wesammikhail

I've had an idea for a different type of free & open search engine for the last 15 years. I ended up pursing other ideas instead over the years.

Last month however I decided to go back to the idea and give it a shot. Right now I'm in the process of scraping and building a huge index. The technical challenges have been plenty. But I should be ready to publish an alpha version by end of month or so.

It's been working for tens of thousands of years. What changed in the last few decades wasn't parenting or technology. It was the rise of the nanny state where the parents gave up the parenting of their kids and entrusted that to educational institutions instead.

Funny you bring this up.

Back in the day when I was like 15 and DC++ was still a thing, I used to browse people's shared folders. One day I came across a file called "the paradox of false positive". It was a 1 pager that described how a machine which is 99.9% accurate at identifying terrorists would be completely useless due to this false positive base rate fallacy you're describing.

It really stuck with me throughout the years. It's kind o remarkable how even a 99.9% accurate heuristic is insufficient at scale.

Which begs the question: lets assume the intentions are pure (which we know they're not but lets be generous), what other options are there when 99.9% heuristic is not good enough? how do you design systems when they're guaranteed to fail as they scale up?

edit: and what do you know, I just saw this as I scrolled down on HN https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48816959

if("false" === true) echo "PHP sucks";

else echo "You're full of shit!";

// output

You're full of shit!

Been using PHP for 20 years and have built multiple startups with it that went from ideas to exits.

Today's PHP is better than it has ever been. Are there some things that are rough around the edges? yes ofc. But there is no language that doesn't have that. It's all trade-offs.

Last week I switched from Nginx+FPM to FrankenPHP and my god even the deployment experience got 10x better.

Safe to say that if you haven't tried the language, give it a shot. Within a few days you'll know if it's a good fit for you or not!

I dont know what it is with products names these days. Antigravity, Antimatter, Composer, Clay, Ramp, Bolt, etc.

You'd think the founders would Google for naming conflict before choosing a name.

Models consume more tokens than ever for the same tasks.

you'd be surprised how good small models have gotten. Size of the model isnt all that matters.

I've seen sources like this before. It's all hearsay and promo. I was asking for any publicly available verifiable information regarding the cost of inference at scale. I haven't seen any such info personally which is why I asked.

I'm dying to see S-1 filing for Anthropic or OpenAI. I don't actually think inference is as cheap as people say if you consider the total cost (hardware, energy, capex, etc)

“people start with a k8s cluster for 5 users” doesn’t really exist

Most people in the BiP these days barely know how to deploy a database or host something using nginx. it's all vercel, supabase, aws, clerk, yada yada. Cost aside, I think that people are addicted to complexity.

source?

One of the stipulations is that OpenAI achieves "AGI"... Need I say more?

Also a lot of this "money" is in cloud compute and credits not cash so...

Pick a few each day and go from there. Easy as that.

You're welcome. And yes indeed it does

you're welcome :)

put in a shot of tequila in it. that ought to get you to perk up real nice.

I post some stuff on social media like code snippets and some markdown instructions. Most platforms have terrible support for rich formatting. So I decided to do it this way instead. I can now just post screenshots.

Also, when creating technical docs and presentations, this turned out to be super helpful.

Just a fun side project I figured others might find useful!

The is the most totalitarian bullshit I've ever heard on HN. The fact that you're okay with another human, just because they have a robe, to compel you to do as they ask OR rot away without a conviction is utter madness.

Imagine if this was the 1500s and the man in the robe was a priest. Would you be okay with that? and if your answer is some form of distinction without a difference argument, I'd urge you to not even reply.

This attitude is ill informed.

Renewables are cheaper now than most forms of energy production. Grids need investment.

Now we are rich it’s only fair we lead in transitioning to renewables.

I despair at these short sighted and fairly wrong on the facts views.

The level of arrogance is unmatched while being both factually wrong AND self-contradictory.

Absolute cinema!

God I love the look of those old school sites. Takes me back to a happier time. Whatever happened? :(

Honeeeeeeeeey get in here, the board of peace officially declared its first war!

Bring the popcorn with you. No need for salt cause everyone got that in spades on both sides.

But is "only" 5% of users paying of a 8-900M user base really so inconsequential? What percentage of Meta's users are paying? Google's? I would be curious to see the author dig deeper here, because I am skeptical that this is really as bad as the author suggests.

The difference is in the unit economics. OpenAI has to spend massively per free user it serves. The others you mentioned have SaaS economics where the marginal cost of onboarding and serving each non-paying user is essentially zero while also gaining money from these free users via advertising. Hence, the free users are actually a net positive rather than an endless money sink.

Keep also in mind that AI has always been, and will always be, a commodity. The moment you start forcing people to convert into paying customers is the moment they jump ship at scale.

Just something to keep in mind.

I had no idea. You just blew my mind

I deploy all my code on linux and have been thinking about switching from windows to linux for my daily driver. But even I dread that. It´s as if linux has tried as hard as possible to make every single little thing as complicated as possible.

imho, user experience is nowhere to be found in the linux landscape. There is very little focus on that. People will tell you try this or that distro. But once you run into a simple problem, it´s often a rabbit hole of a gazilling cli commands to fix it. In the mean time you´re praying to god to not brick something that used to work before.

Speak for yourself. If you find the agentic workflow to be more fun, more power to you.

I for one think writing code is the rewarding part. You get to think through a problem and figure out why decision A is better than B. Learning about various domains and solving difficult problems is in itself a reward.

The author is full of shit is what it is. They see a few posts online and extrapolate from that to fit whatever narrative they believe in.

You can be directionally right but still lose a whole lot of money as an investor for decades on end even when you're right about the eventual outcome. Predicting future outcomes is orders of magnitude easier than predicting the exact moment/timing. After all, "markets can stay irrational for far longer than you can stay solvent".

This is why Burry, schiff, and a bunch of others keep predicting a collapse for decades on end. They're directionally right, they see a pattern but cant seem to time it right.

My prediction: I think this clusterfuck will keep going until

1. Unbearable irrationality: The US owes more money than there is money in the whole world. Measured using something like global M1 or M2 or something of that nature. Basically the system will need to reach a level of irrationality that even its biggest defenders can't cope with. OR,

2. Demographics: Most boomers die of old age after raiding whatever remains of the treasury.

Coincidentally, if my quick math is right, both of these scenarios are very likely to coincide within the next ~10 years or so. So make of that what you want...

my 2 cents: I'm one of these people that could possibly use your tool. However, the website doesnt give me much info. I'd urge you to add some more pages that showcase the product and what it can do with more detail. Would help capture more people imo.

The institutions have been doing a fine job of destroying all their credibility and utility all on their own for far longer than this new AI hype cycle.

ZIRP, Covid, Anti-nuclear power, immigration crisis across the west, debt enslavement of future generations to buy votes, socializing losses and privatizing gains... Nancy is a better investor than Warren.

I am not defending billionaires, the vast majority of them are grifting scum. But to put this at their feet is not the right level of analysis when the institutions themselves are actively working to undermine the populace for the benefit of those that are supposed to be stewards of said institutions.

I still write vanilla PHP with SQL queries. And with all the modern PHP features, things have never been faster or more joyful to work with.

I honestly feel bad for people who fall victims to complexity. It burns you out when all you need is to keep things simple and fun. Life is too short for anything else.