skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Amazon missed the boat on their voice assistant. They could have absolutely dominated. They were first to market with a general in-home appliance with home automation integration.

They did a good job with shopping and music (and timers and junk) but even today Alexa is still far from a full personal assistant.

Amazon should've launched an email service: forward or CC alexa@amazon.com and have your assistant keep track of it. Flights, meetings, reminders, even just responding to emails. The voice-to-text transcription is excellent but so underutilized.

They introduced device to device calling, but as far as I can tell true VoIP never showed up -- why? This would be a killer feature.

Podcast and ebook support was always such a mess and clearly an afterthought.

Amazon's devices were clearly always sold at cost or at a loss. Maybe there's a universe where this is anti-competitive, but there was nothing substantial ever there.

They hired like crazy, but for what? Why doesn't my car have Alexa built-in? Why didn't they obliterate Sonos?

I wish I could use Alexa as a personal assistant, but it never really materialized.

My best guess is that leadership and product vision really, brutally fumbled here. I don't think they knew what they had, and were unprepared to harness its true potential.
Yes. I meant that more as "Homebrew has undergone significant development changes since the creator of tea was last involved." In particular, the transition to the current architecture (favoring bottles over source builds on clients) happened well after him.

Edit: One of the reasons why I think it's important to continue to clarify this is because tea's repository description contains "brew2," implying a successor relationship.
That’s good news.
This sounds like a vodka vaccine for some addicted to vodka. Odds are they will just switch to whiskey or something else.
It's not just about food prices. Brexit has decimated exports, put whole industries and professions in jeopardy, and damaged the value of the pound.
Bendegem's paper is a good introduction and overview:

A Defense of Strict Finitism, http://www.jeanpaulvanbendegem.be/strict%20finitism.pdf
Several investigations have been opened: https://www.reuters.com/technology/manhattan-us-attorneys-of....

It's likely a very complicated case, so I would imagine it will take some time. It took what, 2-3 years to bring the case against Elizabeth Holmes over Theranos?
Grocery list is my no1 user of Google Assistant. The only thing that works everytime.

Sometimes I ask general questions while driving and I get a good answer, things that answers questions that come up while taking to another passenger in the car. Single answer questions work well e.g. "what is the diameter of the moon?" (don't judge we talk about weird stuff during long drives).
Ask HN: How to avoid brute force problem solving?
Dear HN,

Relatively young programmer here. When I encounter difficult problems, I find myself brute forcing solutions in the form of trying different approaches rapidly until I get the result I want. Maybe this is happening because subconsciously I'm trying to preserve the flow I'm in, but I really don't like this state of mind.

I want to be able to slow down and understand the deeper details instead of rushing towards solutions. But in the heat of the moment, it's really hard to steer myself away from a tight feedback loop.

As a side note, I'm aware of countless programmer memes which depict similar behavior i.e. "choosing X hours of debugging instead of reading 2 pages of documentation". So maybe I'm not the only one. Do you experience similar issues? And if so, how do you manage to get out of this mindset and just push yourself towards learning more and getting better?
"turnsout" You're submitting too fast. Please slow down.

Thanks
well in that case, the easy way to understand nix is : "A new linux variant and package manager that can compile all packages from source". Why confuse users it has anything to do with dev environments. If your initial product is for development spaces only, it will only complicate things and nobody would use.
Ah, simpler times.

The photos really took me back to the early 90's and 00's, when I was a kid/teenager, happy to spend hours playing the same first-person shooters for hours, on the same maps, over and over again, with my nerdy friends from school. I'd love to go back for a day and relive those times.
Have you looked into Mycroft?

It's an open source voice assistant, which runs on hardware you physically own and keep in your house.
The only manifestation of Y2K that I ever saw was a receipt with the date 1/2/100.
Any attempt to do that would be political suicide, as indeed Liz Truss recently demonstrated.
Camus and Sartre would like a word. I prefer their worldview.

By your own argument I don‘t even need to give a good reason. I‘m not able to give a good reason, I prefer their philosophy of being responsible based on your notion of not having the ability to see it any different.
Well said.

Problem is likely that people just don't know anything else by now.

If all you've seen is Windows and a Unix clone, well, you could indeed come up with the idea that Unix is "well designed". Even it's actually not designed at all, and more or less everything was just a random accident (and usually even the worst, but "simplest", option around).
Yeah, but at some point those machines would have had to have original training data, so at some point people probably did have time to engage in techno religious wars. Unless of course, all of this is made up, to keep us occupied to not discover the matrix or alike ..
Increase in total numbers or in proportion?

Edit: the link above shows that in raw numbers, non-EU migration increased while EU decreased. Appears to not be a complete 1:1 replacement, though. I asked because if you only give the proportion, it can still increase if just the EU migration numbers go down.

Also relevant to reading the graph, the campaign/referendum on brexit started in 2015.
I do enjoy sharing the fruit of my labor; but I share what money I have as well.

But, I "share" my money with those who provided me and others with things, like farmers, truckers, construction workers, plumbers, electricians, architects, textile workers, drafters, crafts-folks, artists, custodial, medical specialists, government workers, educational specialists, sanitation folks, engineers, engineers, engineers. Did I repeat that? Yes, more engineers.

I'm quite sure you do share your money too (and probably may not know the true extent of your reach).
How does that make one a junkie? Junkie implies they go around collecting junk to sell for drugs. Not all drug users are poor.
I know I’m in the minority here but I’ve never experienced this. Eye contact for me is a deeply uncomfortable thing and I’ve struggled with it my whole life. I do make eye contact with people but I almost never sustain it for more than a couple seconds. I find online meetings to be pretty engaging most of the time. No less engaging than a meeting in an office with the same amount of participation.
Not really. Citizens United was about limits on "soft money". Basically it removed any restrictions on spending by PACs on behalf of a candidate as long as the spending isn't explicitly coordinated with the candidate. Personal vs corporate spending is not really relevant.
"As an American poster, I will get really upset about the idea of GDPR applying to US companies that do business with EU citizens and businesses. I will also complain about other EU regulations, because regulation is bad, stifles innovation and we don't need it in the land of the free, unless the state is California."
I’m embarrassed of the code I’ll write tomorrow …

Honestly, no one cares. Add a note at the top of the readme that provides historical context if you must address the point. Otherwise don’t worry cause everything will be alright. People are too self centered to care about your old shorty code.
Kinda hard to do, I do sorta have to breath, ya know.
Wir sind die Roboten.
He is relaxed and he is sleeping well. According to the NYT.

Could this be code for: he is likely not going to jail?
>I've not been on social media in .. ~8 years

Is Hacker News not social media?
Have you heard about our lord and savior root|parent|prev|next ?
This doesnt mention that fentanyl is used widely in anesthesia and emergency medicine (weirdly enough, its the safest opiate in this setting). Not sure doctors want to just give this away.
Posted as: https://www.reddit.com/r/Starlink/comments/z07m2v/paid_for_s...
I’m aware that probes have started, but with very little fanfare or pomp behind them.

Perhaps people prefer that approach, but to me this is a situation that calls for vocal messaging from the top.

The fraud is public for all to see and pretty much indisputable. It’s far worse than Bernie Madoffs scheme ever was

Evidence needs to be gathered before any formal prosecution sure, but would like to see more of a verbal acknowledgement of the clear wrongdoing from regulators
Based on this comment I'm almost certain you have faster hardware than most of your users.
"tons of reasons"

Let's not kid ourselves. You are already famous with followers. That is the biggest reason you can grow followers quickly on Mastodon.

I had Mastodon and tweeted about it too. And I have 5 followers compared to 200 something followers on twitter.
With the way Intel segments CPUs you need the stupid numbers. "Intel 8-core 3.6GHz 2020 no integrated GPU, no ECC with unlocked multiplier" is a bit of a mouthful.
Alexa devices have had some of the most iteration on improving the hardware and some impressive back end systems. The integration with Audible, amazon music, and many other streaming systems is impressive. Part of that is because the architecture is very much the "brains" hosted in the cloud allowing AWS to other service to be better made.

Google is very much a "search google" and interact with Google's tools... which don't seem to be as well integrated. The "I want to add X to my calendar" is fine, but things like setting up Sirius XM to stream to Google or the Hue lighting setup was awkward (at the time) and didn't work as well when I was comparing the systems.

At one time (it no longer appears to be the case - which is disappointing), Alexa appeared to have a knowledge engine behind it. You could do things like "what color is a light red flower" and then get back "a pink flower is pink". Incidentally asking what color a blue bird was came back with "a blue bird is blue, brown, and red" giving a hint at that knowledge engine worked from some system behind it rather than tautological responses for other silly questions that I asked. Now that comes back with "According to an Alexa Answers contributor..." Asking "Who invented the C programming language" used to respond back "Denis Ritchie" and "what did Denis Ritchie invent" returned back "Denis Ritchie invited the C programming language."

This Alexa knowledge engine appears to have reverted to "search Wikipedia."

Siri doesn't appear to be trying to be a general assistant and is instead focusing on HomeKit automation and special "this is what you can do with it."

Compare writing a skill for Alexa is "write a program and host it on AWS" - but the skills can do, pretty much anything. If you look at Siri "Intents" ( https://developer.apple.com/documentation/sirikit and https://developer.apple.com/design/human-interface-guideline... ) you'll see that the standard intents are very limited and in those domains, Siri is pretty accurate on what is done.

For general queries, Siri used to partner with Wolfram - but this doesn't appear to be the case anymore. It was a meh integration when it was in place.

These differences in how the device behaves comes from some fairly fundamental architectural decisions.

Siri is fairly self supporting, even if limited. Alexa has its brains in AWS and as things become less profitable, Alexa becomes less useful for those things. Google has (to me) always been an also ran because I'm not invested in the google ecosystem for stuff and getting responses where it just reads the first page in google searches is boring.
This is kind of like saying, "don't feel guilty, this weapon won't be used for murder, it's mostly just for arson."
The easy way to understand nix is : "A package manager that can compile all packages from source", this functional mumbo-jumbo is just confusing. If apt could compile all its packages from source with an option to do so and a cache, it would be as reproducible.
And in true modern internet hell self-mockery, the page glitches out and I get a repeat of the end of it in a seeming scroll jacking. Then it glitched again and I’m back at the top of the page. Bizarre.
Elon Musk isn't honest, every dishonest person knows that the best play to run is to be "bluntly honest" part time to basically hide their dishonesty, even people like andrew tate rely on this playbook, it establishes credibility for their other views.
While I like the idea in general but instead of hosting it as a static file, SQLie table would have been a more accessible approach not to mention that it is far easier to query from Rust.

Heck you could even compile SQLite and Rust both to Webassbly as Cloud flare edge workers but I'll not go that far.
During the pandemic, I built an online version of the dominos-based game, Mexican Train, for my wife’s family. They play it often at family gatherings. Her mom posted it to the Villages Facebook group (a huge retirement community here in the US). Mexican Train is very popular in retirement communities.

It blew up. It peaked at around 2600 concurrent players on Christmas. It’s slowed down, but still averages around 70 games/day.

The most amazing party was I run it by donation. I’ve received enough donations to keep it running, and dozens of cards, letters, and long emails thanking me profusely for building the game, and how it kept people connected across the miles and especially during lockdowns.
As excited as I am about the new crop of "personal knowledge base" software, I'm also hesitant because in their rush to commercialize, many are turning into "Org-mode as a Service" type of companies, with the same focus on subscriptions and vendor lock-in.

The developments in this space are very exciting, and remind me of the early Wordpress plugin days. For example, I use a Logseq plugin called "random note" that pulls up a random note from my library. It's a great way to serendipitously re-surface ideas that you haven't thought about in a while.

For now, tools like Logseq and Obsidian can be used completely offline, and synced with anything that supports local file versioning, like Syncthing or Git. I wish I could pay $25 flat and have a lifetime license for the software exactly as it works now. As these are flat Markdown files sitting on my local drive, it doesn't seem like something that would need ongoing maintenance.
I joined 2016, but was reading already years before and honestly I feel HN went downhill from tolerant forum with civil discussion to place where anything against HN hivemind (not that different from most of US companies which vastly support Demoracts with their donations) is downvoted into oblivion.

You call those comments "conspiracy comments", I call them comments with alternative views and as we learned through the pandemic, the people banning and downvoting the "conspiracy theorists" (who were actually spreading facts/truth) were in the wrong and they still can't admit their mistake and it's same thing with anything political.

You question why would be Russia firing rocket at Polish farm - bam, conspiracy theorists, Russian troll! Next day, oh well, shit happenes, Ukraine just made mistake, let's forget about it and let's forget about those conspiracy theorists from day above, but let's keep their downvotes so they won't dare to spread their opinion.

I'd prefer if HN went back to technical topics away from political nonsense which has hardly anything to do with technology. I especially don't like the raising amount of self/metaposts like these with questions how you spend your free time, how long is your... and other teenage topics, which is quite surprising considering recent poll where vast majority of users should be above 25-30, so one would expect certain level of maturity.
This is so true! You have to be 110% sure the other person is actually attracted to you.

This is absolutley not women's fault or problem but if you are unattractive even hinting slightly that you like a person will be interpreted as being creepy. Outside of work you can accept the rejection right away and move on, at work, rumors will ruin you. I don't know about others but no romantic opportunity is worth sacrificing a career.

For me it isn't even just all that but making someone uncomfortable at their work place where they have to work with you everyday sounds like a horrible thing to do. What if they view you as an authority figure or feel like their rejection could affect their career/work? This is even before HR and managers get involved and you get a nice public humiliation. I mean, don't eat where you shit, right? There is plenty of other places better suited than work.
Just like hammers and mallets are equivalent, yeah?

- - - -

Recursion and loops are equivalent. They both just compile to branches with negative offsets, eh?

- - - -

If you take enough LSD everything is equivalent to everything else.
I think there is a nuance to tell that nice people.

If you approach someone, be honest with your intentions while also caring for them. What does that mean? Both attractive and un-attractive women like to date people and get attention. So it’s okay to approach an attractive women. However, when you do it, be honest with yourself that the reason you want to be around her is whatever (a good relationship) and then if she says no, just leave it at that.

Approaching? Ok. Approaching to be a friend? Ok. Approaching to be a friend because you want to have sexy time later? Not ok, this isn’t honest. Not honest = not ok = being a jerk. Approaching because you share an interest in Venus fly trap plants and you want to talk about it? Perfect. She says she doesn’t want to talk? That’s ok. Leave it at that.
What nanny-state whiners don't understand is that helmets can actually twist your neck or choke you as you're flipping in the air and about to hit the pavement head-first. But it's worse than that, helmets give people a false sense of confidence. That's the real problem with our civilisation, too much confidence that death isn't imminent at every turn. Forewarned is forearmed, I always say to my shrinking coworkers. Oh yeah, pry my weapon from my cold, dead fingers.
More of a meta question related to the working of HN...I crossed posted in one of the submissions mentioned below. This one was posted 2 hours ago. Earlier posts with the same link and some comments appeared 3 hours and 5 hours ago and are also visible:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33679791

and

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33680327

they link to the same url.

My experience is that posting something that was posted before, even sometimes within days, will link to the same post. Or get's, sometimes within seconds,
noted as a "[dupe]" . Even if not the same page, but might be the same subject or event.

Why was that not the case here?
That website currently weighs 9.50 kB. Hence, it cannot add too many more sites (without removing some other bits) before hitting its own arbitrary size limit.
It’s the second sentence. I know the optics are bad, but there has to be evidence to back up a statement like that.

And for the record, I agree with you. But if it’s just a “gut feeling” it’s not an argument I can put forward.
> None of these seem to be examples of actual corruption, like buying votes.

Why buy votes when you can own the representative directly? Why should someone who donates massive amounts of money to a campaign have more sway over a representative than another constituent. On that note, maybe only those represented by a candidate should be allowed to contribute to that candidate's campaign.
> there are plenty of cheap, small, large production ICE cars

If there are, then why are you complaining that they "won't sell them to you"?

> There is no reason this three cannot exist together. None.

Mineral resources to make the batteries? Why do you think that Tesla has a waiting period of months.
Yep, high voltage can be useful heh. The US has 240V sockets for things like dryers and ovens, they're just not as abundant. Prospective EV owners here seem to fret about not having one in the garage, but it's not necessary.
> going for low tax low regs.

The problem with this strategy is that the major trading blocks of USA, EU and China will not allow the UK to undercut them. So if the UK goes down this path, then companies based there will find themselves cut off. The UK domestic market is not large enough on its own.
Not really, no. Some of the oldest devices can be unlocked, but the rest use weird chips with encrypted bootloaders. It's not really possible to get them to run unsigned code.
The vast majority of people don't care one whit about online vs. offline. At least outside of niches such as mobility and visual impairments. All those companies--and doubtless others to a lesser degree--have just spent billions developing what are loosely smarthome capabilities that most just don't care about or find useful. It's a case of solving the relatively half of the problem doesn't necessarily buy you much.
Huh?

You do realize that the numbers you’re being told about solar/wind being price competitive don’t take into account the overbuild required, storage or even the huge transmission costs.

Also, there is no storage option on the horizon, expensive or otherwise.

Wind/solar is a scam designed to build our generation as inefficiently as possible so regulated utilities can earn a return on their bloated assets. They get you to buy into this scam because “climate change”.
The Road to Reality: A Complete Guide to the Laws of the Universe
Ok, but net migration is still way down:

>An estimated 202,000 citizens from other EU countries immigrated to the UK in the year to September 2018, and about 145,000 emigrated abroad. So EU ‘net migration’ was around 57,000—roughly the lowest level recorded since 2009.

>In the year before the referendum, net EU migration was estimated at 189,000, so there’s been a large fall following the vote.

Obviously other countries are going to make up a higher percentage of those immigrating, but the total amount of immigrants is down according to that article.
> You can quit. Literally, there is something you can do. If your boss asks you to write or adapt something to surveil, then you can quit.

If you had a union, or even a professional association whose code of ethics had teeth, you could refuse without having to quit. It's incredible to me that in 2022, most programmers are still anti-union.
I can see the benefit of installing things in the home directory. Thats something that was always frustrating with brew. You install postgres, but where do things like the configs and data directory live? But I also don’t want a bloated 50gb home dir.
Consider how many of those linux devices are difficult or impossible to update, and you start to realize the mess we'll be in. At least Y2K affected systems that by and large could be updated easily.
> Not sure. Think about people driving others somewhere and then have to drive back, e.g. their children, drunk people or a friend to the airport etc.

I think the point was people will own their own self driving car instead of sharing with the unwashed masses.

Send it to go pickup the kids, get the groceries at the curb loading station, drive you home from the bar &etc. With good scheduling one car could run around all day picking up and dropping off the family members while running the errands in between.

Of course this is a US centric view because people from other parts of the world are used to having efficient mass transit and not needing to own a car.
Not as bad as the website listing websites that do not list themselves.
Did you delete the post or did mods delete it?