skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'm seeing a lot of people trying to rationalize and excuse this behavior from Google, but man is it a hard sell on me.

My mother recently remarked in a unique conversation that we have had a box of Golden Grahams cereal for a year and should find a recipe to use it up. She opened her phone to search, and lo and behold, the top recommendation after only two letters, R and e, was "Golden Grahams recipes". Not only had that never been a topic of conversation or search beforehand, nor did she have Google open on her phone, but you may have noticed that "Golden Grahams recipes" doesn't even start with R or e. This sparked a long conversation about how privacy really is something worth fighting for.

My only guess is that Google has the ability to listen in because we use Android phones.
A great example of an end-user application that is like a library is Microsoft Excel. Sure, the UX can change, but the formula engine has to be extremely conservative, staying bug-compatible with basically every version, or all hell breaks lose.
I don't care about t-shirts, but the best backpack I've ever owned was given to me when I worked at Google. I probably never would have bought a $200 hackpack on my own, but it's great.
These big companies clearly hate remote work as it seems. Even Apple is forcing its workers to go back to the office.

I guess they want workers to be presential but don't want to pay them enough for the expenses huh.
> I use mine for just about everything in the summer

I’m shedding a tear about my/our future where this is really widespread out of necessity - just being outside might call for daily mask use. You guys are convincing me to go pick up the highest quality reusable mask I can now!
They're not opposite.

"If it ain't broke don't fix it" => don't try to "optimize" something that works well. Maybe it will be able to handle more load after your big refactor, but if it already handle the load nicely and there is no indication load will go up, don't bother.

"Release early and often" => release after each change, don't bundle everything into a big release that happen every 6 months.

The first one is about deciding what to do, the second one is how you release the work you did.
Man, I really was hoping there was a spoof channel called SmerterEveryDay instead of just a typo. Sadly, I spent a >0 amount of time thinking about the host of that channel being the Sweedish Chef borka borka "we're smerter every day"!
> relying on people being intrinsically interested in that doesn’t scale

Every time i see businesses taliing about passion, they are aiming to underpay and exploit employees.

Gaming industry has the most passion, very skilled people and the worst working conditions in the entire IT.

Capitalism for me but not for thee
Civ VI can also take a while to load. Especially if you’re loading a game that’s already in progress. I haven’t timed it but I wouldn’t be surprised if it was over a minute.
The not-fastest shinkansen is still pretty fast, and plenty of people enjoy the train for the experience.
Oh I’m not saying they’re not trying. I’m more saying that they aren’t as good as it sometimes looks.

Humans are very good at finding patterns in happy little accidents. Much better than the ad networks are in making those accidents happen. If the tech was as good as they say, we’d never ever see an ad that wasn’t a hyper relevant instant click.

And it seems unlikely that Apple is selling my iMessage conversations to Facebook. The “we searched for it, created an explicit signal, and forgot because it’s such a habit” explanation seems more likely.

Plus if a simpler method like “hey your location is at a restaurant on most Fridays, why don’t we start pushing restaurant ads on Wednesday” works well enough, why wouldn’t they use it?
They are not the author of the software, that is https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=doronlinder

At a glance this seems to be an interesting program, and they even did a talk about how they are successfully monetizing at VimConf 2021 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=soxBUGYOaLA
Occam's razor, in this situation, is that the corporate entity who profits from collected data while deceiving it's product into perceiving itself as a "customer" might, in fact be... collecting data from its product to sell to it's customers.
For one thing, you may be underselling the homophobia in Islam a bit. And there's Tacitus, who says that the Germans punished homosexuals. That's a bit before the Christians, and it comes from someone from a culture not opposed to the practice.

Second, I find it hard to believe that the Chinese were turned homophobic, and remained so, by a few Christians despite millenia of tolerance, when the vast majority of the country isn't even Christian. It smells like bad historicism.
> The bigger deal for me would be this old laptop and card speaking WEP rather than WPA3.

As I understood, this is exactly helping with not having to use WEP. The Pico is simulating a NE2000 ethernet card, so any old pre-WPA Windows98 drivers are not used at all, but with the Pico doing ethernet-to-wifi conversion and WPA2 encryption.
And that's not enough to boot on some platforms that linux runs on (even with amd64 ISA) unless one partitions the computer into smaller cpu counts
One of the best things about this is the end of the parasitic “IR35 assessment” industry. Companies who ask you 20 questions, the same 20 questions asked for free on the HMRC ruling web site, but charge you for the privelidge.
yeah, church hasn't been separated from state here for a loooooong time
This is a fair point, but I think there is confusion around the meaning of the fact that Regan's models do not "know anything about chess".
I believe this refers to prior domain knowledge embedded in the algorithm itself - but the idea of exploiting data from a large number of GM games is precisely so the model can extract domain "knowledge" from statistical indicators. As for "applying the model to all sorts of areas", yes conceptually if your model can infer anything from any kind of data distribution this applies. In practice it just won't.

If you take a step back and look at the AlphaGo project, the story shows us a very similar model architecture could be applied to a different game, chess, with AlphaZero.
And the "zero" in this case means the model is build with zero human knowledge - not even GM games, only self-play. These models do entirely different things - A0'model given a position, tries to find the best lines, while KR's tool, given a set of games from a given player, will try to price the probability of foul play - but in both cases, no programmer-introduced chess heuristics are part of the model.
Yet AlphaZero performs the way it does and appears to "know" quite a bit about the game. So if a purely statistical approach can yield a very strong engine, which has been qualified as displaying some sort of "creativity" (for lack of a better term) in its play, I don't think it is too far-fetched to imagine other models extracting knowledge about what human play should look like.

Totally agree that this is wrong from Magnus, and cheating from Niemann or not he is responsible for the toxic drama.
I have no stake in either side of this but I would love to hear you elaborate on this. What makes you more interested in a person that markets themselves behind something that isn't your real face?
Like I said, it depends on the available set of moves. If #1 is +1 and #2 is +0.7, but the cheater wanted to play #5 at -0.5 then that’s an outcome-changing difference.

Chess engines like Hiarcs can show a series of good, ok, questionable and bad moves for each touched piece color-coded on the board for example.
Your explanation makes perfect sense. One of my reasons for drinking coffee black is that it isn't water (which is mostly what I drink), and there's no sugar. Now I understand: Starbucks drip coffee is not for black coffee drinkers.
Ask HN: Can math books help you become good at problem solving in general?
Problems can have mathematical nature or a non-mathematical nature.

By problem solving I understand:

1. Understand what the problem demands

2. Find out edge/special cases

3. Work out examples

4. Devise a solution to the problem.

I am not implying merely reading a book will make you a problem solver. Problem solving will make you good at problem solving.

Have you come across any book that helped you become good at problem solving?
>There's a website that aggregates all the coffee vendors, but the name is slipping my mind for some reason.

Sixteen grams, Somethings Brewing...there are a few of those now.

> every once in a while I find myself picking up a cup of "sugar milk with coffee" on the street.Maybe there's something to it....

I ask for strong (filter) coffee without sugar, and that works reasonably well in Bangalore and Chennai.
Land use, even if, would not matter, because solar coexists with existing uses. Float solar on reservoirs and canals, post it in fence-rows on pasture and cropland, lay it out on industrial and warehouse roofing.
When the company misses profit expectations you can be damn sure they'll rip out cogs and throw them on the street without a second thought to save money and get profits up again.

Don't kid yourself or fall for corporate propaganda. You are a cog and you will be treated as such.
For developers, there's no such thing as the ultimate todo-utility

Actually, it's org-mode. But for the rest of us non-Emacs users, there's todo.txt:

https://github.com/todotxt/todo.txt
There will be some bias in what they choose to screenshot right? Meaning, the unrelated topic might show up in the feed but they don’t screenshot it because it doesn’t fit the narrative?

Also, what we’re interested is if the text changed what was shown. If I saw ads for X last week but didn’t notice them, then spoke to a friend and noticed them and took a screenshot, it would appear to confirm the theory. Even though I was always seeing ads for X.

Ultimately, I don’t think people who are convinced of this theory will change their minds so it’s a moot point.
You're still liable for corporation & dividend tax. Though the rates are favourable towards the independent contractor, there isn't a huge amount of difference between a perm. employee these days; when you factor in the additional risk taken on by the independent contractor, it's difficult to say either way which one has the better deal.
All permanent employees should own a share of the company's profits in proportion with their contribution as decided by their peers.
OVH – 10% Price increase for services
Molly Russell inquest: Instagram clips seen by teen 'most distressing'
How much did they typically spend on "swag" per employee per year?
I hear it induces passivity. Like lithium. That is clearly useful to a government.
There's no solid material that survives beyond the tiniest outer layer of the crust so you won't get far.

Perhaps with superheated gas/plasma?
Why? it doesn't materially impact the articles point.
Rest in Peace, Optane
I have no idea. But if there are, the factorio devs will find them and write an extremely detailed blog post about the entire process.
They cut non-business critical travel which many employees for some reason felt was a perk of the job. I heard second hand that some employees would do "office tours" just to try the lunches at the different offices (under the guise of doing some in person meetings that certainly could have been done online). Cutting that kind of wasteful travel is necessary in an economic slowdown (and even necessary before that).
Not all programming is the same. You may love working on automation and Python... but your day to day job is CRUD web apps using Django. Same tools, but totally different stuff.
I generated over a thousand supermodel images with SD. Here's what I found
I just spent the past 48 hours to generate over a thousand model images with Stable Diffusion.

I took the best 5% and released them on https://www.thesemodelsdonotexist.com/.

You can use these images for any project.

Takeaways:

- Stable Diffusion (SD) doesn't understand/can't generate hands (huge issue when it comes to human models)
- Negative prompts many times didn't work for me (if you have figured this out please let me know)
- Certain races are easier to create than others, the model certainly has bias. White male models are easy to generate whereas I really struggled to generate Latin-American women. I didn't quantify the bias - this is only a feeling atm.
- GFPGAN works very well with SD images if the face doesn't look good, but if it does look good GFPGAN usually messes it up. In these cases I used a simple upscaler to scale up the images.
- If you change the aspect ratio (I used 512 x 768 pixels) stable diffusion can do really weird things, very often it duplicates the content. In my case, it very often placed two humans on the photos - again, if you figured it out how to avoid this I'd appreciate if you shared this.
> The west is captured by Malthusian thinking, and their solution is “less brown people,”

Ironic then that brown people is the only group still growing in the west then:

America’s white population declined for the first time [..] Meanwhile, there was significant growth among minority groups over the last decade. - https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2021/aug/12/us-2020-cens...
so it's clear, your gboard si harvesting all input you type and then sells these data to highest bidder, nothing to do with whatsapp, just good old Google harvesting everything for ads
Virtually every one of the solar salespeople (probably a dozen in less than 3 months) I have had come to my door use shady tactics. ("We are here from your energy utility to give you a free energy analysis....", "free solar" (based on net costs only, but ignoring the $30k in payments you sign up to cover installation etc), etc. I'm hip to the tactics, but everyone may not be. I have at least one friend that tells me they regret the decision.

I'm actually pro-solar, and plan to get it eventually, but I think the scaminess surrounding it will put a nasty taste in people's mouths for years to come.
More Bosses Are Spying on Quiet Quitters. It Could Backfire
In fact you are right. My wife and I are going to be doing the digital nomad thing starting later this year and fly around the country staying in hotels. My job working for $BigTech remotely affords us that privilege. It’s going to be much more “fun” exploring the US than anything I’m doing at work.
At BlinkShell we recently added support for WebAuthn for SSH keys. WebAuthn signatures have been a part OpenSSH for a while now, but it looks like we are the first client to do so. You can check out a few cool flows here https://twitter.com/BlinkShell/status/1570427813819486212?s=...

IMO, the best part of Apple adding Passkeys support over WebAuthn is that we are finally able to use Secure Keys as well across all devices. If this takes off, I wonder if it would somehow end up replacing FIDO2 for Secure Keys scenarios as wel.
Really? The clothes are my least favourite of the swag items. Send me it without the company logo and it's a great gift. But if I have to walk around looking like I'm in uniform then I'd rather buy my own.
It's interesting that the Software Dev job market has been on fire for over a decade but retention strategies have evolved at a glacial pace. The industry just collectively decided turnover is to be expected and eat all the associated costs - which are significantly higher than many other professions inside the org.
>What is this weird obsession with 'swag' in tech companies?

Cheap substitute for pay rises or benefits improvements.
That's what I was going to chime in with - you pay for that extra address width. Binary addition and multiplication latency is super-linear with regards to operand width. Larger pointers lead to more memory use, and memory access latency is non-constant with respect to size.

It might make sense for large distributed systems to move to a 128-bit architecture, but I don't see any reason for consumer devices, at least with current technology.
It doesn't matter how many conversations are going. With private key encryption, what a phrase encrypts to for one person would be different than the next. It would have to be trained solely on your conversation. Encryption is also dependent on all the text before it as well as text in the same block, so it would have to be the beginning of the message with no metadata to throw off alignment saying the 16-byte phrase so many times that it could pick up a difference. I'm pretty confident it's impossible to get anything useful out of that.
> the move from a persistent background.js script to a sevice-worker will just make a number of use-cases impossible or very hacky

Yep.

Chrome is even crippling some of their own APIs, like chrome.tabCapture (not available in service workers, and in mv3 will be "foreground only")

AKA, if you want to use chrome.tabCapture in mv3, you have to run it in a tab. And because that tab can be closed at any time, you need to serialize megabytes of data to the chrome.storage api every few seconds.
They're also smart enough to understand that this means this is a phase change into maintenance mode.
40 thousand years of evolution and we barely even tapped the vastness of Atlassian functionality potential
Knew it was going to be Marx.
Thanks, adding the <space> in chats does work!
When money no longer matters, the list of things that I can do that are more fun than finding ways to serve ads to enrich a company that is worth over 1T is a mile long.
> focused on keeping core customers happy

What a shocking business priority!
Excellent link, thanks!
Found some possibly related issues:

https://github.com/w3c/webauthn/issues/1616
https://github.com/w3c/webauthn/issues/1255
I'm glad you say "cover all" because I think people underestimate by quite a lot how far PV and Lithium batteries can get you if you're not near the poles.

So today's tech, just with more deployment mostly solves this.

Yes there's room for Wind and heat batteries and all those other things, but even the brutally stupid approach of Solar PV and lithium batteries that we have today, without any new breakthroughs, is good enough to cover most of it.

People use more energy during the day, when the sun is up. Solar PV is the cheapest energy in history and broadly matches this daily profile.
It is, but it's the same disaster of bugs we already have from multiple independent cores sharing the same memory space, not a brand new disaster or anything.

It's a disaster of latency issues too, but it's not like that's surprising anyone either, and we already have NUMA on some multi-core systems which is the same problem.

We have existing tools that can be extended in straightforward ways to deal with these issues. And it's not like there's a silver bullet here; having separate address spaces everywhere comes with its own disaster of issues. Pick your poison.
Yea I've definitely had situations where I've been challenged in this way (in which I definitely was having a voice-only conversation that seemed to be targeted after the fact). It can be vexing.

It was mentioned elsewhere in this thread, but this is where Baader Meinhof may apply. I don't how many times I've seen a targeted ad that was a "miss" in terms of recency bias. But I absolutely remember every time there was a "hit".

Both situations were targeted based on my digital behavior, but they're playing the volume shooter game. Taking as many shots as possible hoping eventually they score. This could be true in your case. The fact that you and your wife were having a recurring conversation about stem cell research, diabetes, etc. suggests that its likely that this is in your digital fingerprint at least once in the past (recent or otherwise).

Something I try to do now, when I'm being mindful about it, is note how often I see ads that are definitely in my interest bucket but are completely uncorrelated with any recent conversations I've had. That helps at least establish an anecdotal ratio of hits-to-misses that makes the Orwellian/dystopian much less reasonable on balance.
Teachers are service providers. They should have no deeper emotional bond with their students than the cashier at McDonald's has with their regular customers. Students are not friends. While the isolated story of your teacher sharing her wedding pictures is not a big ordeal, it shows an underlying problem of poor boundaries. We have a pervasive problem, at least in the US, of teacher with poor mental health and poor boundaries trying to be friends and pseudo-parents to their students.
No love for Safari browser? :(
If you've got to spy on your employees, you've got weak line management. A good line manager knows when one of their direct reports is checked out.

That said, as a line manager, I see no problem with an employee doing exactly what's in their job description, if they are not interested in advancing.
they are using gboard, so it's pretty clear nothing to do with whatsapp but google doing google things
There's an influential article from 2009 called "The Sodas Are No Longer Free": https://steveblank.com/2009/12/21/the-elves-leave-middle-ear...

Small conveniences and tokens of appreciation really help with employee morale. Many people, even those who believe they cannot be bought so easily -- definitely can be swayed by this stuff.
> I find it abhorrent to 'punish' someone without telling them why they are punished, even if it is a contractual agreement that is broken or enforced.

When someone breaks the terms of service of a company, the company doesn't want to, and has the right not to, have to respond to sealioning from the offending party about which rule, down to the jot and tittle, was broken in what way, and whether that really counts as an infraction of the rule.
So if were walking past a playing blaring the piña colada song, I’d see ads for alcohol and umbrellas? If coworkers around me are talking about activities I’m not interested in, I’d see ads for those?

They have far better information that shows I’m not interested in alcohol or extreme sports. Audio in the background is so low-signal that it isn’t worth showing ads based on it.

Even just transcribing speech something accurately is not something that was possible until the last couple of years. Yet this conspiracy theory has been around for a decade or more.
> I truly do not understand why the US cannot do this and why the UK spent 20+ years trying to enforce stupid legislation like IR35 rather than simply fixing the dividend system

Because politicians work for rich people, and rich people do not like to pay taxes. Rich people mostly get dividends, and so the dividend tax rate remains low.

The entire legal system is warped around the desires of wealth. Look at the LLC regime in the US. LLCs actually provide very little protection for individuals or small groups running their own businesses, since it can always be argued that active owners should be held personally liable, or even that the business is undercapitalized because the owners have to be directly involved instead of just paying employees. To actually get the big print liability shield, you must only supplying dumb money while hiring patsies to do all the actual work. The regime that LLCs grew out of, Limited Partnerships, openly make this distinction between general partners who actually do work and can be held fully liable, and limited partners who invested money and thus must be held harmless.
Your electricity got more expensive because of an artificial NG shortage. Failing to build out solar will leave you buying from neighboring countries that didn't, at prices less than it costs to operate your reactors.