skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> Like all such problems the actual answer is obvious once you realize it or if you already know it.

I believe this problem is really trying to get you to formulate an abstract problem mathematically. It's not a trick question, it can be solved with math.

In this problem we can start with all 10 marbles in one bag (bag A). We have two degrees of freedom: how many black marbles to put in the other bag (bag B) (call this variable b) and how many white marbles to put in the other bag (call this variable w).

0 <= b <= 5

0 <= w <= 5

1 <= b + w <= 9 (can't have everything in one bag)

These three constraints form a hexagon.

Probability of picking black from bag A: (5-b)/(10-b-w)

Probability of picking black from bag B: b/(b+w)

Probability of picking black given probability of picking bag A = 0.5: 0.5((5-b)/(10-b-w)) + 0.5(b/(b+w))

Now we know that the problem has two symmetries, bag A vs bag B (b = w) and white vs black (b+w = 5) so our hexagonal solution space must also be symmetric with probability = 0.5 along those lines. This leaves just 6 points to evaluate: (w=0, b=1), (w=0, b=2), (w=0, b=3), (w=0, b=4), (w=1, b=2), (w=1, b=3)

Manually calculating the probability at each we find that the respective probabilities are ~ 0.722, 0.688, 0.643, 0.583, 0.547, 0.542

This means the best probability of picking a black ball is obtained when 1 black ball is moved to the other bag.
> he list a handful of other "smart" assistants which correctly list London UK's time...

It's only correct if that is what you secretly asked for. If I have never travelled to Europe and I am planning a trip to London, Canada then in my subjective world I would kind of be disappointed when my digital assistant told me the time of London, UK. That person would have equally zero understanding, like "WTF SIRI, why would I want to know some city somewhere I don't even know where it is located on the map when you (know) that I often go and visit Canada. Gosh you stupid idiot assistant!"
This country speaks out both sides of its mouth all day every day. My estimate is the FBI will appeal, likely end up with a Trump-appointee presiding over the appellate court.
> Assuming a person is physically closer to the non-british london, it's entirely likely that they travel there more often

It really isn’t. I can see this being the case for people that live within, say, 100 miles of London, ON - but why would they want to know the time there in that case?
A key advantage seems to be no private schools:

https://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2011/12/what-am...
And some sour grapes to top it off
It's like the "Shirt Without Stripes" problem that was posted here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22925087
TBH, Google Assistant is not that much better. In the last few months it has become absurdly racist against my Italian accent, replying to me in Italian after I ask stuff in English - and getting the question wrong anyway.

But yes, Siri is the worst.
Yes, I should say "experienced developer".
oh, then based on that argument you're not human, just a bunch of atoms
Precisely. It's the user's context that matters, and that can change even for a particular individual at different times and locations.

Remote, proprietary personal assistants tend to apply their own (generally unknowable and unaccountable, from the user's perspective) interpretation of the context.
Yeah, to extend the thought about sudo - which, for clarity, is a command you use to execute something as a superuser on your system; it's not a package manager, but something you often prefix when interacting with one.

So sudo, depending on system configuration, does log interactions, but does it locally. The rationale behind this is that Linux heritage is one of multi-user systems, so you want to have the owner/sysadmin of that system to be able to audit the use of superuser privileges by regular users, in particular when they break something. In a Linux system installed on a desktop, or a server you admin yourself, the user is the only person who can access these logs anyway, so it's no different than any other system log.

That these logs would be automatically sent to third parties is unthinkable - in the sense that nobody would even think an operating system would dare send sensitive information out like that.
It's ridiculous how poor in functionality all of them are... The best they can do is, what? Creating schedule entries, for me. All I ask Google is the weather, time, some search when I'm lazy and translate (the voice translate app itself is great btw). Feeling like a total corporate bitch saying "Hey Google" every time, too :D

This is supposed to be a personal assistant. And I have a whole list of what it could do for me, personally. But it doesn't.

I've been trying to figure out how to hook Google's speech recognition and voice into other apps, since they're great and it's 99% of what I need, hands-free control and feedback. Maybe they should make that easy, preferably offline and let other people create their own personal assistant modules or something.
Searching for "Frankfurt, Germany" in Google Maps shows me Frankfurt am Main now at least. Hard to say if that's been changed at some point.
There was minimal context, location data from the watch. Maybe even the fact that there's a pandemic and he ain't gonna go to London, UK, but possibly Canada.

However you spin it, someone will find a reason to find the answer "stupid", so the only one who is really stupid is the person who fails to ask a concrete question if they expect a concrete answer.
France is indeed the best/worst example as it is the current country spanning the most timezones (13).
The advantage of this is to move things closer together and lower latency. If that means running at a lower clock rate in order to keep heat under control, that may be an acceptable tradeoff.

Different problems benefit differently from low latency vs high throughput. A high throughput machine like a GPU is fantastic for crushing giant matrices due to massive parallelism. On the other hand, an extremely low latency machine is what you want for traditional programs that are full of nondeterminism. There you want as much fast memory to be as close to the CPU as possible so that you’re not waiting as long every time you get a cache miss.
Because it's closer than London, Ontario.
Meaning, the rest of the world literally has other pressing problems than the ones the planet's most capable people are spending their days with.

But I get it now. This new technology is not actually about saving the people, is about controlling them, regardless of what the motto of big tech might be. That quote from Dune is still right on track:

"Once, men turned their thinking over to machines in the hope that this would set them free. But that only permitted other men with machines to enslave them"
In the absence of context there is no best answer. You need context to know why London, UK is much more likely to be the right London "without additional context".
ThinLinc is freeware for most small users; it is good enough for 3D design work (think Blender) on the remote Linux host and has multiplatform clients. It's a modified version of turbovnc with, imo, a moderately enlightened company behind it.
The equity value affects your access to capital, if I remember right. So, if you want to take out loans to ramp up after the virus clears, you’ll be impeded by a low stock price. Not saying this is a good move by IBM, but there may be reasons other than evil rich executives.
I’ve based most of my life philosophy on the work of Peter Singer. His response to your comment would be, “we can’t save all the drowning children.” There’s a point where trying to do so deteriorates our personal well being, which benefits no one.

I would rather people sit around the campfire discussing what they know (timezone related software design decisions) instead of making it up as they go (superficially discussing policy or political situations they just learned about 10 minutes ago).
For a related example, type "11:00 EST to UTC" into Google and DuckDuckGo. Google says 15:00 because it interprets "EST" colloquially as "the current time on east coast US". DuckDuckGo says 16:00 because it interprets EST literally as "the time on east coast when it isn't daylight savings time" (compared to ET or EDT). It isn't clear which behavior is more desirable.
> no point in asking it questions or talking to it for anything but changing volume and setting timers. A smart speaker this is not.

For what it’s worth, that’s what anyone uses any “smart speaker” or assistant for. Settings timers/alarms, asking for the weather, and maybe starting music.

Whether Siri is capable of more is a good question, but people don’t use them for any more.
> and you have to explain why you lost a year later on.

That's only if you do nothing else for the rest of the year...
I would guess that there are more people in North America who are interested in London than people in North America who are interested in London, Ontario.

See what I did there? London (which is a major global city) doesn't need a qualifier anymore than New York does.
Isn't half the point of these digital assistants that they do have the context?

I've got no idea about Siri, but the android one ties into your Google account to get your calendar and mail so it can get context about up coming travel etc.
Yes, I think doing both in parallel, or alternating between periods of theoretical study and periods of applied learning (projects for instance) could work very well. I do, by the way, fully agree that just first principles based learning doesn't cut it either. Practice is necessary, I just didn't feel I learned from practicing things which I didn't understand at all.
How to Understand All This China Stuff
Tryllekunstner
I don't think the CPU overhead is that significant. The memory storage overhead is significant, but that's "solved" by just requiring more memory. I guess we can all thank Java for keeping the DRAM business in good shape.

I'm not talking about what's optimal or efficient, I'm talking about what's evidently "good enough" in the real world.
You might need to politely but firmly ask them to escalate this with the 3rd party provider, especially depending on your footing and monthly spends

According to Wikipedia Frankfort, KY doesn't even have an airport so this is a double whammy of stupid on the part of the 3rd party
Using https://github.com/github/hub has allowed me to fire off small pull requests at a high rate. It _almost_ makes pull request creation as lightweight as commits. This leads to smaller pull requests that are easier to review and likely easier to get a quick review on for because of that. Additionally, the reviewer is IMO likelier to approve the PR, leading to me being a much more productive engineer shipping things at a higher rate.
“Human facing”? Any software worth it’s salt needs to deal with this stuff. Unless it’s a toy program. I quite enjoy Timezone stuff, perversely. Might be Stockholm?
Can't you just cast though? Like this: https://gcc.godbolt.org/z/Mq74Bo

I get that it's a bit of an inconvenient workaround, but it doesn't seem impossible to handle? (At least as far as I've thought it through. I might be missing something though.)
> Compilation translates input code into output code without executing it.

I think it is not totally true. There's Forth immediate words, there's Lisp macros and to a lesser extend there's C++ templates (which are Turing-complete).

> Why would you confuse them by trying to apply the same term to them when we have very good distinct terms for these distinct concepts?

Because from a slightly more generalized perspective, that's the same thing.
Compilation: translate source code to bytecode
Interpretation: translate bytecode into side-effects

If I say that side-effects can be formalized into a language, I think I have most Haskell programmers with me. If you run your program in a VM, and compare examine the bytes of the snapshots before and after. You can use diff to turn those changes into another language. And you can use patch to replay those exact changes.

> Etymology does not come into it. Words mean what they mean, not what some related word might have meant in the past.

You realize you say that on Hacker News?
Dutch system too, except for studies with a limited number of places (a tool which is unfortunately used more and more often). There are some prerequisites, though: e.g. for physics, you need to have had physics at secondary school, and for bio-medical sciences, chemistry and physics are obligatory (IIRC).
The US has no general, coherent, constitutional legal theory of privacy per se. Just the 4th amendment rule against unreasonable seaches. As distinct from ECHR general right to private life.

This leads to all sorts of "I'm not touching you" shenanigans where getting your data from somewhere else is perfectly fine, so long as they're not performing something that could be called a search on you specifically.
See my answer below, there was context and still there is no right/wrong answer. If you expect a specific answer, ask a specific question. If you fail to do so, then maybe that is the stupid thing which happened?
I think it’s an exceptionally American response.

It reminds me of Gamers Online that demand for people to be fired whenever the slightest mishap happens.
I have manage to go a few weeks without putting in my pin. I don't think there is a set limit. Not for my bank/card at least.
Zero replies to any tweets.
Ah you may be right.

Personally, I'd give it all of my information short of financial/state ID/name and maybe accurate location if it means having a real personal assistant.
I've been seeking a terminal based CRUD for ages.
It even sucks at setting timers. I asked to set a timer for 50 minutes and it clearly said 50 minutes on the screen and then “corrected” it to 15 minutes.

For a while, it randomly decided that “call my wife” meant to “call my mom.” It clearly said call my wife on the screen and then switched to “mom”.
That's AIcist :D
I use postgres for pretty much everything these days, sometimes with Hasura if I need GraphQL.

There was a short period of time (1-2 years or so?) where I did my projects with Mongo, but right now I don't see what it can offer over something extremely stable like postgres, which also handles JSON amazingly well.
> If the person asking the question lives in Ohio, they may actually be talking about London OH (or Dublin OH).

I would seriously doubt this assumption. Why on earth should someone living in a state specifically ask for the local time in a different location within that same state?

On the contrary, this context information would make it much more likely that the person actually meant "London, England". Except if there is a timezone border going through the state, of course.

However, I obviously agree with your general point regarding the severe limitations of what we currently call "AI" and how little "intelligence" there actually is.
This was how Blendle used to work, and for me at least it was very effective. Despite using it rarely, I probably still spent tens of euros on it. The ability to instantly get my money back if I didn't like an article played a big part in that.

For some reason they changed their model to all-you-can-read for $10 a month, so perhaps it didn't work so well. I stopped using Blendle as a result, though :-/.
> The calendar notification is very random. Sometimes it fires, sometimes it does not. I have missed couple of meetings because notification popped after the meeting was over.

I see something similar and assumed this happens because Mail / Calendar are relying on ics attachments (not sure what the behaviour is with the Gmail integration). I believe this means that if Mail is closed you don’t get Calendar updates until you open both and refresh.

Either way I find I have to refresh Mail and Calendar a lot to keep them in sync.
They aboslutely do. I've never really thought about it but this is obviously why a Mac trackpad feels smooth as butter but even booting into windows on the same hardware makes it feel awful.
Your outrage rings pretty hollow as you are on Hacker News spending your time complaining rather than doing something about all the problems in the world.
Title is currently "Ten reasons why immunity passports are a bad idea"
Yeah it is the norm these days. I’ve been using macs for 15 years and they bave been fantastic until the very last iteration (after 2016, 17).

My latest MacBook (16") is so unstable that it is actually funny at this point.
Why They Suck: Bill Gates
They only use them for that because it sucks at everything else.
> A simple "Which London?" could've removed the ambiguity and given Siri the opportunity to learn something about that particular person (that London, England is more important to him than London in Canada).

IMO I would be very disappointed if Siri started asking clarifying questions at a significantly higher rate. Siri is already a bit too chatty, and I never feel like having an extended conversation with her.

I’d rather she just say the wrong thing (but make it clear that the answer is for a specific London, e.g. “The time in London Ontario is...”) and I can correct her. It’s the same number of conversational “turns”, but in the happy path when she actually gets it right the first time, it’s one-shot and done.

It’s a lot harder to get signal on this for learning, but I feel like there are ways around this as well. (Maybe saying “thanks” can signal she got something right, and prefixing the next utterance with “no” could signal it was wrong...)
Sure, but maybe a reasonable default context would be "a human currently living on Earth is asking the question."
My point is, there's a limit blame-shifting. Eventually the blame falls on those acting, not on those that influenced them or their ancestors. Eventually you'd get to something like, given the first man was obviously doing something bad for the first woman, how can it not be the woman-kind's fault?
Apple Wins Patent for New Finger Sensing Keys, Built-In iPhone Charger
Maybe GPS data and the fact that due to a pandemic there's a travel ban the actual intelligent answer is in fact "London, Canada" and only a stupid person would fail to see that?

We can spin this all day long. The truth is, if you want a very specific answer, and you fail to ask a specific question, then you're the only one to blame.
Nice! I totally agree with this! I've used https://www.conventionalcommits.org (initially from Angular, I think) and it has _really_ made me a better programmer. Worth pointing out that it also simplified code review a lot to make PRs less of a frictionpoint.
What I like about this idea of Approval Testing is that I don't have to write too many tests if I know my system is working, as long as I am notified when the behaviour of my system has changed (usually in some unexpected way).

This would require auto-mocking of all subsystems to prevent side-effecting functions from sending email & SMSes.
The context is being an ordinary human being in the world. I think a significant chunk of people _in_ Ontario would expect the one in England.
> the ones the planet's most capable people are spending their days with.

I think you are greatly exaggerating the capability and means of the average HN visitor, submitter, and commenter.

That said, I think people, generally, are unable to work non-stop, 24/7 on just the important problems.

Commenting on some trivial shit here doesn't mean you don't give a fuck about the problems of the world, or that you're not working on them.
All of these situations are fairly complicated. So the best thing to do ( even for a human assistant ) is to ask more questions. That is the best way to get clarification rather than just trying to figure out what the context is. The assistant should be able to ask a simple question: "Are you talking about the London in UK or Ohio?"
No, I had a sour experience in 2009 where it ate my data, the devs were rather cavalier with "there's a warning on the download page" (I got it through apt), it ate my data again when the OOM killer killed its process.

I didn't like the project attitude of a database being so lax with persistence, so I never used it again.
School choice and medical choice are very different.

With school choice, parents do incredible amounts of research, and can send their kids to excellent schools wherever they live, or however bad their local school boards are. And yes, ALL parents invest in their kids' success, your (not OP's but generic reader's) stereotypes against minorities aside. It's a relatively efficient market. It benefits from choice + competition, with just transparency regulations (choice schools should be subject to FERPA, PPRA, public records laws, allow parent visits, etc.), and possibly governance regulations (not-for-profit school choice works best).

Medical choice comes up when I'm hit by a car. I don't have time to do research then, and it's the definition of an inefficient market. I go with whoever shows up, and worry about the bankrupting bills and/or malpractice lawsuits later.

Dumping private insurance 100% makes sense. It's pure overhead. It's a place conservatives deny science and evidence.

Providing school choice 100% make sense too. It makes for better schools. It's a place liberals deny science and evidence.
I recently learned iTerm2 (on MacOSX) allows me to select and copy text from previous command, using keyboard only. https://kevinjalbert.com/iterm2-mouseless-copy/ I've always been annoyed having to reach for a mouse for this.
I am doing something. I am raising awareness. Isn't this the national sport in fighting the world problems?!
Reminds me of the Raspberry pi 4 update, where enabling ASPM shaved something like 10% off the idle power consumption:

https://www.cnx-software.com/2019/06/29/new-raspberry-pi-4-v...
I tried Siri sometime in 2012 or so. Came to the conclusion that it was tuned for the US so I disabled it and never looked back :-p
If you're writing firmware for an embedded device without a clock then you'll never have to deal with this. If your software only ever has to interact with other software then you wouldn't ever use time zones unless you really have to. Only humans demand time zones.
I'd say powertop can be worse than useless today. Its suggestions are too aggressive, it suggests min_power which can cause data corruption, instead of med_power_with_dipm which is the recommended value nowadays.
Xiaomi’s investment house of IoT surpasses 300 companies
Correct, you don't. Chrome profiles use the same installation of Chrome. There is no real overhead, and the only limitation is that profiles must use different windows.
This one is interesting in how it includes a dial interface, potentially useful for paint/3D interfaces https://www.patentlyapple.com/.a/6a0120a5580826970c0264e2dbc...

(Note: Apologies for the heavy ads submission, it was the original source from an even worse Forbes article)
English is not my first language, and in school we were taught British English. However, most English language culture I consumed was American. I have given up speaking anything but franken-english.
For a lot of products, US sales are just worth so much more than sales from anywhere else, that it is reasonably common to not care much about the rest of the world. I’ve worked for a few companies that started out with a heavy focus on localization, but eventually realized it was just a massive waste of money.
I don't know anything about IBM in this regard. Isn't that situation dependant? Or is such a thing common enough to say that this usually is the case?

I.e. +50% shares need to be outstanding (assuming nothing is owned by the hostile PE firm).
A group of us once tried to rank cities in Europe by population only to realize that most of them are effectively incomparable.

Cities sometimes have clear legal boundaries that feel irrelevant to the question, like the City of London, but more generally have metro areas that sprawl well into an ambiguously defined countryside. There's rarely a "this block is city, the next block over is clearly not" situation, so the number of people you include ends up being pretty arbitrary.