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Silasdevon Ask HN: Fable hacked my piano, can I release the results?

This whole writeup is basically the verbatim prompt recipe for anyone to just whip it up themselves.

Blocking the final result is no longer a real block, when all it requires is a vague prompt to replicate it.

We've entered a strange territory.

Silasdevon The Twelve-Factor App (2025)

Of course you can, but it's still a really great collection of good practices that lead you to a better place than if you didn't to do any of it.

Silasdevon RAG Is Simpler Than You Think

I apologize for write "just" FTS. I know there is a lot of work involved and your article summed it up pretty damn well, in a way that makes it approachable for someone new to the topic.

I will keep a note of this article for next time I am asked about this topic.

Silasdevon RAG Is Simpler Than You Think

Very little of this is RAG but rather just FTS with clever reformulation and re-ranking.

RAG is about providing an grounded response, given the actual data in the corpus.

Great article and content, nonetheless!!

Silasdevon Your 'app' could have been a webpage (so I fixed it for you)

My take is that they love apps for the simple reason they show as easily clickable buttons to enter. Most dread having to type a Web address for something they regularly do. Few know that they can create an "app-icon" from any Web page. Should be advertised more.

Silasdevon If you are asking for human attention, demonstrate human effort

I had a new colleague on the team, who I had to on-board. I gave him a few simple tasks, just to get him into the whole setup. He literally copy/pasted my task description into Claude and asked it to complete the task. To begin with, I didn't suspect this, so when he asked for more help, I gladly wrote up a detailed explanation with more information and detail for him to learn. Little did I know, he never read it but put it directly into Claude. Not even sure how I should handle it, but my first instinct was to get extremely annoyed.

Maybe this is just how things are going to be. But in that case, I'm done spending my time being a helpful idiot talking indirectly to a robot through another person.

Silasdevon ClickHouse raises $350M Series C

SQL, OLAP, Primary use case is fast aggregations on append only data, like usage analytics.

It's fast, it's........ really fast!!

But you need to get comfortable with their extended SQL dialect that forces you to think a little different than with usual SQL if you want to keep perf high.

Silasdevon Httptap: View HTTP/HTTPS requests made by any Linux program

This seems like the kind of things you can do before you get kids and have real responsibilities. Then you need to get back to reality. Sounds fun though and I would have liked to experience it.

Silasdevon iPhone 16 Pro and iPhone 16 Pro Max

Exactly.

It's just a natural maturity-curve that every new piece of tech inevitably goes through.

Tech on the maturity curve:

ICE cars: settled

EV cars: rising

PC's: settled

Phones: settled

Smart TV's: slowly rising still

Wearables: rising

Silasdevon Continuous reinvention: A brief history of block storage at AWS

Great read, although a shame that it didn't go any further than adding the write cache SSD solution, which must have been many years ago. I was hoping for a little more recent info on the EBS architecture.

Silasdevon AI generating radio-quality music

This is absolutely wild

Silasdevon European crash tester says carmakers must bring back physical controls

Did Douglas Adams travel in time.... this is scarily accurate!!! My BMW keeps turning off the volume if I wave at anything in the direction of the touchscreen. There is a little infrared camera near the roof that can sense hand-gestures and turn volume up or down ... and lots of other things.

Douglas Adams so spot on I want to cry!

Silasdevon Revealed: The names linked to ClothOff, the deepfake pornography app

It's inevitable. We are in a normalization phase right now. Soon, kids will just shrug at stuff like that, because they will all know it's likely fake and therefore not care much about it.

However, I feel really bad for those who has to be the ones to go through the pain of this phase though.

Silasdevon Freenginx: Core Nginx developer announces fork

Insane find. Brilliant!!

Silasdevon U.S. workers say banned weed killer in 50 countries is giving them Parkinson's

Same. I even got my mom an electric bicycle as a present, just to lower the entry to physical exercise, but it just collected dust in the corner, despite endless promises to start using it. She passed away suddenly 3 years ago. I'm sure her heart just gave up. Still can't really take it in.

If the joy of your bad habits outweigh whatever other sources of joy you have in your daily life, then it's hard to motivate someone to stop. In their mind, they are making the conclusion that they'd rather die with some joy from the bad habit than die entirely unhappy - which kind of makes sense.

Silasdevon Sqids – Generate short unique IDs from numbers

It's particularly funny because their example docs for .NET outputs "B4aajs", which to any Swedish l33t speaking individual, would read "Bajs", which means "shit"

Silasdevon Major outages across ChatGPT and API

To my knowledge, you cannot mix embeddings from different models. Each dimension has a different meaning for each model.

Silasdevon Ask HN: PG's 'Do Things That Don't Scale' manual examples?

I was in an online fashion market place company that wanted to test 60-minute delivery in the same city.

We bought a few bikes and had employees ride out to customers, just to check if there was an actual demand. Turned out there was not and the idea was dropped with a low investment.

Silasdevon Yandex open sourced it's BI tool DataLens

Yes, that is really a shame, although it's been fully open sourced.

Yandex is aware of how the geopolitical situation is hurting them and are therefore building a new company called Double.Cloud, based in Europe, to work around the negative public opinion on Yandex, and thereby continue being able to sell Clickhouse cloud services.

Silasdevon Unlimited Kagi searches for $10 per month

You should really consider getting a proper router like Unifi or the like. It's a one time cost and it will save you from these issues no matter what ISP supplied crap you end up getting.

Just plug whatever ISP router directly into your own, more capable, router and your home network will look identical, no matter where you move to or how many times you change ISP.

That said, running Pi-hole on a Raspberry pi is a treat!

Silasdevon Show HN: LLMs can generate valid JSON 100% of the time

The idea is not to just generate any random string that matches the grammar. The idea is that if your request is "What are the first 10 digits of pi?" and you restrict the response to the regex: "[0-9]+\.[0-9]+", then you actually receive a correct answer of "3.1415926535" and not just a random string such as "1.2346789", which also happens to match the pattern.

Silasdevon Ask HN: My GPT project has become a local hit but I can't afford the bill

>Wouldn't it be almost impossible to hit a duplicate when the users each form their own question?

The embeddings approach would increase the likelyhood of finding the same question, even if phrased slightly differently.

Silasdevon Show HN: GPT-4-powered web searches for developers

Just set a User Agent that fools them into thinking you're using Edge:

Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/112.0.0.0 Safari/537.36 Edg/112.0.100.0

Silasdevon TIC-80 tiny computer

The game, DRIVING TEST, was surprisingly simple, challenging and fun. https://tic80.com/play?cart=3045

Thumbs up!

Silasdevon Few-Shot Head Swapping in the Wild

Impressive results

Silasdevon NPS doesn’t say anything particularly useful

Why do everyone seem to think that management does not have actual good intentions with measuring NPS as a KPI? The companies I've worked with have all had genuinely good intentions making the best possible experience for the user, because that is what ultimately wins in the end. If someone scores 1-6, you ask them to provide additional feedback, to learn from it - problem solved and everyone has all the info they need to go about their work.

There seems to be this idea that KPIs are evil and interpreted in vacuum. It's rarely like that.

Silasdevon Octopuses, crabs and lobsters to be recognised as sentient beings under UK law

Just picturing that makes me feel terrible

Silasdevon What is AT&T doing at 1111340002?

This video from defcon gives a good overview of what Java Card applets is, the limitations and what it can do: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=31D94QOo2gY

Silasdevon Cast AI vs. Spot.io: Two approaches to automated cloud cost optimization

This article is too biased. It's very obvious that the author attempted to make what would look like a fair comparison, but the bias shines through every single sentence in favor of Cast AI.

Silasdevon Klarna users are being signed in to random accounts

Happened for the danish tax authority about 10 years ago as well. Although I think the issue for them was that the unique login token was based on a timestamp that several users happened to share during very busy peaks.