skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
How big is your targetable market ? How many customers would you have if you had a 100% monopoly. If the number is in the thousands or more, then you're best off trying and failing than getting it right from the start.

Every company is unique. But at your scale, you can throw blind darts until something sticks. Most tiny companies do not require a principled approach to sales or marketing. You want to try proposing different price points, contract terms, outreach methods & channels. Keep each experiment small, fail fast and pivot.

Once you gain a few customers, feedback & recommendation based organic growth is a good 2nd step. But, your first few wins can totally feel like a crap shoot.

All that being said, the best products market themselves. A problem is only worth solving if it is immediately painful to company bottom line. Sales & marketing only works if the product alleviates such pain.
I do like the tabbed explorer... that is nice.
Hm, I think we are discussing different topics here.

I doubt that we use the same definition for something being "real". I'd like to avoid that discussion, and talk about what constitutes a thing.

To me, _things_ merely exist in someone's brain, and their corresponding physical representation sure is real, it exists there in reality. But the physical "thing" does not have any relevant meaning other than to us observers. For all the universe could care, the chair is just a bunch of atoms, similar in value to a chunk of space on the left of it.

Consider also some problems, such as the chair not being in an absolute position in time. It is constantly moving with the earth, and with the solar system, at an incredible speed. Also, the chair will probably not be here anymore in 1 billion years. Also, if you zoom in, all the atoms are moving like crazy. It just works fairly well as a chair to us human observers, but it seems irrelevant to aliens with different life spans.
The Silent Epidemic: How AI Companions Are Shaping Our Response to Loneliness
I had to switch to Chrome. Reinstall was not enough for me.
They're quite powerful and get tons of grant money to extend their networks and provide service they never actually provide.
Both these issues can be resolved by adding some sample code to context to influence the LLM to do the desired thing.

As the op says, LLMs are going to be biased towards doing the "average" thing based on their training data. There's more old backend code on the internet than new backend code, and Tailwind is pretty dominant for frontend styling these days, so that's where the average lands.
It still calculates hex digit sums instead of decimals in the Iteration #3 of the promot engeneered version.

Upd: the chat transcript mentions this, but the article does not and inlcudes this version into the performance stats.
> I find that it is IMPORTANT to never start these coding sessions with "write X code". Instead, begin with a "open plan"

Most llms that I use nowadays usually make a plan first on their own by default without need to be especially prompted. This was definitely not the case a year ago or so. I assume new llms have been trained accordingly in the meantime.
...No, no that's not how ADHD works. It's difficult to sum up how wrong this is concisely, but I invite you do to some serious research into ADHD, how it functions, and the great variety of ways in which it can present in different people. It's quite a poor analogy.
Mostly true - but there is other information in the ethernet packets themselves - for example see

https://www.informatik.tu-cottbus.de/~andriy/papers/clock-sk...

and there is information added during the routing - not just information from client - from the intermediates.

And you also have to consider the power of patterns - where one piece isn't enough to see the picture, but if you have enough pieces you can ( jigsaw identification ).
Paradoxically, from public health perspective that does not matter. If you study efficacy of masks, adherence to masking protocols is absolutely crucial variable to control.

However, if you study efficiency of masking mandates, you do not get the luxury of controlling masking protocols and *have* to take adherence to masking protocols as population parameter. As expected, studies where actual adherence is in the gutter find masking mandates ineffective at population level.
I'm creating a desktop app, a Python editor designed for beginner data scientists. The biggest shift for me was changing how I talk about it. Instead of focusing on the app's features, I started talking about the benefits it gives users. For example, the app automatically installs Python and all the needed packages. I now describe this as: "Painless Python setup—install everything you need automatically." Thinking more about users and their problems has made a big difference in both marketing and sales.
Man, I really loved modding for HL2, but they really neglected the Source SDK.

Hopefully this means we can finally get an upgrade.
Formation of protocells under a plausible early Earth atmosphere
But we're discussing a training technique, that explicitly takes advantage of the continuous (and embedding vs token probability) representations ...

You could quantize a model like this after training, as usual, but that's irrelevant.
The purpose of the homomorphic encryption is that they can compare similar landmarks without seeing the unencrypted image data on the server side.
The bots have canceled me.
Malicious NPM Campaign Targets Ethereum Developers with Fake Hardhat Packages
Satellite internet can't meaningfully compete with other forms of internet at scale because it can't accommodate but a fraction of them. Even terrestrial wireless internet can't really replace wired even though its certainly cheaper to deploy.
Do you have an example prompt that works?
because THIS code becomes faster once RCX is saved and restored during the interrupt call
As someone who lives in the NYC area I feel the same about Dominos. It's different from what I really consider pizza, but sometimes it's exactly what I want and that's totally fine.
Show HN: Knotilus–uncover hidden Fibonacci-like sequences
Hi HN,

I'm new to Hacker News, but a friend suggested this would be a great place to share my project and get some feedback.

I’ve been working on Knotilus, a daily puzzle game where the challenge is to find three hidden Fibonacci-like sequences among a set of numbers. Each daily puzzle includes between four and ten possible sequences, and the goal is to identify the three solution sequences that share only one number, the “knot,” while all other numbers in the solution are unique.

I’m a hobbyist when it comes to web design and development, so I built Knotilus as a fun way to learn more about creating web applications while sharing a new puzzle concept.

I built Knotilus using:

Frontend: Vue 3

Backend: Flask

Database: PostgreSQL

Here’s what makes Knotilus interesting:

Daily Puzzle: A fresh challenge every day, a new puzzle is made available everyday at midnight based on the user's timezone.

Customizable Difficulty: Adjust the puzzle level (how many numbers are available to make sequences) and mode (with or without helpful visual indicators). The solution remains the same, regardless of difficulty.

Community Benchmarks: Compare your performance (time, hints used, etc.) with others anonymously. Though this feature depends on whether or not I'm able to draw enough of an audience

Unique Concept: Inspired by Fibonacci sequences, the game offers what I believe is a unique idea for a daily puzzle.
Accessible Design: Play directly in your browser, no downloads or installations required.

I’d love to hear what the HN community thinks, would you give it a try? Do you have ideas for improving the gameplay or user experience?

You can check it out here: https://knotil.us/

Thanks for taking a look!
My experience was growing up in a semi-rural area in the U.S. in the 90s. At that time, DOS software was plentiful, but rarely purchased and usually shared over floppies. The users tended to be geeks, and so they had some pretty sharp tools on hand. Whereas, in the age of Windows, especially 95 and on, copy protection became stronger, the user base expanded massively, demand shifted to office apps and games, and software started to grow too big to fit on a reasonable number of floppies. This transition happened while I was a young child, so perhaps it was just poor timing, but still it seemed like DOS was a sea of open possibility while Windows required a bank account which I didn't have.
Current laws are not fit for purpose but that gets to the heart of what worries me about the US: we can't pass laws any more.

I mean, that's an exaggeration, but major decisions like this being decided by the courts is fundamentally wrong. If the majority of the population disagree with this court ruling we ought to very simply head to congress and pass a new law to overturn it. But we won't and everyone knows it. Not to draw too many parallels but it feels similar to the recent overturn of Roe v Wade. It feels like we, as a population, are powerless to do something the majority wants.
Biden Blocks Japan's Nippon Steel from Taking over US Steel
Reacting to trolling will get you trolled even more by the grand masters Trump and Musk and their troll armies.

Gotta learn to grey rock at a group level.

That is the most effective way of making them sweat in an Attention Economy rigged in their favor.

Even more effective if you have a plan for the future that makes them react to what you are doing, instead of the other way around.
The main issues here are the default opt-in and not announcing this feature way back in September. If someone wants this, they can always enable it if it’s opted out by default. I’d expect Apple to fix this soon.

The link below is from the original author of this revelation, and is better suited for discussion, IMO. The author, Jeff Johnson, is a long time developer of applications on macOS and iOS/iPadOS.

Apple Photos phones home on iOS 18 and macOS 15

Discussed five days ago at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42533685

December 28 2024

https://lapcatsoftware.com/articles/2024/12/3.html

The follow up is also interesting and relevant:

The internet is full of experts

December 31 2024

https://lapcatsoftware.com/articles/2024/12/4.html
> my solution would be to have kids and develop them instead of myself

I never understood that kind of argument. Your kids will have decaying bodies just the same. You're only recreating what you're trying to escape, in somebody else.
Many writers here see this as unfairly singling out Serbia.

I find it helpful to see this as a case study. Instead of seeing as only a portrait of one country ("and my country is different"), consider it as an illustration ("my country could feel like that, too").

Note that the report goes well beyond the title.

1. Norway was the source of the Cellebrite technology?!

> Additionally, the Norwegian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, which donated the Cellebrite UFED technology, and the United Nations Office for Project Services (UNOPS), which managed procurement for the Norwegian government’s grant to Serbia’s Ministry of Interior, failed to conduct an adequate due diligence process to assess and mitigate for the potential risks of this technology to human rights and to provide safeguards against its abuse

2. The "chilling effect" (page 10) notes apply to anyone in a position resisting the government, in any country.

3. The details section is more specific about everything, and none of the facts are good.

I think the details here go beyond "surveillance is happening everywhere", so I think it's wrong to dismiss this as some kind of fluff or hit piece. Even if other places are also bad, see the truth in this as well.
Mptcp: Revolutionizing connectivity, one path at a time
> We should all be more emphatic and considerate.

I'm sure it was just autocorrect being a nuisance, but you probably mean empathic.
Ask HN: How do LLMs used for coding deal with runtime/dependency versioning?
If I need LLMs to generate code for a specific runtime or library version, can this successfully be done?
The internet is probably good on balance. The best thing to ever happen to humanity...forget it. The best thing to happen to humanity is most likely the practical harnessing of electricity for light and industry.
This whole thread reads like two chatgpt bots talking to each other. HN needs a flag for obvious LLM content.
I get this feeling as well, but then again debugging large SQL queries can be very opaque. Things like pl/pgsql help, but then it starts becoming more and more like a normal programming language.
By iterating it 5 times the author is using ~5x the compute. It’s kinda a strange chain of thought.

Also: premature optimization is evil. I like the first iteration most. It’s not “beginner code”, it’s simple. Tell sonnet to optimize it IF benchmarks show it’s a pref problem. But a codebase full of code like this, even when unnecessary, would be a nightmare.
Right, so I assume that they can’t build up a database of images to use for training future models. But I was hoping someone who understands homomorphic encryption and machine learning better than me could confirm this.
> Having that allows me much greater freedom of choice, not only in the brands I choose, but in the overall way I live my life at home.

It would be one more way for already large and powerful companies to monopolize things and squeeze out competition. Having neutral electricity means that no company, industry, or type of product is able to constrain or manipulate my freedom of choice through the universal and ubiquitous electrical service. it isn't a situation where I feel I would be blocked from using electricity for certain thing, like running a home server. It is that I understand all too well that I am not immune to that manipulation, and over time, I would be steered and constrained and I would be worse off.

Regulating the energy efficiency of devices sold has actually saved me, and everyone money. And it does it with the goal of helping consumers, not in giving one company another lever to increase it’s profits. That is what I want, regulation that maximized consumer choice, while improving the products and services they receive.
>Not everyone wants the software/OSes we run to automatically send data elsewhere.

I personally find it offensive when a mega-corp makes the assumption that my connection to the Internet is available for them to build for-profit services without giving me sufficient agency.

The cant-disable-Wifi-safely dark pattern is bad enough. But turning me into a data harvester for their million-dollar services, without even thinking about giving me a cut?

No thanks.

Alas, these anti-patterns have become a norm by way of ignorance, and its not getting better.
Ask HN: Best self-hosted wiki for local communities?
Hey HN! I moved to a small, rural region of around 50k people across multiple towns. There is a lot going on, but the information is not centrally collected, usually through Facebook and word to mouth.

I want to build out a knowledge base and collect information for everyone to share and contribute.

What is a good browser, self-hosted version of a wiki? I would like to change the design and maybe built out own functionality, and also start somewhere so I don't have to build everything from scratch.
Which since spotify has turned to shit is in turn bad for consumers.
> There is no thinking. No comprehension. No decisions.

Re-reading my own comment, I am unclear why you think it necessary to say those specific examples — my descriptions were "results, made, disagree, right/wrong, struggle": tools make things, have results; engines struggle; search engines can be right or wrong; words can be disagreed with regardless of authorship.

While I am curious what it would mean for a system to "think" or "comprehend", every time I have looked at such discussions I have been disappointed that it's pre-paradigmatic. The closest we have is examples such as Turing 1950[0] saying essentially (to paraphrase) "if it quacks like a duck, it's a duck" vs. Searle 1980[1] which says, to quote the abstract itself, "no program by itself is sufficient for thinking".

> I guess my point is, when you use LLMs for tasks, you're getting whatever other humans have said.

All of maths can be derived from the axioms of maths. All chess moves derive from the rules of the game. This kind of process has a lot of legs, regardless of if you want to think of the models as "thinking" or not.

Me? I don't worry too much if they can actually think, not because there's no important philosophical questions about what that even means, but because other things have a more immediate impact: even if they are "just" a better search engine, they're a mechanism that somehow managed to squeeze almost all of the important technical info on the internet into something that fits into RAM on a top-end laptop.

The models may indeed be cargo-cult golems — I'd assume that by default, there's so much we don't yet know — but whatever is or isn't going on inside, they still do a good job of quacking like a duck.

[0] Turing, A. M. (1950). Computing machinery and intelligence. Mind, 59, 433–460. https://doi.org/10.1093/mind/LIX.236.433

[1] Searle, J. R. (1980). Minds, brains, and programs. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 3(3), 417–424. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0140525X00005756
The difference is that if you're not in a walled garden, all the elements of the stack could be replaced. Obviously one needs to avoid big3 clouds and adversarial domain registrars who make it difficult to transfer domains.
Amen! Travelling is just virtue signalling and social posturing. I've travelled the world, way too much for both business and "pleasure" and there's nothing new, no hidden insights, that I couldn't have gotten at home.

I advice all people I meet to stop travelling, and to spend more time with themselves and explore their inside, instead of being captivated by the outside, like a child by a new shiny toy.

The world would truly be a better place if that ever happened.
It appears that your ignorance on the topics of infrastructure and the advancement of technology over the past five decades makes having a useful conversation impossible. Not every cable in the ground was installed with today's state of the art technology. Enjoy your apparently unthrottleable internet connection.
He just went home (/s)
In this case, they may display a message like: 'This page is intended for USA visitors only. Our services do not operate outside the USA.', but no, they say you are banned because just...
Internet access is a closed system for a lot of the population. Satellite internet is not meaningful competition in that area given how much of our lives are channeled through an internet connection. 5G cellphone connections are closer but if you put all household data through a cell connection the towers would surely get immediately overloaded.

> Why doesn't McDonalds charge for napkins and ketchup?

If they did I could just go to Burger King. But someone living in a town where McDonalds is the only restaurant would be powerless. (and McDonalds does now charge for sauces they used to give away for free!)
Oh right, my bad, thanks. Totally escaped me when I wrote that :-)
Maybe. Often when families immigrated to America they tried to pick a spelling that would allow English speakers to pronounce their name close enough to what they were used to that they would understand they were being called. Sometimes the this was a different English word that had nothing to do with the meaning in the original language. (I suspect the same happens with immigrants elsewhere, but I know my family name is based on getting close to the original sound and that happens to be a word that has a different meaning in English)

I don't know if the original word was a occupation back in the old world or not. (the dialect my family spoke is no longer spoken so it would be difficult to research)
That’s said, if you’re struggling with humility and connection, legally punching someone in the face and being punched in return can be quite rewarding.

So, go join that boxing/bjj gym and learn just how pathetically average you really are!
> The problem with this workflow is that it's like having a bad intern on the phone pair programming.

Even worse than that - an intern has a chance to learn from this experience, get better and become a senior one day.
Give me a real example of something in computer science they can't do? I'm interested since Chatgpt is better than any professor I've had at any level in my educational career.
>developer chrome, Mac

Maybe in your country, but tons of countries outside of the US (first world) avoid Macs like the plague and just use Linux/Windows as building machines.

But you are right on Google/Cloudflare, they are the poison of the web.
I received spam for quite a while from Robinhood, back when they suggested they were going to enter the UK market and to sign up for more details.

They didn't but I still recieved spam which I couldn't opt out of because they wanted me to log into my account, even for support, which obviously didn't exist.

At least back then we had Twitter and messaging them publicly got a customer service response.
Sphinx Defense | Engineering, DevOps, & Product | Remote (US Only), DC, Colorado Springs, LA | https://www.sphinxdefense.com

Sphinx Defense builds software to solve complex national security problems for America and its allies. Founded by engineers and technologists with deep experience across commercial and defense technology, we're building a vehicle-agnostic communication infrastructure to enable satellite operators to securely utilize antenna networks and maneuver satellites in real-time. We're bootstrapped, profitable, and growing aggressively.

To learn more about who we are, our engineering culture, and whether this is the right place for you, read our Key Values profile: https://www.keyvalues.com/sphinx-defense

Our current openings are:
Sr. Backend Engineer - Space Command and Control - Colorado Springs : https://grnh.se/820b466f8us

Sr. Backend Engineer - Space Command and Control - Remote : https://grnh.se/9c9d31ef8us

Sr. Backend Engineer - Remote : https://grnh.se/52b6fb768us

Backend Engineer - Remote : https://grnh.se/8f9590e48us

Don’t see a role that aligns with your interests or don’t have the specific Space/ Command & Control experience? Apply to the general interest application and list what type of role you would be interested in : https://grnh.se/4ce199d68us

Check out our open roles: https://www.sphinxdefense.com/#careers
I took 1.5 years off to work on an open source project (also because I was struggling with health issues), and the hardest thing was describing what you're doing to other people. I thought I was "above" social status, that it wouldn't affect me, but it did. I was essentially unemployed, that's how it felt at least. It's so much easier just saying "I do X for a living, I work at company Y". It means some company thinks you're good enough to pay good money for.
>Problem is, how would you know if you have never learned to code without an LLM?

The quick fix I use when needing to do something new is to ask the AI to list me different libraries and the pros and cons of using them. Then I quickly hop on google and check which have good documentation and examples so I know I have something to fall back on, and from there I ask the AI how to solve small simple version of my problem and explain what the library is doing. Only then do I ask it for a solution and see if it is reasonable or not.

It isn't perfect, but it saves enough time most times to more than make up for when it fails and I have to go back to old fashion RTFMing.