skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
AirPods Suck in Video Conferences
Am I the only one that has trouble understanding people that use Airpods on video conferences? Overall I think I can understand over 95% of what someone using Airpods says, but it takes so much more mental energy and focus, compared to the people that have a little boom mic on a legit headset or have a desktop mic. If someone using Airpods has a non-native-English accent, then my comprehension drops even more and I find it really taxing to piece together what they are saying. In 2022, I really started struggling with so-called Zoom-fatigue and I've narrowed down the biggest factor to struggling to understand what people are saying with Airpods (combined with having to crank the volume of my headphones on my end).

I have dug into the issue with specific people and often we discover that they were inadvertently using the mic from their laptop or webcam. When we restored audio input to the Airpods, there was an improvement, but the audio quality still, for the most part, kind of, just ... sucks.

Is it just me? If not, can this serve as a PSA to Airpod users to upgrade to a simple, legit headset or desktop mic for the benefit of your fellow employees?

Airpod users:
Do you find people asking you to repeat yourself in meetings?
Have you tested out your set up (where the video conf app records your voice and plays it back to you)?
Side question: Do you have any health concerns about making wireless earbuds your long-term choice of audio hardware, given we're going to be using video conferences for the foreseeable future? I'm sure Bluetooth is generally "safe," but what of the health effects of long-term (3-8 hours per day for the next 5+ years) use of two wireless radio transmitters so close to your brain?
I know someone who was doing the equivalent of the bartending thing. Her grandfather was loaded and all major expenses taken care of. She kept it quiet but would give coworkers a ton of shit for general life things that she didn’t have to worry about. “sorry I’m late I had a flat tire.” “That’s not an excuse. You should have found a way to get new tires so you’re not late like me.”
So sorry to hear of your loss, but so glad that you were able to have this talk with him before he died.

I am the family historian. I've learned that genealogy is not just about collecting names and dates, it's really important to collect stories. To that end interviewing family members, especially older family members, is key to understanding their lives and the lives of those who came before them.

I've interviewed not just my parents but also their surviving siblings, my great aunt before she passed, a distant cousin in his 90s, and perhaps most importantly my late father in law who never talked of his wartime service with his family but opened up to me. I recently shared one recording with his son, my brother in law, and it was really quite moving as he could hear his voice and stories that he had never known in detail.

People who take on the role of the family historian learn that lots of old photos, letters, and other keepsakes will come your way. One of the best things was an account written by a maternal great aunt about our immigrant ancestors and her impression of their personalities. The story of this document is interesting in itself. My older 1st cousin once removed back in the 70s had a similar role to mine, and tried to get her to record it on cassette. She refused, but decided to write it out (in longhand) which the cousin's wife typed up. A copy was lying around the family cabin. I can't tell you how overjoyed I was to find it.

I've built a small business based around genealogy, and I love to evangelize and encourage people to connect with relatives and share stories. In this age of endless distractions and digital tools and bad stuff happening around the world, talking with people and learning about their lives (and their family stories) is one of the most important things we can do IMHO.
GPT-3 prompt:

I really love the vibe of Koh Lanta in Thailand. It has tourist amenities without really being touristy. I find it charming, slow and cheap. Is there a place in Croatia like it?

Completion:

There is no exact place in Croatia that has the same vibe as Koh Lanta in Thailand. However, there are places in Croatia that have a similar charm and slower pace. These places include Hvar Island, Korcula Island, and Istria. While these places do have some tourist amenities, they are not as touristy as Koh Lanta and still offer a more authentic Croatian experience.

Another:

There is no exact equivalent to Koh Lanta in Croatia, but the small town of Nin on the Dalmatian coast comes close. Nin is a charming, slow-paced town with beautiful beaches and a relaxed atmosphere. It is also quite inexpensive by Croatian standards.
Yeah but you get no independence that way. Slip up and post the wrong "badspeak" phrase of the month? Shadow banned. As long as content is sitting underneath a huge lingering banhammer, the content will never be as raw and authentic as content was back in 2006. This reinforces the echo chamber issue and also makes the internet feel contrived and soulless.
Have you ever used a Nintendo Switch?
This reminded me of a project from long ago. When I was growing up, I was not particularly good about expressing gratitude to my family. I recognized this in myself and in college and wanted to make up for lost time.

I went around and interviewed my extended family and some of my mom's friends over the course of about 6 months. I asked each person for any fun or touching stories they had. There were a lot. I edited down many hours of footage into a 45 minute video that basically said, "thanks for the last 22 years".

Days before I moved across country to start my job after graduation, I got the family together and had a viewing party. Unbeknownst to my mom this wasn't a going away party for me, it was an appreciation party for her. It was a wonderful moment.

Two people who I interviewed as part of this project have since passed away. So I dug up and digitized all of the unedited footage so that I can easily pull it up on my computer. There are some wonderful memories from my grandma and my father at a happier/healthier time in their lives. In their final years they were not really able to speak at all, so this footage really captures them at their relative best. It has been a helpful way for me and my family to deal with grief.

OP: Thank you for sharing your story. Sorry for your loss.
>I think calling gender a sensitive context is not unreasonable.

It is very unreasonable, but it's also the truth. sigh
Someone here put me onto "The Thick of It" and I absolutely loved it. But some of the humor comes from its frenetic pacing -- unlike "Friends", which someone here praised, there was absolutely no pausing for the audience to "get it."

I was just in awe that any cast could be that quick, or that any writers could write that stuff.
Design patterns don't have much to do with 'good code'.

Many(most?) 'design patterns' are just standard ways of coming up with abstractions that your language does not provide. It's no wonder that particular book became popular at around the same time a particular programming language saw large adoption.
I don’t blame other countries for banning American information providing/gathering services either.
"Domain Driven Design" is very poorly written. It's 500 pages of small print with small margins, so realistically it's closer to 750-1,000 pages. Evans is a terrible, verbose writer. I read Domain Driven Design, but I can't recommend it. Surely there's a shorter version someone could recommend? There's only a handful of good ideas in the book which I'm sure could be easily distilled.

Domain Driven Design is also a dangerous paradigm to apply everywhere. In fact I suspect that the majority of the time it's a mistake. Specifically the act of hard coding business concepts (products and processes) as first class citizens (classes, services) into your software. This makes your business inflexible and requires engineering effort to iterate on your business processes. It's a poison, and the deeper you build it into your architecture, the deeper the poison seeps, locking you into stale business concepts.

Domain Driven Design should be analyzed much more critically than it is, especially given how much time engineers waste slogging through the ramblings of Evan's clouded mind. I highly recommend https://dev.to/cheetah100/domain-driven-disaster-147i for further reading.
That's what I was thinking too. But for what it's worth, California still has about 10% of America's population, but 39% of its EVs. So adoption rates do seem skewed in some states.

Maybe the real question is why? I'm surprised New York doesn't have anywhere near as many as California.

The most interesting stat is that EV registrations last month are 2.4 times what they were 14 months ago. Wonder how that will affect these numbers going forward and in the years to come.
Russian Court Sentences Griner to 9 Years
Is it worth trading Victor Boot for her?
This [1] was handy for me, a Pixel user:

[1] https://android.gadgethacks.com/how-to/enable-hidden-graysca...
> Before the A12, Apple devices do not have these critical technologies:

> Page Protection Layer (PPL) “requires that the platform execute only signed and trusted code.”

> Pointer Authentication Codes (PAC) are “used to protect against exploitation of memory corruption bugs.”

> “Bulletproof” Just-In-Time (JIT) compilation “is the process by which JavaScript is compiled to native code which forces the separation of memory mappings used to isolate write and execute functions.”

> See Apple’s high-level breakdown of SoC Security.

> The technical details of these low-level technologies are out of scope from this publication, but there are many resources to learn about them, like here and here.

> The thing that you need to know is that without these critical security technologies, Apple devices are vulnerable to easy-to-perform physical and remote exploits.

Definitely not “easy-to perform” and bulletproof JIT is possible on all ARMv8 devices
Volcano in Iceland again (live stream)
Fagradalsfjall volcano Iceland. Live from Langhóll.
An eruption started again in Fagradalsfjall on August 3rd 2022. This is the view from Langhóll.
What the hell is a blockchain VPN? Pay per kb with 10s latency?
Sorry for your loss. So happy that you were able to get some of his story. Are you planning to do something with your recordings?

For others who might read this, I started doing this with my Mom and Dad (they're in fine health despite their advanced age). I carry around a fancy recorder and a couple of lav microphones - I wire us up and push record and just start talking. I got a 2-3 hour session the last time I visited, and intend on continuing to do so in future visits. I find that they just forget that they're being recorded this way and speak pretty openly and freely.

I found that it's helpful to ask specific questions. My dad was born in Hong Kong and lived through the Japanese occupation and we spent much of our last visit talking about that. I find that it's helpful to ask follow-up questions to pull out additional color and details - "what was the name of this person" or "what do you remember about the market - smells? sounds?". This way it makes the story that much more interesting. I highly recommend [1] as a resource for what interesting stories sound like and how to put them together.

It also helps them relive those moments as well. I did that with my Mom and it really helped her relive some of those happier moments in her life. I learned the story of how she was on the last boat to pass through the Suez Canal before the 1956 crisis closed it off [2] and how she was honored at a ceremony honoring the memory of the 50th anniversary of the crisis and Lester Pearson's role in resolving it.

[1] https://jessicaabel.com/out-on-the-wire/
[2] https://www.history.com/topics/cold-war/suez-crisis
Pear – We partner with entrepreneurs from day zero to build companies
I think that pallettes with perceptually uniform brightness don't really make sense as generative models. Different colors have different apparent brightness and we're used to it. There's a kindergarten near me with different sections of the fence painted in different "basic" colors, it doesn't look jarring at all with yellow and cyan being brighter than red.

Such colors spaces are great for color difference measurement, though.
Google, why are you so bad at this? Why can't you fire the people making these horrible choices that gets you ridiculed and pushes you further and further from thought leadership?
Not to try discount the damage (as someone who grew up in North Queensland it's absolutely heart breaking) but coral often looks worse/dead on camera.

This is because of the colour shift as you you go deeper into water, a red filter (or light sourcee) is needed to capture the colours as you're seeing them.
> Yesterday, Ukraine claiming nearly the opposite

I think you are misreading. These are different reports of the same claim against Russia, they aren't opposites in any sense.
You can see them even at that scale. The original experiments by Tyndall that demonstrated the effect were in a tube [1] currently on display at the Royal Institution.

[1] https://www.rigb.org/sites/default/files/styles/original/pub...
It's absurdly common for Google to completely ignore the first term I include in a search. It's not like I typed it just for fun!
Quorn is both a hilarious and genius name.
Totally agree with the post but this part:

> The majority of SIM cards require registration using government-issued ID.

While true, it costs $30 at walmart paid in cash with no id to get a simcard with 4g. there are 11 million illegal migrants in the US and it would be harmful to them to require a government id to get a cellphone.
So libel?
I asked GPT-3 "What is a place in Croatia similar to Koh Lanta?"
and the answer was "A place in Croatia similar to Koh Lanta is Hvar."
I'm so sorry that you and others in the comments weren't able to do it. I was undeservedly lucky that he lived long enough, healthy enough and that he partly recovered thanks to blood transfusions. Even then, I (and he) wasted years and haven't had many adult conversations with him and I'll miss those too.
Sorry for your loss. Glad you had this opportunity.
The most annoying habit he's picked up recently is asking people to define words. It's never really interesting. For instance, during an interview with an economist, "let's start with what is economics"? He was interviewing CEO of Coinbase and Armstrong will try to give a normal answer and Lex will just interrupt "what is a wallet" or ask questions like "do you consider Coinbase layer 1, 2 or 3". They're just bad questions and interrupt a normal conversation.

On the other hand someone like Tyler Cowen doesn't ask for clarification unless he legitimately doesn't know what some is talking about. Some guests even said "maybe I should explain that", to which Cowen replies, "this conversation is for us, don't worry about the audience", and that leads to a much better natural and interesting conversation. If the listener doesn't understand anything they can always pause and look up what they don't understand
Sorry, unrelated, but your comment hit a pet peeve of mine.

I love GraphQL, and I think it has a number of features that make it better and more usable for most APIs than a RESTful interface.

The thing I despise about GraphQL is they put "QL" in the name, so legions of software developers think that it is somehow comparable to SQL, or somehow is a generic query language for data.

GraphQL has absolutely nothing to do with SQL. Comparing "GraphQL vs SQL" is like comparing "HTML vs Java".
I understand very, very well. The average American lives in a hellscape, one serious illness removed from homelessness. If you can imagine losing your home to illness, you are lower class like the rest of us.

Upper class is what they call the 1%. Most of us are among the other 99%.
Tech-infused Airbnb shows seniors how to age in place in style
I assume you're having to work hard to make a lap of Australia as intrepid as Africa!
You can buy a used game from a separate company and throw it in your nintendo no problem. You can use a different app store on Android or sideload. The Epic case was not a total loss - I do not agree personally
Not sure comparing a yet to be released OS is a solid selling point here.
Yeah conspiracy theories, or people just going full potential in villainy would be very interesting takes.
Some does, some doesn't. The Marx Brothers movies still work, while Bob Hope does not.

To pick two TV shows that were popular at the exact same time: the original Bob Newhart Show still totally works, while The Mary Tyler Show is wearing kinda thin.

Newhart deliberately avoided any topical humor in his shows, just for that reason.
Vast New Study Shows a Key to Reducing Poverty: More Friendships
One of those individuals also solicited sexual favors from his subordinates in the Google offices during work hours [1].

I don't know if we should put them on a pedastal.

[1]: https://www.businessinsider.com/google-sergey-brin-employees...
I agree with that, but a comparable education is explicitly not a goal of mine.

My question is whether it would make a comparable workforce, and to that end I suspect it would.

In my mind, the purpose of the government funding education is a return on investment. They're expecting to get more back than they put in over a long enough time horizon. The goal isn't education for the sake of education, it's to create an educated workforce that can produce higher value goods and services.

We can put public money to better use than education for the sake of it. If people want to learn for the sake of it, they can use the library or YouTube or pay for a teacher.

We've got other problems like people without healthcare or homes, climate crisis, a terrible foster care system, etc. Put the money towards that instead of paying for massive buildings and staff to teach everyone underwater basket-weaving so they're "well-rounded".
> I would consider humans manually reporting tweets to be much more reliable than AI flagging, especially given the bizarre false positive results we've seen from Twitter AI flagging.

Sure. However, in this case Twitter is the one with the AI and the one deciding whether to trust a source. The case for child porn is virtually binary and even where it isn't, they're going to lean on the side of not allowing something. The case for harassment is reported by unknown humans who are probably personally involved, and whether something is or is not harassment is not always black and white. From Twitter's point of view, it probably makes more sense to trust their own AI.

Here, the author hasn't provided specific examples of alleged harassment, so readers can't even make a judgment call.
I don't know why they bother. I have never once used Google Meet, or Google Duo, or Google Hangouts. I have never heard of anyone else using them. I have never been asked to contact someone or join a meeting using one of these apps.

Google: just change the name, change the code, do whatever. Nobody will notice.
That’s the point though, these colours are great because they have (almost) uniform perceptual differences and that is what I was aiming for.

Of course this means that “yellow” no longer looks like the (much brighter) yellow that we’re intuitively used to, but that yellow would also jump out from the page much more than the main text colour or other “naturally” darker colours.

And I still tried to position them as close as possible to intuitively named colours though with all the other constraints there wasn’t much room for that.

Whether you think this even luminance is something desirable is up to your personal preference, but in my opinion it makes the code more readable as your eye isn’t drawn to things as much when you’re not actively scanning for them.
I did the same for both parents and recorded it as I interviewed them. It was extremely interesting. You learn a lot.
5. Assume there is at least one other side or version to every story.*

Shape of the Earth, opinions differ.
The next problem is verifying all of that information.

It will require multiple dozen auxillary Google searches and reading through countless articles and message boards.

GPT-3 is a great research tool as a brainstorming engine, but sadly cannot currently be formally trusted to output truthful information, even with conditioning.

It takes someone with prior knowledge or subsequent research in order to make use of the result. I'd say this isn't what the author was intending.
doh, I had not noticed...
Source for your assertions?

1. What were the number of bills passed in the "zero hour"

2. Which bills didn't meet the quorum and were passed off as ordinance and allowed to lapse?

3. Which bills were passed bypassing the time honoured state versus federal relations?

You make hollow assertions without backing up your claims.
> Edit to everyone pointing out a technicality: yes, puberty blockers != hormone replacement therapy. However, puberty blockers ⊆ hormone replacement therapy.

Not commonly. And the difference between delaying puberty and inducing puberty is more than a technicality.
I'd be super interested to see if these other places actually fit the descriptions it gives, or if it essentially just generated a likely pattern of text to be seen after the first part saying there's no exact match and then filled in random known Croatian location. I honestly don't have any intuition of which of those is more likely!
Yes we need to decrease CO2, so the people who emit the most need to reduce the most. Nations don't emit CO2, people do
It should be a law to require human approval before any porn content is posted. I mean for obvious hints of minor presence. They can require government id for account creation as well. Moreover, "Teen (18+)", "barely legal" and similar content should not be allowed.

You would think DRM would have been all about enforcing this instead of corporate greed.
Fair enough hahaha
What’s the copyright law on taking ideas and principals from a book like that, and rewriting it?
The five best books to understand AI
Another one:

There's something horribly un-optimized going on when I click and drag some values to a new location. Even when there's no overlap, dragging a tiny number of values, like say 3, ends up hanging for several seconds on my very fast computer.

I remember this also didn't used to happen back ~2011-2013 ish, and then I remember it started happening at some point and hasn't been fixed since.
From their FAQ (https://browser.kagi.com/faq.html#oss)

> Is Orion open-source?

> We’re working on it! We’ve begun with some of our components and intend to open more in the future.

Forking WebKit, porting hundreds of APIs and writing a browser app from scratch has been challenging for our small team. Properly maintaining an open-source project takes time and resources we’re short on at the moment, so if you want to contribute at this time, please consider becoming a beta tester.
There are thousands of competitors in the gaming market.

There is also a big difference between a company saying "I am only going to make this for the Apple app store" and saying "You can only have the Apple app store".