rishsriv's comments

Hey HN! We just open-sourced – our text to SQL LLM that outperforms OpenAI's gpt-3.5-turbo on out-of-training-set schemas, and matches gpt-4 when trained on a single business's schema.

SQLCoder is a fine-tuned variant of StarCoder, supplemented with a lot of hand-curated of data and slightly novel fine-tuning techniques.

We are also open-sourcing our framework for evaluating whether LLM-generated SQL is correct. SQL is tricky to evaluate. Two very different SQL queries can both be "correct". For the question, "who are the 10 most recent users from Toronto", both of the following are correct in their own ways – so we had to build a new framework algorithm to evaluate query correctness.

Query 1: ```sql SELECT userid, username from users where city='Toronto' order by created_at DESC LIMIT 10; ```

Query 2: ```sql SELECT userid, firstname || ' ' || lastname from users where city='Toronto' order by created_at DESC LIMIT 10; ```

The model is small enough to run on a single A100 40GB with weights in 16 bit floats, or on a single high-end consumer GPU (like RTX 3090/4090) with 8bit quantization. We will also release a ggml-based quantized version soon, and you should soon be able to run it on most M1 or M2 Macbooks with 32GB of RAM.

The model weights have a CC BY-SA 4.0 license. You can use and modify the model for any purpose – including commercial use. However, if you modify the weights (for example, by fine-tuning), you must open-source your modified weights under the same license terms.

Our evaluation framework is at https://defog.ai/blog/open-sourcing-sqleval/ Interactive demo: https://defog.ai/sqlcoder-demo/

Would love for you to give it a spin, and let us know what you think!

This is so sorely needed. I used the app after the PH launch and loved how easy the self-serve was!

Do you have plans to let users define "types" of data that can be redacted (like monetary terms in a contract, code embedded in documents etc)? Also, any plans on making this an API that other developers could build on top of?

This looks fantastic. Will try replacing our current fine-tuned FLAN-UL2 model with this.

I wonder how the devtooling around this will evolve. Seems like a matter of days until someone creates a GUI wrapper around this, and obviates the need to use programmer time for fine-tuning

Looks promising! Would love to know how this is different from creating postman collections, and running tests on those

Great tool! Some feedback on your landing page: the Start Practicing CTA button at the bottom of the page should ideally link to the link [1] in your "Start a new YC interview prep session to kick-start your prep" option. Not just the login screen. I was confused about how to start a practice interview after I logged in.

[1] https://app.betafi.co/studies?create=true&template_id=p_wqzp...

Farm fires are partially a result of legislation to prevent ground water levels from going too low [1]. Fairly multifaceted issue, not just electoral appeasement

[1] https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1588016682060378112.html

I like Wikipedia's current events portal [1]. Does not (generally) include frivolous news, and provides a much wider perspective than most news outlets

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portal:Current_events/November...

Algorithmically generated content by itself might not be a bad thing for users' search experience IMO, as long as the engine can differentiate between "right" and "gibberish" content.

Linking to verified sources (research papers, official websites, verified social media accounts) when writing about these topics might make this easier. LLMs will then be able to understand if one if misrepresenting what was stated in the linked sources or not.

This is awesome! Thank you for sharing your story.

Did something similar as an experiment a few years ago, except I used photos and name strings as fuzzy identifiers across social media profiles.

We also scraped individual reactions from social media apps to get a _very_ detailed profile on what they engaged with (like using the "Angry" reaction emoji when Trump said something stupid vs using the "Angry" reaction emoji when someone AOC said something stupid).

Never released it in the wild for obvious ethnical reasons, but was an interesting technical challenge. Also led to super interesting insights – like learning that videos and text links were watched by entirely different audiences on Facebook and Twitter [1]

[1] https://twitter.com/rishdotblog/status/1483329729302515712

Yikes, yes. Thank you for the heads up!

We've mostly been using the GA plugin for use with beta users. Had completely forgotten about the need to verify the app with Google. Will do that this week.

They do have relational DB connectors [1], which have been working great for us. But maintaining a centralised DB is still a bit of a pain and latency can be high, depending on where users are accessing them from. Having a managed, distributed SQL service will be easier to manage and will likely have much lower latency. Their SQLite DB, D1 [2] looks interesting. But would be awesome to have Postgres' more complete feature set as a managed, low-latency service

[1] https://blog.cloudflare.com/relational-database-connectors/ [2] https://blog.cloudflare.com/whats-new-with-d1/

This is awesome! Had been meaning to open-source parts of my startup [1] that is built almost entirely on Workers right now. Glad we can do that now without making massive changes to the code-base.

Amazed by what OP and the Workers team have done over the years. Took a while for us to get used to the Workers paradigm. But once we did, feature velocity has been great.

Last wish list item: a Postgres service on Workers (D2?) becoming available in the not too distant future

[1] https://datanarratives.com/

Building a no-code data workspace

Backend: Cloudflare Durable Objects for the consumer-facing app, Python cronjobs on a GCP hosted VM for background task processing, FastAPI for self-hosted vector search

Frontend: Nextjs. Antd as UI framework, Highcharts for charts. Hosted on Vercel

Thanks for pointing me to the performance numbers!

No open datasets that I'm aware of for fuzzy geocoordinate matching, unfortunately

This looks pretty cool! Is this basically efficient/scalable fuzzy object matching?

IMO, it would be super useful to have some performance benchmarks – how fast is this for 1k/100k objects? How does that compare to other approaches etc

Not sure how feasible these are, but features I would find super useful:

- string matching across languages in different scripts (with something like unidecode maybe? [1])

- fuzzy matching that includes continuous variables like lat/long, age etc

Excited about using this – will be following the repo very closely!

[1] https://github.com/avian2/unidecode

Try to make something that works in the real world as soon as you can (a web-page, a mobile app, a web-app, or whatever is most relevant to what you're learning).

Being able to create something that works - no matter how simple - can be a far stronger motivator that simply checking off a curriculum's requirements.

> I'm not suggesting that everything is hunky-dory, just that we bear in mind the proportions of the problem. Also Pinker may well be off the mark here, as others have pointed out in[1].

Tried to find more data on this, which seems to confirm Pinker's hypothesis - https://ourworldindata.org/global-mental-health

The data seems unrepresentative, though. While data on suicide rates is fairly clear, it might be more interesting to look at revealed preferences instead of self-reported ones. To this end, indicators for "lives of despair" (drug OD deaths, hospitalisation for drug/alcohol abuse etc) might be more appropriate.

I tried to summarise the ideas discussed in the podcast (Full summary at https://medium.com/@rishdotblog/peter-theil-and-eric-weinste...):

1. Innovation has continued and accelerated in the world of bits, but has plateaued in the world of stuff

2. If you go to a room and get rid of all the screens, how do you know you’re not in 1979?

3. Since the Great Depression, we’ve been managing economic metrics. But the technological and economic tailwinds haven’t been there at all.

4. In a healthy system, you can have wild dissent and it’s not threatening. Because everyone knows that the system is heathy. In an unhealthy system, the dissent becomes much more dangerous. There are very few people who openly criticise the unhealthy systems that they are part of

5. In late modernity (which we are living in), there’s simply too much knowledge for an individual to understand all of it. In 1800s, Goethe could understand all of everything. In 1900s, Hilbert could understand all of mathematics. But now, the kind of specialisation we have is much harder to get a handle on.

6. If you believe that productivity and growth is over, and you don’t want to emphasise merit. Instead, you focus on simply making sure that each group has its share of slots on the table. It’s not about wealth creation, it’s about receiving the wealth that’s already there.

"The following content may not be eligible for monetization: ... Tragedy & Conflict Content that focuses on real world tragedies, including but not limited to depictions of death, casualties, physical injuries, even if the intention is to promote awareness or education. For example, situations like natural disasters, crime, self-harm, medical conditions and terminal illnesses.

Debated Social Issues Content that is incendiary, inflammatory, demeaning or disparages people, groups, or causes is not eligible for ads. Content that features or promotes attacks on people or groups is generally not eligible for ads, even if in the context of news or awareness purposes. ..."

Facebook has the right to do whatever it wants on its platform, but this will have bad social consequences. Publishers will have no incentive to cover conflicts in war-torn regions, attacks by radical religious groups on minorities in third-world countries, or any news that is not happy and advertiser-friendly under these guidelines.

The only groups that will now have an incentive to cover these issues will be those with a political agenda - including political pages and fake/misleading news outlets.

Terrifying for the future of the discourse in the world :/