skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Siri the voice assistant is disappointing, but I find Google's and Amazon's to be disappointing also and I think it's an inherent problem of voice assistants and AI. If Google Assistant can get basic tasks correct more often, I just end up irritated that it can't get more complex tasks correct.

But Apple's been branding some simpler heuristics as Siri and those are excellent:
- Suggesting data to add to a contact based on scraping from elsewhere
- Associating a phone number that's calling me with a person who emailed me with a phone number in the signature
- Suggesting apps to open based on time, location, connected peripherals, or recent activity
- Suggesting driving directions based on calendar items or history

None of these make me say "wow! AI!" But they do make me feel like my phone "just works" which is even better.
OpenFisca: The French tax code, turned into Python
Which would make the offering they have for european customers even more laughable.
The tendency towards centralization (corporate or state, doesn't really make a difference) is because of three things:

1) Economies of scale for machinery (in this case, computers, routers, etc.) Nowadays, Facebook and Google are laying their intercontinental fiber optic cables. Apple and Amazon are developing their own silicon. Decentralized can't compete with that.

2) Economies of scale for user networks. In Monthly Average Users we trust. Maybe a Mastodon instance works out for a small group of like-minded tech-literate friends. Realistically, small platforms just can't compete without growing into large platforms. Even in the naturally-decentralized blog space, medium and substack dominate.

...hey Carl, substack and tiktok are new upstarts, how did they compete with centralized giants?

3) Economies of scale for attention. Advertisements these days are pretty compelling. UI is important for online platforms to get mass adoption. Both of these things need capital to build out, and benefit tremendously from scale.

Add these things up and there's no surprise the masses gravitate towards centralized services, especially since they've figured out a business model that's free and "just works" for the non-technical user.
True, and the social isolation has sucked. I've had the shots, and those sucked too. But I'm not concerned this is going to be a new permanent state of affairs. I think it was a one time emergency, and how one carries oneself in a crisis says a lot about a person. If or when it shows itself to be a permanent state of affairs - then the calculus of endless vaccinations and endless quarantine would change things. I have patience and a long term view of this whole situation.
Supercomputers reveal how X chromosomes fold, deactivate
You're implying that Democrats shouldn't be criticized because Republicans are worse in some other respect. Every group should be open to criticism. One group's ignorance doesn't absolve another's.

Addressing your specific points, the BLM rioters were almost exclusively Democrats, and there were hundreds of BLM riots: https://acleddata.com/acleddatanew/wp-content/uploads/2020/0...

As for ivermectin, it has been used in hundreds of millions of humans, so characterizing it as "horse paste" is not accurate:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ivermectin#History

If you wanted to point to some way in which Republicans in general are worse, you could point out how anti-vaccine conspiracy theories are more prevalent among Republicans. This form of ignorance has done considerable harm.
The winters aren’t really more mild in Japan. They invented the kotatsu to get around poor insulation (I’ve stayed in low quality housing in Japan in the winter and it wasn’t fun).

Japanese rebuild their structures much more often than in Canada and the USA and so don’t overbuild accordingly. The result is that housing quality appears better simply because the structures are newer. See https://japanpropertycentral.com/2014/02/understanding-the-l...
It depends on the actual toilet bowl (the brand). Some are much better then others at flushing.
Break into this CEO’s laptop to steal company secrets and plant malware
Lenovo Legion Play leak shows off an Android-powered cloud gaming console
> Planned downtime is still downtime

Isn’t that obvious? Did it really need to be said?

What the article misses is that in most cases where I worked with clients, downtime was not necessarily for the customer mainly, but for the internal non tech team. You need planned downtime to: have a proper recovery plan in case whatever you’re doing doesn’t work out and you gotta revert, or so that you can work comfortably. I had downtime at different moments day and night and planned downtime during the day or night; planned always wins on so many levels.

If you think planned downtime is not downtime, it’s not the strategy’s fault, it’s your own thinking.

The whole thermostat thing is really not worthy of addressing. Your technical dependency justifies a feeling, but an opinion is a bit much. At best you can call it a half baked thought. Definitely not worth an “opinion piece”
China’s dancing grannies: ‘stun gun’ claims to solve nuisance dance-offs
Yeah over the past few years this has been an issue I have found myself becoming increasingly passionate about. It's a particular problem of internet connected devices - in the past it was not really possible to own something which is acting on behalf of another party while it's in your possession, but that's exactly what corporate-owned operating systems do. And we haven't taken the time to develop legal frameworks around how that should work.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28755257
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28755028
sorry. Yeah, the parent poster did it to me. I didn't mean to pass it on. Don't worry. Put on Fugazi and smoke a joint... you won't remember this in a couple hours.
Why would you disable them?
You fix it and done.
The reddit coinbase/pro sub, there are scam accounts on there that message you "Hi this is official support" something along those lines.
Is it common to put where you defecate in the same room as where you clean? I've seen many "half baths" which are just toilets and sinks, but bathrooms that also contain toilets not even separated by a door.

If it's about space utility, then dividing the rooms in two allows twice as many occupants, unless it's customary for people not to wait to use the toilet until others are out of the shower.
Sure, but conference calls usually come with a timezone and time, not a city (which isn’t exactly unique to a timezone)
As someone who was pre primed to agree with this article, I still think it is a garbage faux outrage piece. Roofs rot out on average after a few years? Give me a break.

This journalism is flimsier than the houses it is discussing.
> Sounds like the BMJ dont trust this chap and are questioning his financial interests.

The article you mentioned only refers to stock portfolio and potential conflicts of interest regarding policy decisions on performing antibody tests.

The statement that was quoted in this discussion is about an entirely unrelated subject: the prevalence of long Covid. The initial claim is that the statement is supported by data from the Office for National Statistics.

If you want to question John Bell's claim regarding the prevalence of long Covid, just check if his statement is corroborated by the data. Either it's supported or not.
Facebook Outage Increased Developer Throughput by 32%
Why would you disable them?
You fix it and done.

If you start your project with 0 warnings and enforce it in CI it is responsibility of developer who adds the code to make it warnings free and not disable the warning (that needs to be checked in code review).
Yes, I’m familiar with the pivot after failing at its stated goals. That has the same problem: you need to conduct illegal transactions on both ends which will be expensive even if it doesn’t lead to getting caught, and the volatility is potentially ruinous if you can’t wait for favorable exchange rates with a stable currency.
Coronavirus's risk to children is low. It's not true that there are no mitigations for Covid: children in the UK are being vaccinated against Covid, as often happens against winter flu.

Measures to protect adults against coronavirus have not come for free for children. Mental health referrals amongst children have doubled since before the pandemic [1]. In more unintended consequences, smoking amongst young people has also surged [2].

Now that we have the vaccine in the UK, and most adults and the vulnerable are vaccinated, I'm against anything that further disrupts a normal childhood, as at this stage, measures would be causing more harm than good.

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/society/2021/sep/23/childrens-nh...
[2] https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-58317263
Dun Da Lamh
Sending encrypted email and using Tor to bypass WiFi is restrictions are very, very crypto-nerd things to do, and running Linux is non-mainstream at best.
The speech recognition is performed in the cloud, not locally, so under the current architecture they do indeed need to upload the audio capture following the wakeword.

One of the other things I used them for frequently before disabling it on all my devices and removing all of the networked mics from my house was things like "remind me to $THING at 21 tonight".
Buckle Lock. Secure the buckles and secure your backpack
Backpacks are insecure. Often, theft is the result of an easy opportunity. Very few thieves carry knives and scissors. Secure the buckles and secure your backpack.
I live in a ~150 year old wood house that has no deeper issues and in the city nearby there are houses way over 500 years old standing strong.

By our standard the sentence above doesn't sound to wrong.
Do one better, get their contact info and then sue. They are all breaking some law, so once you have their info it is easy to win in court.

You pretty much need to be a lawyer to pull the above off.
It wasn't a personal attack. I don't know the guy from Adam. It was a response to someone writing that the authority thing was "sorted out."
Solid photo, the colors pop

Side note: he's one of those guys I used to "follow" while listening to podcasts about being an entrepreneur, figures like $70K/mo insane. I haven't gotten there but still, gave me drive back in the day. Made me think about life differently.
I read the analyses posted here and those seem level-headed. But I saw the numbers at the front and given I am a big fan of reuse / renting companies, I got all giddy and excited and didnt last past couple of pages. How can I improve my mindset when it comes to reading ipo filings ? I couldnt spot the issues others pointed out. Any tips ?
1. Masks are a symbolic statement of tribal affiliation
2. The mask tribe is concerned about the look or fashion of the mask
3. Surgical masks or N95 are not attractive
4. Cloth masks are more comfortable
5. There has never been any definitive, scientifically-based guidance or training on the use of masks and the resulting effectiveness for this virus. People just throw on a mask and hope for the best.
> IOW, communist products were not planned for forced obsolescense?

Can you detail how forced obsolescence applies?

I detailed in comment above how this communist glass wasn't better at least for bars/pubs/homes.

- These glasses also broke, just a bit harder.

- Breaking isn't a big issue (it's not common at least in bars/pubs or homes). I can count on one hand the glasses I've broken in my life.

- it was more expensive to produce

As for other markets, there are better products (secured glass for cars/home windows, gorilla glass for phones, etc)

This is just the sort of idea that worked well during communist party meetings and got implemented... too bad it was a waste of money, but hey, can't argue with the party.
In Austria banks switched from Maestro to Mastercard Debit to make online payments easier.
Interesting that drug decriminalization has been coincidentally in lockstep with social strife. If I were an oligarch, I might prefer people smoke weed, indulge in psychedelics, etc. if it means shifting focus away from me. Worked in the 60s.
It is theoretically possible with self-study, but the problem is it's still very easy to make practical mistakes even if you "understand" all the theory.

Eventually you run into a problem and have to re-spin the board with no margin of extra time (assuming this is for work). In that scenario, having access to an experienced expert is immensely helpful.
If you used Facebook to login to some other service then that account also essentially became inaccessible
That is amazing, I had no idea. It's not something I ever thought about, I just assumed that everyone thinks in the same way.
> And they didn't create an "App Store" or any other free extensible model for Siri. They should have, because people are on aggregate more creative than any big company including Apple -- thanks to survivorship bias.

They did, its just not well advertised. Any app on iOS can expose actions to Siri, for example the BBC Sounds app exposes actions to start playing a specific radio station. Those actions are then available from Siri on your phone, and any HomePods that have been granted access to execute actions on your phone.

On your point of looking at it like a command line, those same actions are also exposed to Shortcuts, allowing you to compose them in arbitrary pipelines. The output of one action can be passed into the output of another or even stuffed into a variable for later use.

I've developed for all three of the major voice assistants and Siri is by far the best simply because it completely throws out the window the concept of developing a "voice application", voice is just one possible entry point into an iOS app.
Things like this make me think of the movie Gattaca. Mild Spoilers After the murder, they just go around vacuuming up any and all organic material to test for DNA. They get a hit from someone who “isn’t supposed to be there” and immediately focus the entire investigation on that person. It fits the very real pattern of using science to just confirm the human biases held by the people using it. If police can sweep up and search through a mountain of data, it is going to be the Muslim immigrant hit they focus on over the white middle manager. It will be the person struggling off and on with homelessness that gets arrested because they matched a pattern and didn’t have an alibi, over the suburban mom.

That if you give police a list of random correlations, they will focus on “those people” that are assumed to be more criminal and usually have less means and ability to fight back.
I’ve upgraded piecemeal several times this decade. Harddrives-> Sata SSD -> NVMe SSD. The power supply, fans, and case are all 10 years old and continue to be great. I’ve upgraded the graphics card 4 times, and the CPU/MoBo twice. I’ve upgraded or extended the RAM three times.

There is definitely value in SOC for CPU/MoBo (maybe memory), but the other components work better upgrading at different rates.
Note:

this is a parody, billboard booked is in San Jose, not Cupertino. Nearest I could find
It’s not a higher standard, just recognizing that the situations are different. People need water in a way that they don’t need a CDN, and the options for getting it are local rather than global.
Alcohol does not decrease stress, it increases it. Alcohol consumption is a stressor itself.
Blogspam: https://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=deepCelibate
Driving isn't solved though. There are very limited areas where computers can drive. Apart form that, driving is done entirely by humans.

Driving would be a task where AI could become hugely important and help to solve labor shortages (see UK right now). But it's not nearly there yet. Apart from that, I don't see anything in that list that would make a big impact on humanity. Solving Chess and Go was impressive, but it doesn't really change people's lives. And facial recognition seems to have more malicious use cases than ethical ones.

And bipedal locomotion has improved but is it really solved? Are there robots that can reliably perform the range of motion that humans can? There are some very expensive robots that can jump or run but that's only a small part of what humans can do.

From my subjective observations, there's very little automation in the physical world. It's all still done by humans. No matter if it's picking up trash, stocking supermarket shelves, driving buses and trucks or delivering the mail. Many of those (maybe except for driving) are extremely simple tasks for humans, they haven't been reliably solved by machines or are far more expensive than hiring humans.
They don’t need it. The danger was always Credit Karma’s users + the tax business. The tax business by itself means little. Spinning it off even makes the deal look better to regulators.
The article doesn’t really explain very much (not that it ought to explain everything, but there’s very little).

The proof of the standard claims about ‘expressive adequacy’ (=functional completeness) in propositional logic is given in cap. 4 of Button’s Metatheory; forallx:Cambridge uses the same notation and gives a fairly easy (from a skim) introduction to propositional logic.¹

Briefly, however, a simple method of dealing with at least some of the cases is as follows.

Consider the connectives of propositional logic (e.g., ¬, ∧, ∨—add more symbols to taste to represent every other possible connective given by a truth table on two variables).

A sentence contains various sentence letters (P, Q, R, P₁, Q₁, R₁, P₂…—adjust to taste) and connectives; we define them inductively, with the base ‘atomic’ cases as the sentence letters and the inductive cases

- ¬φ where φ is a sentence,

- (φ · ψ) where φ and ψ are sentences, and · is some ‘binary connective’ (i.e., it corresponds to a function given by a truth table with two variables: it could be ∧ or ∨ or even the Quine dagger.)

Now, let the complexity of a sentence be the number of connectives appearing within it, which is equal to the number of invocations of one of the inductive rules above required to obtain a sentence (one can also think of sentences as trees).

We use induction on the complexity of a sentence to prove statements about all sentences. Let us consider, by way of example, or (∨). We can prove that ∨ alone is not expressively adequate.

Consider an assignment of truth values such that the truth value of any sentence letter is T(rue). Now, it should be possible to write some sentence the truth value of which is F(alse) solely using ∨, if ∨ is expressively adequate.

The difficulty is that one can’t. Informally, ∨ cannot take two true statements and give a false one, but it only has (under this assignment of truth values) true statements. It is easy to fill in the base and inductive cases because propositional logic is truth-functional (i.e., it does not matter what a proposition says, merely whether it is true or false.)

Similar strategies to find properties invariant under the use of inductive rules may be used to prove all sorts of metalogical statements, as shown in Button’s book.

0: available at http://www.homepages.ucl.ac.uk/~uctytbu/Metatheory.pdf

1: http://www.homepages.ucl.ac.uk/~uctytbu/OERs.html
I don’t know why you continue to care. All I see are people clinging to their precious mask mandates and pushing for vaccine booster shots, with the ‘hospitals are filling up’ and ‘the unvaccinated cause mutations’ excuses. But as has been known from at least a year ago, hospitals are filling up with the vulnerable population so that would leave no reason for vaccine mandates on the not vulnerable population, like young people, and vaccinations do not prevent mutations.
I find it works well for a few use cases:

- play some song or playlist

- open all the blinds, or a set of blinds, or all lights, or some lights. And close then close them/turn them off.

That’s about it. The only reason it works well for those use cases is because the equivalent menu/physical controls take too much time to use vs voice commands.
The Superfest glass process is very similar to what is used to produce Gorilla glass. The glass is heated up and submerged in or sprayed with a potassium solution. The hot glass matrix opens up enough for potassium ions to diffuse into it. When the glass cools, the potassium ions are trapped creating a lot of internal stress.

This internal stress helps the glass to resist being scratched or broken —- until it fails catastrophically. :-)
Absolutely agree about the disconnect between my own experience and the views coming from the community. It has made an already frustrating experience even more off putting.
Pakistan took YouTube offline–how to ensure it never happens again (2008)
> An article which describes the results of a study..

Presenting your own editorialized conclusions is not the same as providing a primary source.

The proof is that you've tried to pass off a study on the quantification of the real world correlation of symptoms tentatively linked to long covid as, somehow, proof of a causal relationship, even though nothing of the sort was suggested.

You're inadvertently demonstrated the need to check primary sources, and the role that tabloids play in disseminating misinformation
Way back when I wrote accounting software in the UK. I had a conversation with my boss about us writing our own payroll software so we didn't have to a pay a third party to white label their software.

I then went and found out how many folks one of our competitors (a bit more mass market than us) had writing payroll software.

The answer was it was a six person team just to keep up with the government changes every year. We never bothered any more with that idea.

Payroll is surprisingly hard.
Why Rain Might Cause Wars of the Future
> had been able to silence unpopular opinions?

They definitely could, it just didn't matter because people spoke up anyway.
It was entertaining.
Why is the attitude so prevalent in 2021 that the market is always the answer and regulation never is?

Every high-functioning society is built on a foundation of sensible and fair regulation. Over the past 30 years, we've seen a rise in truly transformative web technologies, and mostly we've left it up to the market to see what would happen. And what has happened has not been universally good. When will we decide it's time to regulate these tech firms?
That’s not what the term means. If those services bother you, your advocacy will be more effective if it’s not misleading.
Mostly it's the Capacitors that go bad.
Adrian's Digital Basement has some videos on resurrecting old 8bit apple computers.
here's a good playlist to start. He starts talking about the power supply around the 26 min mark.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qTkX7rkq_Kk&list=PL4tFqFVNf5...
Can anyone with more insight into the three researchers explain if this is a political statement or if their work really represents the best physics research? I am genuinely asking as I don't know much about their research.
I follow an Instagram account which features houses from all over Europe. Only Norway/Sweden/very northern countries have mostly wooden houses. The rest of Europe has mostly stone/brick houses.

It might also be climate related, wooden houses are warmer and stone houses are cooler.
>> I am of course pessimistic on tax reform since that general populace just accepts "oh yeah filing taxes sucks"

That is not the hold back for tax reform, any efforts to simply the tax code gets push back from every special interest that to keep their deductions, and they point to "the others" as "unfair" deductions, so it never changes.

People with kids want to keep the massive deductions for having kids, even though childless people believe that is unfair, people with homes want to keep the deductions for home ownership even though renters believe that is unfair, and so it goes down the line for 1000's and 1000's of loop holes and deductions...

Never a one shall be expunged from the code
This is more likely imo