Hacker News Reader

jfisher4024on Does your startup need complex cloud infrastructure?

No product I’ve ever worked on has been successful enough to require the optimizations that microservices can provide.

Part of the reason they weren’t successful was because my managers insist on starting with microservices.

Starting with microservices prevents teams from finding product-market fit that would justify microservices.

jfisher4024on Show HN: Ragas – Open-source library for evaluating RAG pipelines

Any tips for Mixtral? That’s what we tried

jfisher4024on Show HN: Ragas – Open-source library for evaluating RAG pipelines

Congratulations on the launch! I was unable to use this library: I was trying to evaluate different non-OpenAI models and it consistently failed due to malformed JSONs coming from the model.

Any thoughts about using different models? Is this just a langchain limitation?

jfisher4024on Flexible schemas are the mindkiller

Those are some great quotes!

jfisher4024on Flexible schemas are the mindkiller

I’m working with a Derek right now. Highly motivated and highly incompetent. Usually it’s one or the other. How do you deal with people like this?

jfisher4024on Quarto

Quarto is great

jfisher4024on Coding on Copilot: Data suggests downward pressure on code quality

I used to use it mainly to write unit tests, which is a nice use case because it’s obvious if it gets it wrong. (The test fails.)

One time I had to use the Go protobuff reflection API, and Copilot was actual crucial because the docs are so bad.

Can’t use it in my current role and I feel less productive.

jfisher4024on Controversial California bill would physically stop new cars from speeding

This is like how CI forces developers to write better code by nudging us towards good behaviors. Is it annoying sometimes to write well-formatted code with high test coverage? Sure. Is it annoying to drive at the speed limit? Sure. Ultimately, it leads to a better outcome.

If this gets adopted, within 10 years people won’t be able to imagine how we lived without it

jfisher4024on If We Made Shoes Like We Make Housing, People Would Go Barefoot

I’ve been trying to come up with a metaphor to explain the housing crisis in California to my friends in LATAM. Shoes are a pretty good. I want something punchier, though.

jfisher4024on How Cars Turned Into Giant Killers

> You Don’t Need a Full-Size Pickup Truck, You Need a Cowboy Costume

That’s hilarious

jfisher4024on Ask HN: Which sources cover AI developments without falling for the hype?

Surprised no one has mentioned AK’s daily paper digest: https://huggingface.co/papers

He also posts summaries on Twitter, or at least he used to but my Twitter account is glitched and I can’t see Tweets anymore

jfisher4024on Skybox AI: Use AI to generate 3D worlds

Can someone please use this to improve the skyboxes in the KOTOR games? Please and thank you.

jfisher4024on Spiraling in San Francisco’s Doom Loop

I’ve lived in San Francisco for 20+ years. Downtown is in bad shape, but the rest of the city is quite lovely. I think techies don’t explore the “villages” (Richmond, Hayes Valley, etc) and only see the more corporate, less flattering side of the city (SoMa). This will lead to an uneven view of the city. And a deservedly negative one.

The rumors of San Francisco death are exaggerated. They are also self-fulfilling because they discourage people from investing in the community.

My advice to techies: move West. Take a pottery class and eat a dumpling. Make friends with artists. It’s a richly cultural city once you get out of the bubble.

jfisher4024on Unlimiformer: Long-Range Transformers with Unlimited Length Input

Neubig is the real deal. I’d take this paper seriously.

jfisher4024on HuggingChat

Better than StableLM chat, worse than ChatGPT. Seems like the best open-source chatbot?

jfisher4024on Show HN: rpgGPT, RPG with LLM-Powered NPCs

That’s a clever way of doing state. For dndinfinity.com, I rendered the game state as natural language (e.g. “the players are engaged in the following quests”) in the prompt, under the theory that it would be able to reason better.

What issues (if any) did you have storing state in json and just plopping that in the context window?

jfisher4024on I worked at Google for -10 days

This happened to me too. After I got an offer letter from Google, I was ghosted and notified that the position was deprioritized a week after I was supposed to have started.

I signed a lease in the intervening period expecting a 50% raise compared to my previous job. Bad move lol. Took forever to find a different job.

jfisher4024on Neural Networks: Zero to Hero

It might make sense to get a handle on Python first

jfisher4024on LangChain Announces 10M Seed Round

Congrats to Harrison and the team. The pace of Langchain development is pretty stunning and they deserve the shot to make this happen.

jfisher4024on My kids and I just played D&D with ChatGPT4 as the DM

I made an interface for this along with a quest log and game visualizations.

Check it out in a few days at dndinfinity.com

It’s currently down because it hit the maximum usage limit lol. Serves me right for using GPT-3 instead of the ChatGPT API.