hackathonguy

I'm very curious whether a) anecdotally, anyone has encountered a real enterprise cost-cutting effort focused on LLM APIs and b) empirically, whether anyone has done any research on price elasticity in LLMs of different performance scales.

So far, my experience has been that it's just too early for most people / applications to worry about cost - at most, I've seen AI to be accountable for 10% of cloud costs. But very curious if others have other experiences.

I love that the base model starts with 16GB of RAM here. The value of these computers is incredible - I purchased a Macbook Pro in 2021 and it's still powering through every task I throw at it. Before Apple started making their own chips, I felt like I had to upgrade every 2-3 years to prevent my laptop from becoming a hurdle in completing every day tasks (remember when tab management was a thing?). Really happy with these machines.

I'm curious if it might be possible that an AI "civilization", similar to the one proposed by Altera, could end up being a better paradigm for AGI than a single LLM, if a workable reward system for the entire civilization was put in place. Meaning, suppose this AI civilization was striving to maximize [scientific_output] or [code_quality] or any other eval, similar to how modern countries try to maximize GDP - would that provide better results than a single AI agent working towards that goal?

We currently make about $3K per month with https://www.hiyodel.com - ChatGPT-powered copywriting for Shopify stores. The Shopify ecosystem is a toughie and it's been a difficult road so far, but it's great having the "passive" income!

In Jewish law there is a paradigm called "this one is benefitting and this one is not losing". Essentially, the idea is that if you're enjoying something belonging to someone else, that doesn't constitute stealing as long as they don't stand to lose anything owing to your usage.

This applies to lamplight, and interestingly, can be applied to piracy as well: if you can honestly say you wouldn't have purchased the movie/software/music anyway, downloading it is not stealing.

As others have mentioned in the comments, this idea doesn't work for wifi: performance is inversely correlated with connected devices, making using your neighbor's wifi a case of "this one is benefitting and this one is losing".

Wondering if it's just me: I bought an M1 MacBook Air with 8GB of RAM, based on reports saying that RAM management is much more effective than with Intel CPUs. Ever since, I'm really struggling with load management. I typically have Chrome open with 20-30 tabs, plus a couple of Electron apps (Notion, Slack, Google Calendar), and my MacBook frequently slows down to a crawl or gets stuck entirely. Simple commands - "close all tabs" in Chrome - can take 50 seconds to execute. Is anyone else experiencing the same?

What makes Zurich one of the best places to live now?

I'm so excited about this - I've been looking for a cheap device that won't take up much space and allow me to play AAA PC games despite having a Macbook as a primary machine. Can't wait to get my hands on this.

Best of luck to you guys! I understand the different point of view.

The way I see it, being "always on" is one of the worst things about office work. Always on is a constant distraction from doing good concentrated work. I think off by default is a far better paradigm for remote communication tools.

I see lots of praise for TransferWise here and I regret not trying them out earlier.

For what it's worth, I can add my two cents regarding PayPal. From a customer experience perspective, PayPal is pretty great - the UI is smooth and I like being able to pay with my PayPal balance online.

Having said that, their fees are nothing short of exorbitant - for international transfers, if I'm not mistaken, the fee is 4.4% + a fixed price per transaction + 2.5% on top of that if you also want to exchange currencies. A $1,000 bill paid to my PayPal account by a U.S.-based client can easily become $930 or even less by the time it reaches my bank account. I've stopped accepting payments via PayPal for that reason.

Furthermore - this isn't personal experience, just word on the street - I hear PayPal Customer Service can be pretty atrocious to merchants, which is another thing I'm not too happy about when it comes to their service.

> Already, there are a few companies that have applied to YC, gotten accepted, and ostentatiously turned it down.

Can anyone shed some light into this? Why do companies turn down YC after being accepted?

We just came back from a month in India with our lovely 1.5 y/o twins. They honestly made the trip 10x better. Their awe and wonder really opened our eyes. And getting help is easy when you're around backpackers.

Out of curiosity - can you share if you received any new paying users through this Show HN, and if so, how many? I realize there's a 7 day trial so even number of trial signups would be interesting. Trying to gauge the HN effect for a product like this.

"On average, the fund holds 1.4 percent of all of the world’s listed companies."

This blew my mind.

Ah! That sort of proves the point, doesn't it? 25% of 694 is 173, which is even higher than 132 villages where there were no female babies. That means there are actually more female babies than you'd predict in advance. Or is my math wrong somehow?

The article doesn't indicate how the villages were sampled.

Suppose a village has a birth rate of 8 babies a year (2 babies every 3 months). There's (roughly) a 50% chance the babies will be male and female, 25% chance that they're both female and 25% chance that they're both male.

That means that if you're sampling from a district that has 1,000 villages (with the average birth rate of 2 babies / 3 months, roughly the birth rate indicated by the article), one quarter of the villages will have 2 male babies - that's 250 villages with 0 female babies born in the last 3 months.

Not making any claims regarding foeticide in India - just saying that the way they chose the villages matters a lot.

I completely agree, but would like to note a common fallacy following this logic.

If my hourly rate is $20, I might think that a $200 phone is worth 10 hours.

The thing is, the majority of those $20 I make are probably already allocated to things like rent, food, transportation and so on. If those things account for 50% of my expenses, for example, the $200 phone is actually worth 20 hours of my time. (That is, unless all my necessities are already accounted for, and I'm working 10 hours on top of what I usually work to buy the phone.)

It's important for freelancers to account for what is essentially their "operating expenses" when making purchasing decisions.

It's worth noting that Jeff Bezos has a lot to gain from publishing these threats. While publishing the descriptions of the photographs may sting, publishing the photos themselves would hurt a lot more. Now that he's made the accusations public, AMI could not plausibly publish the actual photos.

I'd love to hear more about perceived opportunities in legal tech. For some reason, the legal industry seems very averse to change, but I'm sure that's not always going to be the case. (Lawyer here).

Not OP, but gonna pipe in as a Jerusalemite: in Israel, being a foreigner is almost a default state. Consider that a very significant portion of the population only came in the last 30 or so years, and a vast majority of peoples’ ancestors only came in the last century. It’s a relatively new country. From a more practical standpoint, there are large English speaking communities all over & most Israelis are very fluent English speakers.

Spot on! Jerusalem is great: perfect weather, incredible people, easy access to nature, lots of culture all around. Only downside is it’s getting a little expensive - in Israel, second only to Tel Aviv and the surrounding area.

Related question: do you charge by the hour? If so, what's your hourly rate and what software do you use to track your time?

Anyone using Brave? Would love to hear your impressions.

Pinning, bundling, gestures and embedded todos/reminders all make Inbox the best email app there is. Hats off to the Inbox team - you've made a great product. I'll miss it.

Ramallah in particular is a very westernized, modernized city. To illustrate, the city has KFC branches (which no city in Israel has), and coffee downtown can run you $6 (compared to $1 in cities like Nablus).

The oldest building on the list actually dates to 1190.

Just thought of another ZKP - my niece can prove to me that she knows the password to a device by logging in, without me ever knowing the password myself.

This can easily be remedied by having the verifier ensure the prover is in an empty room, equipped with only cardboard and scissors.

Zero knowledge proofs are fascinating - as a non-mathematician, I particularly enjoy real-world examples.

Two famous examples ("The Ali Baba Cave" and the "Two Balls and the Color Blind Friend") appear in the Wikipedia article on zero knowledge proofs [1].

My favorite, however, is this paper [2] on convincing another person you've found Waldo, without revealing his location and therefore ruining the game. It's extraordinarily simple: take a piece of cardboard larger than the Where's Waldo book, make a small, Waldo-sized cutout, and position the cardboard in a way that only Waldo himself is visible. As long as you don't give away the position of the book underneath the cardboard, you can prove you've found Waldo without providing _any_ information as to where he is! It's pretty great.

Would love to know of other real world examples. :-)

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zero-knowledge_proof#The_Ali_B... [2] http://www.wisdom.weizmann.ac.il/%7Enaor/PAPERS/waldo.pdf