Wednesday, 27 September 2023

New best story on Hacker News: Essence: A desktop OS built from scratch, for control and simplicity

Essence: A desktop OS built from scratch, for control and simplicity
449 by luismedel | 164 comments on Hacker News.


New best story on Hacker News: Who lusts for certainty lusts for lies

Who lusts for certainty lusts for lies
473 by hprotagonist | 167 comments on Hacker News.


New best story on Hacker News: EU tells Apple to open everything up to its rivals

EU tells Apple to open everything up to its rivals
522 by mmastrac | 1162 comments on Hacker News.


New best story on Hacker News: A journey into the shaken baby syndrome/abusive head trauma controversy

A journey into the shaken baby syndrome/abusive head trauma controversy
566 by rossant | 282 comments on Hacker News.


New best story on Hacker News: Show HN: Unity like game editor running in pure WASM

Show HN: Unity like game editor running in pure WASM
523 by TrevorSundberg | 115 comments on Hacker News.
In the wake of all the Unity nonsense, just wanted to toss the Raverie engine into this mix :) We’re building off a previous engine that we worked on for DigiPen Institute of Technology called the Zero Engine with a similar component based design architecture to Unity. Our engine had a unique feature called Spaces: separate worlds/levels that you can instantiate and run at the same time, which became super useful for creating UI overlays using only game objects, running multiple simulations, etc. The lighting and rendering engine is scriptable, and the default deferred rendering implementation is based on the Unreal physically based rendering (PBR) approach. The physics engine was built from the ground up to handle both 2D and 3D physics together. The scripting language was also built in house to be a type safe language that binds to C++ objects and facilitates auto-complete (try it in editor!) This particular fork by Raverie builds both the engine and editor to WebAssembly using only clang without Emscripten. We love Emscripten and in fact borrowed a tiny bit of exception code that we’d love to see up-streamed into LLVM, however we wanted to create a pure WASM binary without Emscripten bindings. We also love WASI too though we already had our own in memory virtual file system, hence we don’t use the WASI imports. All WASM imports and exports needed to run the engine are defined here: https://ift.tt/1vkDb5d... The abstraction means that in the future, porting to other platforms that can support a WASM runtime should be trivial. It’s our dream to be able to export a build of your game to any platform, all from inside the browser. Our near term road-map includes getting the sound engine integrated with WebAudio, getting the script debugger working (currently freezes), porting our networking engine to WebRTC and WebSockets, and getting saving/loading from a database instead of browser local storage. Our end goal is to use this engine to create an online Flash-like hub for games that people can share and remix, akin to Scratch or Tinkercad. https://ift.tt/KyHjlIh

Monday, 25 September 2023

New best story on Hacker News: Ian's Shoelace Site

Ian's Shoelace Site
424 by mhb | 53 comments on Hacker News.


New best story on Hacker News: Unity's oldest community announces dissolution

Unity's oldest community announces dissolution
411 by Morizero | 275 comments on Hacker News.


New best story on Hacker News: The elderly are becoming homeless at a rate not seen since the Great Depression

The elderly are becoming homeless at a rate not seen since the Great Depression
407 by myshpa | 860 comments on Hacker News.


New best story on Hacker News: Bitwarden: Free, open-source password manager

Bitwarden: Free, open-source password manager
402 by punnerud | 264 comments on Hacker News.


New best story on Hacker News: There's a new map style on OpenStreetMap.org

There's a new map style on OpenStreetMap.org
407 by gslin | 71 comments on Hacker News.


New best story on Hacker News: We are beginning to roll out new voice and image capabilities in ChatGPT

We are beginning to roll out new voice and image capabilities in ChatGPT
510 by ladino | 350 comments on Hacker News.


New best story on Hacker News: A hacker's guide to language models [video]

A hacker's guide to language models [video]
421 by rrampage | 27 comments on Hacker News.


Wednesday, 20 September 2023

New best story on Hacker News: My uBlock Origin filters to remove distractions

My uBlock Origin filters to remove distractions
413 by mig4ng | 166 comments on Hacker News.
Repository with my filter lists that block some distractions from sites I want to keep using. I am pretty ruthless removing distractions from my life (e.g. no Instagram, Facebook, TikTok), but some tools I'd like to keep using some parts of it. E.g. Twitter/X, I dislike the feed but I like reading some threads that are shared here or on blog posts. Same for YouTube, I enjoy some videos but I do not want recommendations when I finish the video I was watching. Feel free to suggest more, open issues, pull requests or send me an email :)

New best story on Hacker News: DALL·E 3

DALL·E 3
498 by davidbarker | 370 comments on Hacker News.


New best story on Hacker News: FAA authorizes Zipline to deliver commercial packages using drones

FAA authorizes Zipline to deliver commercial packages using drones
475 by gok | 402 comments on Hacker News.


New best story on Hacker News: Car allergic to vanilla ice cream (2000)

Car allergic to vanilla ice cream (2000)
464 by isomorph | 156 comments on Hacker News.


Monday, 18 September 2023

New best story on Hacker News: Show HN: HyperDX – open-source dev-friendly Datadog alternative

Show HN: HyperDX – open-source dev-friendly Datadog alternative
450 by mikeshi42 | 107 comments on Hacker News.
Hi HN, Mike and Warren here! We've been building HyperDX (hyperdx.io). HyperDX allows you to easily search and correlate logs, traces, metrics (alpha), and session replays all in one place. For example, if a user reports a bug “this button doesn't work," an engineer can play back what the user was doing in their browser and trace API calls back to the backend logs for that specific request, all from a single view. Github Repo: https://ift.tt/piRCJM9 Coming from an observability nerd background, with Warren being SRE #1 at his last startup and me previously leading dev experience at LogDNA/Mezmo, we knew there were gaps in the existing tools we were used to using. Our previous stack of tools like Bugsnag, LogRocket, and Cloudwatch required us to switch between different tools, correlate timestamps (UTC? local?), and manually cross-check IDs to piece together what was actually happening. This often made meant small issues required hours of frustration to root cause. Other tools like Datadog or New Relic come with high price tags - when estimating costs for Datadog in the past, we found that our Datadog bill would exceed our AWS bill! Other teams have had to adjust their infrastructure just to appease the Datadog pricing model. To build HyperDX, we've centralized all the telemetry in one place by leveraging OpenTelemetry (a CNCF project for standardizing/collecting telemetry) to pull and correlate logs, metrics, traces, and replays. In-app, we can correlate your logs/traces together in one panel by joining everything automatically via trace ids and session ids, so you can go from log <> trace <> replay in the same panel. To keep costs low, we store everything in Clickhouse (w/ S3 backing) to make it extremely affordable to store large amounts of data (compared to Elasticsearch) while still being able to query it efficiently (compared to services like Cloudwatch or Loki), in large part thanks to Clickhouse's bloom filters + columnar layout. On top of that, we've focused on providing a smooth developer experience (the DX in HyperDX!). This includes features like native parsing of JSON logs, full-text search on any log or trace, 2-click alert creation, and SDKs that help you get started with OpenTelemetry faster than the default OpenTelemetry SDKs. I'm excited to share what we've been working with you all and would love to hear your feedback and opinions! Hosted Demo - https://ift.tt/lqZus6Q Open Source Repo: https://ift.tt/piRCJM9 Landing Page: https://hyperdx.io

New best story on Hacker News: OpenRA – Classic strategy games rebuilt for the modern era

OpenRA – Classic strategy games rebuilt for the modern era
441 by xbmcuser | 106 comments on Hacker News.


New best story on Hacker News: Building an economy simulator from scratch

Building an economy simulator from scratch
474 by Ruddle | 196 comments on Hacker News.


Thursday, 14 September 2023

New best story on Hacker News: Unity has seemingly silently removed its GitHub repo that tracks ToS changes

Unity has seemingly silently removed its GitHub repo that tracks ToS changes
521 by agluszak | 133 comments on Hacker News.


New best story on Hacker News: PostgreSQL 16

PostgreSQL 16
491 by pella | 66 comments on Hacker News.


New best story on Hacker News: Tyranny of the Marginal User: why software gets worse, not better, over time

Tyranny of the Marginal User: why software gets worse, not better, over time
477 by ivee | 261 comments on Hacker News.


New best story on Hacker News: Don’t mess with a genius (2010)

Don’t mess with a genius (2010)
453 by wglb | 110 comments on Hacker News.


New best story on Hacker News: Don't use Discord as your Q&A forum

Don't use Discord as your Q&A forum
439 by kraktoos | 276 comments on Hacker News.


New best story on Hacker News: Meduza co-founder's phone infected with Pegasus

Meduza co-founder's phone infected with Pegasus
440 by Klaster_1 | 260 comments on Hacker News.


Tuesday, 12 September 2023

New best story on Hacker News: Ask HN: Why did Visual Basic die?

Ask HN: Why did Visual Basic die?
405 by Zelphyr | 507 comments on Hacker News.
I've been a software developer for almost 30 years. I remember using VB back in the 90's and I was thinking about it the other day and it dawned on me; despite all the advances in technology since then, nothing I have found compares to that development experience today. I would go so far as to say we've gone backwards in a big way. Now, I'm no fan of Microsoft products but, I have yet to find a tool that can allow me to be as productive in so short a time as Visual Basic. Yet I can't help wondering what problems it had that caused them to abandon it? Moreover, why hasn't someone come out with a solid replacement?

New best story on Hacker News: Fine-tune your own Llama 2 to replace GPT-3.5/4

Fine-tune your own Llama 2 to replace GPT-3.5/4
469 by kcorbitt | 124 comments on Hacker News.
There has been a lot of interest on HN in fine-tuning open-source LLMs recently (eg. Anyscale's post at https://ift.tt/0uLEbQK ). I've been playing around with fine-tuning models for a couple of years, and wanted to share some insights and practical code. I’ve condensed what I’ve learned into a small set of notebooks at https://ift.tt/y45pVvr... , covering labeling data, fine-tuning, running efficient inference, and evaluating costs/performance. The 7B model we train here matches GPT-4’s labels 95% of the time on the test set, and for the 5% of cases where they disagree it’s often because the correct answer is genuinely ambiguous. What is fine-tuning? You can think of it as a more-powerful form of prompting, where instead of writing your instructions in text you actually encode them in the weights of the model itself. You do this by training an existing model on example input/output pairs that demonstrate the task you want your fine-tuned model to learn. Fine-tuning can work with as few as 50 examples but I usually try to get 1000+ if possible. Prompting still has some big advantages over fine-tuning. It's way easier/faster to iterate on your instructions than label data and re-train a model. And operationally it's easier to deploy one big model and just adjust its behavior as necessary vs deploying many small fine-tuned models that will likely each get lower utilization. Fine-tuning has one huge advantage though: it is far more effective at guiding a model's behavior than prompting, so you can often get away with a much smaller model. That gets you faster responses and lower inference costs. A fine-tuned Llama 7B model is 50x cheaper than GPT-3.5 on a per-token basis, and for many use cases can produce results that are as good or better! For example, classifying the 2M recipes at https://ift.tt/DTjwkJX with GPT-4 would cost $23k. Even with GPT-3.5 it would cost over $1k. The model we fine-tuned performs similarly to GPT-4 and costs just $19 to run over the entire dataset. Disclaimer: My brother David and I are working on an open-source product called OpenPipe ( https://ift.tt/PhXGDYn ) to help engineers adopt fine-tuning as simply as possible. But none of the information above depends on our startup. The current post is just about sharing information that we’ve learned about fine-tuning. I hope it’s useful!

New best story on Hacker News: Death by a Thousand Microservices

Death by a Thousand Microservices
408 by thunderbong | 280 comments on Hacker News.


Monday, 11 September 2023

New best story on Hacker News: UK air traffic control meltdown

UK air traffic control meltdown
430 by jameshh | 219 comments on Hacker News.


New best story on Hacker News: Every type of plastic used by LEGO (2022)

Every type of plastic used by LEGO (2022)
383 by nkurz | 116 comments on Hacker News.


New best story on Hacker News: Google Chrome just rolled out a new way to track you and serve ads

Google Chrome just rolled out a new way to track you and serve ads
460 by ed_westin | 342 comments on Hacker News.


New best story on Hacker News: Procreate Dreams

Procreate Dreams
445 by petecooper | 149 comments on Hacker News.


New best story on Hacker News: Aardvark'd: The Fog Creek documentary, 18 years later

Aardvark'd: The Fog Creek documentary, 18 years later
490 by mtlynch | 167 comments on Hacker News.


New best story on Hacker News: Nginx Unit – Universal web app server

Nginx Unit – Universal web app server
593 by promiseofbeans | 165 comments on Hacker News.


Wednesday, 6 September 2023

New best story on Hacker News: U.K. abandons, for now, legislation that would have banned end-to-end encryption

U.K. abandons, for now, legislation that would have banned end-to-end encryption
445 by alwillis | 119 comments on Hacker News.


New best story on Hacker News: Internet-connected cars fail privacy and security tests conducted by Mozilla

Internet-connected cars fail privacy and security tests conducted by Mozilla
456 by rntn | 468 comments on Hacker News.


New best story on Hacker News: Learn WebAssembly by writing small programs

Learn WebAssembly by writing small programs
403 by todsacerdoti | 69 comments on Hacker News.


New best story on Hacker News: Show HN: Puck – Open-source visual editor for React

Show HN: Puck – Open-source visual editor for React
396 by chrisvxd | 86 comments on Hacker News.
Hey hackers, OP here! I've been dipping in and out of this problem space for the last few years with many of my clients. Puck sits somewhere between an old-school WYSIWYG-powered CMS and headless one, allowing content teams to author content using real React components. Traditional CMS solutions were flexible but often resulted in page that completely broke the brand guidelines. Headless CMS solutions are a fantastic way of controlling brand by restricting UI changes to developers, but makes layout changes restrictive and slow as developers often need to get involved. Puck provides a visual editor for React that can sit on top of your existing headless CMS (or act as standalone). We've been dog-fooding it on a few pages at https://measured.co and on https://wellpaid.io . So far, so good The API is built for React, which allows FE devs to quickly integrate their existing component and add some form fields for author input, or connect it to a headless CMS of choice. It's open-source under MIT, and pairs nicely with Next.js (check out the demo application). Next in the pipeline: support for multi-column layouts, richer demos, new plugins. Looking forward to hearing your comments!

Tuesday, 5 September 2023

New best story on Hacker News: OpenTF repository is now public

OpenTF repository is now public
423 by cube2222 | 145 comments on Hacker News.


New best story on Hacker News: Ask HN: I’m an FCC Commissioner proposing regulation of IoT security updates

Ask HN: I’m an FCC Commissioner proposing regulation of IoT security updates
760 by SimingtonFCC | 246 comments on Hacker News.
Hi everyone, I’m FCC Commissioner Nathan Simington, and I’m here to discuss security updates for IoT devices and how you can make a difference by filing comments with the FCC. As you know, serious vulnerabilities are common in IoT, and it often takes too long for these to be patched on end-user devices—if the manufacturer even bothers to release an update, and if the device was even designed to receive them. Companies may cease supporting a device well before consumers have stopped using it. The support period is often not communicated at the time of sale. And sometimes the end of support is not even announced, leaving even informed users unsure whether their devices are still safe. I’ve advocated for the FCC to require device manufacturers to support their devices with security updates for a reasonable amount of time [1]. I can't bring such a proposal to a vote since I’m not the chairman of the agency. But I was able to convince my colleagues to tentatively support something a little more moderate addressing this problem. The FCC recently issued a Notice of Proposed Rulemaking [2] for a cybersecurity labeling program for connected devices. If they meet certain criteria for the security of their product, manufacturers can put an FCC cybersecurity label on it. I fought hard for one of these criteria to be the disclosure of how long the product will receive security updates. I hope that, besides arming consumers with better information, the commitments on this label (including the support period) will be legally enforceable in contract and tort lawsuits and under other laws. You can see my full statement here [3]. But it’s too early to declare victory. Many manufacturers oppose making any commitments about security updates, even voluntary ones. These manufacturers are heavily engaged at the FCC and represented by sophisticated regulatory lawyers. The FCC and White House are not likely to take a strong stand if they only hear the device manufacturer's side of the story. In short, they need to hear from you. You have experienced insecure protocols, exposed private keys, and other atrocious security. You have seen these problems persist despite ample warning. People ask, ‘why aren’t there rules about these things?’ This is your chance to get on the record and tell us what you think the rules should be. If infosec doesn’t make this an issue, the general public will continue falsely assuming that everything is fine. But if you get on the record and the government fails to act, the evidence of this failure will be all over the Internet forever. If you want to influence the process, you have until September 25th, 2023 (midnight ET) to file comments in the rulemaking proceeding.[4] Filing is easy: go to https://ift.tt/LXh9kGY and click to file either an ‘express’ comment (type into a textbox) or a ‘standard’ comment (upload a PDF). Either way, the FCC is required to consider your arguments. All options are on the table, so don’t hold back, but do make your arguments as clear as possible, so even lawyers can understand them. I’m here to listen and learn. AMA. Feel free to ask any questions about this or related issues, and I’ll answer as many as I can. I just ask that we try to stay on the topic of security. My legal advisor, Marco Peraza, a security-focused software engineer turned cybersecurity lawyer, will be answering questions too. I’m open to incorporating your ideas (and even being convinced I’m wrong), and I hope that my colleagues at the FCC are as well. Thank you! [1] https://ift.tt/uO2AP6g... [2] https://ift.tt/nrS4sA1... [3] https://ift.tt/nrS4sA1... [4] If your comments are purely in response to arguments made in other comments, you have an extra 15 days, until October 10, 2023.

New best story on Hacker News: Get a cable modem, go to jail (1999)

Get a cable modem, go to jail (1999)
432 by resolutebat | 336 comments on Hacker News.


New best story on Hacker News: Writing a C compiler in 500 lines of Python

Writing a C compiler in 500 lines of Python
395 by vgel | 120 comments on Hacker News.


Monday, 4 September 2023

New best story on Hacker News: Sony sends copyright notices to TV Museum about shows 40 to 60 years old

Sony sends copyright notices to TV Museum about shows 40 to 60 years old
369 by CoBE10 | 190 comments on Hacker News.


New best story on Hacker News: VSCodium – Open-source binaries of VSCode

VSCodium – Open-source binaries of VSCode
389 by Brajeshwar | 192 comments on Hacker News.


New best story on Hacker News: Ask HN: Who is hiring? (September 2023)

Ask HN: Who is hiring? (September 2023)
376 by whoishiring | 362 comments on Hacker News.
Please state the location and include REMOTE, INTERNS and/or VISA when that sort of candidate is welcome. When remote work is not an option, include ONSITE. Please only post if you personally are part of the hiring company—no recruiting firms or job boards. One post per company. If it isn't a household name, explain what your company does. Commenters: please don't reply to job posts to complain about something. It's off topic here. Readers: please only email if you are personally interested in the job. Searchers: try https://ift.tt/tmTl8fw , https://ift.tt/B4mdSHT , https://hnhired.fly.dev , https://ift.tt/4JUkKVQ , https://ift.tt/P5ys4JK . Don't miss these other fine threads: Who wants to be hired? https://ift.tt/8nbRXcd Freelancer? Seeking freelancer? https://ift.tt/8G0v61i