Tuesday, 31 October 2023

New best story on Hacker News: Firefox got faster for real users in 2023

Firefox got faster for real users in 2023
509 by kevincox | 222 comments on Hacker News.


New best story on Hacker News: Phind Model beats GPT-4 at coding, with GPT-3.5 speed and 16k context

Phind Model beats GPT-4 at coding, with GPT-3.5 speed and 16k context
501 by rushingcreek | 221 comments on Hacker News.
Hi HN, We’re excited to announce that Phind now defaults to our own model that matches and exceeds GPT-4’s coding abilities while running 5x faster. You can now get high quality answers for technical questions in 10 seconds instead of 50. The current 7th-generation Phind Model is built on top of our open-source CodeLlama-34B fine-tunes that were the first models to beat GPT-4’s score on HumanEval and are still the best open source coding models overall by a wide margin: https://ift.tt/79xoLWH... . This new model has been fine-tuned on an additional 70B+ tokens of high quality code and reasoning problems and exhibits a HumanEval score of 74.7%. However, we’ve found that HumanEval is a poor indicator of real-world helpfulness. After deploying previous iterations of the Phind Model on our service, we’ve collected detailed feedback and noticed that our model matches or exceeds GPT-4’s helpfulness most of the time on real-world questions. Many in our Discord community have begun using Phind exclusively with the Phind Model despite also having unlimited access to GPT-4. One of the Phind Model’s key advantages is that it's very fast. We’ve been able to achieve a 5x speedup over GPT-4 by running our model on H100s using the new TensorRT-LLM library from NVIDIA. We can achieve up to 100 tokens per second single-stream while GPT-4 runs around 20 tokens per second at best. Another key advantage of the Phind Model is context – it supports up to 16k tokens. We currently allow inputs of up to 12k tokens on the website and reserve the remaining 4k for web results. There are still some rough edges with the Phind Model and we’ll continue improving it constantly. One area where it still suffers is consistency — on certain challenging questions where it is capable of getting the right answer, the Phind Model might take more generations to get to the right answer than GPT-4. We’d love to hear your feedback. Cheers, The Phind Team

New best story on Hacker News: The Grug Brained Developer (2022)

The Grug Brained Developer (2022)
461 by simonsarris | 179 comments on Hacker News.


Thursday, 12 October 2023

New best story on Hacker News: Desmos 3D graphing calculator

Desmos 3D graphing calculator
358 by benpm | 79 comments on Hacker News.


New best story on Hacker News: The midwit home

The midwit home
345 by stacktrust | 242 comments on Hacker News.


New best story on Hacker News: The Twelve-Factor App (2011)

The Twelve-Factor App (2011)
331 by edward | 204 comments on Hacker News.


New best story on Hacker News: First word discovered in unopened Herculaneum scroll by CS student

First word discovered in unopened Herculaneum scroll by CS student
334 by razin | 78 comments on Hacker News.


New best story on Hacker News: Spacedrive – an open source cross-platform file explorer

Spacedrive – an open source cross-platform file explorer
329 by microflash | 150 comments on Hacker News.


New best story on Hacker News: Introduction to Modern Statistics

Introduction to Modern Statistics
361 by noelwelsh | 71 comments on Hacker News.


Thursday, 5 October 2023

New best story on Hacker News: Bitmagnet: A self-hosted BitTorrent indexer, DHT crawler, and torrent search

Bitmagnet: A self-hosted BitTorrent indexer, DHT crawler, and torrent search
389 by KoftaBob | 87 comments on Hacker News.


New best story on Hacker News: Strong static typing, a hill I'm willing to die on

Strong static typing, a hill I'm willing to die on
381 by tasn | 802 comments on Hacker News.


New best story on Hacker News: Where does my computer get the time from?

Where does my computer get the time from?
443 by fanf2 | 144 comments on Hacker News.


New best story on Hacker News: Debunking NIST's calculation of the Kyber-512 security level

Debunking NIST's calculation of the Kyber-512 security level
452 by bumbledraven | 191 comments on Hacker News.


New best story on Hacker News: Pythagorean Theorem found on clay tablet 1k years older than Pythagoras

Pythagorean Theorem found on clay tablet 1k years older than Pythagoras
578 by samaysharma | 161 comments on Hacker News.


New best story on Hacker News: Show HN: Classic Video Poker

Show HN: Classic Video Poker
551 by appstorelottery | 210 comments on Hacker News.
I'm a Unity 3D refugee, certified expert, started in 2005 when it was a two man-band with Joachim and David. I've been lucky enough to make a good living out of Unity with my own consultancy over the years making data visualisation applications (Wind Energy) and innovation projects (Visualising accounting data for Wolters Kluwer etc.). Godot is pretty amazing in my opinion. Wrote this game over a few days and was productive in Godot basically instantly. I couldn't get up and running in Unreal despite trying a few times. It's my ambition to start a niche agency developing 80's style games of skill and chance for the corporate world. So... If anyone has any leads for making Space Invaders for Nike - please help! Happy to pay 5% on whatever work I get.

Tuesday, 3 October 2023

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

Ask HN: Who is hiring? (October 2023)
456 by whoishiring | 475 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/ErwWTGq , https://ift.tt/2pPmiB3 , https://ift.tt/r6D5gR8 , https://hnhired.fly.dev , https://ift.tt/YomHcyG , https://ift.tt/egwPNRk . Don't miss these other fine threads: Who wants to be hired? https://ift.tt/mpRZY5l Freelancer? Seeking freelancer? https://ift.tt/mRON7BP

New best story on Hacker News: Exploiting the iPhone 4

Exploiting the iPhone 4
432 by codyd51 | 46 comments on Hacker News.
Hi HN, author here! For the past three months, I've been obsessively working on gala, a jailbreak for iOS 4 that currently targets the iPhone 4. While other jailbreaks for this device, and this iOS version, already exist, the 'special sauce' of this jailbreak is that it comes with a 6-part series describing the building of a jailbreak and the many challenges that arose when jailbreaking iOS. The series includes interactive visualizations at every step of exploiting the device - from pulling memory dumps of the boot ROM to debugging a flashed filesystem image. That said, this isn't just a bare-bones jailbreak with some writing attached: gala is a fully-fledged suite that includes a significant Python application, a Cocoa GUI for end-users, a Rust payload, Cocoa Touch games to play within the boot environment while the jailbreak completes, and C utilities that run on-device. This was a lot of fun, and the journey included lots of milestones: when an iOS device boots, it does so in discrete stages (boot ROM, then boot loader, then kernel, etc.). This meant that my experience of developing this jailbreak also included these milestones, as over time I successfully compromised and ran each of these stages! Building this was personally exciting because I used to regularly make and sell tweaks for jailbroken phones on Cydia. The jailbreaks themselves always seemed like inscrutable black magic, until now! I'm really gratified to have finished up this project, and am excited to put it out into the world. Please feel welcome to have a look at the code, the writeup, or give it a spin on an old iPhone 4 that you have lying around. I hope you enjoy!

Sunday, 1 October 2023

New best story on Hacker News: Some Pixel owners still can't dial 911 during an emergency

Some Pixel owners still can't dial 911 during an emergency
376 by vpt | 261 comments on Hacker News.


New best story on Hacker News: Show HN: RISC-V assembly tabletop board game (hack your opponent)

Show HN: RISC-V assembly tabletop board game (hack your opponent)
377 by throwaway71271 | 46 comments on Hacker News.
I made this game to teach my daughter how buffer overflows work. I want her to look at programs as things she can change, and make them do whatever she wants. Building your exploit in memory and jumping to it feels so cool. I hope this game teaches kids and programmers (who seem to have forgotten what computers actually are) that its quite fun to mess with programs. We used to have that excitement few years ago, just break into softice and change a branch into a nop and ignore the serial number check, or go to a different game level because this one is too annoying. While working on the game I kept thinking what we have lost from 6502 to Apple Silicon, and the transition from 'personal computers' to 'you are completely not responsible for most the code running on your device', it made me a bit sad and happy in the same time, RISCV seems like a breath of fresh air, and many hackers will build many new things, new protocols, new networks, new programs. As PI4 cost increases, the esp32 cost is decreasing, we have transparent displays for 20$, good computers for 5$, cheap lora, and etc. Everything is more accessible than ever. I played with a friend who saw completely different exploits than me, and I learned a lot just from few games, and because of the complexity of the game its often you enter into a position that you get surprised by your own actions :) So if you manage to find at least one friend who is not completely stunned by the assembler, I think you will have some good time. A huge inspiration comes from phrack 49's 'Smashing The Stack For Fun And Profit' which has demystified the stack for me: https://ift.tt/SYy5NjI TLDR: computers are fun, and you can make them do things. PS: In order to play with my friends I also built esp32 helper[1] that keeps track of the game state, and when I built it and wrote the code and everything I realized I could've just media queried the web version of the game.. but anyway, its way cooler to have a board game contraption. [1]: https://ift.tt/Ya5SgOz

New best story on Hacker News: Tire dust makes up the majority of ocean microplastics

Tire dust makes up the majority of ocean microplastics
400 by geox | 286 comments on Hacker News.


New best story on Hacker News: Every single Onewheel is being recalled after four deaths

Every single Onewheel is being recalled after four deaths
383 by scrose | 404 comments on Hacker News.