skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The truth is in the middle. I've now had two startups where I came in to fix things where the system would fall over if there were more than 1 user. Literally; no transactional logic and messy interactions with the database combined with a front end engineers just making a mess of doing a backend.

In one case the database was "mongo realm", which was something our Android guy randomly picked. No transactions, no security, and 100% of the data was synced client side. Also there was no IOS and web UI.
Easiest decision ever to scrap that because it was slow, broken, and there wasn't really a lot there to salvage. And I needed those other platforms supported. It's the combination of over and under engineering that is problematic. There were some tears but about six months later we had replaced 100% of the software with something that actually worked.

In both cases, I ended up just junking the backend system and replacing it with something boring but sane. In both cases getting that done was easy and fast. I love simple. I love monoliths. So no Kubernetes or any of that micro services nonsense. Because that's the opposite of simple. Which usually just means more work that doesn't really add any value.

In a small startup you should spend most of your time iterating on the UX and your product. Like really quickly. You shouldn't get too attached to anything you have. The questions that should be in the back of your mind is 1) how much time would it take a competent team to replicate what you have? and 2) would they end up with a better product?

Those questions should lead your decision making. Because if the answers are "not long" and "yes", you should just wipe out the technical debt you have built up and do things properly. Because otherwise somebody else will do it for you if it really is that good of an idea.

I've seen a lot of startups that get hung up on their own tech when it arguably isn't that great. They have the right ideas and vision but can't execute because they are stuck with whatever they have. That's usually when I get involved actually. The key characteristic of great UX is that things are simple. Which usually also means they are simple to realize if you know what you are doing.

Cumulative effort does not automatically add up to value; often it actually becomes the main obstacle to creating value. Often the most valuable outcome of building software is actually just proving the concept works. Use that to get funding, customer revenue, etc. A valid decision is to then do it properly and get a good team together to do it.
The middle approach would be implementing the infrastructure in a basic way that is simplistic, but provides benefit and can be expanded.
like != need
Bacteria on the space station are evolving for life in space
Are jobs being consolidated? Businesses starting but just don't need employees? AI can't do the job yet - is it people with little to no programming skills trying to ChatGPT their way through it?

The phenomenon seems to extend beyond California. I see many job listings constantly updated on Wellfound and elsewhere. Are these actually ghost jobs?
What climate activists won't tell you about protecting the planet
Beta Testing an Advanced Golf Practice Tool with Tour Players. Here's Our Lesson
We're in the process of beta testing a new golf practice tool designed for serious golfers, co-created with feedback from tour players. The tool focuses on advanced analytics to track and improve practice routines, allowing golfers to refine their skills like the pros. Throughout development, we’ve learned valuable lessons from the elite players who shaped its design. If you’re interested in early access or want to share thoughts on product development, let’s discuss the journey and insights that went into this tool or sign up for beta via the link
It’s the choice of target, rather than the weapon that makes me look down on them. Aiming to blow up bystanders is disgusting, not sure how you made this be about "choice of weapon".
New Internet Noise Storm: Secret Messages and the China Connection
iPhone 15 plus tens of thousands of dollars on lenses, tripods, mics and other accessories. This is an ad.
Show HN: Create and print your own card game in minutes
Hey HN!

Two years ago i proposed to my GF with a board game I made using stable diffusion. I wrote about it here: https://bogomolnyelad.substack.com/p/board-game

I thought it would be cool to help people do the same, starting with playing cards. Let me know what you think!
I was trying to do this using Prompt Caching like a month ago, but then noticed there's five minute maximum lifetime for the cached prompts - doesn't really work for my RAG needs (or probably most), where the queries would be ran during the next month or a year. I can't see any changes to that policy. Little surprised to see them talk about Prompt Caching relating to RAG.
> The SQL database is probably the hardest part to scale

Use an ORM and SQLite, I bet you a beer that you won’t hit the perf ceiling before getting bored of your project.
> They claim so much and their browsers' code is 100% proprietary

Far from me to defend Arc (I dislike it for several reasons) but it’s based on Chromium so it’s far from 100% proprietary. Don’t Edge, Vivaldi, and even Chrome have proprietary layers on top of the open-source Chromium?
Answer: "Not as much as you think"

The reason is that most potential customers will come back later, and that's assuming that the system that went down even had any real money attached to it.

I see a lot of multi-region, multi-zone architectures deployed for government websites that get maybe a couple of unique users per day. These could be down for many hours and chances are that no human would notice.
I, as a game developer, also ask of a tiny bit of fair play amongst ourselves.

The game isn't fun to play only because they slapped BOTW + pokemon copycats with guns. So, why did they decide to go so much on your face when they could have literally tweaked certain elements to keep them similar but not identical?

People got absolutely bananas with Genshin Impact because of the similarities in style while the core loop and business model being more different.

To top it off, the developers of PalWorld are literal neighbours of Nintendo (both from Kyoto). So this does have to be a very open and direct diss at Nintendo as whole.
I think many of these features are fantastic and Matrix 2.0 is a great set of features. However I think Element X is still missing quite a number of features for (my personal) daily use (e.g. spaces, threads and roomlist). Also it's not available for Intel-based Macs, which makes it unusable for many of my team members :(
What about your moral obligation?
Not just the original file quality, it's exactly the same image but (losslessly) compressed better.
Just found out recently that even DHH abandoned macOS and is promoting Ubuntu with his own customizations.
I agree with this if you are talking fb/google scale; you will very likely not even get close to that, ever. But millions of users, depending on how it hits the servers over time, is really not very much. I run a site with well over 1m active users, but it runs on $50/mo worth of VPSs with an LB and devving for it doesn't take a millisecond longer than for a non scaling version.
Scaling databases is easy. But you can really blow performance out of the water if you don't know SQL and use an ORM the naive way. Micro services and things like graphql make it worse. Now you are doing joins in memory in your FF-ing graphql endpoint instead of in the database.

A simple cheap database should be able to handle millions of rows and a handful of concurrent users. Meaning that if your users drop by a few times a week, you can have hundreds/thousands of those before your server gets busy. Run two cheap vms so you can do zero downtime deployments. Put a load balancer in front of it. Get a managed database. Grand total should be under 100$ per month. If you are really strapped for cash, you can get away with <40$.
Yes, but it's a half-baked step.

Probably it's time to rethink what a nation means.

At least I got a vision, citizenship is like being a member of an association.

Currently, citizenship is very restricted, but I hope for a more open world, where citizenship is a lot more fluent than today. Of course many protections are neccessary which are implicit in citizenship. That's why I wrote about human rights and corporate organisations. I imagine an automatic membership bound to residency and what is citizenship today turns into membership to some cultural association.

And customers become members of their corporate entity and thus gain many rights we don't have today. That's why I said, corporate entities turn into countries.

Perhaps in about a hundred years if our civilization is still thriving at least somewhat?
I don't see an issue, using something like Firebase is what a smart engineer would do. Just this one piece of logic is a problem.
We build a corporate RAG for a government entity. What I've learned so far by applying an experimental A/B testing approach to RAG using RAGAS metrics:

- Hybrid Retrieval (semantic + vector) and then LLM based Reranking made no significant change using synthetic eva-questions

- HyDE decreased answer quality and retrieval quality severly when measured with RAGAS using synthetic eval-questions

(we still have to do a RAGAS eval using expert and real user questions)

So yes, hybrid retrieval is always good - that's no news to anyone building production ready or enterprise RAG solutions. But one method doesn't always win. We found semantic search of Azure AI Search being sufficient as a second method, next to vector similarity. Others might find BM25 great, or a fine tuned query post processing SLM. Depends on the use case. Test, test, test.

Next things we're going to try:

- RAPTOR

- SelfRAG

- Agentic RAG

- Query Refinement (expansion and sub-queries)

- GraphRAG

Learning so far:

- Always use a baseline and an experiment to try to refute your null hypothesis using measures like RAGAS or others.

- Use three types of evaluation questions/answers: 1. Expert written q&a, 2. Real user questions (from logs), 3. Synthetic q&a generated from your source documents
Anemoi – A framework to streamline development of ML weather forecasting models
It bothers me that they changed a lot of letters from the original Comic Sans. They even added serifs, which contradicts the "Sans", and the spirit of the original!
AppleTofu had a very small startup in 2018, operating out of the owner's home. Since those early days, we've enjoyed a remarkable journey, expanding our product range to include a wide variety of items. We specialize in high-quality dish drying racks and have a strong presence in the USA. Our offerings also include various types of dish racks, kitchen counter racks, drying racks, and other essential kitchenware. We proudly ship our products to customers across the USA, Canada, and Mexico.
The collapse of Russia could lead to nuclear war, misplaced bombs, or other calamities. After the collapse of the USSR, the West took great pains to ensure that the bombs outside the newly formed Russia didn't fall into the wrong hands.

There could be a replay of that scenario, but with an openly hostile and fragmented set of former-Russian states that won't allow Western "interference".
Making Free Proxies with Tor and Ansible
Completely newbie questions from someone outside the field who hasn't been following closely:

Is the spatial memory a fixed size (how big?) or does it grow over time?

And is there a point at which is is saturated and future results decline?
> I have yet to find a privacy policy that says frankly "we only know your IP and time you downloaded the software, for the few weeks before the server logs are overwritten."

Not with those exact words, but that’s Alfred. Server connections are done only to validate the license and check for updates, and you can even disable that.

https://www.alfredapp.com/terms/

> Alfred only contacts our server when activating your Powerpack license in order to validate it, as well as periodically checking for new software updates. You can disable the software update check in the Update preferences, but we recommend keeping this enabled to ensure that you always have the latest version for security reasons and to make the most of the awesome new features!
as always, the result of more security without taking into account real-life human behaviour, only leads to less security overall as people will just use services that don't have this behaviour and always allow getting back your account
Secret Service investigating Elon Musk's X post about assassination threats
> Granted I only travel with hand luggage

That makes an enormous difference, since you usually can do your check-in online a day or more before departure.

I just had a flight where I had purchased my connections on separate tickets. When I arrived at the baggage drop-off, it was closed and no staff from the airline was anywhere. So I had to bring my big suitcase along through security and then the airline staff at the gate was friendly enough to check it in for me for free.

But if you're bringing anything in your checked luggage that security doesn't like, you will have to just leave that item at the airport. You might also have to pay a high fee to bring it to the gate instead of checking it, depending on airline. I had purchased my ticket directly from the airline, so maybe they treated me better because of it?
i thought of the same thing, considering it's san francisco
Same reason they offer deals in the first place, price discrimination and yield management.
How does that relate to the scenario and what of the templates?
I thought entrapment was illegal (that car dude that wanted to deal coke to save his company).
GraphRAG-SDK v0.2: Expanding AI and Knowledge Graph Horizons
> Try reading the most fucked up part of Naked Lunch in a Walmart Subway sometime

I've read Naked Lunch, but I don't remember any descriptions of child abuse. Not saying I don't believe you, just wondering why I wouldn't remember the most fucked up part of a book.
Quite an interesting idea to install if you use slack
It's only a good thing if you can disable it, and you can't. I know which apps I granted permission, don't bug me about it. This is terrible UX design.

I really hate how every year I have to hope macOS won't introduce annoying new features (this annoying nagging screen), break compatibility with existing third-party apps (Intune VPN was broken for months after the release of Sonoma) or just remove existing functionality entirely altogether (subpixel aliasing was removed a few years ago resulting in awful font rendering on non-retina displays).

How can I justify spending an extraordinary amount of money on a MacBook Pro when the operating system introduces breaking changes _every year_? And on top of that, I can't even choose to run my own operating system? Very annoying.
Problem is that you can budget time/cost of endeavors that were already done.

If you are doing R&D that is not something you can budget because definition of research is you don't really know what you are searching for - well you have to have some reasonable idea of course but if $20k becomes suddenly $50k that should not be a surprise for R&D.

People might say "but the CRUD app you are building is not real R&D" if you are really building a CRUD app that is like an existing one - setup Wordpress, SAP, Shopify or pick from dozens of existing ones and be done with it. All else is R&D because there is more unknowns than known stuff, there are always integrations with 3rd parties, some workflows that need implementations etc. .

Even building a piece of road - well all tech is there - can end up running over time/budget if for example you find terrain under is not as one expected and it sinks or something and you have to figure out how best to deal with that and there is no expert to deal with that specific type of ground you ran into.
In short: no.

The vector databases are here to store vectors and calculating distance between vectors.

The embeddings model is the model that you pick to generate these vectors from a string or an image.

You give "bart simpson" to an embeddings model and it becomes (43, -23, 2, 3, 4, 843, 34, 230, 324, 234, ...)

You can imagine it like geometric points in space (well, it's a vector though), except that instead of being 2D, or 3D-space, they are typically in higher-number of dimensions (e.g: 768).

When you want to find similar entries, you just generate a new vector "homer simpson" (64, -13, 2, 3, 4, 843, 34, 230, 324, 234, ...) and send it to the vector database and it will return you all the nearest neighbors (= the existing entries with the smallest distance).

To generate these vectors, you can use any model that you want, however, you have to stay consistent.

It means that once you are using one embedding model, you are "forever" stuck with it, as there is no practical way to project from one vector space to another.
My 48GX will never be jealous of a damn TI, LLVM or not.
Is there a cool down between bursts or can you do 10 a second for as many consecutive seconds as you like? You only have to get the images encoded and stored before the next burst starts, or at least before the user runs out of memory.
> Funny how they don’t mention the time your employer doesn’t get from you while you commute.

Alternately, the time/fuel that an employer is making workers expend without compensating them for it.
In my experience, there was issues of lost/undecryptable messages also when you did backup/restore your keys.

That was the annoying issue, I could not trust it.
30th-anniversary limited-run PS5 and PS5 Pro bring back mid-'90s gray plastic
Look that the timestamp, friend. This is likely a “second chance” for this submission.
Bin Laden - what a non-sense. We buried him at sea for religious reasons even though that goes against Muslim beliefs.

If you still believe that Sadam Hussan had weapons of mass destruction and ties to Al Queda then I have a domino theory Ukraine war to sell you.

...Remember kids, jet fuel and office furniture melt steel beams.
I follow your blog and read almost everything you write about Llms. Just curious (if you havent already written about it somewhere and I missed it), how much do you spend monthly, exploring all the various Llms and their features? (I think its a useful context for having a grasp of how much I would have to spend to keep up to date with the models out there and the latest features)
> Everything that you can learn in undergraduate you can learn on the internet.

In principle yes. But it's extremely rare that 18-23 year olds will voluntarily grind through even the tough bits of that curriculum. Autodidacts often have gaping holes of knowledge in the non-fun stuff. Some hypermotivated people will chew their way through it through sheer self-motivation but the vast majority doesn't have the iron will to do that without external pressure. Even top athletes go to training camps and have trainers who push them.

One can of course argue that the material is irrelevant to actual jobs, and it's an eternal debate whether universities should teach fundamental thinking tools and "theory" or just job skills and web frameworks and git commands.

Getting a degree is about several things:

- It shows you passed admissions (in case that's hard)
- It shows you persisted in your studies and managed to pass exams with certain grades
- It shows you have acquired certain foundational knowledge

The first two show your ability to learn new things. Even if (and that's just an if) what you learned wasn't directly useful, you show that you can learn, i.e. have some personal qualities like intelligence, conscientiousness, agreeableness. That you're organized enough, don't give up too easily, can work under an authority etc. Many commenters here take these things for granted, but there are many job applicants who are not like you or your friends in these regards and having passed through those filters prepared by colleges is a very meaningful signal to employers.

And the foundational knowledge of math and algorithms is in fact also very useful for any non-code-monkey stuff. You learn a terminology, a vocabulary to talk to colleagues. Yes, you'll learn most things on the job, but it still makes a difference.

And then there's networking as well. Later in life, a recommendation can be very useful for getting a job. Lots of jobs never get publicly advertised because the signal-to-noise ratio is much better if people first search among acquaintances and contacts.

So a college education gives: foundational knowledge, demonstrable evidence of personal qualities, external push and motivation for developing yourself, a personal network.
There's a bug megatread on r/macos full of networking bugs that makes it clear that upgrading to sequoia is not a good idea just yet.
I'll glance at recipes to figure out how something is done, when I don't know how to do it. Usually stuff that's from different cuisines that I'm used to. It's hard to e.g. invent a recipe for borscht from first principles if all you know is that it's got beets in it.

Most of my process is just cooking a dish (or an ingredient) over and over again until I've figured out to make it fantastic. It's a great way to become very flexible and learn how to work around missing ingredients.
The atmosphere in the habitat is specified to be 33 atmospheres, mostly helium and oxygen.

The characters need to use "talkers" because their voices would be too high pitched to be understandable otherwise.

I think the author either forgot about the talkers when the characters were in the plane, or left them out. How he describes a voice "echoing" in the 96+ percent helium of the plane does not really make sense. Also, why does the plane have enough helium and oxygen gas to pressurize up to 33 atmospheres? Helium leaks like hell, right? It lasted that long? And it can't really have switched from something else, based on how the "wacky events" are claimed to happen in the book. If the ship has an AI, it's probably just standard control loops attached to an expert system (based on Crichton's other books, is that a fair assumption?), I doubt it would detect people outside and then adapt.

Wouldn't it get crushed before it had the opportunity to be pressurized in the first place? I doubt the mission planners knew it would jump into water, but I guess it was in shallower water and then sunk/the seabed collapsed or something?

If that's the explanation, it must have been pressurized according to an algorithm the entire time, not based on the habitat. The habitat was never connected to the plane before the characters went in, they walked over in suits.

I can't really see how something like that would last that long. Current soft plastics don't, and I don't really think that's solvable with incremental improvement, but incremental improvement is what's shown in the book.

Sure, you can add antioxidants to polymers, but that competes with dyes/carbon black for UV resistance, and flame retardants, for the filler percentage. Too high a filler percentage and the mechanical properties go in the trash, you can quite commonly see this with plastic parts that attach to circuit boards, they're really brittle. With soft plastics, you usually need plasticizers too, and those leach out/degrade over time, and I have no idea how to to fix that.

I'm thinking a fluoroelastomer with antioxidant/carbon black/some flame retardant as fillers, but fluoroelastomers don't have very good mechanical properties in the first place. I think that's really pushing it.
How I've built an unprofitable MEV Bot in Rust
As always the plan is to destroy existing industries and then raise prices to above the actual cost.
I think you're just seeing the results of years of over-hiring, followed by a slight downturn. When money is cheap, companies over-hire. And when money is expensive, companies fire/layoff/whatever.

In this variation of musical chairs, you need to be seated before the music stops.