messages and comments on the ticket why this was added.

What I could have used the other day was "find the commit where this variable became unused". I wanted to know if the line that used it was intentionally deleted or if it got lost in a refactor. I eventually found it but I had to click through dozens of commits to find the right one.
It's a new source. Of course there's a different way to get that info too. It's like saying "we had one leak, there's no value in any new data leaks ever".
Atlassian CEO's idea to build 4k-kilometer extension cord plugged in
China scale is so vast that even with these additions, nuclear share of energy mix will be less than 5%. Important to be building them regardless, institutional knowledge gained from this nuclear buildout will mean future efficiencies - China probably already the fastest in nuclear from approval to production
Small unrelated bug report: in your "Book review: Bernoulli's Fallacy" article, there is a link to: https://www.thatgeoguy.ca/blog/%7B%7B%20site.baseurl%20%7D%7...

I don't have much time to read through all this now but I'll check later, looks like great write-ups!
From the article: the costs to produce ram chips were about ten times higher than in the West. The GDR apparently put a lot of resources into it’s coop industry (hey, better than nuclear weapons I guess).

Being bankrupt was one factor in allowing the wall to fall peacefully.
Don't have an account and I'm not making one.
I think that if you want your page to be well discoverable, to be well asvertised, positioned in search engines and social media you have to support standards. Like open graph protocol, or json ld.

Be nice to bots. This is advertisment after all.

Support standards even if Google does not. Other bots might not be as sofisticated.

For me, yes, it is worth the bother
Engineers are not just builders
IMO they went dark because they were forced to pivot to AI to survive, soft-abandoning their core mission of expanding developer literacy.

Their biggest business problem is that they can’t win at that mission in a way that nets the company a win, because the tools they use for basic literacy are all downstream of Github’s. Every time they improve something to gain a competitive advantage they end up giving the same advantage to their biggest competitor. Even their AI tech is downstream of their competitors’!

I mean, I used to have a lot more respect for Steve Yegge, but his post about joining SG was one of the last optimistic things written about the Sourcegraph platform, and one of the last genuinely optimistic things Steve has written (that also made me optimistic). I absolutely loved watching Prime disassemble Steve’s current view of the world in the most still-grounded-in-reality way possible.

Disclaimer: I am the author of a competing technology (BABLR), am banned from the Sourcegraph Discord for agitating for change, and am now CEO of the newly-born Silphium Labs: an org with the same mission as Sourcegraph but which still believes in transparency, open source, and the realistic possibility of bringing no-cost code literacy to everyone in the world
I like animating the checkbox most, but showing a loading symbol next to it is clearly also much better than the current behavior.

In the YouTube example, I don't think the last two options you mentioned would work very well.
WITH clauses are a somewhat recent feature, at least on PostgreSQL. If you learned SQL before they became commonly available, it's unsurprising if you tend to think of other SQL techniques first.
Performance optimizations of WebSocket compression in Go application
This needs to go further with the realization that certain groups (not men) are much more ready to sue.