skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: Is there a need for custom RAG solutions (AI assistants) for SMBs?
Hello hackers,

I have been thinking about ideas for startups and recently thought of the huge market for SMBs and SMEs. Apparently, the global SMB market is projected to reach $7 trillion by 2025. Everyone knows what Retrieval Augmented Generation is but there are hardly any companies doing it at scale.

My thought process is that small to medium businesses and enterprises can benefit from their own personal assistants so that the existing employees can focus more on face to face customer service instead of answering the same repetitive questions on phone/chat/email.

Can anyone help me validate this idea please?

PS: A previous idea I had was something like captcha for social media content but that didn't work out too well. I thought about pivoting towards building something for seamless integration between existing social media platforms and existing deepfake detection solutions but I believe this isn't going to be necessary.
I think it's the [artillery shells](https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/ukraine-...) that's been a bottleneck thus far in Ukraine. It's like NATO keeps around 3 serious war days worth of ammunition on stock.
Not quite because there are logistical challenges to moving large quantities of physical money.
Mine asked me to check in with a friend while I was standing right next to him.

We were leaving an event together, so it probably assumed we would be going our separate ways, which is exactly what check-in is for. As a guy, I’m never going to tell my other guys friends to text me when they get home so I know they’re safe.

I’ll be curious if I get a notification next time I see my mom, as she’s pretty much the only person I’ll send that text for.
I would extremely surprised if the US government doesn’t have all of 23andme’s data, it’s simply too valuable not to get that data by any means possible for black ops side of government.
But pretty close.
I think this view is a bit narrow in terms of what "AI" advancements may depend on. I think it's very easy to argue that large scale AI adoption will require orders of magnitude higher bandwidth than what we currently have. It's not clear that long term electronics will win in all applications, especially with the strong resurgence in interest of photonic computing. Fundamentally, photonic platforms have much higher potential bandwidth (at the cost of power and size currently) than electronics.

GaAs (and other III-V) would likely be an essential material for some kind of photonic or hybrid compute system.

The response below addressed the quantum sensors, but I would be careful of calling "everything" quantum such as image sensors. Sure they rely on the photoelectric effect which is quantum, but not really in the sense of what we would consider a 'quantum sensor' today.

I suspect what could be more relevant are III-V based SQUID Qubits. These are highly sensitive systems that multiple nations are exploring for submarine detection. More near term, quantum communication via quantum light sources also can leverage a III-V platform.
The most likely reason for war is to move the competition with China onto a military footing rather than an economic one. The US would win the first, and that result would help the second. If you’re seeing western powers gear up for war, it might be to secure their economic future rather than a just intervention
It's because Clarc is finally out:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21758298 (Dec 2019)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32597291 (Aug 2022)

That's the performance work I often mentioned in those pinned comments. I need no longer lament that it's not done!

Not sure what I should do with those old comments (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...) ...maybe nothing.

Btw, we rolled this out over 3 weeks ago and I think you're the first person to ask about it on HN. There was one earlier question by email. I think that qualifies as a splash-free dive: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que....
Maybe I should hire a copy-writer!
That's not entirely true. The most common 1500 or 150 sized "half-ton" trucks are included in CAFE and do affect the fleet fuel economy rules. It is the heavier 3500 or 350 and up "1 ton" trucks that are considered commercial and not included in the CAFE fleet fuel economy requirements. If you can take 1 MPG off the fuel economy rating of a half-ton truck, the auto manufacturers are all ears and ready to buy if you can prove it on the drive cycle. They are motivated to optimize the trucks where they can, while still having a salable product.

But the desire for larger, taller vehicles in North America wasn't all about fuel economy relaxation either. The minivan replaced the sedan and station wagons as family cars in the 80's, and cross over SUVs replaced minivans in the 00's. Even small cars of the 90's like Camarys and Civics ended up bigger and taller in the 00's.
Try sending the bob straight to an LLM and have it give you markdown. Bet it works.
America’s secret weapon, right there with no nearby enemies and two oceans
Not the only reason. You can get a significant boost in energy release by using uranium in the tamper.
Is there something similar for ctrl+f?
he said basically the same thing in the episode - he was specifically talking about EVs but it applies to most cars, and his criticism wasn't that they're bad at anything, but that they're boring.

Clarkson's ideal car blows up sometimes, becuase that makes it more fun and interesting. his idea of a good car isn't a useful benchmark for a commuter.
I use notion and like using it. But it’s high contrast Jira.

Yes it’s decluttered but it’s not a very sticky product.
According to the article they just brought it back to 2014 levels.
Throwaway account here. I recently spent a few months as a trainer for a major AI company's project. The well-paid gig mainly involved crafting specialized, reasoning-heavy questions that were supposed to stump the current top models. Most of the trainers had PhDs, and the company's idea was to use our questions to benchmark future AI systems.

It was a real challenge. I managed to come up with a handful of questions that tripped up the models, but it was clear they stumbled for pretty mundane reasons—outdated info or faulty string parsing due to tokenization. A common gripe among the trainers was the project's insistence on questions with clear-cut right/wrong answers. Many of us worked in fields where good research tends to be more nuanced and open to interpretation. I saw plenty of questions from other trainers that only had definitive answers if you bought into specific (and often contentious) theoretical frameworks in psychology, sociology, linguistics, history, and so on.

The AI company people running the projects seemed a bit out of their depth, too. Their detailed guidelines for us actually contained some fundamental contradictions that they had missed. (Ironically, when I ran those guidelines by Claude, ChatGPT, and Gemini, they all spotted the issues straight away.)

After finishing the project, I came away even more impressed by how smart the current models can be.
As long as my social security checks do not bounce starting in ten years, let as many people in as you want.

Burning a bit of karma never hurts now and then.
if that's your major concern, look into just using plain wireguard. It's what I run on my server/desktop/laptop and it works great.
Most x86 ABIs do not mandate padding for 64-bit types, due to the lack of 64-bit loads (at the time).
> When people hype up that the AI solved something for them, I wonder were they lazy like me working with something complex, or were they lazy and didn't even try on something simple?

The truth they won't tell you is that they have likely invested in that AI tool and they are hyping it up with their VC friends that 'It works' even when they know it doesn't.

Each time I talk to the AI bros about these limitations, they retort to their whataboutisms with 'But humans hallucinate too!', 'The human brain is the same as an LLM' nonsense excuses.

LLMs do not 'understand' your problems nor can they reason about them. O1 is no different and instead of buying into the scam and prompting endlessly with garbage results and attempting to replace your co-worker, actual programmers can write the plan for the code themselves and solve it. Especially for unseen code or new changing syntax for it.

Whenever I see someone promoting another AI tool, I always see who invested and 9/10 of the time it is funded by VCs and ex-FAANG engineers yet again on the snake oil grift. (And they know it but will never admit it.)
The government will try all sorts of immoral things, it is made up of people after all, and a significant portion of people have no or very weak morals/compassion. Tuskegee experiments, human radiation experiments, edgewood arsenal experiments, project 112, operation sea-spray….
It is pretty good at coding; I have 40+ years of hobby and professional experience of coding in dozens of languages, from small projects to millions of lines architected and (co) written by me. There is software I wrote begin 90s still running production etc. I am a cto now but I still write code for my job about half time and in my free time as well, that is to say, I was until recently; now I have the tooling (made myself as I didn't like what there was at the time) to not code at all and yet I produce more code than ever. We use PRs and reviews and my colleagues are quite surprised about the speed and the quality. So yeah, not bad for sure even in my field of expertise.

We are now rolling out my tooling in the company so everyone can forget about the boring stuff and just focus on the business logic. There is resistance as this is going to cost jobs; we don't have infinite work to do and this is much (much) faster.
Why gallium arsenide? It's quite fussy.

"This facility is the only secure site in the UK capable of manufacturing gallium arsenide semiconductors, a vital component in military platforms such as fighter jets."
Hopefully everything will work fine. But if anything goes slightly wrong, those media companies will highlight Elon's name in every opportunity.
Neat that FFT yields great waves.

But ultimately, does that model model vortexes or other fluid dynamics?

Can this model a fluid vortex between 2-liter bottles with a 3d-printable plastic connector?

Curl, nonlinearity, Bernoulli, Navier-Stokes, and Gross-Pitaevskii are known tools for CFD computational fluid dynamics with Compressible and Incompressible fluids.

"Ocean waves grow way beyond known limits" (2024-09) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41631177#41631975

"Gigantic Wave in Pacific Ocean Was the Most Extreme 'Rogue Wave' on Record" (2024-09) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41548417#41550654
Some food for thought. Although I think the authors criticisms of syntax highlighting are a bit personal and subjective, alternative schemes would be interesting to explore.
I think any given model is going to decay over time. The data used in them becomes out-dated and the models cost money to run and various cost-saving short-cuts are thus made to reduce accuracy. Also, having your old model seem clunky can make your new model seem great.

Obviously, there are real ways new model get better too. But if we have diminishing returns, as many speculate, it will take a while for it to be entirely obvious.
CVTs are not very common, although they have certainly become more popular lately. Regular automatic transmissions feel very sluggish compared to manuals.
Some major global powers (i.e. China) have a vested interest in that escalation. Having the US tied down in two other conflicts means significantly less resources.

Which means Middle East and Ukraine are already part of a global-ish war. Proxy wars, so far, but in service of a larger goal. (No, I don't think China necessarily instigated, but they're sure supporting ongoing conflict)

As part of that, I'd also assume that the US nudged the UK to maybe consider their supply chain in case the US can't cover Europe's ass. (They can't, not if they expect a Taiwan conflict)
One of my old professors worked at HP and chatted about his involvement in putting ICs in ink cartridges. From what I remember hearing, each one is flashed with calibration data to improve the print quality.

Does anyone know if this is still true, or if it makes that much of a difference?
Matrix conference: On current developments, the state of open source and more
It's not closing down, from the article they are moving to newer furnace technology which requires less workers to run.
I don't mind scale. I mind the bureaucracy and promotion-driven-development that comes with working in a bloated engineering org.
Did you read the blog posts he posted on WordPress.org? That information, alone, direct from his mouth, is enough to remove any doubt. He's unhinged and dangerous and no one should feel safe with him in their supply chain.

https://wordpress.org/news/2024/09/wp-engine/

https://wordpress.org/news/2024/09/wp-engine-banned/
Like when Ebola was discovered near the Ebola River, it got the name "Ebola", which made everyone hate and loathe residents of the area around that river. Or Marburg, Germany, which became anathema after the Marburg Virus emerged. Or the "Hong Kong Flu" which nearly killed Lyndon Johnson (and did kill many others) and whose name resulted in the longstanding economic depression in Hong Kong. Even today people avoid Spain because of the dreaded Spanish Flu. I could go on.
There is a reason for "obsoleting" these Intel-based Macs - they're simply too slow for the average user with Apple and other services enabled. Disable iCloud, Spotlight, MS Office auto-update and other cloud storage services and one has a chance at a (mostly) useful machine, up to a point.

With some hardware skills, one can upgrade / replace the internal storage, though this only goes so far.

Problem is, there are newer, cheaper and better devices with faster storage and higher memory bandwidth, so the market on more recent (non-obsolete or non-vintage) Intel Macs holds steady (for legacy compatibility purposes), while anything that lacks Thunderbolt 3 / USB-C ports becomes a liability.

The last time I saw this was during the transition to Intel chips: PPC G5-based devices fell off the face of the earth within a couple of years, with older G4s holding up the rear for legacy (Mac OS 8.x/9) compatibility. It's a plateau.
Because people who were kids in the 80s are now entering their middle ages
Good. We need more boring cars. No maintenance, same max speed, same acceleration, not allowed to put stupid mods.

Tesla learned this more than a decade ago, yet legacy auto marketers manage to fool you need to express individuality by spending tens of thousands of dollars.
Gen III night vision relies on it; I don't know if they ever made it there, tho.
The editorial asides in this style of writing don't work for me. I know exactly what "drive a ballet dancer" means and don't find it at all clumsy. While I disagree with him, I also understand exactly why Jeremy Clarkson doesn't care about emissions and safety standards.
notion doesn't have normal text files.

You can click "export to markdown" on a notion page, you can click "import from markdown", but those two markdown dialects are totally incompatible. Most of the time notion can't even read what it exported.

The notion web editor for me has very noticeable lag, so I really want to just be able to write some text somewhere to represent a notion table or whatever, but there's simply no supported way to do that I'm aware of.

I mean, it's fine, using a i7 core at 100% at all times just to produce text at a 2 second delay is totally fine for a text editor, I'm sure notion's doing its best.
Racket! This is the language that the common author (Dr. Daniel Friedman) uses, and many of the Little books use custom DSLs implemented in Racket.

Racket now runs on Chez under the hood (inheriting the performance), and has a pretty decent ecosystem as far as schemes go.

(I TA for Dr. Friedman’s programming languages course)
This is a nightmare to implement (unless you go library by library and do it by hand, or you have significant compiler help), as e.g. functions may not directly use a struct with time_t but indirectly assume something about the size of the struct.

Note that for example the std::string transition did not do this.
> Worldwide, the United States is home to more international migrants than any other country, and more than the next four countries—Germany, Saudi Arabia, Russia, and the United Kingdom—combined

That's a somewhat misleading way of presenting data.

It is true that in absolute terms, the US contains more immigrants than any other country on earth.

However, on a percentage of the population basis, the US is actually only around the OECD average in terms of numbers of immigrants: https://www.oecd.org/en/data/indicators/foreign-born-populat... – in 2019, Luxembourg was 47.30% foreign-born, Australia 29.90%, Switzerland 29.70%, Israel 21.20%, Sweden 19.50%. At 13.60%, the US was around the middle.

The fact that the US comes first in absolute terms, is not because the US is unusually welcoming to immigrants, it is because (among developed countries) it is unusually populous – at 333 million people, it is over 2.5 times more populous than the 2nd most populous OECD member (Japan).
> with no nearby enemies

What is Cuba then?
Fair, but I prefer the live sets which I don't think I can really purchase
How does this compare to and/or integrate with OTOH Apache Arrow which had "arrow plasma IPC" and is supported by pandas with dtype_backend="pyarrow", lancedb/lancedb, and Serde.rs? https://serde.rs/#data-formats
It's much more effective at extremely high frequencies used in compact radars, like the kind used on fighter jets.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gallium_arsenide#GaAs_advantag...
The list of countries "casually arming up" and talking about bringing back conscription is a little concerning.
How well is tailscale accepted in orthodox enterprise security circles?

I like the idea of it but can't even imagine trying to get it past the cyber security folks.
+100

Many companies have products that operate at “scale”. They manage to do so with pretty boring techniques (sharding, autoscaling) and technologies (postgres, cloud storage).

Because of the insane blog driven tech culture, many of these teams get questioned by clueless leadership (who read these blogs) and ask why the company isn’t using cassandra / some other hot technology. And it always causes much consternation and wastage.
Too weak to be an enemy?
Pretty fun read, even tho I'll never work at such scale lol
AIK, for using mosh, you need to install mosh on target host as well. Seems like autossh doesn't need this step.
So long API Gateway, and thanks for all the routes
It seems that some people have a way higher propensity to cavities than others. Is this because they have some bacterial overgrowth? Maybe the wrong bacteria? Has there been any research into this and how to bring your mouth bacteria back to normal levels?

I'd love to not have my dentist tell me my gums are receding despite flossing and brushing the recommended amount and not usually eating sweets or carbs.
This, of course, is the true paper on the design of text editors:

"Multics Emacs: The History, Design and Implementation", Copyright © 1979, 1996 Bernard S. Greenberg

https://multicians.org/mepap.html
It still blows my mind that Google Docs still haven't taken over Notion's business altogether. I have used Notion for ~6 months for my own company, ended up going back to Google Docs because it was not worth it. I am sure there are a billion other uses of it, we weren't using any of its database-like features, just as an internal documentation platform, but still fascinating to see a business thrive on the lack of innovation of a giant.

In practice, Google could put a tree-like organization of docs on the sidebar, make the search a bit comfier, and make draggable blocks, and get 80% of the Notion users. I guess they don't have a financial incentive to make docs better, but I would gladly pay extra to have everything there.

I guess someone could build a browser extension that adds that UI to Google Docs, or eventually I'll go and do it myself.
are there some experts on the subject whose writing you would recommend, by any chance? :)
I didn't realize that! That seems like the most practical application from a defense perspective.
Or perhaps blame Boeing and NASA, rather than the single competent organisation that's managing to hold the whole damned thing together.
Sailing Insights from 13M Measurements/Day: The Smartboatia NMEA and LTE-NB Hub
I wonder how much prompt skill is actually influencing the quality of the response.

After using LLMs daily for some time, I have developed a feeling on how to phrase my requests as to get better quality answers.

For example, ensure that it can process the information linearly, like asking to classify items in a list and adding the label directly after the item so that the order remains, instead of allowing it to create multiple lists as the output (which it tends to do by default).

So, at least for me, the prompts are getting smarter.
Cheaters playing with cheaters is what we have yet. The problem is not in the cheaters, is in the game that deliberately select for cheaters.
If you already have a service, test it out and measure its impact. That's going to be way more informative than all of our educated guesses combined.
FDA Approves Nasal Spray Influenza Vaccine for Self- or Caregiver-Administration
Wondering the same thing for Google sheets
Cats are fascinating because the best and the worst people in our lives could be described as cat like.

You know a cool cat. You also know a skittish cat.

Most animal connotations have a singular meaning, but cats, cats refuse to be boxed in.
Canada will rise again!
For web-servers on remote machines, I have found this useful:

socat TCP4-LISTEN:1234,fork,bind=127.0.0.1 EXEC:'ssh my.remote.server nc 127.0.0.1 1234'

1234 = local/remote port. Can be adapted to use unix sockets at the remote end. my.remote.server = your remote server address.

This will set up a tunnel only when needed, and seems to play nicely with my browser.
It’s a downsized crew, right? As in they purposely are sending up fewer people so that there is room to bring back everyone?
Are humans not word generators with arms and legs?
Foo, bar, baz, etc. are more metasyntactic variables than nonces.

https://jargon-i18n.com/en/M/metasyntactic-variable.html

I don't think they're related to FUBAR . . . that would be fugazi.

Nonsense pop terms are not this. They're slang. Blame (mostly) teenaged girls for that stuff, not elite (mostly male) engineers of yore.
What happened to the project?

Domain is for sale: https://openbazaar.com
All of the GSuite was an acquisition, so it's kind of amazing that it has been maintained, let alone continues to exist, at all
Ask HN: How do you calculate and predict future churn?
With the rise of numerous SaaS businesses and AI making it easier for individuals to launch companies, how do you consistently monitor current churn and, more importantly, anticipate future churn? Are there specific tools you use, or do you create daily dashboards to track this information?
This by itself is half the reason I think Nix's approach is a step backwards.
Ask HN: What are the production level hosting solutions for on prem
I am a software developer mainly have experience with kubernetes. Kubernetes is great, but we all know it is too much for a simple hosting solution. So what are the other hosting solutions, like something as web server, something to route traffic, ingress, proxy etc you use at production level for self hosted, or on prem deployments. Idealy something that can give flexibility, easy start and simplicity