skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Nice questions. Good food for thoughts.

I still hate how spammy Tim's website is. You click an "X" to remove a sidebar ad, and instead it pops up another bigger ad in front of your face.

I thought the whole thing was to be happy with enough money (TMI, as he calls it). In an alternative universe, Tim Ferriss blogs for free, from a nice affordable location in the Caribbean, and "works" only 4 hours per week, instead of perhaps 50 or 60.
We need therapy for people like that. I understand where it comes from but it doesn't align with contemporary pressures.
> adding an authentication key to audio

I'm afraid that it's not going to work. Not more than adding an authentication key to handwriting.

The voice itself was an authentication key, as was the hand. But now these keys are too weak and easy to forge.

I'd say we should completely stop trusting the authenticity of any recorded voice, and maybe all voice by phone. Trust the content, the style, have a set of agreed-upon keywords with your partner and/or your parents to check that the other side is indeed who it alleges to be in an extraordinary situation. Maybe not today, but tomorrow it may happen to be useful to thwart a scam directed against you, with the scammer perfectly imitating the voice of your loved one(s).
That 20 watts is to run the network. Our brain has had a billion years to work out details of the architecture and encode a lot of basic stuff as instinct (and it still sucks at a lot of things). You should be counting that energy cost as well - we didnt get from nerve nets to frontal lobes overnight.
I like natural scroll so much I even use AutoHotkey on Windows to emulate the same behavior. Unfortunately, it reverses everything, so, say, volume scroll is reversed too. I'm sure there are workarounds about that.

Unlike some comments here, when I move from TrackPad to mouse, I still think of the scroll wheel as the document, so natural scroll makes more sense for me, personally.

The only thing I would get rid of in TrackPad is the "bounce effect" when you reach the Home/End of the document. Also, many documents are perfectly fit in the app window (e.g. Preview) but still the horizontal scroll moves them around, which is annoying (try opening a new PDF in Preview and use left/right arrow keys to move to next page; it scrolls the document horizontally slightly!)
Then you have your own special definition. A "tech company" is a company whose primary business is tech, including companies pushing out boring line-of-business applications like you describe. It is in contrast to companies whose primary focus is something else e.g. agriculture or pharmaceuticals.
I believe this is consistent with at least one other FAANG company.
Facebook’s ‘Red Team’ Hacks Its Own AI Programs
Have you worked in a company where the average age was that low?

When I joined Snap about 5 years ago, I was middle aged compared to the average which was probably in 20s - even my CEO is reasonably younger than me :). The company was also pretty small (100?).

From that (single/anecdotal) data point, I'd say it is not as bad as you portray. There is definitely an affinity to try new things - part of your job is evaluating it for all its worth rather than its glitter and ensuring you communicate that well / provide value. I always try to focus the conversation on the problem we are trying to solve and how the new tech is solving it better. The good alternatives usually seem to catch on very quick (See Go vs Java, Kotlin vs Java) compared to the also ran technologies. Your worth will kick in based on your skill level in judging these and definitely in getting to a mentoring role rather than a gate keeper role. But it has been a lot of fun.

The agility is also something to keep in mind: Snap allows for extreme career mobility. Recently I switched teams from doing data related work (for the past 15 years?) to a complete unknown of joining our spectacles team and Snap has been supportive. You just don't see the typecasting you tend to hear about in bigger companies.

So yeah - give it a shot with an open mind! You may be surprised!
Yup that's exactly what I was saying. Cloudfare is designed for website resources, mostly smallish images and bits of JS and CSS. They would probably regard 5MB as a rather large resource. I'm not gonna blame them for having no idea what to do when somebody tries to run a 13.7GB download through them.
Habits of Highly Focused People
Humanity at its finest: depleting a potentially valuable resource forever so you can make more of a drug that ruins hundreds of thousands (if not millions) of lives a year.
I would guess it's a significant benefit for certain people who have the dedication to actually keep a garden- but it seems pretty clear that most people don't successfully keep gardens long term.
That's super cool.

I am worried about the potential abuse of this service, are there any existing services that can help to identify audio deep fakes like this one is for making them?

Found Resemblyzer: https://github.com/resemble-ai/Resemblyzer
The advantage that Agile brings to the table is that it enables more tracking and measurement at finer-grained time intervals than other approaches. Tracking and measurement is the key feature of Agile or any other software development methodology. It enables the business to determine what needs to get done, if it's on track to completion, and if not, what the pain points are. Having a short OODA loop for these three points is paramount to the business's success and in order to do that you need to track and measure. You can't manage what you can't measure, and Agile processes give the business data and analytics about how their development efforts are going at least at a sprint level of granularity; depending on local practices it could be as fine as one day. That's huge. It could potentially add visibility to all aspects of the business -- so get ready to see Agile everywhere.

TL;DR, if you believe Agile was created to help you do your job better, you might also believe that open-plan offices were really adopted to "foster collaboration" and not make you easier to spy on at work.
This is cool. Do you have any documentation around the security controls implemented to protect sensitive communications between patients and therapists? Among others? I presume this is ultimately still protected information under HIPAA
Voice imitation isn't just timbre.

It's prosody, rhythm, accent, word choice, and so on.

By the time you've mastered all those, you're practically halfway to becoming a professional voiceover artist.

Remember, trained voiceover artists have been mimicking voices for a long, long time. Their timbre isn't always perfect, but faking voices doesn't need deepfakes.
really? I am very impressed by GPT-3 but I still don't see any way to make money "obviously" out of it.

Maybe it can be an adjuvant to human in some tasks but then so could existing technologies too, I guess?
If you write it, sign me up to buy a copy!
I'm stoked to hear that, thank you! I am actually looking at buying some property in the Catskills and I was thinking of adding in some solar panels because I thought it would be fun, and this is welcome news.
Well 95% of the letters I receive go straight into the trash can, so I'm really not too concerned if it's delayed
I don’t actually know if this is true, but the intuition I have is that this huge expenditure of energy is just the result of speeding through evolution. Our neural structures have evolved for hundreds of millions of years. The aggregate energy cost of that evolution has been enormous, but the result is a compact, hyper-efficient brain. Who’s to say that on the other end of this we’re not going to end up with the same in silicon?
It's particularly ironic to trying to make usage of 'irregardless' seem like reaching for unearned language skills since it is a real word, being several hundred years old. You could benefit from looking into the actual standing of this word - is it possible that you're the one who's reaching?
"those people are pure engineers, that don't know/are not interested in business, marketing, making a product out of their software, etc.. practically anything besides coding"

Yeah, that's a serious problem, and one similar to ones that artists and musicians face.

I've made a fair bit of art (paintings, drawings, sculptures) but except for one group exhibit in high school I've never bothered to exhibit it anywhere, sell it online, or show it to anyone apart from family members and a few friends (and even they haven't seen most of my art). It's just too much trouble. I'd like to make a living making art, and have considered creating an Etsy page or something, but have never gotten around to it. So I just keep making art for myself.

I also make music, and have kept that mostly to myself for the same reason. I've uploaded a fraction of it to Soundcloud, but I don't advertise it in any way, so even finding it on Soundcloud would be almost impossible for someone if they didn't search for specific keywords that I've tagged my music with. Mostly I don't bother even uploading it, though. It's too much trouble to record, edit, name, upload, provide metadata to Soundcloud and find an image to go with the track. So I just tend to keep the music to myself.

I've also written quite a bit of software over the years, and have open sourced some of it, and am a big believer in open source, but it's just too much trouble for me to package stuff nicely, write readmes for my software, and make sure the software is decoupled enough from my own environment to be useful/buildable for someone else, so a lot of it has just kind of rotted away on my hard drive for decades without anyone else even knowing of its existence. So I mostly just write this code for myself.

Some people go all out to promote their software, music, or art, but that's just not me. For me the joy is in the creation, and the rest is just not important enough.

Kudos to all those people who actually go to the trouble of open sourcing their code, release music to the public, or show their art. I know how much work just doing that can be, never mind trying to make a living at it.

That said, if you are willing to go to the trouble, there are successful open source projects which manage to make money that you could model your own projects on.
It looks like problem! :-)
I have solution for this for years, but demand is not there yet.
In Minneapolis, Armed Residents Set Up Patrols Amid Calls to Defund the Police
I started brewing my own beer when the pandemic started. It's a fun new hobby, and I get to just re-use the glass bottles I bought, so it's also not wasteful.

It's also surprisingly inexpensive to get started. Like any hobby you can spend as much money as you want, and supply stores will try to push you to the latest and greatest. But I think I'm going to remain happy with my simple siphon, pair of one gallon (~3.75L) glass fermenters, and glass bottles for a long time.

Also, for whatever reason the homebrewing community in the US seems to have standardized around the five gallon (19L) batch size, but there's nothing wrong with smaller batches. I like being able to have more than one kind fermenting at once, and the space to variety ratio is great. Who really wants five gallons of the same thing when you gave have a few gallons of different beers?
Also I think that a big problem is our health care system. I may be wrong on this, but I imagine it costs a company more money to employ an older person who may actually use their health insurance or have health problems.

Removing the burden of health care from companies would maybe solve a bunch of these problems and allow companies to risk hiring older people.
Learn Terraform or build your own abstract tooling on top of them. Infrastructure as code is a cool, exciting space and I think we've ways to go !
The Atlantic is an institution with a storied history and strong reputation. The blockchain is a wild west known for (at best) overpromising and underdelivering and (at worst) pump-and-dumps, fraud, and black-hat hacking.

If they mention a blockchain project, it's basically like sending some of their audience straight to Binance to get rekt.

Do you see why it's not a slam dunk for them to shoutout some project that's passionately trying (and unlikely) to solve these hard problems?
Setup blog and email on custom domain for (almost) free
Have surveyed this at my (large) office and it’s about 50/50.

I don’t know what the exact numbers would be aggregated across the entire population, but from comparing surveys across my own office and several other large companies I think there are two large minority positions (want to WFH forever / want back in office) and a third slice of undecideds.
> And I wouldn't trade the extra 2-3 hours a day I get with my family or to spend on hobbies instead of sitting in bumper-to-bumper traffic for anything.

This is the actual difference between our situations.

I have a ten minute commute. Avoiding ten minutes in the car isn't worth the hassle of working from home (we don't have space for me to have my own "office", so I'd just be in the living room with everyone else)

If I did have a multi-hour commute every day, I'd absolutely be working from home any chance I could.
Take a look at online UPS systems. They convert incoming power to battery voltage, keep the battery charged, and output via an inverter that's made to run without being tied to the grid. They shouldn't be that costly if you can find them without large batteries, instead just hooking them up to your own.
With the risk of coming across as vapid, I believe that a more profound and possibly undermining insight here is that "appearance" is itself an implicit experience of it, meaning that you can't really escape experience or consider something as truly decoupled from experiencing it.

With that, "Appearances vs. Experiences" becomes more of a false dichotomy, an argument that privileges certain experiences over others, which is fine, but possibly less effective.
I ended up taking a 3 month leave of absence to take care of my 3 young kids (one of which has a disability). Ireland closed schools and universities on 13 March 2020 and we quickly realised that even with 2 parents at home full-time, we couldn't work and take care of our children.

We found a good balance eventually but it was only possible through the circumstances of my wife's role and my ability to take leave.

Many many people are not in a position (negotiating power, financially) to do that which makes this extremely tough mentally and physically. If you have the ability (time, money) to help friends, family, neighbours, please consider doing so (those that need it will very much appreciate it).
I think regular folks are already pretty clued into how other things like text mining and sentiment determination have big markets considering how strong the backlash against tech politically is right now. The everyday public and by extension politicians seem reasonably capable of imagining how data can be monetized for ads, and they dont seem too happy about it.
You are correct. However:

- These days, it has become common to use the term "Virtual Machine" specifically to refer to hardware virtualization. The old meaning of the term, referring to language runtimes, is (sadly) now so uncommon as to be outright confusing to many people.

- Most other Serverless environments technically do wrap their containers in virtual machines (like Firecracker), since plain containers aren't considered sufficiently secure on their own.
They could be using YaCy, setup their own infra and provide premium access to fast and more reliable YaCy results. That would at least make them a competitor and not just a Bing UI.

I mean, sure, it's cheaper, but it doesn't really set them apart from any other Bing UI. Actually running something they own, especially something opensource and federated, would distinguish them and warrant whatever fee they deem necessary.
I only use trackpads on osx, but I use scroll wheels on linux and windows too. So I'm fine with whatever on the trackpad, but I need my mouse to stay consistent with the rest of the world.
How often do legal frameworks change?

As a non-expert, I think there's a 50% chance it costs 10x more to teach each new hire for a month.
Is this true? On Google I only see mentions of using voice data to improve their speech transcribing.
Africans to Get French Pay TV with Their Solar Energy Systems
Uhh Jenkins has a positively massive API - and there's no button pushing needed, just use a Jenkinsfile https://www.jenkins.io/doc/book/pipeline/jenkinsfile/
As a physician, I attend conferences, subscribe to online references, question banks, various journals, take ongoing CME, repeat licensing exams, and spend the equivalent of one workday a week reading those new materials, and try to spend a couple hours refreshing myself on materials outside of my specialty. This amounts to an extra un-reimbursed workday a week, and several thousand dollars a year.

When I worked in a place that offered CME/conference reimbursement, it covered about 1-2K a year, depending on budgeting issues. In my current place, and for all independent or small practice physicians, that comes out of your own pocket.

This does not have any career benefit whatsoever; it’s done so as to be worthy of our patients’ trust.

I wouldn’t mind if it was at least partially reimbursed though. It’s an enormous chunk of change, and not for my benefit.
This is my pandemic side project, and I'll be happy to answer any questions about it.
How to split your time. Tips from a previous Head of Product Marketing at Google
I think, I can make a better version:

1. Make person wear a thermal jacket

2. Connect thermal jacket through a heat exchanger to a pack of ice, evap cooler, or a CO2 bottle.

And if cost, and weight is not an issues, one can go for a vapour compression system.

I worked on a dumb "smart mini vine cellar" once, and the company whose parts we were buying was also making this: https://youtu.be/WbrytRV_LK8
I might have missed the business plan behind monetising GPT3 here.
Can you elaborate on why you think prompt programming will successfully take a cut from services?

Prompt-programming is a standard features of all LMs. What differentiates GPT3 is not this application but the quality of the output. NLP companies such as chatbot providers and specialised search (patents, legal assistants, tenders) have been using domain-specific LMs for years.
Companies Flee Argentina, and Coronavirus Is Just One Reason
True, but depending on what you created, it might open up the path to dual licensing.
I worked from a company that was acquired and about 1/4the people in the building were left working in a building for about 4x the number of people there.

All the layoff horror aside, it was glorious working there for a while before they started renting the unused space.

The executive bathrooms were real treat. it was always quiet, every common space was sort of a private lounge.

I wonder if folks in the office are having the same experience.
The capital costs of something like a automobile factory ($500 mil+) pretty much force you to run 24/7. Also, automobiles are labor intensive to produce, so idling the workforce alone would cost more than building more power.

Something low capital, low labor and high energy like steel recycling has already shifted to operate when electricity is cheap.
felica did see usage as university cards but when I say "Osaifu Ketai" I mean the entire business model surrounding it too. Only Hong Kong successfully implemented it.
So it would make a profit providing a service no one else finds profitable (offering services to these unbanked), and will also take a loss to serve this underserved marked?

How can it act as both a public service and source of free money? Even if it made a small profit doing so, it would be less than ramping up their most profitable areas and would have an opportunity cost.

(If you mean they should do it purely as a public service, that's a fair point, but you're writing like it's an easy way to improve their financial position, which doesn't make sense.)
No harm to repeat it, especially since the temptation might beat the rational mind.
> Like, how does the local mom and pop correctly evaluate a person's IT chops?

Not my problem.

> The nephew says they can set up their website for cheap, and they want to be nice, so they give him the job. Turns out he's a newb and later their database gets deleted and you are on here saying that's a good thing? Hrm. I don't agree.

Mom and pop prefer nepotism over skill, credentials and reputation, without even a second opinion. There is a reason that this is frowned upon (and has been for at least some 2000 years before mom and pop were born), regardless of the domain.

On the off chance that their database doesn't contain any personally identifying information on their customers, this is an idiot tax. In any other case, their loss is completely justified when compared to the potential losses, abuse and manipulation of their customers that come with exposing their PII to the public.
Do you want a computer that can reliably understand you and give you the best possible answer 99% of the time?

I think most people would go: yes! How much does it cost?
Generally I'd agree, but there is some rationality to the idea that we should not encourage and promote certain activities because of their inherent dangers. Smoking, for instance.
Monospace Font Selector
It think it is all right except for the A.I. part.

GPT-3 is taking a graph-structured object ("language" inclusive of syntax and semantics) over a variable-length discrete domain and crushing it into a high-dimensional vector in a continuous euclidean space. That's like fitting the 3-d spherical earth onto a 2-d map; any way you do it you do violence to the map.

I think systems like GPT-3 are approaching an asymptote. You could put 10x the resources in and get 10% better results, another 10x and get 1% better results, something like that.

You might do better with multi-task learning oriented towards specific useful functions (e.g. "is this period the end of a sentence?") but the training problem for GPT-3 is by no means sufficient for text understanding.

GPT-3 fascinates people for various reasons, one of them being almost good enough at language, lacking understanding, faking it, and being the butt of a joke.

If GPT-3 were a person with similar language skills and people blogged about that person, mocking it's output, the way we do with GPT-3, people would find that cringeworthy. Neurotypicals welcome it as one of their own, and aspies envy it because it can pass better than they can.

At $2 a page it can replace richmansplainers such as Graham and Thiel who never listen. It's not a solution for folks like like Phillip Greenspun who read the comments on their blogs.

For that matter, it may very well model the mindlessness of corporate America: if you accept GPT-3 you prove you will see the Emperor's clothes no matter how buck naked he is. AT&T executives had a perfectly good mobile phone business: what possessed them to buy a failing satellite TV business? Could GPT-3 replace that "thinking" at $2 a page? Such a bargain.
America's First Paramedic Crew Deserves Their Own Movie
Wealthy interests built the system, but they're not the only abusive actors within it. It would not surprise if smaller firms completely failed to protect the data of other parties more often than larger firms did so. The best way for database operators to prevent unauthorized access and deletion is to secure their databases in some way. The best way for anyone else to prevent abusive access is to delete unsecured databases. Working together, this problem will be solved eventually.