1. OpenLLM
Total comment counts : 23
Summary
OpenLLM is an open platform that allows businesses to deploy, fine-tune, serve, and monitor any large language models (LLMs) with ease. It supports a wide range of open-source LLMs and model runtimes, and its flexible APIs allow for serving LLMs over RESTful API or gRPC with one command. OpenLLM provides support for LangChain, BentoML, and HuggingFace to make it easy to create AI apps. In addition, OpenLLM encourages contributions and seamlessly integrates with other tools such as HuggingFace Agents and BentoML, offering a comprehensive set of options for deploying and hosting online ML services in production.
Top 1 Comment Summary
The main maintainer of the OpenLLM team is actively developing the fine-tuning feature and plans to release a PR soon. Joining their Discord is the best way to track their development workflow.
Top 2 Comment Summary
The writer is requesting for the minimum system requirements needed to run Falcon-40b, and suggesting that such information be added to the models list, specifically for the benefit of newcomers who may not have prior knowledge. In addition, the writer suggests that if there are only a few setups known to work, it would also be helpful to have those listed.
2. Releasing an indie game on 3 consoles at once and failing financially (2016)
Total comment counts : 36
Summary
Toto Temple Deluxe, a local-multiplayer game, was released on Ouya in 2014, before being released on PS4, Xbox One, Wii U and Steam in September 2015. The game did not sell well, but the creators do not believe it’s because it wasn’t fun. They suggest that the tricky controls hindered accessibility for casual players, while the marathon-esque gameplay and lack of intense moments made it difficult to engage and hold interest in players. Furthermore, the theme of the game came from the initial game jam and didn’t embody the creative idea or attract attention from potential players.
Top 1 Comment Summary
The author expresses sadness over the amount of negativity and lack of empathy in the comments section. They emphasize the importance of valuing small developers and entrepreneurs who share honest and valuable reflections about their experiences.
Top 2 Comment Summary
The article discusses how the independent gaming market has become flooded with developers, leading to a focus on marketing in order to succeed. Despite the free availability of game engines and their overall quality, many indie developers struggle to make a profit and may need a publisher to handle marketing. The author argues that “true” indie games are dead due to the difficulty of standing out in a crowded market.
3. My First Impressions of Nix
Total comment counts : 35
Summary
The article discusses the author’s experience experimenting with Nix, a tool for configuring software environments. The author compares Nix to Ansible, another configuration tool, highlighting Nix’s ability to recognize the state of a system and make changes accordingly. The author also notes that Nix is designed to configure the environment it is in, while Ansible is designed to configure systems over the network. The article ends with the author sharing their difficulty in finding good documentation for Nix and their struggle in installing NixOS on a Raspberry Pi.
Top 1 Comment Summary
The author argues that Nix’s speed is not due to its statefulness but rather its functional and reproducible caching. Although there is statefulness in system activation, it is not what makes Nix unique.
Top 2 Comment Summary
The article discusses the issue of a Django application packaged in Nix, where the package depends on “django_4”, causing invalid bug reports whenever someone updates that Nix package. The problem arises because all Nix packages using django_4 need to use the same version, even though Python projects don’t support using different dependency versions than the ones specified in the requirements.txt file, making it prone to breaking several things.
4. Show HN: Slint – A declarative UI toolkit for embedded and desktop
Total comment counts : 33
Summary
Slint is an open-source tool that enables developers to create native user interfaces using C++, JavaScript, or Rust. The tool features quick iteration and live-preview capabilities, allowing users to modify colors, animations, geometries, and text instantly. It provides flexible layout options, enabling responsive UI design for various screen resolutions and sizes using a single design. Slint has a low footprint and minimal resource consumption and can integrate with a user’s IDE of choice. The tool has been praised by developers for its performance, ease of use, and flexibility.
Top 1 Comment Summary
The author spent two weeks selecting an embedded UI framework and ultimately chose Slint due to its domain-specific language, simplicity, and VS Code extension for real-time GUI feedback. The author was impressed with the framework compared to Microsoft’s Windows Presentation Foundation, but is worried about optimizing binary size for their microcontroller that only has 1MB of flash storage. The 900kb used for a 15-screen app with no icons or images is a concern and the author wonders if virtualization of UI elements could help.
Top 2 Comment Summary
The article suggests that there is usually a catch when something seems too good to be true, such as companies offering software solutions that turn out to only work on specific platforms or require additional payment for full functionality.
5. Sketch.systems
Total comment counts : 28
Summary
Sketch.systems is a tool intended to assist software designers in comprehending complex product behavior. It allows users to sketch out states, attach prototypes, and get quick answers to queries. The program supports the ability to brainstorm feasible system states and add them to a spec as a simple, text-based notation. Users can link their states together with transitions that are triggered by events, allowing them to explore the system. States can be nested, making it more straightforward to understand the system and eliminate repetition, while envisioning how each UI should look in each state makes it easier to understand. The specification diagram is automatically updated as improvements are made to the spec. The tool is designed to support sketching at a high level of abstraction; according to the creators, turning Sketch.systems into a programming language IDE would detract from its usefulness as a sketching tool.
Top 1 Comment Summary
The article discusses a tool that could have been helpful to communicate complexities to product management during a project. The tool simplifies the complexities of a project in a way that is approachable to non-programmers and non-designers. The simplicity of the design in the tool is praised, and it is suggested that it can be utilized for larger state charts composed of smaller components. The author plans to try it out and applauds the tool.
Top 2 Comment Summary
The article proposes using a text-based state machine formulation that checks the reachability of states between the machines in backend, distributed, stateful and microservices systems. By checking the reachability of the next state, the code can prevent entire classes of bugs, especially in the absence of behaviour in code using threads or distributed systems. The author’s idea of value flow tracing can detect steady-state systems that always make forward progress.
6. Display brighter-than-white color on Apple devices
Total comment counts : 37
Summary
The article provides a small video file (~1 KB) that can display a very bright white color on HDR-enabled displays. By viewing the file on a recent iPhone or iPad without low-power mode turned on, the user should see a very bright white color above #ffffff. However, the white color may appear normal on unsupported displays. The creator warns against abusing this small file.
Top 1 Comment Summary
The article discusses how Apple’s approach to displaying HDR content is clever, in that it only displays the HDR content on part of the screen, while the rest of the screen remains non-HDR. However, the practice looks bad in reality and can be annoying for users when scrolling through Instagram or other feeds, as the sudden appearance of HDR content can be too bright and make the rest of the screen look muted.
Top 2 Comment Summary
The article discusses the ability to enhance the white color on HTML elements with some CSS hacks, which has been known for some time and could potentially be used in advertising. It also shares some tools for enabling an HDR mode on macOS and iOS for a fuller display.
7. HDR QR Code
Total comment counts : 34
Summary
This article discusses the development of an HDR QR code that can only be viewed on devices with an HDR display, a compatible browser, and low-power mode turned off. The QR code relies on a brightness level outside of the standard range of sRGB color space, making it incompatible with CSS colors or widely-supported image formats. Instead, the code is a video containing bright white pixels with a QR code alpha mask applied via CSS. The ratio of brightness between the two QR codes can be measured using a camera to take a photo.
Top 1 Comment Summary
The author is describing how their perception of white changes when they view it next to something else, making other whites look washed out and grey in comparison. The human visual system operates through comparison.
Top 2 Comment Summary
The author suggests that HDR can be useful for creating more saturated bright colors in various contexts, such as using a more saturated light blue color for text in syntax highlighting or terminal colors. They feel that the current sRGB colors are too dark and would prefer to simply increase the brightness rather than mix in other colors.
8. PostgreSQL reconsiders its process-based model
Total comment counts : 43
Summary
The developers of PostgreSQL, a popular database system that has been in use since 1986, are considering a fundamental change to the software’s underlying process-oriented model. At present, each connected client spawns its own server process, which can cause scalability issues on large systems. Developers have proposed moving to a threaded model instead, which could result in significantly increased performance. However, there are concerns about the complexity and cost of this change, including the need to modify the server’s use of global variables. As yet, no developer has committed to shepherding the project through to completion.
Top 1 Comment Summary
Tom Lane thinks that the adoption of a new code for a technology will be a disaster due to the likelihood of breaking other existing codes that are not under control.
Top 2 Comment Summary
The article suggests that the idea of changing PostgreSQL from process-oriented to thread-oriented is not a good one. This is because sometimes the processes crash and changing it to thread-oriented can cause all other clients to also crash and cut connections. This can result in context switching overhead or cache misses and can be a potential problem.
9. Neural networks in the 1990s
Total comment counts : 29
Summary
The article addresses the issue of JavaScript being disabled in the user’s browser when trying to access Twitter.com. It suggests that the user should enable JavaScript or switch to a supported browser to continue using the site and provides links to the Help Center, Terms of Service, Privacy Policy, Cookie Policy, and Imprint.
Top 1 Comment Summary
The author reminisces about the mid and late 90’s when there was a lot of work being done on neural networks (NN), as well as other computational areas grouped under the term “soft computing”. Limited computer power was a factor that inhibited progress, and although certain fields like civil engineering and hydrology found some use for NN, breakthrough commercial applications were still lacking. However, the author recognized the potential of NN, including their application in physiology to investigate vision.
Top 2 Comment Summary
This article discusses why neural networks were not bigger in the 90s. There was no issue with computation, but vanishing gradients and poor regulation meant that increasing network size rarely improved performance empirically. A major issue at the time was an ‘AI winter’ after neural networks failed to live up to their hype in the 80s, leading to computer vision and NLP researchers largely abandoning neural networks. A lot of the problems that did benefit from neural networks in the 90s/early 2000s just needed a non-linear model but didn’t need huge neural networks to do well. Nowadays, the recent surge in AI is being fueled by smarter approaches, more computation, but, more importantly, a ton more data that the internet made available.
10. How many shipwrecks are there in the world’s oceans?
Total comment counts : 11
Summary
An expedition led by Unesco has discovered three new wrecks on the seafloor of the Skerki Bank, a shallow reef in the Mediterranean. The shipwrecks date back to the 1st Century BC, 2nd Century AD and the 19th or 20th Century, respectively. It is thought that there could be over three million undiscovered wrecks globally, with maritime graveyards proving to be hotspots for discovery. However, finding these wrecks can lead to disputes over ownership, such as the $17bn worth of cargo found on the San José, a Spanish galleon that sank off the coast of Colombia.
Top 1 Comment Summary
The Vasa was a powerful Swedish warship that was launched in 1627 but sank minutes later due to poor design and lack of appropriate ballast. It sat at the harbor bottom for 300 years until Swedes decided to refloat and restore the multi-story museum that stands around it, housing the completely restored ship.
Top 2 Comment Summary
The Black Sea, which is a deep, cold, de-oxygenated body of water that preserves objects, contains many boats, some dating back to prehistoric times, due to its location as a marginal trading space between various cultures. The boats in the Black Sea were used for shipping goods that were too bulky or heavy to transport by land, and economically, sailing was likely the most efficient method for moving goods to and from buyers and sellers. Additionally, the article raises a question about how many wrecks from the pre-coal era on the Atlantic run are now covered by the trail of ash left by coal-era boats.