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emilsedghon Forty years of GNU and the free software movement

the reason that it has so few women involved

Citation needed here.

Free Software movement at this point is much, much larger than FSF, GNU and rms. Many of those communities (Like KDE which I've been involved with) have been very very welcoming and inclusive to woman. However, woman have always been under-represented there just like many other areas in Tech.

Not saying rms has not made GNU/FSF difficult for woman though. Just saying the reasons woman are under-represented go deeper than rms.

emilsedghon Reviewing a Dell Linux PC 23 years ago

> What really is the software progress in last 20 years?

It has become significantly cheaper and easier to build software.

That has come at the cost of an enormous complexity paid by hardware and reliability.

emilsedghon PgBouncer is useful, important, and fraught with peril

I don't think 10K updates per second are really that difficult for the db (Unless you have locking issues).

But at that point your reads should be probably be sent to read-only replica's. So you write to a master but all your read-heavy apps and queries run against replicas.

emilsedghon Dude,Where's My Donations? Wikimedia gives another $1M to non-Wikimedia projects

Of all the things people can be angry about Wikipedia's small contributions to other non-profits is the one they choose do protest. Amazing.

Wikipedia has been one of the most beautiful creations of the Internet and they continue to be trustworthy. I don't really see anything worthy of bad faith assumptions about Wikipedia's $70K donation Filipino American National Historical Society. Seriously people find better causes. Protest real issues.

emilsedghon Brand-new Linux release, which I'm calling the Debian Linux Release (1993)

It has aged extremely well. Based on the degree of the up-to-date you need you can use

* Experimental

* Unstable/Sid

* Testing

It all depends on what your definition of up to date is.

emilsedghon Ask HN: I learned useless skill of prompt engineering, how relevant will it be?

I may have a gig for you if you are interested. Feel free to send me a message.

Email is the <username>@gmail.com

emilsedghon Desktop Linux has a Firefox problem

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WebKit#Origins

emilsedghon LangchainJs Real-World Examples

If the product you're building is just a prompt that needs to be executed langchain is not for you.

But if your product requires memory, index, reactive decision making and tool use, capability to mix and match all those with different models, integration with third party tools (like Serp and whatnot) then langchain is for you.

emilsedghon “Web Environment Integrity” is an attack on the free Internet

What is all these negative nonsense about "people don't give a shit" on every thread about this. We don't need every single person in the street to give a shit. We only need enough influence within the industry and regulatory to give a shit. And they are. We are all upset by this and upvoting it and companies and organizations are writing about it. Keep that up and push for other companies to reject it or for regulation to stop it.

You know what Google fears most? Being broken down. If they push for this, we can organize calls to our representatives and raise our concerns and call for regulations and/or breakdown of Google's anti competitive behavior.

emilsedghon Web Environment Integrity API Proposal

This is not the right attitude. Google wanted AMP. Google didn't get AMP. AMP is dead.

emilsedghon Three signs that Wayland is becoming the favored way to get a GUI on Linux

Just because it's been 15 years and it hasn't reached 100% adoption/parity doesn't mean it's not a success. The feeling around it when it started was that it's going to many many years for it to reach that and I'd say it's en route.

I don't understand the criticism Wayland gets. If you don't like it just don't use it. X.org is fine. Wait for it to get the features/quality you expect.

Wayland people _are_ the X.org people. You can't force them to continue developing a technology they don't believe it and not moving forward.

emilsedghon AMC Says More Than 20k Have Booked 'Barbie'-'Oppenheimer' Double Features

Or maybe these studios need to stop making stupid movies that nobody cares about anymore. Flash? Seriously?

Promote actual movies a little more rather than spending hundreds of millions on dumb movies and leaving no room for real cinema.

emilsedghon Ask HN: How did you earn your first $100 and first $1k online?

Amazing! What icon set is that? You should send a link. Should still be available through https://store.kde.org/browse/

Edit: I suppose one of these: https://store.kde.org/u/Doches

emilsedghon Pink Floyd, 'The Wizard of Oz,' and me

Roger Waters has been wearing that uniform at least since 1980's [0]. He becomes a fascist to criticize fascism not to advocate. It's like trying to cancel Charlie Chaplin for becoming a Fascist.

Back then he wasn't a critic of Israel and therefore nobody cared.

I'm a Jew and I don't think he is anti semitic. That's absurd.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B5K9z1AerQw

emilsedghon Two US lawyers fined for submitting fake court citations from ChatGPT

With that logic all us programmer's careers should be ended due to the bugs we introduce because "they are equivalent of a surgeon thinking...".

It's not equivalent to that. Nobody lost their leg over this.

emilsedghon Two US lawyers fined for submitting fake court citations from ChatGPT

Why so eager to end someone's career? He did a lazy/stupid thing. People do far worse things.

The client may want to sue them and seek damages or something and that'd be fair but I don't think their career should end. That's harsh.

emilsedghon Anime.js – A lightweight JavaScript animation library

Anime.js is pretty fantastic. Lovely API. Well done Julian.

emilsedghon Native JSON Output from GPT-4

Building agents that use advanced API's was not really practical until now. Things like Langchain's Structured Agents worked somewhat reliably, but due to the massive token count it was so slow, the experience was _never_ going to be useful.

Due to this, the performance in which our agent processes results has improved 5-6 times and it does actually do a pretty good job of keeping the schema.

One problem that is not resolved yet is that it still hallucinates a lot of attributes. For example we have tool that allows it to create contacts in user's CRM. I ask it to:

"Create contacts for top 3 Barcelona players:.

It creates an structure like this"

1. Lionel Messi - Email: lionel.messi@barcelona.com - Phone Number: +1234567890 - Tags: Player, Barcelona

2. Gerard Pique - Email: gerard.pique@barcelona.com - Phone Number: +1234567891 - Tags: Player, Barcelona

3. Marc-Andre ter Stegen - Email: marc-terstegen@barcelona.com - Phone Number: +1234567892 - Tags: Player, Barcelona

And you can see it hallucinated email addresses and phone numbers.

emilsedghon Ask HN: Anyone at Reddit can confirm a traffic dip?

I think that's one of the problems here. When Digg happened, Reddit was already a very viable alternative.

But now there doesn't seem to be any.

emilsedghon California spent $17B on homelessness – it’s not working

None of this is true. Iran has extreme poverty, people have bare access to food these days and there's a massive amount of child beggars in the street. People are selling body parts to get access to food.

Source: Iranian.

emilsedghon Llama.cpp can do 40 tok/s on M2 Max, 0% CPU usage, using all 38 GPU cores

> driven by consumer desire for local LLMs

Citation needed. I don't think general public has any desire/care for that. Like they don't care about a locally run Siri.

emilsedghon Ask HN: Who got hired from HN?

They knew I was in Iran. None of us knew it's illegal to hire contractors we just thought it's some banking access issue. Also it was a small amount and not a systemic thing I was the only one.

emilsedghon Ask HN: Who got hired from HN?

Thank for the concern im a US citizen now.

emilsedghon Ask HN: Who got hired from HN?

~10 years ago I was living in Iran and was hired as a contractor in a US company.I was being paid using Bitcoins (due to sanctions).

emilsedghon WP20 and Audrey Scholars

Can we celebrate this project which has empowered millions of people to power their businesses, share their ideas, get their engineering careers started, make a living, all in free software as a collaborative effort all around the globe?

Earlier days of web there were so many projects fighting for this crown. Starting from Movable Type to PHP Nuke, Xoops, Joomla, Drupal (and a billion others). Well done open source and free software community. Shoutout to all those people who worked on all those platforms to make this a possibility.

emilsedghon Seattle Amazon workers plan walkout over return to office, layoffs

Its not about meritocracy. Its about compensation.

emilsedghon KDE Developers in Germany Planning for Plasma 6.0

There are a couple of reasons not to worry about this upgrade:

A. 3 -> 4 required very very significant changes. 4 -> 5 and now 5 -> 6 are nowhere near that.

B. KDE really learnt their lesson on this and they are very careful not to create anything similar to that. Thus, not big rewrite/changes like 3 -> 4 are in the works.

This is just to get the whole project going with Qt 6 which isn't that much different from Qt 5.

Edit: Disclaimer, I used to be a very minor contributor to KDE around 3 -> 4 time.

emilsedghon Verified accounts are now prioritized

Maybe the two things should be different? Blue checkmark for official accounts, but to get boosted you need to pay up?

emilsedghon Google DeepMind

I don't think it is.

I'd prioritize their problems like this:

1. LLM's don't have a lucrative business model that Google needs.

2. The quality of their language model is really lacking as of now.

You fix 1 and 2, ChatGPT's branding is nothing. Google is the biggest advertisement machine in the world and they can market the hell out of their product. Just see how Chrome gained ground on Firefox for example.

Google is still used several folds more than ChatGPT and if you resolve 1 and 2, Google will make their money and their users have no incentive to go to ChatGPT.

emilsedghon Agile Is a Glass Cannon

Young individual without enough skill/experience joins a team and fails miserably. Same individual joins another team and succeeds.

Skills and/or experience are _not_ prerequisite for every single individual. You need enough skillful/experienced people to create a process/culture that allows less experienced engineers to join and flourish.