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lolpanda

49 karma · joined September 30, 2020

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lolpanda··on Standard Completions
I actually think the legacy completion API is superior to the newer chat creation API. The completion API takes all the input as a single string, whereas the chat API expects input as a list of messages. Given today's common use of agentic workflows, the model often has to process a large amount of input—RAG data, function calls, and other metadata—in addition to the user and assistant messages. The conversation itself might be just a small part of the overall prompt.

I’ve found it more intuitive to format the conversation as <conversation>...</conversation> within one unified text prompt, alongside all the other input data.

OpenAI’s new completion API supports both a single large string or a list of messages, which is great. I briefly experimented with the prompting tool in Claude—it essentially builds a big prompt that includes instructions and examples in XML format.

lolpanda··on Go Data Structures (2009)
oh i never thought about y = append(x, ...) in which scenario would make sense to have different x and y?
lolpanda··on Launch HN: Pinch (YC W25) – Video conferencing with immersive translation
Great idea! The demo looks impressive. What are your thoughts on real-time translated captioning compared to AI voice? I guess it's still difficult to mimic nonverbal elements like laughter and pauses.
lolpanda··on Introducing deep research
"synthesize large amounts of online information" does it heavily depend on the search engine performance and relevance of the search results? I don't see any mention of Google or Bing. Is this using their internal search engine then?
lolpanda··on SQL nulls are weird
I actually like how NULLs behave in SQL. They mean "I don't know" In the modern programming language we all care about Null safety. But no matter how you model your data, you will always run into the situations when you don't know everything. So I believe NOT NULL is not very practical. NULLs in SQL handle these case very well - when the input is unknown your output is unknown
lolpanda··on Hyperview – Native mobile apps, as easy as creating a website
Those mini apps are built on the same web stack. I believe the main advantages of creating mini apps are that the platform provides identity (allowing you to know who the users are upon permission approval) and payment APIs.
lolpanda··on iTerm2 critical security release
I'm a heavy use of tmux integration in iterm2. this allows seamless mouse scroll in a tmux window. I haven't seen any other terminals that provide the same tmux support.
lolpanda··on Tldraw Computer
this looks like the workflows in gumloop.com
lolpanda··on Show HN: Open source framework OpenAI uses for Advanced Voice
so the WebRTC helps with the unreliable network between the mobile clients and the server side. if the application is backend only, would it make sense to use WebRTC or should I go directly to realtime api?
lolpanda··on Wcurl Is Here
the only reason i use wget over curl is that when i'm downloading a file, i don't have to specify the output file name with wget lol
lolpanda··on Cursor Has Raised $60M
i think cursor is the only player that forked vscode. i've been using cursor for a week and i really like it. it's able to auto complete/correct code in multiple places at the same time. other copilot extensions in vscode were not able to do this. but i assume microsoft will quickly add this feature in vscode and others will catch up soon. i don't know if it's a true advantage to stay as a fork of vscode.
lolpanda··on Postgres.new: In-browser Postgres with an AI interface
I like the UI. The chat interface is a good fit for this task. How do you prevent or should you prevent users from entering "write me a fib(n) in python" in the chat? To me the chat is solely designed for table creation directives.
lolpanda··on Marta File Manager: Back on Track
what do people think about installing new software from less well known companies and giving the app full access to all your files? how would i convince myself that this software won't upload my data in the background?
lolpanda··on Anthropic is scraping websites so fast it's causing problems
Cloudflare has a switch to block all the unknown bots other than the well behaved one. Would this be a simple solution to most of the sites? I wonder if the main concern here is that the sites don't want to waste bandwidth/compute for AI bots or they don't want their content to be used for training.
lolpanda··on DevRel at HuggingFace
I'm curious here how do they make money? i heard that they have ai consulting service. is that sufficient to run the company? i don't think any researchers i know pay for hugging face.
lolpanda··on I Received an AI Email
ok does it mean an end to email? it's nearly free to send emails to anyone. for comparison, it's much more expensive to send linkedin messages or create ads on social networks. did anyone attempt to create a paid email service (pay to send)?
lolpanda··on Python Modern Practices
what are the pros and cons with pydantic models vs data classes? i like the runtime validation in pydantic models. the pattern i landed on is that 1) only use primitive data types such as str, int, pydantic models and pandas dataframes to present data. 2) no classes with methods, no polymorphism, only use module functions.
lolpanda··on Context caching guide
i think llama.cpp has context caching with "--prompt-cache" but it will result in a very large cache file. i guess it's also very expensive for any inference api provider to support caching as they have to persist the file and load/unload it each time.
lolpanda··on No Abstractions: our API design principle
Good point. it's not a problem with JSON. It's just that most of the JSON libraries by default parse numbers into floats.
lolpanda··on No Abstractions: our API design principle
for any APIs related to money, should the currency be in strings as opposed to in floats? This will prevent accidental float arithmetic in the code. I always find it tricky to work with currency in javascript.
lolpanda··on World's Smallest CSV Parser (C#)
I reviewed the code in this project and it looks pretty reasonable. I thought CSV was a loosely specified format. In my past experience, I never had a smooth experience moving data from one system to another using CSV. I had a lot of trouble with Snowflake -> CSV -> Clickhouse. I now use JSONL for pretty much everything.
lolpanda··on Launch HN: Aqua Voice (YC W24) – Voice-driven text editor
I love this idea. Wish there's a browser extension so I can dictate in my emails.
lolpanda··on Show HN: Flyde – an open-source visual programming language
I don't think visual programming language can or should replace code in plaintext. I like the idea of visual programming at higher level. It can be very good at communicating data flow, business logic and processes. But each of the building blocks can still be implemented in programming languages today. I feel like AWS Step Function is very close to what I wanted. They also have a very nice builder UI.
lolpanda··on Show HN: I made an app to use local AI as daily driver
Oh thanks! didn't know there are quite a few ChatGPT local alternatives. I was wondering what users they are targeting. Engineers or average users? I guess average users will likely choose ChatGPT and Perplexity over local apps for more recent knowledge of the world.
lolpanda··on Mistral Large
This is not true. For LLM data labeling, the knowledge workers are very well paid. The hourly rate is way above minimum wage. The questions oftentimes require domain knowledge. They are complex enough and cannot be answered by random person on the internet. AFAIK most of them are located in US.
lolpanda··on Google cut a deal with Reddit for AI training data
Reddit blocks all search engines from crawling their comments, essentially blocking all user generated contents.

See this directive in https://www.reddit.com/robots.txt `Disallow: /r//comments////*`

But I can still search Reddit on Google. How does Google manage to get the data?

lolpanda··on Show HN: I scraped 200M Shopify products to build a search engine
Oh is the site currently down? I tried a few queries, including the ones on the landing page. It gave me empty results.
lolpanda··on LlamaCloud and LlamaParse
I was hoping to get structured data. For example, parsing an voice will give results like {"title"... "line_items": [...], "date":...}
lolpanda··on LlamaCloud and LlamaParse
I think LlamaParse is trying to solve a hard problem. Many enterprise customers I know have strong need to parse PDF files and extract data accurately. I found the interface a bit confusing. From your blog post, LlamaParse can extract numbers in tables, but it appears that the output isn't provided in tabular format. Instead, access to these numbers is only available through a question-answering. Is this accurate?
lolpanda··on I Fucking Hate Jira (2022)
I've used many tasking tools in my previous startups, Asana, Phabricator, Jira, Shortcuts... I think I liked Phabricator because it's flexible and not scrum like when you manage projects. I can see why people hate Jira.

Jira is the only tool I know that has proper permission and visibility controls.

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