Thursday, March 14, 2024

Wednesday, March 13, 2024

Show HN: DB to map cities to countries and states https://ift.tt/SNCu8zg

Show HN: DB to map cities to countries and states https://ift.tt/IkO2DN9 March 12, 2024 at 07:13PM

Show HN: I made a tool to ditch paying $20/month LLM subscriptions https://ift.tt/K7AfhWy

Show HN: I made a tool to ditch paying $20/month LLM subscriptions https://ift.tt/4SdT7D0 March 13, 2024 at 06:14AM

Show HN: StableBuild – make any Docker container deterministic https://ift.tt/NaQxv3V

Show HN: StableBuild – make any Docker container deterministic Hi HN! I've posted this a few weeks back without much HN traction - today we've added a free community tier, so anyone can try it out. TL;DR: We’ve launched StableBuild, a new tool to easily freeze and pin Docker images, operating system packages, Python packages, and arbitrary build dependencies; in 5 lines of code: https://stablebuild.com . As the CTO at an ML startup w/ 75 people ( https://ift.tt/hTJcI0t ) I’ve grown incredibly frustrated with non-deterministic builds. Last year basically every week one of our containers (we have 40+ unique ones in prod) would stop working properly because some dependency was updated or removed. This ranges from Nvidia deleting cuda base images from Docker Hub, to Chromium being removed from the Ubuntu package registry in favor of the snap version, to pandas 2 being published with breaking APIs - while everyone just depends on e.g. pandas>=1.4. This has been super disruptive because builds break for no apparent reason: someone pushes some unrelated code change, a container needs to be rebuilt, now it gets the latest dependencies => boom, either a compile error or an integration test fails. Many times this even blocks deployment. If the build system has decided that a container on master needs to be rebuilt, we can’t deploy the complete system if a dependency has shifted. And, fixing this naturally falls on the most senior engineers. Anyway, to fix this I’ve funded (together w/ my Edge Impulse cofounder) StableBuild. It’s a set of mirrors and registries that let you easily freeze and pin Docker images, apt/apk packages, Python packages, and arbitrary files and URLs from the internet. It currently consists of: * A custom pull-through cache for Docker Hub, that makes any image pulled immutable. Protects against updated or removed images; and as a nice byproduct also bypasses pull-rate limits in Docker Hub. * Full daily copies of the Ubuntu, Debian and Alpine package registries + the most popular PPAs; so you can pin to a specific date (give me the package registry as it was on 2023-12-15). Essentially what snapshot.debian.org does, but fast and highly available (and for more repos). * Full daily copy of the PyPI registry, so you can also pin to a specific date. This has been super useful for resurrecting old Python code. Any Python example w/ dependencies is bitrotted the moment it gets published - StableBuild’s historic registry helps tremendously (see https://ift.tt/4lNPo6v ...) * A generic file / URL cache for arbitrary things you need to pull from the internet during builds. This has all been in production with SB’s first customers and has basically eliminated random build failures due to changed dependencies for them. Naturally you still want to upgrade dependencies (security patches are nice!) - but you can do it at their own pace, rather than whenever a container rebuilds. StableBuild is now available for everyone. There's a free Community tier (since today) that gives free access to all services and mirrors (although with a hard 15GB/month traffic limit), and commercial pricing starting at $199 (cheaper than running a high-available apt mirror on AWS - which we used to do at Edge Impulse). Would love to hear people's thoughts <3 Sign up: https://dashboard.stablebuild.com Docs: https://docs.stablebuild.com https://www.stablebuild.com/ March 13, 2024 at 01:49AM

Show HN: Cahier – A knowledge base with native support for research https://ift.tt/o0A4BvM

Show HN: Cahier – A knowledge base with native support for research I'm happy to be on Hacker News to present my most recent project. Cahier is a personal knowledge management system created to support out of the box the research workflow. It allows you to both store and consume study documents (PDFs, web pages, etc.), manage the annotations from those documents, and produce written content based on them. It goes further than existing reference managers because we chose to make the annotation management a part of the application, so you can organize and centralize highlights in notes and special document elements. It's a local-first, native application for Windows and macOS, created to be a research companion for serious readers. Here's a more detailed method that uses the app: https://ift.tt/9k6hywU... https://getcahier.com March 12, 2024 at 05:47PM

Tuesday, March 12, 2024

Show HN: Just launched an app to help you find Pocket Knives https://ift.tt/qQt7HBc

Show HN: Just launched an app to help you find Pocket Knives https://ift.tt/WKk7BRV March 11, 2024 at 11:55PM

Show HN: Prompts as (WASM) Programs https://ift.tt/h5bu0Vk

Show HN: Prompts as (WASM) Programs AICI is a proposed common interface between LLM inference engines (llama.cpp, vLLM, HF Transformers, etc.) and "controllers" - programs that can constrain the LLM output according to regexp, grammar, or custom logic, as well as control the generation process (forking, backtracking, etc.). AICI is based on Wasm, and is designed to be fast (runs on CPU while GPU is busy), secure (can run in multi-tenant cloud deployments), and flexible (allow libraries like Guidance, LMQL, Outlines, etc. to work on top of it). We (Microsoft Research) have released it recently, and would love feedback on the design of the interface, as well as our Rust AICI runtime. I'm the lead developer on this project and happy to answer any questions! https://ift.tt/wzHYdlp March 11, 2024 at 10:30PM

Show HN: Do You Know RGB? https://ift.tt/t8kUpbO

Show HN: Do You Know RGB? https://ift.tt/OWhvmMT June 24, 2025 at 01:49PM