skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
So what were the 10,000 people working on? How does that staffing number compare to Google Assistant or Apple Siri?

Now that Google and Apple have offline on-device speech models, Amazon could provide offline speech recognition plus the ability to script 3rd-party APIs without going through their cloud. They could even limit that feature to Prime or other subscription, if they want to retain a surveillance business model for non-subscription users.

For people with visual or physical impairments, Echo/Alexa can be life changing, as it can control lights, sound/video, TV, internet radio, fans, microwave and landline phones. Yet, it could do so much more, if their stellar far-field microphone platform was a trustable (offline) voice interface to any home/IoT device or cloud service with an open API.

New Echo devices even include motion detection, another under-utilized capability in a sea of sketchy IoT devices with questionable firmware. Amazon already has robust security for AWS and mindshare with developers, they are missing the opportunity to offer the most secure, most hackable voice platform for home security and automation.

Have big companies forgotten the cardinal rule of platforms? First you let creativity and innovation explode, THEN you steal the best use cases and incorporate them into the platform. It doesn't work in the other direction, no matter how many PMs, whiteboards and lego-filled rooms you throw at early markets. See the Twitter API for prior lost opportunity.

Voice UX is a combination of CLI grammar and a long tail of use cases which are unique yet frequent enough to memorize commands. It's not too late to make Alexa an offline-first, developer friendly voice platform for ... everything, not just whitelisted partner devices and interfaces.
Spot on. I can vouch for all those use cases plus I enjoy my Amazon Music sub on it. Everything else they've added often makes the experience for those very core things worse.
The mutational load thing rings true, because i both have a weird uneven resting expression and I am crazier than a shithouse rabbit.

I do think there is a big correlation between crazyness and “professional hot people” (sex workers, intimacy workers, many service people, models, actors, etc), being that the mental game of attraction is inherently irrational and it helps to operate on vibes vs. numbers.
The feeling when self awareness blows into the forum like a refreshing breeze
Missing the "previous discussions" links showing it was posted in 2012, 2015, 2017, 2018, and twice in 2020.
I literally drilled a hole in the wall underneath the kitchen sink to pass a wire to 2 friends living in the opposite appartement. On campus, you could see wires hanging from window to window outside dorm buildings. Nice times
Alternate theory- he bought Twitter because his life’s goal is to get humanity to populate other planets, and Twitter makes this planet look like a dumpster fire by comparison.

3D chess, indeed.
I bought a GPS with Alexa because it was over $50 cheaper then the same model without the Alexa integration. Big mistake. The device doesn’t function at all without enabling Alexa so that thwarted my A plan. Instead Alexa is always listening and always trying to inject itself into conversations. My B plan was to never say the A word (Alexa!) but apparently there are a long list of other words that trigger it. I can always tell when I’m someplace without cell service because Alexa is quiet. North Dakota, Wyoming, and Montana are all Alexa free zones. My C plan is to train everyone in the car to yell “Go away Alexa!!!” As loud as they can whenever it talks and that does seem to make it abort whatever search it is running at the moment and keep it quiet for an hour.

The next time I buy a GPS I’ll spend the extra $50 to not have Alexa.
Doesn’t [-] set it to zero?

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brainfuck
It's neither. It's donations to support causes.
Like others, I find Alexa and its ilk are handy for some specific tasks. Setting the alarm in my bedroom or sometimes timers in the kitchen. A quick, cursory weather forecast. Playing an album or playlist in bed or in car though confusion is more likely at that point. Turning the one switchless light in my bedroom off and on.

The key is that you basically need to get the exact wizard incantation right.

That's not useless for a fairly low $$ device. But it's certainly not going off and booking my travel to San Francisco for me. Or even ordering from Amazon given I probably want to check prices.

I don't actually have an issue with using Alexa etc. in general. The same data is going to be in a search engine or somewhere in any case.

There's just not much it's good for and therefore it's really hard to see thousands of highly paid engineers working on this stuff. For my uses, Alexa hasn't improved one iota for the past n years. How much money has been pissed away on salaries and other expenses in that time?
Given that my opinion hasn't changed much for 8 years, I suspect, I wasn't parroting the 'fanboy' rhetoric from 2022 back in 2015.
> I find the US political donation system a weird mix: is it bribery or a protection racket or both!?

Definitely both, his text interview pretty much revealed to what extent he was willing to go to open the right doors, once in them he realized he had to keep the grift going and donations/contributions are how things get done in order to 'be liked' and make a 'reputation.'

I want to re-iterate, this has nothing to do with Bitcoin (FTX never had any exposure to it), and more to do with how an insider with political, VC and SV connections who used alt cryptocurrencies (specifically his own) to do EXACTLY what crooks from wall street have done (Lehman, MF Global). This guy had backing from Sequoia to Blackrock, and sat down with tons of politicians on panels and was on the cover of tons of media and was about to do a panel will Janet Yellen and Zelensky this month!

Again, he is an insider who had a lucrative trading background and pivoted to go out on his own pretending to be a woke Effective Alturist to VCs in order to grift retail who were incredibly short-sighted with promises of infinite yield farming with alts. Seqoiua 'loved' and ave him $250million while he played video games during his pitch: please help me understand how ANYONE who has been a founder and has had to bootstrap how could anyone get away with this if he weren't a connected insider? It's like the most satirical version of Silicon Valley come to Life.

If Elizabeth Holmes went down perhaps the pressure will be on to get him back to the US and prosecute him for financial malfeasance, but it seems the Bahamas intends to financially ruin him before that happens. I fear his connected parents have already started to make phone calls and call in favours in order to get him a pardon or at the very least a very short sentence in a white collar crime prison.

In short, Bitcoiners get multiple life sentences in a SuperMax for running websites, and I envision an insider like SBF (and his gf a Stanford grad who is responsible for losing customer funds who is seemingly out of the picture) who ran a ponzi scheme funded by VC money will likely get a light sentence if anything at all.
This whole ordeal made me realize that I'm less interested in following people and things they say and more interested in getting neat information and projects behind those people. I hardly read opinion pieces since to me they're not worth that much, even coming from a prolific person, I find the clock is only right a few times and those pieces will make their way to me. That's a reason I like HN. The link is the important bit, sometimes it links to a person who is writing things, other times it's just a nice github link. But it's always about the content. I deleted Twitter off my phone last night and may join Mastodon but honestly I've just realized that Twitter style social media is something I don't care for much.
I find it interesting they limit the music capabilities to something approximating an NES/gameboy rather than going with a sample/tracker-based system like on the Amiga. That was what really good games of that early era used. (There's an incessant mind bug that these retro computer things need to either use bips and boops or support full .wav playback with no inbetween.)
YES! I worked on the FedEx Enhanced SuperTracker software from 1999-2006, which I believe is the "Version II" you're referencing. The core software was still written in Forth, but we rebuilt the package routing logic in in C, which might be what you're referring to. Very curious to know how you are familiar with all the history, did you work there or at Forth, Inc?
As a Perl guy: yes. :(

Warning all, don’t paste this into your shell!
Still it does not always work. On faux webshops you can be tricked into making a fund transfer, while you think you are paying for goods. This is a common scam as chargebacks do not work on fund transfers!

Actually following the papertrail and disconnecting the fund transfer shops for helping the scammers is not done, so they can go on with impunity.
solution exists such as, coupons, customer onboarding rebates, gift articles.

It would probably have to be other than the primary purchase, but if you know your customers, and the landscape of your sales deme, you could offer a range of most probably useful items to include "for free" along with the purchase.

if someone buys, monopoly include coupons for a case of soda.
if someone buys, toothpaste, include free toothbrush, viceversa.
No Svelte either, I'm in shambles.
The jump from lab demonstration to commercial viability is exactly the place where almost every tech trick fails.

So there is no need to pay this thing any attention. Geothermal under ideal conditions is not competitive. Steam turbines have operating costs solar and wind do not.

This is the same reason nukes are a dead end, and D-T fusion besides. It doesn't matter how cheap your heat source is if you need to pay for operating a steam turbine to get any power out. Solar and wind provide high-grade energy directly, so are impossible to compete with anywhere they work.

There are uses for direct heat piped underground to heat buildings, but you don't need to bore to 10km, or even 3km, to get enough heat for that.
Although they've improved from their early days, Hyundai/Kia have never been one of the brands with a reputation for long term reliability, like Toyota and Honda. Any reason to believe they'll do better with their electric models?
When NVIDIA is the benchmark, everybody is a saint on Earth.
The Specialized Vessel That Will Launch Photo Tourism Space Pods
Are you sure you were using the real site when doing the initial signup, and didn’t actually use a scam site?
To me this also seems like the right attitude and the right comment.

The author blames twitter for negativity and arguments, but spent quite some time on his post criticising the new Twitter ownership and then went on a rant about Elon Musk. How is that better.

Is the idea here that people should express their criticisms on blogs rather than tweets? But blogs have to be shared on some kind of social media to be read by others too (like this on on HN).

I would agree more with the message of "do what you like and don't go around telling others what they should be doing". Doesn't matter the platform. If everyone practiced this then most problems with social media would go away.
Those comments violate the HN guidelines.

Please read and follow them: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Kidding, I too thought this thread was the parody at first. After all, they are real HN comments!

Or maybe this is part of the parody. Maybe if we trained an AI to detect genuine vs. parody?
As a ______"____"______________, I agree.
They are in the UK, and per their post used direct bank transfer. No CC involved.
IIRC, context is one of the most expensive parts of Alexa in their infrastructure.
Often re-writing suffers from "It's bigger and was more expensive, but it has different bugs!"

That is, nothing good. So many ways it can go wrong - second-system syndrome (RIP Fred Brooks!), missing features, paralysis during planning, fail to launch and on and on.
Let's be clear, he's ranked #6 political donor.

#2 donor to Democrats, only behind George Soros. Donated $35.7 million to democrats, $240k to republicans.

https://www.opensecrets.org/elections-overview/biggest-donor...

It will be a galvanizing event to see how he is punished for scamming billions of dollars from regular joes. Especially after Elizabeth Holmes got 11 year for scamming on a significantly smaller scale.
I just bought a cheap TV from BB for the WC and got a freebie Echo Dot. What can I actually do with it?
Agreed. I've seen statistics along the lines of 75% of relationships, in the UK, starting due to meeting at work.

I've certainly dated several colleagues, over the years.
I get a https error.

Anyway, the profiles are too short. You should ask your friends to fill one so you get some realistic data there.

I still not sure how useful is to add ** to the emails. It's probably too easy to guess the correct email anyway. Showing the complete email would make people unhappy too, so I have no good solution for this.
The vibe I get from Amazon Devices is that all the innovation and drive came directly from Bezos. Not much tends to happen after he loses interest (or worse, retires).
The Kindle is another example of this situation.
Depends where you work I guess. There are still folks that deploy their React app in "dev mode" after all.
The AM and FM radio here are full of stations I don't want to listen to - same with most of what's on DAB. Just an AUX socket please.
We don't get our music through Amazon, so we don't get that use case, but I imagine it'd be nice.
Very happy that “tangential” and “could you elaborate” are in there.
It's likely anybody past 40 is too out of touch with rapidly-changing technology and culture as to be a bad choice.
I love this idea—I think it would be fun to gamify it! Keep the predicted thread secret, and then use it to award points to hn commenters based on originality. If a comment is functionally the same as a predicted comment, it gets -10 points. If the comment is novel, it gets 10 points. Then there's a sliding scale between.

You'd need some checks to prevent people from posting a bunch of Zalgo text (maybe a model to identify "interesting" or "insightful" posts), but it could be a fun overlay on the hn commenting ecosystem.
Yes, we live on the forum https://conwaylife.com/forums/ and the Discord https://discord.gg/BCuYCEn.
I'm also curious who submitted this to HN? Was it the author trying to monetize their blog?
It's not inappropriate, it's just never a better choice than languages that are actually used, because then everyone who learns can say "I know X". I know Forth really well but I don't put it on my CV, even though I work in probably the main sector it's still used (embedded).
This is pretty much the same around my house only we also use it to make shopping list for things we don't buy from Amazon.

I cannot think of a single time I've bought something through alexa. I also can't imagine why someone would.
Big Bang was not the beginning [video]
Even if the average C developer is more expert than the average Rust developer, I don't think the kernel will be developed by an average developer of either language.
This is hilarious, but this is the best we have! But since it's funny, one must concede the truth that made it so. Well done.
Pants 2 IIRC. It has been several years now, so I forget the particulars.
Ellipsometry
>"Ellipsometry is an optical technique for investigating the dielectric properties (complex refractive index or dielectric function) of thin films. Ellipsometry measures the change of polarization upon reflection or transmission and compares it to a model.

It can be used to characterize composition, roughness, thickness (depth), crystalline nature, doping concentration, electrical conductivity and other material properties."

PDS: In other words, it's sort of like a microscope/debugger/scanner/probe (perhaps like Star Trek's "Tricorder") -- but for anything thin-film related -- such as printed electronics, LCD screens, solar panels, silicon IC's, thin-film transducers, thin-film nanotechnology, etc., etc.

Related:

Introduction to Ellipsometry and Polarized Light:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BycPkRIutqg

What is Ellipsometry?

https://www.jawoollam.com/resources/ellipsometry-tutorial/wh...

Spectroscopic Ellipsometry for Organic Electronics Applications:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PO2pwAZBsMw
My very very very favorite experience with my Google Assistant was when making a shopping list.

"OK Google, tell me my shopping list."

"Eggs, Kale, Chicken Thighs and four other items."

I laughed until I cried.
This is too generous considering none of these comments trigger an unrelated and subtly racist political response.
>It's a grossly corrupt system, but notice that corporate media (owned by the same people) chose not to put 'concern about government corruption' on their list of items to poll voters about prior to the midterms.

I find it difficult to view the things you describe as "grossly corrupt"

>Then, the Senator or House member will always take the donor's call

Ok, so what?

>will introduce bills written by the donor's lawyer

What exactly is supposed to be wrong with this?

>will put pressure on regulatory agencies to do what the donor wants, etc.

Not in any official role, as a politician they just happen to be a well respected person with influence. How would you even forbid this?

None of these seem to be examples of actual corruption, like buying votes.
It should be relatively straightforward with something like pushover.net (I'm not affiliated with them). Most low-code tools can send an API request.
Asking for specific albums, songs, and playlists seems to be somewhere on the edge of Alexa's (and Siri's) capabilities and can easily get into the frustration zone.
In another thread, OP said they did not pay by credit card.

I just tried to sign up and in Canada, my only options are Apple Pay or a credit card.

Anyways OP, this is a good thing to start thinking through. I’m not sure where you’re from but I only have the option to pay via card.
... and no one about site's contrast or scroll hijacking...
I like the simplicity of this. The source code is small, so one can easily change it as one needs and looks like other people have posted links to similar projects. Really appreciate this and the thread.
If by “back in the day” you mean 10-15 years ago, then Internet and social media adoption was a small fraction of what it is today.

Today, you can’t handle (or attract) a large percentage of Twitter users without tons of financing (to handle server costs until ad revenues kick up) and lots of paid or viral advertising.

The 1st 80% of the functionality is super easy and open source, it’s the last 20% of handling advertising, content moderation, content algorithms, etc. that’s more complex.
I frankly don't care about the donations.

What matters is the sheer scale of the fraud and the fact that it doesn't seem to be getting pursued aggressively by the US. I mean they announced a ticketmaster anti-trust investigation due to the Taylor Swift ticket fiasco, but $10B in fraud isn't enough to elicit a more notable and vocal response?

I'm sure it will be pursued but where is the outcry?
Internet Archive is implementing readium LCP which is an open drm standard with many competing readers like Thorium. No adobe ID required.
>Here's a hyper-anal correction that is itself correct, but doesn't exactly contradict the OP.

I've always hated this. Thankfully I've found it happens much, much less on HN vs say reddit haha.

The cherry on top is how the correction is effectively useless.
I love the idea that nature has intentions, and that if it did, we could know what they are. Deliciously magical!
I'm pretty sure I did. I do have a payment to "Starlink Internet Services Limited", but I don't know the IBAN.

Edit, the IBAN is: DE47 2022 0800 0092 9273 61
> Math can describe lots of universes that differ from observation.

This has all been hashed out already. Look up the mathematical universe hypothesis and Wolfram's Ruliad for two different but similar approaches. The basic idea is that all consistent mathematical objects exist, and we simply inhabit one of them.

The fact that QM and GR are inconsistent with each other is not an issue because they describe different universes in mathematical space that are close but not equal to our own.

> And finally, nature is under no obligation to be describable mathematically. That it is so describable is a fortuitous circumstance

That too is a conjecture. There is exactly zero evidence that nature is non-mathematical, but people who keep saying this are basically insisting that it's effectiveness at describing reality is simply a continuous chain of grand coincidences. To say this is statistically implausible bordering on impossible is the kindest way to put it.
They're stupid inflated right now. Pre pandemic, they were selling for ~7500 used in the US.
> In extreme capitalism, even the government is up for sale to the highest bidders.

I'm going to guess (with a great deal of certainty) that you've never spent time in a former or current socialist/communist country, because that is how things get done there with the implicit expectation of it being the precursor for how anything gets done.

I think that is one of the many overlaps all States have in common: the superficial means may differ but through largess and outright theft (and eventual consolidation) of a Nation's wealth amongst a minority with an effective monopoly on violence is the crux of how they all operate.

Condemning it entirely and finding a new ways to structure Society should be the aim, but since tribalism is so effective you have the plebs fighting amongst themselves about who's corrupt system steals from them the most legitimately.
Google Assistant has this with Alarms and Timers. They are different systems with some different constraints but no user on the planet would actually consider them to be different concepts.
Not even 99.98% of people have unambiguous genitalia (it's about 99.5-99.97% [1]), before we even get to people with the "opposite" genitalia of what their chromosomes would suggest. An in any case, genitalia was only one of the 4 things I mentioned, and are also one of the ones that can be changed later.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intersex#Prevalence
This is a nice tagline, but I think it's much more benign than it sounds, and it's not exclusive to America.

It's just a legal convention to help think about how corporations fit into laws not explicitly written for them. For example, who can enter legal contracts and what are the repercussions if they are broken? Well contract law was thought of around people, but if you think of a corporation similarly, then the law still makes sense. Of course, they can and do specify restrictions that only apply to corporations or opt them out.
Show HN: A tiny WASM runtime in JavaScript
Wrote a tiny Wasm runtime in Javascript.
This is mainly a POC and for demonstration purposes. I hope it will be useful for current and future WebAssembly learners.
Of course contributions and suggestions are very welcomed :)
I'd say, go for it!

My most widely-used project (that I was solely responsible for) is an absolute horror of tangled code. It was originally written -- or rather, hacked together with spit and baling wire -- purely for my own use, as a tool to accomplish specific tasks.

Turned out some other people thought it was interesting. I made the code available -- and nearly 2 decades later, it's still going strong, largely thanks to others who have stepped in to handle the occasional maintenance tasks.

The code is still appalling; but it does its job, and people still value it.
If people did not reproduce if they couldn't get a beautiful mate, then beauty would be widespread. But even if you can't get the most beautiful girl, most men still settle for what they can get, thus continuing the non-beautiful lines.