robbie-c

Well I did say "good", which excludes things that don't fit in the context of the wider business.

I think startups have an easier time for 2 reasons: They are innovating on the product side already, and probably were already capacity constrained for work on the top ideas. They also have a high proportion of tech debt which never bubbled to the top of effort vs reward (competing against product work) before but would still be valuable to fix. E.g. https://posthog.com/blog/sql-parser was on the HN frontpage a few months ago, and this work would never have happened in the before times

> That's dumb and just an excuse. If it were true, why not keep the whole team and empower them and deliver 10x the existing value?

That requires having enough good new ideas for everyone to work on, and sadly a lot of companies don't have those

It doesn't seem so easy, because if you can easily dismiss a collection of digital neurons then why is it so hard to dismiss a collection of biological neurons as being conscious?

The best way I have found to think about this is that consciousness is a property of a collection, like temperature. One atom does not have a temperature but if you have enough of them together then it's a useful enough property to talk about. Similarly, one human neuron does not have consciousness but if you put enough of them together then they do.

One of Nico's colleagues here, I'm working on an MPS port https://github.com/PostHog/jeeves/pull/1 which should speed up M5 Pro performance quite a bit

> it will not be worth what the loan assumed

I'm begging people to take the time to write things themselves rather than getting Claude to write for them.

If you want human effort from readers, please put in human effort while writing.

While I'm here - I recently optimized our PR review skill to make better use of the KV cache.

Previously, it loaded up the diff, persona and prompt, and wrote those into the first message for each of 6 sub-agent reviewers. The prompt was templated with the persona name, so was slightly different for each reviewer.

My optimized version had a common first message with diff + prompt, and a script to run to atomically claim a persona. It also runs the first reviewer before the rest to warm the KV cache, and the agent doesn't launch the rest of the subagents until the first persona has been claimed (which means that the LLM is running, and therefore the KV cache is warm). The agent has a script it runs which does the waiting for it.

Agents 2-6 only run once the KV cache is warm, and because the intro message including the diff is shared, it's there in the cache. Only the persona file is different.

In my testing this brought down the cost of a review by ~half, though of course this depends on how big the diff is, how many agent are launched, and what model is used.

I'm begging people to write articles themselves rather than letting Claude do it for them.

I want an expert opinion, if I just wanted to ask an LLM I have my own.

How can this article not mention the KV cache even once?

> There are people who do, - And there are those who criticize.

There’s no need for that. I’ve done plenty.

Is it on topic to complain about the various claude-isms in this article? I don't know any actual humans that write titles like "Two floors the rate card hides".

I find my brain disengages once I suspect something of being written by an LLM. If the author didn't put much effort into writing it, should I expect them to have put much effort into fact-checking it?

Edit: this specific title has been deleted from the article. That was not my point! Please put in more effort into writing things that you want others to read! Rather than putting in low effort but being better at hiding it.

They sort of are, in that they want subscription users to have clients that behave well with the KV cache etc.

If you don't use a subscription, and pay per token instead, you can easily move to another harness.

A family member stayed in a hotel in Dubai recently and on returning said how incredible the staff were and willing they were to help them, and my response was "no shit"

Nothing has changed, just OP found the mirror of the main repo with the ee/ folder removed. That repo has been up for most of the lifetime of the company.

PostHog has always been open source. I'm not sure why this has been shared on HN at all.

That's valid criticism, I kinda hand-waved the "months" part. I read everything I could about parsers while building this (I have a CS background but hadn't thought about parsers in a long time) and came across this blog post https://lakesail.com/blog/sql-parser-in-one-week/ which talked about building a toy parser in a week, so I scaled that up to months for a production one.

The previous parser is mostly a declarative grammar file, which is extremely readable. It codegens a C++ parser, which is hard to read. It depends which of those you count as the previous parser's source code!

In the future, we'd make changes by modifying the ANTLR parser first, then using the same approach as in the blog post to get the new parser to parity. We have no plans to get rid of the C++ parser as an oracle!

Yeah, one of the interesting parts to me while working on this is that the breakpoint for when it's worth writing your own parser vs accepting ANTLR's slowness has shifted massively. Previously it would have been someone's full-time job to maintain. Now with this approach you can get the best of both worlds.

:D

I was hoping to avoid the criticism that I was picking the most favourable number and being misleading!

In what way? This was a geometric mean of the improvements from a small test corpus. In production, where it only parses longer SQL that didn't hit the parser cache, the mean parse time went down by 454x, across millions of parses.

Ha I did consider that! But 70x is plenty fast enough (we still have to query an actual database!) and the parser runs in a shared process on untrusted input, so it wasn't worth the security risk

It took about 2 days to get a proof of concept, and about a week to get something I could ship to production.

I skipped a few features for the PoC (like XML tag support, token positions), so most of the delta was adding those back in!

Our SQL is very similar to ClickHouse SQL, in that we used ClickHouse SQL as a starting point as that's what our underlying DB is. We needed to have our own parser so that we could add additional language features on top.

We pay github quite a bit of money and it's down for us too

I did that first, which didn't work for a couple of reasons. Many "big and tall" stores are the intersection only, and many of the stores didn't quite have the right vibe. I do have some of my wardrobe from places like 2tall.com but I was looking for something very silly for an in-joke for a friends vacation.

Undecided. One of the sites didn't have an LT but the LLM flagged that chest dimensions on their large were narrower than others, so could be worth trying.

Huh, I shopped for clothes using AI today.

Not super relevant to the Googlebook ad, but in case the perspective is interesting to you: I'm quite tall (194cm) but not very wide, so I usually struggle with buying clothes online. I used AI to scrape a bunch of clothing stores to see whether they sold a men's shirt with an LT or slim fit size, in stock, and matching a particular vibe.

Wait - are you missing all the context on this? Anthropic pushed back against this hard, there was a whole back and forth. I'm on mobile and can't look it up for you atm but if you google about this scenario, Anthropic definitely come out of this looking a lot better than OpenAI and xAI

Quite a lot worse. Both OpenAI and xAI were among the largest donors of Trump's campaign

Musk was the largest individual political donor of the 2024 election [1] and Greg Brockman was the largest donor to Trump's "MAGA Inc" super PAC [2]

[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2024/12/06/elon-mu...

[2] https://www.theverge.com/ai-artificial-intelligence/867947/o...

There's proof of financial dependence, here's a recent report https://assets.mozilla.net/annualreport/2021/mozilla-fdn-202...

In 2021 they got $500M "royalties" (this is their payment from Google) with only $75k revenue from all other sources, including $7.5k donations.