Show HN: Open-access book on platform governance https://ift.tt/mqfhKV2

Show HN: Open-access book on platform governance Hi there, I'm a political theorist, a professor at Northwestern law school and a founding fellow, board member, etc. of the Integrity Institute. I also was the in-house democratic theorist on Facebook's "civic integrity" (election protection) team for a while, and helped out with the research supporting the creation of the Meta Oversight Board. I just published an academic book with Cambridge University Press bringing together those experiences with research in political science to argue that the way forward for mitigating the harms of big internet platforms and governing user behavior on them is to create global direct democratic institutions for them. You can read the whole book for free on Cambridge's website or by downloading the open-access (license CC-BY-NC-ND 4.0) PDF at the link. If you want a hard copy, you can also buy it in paperback or hardcover. https://ift.tt/GjwHVp5 August 5, 2023 at 12:21AM

Show HN: WebRTC Without Signaling Server https://ift.tt/rQRvnuP

Show HN: WebRTC Without Signaling Server Web-components (lit) to use WebRTC p2p data channel connections, in the browser, without the need of any predefined signaling server. https://ift.tt/UVImblH August 4, 2023 at 11:53AM

Show HN: Put ChatGPT on any website in 5 seconds. No signup required https://ift.tt/kofyr8S

Show HN: Put ChatGPT on any website in 5 seconds. No signup required Are you looking for a way to boost customer engagement on your website without breaking the bank? Look no further, because VivoChat AI is here to save the day! This chatgpt based chatbot is not only easy to set up, but it also handles everything on its own. Can you imagine the convenience? You won't have to spend a single dime, yet you'll be able to provide your website visitors with an exceptional experience. Yes, you heard it right - VivoChat AI is completely free! Get started today and watch as your website becomes a hub of activity and interaction. Your visitors deserve the best, and with VivoChat AI, you can give them just that! https://ift.tt/vfcZK0A August 4, 2023 at 01:48PM

Show HN: Try my new Bash prompt https://ift.tt/q16gBiQ

Show HN: Try my new Bash prompt PS1='\$ ' # short and sweet prompt old_cmdno=${old_cmdno-0} old_lines=${old_lines-0} old_cols=${old_cols-0} prepare_terminal() { stty rows $((LINES - 1)) printf "\n\033[1A" old_lines=$LINES old_cols=$COLUMNS } update_status_line() { local exit=$? local getcmdno='\#' local cmdno=${getcmdno@P} local esc=$(printf "\033") local pwd=$PWD local dots= [ $LINES -eq $old_lines -a $COLUMNS -eq $old_cols ] || prepare_terminal local status_esc="$esc[7m$esc[m" while true; do [ "${pwd#/*/}" == "$pwd" ] && break local status="$esc[7m$(date +%m-%d/%H:%M)$esc[m $HOSTNAME $dots$pwd" local status_len=$((${#status} - ${#status_esc})) [ $status_len -le $COLUMNS ] && break pwd=${pwd#/} pwd=/${pwd#*/} dots='...' done status_len=$((${#status} - ${#status_esc})) [ $status_len -gt $COLUMNS ] && status= printf "${esc}7$esc[%s;1H$esc[K%s$esc[1;%sr${esc}8" $((LINES + 1)) "$status" $LINES if [ $exit -ne 0 -a $cmdno -ne $old_cmdno ] ; then printf "!%s!\n" $exit fi old_cmdno=$cmdno } PROMPT_COMMAND='update_status_line' August 4, 2023 at 08:50AM

Show HN: ChatMyFiles, Open Source ChatPDF https://ift.tt/if3ro9O

Show HN: ChatMyFiles, Open Source ChatPDF ChatMyFiles is an open-source alternative to ChatPDF: you upload any PDF or Microsoft Office document and ask questions about it. Unlike other "chat with your documents" solutions, ChatMyFiles can be self hosted using a one-click deploy script that uses Terraform to deploy a - Vector database - Server - (Optional) Open-source LLM such as Falcon, Llama, or GPT4All to your virtual private cloud (VPC). We used Langchain to interface with open source LLMs and Ragstack to deploy to Google Cloud: https://ift.tt/QFeClWd https://ift.tt/lEGeYvu August 4, 2023 at 01:40AM

Show HN: Open-Source Favicon Provider https://ift.tt/dNWO0X3

Show HN: Open-Source Favicon Provider Hey HN, We couldn’t find a reliable favicon provider for our CRM [1]. There are existing solutions (FaviconKit, Google faviconV2, ...) but we have faced issues with all of them: rate-limiting, down-time, inconsistent icon size. We were looking for a solution that is: 1) reliable : no down-time ; 2) accurate : request a specific icon size to optimize for user bandwidth ; 3) high-quality : that provides the highest resolution icon available for a given requested size ; 4) open-source : this is a common need and a simple problem to solve: an open solution should exist and anybody should be able to contribute or to host it. Technical details: Here is the source code: https://ift.tt/zXHP2Br . The way it works is very simple. We have implemented a few strategies to fetch favicons: get favicon from html meta/link tags, call Google Favicon API. Then we retrieve the image and store it into S3. The next time someone asks for the image it is usually served from our CDN cache directly. If not, then it’s pulled from S3. Cloud Hosting: We are hosting a server on favicon.twenty.com. We will be using it to power Twenty CRM, so it will be maintained up and running for our own needs. Feel free to use it by directly by embedding images like this: https://ift.tt/tEeFO7R or https://ift.tt/W6TPBZE [1] https://ift.tt/uxWaknc https://ift.tt/zXHP2Br August 4, 2023 at 01:24AM

Show HN: Interesting companies that are running on-prem https://ift.tt/IGA9Yvq

Show HN: Interesting companies that are running on-prem https://ift.tt/mexwnb3 August 4, 2023 at 12:35AM

Show HN: Create your first ZK-SNARK Contract with Mina Blockchain https://ift.tt/RkwgLM8

Show HN: Create your first ZK-SNARK Contract with Mina Blockchain https://ift.tt/HQ4cq8X August 3, 2023 at 11:51PM

Show HN: Zep – pgvector-based memory store for LLM apps https://ift.tt/r2eByjw

Show HN: Zep – pgvector-based memory store for LLM apps Hey HN - we launched Zep's document vector DB today. Zep is an open source memory store for LLM apps, and this builds on existing chat history memory persistence, embedding, and enrichment capabilities. Zep uses Postgres and pgvector for database operations and vector search. Vector search can be complicated on Postgres, with careful configuration required at both index creation and query time. We've focused on significantly improving this developer experience. Zep automatically selects index and query parameters for developers based on best practices and known heuristics. Vector database operations are exposed via a simple Python (and LangChain) API for working with document collections, documents, and search results. While we focus on LLM App use cases, you can turn any Postgres instance with pgvector into a vector database with great DX. Our launch announcement: https://ift.tt/A54HM0l... -Daniel https://ift.tt/zYdF5Oc August 3, 2023 at 11:47PM

Show HN: Making Don Quijote accessible to Spanish learners https://ift.tt/JYjyfGw

Show HN: Making Don Quijote accessible to Spanish learners I love simple english wikipedia and I wanted to use that style of writing to make spanish books accessible to me. First I simplified the spanish[0] but simplification can't remove every word I don't know. This led me to adding the definition for words I probably wouldn't know[1]. Second simplifying the spanish ruined the magic of Don Quijote so I tried just adding definitions to the original[2]. The definitions aren't perfect but they let me stay in the flow of the text. I'm tempted to make a firefox extension to annotate any website so I can spend more time reading spanish. Let me know what you think! [0] https://ift.tt/1MXqo8z [1] https://ift.tt/x5u9gTr [2] https://ift.tt/t5BzRUi August 3, 2023 at 08:58PM

Show HN: TripClub – Plan Travel with AI https://ift.tt/C3prU8Y

Show HN: TripClub – Plan Travel with AI Hey HN! This is Will and Riley from TripClub ( https://tripclub.ai/ ). TripClub helps you plan and visualize your trips while giving you recommended itineraries to anywhere in the world based on your input. We began working on this when we couldn’t find a good solution to plan trips with friends, and found that most people we knew used something like google docs along with 24 tabs for researching places. Also, with the recent progress in generative AI, we found that we could now create detailed trips based on any input you’d like, and turn these into visually appealing itineraries. As you may have suspected, we primarily use openAI models for trip generation on the backend. We put the recommendations into an interactable map and itinerary. After creating a trip, you can add your friends so everyone can collaborate on editing the various places on your itinerary. Right now every aspect of the app is free and we hope to keep it that way. However we haven’t built in a source of revenue at the moment and are fully bootstrapped, so this could change (we plan to make revenue on hotel bookings in the future). We’re looking forward to hearing any of your comments, questions, and feedback! https://tripclub.ai/ August 3, 2023 at 09:06PM

Show HN: Learn languages through immersion with AI friends https://ift.tt/89GmBWV

Show HN: Learn languages through immersion with AI friends https://ift.tt/AeHs7mp August 3, 2023 at 07:26PM

Show HN: Using LLama2 to Correct OCR Errors https://ift.tt/wt5L1Dq

Show HN: Using LLama2 to Correct OCR Errors I've been disappointed by the very poor quality of results that I generally get when trying to run OCR on older scanned documents, especially ones that are typewritten or otherwise have unusual or irregular typography. I recently had the idea of using Llama2 to use common sense reasoning and subject level expertise to correct transcription errors in a "smart" way-- basically doing what a human proofreader who is familiar with the topic might do. I came up with the linked script that takes a PDF as input, runs Tesseract on it to get an initial text extraction, and then feeds this sentence-by-sentence to Llama2, first to correct mistakes, and then again on the corrected text to format it as markdown where possible. This was surprisingly easier than I initially expected thanks to the very nice tooling now available in libraries such as llama-cpp-python, langchain, and pytesseract. But the big issue I was encountering was that Llama2 wasn't just correcting the text it was given-- it was also hallucinating a LOT of totally new sentences that didn't appear in the original text at all (some of these new sentences used words which never appeared elsewhere in the original text). I figured this would be pretty simple to filter out using fuzzy string matching-- basically check all the sentences in the LLM corrected text and filter out sentences that are very different from any sentences in the original OCRed text. To my surprise, this approach worked very poorly. In fact, lots of other similar tweaks, including using bag-of-words and the spacy NLP library in various ways (spacy worked very poorly in everything I tried). Finally I realized that I had a good solution staring me in the face: Llama2. I realized I could get sentence level vector embeddings straight from Llama2 using langchain. So I did that, getting embeddings for each sentence in the raw OCRed text and the LLM corrected text, and then computed the cosine similarity of each sentence in the LLM corrected text against all sentences in the raw OCRed text. If no sentences match in the raw OCRed text, then that sentence has a good chance of being hallucinated. In order to save the user from having to experiment with various thresholds, I saved the computed embeddings to an SQLite database so they only had to be computed once, and then tried several thresholds, comparing the length of the filtered LLM corrected text to the raw OCRed text; if things worked right, these texts should be roughly the same length. So as soon as the filtered length dips below the raw OCRed text length, it backtracks and uses the previous threshold as the final selected threshold. Anyway, if you have some very old scanned documents laying around, you might try them out and see how well it works for you. Do note that it's extremely slow, but you can leave it overnight and maybe the next day you'll have your finished text, which is better than nothing! I feel like this could be useful for sites like the Internet Archive-- I've found their OCR results to be extremely poor for older documents. I'm very open to any ideas or suggestions you might have. I threw this together in a couple days and know that it can certainly be improved in various ways. One idea that I thought might be fun would be to make this work with a Ray cluster, sending a different page of the document to each of the workers in the cluster to do it all at the same time. https://ift.tt/6dOmpQg August 3, 2023 at 01:23AM

Show HN: We built swup+fragment-plugin to visually enhance classic websites https://ift.tt/D6vWdrK

Show HN: We built swup+fragment-plugin to visually enhance classic websites ## TL;DR - Progressively enhance your classic website / MPA to a single page app. - Support for fragment visits, comparable to nested routes in React or Vue. - Keep your site crawlable and indexable without any of the overhead of SSR. - No tight coupling of back- and frontend. Use the CMS / Framework / SSG of your choice. - Strong focus on interoperability with DOM-altering JS tools (think Alpine.js, jQuery, ...). - Strong focus on accessibility, even for fragment visits. ## Long Version: Best of three worlds Hi, I'm Rasso Hilber. I have been a web designer and developer since around 2004. From the beginning of my career, I always had to make tradeoffs between 3 goals when building websites: 1. The websites I build should be visually impressive, original, and snappy. 2. The websites I build should be crawlable, accessible and standards compliant. 3. The websites I build should have low technical complexity and be easy to maintain in the long run. In the beginning, I was able to achieve goals 1 (impressive!) and 3 (easy to maintain!) by using Macromedia/Adobe Flash, but due to the nature of the technology horribly failed to deliver crawlable and accessible websites. Later, I found a way to run two sites in parallel for each website I built, one using CMS-generated XHTML for crawlability, one in Flash for the visitors, fetching the data from its XHTML twin. Now I had solved goals 1 and 2, but my setup was awfully complex and brittle. Around 2010, I was relieved to see Flash finally coming to its end. I switched to building websites using PHP, HTML, and jQuery. I could now tick goals 2 (accessibility) and 3 (low complexity), but the websites I was able to build using these technologies weren't as impressive anymore. Hard page loads between every link click being one of the biggest regressions in UX from the days of Flash IMO. Around 2014/15, I first heard about the new frameworks: Angular, React, Vue. These frameworks were not intended to be used for classic websites. They were made for single-page-apps! But it felt to me like no one cared. Even when building classic websites, many developers sacrificed SEO and accessibility for a snappy experience, serving an empty `

` to the browser. I couldn't blame them; I had done the same in my early days as a Flash developer. They ticked goal 1 (impressive) and goal 3 (low complexity). But the lack of accessibility kept me from joining the movement. I was still building classic websites, after all. After some time, many started realizing that serving an empty div had downsides – SSR, hydration, and whatnot were born, now ticking goal 1 (impressive) and goal 2 (accessibility), with the trade-off of awful complexity. It reminded me a lot of my little Frankenstein's monster "Flash+XHTML," and I still didn't want to join the hype. Still, because the noise was so loud, I felt like I might be becoming obsolete, an "old man yelling at the clouds". New very interesting tools like HTMX or Unpoly popped up that looked promising at first, but at closer inspection weren't optimized for my use case either. These were primarily built for real interfaces/single-page-apps (html snippets instead of full pages, UI state independent of URLs, altered DOM saved in history snapshots, ...). I wanted to find a tiny tool, optimized for building presentational , content-driven websites with a strong focus on accessibility . Instead, after a few years of rolling my own home-grown solutions, I started using swup[0], a "Versatile and extensible page transition library for server-rendered websites". Swup consists of a tiny core and a rich ecosystem of official plugins[1] for additional functionality. It was hitting the sweet spot between simplicity and complexity, and felt like it was perfect for my use cases. Shortly after I had started using it, I became a core contributor and maintainer of swup. The only thing I was still missing to be a happy developer was the ability to create really complex navigation paths where selected fragments are updated as you navigate a site, much like nested routes allow in React or Vue. The last two months I teamed up with @daun [2] to finally solve this hard problem. The result is two things: 1. A new major release of swup (v4) that allows customizing the complete page transition process by providing a powerful hook system and a mutable visit object 2. The newly released fragment-plugin [3] that provides a declarative API for dynamically replacing containers based on rules Use cases for the fragment-plugin are: - a filter UI that live-updates its list of results on every interaction - a detail overlay that shows on top of the currently open content - a tab group that updates only itself when selecting one of the tabs - a form that updates only itself upon submission I can now finally build websites that tick all three boxes: 1. Visually impressive, fun, and snappy by using swup's first-class support for animations[4], cache[5], and preload capacities[6], enhanced with fragment visits as seen on the demo site. 2. Accessible by being able to serve server-rendered semantic markup that will fully work even with JavaScript disabled (try it out on the demo site!). On top of that, swup's a11y plugin[7] will automatically announce page visits to assistive technologies and will focus the new `

` element after each visit. 3. Because now all I need for my fancy frontend is a bit of progressive JavaScript, I can choose whatever tool I like on the server, keeping complexity low and maintainability high. I can use SSGs like eleventy or Astro (the demo site is built using Astro!), I can use any CMS like WordPress or ProcessWire, or a framework like Laravel. And I don't have to maintain an additional node server for SSG! The plugin is still in it's early stages, but I have a good feeling that this finally is the right path for me as a web developer. All it took was 20 years! ;) [0] https://ift.tt/dHK8hNx [1] https://ift.tt/jahtk8T [2] https://github.com/daun [3] https://ift.tt/7mYd8kJ [4] https://ift.tt/RLa4mTH [5] https://ift.tt/dTIXx6u [6] https://ift.tt/MQFjB4C [7] https://ift.tt/WNxMFY8 https://ift.tt/d5sfZO6 August 2, 2023 at 05:45PM

Show HN: Glo Dollar – the antipoverty stablecoin https://ift.tt/17S3u0t

Show HN: Glo Dollar – the antipoverty stablecoin Hi everyone! I just shipped a crypto project which I think all of you might actually like. It’s a digital dollar that helps end extreme poverty called Glo Dollar. We're backed by Sid Sijbrandij (GitLab). How it works: 1. You buy $1 Glo Dollar for $1 USD 2. Our partners invest the $1 USD in US Treasuries 3. Revenue we make we donate to a charity called GiveDirectly.org who use it to fund basic income programs for people in extreme poverty Note that you can _always_ redeem your $1 Glo Dollar for $1 USD again. We’re doing this because we believe stablecoins are a public good and should be managed as one. At the moment, the two big stablecoin companies are making record profits for a tiny group of shareholders instead. Tether, the issuer of USDT, shared profits of ~$1.5 billion in Q1 on assets under management of ~60 billion, with just ~50 people on staff. Even though its success is mostly attributable to the ecosystem’s adoption. Glo Dollar seeks to radically change this dynamic by repurposing its revenue to a good cause rather than risk/profit-seeking shareholders. At scale, we could lift millions of people out of extreme poverty. So even if you loathe crypto, we hope you at least appreciate what we’re trying to achieve. Very curious what y’all think :-)! https://ift.tt/dMVmnzW August 2, 2023 at 11:52PM

Show HN: Bookmarklet to open any web page in archive.is https://ift.tt/puSg5MK

Show HN: Bookmarklet to open any web page in archive.is This will bypass most paywalls. Simply make a new bookmark, edit it and paste in this code: javascript:(()=>{var url="https://archive.is/"+encodeURI(window.location.protocol + "//" + window.location.hostname + window.location.pathname); window.open(url, "_blank");})(); August 2, 2023 at 12:50AM

Show HN: Magic Loops – Combine LLMs and code to create simple automations https://ift.tt/oImaE1f

Show HN: Magic Loops – Combine LLMs and code to create simple automations Howdy! We built this as an experiment in personal-programming, combining the best of LLMs and code to help automate tasks around you. I personally use it to track the tides and get notified when certain conditions are met, something that pure LLMs had trouble dealing with and pure code was often too brittle for. We created it after getting frustrated with the inability of LLMs to deal with numbers and the various hoops we had to jump through to make ChatGPT output repeatable. At the core, Magic Loops are just a series of "blocks" (JSON) that can be triggered with different inputs (email, time, webhook), then operate on those inputs using a combination of LLMs and code, and then output those results (email, text, webhook). Under the hood, the LLM calls are using GPT-4 via OpenAI and the code is run in sandboxed (no internet) Docker containers in AWS. You have full control over each step of the loop, but you can also create (or attempt to create) a Magic Loop by simply describing what you want. We use GPT-4 to break that request into feasible steps, and then create a Magic Loop scaffold. Of course, you should still validate the loop before publishing it! We've seen some neat use cases already: - "Text me when the tide is less than 1ft between 7am and 7pm at Fort Funston" - "Summarize an email using this format and forward it to this address" - "Text me every time our store does more than $1000/day in volume on Shopify" - "Take specific data from Cloudflare, format it, and send it to Mixpanel every hour" We hope you enjoy what's essentially an experiment at this point. If folks like the concept, we're thinking about open sourcing it so you can run the loops locally with the code runtimes you wish (rather than in our code runners). Let us know what you think, and more importantly, what you wish to build or automate! Cheers, Adam & Mihai https://magicloops.dev August 1, 2023 at 10:27PM

Show HN: What you can do with 35 bytes of HTML and a single CSS file? https://ift.tt/BCMaoAD

Show HN: What you can do with 35 bytes of HTML and a single CSS file? Hi! Minimal code required to render an contentful and styled HTML page with CSS consists of these 35 bytes: In the submitted link I try to share with you how it works and what are the limitations of this hack I hope you have some fun with it :) Thanks Repo: https://ift.tt/qPwfyK1 https://ift.tt/e9iUjBu August 2, 2023 at 01:12AM

Show HN: IdentityLM, cryptographic proof of identity via language model output https://ift.tt/8hCaiy9

Show HN: IdentityLM, cryptographic proof of identity via language model output Hi HN, IdentityLM allows you to create text from a language model that is statistically signed by you, in a way that is computationally very hard to replicate, and computationally very easy to verify. It builds on current research around logit biasing, statistically advantaging certain tokens in a deterministic way. That research focuses on watermarking language model output to identify the model it came from. A really good paper about this idea was just awarded outstanding paper at ICML - https://ift.tt/u4MeHEh . I’ve basically taken that research and interpreted it in the context of public key cryptography. The readme of the github repo is basically small white paper describing how it works. Why should you care? First of all, we can fight scams and deepfakes with it which I know everyone is worried about with generative models becoming so good at simulating a politician, or writing convincing phishing emails and so on. Using speech-to-text it could also verify phone identities. Second, it’s allows transferable identity and trust across any internet platform. You can prove who you are anywhere, and link different profiles, just with natural text. Third, it allows extra encryption around pretty much anything. It adds an extra layer of proof to any interaction or communication. Love to have any comments or feedback! https://ift.tt/iNg3lSR August 2, 2023 at 01:06AM

Show HN: Your Open Source CV https://ift.tt/oy07MA5

Show HN: Your Open Source CV Hi HN! We launched Ringer last year and have been working hard on new features to support creators in Open Source. Today we're launching the Open Source CV. This is your complete history of contributions from GitHub in an easily shareable format. We're also making the code for the CV open source so that you can self-host: https://ift.tt/jJ91AXr Always happy to hear thoughts and suggestions! https://ift.tt/xnrt6qh August 1, 2023 at 07:39PM