skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Here are the accuracy stats broken down by year, for the last ten years:

https://weather.slimyhorror.com/tenyears.html

'Last year' = last 365 days, '2 years ago' = the 365 days before then, etc etc

For most places, it does seem that this last year's weather forecasts have been worse.
That's my sentiment on this .... progress will be a killer in this realm of software development and on a large scale. Developers who get into robot cars the deaths their AI makes doesn't or won't bother them? Just analyze the data, learn and ship the fix who cares about johnny, susie and their kid killed by their AI's mistake in which they weren't even driving a robot car just driving alongside one like Uber's pedestrian killer robot car.

Right now the vast majority of developers code we are shipping is just fixing bugs in business and consumer applications where loss of life is almost nil in what we fix and ship.
% ping whatsapp.com
ping: whatsapp.com: Name or service not known
% ping web.whatsapp.com
ping: web.whatsapp.com: Name or service not known
% ping facebook.com
ping: facebook.com: Name or service not known
% ping instagram.com
PING instagram.com (31.13.65.174) 56(84) bytes of data.
64 bytes from 31.13.65.174 (31.13.65.174): icmp_seq=1 ttl=53 time=110 ms
For Facebook and WhatsApp it looks like a DNS issue, name resolution fails with SERVFAIL:

$ dig facebook.com

; <<>> DiG 9.16.21 <<>> facebook.com
;; global options: +cmd
;; Got answer:
;; ->>HEADER<<- opcode: QUERY, status: SERVFAIL, id: 23982
;; flags: qr rd ra; QUERY: 1, ANSWER: 0, AUTHORITY: 0, ADDITIONAL: 1

;; OPT PSEUDOSECTION:
; EDNS: version: 0, flags:; udp: 512
;; QUESTION SECTION:
;facebook.com. IN A

;; Query time: 16 msec
;; SERVER: 8.8.8.8#53(8.8.8.8)
;; WHEN: Mon Oct 04 17:53:00 CEST 2021
;; MSG SIZE rcvd: 41
Something as fundamental as heat and pressure are not important? I don't have a biology background, but learning that we just discovered these genes gave me the impression that we're still living in the stone age. Kudos to the award recipients for discovering the genes responsible.

It's probably that much harder to find these genes responsible for such basic sensory abilities that so much work must have gone into them if not for their lack therapeutic importance as you suggest, but also for the prestige scientists knew they would receive if they did discover them first.
Yeah let's keep it that way.
They claim R2 is only free for infrequent access, and the storage price is still really expensive compared to the cost of hard disks, so the potential for disruption seems quite limited.

There seems to be potential for big disruption only if downloads aren't counted as operation in "Above this range, R2 will charge significantly less per-operation than the major providers".

Based on the release it seems the thing that would be most disrupted is storage and distribution of huge files (one download operation, huge egress bandwidth), which would result in it mainly being used for Mega clones for paid piracy.
>Seems like as perfect an example of "cutting off nose to spite face" as I can imagine.

If Google was purely beneficial, then yes. If no, then it's a tradeoff.
It would be safer and more efficient to have a higher number of smaller nuclear plants closer to populations than a small number of large plants further away.
Most data interchange specs that actually get used come from suppliers that already have a huge share of the market, or from a widely recognized standards body. Since you aren't either, how about trying to start an independent org on which you will be one of many board members to promote interop itself, not necessarily your protocol. A long road to be sure but also somewhat less intractible.
Looks like the routes to their hosted nameservers are down, e.g. A.NS.FACEBOOK.COM
HN hug of death!
Nuclear was built up as the boogeyman in the mid 20th century as a vehicle to garner political support for various factions and to boost sentiment for conflict with the USSR. That’s why. It worked as a useful tool to grab people’s attention and give them strong opinions.
The problem is as soon as new predictions are made it causes the people participating in an economy to change their behavior.

Thats why people working at central banks like the Federal Reserve will try to downplay risks like inflation to prevent signalling that theyll raise interest rates causing a market correction or businesses from raising prices to deal with it.

I think the cats out of the bag now but they sure would love to stuff it back in the bag.
Implicit overflow is how your processor works. Until that changes it will always be appropriate in some programming languages.
The main problem is human overconfidence in the resulting functions, which are often measuring things humans didn't realize was embedded in the data (eg with tumor recognition), or are utterly hopeless at representing the infinite edge cases that the real world can present (eg self-driving cars).

It's one thing to have hoped that these methods could solve these problems when the improvements were coming rapidly, but there will always be a limit to how well these systems can perform. And the problem is that they fail in entirely non-intuitive ways, making human oversight to correct for errors very difficult or impossible as well.
Oh no...

Anyway...
Why obsessively following successful people online is dangerous
Peak Social
down in india
> Microsoft doing exactly the same thing they were, twenty plus years ago,

They never stopped, one big reason why Firefox restricts what plugins users can install was Windows installing plugins that could not be removed or disabled.
> Impossible, all USB-C QC chargers are also USB PD chargers.

You have a lot of USB-A QC chargers, and you just take a usb A -> C cable. [0]

> The port is either marked (everything but MacBooks) or doesn't matter (MacBooks, pretty sweet).

https://p3-ofp.static.pub/fes/cms/2021/07/01/5q6w49cnwh2ka55...

So... do I tell my grandma to plug it into the "weird robot"-symbol port (5), or the "danger, high voltage" one (6)? It fits into both.

> No, not at all. 20 to 10 years ago all charging ports (including on cameras, phones, everything) were barrel plugs of slightly different diameter; everybody's cranking out their own boxy black chargers putting out maddening variations on the same ~20V for laptops and 3-5V for smaller devices, you can't share chargers between devices, can't always find the replacement, especially if the device is on the older side. Buying a device with a different connector - bam, old charger goes to e-waste (or e-bay).

This is not really true... Some laptops maybe... Lenovo had a square one ( https://www.amazon.com/Converter-Charger-Adapter-ThinkPad-Un... ) for example. Phones had all the custom ones...

ericsson examples:

https://www.amazon.com/Charger-Cable-Ericsson-C510i-C702i/dp...

https://www.navigation-accessoires.com/en/sony-ericsson/p-se...

Either way, you brought one device + one cable, and you know where to plug it.

Yes, from an average tech nerd perspective, this might be better, because people know and remember what to use where, which protocol their devices use, and which port they have to plug it in. Normal users don't.. and if it fits, they use it like that. If they buy a custom charger for their laptop, they won't use it to charge their phone, because they know their phone charger won't charge their laptop, even though everything fits.

I'm not saying it's all bad, but dealing with several older relatives, and stuff that fits and doesn't work is making it a pain in the ass, especially with stores selling stuff (eg ikeas https://www.ikea.com/us/en/p/askstorm-40w-usb-charger-dark-g... ) that works but doesn't charge if under heavy use.

[0] https://www.amazon.com/Charge-Charger-Portable-Adapter-Folda...
To put a fine point on your comment, your figure also includes deaths from Fukushima and Chernobyl.

Also, the newer reactor designs are really impressive with respect to safety and economics.
The Myth That Democracies Bungled the Pandemic
A valid question, and one that deserves an answer.

However, also valid to note that 38k+ people die on US roads each yeah, and as I understand it, most of those are chalked up to being freak, unpreventable "accidents". So maybe there's a step here even ahead of autonomous vehicles where we commit to abandoning this way of thinking and insist that every road death is fully root-caused. Not just back to human error, but in the FAA sense, back to why equipment, processes, and infrastructure were in place that allowed a single moment of human inattention to be so deadly.
Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp are currently down for many users
People will downvote you for any number of reasons - some good, mostly bad. Ignore it, don't comment on it - "Please don't comment about the voting on comments. It never does any good, and it makes boring reading." Inquisitive and thoughtful HN readers will read your comment anyway, think about it, and comment on it.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
I just did this! https://weather.slimyhorror.com/tenyears.html

(edit: graphs would be a much better way to display this, but making this page full of numbers was a quick ten minute hack)
Maybe you need to talk to more? I would say I’m an environmentalist who is in favor of nuclear power, and I know more. (Edit: I and my friends went to school for physics so maybe that has something to do with it)
Those situations aren't analogous: if the water utility cuts me off, my options are things like drilling a well, trucking in water, or moving. If Cloudflare declines not to do business with me, there are many competitors around the world who I can switch to at varying levels of service depending on how much control I want.
This cannot be said enough.
It does exist already as a compiler optimisation method, where the compiler infers possible values at different locations in the code. It's called Value Range Propagation or Value Range Analysis [1]. Loops complicate it as a sibling comment mentions, but they don't prevent it from being useful.

There are indeed an infinite number of similar traits. Compilers have to limit themselves to a reasonable subset, because if you take the idea of general numeric traits far enough, you end up with general purpose theorem proving.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Value_range_analysis
Maybe they tried everything else before that.

At first it was working but they couldn't serve responses: https://i.imgur.com/UaCtOiX.png

Notice the "2020"
Just wondering - would the engineer who made the mistake be fired?
WhatsApp is pretty important infrastructure for most of the world
To me there's a difference. Probably that terminating tls is base of CFs business model.

Or that I'm just being illogical. No idea, just...don't like it.
Following more and more people leads to more time wasted.
I don't think they created microsoft-ie:// protocol links. In some ways, this feels worse.
> US commercial nuclear plants

To be clear, US coal and natural gas plants kill a lot of people regularly.
Though it would be naive on the side of the FDA to assume McKinsey didn’t advise some pharma companies. The list of Fortune 500 companies they don’t advise is probably shorter than the one they advise. That doesn’t excuse bad disclosure if it is the case, but it is hard to argue the FDA would have done anything differently.
There's a difference though now, isn't there?

For instance, every modern smartphone today has AI inference accelerator in it. Not even the largest supercomputer in 1985 (or even 1995) had anything close to the AI capability of even a phone today. Some are even beaten out by watches.

Also, there were no practical applications of AI in 1985. There was a lot of speculation, but nothing came out of it because the technology just wasn't there yet.

Today computer vision, voice recognition, voice synthesis, driving assist mechanisms, face recognition, and many other fields have been advanced considerably through the use of AI technologies.

We have yet to even scratch the surface of what is possible with our current level of development.

Yes, we'll hit a wall soon enough, but we'll hit that wall having developed a range of useful products. The previous iterations were considered hype because nothing came out of them, but that can not be said for the current environment.

It's like saying there is a hype-cycle in cataract treatment because the development of method plateaued between babylonia and the age of reason.
No apologies needed. The internet gives people a platform to speak without the same(but not necessarily less) social accountability that exists in meatspace. The change in accountability implies a change in the access that participants have to social scripts. What we are experiencing is a mismatch of social script access between meatspace and the digital space enabled by novel digital mediums and increased connectivity.

That is the current contradiction. My bet is that neither the meatspace social construct nor the digital social construct wins. The resolution is in their synthesis. That probably means that some meatspace social norms change and some digital social norms change. Finally, any resistance to those changes in inherently reactionary.
Read a Paper: A Domain-Specific Language for Video Editing
Hope it's permanent
In the beginning it responded but gave server errors.
Yeah we like our solution more of course. The numbers in https://cdn.sanity.io/images/f1avhira/production/20a5afdaae3... are documented by Amazon themselves.
If they are then Facebook is worse than I thought.
> We have beat humans on every single atari game by at least one order of magnitude

There's mechanical skill involved, it's not purely intelligence.

> We are also seeing models that are able to generate code given prompts.

This has been discussed a lot, but the generated code is nowhere close to good enough for large projects where you really need intelligence.

> Given enough representational power, I don't see why a...

Except that it's not linear scaling. The larger NLP models consume absurdly large resources, it's not straightforward to "get enough representational power"

Also, most models fail to adapt to new tasks outside of their narrow training scope, that's a massive problem. Even if you make models large, you will find that getting data covering all edge cases is exponentially expensive.
>If you clear your Google history

Also what if you are logged into Google, but your Google search history was always switched off?

>What if you did the search from Brave or Safari, where you were not logged into Google?

Relevant quote from the article:

>In Wisconsin, the government was hopeful Google could also provide “CookieIDs” belonging to any users who made the searches. These CookieIDs “are identifiers that are used to group together all searches conducted from a given machine, for a certain time period. Such information allows investigators to ascertain, even when the user is not logged into a Google account, whether the same individual may have conducted multiple pertinent searches,” the government wrote.
dig +trace messenger.com

shows that all is well with the root DNS servers and

dig @a.ns.facebook.com messenger.com
;; connection timed out; no servers could be reached

and also

ping a.ns.facebook.com
3 packets transmitted, 0 packets received, 100.0% packet loss

shows that something's wrong with facebook.
That’s not the culture at facebook
Cost shouldn’t be the only dimension to evaluate solutions to planet-wide problems.

See https://youtu.be/KC7YD98HixM. It does cost more to generate nuclear power but it’s also the only viable clean and “firm” (turn on and off based on demand) type of power generation available to us.
Do revolutions typically start over night or do they build up until there's a tipping point? Apple has been working towards a revolution, the M1 is the tipping point.
Don't want to be swept up in a dragnet? Don't want to be a suspect based on normal everyday activities? Then you better not use Google, try DuckDuckGo or another private search engine.

Edit: downvote all you want. dealing with google is like talking to the police, whatever you say/do will be used against you. in googles case for advertising/influencing you or by the government using the google gold mine. you can spare yourself by using a different search engine.
This definitely isn't a disruption in the academic sense of the term: https://hbr.org/2015/12/what-is-disruptive-innovation

But even in the casual sense I don't think it's disruptive. They've introduced a competing service at a modestly lower cost. This won't put AWS out of business. Customers won't switch away en masse. It even won't make a noticeable dent in AWS's quarterly revenues.

So this isn't disruption. it's bog-standard business competition. Which I very much welcome.
DuckDuckGo famously does not save your search history but the way things are going I fear that one day such a thing will be mandated.
Self-host a messenger without your own domain
What makes you think it was a mistake? What makes you think an engineer did it?

Sometimes things just break and take time to fix.
What leak are you referring to?
I think it's more simple human nature. When you have billions, it's so easy to delegate work that tax avoidance becomes as simple as flipping a switch that says 'pay less taxes'. And if your highly distanced from the effects of your actions, I doubt many people would not flip the switch.
My Missing Memory
Yes, it's true, but they can change their own rules. I'm sure there have always been sexual transgressions, my family left their church two generations ago because of a pedophile priest (Father Butch in Dauphin Manitoba). Search is cheap and getting cheaper, and their institution is being damaged by a policy that wants to defy gravity. The Catholic church is ancient, and no doubt resilient, but it has never had to contend with anything like the Internet.
Maybe you were thinking the autopilot accident rate being 5-10x _less_ than human drivers?

> In the 2nd quarter, we recorded one crash for every 4.41 million miles driven in which drivers were using Autopilot technology (Autosteer and active safety features). For drivers who were not using Autopilot technology (no Autosteer and active safety features), we recorded one crash for every 1.2 million miles driven. By comparison, NHTSA’s most recent data shows that in the United States there is an automobile crash every 484,000 miles.

Tesla publishes these safety reports; the accident rate has held fairly steady quarter over quarter: https://www.tesla.com/VehicleSafetyReport
I love my M1 Air, but ultimately it's a moderately faster version of what I had before. The real benefit, so far, is that I have a fanless machine with the same kind of power as the previous pro level machines. Otherwise, it hasn't exactly changed what the computer is on a fundamental level.
To be extremely pedantic, their general approach isn't new. Folks in the meteorology community have been toying with generative modeling approaches for the past five years. For example [1] used GANs for super-resolution reconstruction of radar-derived imagery and if you skim the past 4-5 AI conferences at the American Meteorological Society Annual Meeting you'll see multiple people working with similar (albeit simpler - usually weather folks aren't domain experts in AI) modeling approaches.

The DeepMind work is fantastic. The media spin isn't - and I don't mean DM's PR team, I mean the opinions shouted from the rooftops across blogs and popular media (including the MIT Technology Review [2]). DM's technique still falls squarely in the domain of extrapolation from recent imagery - exactly what some commenters here are pointing out was developed decades ago. There's little evidence that the new approach can robustly handle the development of new convection or non-linear evolution of mesoscale systems. That's obvious in the animation that's being shared - within the envelope of the linear system over the UK, the structure of storm cells is highly persistent and the overall motion is linear. But you can readily identify areas of unrealistic growth/decay (usually attributed to numerical diffusion in pure image processing techniques, e.g. semi-lagrangian advection of the background OF field).

That matters because the practical application(s) of precipitation nowcasting are really limited to things like, "it will rain in XX minutes at location YY". As long as there is rain on the radar, that problem is 'solved' about as precisely as you would ever need.

IMHO the biggest innovation here relates to the computational efficiency of the approach. Probably a total beast to train the DGMR system, but inferences in a handful of seconds? That's awesome - it opens up new possibilities for _analysis_ (e.g. sampling a large ensemble from the latent space of plausible future states of the radar imagery and producing highly-tuned probabilistic forecasts or incorporating stochastic mechanism that may yield more realistic projections of cellular growth/decay within linear systems) which have thus far been computationally intractable.

The next leap forward in nowcasting is convective initiation. That would be a legitimate game changer in meteorology.

[1]: https://www.mdpi.com/2073-4433/10/9/555/htm
[2]: https://www.technologyreview.com/2021/09/29/1036331/deepmind...
Just compile with -fwrapv.
https://www.whatsmydns.net/#A/facebook.com
It isn't just DNS. If you happen to have cached entries, the site is returning errors as well.
How could anyone answer that question? We don't even know that an engineer made a mistake in the first place, much less what the mistake was and what led up to it.
facebook.com DNS is not resolving in most of the world right now (click Search on the top left):

https://dnschecker.org/#A/facebook.com
Over the last several months I have been learning and using ClickUp [1] and it provides several tools that can be used to achieve what the article describes.

First they provide a very flexible hierarchy. You can create multiple workspaces with multiple folders and lists of tasks within them, or start with just one space with one list of tasks.

Next you can view a list vertically as a list, or horizontally as a kanban-style board, or as a mind map, or a number of other options.

Third, you can put tasks on a calendar to timebox and arrange the flow of your work.

You can define a set of statuses to apply to the tasks in a lists, and can copy these status arrangements between lists. These define the flow of your work and the columns of your board.

Tasks can have subtasks, and can also contain check lists and comments. Check lists can be converted into substasks. Combinations of folders lists tasks and subtasks can be made into templates to speed the setup of a new project.

There are a number of other features which help to capture info and keep it in one place: Notepad is a quick place to jot something down that can be converted to a task later; Docs is a somewhat wiki-like place to write longer notes; then you can link things to provide the necessary relationships and associations. There are also numerous integrations with other apps to import or export data.

The phone app is pretty good too, including the calendar and kanban views.

Not a paid endorsement, just very enthusiastic about the capabilities of this system and how it can be adapted to suit many different working styles. Thought other productivity-heads might enjoy it! =)

1: https://www.clickup.com
I think the OP was referring to the practice of "encouraging" users to sign up for iCloud, buy an Apple Watch, iPhone, iPad, Apple Music, Apple TV, Apple Arcade... and use Apple Sheets, Apple Mail, Apple News, Apple Maps, iMovie, Garage Band, etc.

I'm sure they would argue they're just providing a seamless experience for users, but I imagine there's a tiny bit of business interest in there as well.
Malthus wrote in the 1800s about how society was on the verge of collapse because we were all going to run out of resources.

People who take a lot of stock in these types of predictions generally cannot see the value of economic growth and try to save the world by enforcing their own set of puritanical environmental restrictions.