skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I work for a remote company (2 years now) and I just make friends elsewhere (typically neighbors and people I interact with outside of work day to day, as you'd expect). I actually find these friendships to be more fulfilling than work friendships.

I don't doubt lots of companies are providing terrible work from home experiences right now but if you're lucky to work for an all remote company from before COVID a lot of your criticism doesn't ring true for me at least. I'm sure there are people it just doesn't work for though, and I respect that might be the case for you. I just don't think a blanket statement "remote work doesn't work in the long term" is very likely to be true.
Because either you have to pay some native a decent money to make a translation or because some strings are embedded in code?
Well, I don't know what to tell you but CO2 emissions from fossil fuels accumulate in the atmosphere. There is this weird thing happening that since 1960 the CO2 content in the atmosphere has risen from 300ppm to 400ppm. It's up to you to believe whether that is a coincidence. Random googling tells me we emit 36 billion tonnes per co2 per year. Even more random googling tells me there are 3 trillion tonnes of CO2 in the atmosphere. It's not hard to put them together and conclude that humanity responsible for growing the CO2 in the atmosphere by 1% every year right now. Now lets say these numbers are complete garbage and inaccurate (which they certainly are) and say they are off by 70% (which they certainly are not) and the a highly conservative number is closer to 0.3%. After 30 years 9% of CO2 in the atmosphere is man made assuming we start off with 0% man made CO2 (obviously not true).

The point of this comment is not to prove that there is a certain percentage of man made CO2 in the atmosphere because I don't have accurate numbers. The point is that humanity is powerful enough to reach an arbitrarily high percentage of man made CO2 in the atmosphere and it is certainly possible for 50% of the CO2 in the atmosphere to be of human origin if we wait long enough and do nothing.
That was the exact thing that caught my attention.
Is there any kind of cultural production, any genre that you like a lot more than most people? Because if there is there’s someone who likes it 100 times more than you and has made a list of the top 100 things in it. If you haven’t gone through multiple of these lists then you you’re not even trying to get through the enormous amount of fantastic content out there that is wildly disproportionately likely to be great, for you.
>> Why the hype? As is turns out, GPT-3 is unlike other natural language processing (NLP) systems, the latter of which often struggle with what comes comparatively easily to humans: performing entirely new language tasks based on a few simple instructions and examples. Instead, NLP systems usually have to be pre-trained on a large corpus of text, and then fine-tuned in order to successfully perform a specific task. GPT-3, by contrast, does not require fine tuning of this kind: it seems to be able to perform a whole range of tasks reasonably well, from producing fiction, poetry, and press releases to functioning code, and from music, jokes, and technical manuals, to “news articles which human evaluators have difficulty distinguishing from articles written by humans”.

I have to stop at this before going on with the rest of the text. GPT-3 is, indeed, "pre-trained", on a huge corpus of unstructured text. The "range of tasks" in the passage above are actually all just one task, language generation. In fact, GPT-3 is specifically "pre-trained" on exactly that task, generating language. It doesn't need to be fine-tuned any further.

I think what the article is trying to say is that GPT-3 can perform some tasks that aren't usually thought of as strictly language generation tasks, such as machine translation or question answering, without having been specifically trained to do those things. "Not specifically trained to do those things" means that, e.g. instead of being trained with examples of sentences in one language and their translation in another, GPT-3 is trained with examples of arbitrary text respresenting a snapshot of many, diverse uses of language. Presumably, these diverse uses of language include translation, so GPT-3 also picked up the ability to do some translation. The same goes for question answerning etc. However, it should be noted that GPT-3 on the whole does not score very highly on metrics designed to measure performance on such let's say side-tasks. It certainly scores nowhere near as highly as specialised systems e.g. for machine translation etc. This is before looking at what those metrics actually try to measure which is usually only a very loosely defined sense of success [1].

Anyway I suppose I'll go on with the rest of the article, but I just wanted to flag this inconsistency up because it's a typical example of the subtle misunderstandings that circulate in the lay press about systems like GPT-3. Ultimately, for anyone who wishes to understand what systems like GPT-3 are, the best source is the relevant research and of course a bit of background in the subject and history of AI. If that sounds like a tall order, well tough. You can't replace knowledge of a field of research with more than 50 years of history with a quick read of five or six online articles and a dozen tweets.

_________________

[1] https://www.skynettoday.com/editorials/state_of_nmt
Brilliant pictures and an explanation. That's exactly what PhD is about!
Sounds like a very aggressive negotiating tactic on Google's part.

They're scared that if the Nordic agreement succeeds, they'd gradually be bid up on content pricing everywhere.

Koda and the Nordic group are not necessarily in a weak position. But might be in an even stronger position if they had an alternative video/ streaming service to recommend, which paid them higher content partner rates.

It will only take one content provider to hold out for long enough, yet still be an attractive market at higher content rates, to break Google's embargo. Good luck.
This shares the same foundation as the argument that ebooks will kill physical sales and solent will change how people see food, namely that we're all purely motivated by boiling every need we have down to the most fundamental version.

It never seems to play out that way at population scales
That's what happened to del.icio.us after it was bought by Yahoo. Kind of ridiculous that web code ages out that badly, but I guess in startup world as long as it lasts till the IPO or acquishutdown that's all that matters.
It's inherently no longer a hobby once you have to do it every day to pay your rent.

I think finding something you get paid for that you can get some sort of enjoyment out of is way easier than monetizing a hobby and keeping what you enjoy about that hobby alive.
Just noticed that Google Maps translates a lot of German business names into English, which is exactly what I don't want when I’m driving along, looking for their sign. There’s enough “Denglish” (intentional use of English-like terms) in use by Germans themselves that this adds rather than removes confusion for non-native German speakers.

For example, “Stoffe Bauer” into “Fabric Farmer” - Bauer is a common family name, and Stoffe is the first thing on their sign.
Surprising number of exoplanets could host life
You my find something that fits you needs in the projects mentioned here https://github.com/pirate/ArchiveBox/wiki/Web-Archiving-Comm...
Would some sort of slightly ridiculous iframe fallback work? That is, just embed reddit's entire video play page?
Screwfix is the Argos of DIY.

Toolstation also.

Ideal business model for Covid times it turns out.
Maybe they fully translated an earlier version of the app but more strings were added in subsequent versions and not translated. When there's no translation available for a string, it falls back to English.
Anecdote: I had a terrible time trying to use AegosSub, but Subtitle Edit is a total breeze: https://www.nikse.dk/SubtitleEdit/
Fooling deep neural networks for object detection with adversarial 3-D logos
They could have spent the time they used to produce the current mess to learn about the old code and improve on it, or document it and then use it as a starting point for their new stuff and then improve on it.

10 years isn't necessarily bad either. Just look at HN. Functional with minimum of JS, 2.0kB transferred to load this reply page, tho it will not win any fancy design awards anytime soon. But all in all, great user experience. If you wanted to inline the reply form into the comments pages, that can be done easily in under 1KB of unminified js.

Loading the reddit frontpage (not signed in, adblocker): 21.8MB transferred (11.7 without media and fonts), 501 requests (183), 20+ seconds to load, 11667 ms of scripting. What the actual fuck.

old.reddit.com: 2.7MB transferred (2.1MB), 100 requests (24), <2seconds to load, <300ms of scripting.
> i'm all for revolution, my best friend is actually a bolshevik, just don't use non-political medium to push some agenda

eyeroll.gif

Not only do I not believe that, I'm sure the Bolsheviks had some words about attempting to separate the world into separate "political" and "apolitical" arenas.
Should virus-naming rules change during a pandemic? Question divides virologists
So before anyone goes off half-cocked, the proposed legislation applies to:

1. News businesses that are registered with ACMA and comply with the codes for print/TV/radio regarding content, eg press council etc and publish predominantly Australian content for Australian audiences

2. Have revenue over $150K/year

3. Digital platforms (as determined by the Treasurer)

It requires both sides to:

a) provide each other with information,

b) negotiate in good faith,

c) submit to formal arbitration if they can't agree.

The platforms are required (as a minimum) to not discriminate between news sources, what they collect about users that click on the news sources (where that is different to what they normally collect), and how they make that information available to the news source.

They're required to explain how they display paywalled contant, how they display non-paywall content, how they display advertising, and, if they change that, how the change will affect the news sources. It also requires the platform to, if they allow user comments (eg a FB page), allow the news source to control/disable/moderate those comments.

The news sources are allowed to co-operate in the negotiations.

It's not a long bill and it's in plain(-ish) English.

https://www.accc.gov.au/system/files/Exposure%20Draft%20Bill...
Why is there no widely accepted progress for 50 years?
The troubles with that approach are that a) we've tried it, and it doesn't work very well, b) it's complex - how much is 'too much', how much do you 'take from the top', and how much do you 'give to the bottom', and c) it's expensive to administer, because a lot of time it spent working out the numbers and scheduling (and monitoring to prevent fraud) involved in the (b) bit.
An interesting (and free) book about the subject is "The Idea of the Labyrinth from Classical Antiquity through the Middle Ages" by Penelope Reed Doob https://www.amazon.com/Labyrinth-Classical-Antiquity-through... Sometimes it goes too far in seeing a "labyrinthine aesthetic" everywhere, but nevertheless it contains interesting information.

Speaking of labyrinths, programmers are like Daedalus: they design labyrinths, only to be immured inside them. Daedalus was commissioned to build an actual labyrinth; programmers set out to build cathedrals, but then mess up. They keep reworking sections of the labyrinth even as they are lost inside, trying to straighten out the paths, render them comprehensible. But they always end up creating more twists and turns.
I think they abandoned the code word thing. Now you just get a numeric code on a printed ticket. I thought it was cool but I'm sure it was confusing to a lot of customers.
>> "There’s no inherent reason OSS should somehow forcefully live"

What on earth does this tirade even mean? Every business lives 'forcefully' and fights for survival. Sometimes it comes with values, i.e. we dont use child labour in DRK to mine thallium, fairtrade, organic, etc. OSS is one of those values.

Is there a business that lives 'effortlessly'?
The Resumes of Chernobyl
The reality is likely neither here nor there - i.e. computing may have more to offer to the creative endeavor than creators would like to admit, but still leave an obvious gap which technologists might be loathe to admit.

It may be instructive to look at David Cope's [1] work (what he calls "recombinant music" [2]). Cope's been writing algorithms to compose in the styles of the masters (Mozart/Chopin/et al) for about 3 decades now, well before the recent surge in "AI". His techniques are much less sexy for the "deep learning" enthusiasts, and yet he managed to outrage an audience of connoisseurs who assembled to listen to a "lost Chopin piece" only to be told, after they shared their applause, that it was composed by a computer taught to mimic Chopin's style (the composition was performed by a musician). The response, in my opinion, also points to music as a social constructed experience and not purely attributable to the sound signal itself. i.e. if I give you a romantic background story for a lost composition of a master, you may be inclined to experience the piece in a more favorable light than if I told you it was generated by an algorithm (or the converse).

You're absolutely right that the musical output of the current crop of "AI" projects (especially the ones using deep learning / neural networks) are crappy to even a modestly trained listener .. or even a lay untrained listener for that matter. However, more involved modeling (such as Cope's) has produced some very compelling results decades ago, so it would be a mistake to assume that the current crop won't get close enough [3]. The fact that DL systems don't need to be instructed in the way Cope has had to encode his musical understanding is also something to be considered in the evaluation as well as in scoping their capabilities going forward.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Cope
[2]: https://www.recombinantinc.com
[3]: https://deepmind.com/blog/article/wavenet-generative-model-r... (see "Making Music" section and examples there)
Linky?
One possible solution is to make it very clear that the subtitles were not written by the video poster. Something like a red triangle next to the language name.
Scared That Covid-19 Immunity Won’t Last? Don’t Be
Thanks, I’ll use that if I get a chance to do the reminder of the route.

I took a wrong turn in Eiken, which isn’t directly next to the river, and didn’t notice my mistake until I’d already exhausted myself. The nice scenery was a pleasant but unfortunate distraction.
Projecthealth.uprofitoapp.com
It's about registered news companies being able to force Google/FB to bargain/arbitration about revenues from displaying their news on the platform.
Try https://github.com/jiahaog/nativefier, it's not perfect but it works.
Wow, that is fantastic, and presented in a really nice way with those turning pages. I wonder who owns it, if you remove the dev. from the start of the url it redirects to argos.co.uk

This would be great as a full screen tablet app / site.
lol, that's terrible. And a great example of lacking context.

Youtube also seems to randomly machine translate video titles into German for me, but weirdly enough only sometimes, for some videos. And has a similar problem that short labels etc just don't work if translated by something not optimized for it - and that a German channel probably would use English words in many cases...
The secret to building side projects fast:

* Django https://www.djangoproject.com/
* Unpoly https://unpoly.com/
* Parcel https://parceljs.org/
* Heroku https://www.heroku.com/
* Tailwindcss https://tailwindcss.com/
Australia to force tech giants to pay for news in landmark move
No, the problem is that we forgot to teach (or in many cases – deliberately did not teach) people one of the most basic skills (critical thinking) and now we're surprised that this has come back to bite us in the ass.
We learn: the 4 pillars of learning
In Firefox middle click on title doesn't work (it should open link in new tab).
Agreed for most what was said there.
Still, I find that people mostly use SLA as only thing important to track for alerting and incidents arousal. There is a lot of said about importance of defining solid SLI - Service Level Indicators which are aligned to SLO - Service Level Objectives
SLAs are usually given to external user of SaaS, not very useful for SRE team.
Learn HTTP response status codes
In some ways the catalogue shopping experience seemed better than what internet shopping is like today, leafing through the pages or flipping to relevant, organised section of the book to look at the things just felt, I dunno, slower, more pleasurable?

The reading and re-reading built the anticipation and made the purchase more satisfying because you invested so much time into thinking about it beforehand.

There is also that you could be 100% certain that the product was genuine and from a brand that you had heard of, and Argos sold a full range, if you wanted to buy a product that would last you could. Contrast to the modern Amazon experience where you search, you get hundreds of results of near-identical items from weird-sounding brands you have never heard of, and you pick one at random knowing that it is going to be a piece of junk that won't last but it's so cheap you don't care. There's no pleasure in shopping like that, it is purely utilitarian and transactional.
Are you saying that citizens with a mind to criticize an administration/senator/whatever are regularly blackmailed into refraining from doing that?
If you're looking for a more structured (Open Source) user feedback collection app, see Fider: https://github.com/getfider/fider
‘Success Addicts’ Choose Being Special over Being Happy
Leveraging Cloudflare Workers to prevent attackers from bypassing Cloudflare
Ask HN: What are some easy and unique life hacks you know?
As part of learning Firebase I decided to build a website that will collect the best, unique and easy to implement life hacks.

But I need some help with content. If anyone has some good unique life hacks please comment here or submit it on my website:

https://lifehacks.tips/

Cheers!
I won't be suprised too see people carry on using either only face masks or masks with exotic patterns to fool facial-recognition cameras on the streets.
A College Degree Is No Guarantee of a Good Life
I'm pretty sure that's a false dichotomy. There are plenty of options in between.
In answer to the the question posed on the linked page 'who's the author?', probably Anthony Edwards (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A._W._F._Edwards) see https://quentinsf.com/software/venn/ and https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/combinatorics-probab... and https://books.google.co.uk/books/about/Cogwheels_of_the_Mind...
I've worked on unikernels for several years, and I've recently had some insight into low-overhead emulation. Depending on your use-case it's possible that a tiny emulator will be less overhead than everything else for the construction/destruction part. So, imagine that you have a programmable web server and each request needs to be served quickly. Then, reducing the overheading of forking the master machine is everything. The cost of doing a few emulated instructions into systemcalls (which largely model what you already have to check normally), you are going to have lots of room before you hit a point where something heavier like a JIT-enabled emulator or rv8 which has millisecond-overhead.

I am working on such a thing now and it has a 6-microsecond overhead in a highly concurrent scenario (60k req/s). So, I think there are cases for everything.
The Panopticon Is Already Here
Frequently Asked Questions about Go maps
Paywall Bypass:

https://web.archive.org/web/20200731062723/https://www.nytim...
So this is just a very roundabout way of subsidizing Australian news media without having to call it that.
Once you figure out simulation and EDA tools, breadboards are pretty much pointless. If the circuit is simple enough to breadboard within half a day, it's also simple enough to simulate effectively. If it's complex (normally due to high speed effects, parasitics and other things that are terrible on a breadboard) then the time spent getting it working in a breadboard is essentially wasted. You never know if it's the design or breadboarding at fault.

Soldered breadboarding (eg veroboard) has its place - at least then you can be certain there's not any electrical connection issues. But PCBs are so cheap and quick even that seems fairly pointless. It's very labour intensive for complex designs which would take less than a day to design and layout in EDA.
Tibetan monks do practice Bodhicitta, which is a kind of Metta (loving-kindness) practice. This produces positive states of mind, not just peaceful ones. The most famous practitioner is probably Matthieu Ricard, a Buddhist monk who has been called "the World's Happiest Man".
The banana is not just a background image, it is a set itself.
This is a matter of scale more than disruption though.

For instance Shimano crushed all other cycling equipment vendors in an unprecedented way, at a scale never see before and built a worldwide empire.

But did Shimano’s entry fundamentally change the field ? I’d argue no. They iterated and executed flawlessly, actually not disrupting what was a good business to them from the start.

I’d argue Facebook is in the same position. They brought unprecedented scale and became the massively dominant player, while keeping the field mostly the same in quality (targeted ads, social games etc. were already a thing, older SNS already pivoted on that before facebook coming in)
Same for random English to Swedish translations.
> For a website dedicated to sharing stuff from all around the we

Reddit has moved away from being a sharing website to being a social network. This started years ago, but they have consistently move in the direction of siloing users. Strongly encourage users to upload images and videos directly to reddit; Reddit media cannot be hot-linked and always shows you the reddit thread; new features are only available in the official site and apps; certain media won't play properly on third party apps; website experience degraded by constantly pushing users to their app, where they can better control and track them.
New Relic Now Simplified and Free for 100GB / Month
I used to imagine out entire households with the Argos catalogue. Even down the choosing the toaster and bed linen. The nostalgia is strong, but I agree, it's not been replaced by anything approaching the same experience for laid back browsing at home.
Well at least they finally did it, each labor prime minister has been against it until they left office and miraculously started supporting it.
There's not much evidence to support anything in your comment.

If masks were so effective it would be easy to find that benefit in any of the good quality trials that have been run, and we don't see that benefit. To see any benefit of mask wearing we have to drop the quality of evidence right down.

One thing often missing from these discussions is the concept of "number needed to treat". How many people need to wear a mask to prevent one additional infection?

https://www.fhi.no/globalassets/dokumenterfiler/rapporter/20...

> Given the low prevalence of COVID-19 currently, even if facemasks are assumed to be effective, the difference in infection rates between using facemasks and not using facemasks would be small. Assuming that 20% of people infectious with SARS-CoV-2 do not have symptoms, and assuming a risk reduction of 40% for wearing facemask, 200000 people would need to wear facemasks to prevent one new infection per week in the current epidemiological situation.