skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Twitter has 396.5 million users globally today. That's about twice what Whatsapp had at the time when they had 50 employees. Yet catering to twice the users takes Twitter 150 times as many employees. There's a huge gap spanning two orders of magnitude there.

> Facebook, at one point, had 50 employees too. Doesn't mean Facebook today can run on 50 employees.

Indeed Facebook had 50 employees at one time, and indeed Facebook most probably can't run on 50 employees toay given they have 2.5 billion users. But I'm not sure what your point is?
Snark: In other breaking news, scientists have discovered that teenage boys think about sex more than twice a day, and that warm water is kinda wet.

Yes, anybody who's been paying attention already knows about the stack of studies where supposedly great-and-wise ivory tower Ph.D.'s gave higher ratings to whichever half of a bunch of $Things that $Researcher randomly put male names on, and lower ratings to the other half of the $Things, which randomly got stuck with female names.

Now - does academia have any interest in actually fixing the problem? Or was this just another paid gig doing performative activism?
The same law that gives any officer in charge of a police station the authority to demand any data deemed desirable for the purposes of any investigation, inquiry, trial or other proceeding?
Playing devil's advocate here : it is sometimes desirable to reuse a design that your end user's are going to be familiar with.

So there's a tension between "being boring and usefully" and "being original at the cost of forcing your users to adapt".

Case in point : I had to explain a feature yesterday to a user, and it's complex and not trivial, and what basically saved my day was saying : "it works like in X".
> Also, ML models (probably) can't be compressed because they already are compressed; learning and compression are the same thing!

I feel like they're kind of two sides of the same coin: learning is about putting more information in the same data, while compression is about putting the same information in less data.

I'm wondering if some lossy floating-point compressor (such as zfp) would work.
> It looks a lot more like trolling if an otherwise incredibly useful and productivity-boosting technology is being stymied by people who want to receive payouts for a lack of meaningless attributions.

This one sentence threw off my entire opinion of the article as it demonstrates the author's clear bias in favor of Copilot, not just specifically in this case but in principle.

Legal opinion on Copilot and generative AI in general hinges entirely on metaphors. If the AI is understood to behave like a human being building knowledge and drawing from it for inspiration, Copilot is just another way to write code. But we've already established legal precedent that machines can not hold copyright, which suggests that they can not be deemed to be creative, which could be used to argue that they are therefore just creating an inventory of copyright works and creating mechanical mashups.

The author's dismissal also ignores that this would not JUST result in attribution. If Copilot indexed copyleft code and were required to provide attribution when using this code, the output might also be affected and this could in turn affect the entire code base. Worse yet, Copilot may output code with conflicting licenses. The author considers only the possibility that Copilot itself might have to inherit the license (and the dismissal that it would "help noone" because it runs on a server ignores both the existence of a (presumably self-hosted) enterprise service and the existence of licenses like AGPL, which would still apply) but it seems most people's concerns are with the output instead.

I also fail to understand how the argument that it doesn't reproduce the code exactly 99% of the time is helpful. If I copy code and rename the variables and run an autoformatter on it, it's still a copy of the code. It's odd to see a lawyer use what is essentially obfuscation as a defense against copyright claims. Also 1% is an incredibly large number given how Copilot is supposed to be used and how large the potential customer base is. Given the direction GitHub is heading with "Hello GitHub" (demoed at GitHub Universe yesterday) it's not unlikely that Copilot would in some cases be used to generate hundreds, thousands or tens of thousands of lines of code in a single project.

The question isn't just whether Copilot is violating the law or not, the question is why it is or isn't because that could have wide implications outside GitHub itself. But as the author points out, sadly the lawsuit doesn't try to settle this for copyright, which might be the most impactful question.
Browsers, JSON, and FormData
This is a great way to drive away your best talent and ensure those who stay are more tired, frustrated, and stressed.
WFH become more common. You cant program with voice in office full of people who also program with voice. At home you can multytask work with voice while doing home stuff with hands. You just need projector do display on wall while you cook or assemble IKEA table.
Sabine Hossenfelder has a good summary of the state of Quantum Computing so far:

https://youtu.be/CBLVtCYHVO8
Facebook shows off a realistic avatar from just a phone scan recently.

Surely that could be converted into some 3d model of sorts.
Osterhout tends to be prescient in his diagnoses, though not his solutions. Eg. His take on scripting languages filling a unique role that wouldn’t be replaced by system languages was pretty accurate; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ousterhout%27s_dichotomy , especially in the AI/ML community these days. His solution, Tcl/Tk, was niche though.

On the supposed death of TCP, Bruce Davie posted a more nuanced take: https://systemsapproach.substack.com/p/tcp-the-p-is-for-plat...
And
https://systemsapproach.substack.com/p/quic-is-not-a-tcp-rep...

In short, a lot of what we do on the web and data centre these days feels more like RPC, and HTTP/3 (QUIC) seems more fit for purpose. This doesn’t mean it replaces TCP for high throughput byte steams.

Another interesting development in the data centre is the rise of WireGuard for mesh secure connectivity, with Tailscale as its most recent herald. Hop-by-hop mTLS is notoriously hard to manage but Tailscale is a breeze. And identity based ACLs replacing CIDR-based firewalls? Yes please!
What? I still use IMAP on free tier without issues. Is this only for new accounts?

edit: Damn, I just read the sibling account. Kind of nervous now, I hope they won't drop this any time soon for grandfathered accounts.
Would love to check it out. Email is in my profile.
> Musk told workers in the email that he wants to see subscriptions account for half of Twitter’s revenue.

Given the direction in which their advertising revenue is going, they might get there.
Seems crazy. The president and his lawyers knew Pence had no legal grounds to reject electoral votes. But they were encouraging him to do so. If it didn't work, it was going to be all on Pence. If it worked, Trump would remain president.
“Synthetic withdrawal” of FTX trapped funds
I think the exception might prove the rule in this case. I still believe the majority of people require the presence of some body language in order to connect with others, if this weren't the case then we would have abandoned meeting in person altogether long ago with the invention of the telephone or even writing since we've been sending letters to each other for a long time as you mention. Since most people don't connect well empathetically with others through text or images alone, I think the best thing we can do is to bring more human presence to long distance communications. If you prefer to stick with text or voice alone then no one is going to stop you but lots of other people will flock to a system that provides a close facsimile of in person conversation.
Imagine an office where everyone is sitting screaming at their computer.
It's really useful for those who have challenges typing (arthritis, disabilities etc..), perhaps not best for general audience as typing with auto complete is faster.
> No, under the US Constitution it is for a specified public benefit as its purpose, the private benefit is a mechanism to achieve that.

Well, that's false. The actual US Constitution in Article I Section 8 Clause 8 says, "[The Congress shall have power] To promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries."

That could, possibly one-day provide public benefits, but it doesn't have to. If public benefits happen, they are side-effects. The purpose is for authors and inventors to have exclusive rights in their writings and discoveries. They are never required to publish or advance anything for the public. This is a private protection not a public benefit for a "specific purpose".
Ask HN: Forums for Data Science/Machine Learning Discussions?
Hi,

I'm curious if there are specific forums where I could have access to content on Data Science related subjects. Preferably with a focus on Machine Learning best practices, but I'm open to any type of extension.
Inflation is trending down and there are plenty of long term CDs and bonds with decent rates that will almost certainly mature long after this current inflationary period comes to pass. The Fed has given strong signals that they intend to tackle inflation regardless of the cost. So locking a 10+ year CD or bond at current rates is almost certainly going to beat inflation in the long term. Also FWIW, I do expect rates to continue to rise for a few more months, so I am keeping plenty gradually rolling my savings into these investments.
Yeah, use ps -Z PID (from outside of a container) to check its label.

Some other useful sources of info - the container_selinux man page tells you about container_t. And an index of Dan Walsh's blog posts about containers & SELinux can be found in the README of <https://github.com/containers/container-selinux>.

And of course the RHEL documentation for creatign custom SELinux policies that inherit from container_t (for instance, I use it to allow processes within a container to read their certificates out of /etc/pki/tls which is normally forbidden. It's documented here: https://access.redhat.com/documentation/en-us/red_hat_enterp...
You can also `revert` which, while staying in history, needs no warning.
I sometimes use voice recognition in Notes on my Mac to write up my meeting notes, but I find that my waffly speech results in very verbose notes.
Also still quite a few mis-hears where I read my notes back later and have to work out what I was actually saying.

Can I have transcription that can then turn my rambling into neat and concise prose?
A game whose popularity & longevity has become a cliché, Skyrim, is usually played in 1st person. Myst & Doom were both known for their ability to engage players in a flow state in their heyday.
I take your point about narrative, but I think first-person games are giving players a different experience -- agency & flow -- compared to the identification you experience in a 3rd-person game.
Off topic but I find it funny when a site shows a popup to sign up for the newsletter as soon as you get on the site but then has no newsletter sign-up at the end of the article.
Not a doctor, but I also started to using the dictation feature on my iPhone more and more recently. It's often more convenient than typing when I'm walking (which I do a lot) and the pickup of voice messaging, talking to your phone like it's a mic, made me more comfortable doing it in public.
I just wished their spam handling was better. Not a day goes by without 10+ spam on my inbox.
To clarify the comment (and this being contingent on every user of FTX getting his money back which it appears it's going to be so) SBF was playing 5 billion dollar hands of poker because he was winning with lower dollar value hands than that, problem is that he kept raising the stakes until he went bust.

I doubt any exchange/bank could save themselves by facing the extremely bulky and fast withdrawals in the span of hours that FTX was facing; the only play there was to save face while avoiding locking withdrawals as much as possible e.g. the binance play (obviously horrid but it did buy some time.)

Besides that, the net worth of SBF and Alameda being denominated in FTT and using customer funds (unproven as of now) to make more gambles is obviously terrible, and here everyone is to free to shit on him all they want, but the point is, the EA community shitting on him? Having Sam donated more than a hundred milli to various orgs? mind you that he still is a good poker player, likely to come back, and cover all users funds.
Ah yes, Dragon NaturallySpeaking. Training for hours and hours and getting incredibly subpar results. It was a fun toy but there's a reason it didn't really take off in corporate settings.
In the “jungle” you only own what you can protect. Even your life. Violence is natural. Non-violence, property rights and free trade is extremely unnatural, and requires a strong central authority to write the rules and impose them.
Regurgitating old critiques of terrible, homogeneous design, then holding up as counterexamples two of the most embarrassingly bad designs of the last few years. I suppose this is appropriate for a marketer to write, since Tesla and "Liquid Death" are just marketing departments with other afterthoughts attached.
It's the future I always imagined as a child. A vast divider-less cubicle scape of people in Patagonia vests who define all caps constants by yelling at their standing desks.

"USER!! UNDERSCORE LIMIT!! EQUALS TWO THOUSAND AND FORTY EIGHT!"
A pretty amusing jab at the "Everyone Can Become One Of The 0.01%!" trope.
It seems that Musk at this point is completely unaware that he is a walking contradiction.

On one hand, he is a technologist. Forward thinking and driving towards the future.

On the other hand, he is an old fashioned factory owner. He views his workforce as pure labour and can't accept that he can't force his employees to work under his total control. He also can't accept the gain in life capital for his employees in working from home for his workforce and that the future of work for humanity is probably decentralised offices and WFH, not middle managed, over the shoulder, supervised, centralised offices.
In case anyone else stopped after watching the video, if you scroll down a bit further you see the list of

FEATURES

Write/edit code

Just state your intent in natural language and let Hey, GitHub! do the heavy lifting of suggesting a code snippet. And if you don't like what was generated, ask for a change in plain English.
Go to the next method

Code navigation

No more using mouse and arrow keys. Ask Hey, GitHub! to...

go to line 34
go to method X
go to next block

Control the IDE

"Toggle zen mode", “run the program”, or use any other VisualStudio Code command.

Code Summarization
Don’t know what a piece of code does? No problem! Ask Hey, GitHub! to explain lines 3-10 and get a summary of what the code does.

Explain lines 3 - 10
Eye strain is one reason I have been waiting for something like this. If I could close my eyes and just navigate the codebase through a mental modal and some voice commands, I really wouldn't mind paying!

I have looked at some tools for the blind, but you need just way too much dedication for it to work for you and since you have working eyes it is usually easier to just open your eyes.
Let's try to picture the noise in an openspace full of people using that ... focusing is going to be difficult, well at least for people like me who are easily distracted by background noise/conversations.
Ask HN: How did Vercel get this big?
In 7 years Vercel raised $313 million and is valued over $2.5 billion (round of November 2021). And they seem to have +400 employees[0] and are still recruiting more[1].

So I guess my question is, how can an open-source framework (Next.js) and a thin layer over AWS and CloudFlare be this massive? Am I missing something?

[0] https://www.forbes.com/companies/vercel

[1] https://vercel.com/careers
Because like Zuck said, Twitter was a clown car. Engineering could build good stuff. The management and board was however one clown after another.
I think this is the reddit post that started it all and got reposted everywhere.

https://www.reddit.com/r/KotakuInAction/comments/yorypr/very...

And here is a discussion in Japanese from November 6 on Twitter.

https://nitter.it/you629/status/1589379389841879040
> This is unironically the reason

Can I ask an off topic question? Where did this sudden popular use of “unironically” come from? I don’t get it. Why would it be ironic?

It reminds me of the sudden rise of “literally” a decade or so ago.
They could've amazed a few people a bit more by emulating x86 apps even faster (but M1+Rosetta can already run some stuff faster than an Intel Mac), but then the benefit of releasing native apps would be much decreased ("why bother, it's good enough ...").

It's a delicate political game that they, yet again, seem to be playing pretty well.
Given how rust-y that looks, are you aware of `dbg!`? Debug printing + file name + line number and it does it properly to stderr
The issue I have with this is that design is typically domain specific. What works for an everyman-search engine might not be a perfect fit for an accounting software, an professional team managment tool or an powerplant control software.

A design targeted to the occasional user can spectacularily fail for power users that use the thing 4 hours every day. Sure it is easy to understand and self explainatory. But this is an advantage once at the beginning and might cost your users every day after that.

Having a steep learning curve is not a feature, but sometimes easy to use means a UX sacrifices fast and efficent workflows (cue notepad.exe vs vim).

Sure, notepad.exe is easier to use (and probably has more users in absolute numbers) than vim, but if your target group is power users, guess which one might feel more worth investing into for them?
Glad to see one more article on fakes > mocks. Here's mine that is not quite as good and focuses on Go from four or so years ago: https://sendgrid.com/blog/when-writing-unit-tests-dont-use-m...
Cutting edge technologist for the investors, old school factory owner for managing people. Makes perfect sense if you're trying to extract the max amount of money.
Half formed thought ... however.

I am more than just my job (or hobby, or location) - say I am a worker and have my @work, and I am deep into digital art so I am also on @mastodon.art.

I should really only talk with my work hat on @work and my art hat on @mastodon.art - should these be able to be optionally linked. Should the follwers of me @work also see my @hobby etc without having to follow me all over the federated universe?

Movie star X on twitter will promote their new movie, talk about their kids, pump and dump crypto, slag off a politician, rip the latest death etc. All one the same 'instance' or server.
The assistants (Google, Alexa, Siri) are not great at NLP. Compare how you speak to them vs speaking to a LLM like gpt-3, there is a world of difference. The latter feels like speaking to a human, the former more like your trying to get your voice commands into a state machine.
Yes, but this answers to the grandparent, not the parent.

This means it's an assistive technology, but hardly "a generational paradigm change in how to write code".
Also acts as a self reinforcing thing.

Like games, wasd is movement, so every other game copied that. If you try to change, people are going to be mighty confused why the controls aren't "normal".
It's the "caveman principle" [0] at work. We are still biologically pretty much the same. Hopefully, it means that something like Metaverse will never materialize or that it will take the emergence of a Matrix-like VR first.

[0] https://associationsnow.com/2013/04/how-the-future-of-associ...
I hope to see the click consonant "‖" adopted as "||" one day.
Yes, I could claim that pirating music is the "standard" but it doesn't negate the fact that there are copyright laws that could land me with a fine or in jail. GitHub can claim whatever they want, but their policies and the laws surrounding them still stand.
>I can't imagine that they bring a better product than two of the richest companies in the world

Code is much more constrained by language syntax though.

Even for the "call peter" example, while the input is easy, the expected range of inputs that Siri should handle and be able to differentiate it from is huge.

Of course this is still a problem for e.g. defining variable names, where you could say anything.
Playwright's selectors are very resilient.

Yes, your copy might change, but that is also a change in spec (whereas a change in DOM is not always a change in spec).
True, but the fact that technology is going to reinvent everything, including work seems to be an oversight. I'm not sure an old school factory owner is going to attract the best people in a highly skilled industry
I’ve enjoyed some UX PhD research seminars, and I think something needs to be said for the legitimate UX research being done. (You wouldn’t believe the thought/effort/testing that can go into the shape, color, details, etc. of a web app button.) For example: Amazon’s app structure (for their main online shopping experience) has been tested ad-infinitum by people who know what they’re doing. If you’re designing a similar shopping experience, it’s not “copying Amazon” as much as using the state of the art in shopping experience design.

There’s no deductive logic that says “Facebook has spent millions on research so it’s correct”, but common sense says this isn’t a bad strategy. UX research is a legitimate undertaking, and Facebook definitely had the chops to hire people who have invested their education in understanding the nuances of when to use which design elements. It’s literally a science.

UX design (I’m not speaking of other aspects of design) isn’t really a creative process as much as an engineering discipline. There’s a best way to achieve any particular outcome. Maybe taste is involved in where you hide the rubbish of your application, but the basic functionality has a “best flow”. Copying one of the giants is the best way to get this flow for the average person.
The amount of users joining the network daily already started to drop. I see no Eternal September actually happening if the trend continues. I'd give a week for that.
Nope: https://twitter.com/esthercrawford/status/159047344889964544...
Travel to New Dehli and take a car ride around the city imagine what it would take to distribute dollars in a slum. Imagine the emotional turmoil caused by a billionaire tickling themselves by "using" people for an exercise in amusement. It is practically an act of domination.

There aren't just legal barriers, but language barriers and human locating barriers. Imagine trying to get people to distribute dollars which is an action that has no practical purpose other than amusement. How would you motivate people to participate?

There are islands on this planet that have no concept of international law because their inhabitants kill almost anyone that tries to get on their island. AFAIK international law says attempts to communicate with these people are illegal. Furthermore, we don't know what their concept of value is, nor would they have any understanding of what a dollar is. There is no exchange rate. To these people a dollar is a piece of paper.

That ignores that dollar distribution is poorly defined. Old people die and new people are born constantly. This makes the problem poorly defined since the act of sending is not and cannot be instantaneous.

I would take some of that money and travel to get perspective. If you've traveled for understanding rather than self amusement this question is a non starter.