skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
So, that little slope probably saved my life once.

I was trucking up 44 at a fairly moderate pace (I'm not a big speeder) around a curve when there was suddenly a car in my lane, so I jerked the wheel to the right lane ... where there was another car, I twitch back to the other lane and begin, well, hydroplaning or whatever it is when you have just a touch of rain to bring up the oil from the road. Brakes were not effective and I was headed right for the highway divider at somewhere between forty to fifty miles per hour, at a forty-five degree angle. In this flimsy little car, that corner impact is going to hit me pretty hard.

That's when I looked at the little slope at the base of the highway dividers and reasoned that if I could get my car parallel to the divider, the impact would be taken on the left wheels and the left side of the suspension, areas designed to bear some weight from that particular direction already. I managed to get the car aligned by tweaking the wheel direction, hit, slid for about ten or fifteen feet. I was so nearly perfect to parallel that I only lost the rubber covering to about an inch of bumper. Ended up replacing the tires a few weeks later just out of an abundance of caution, but otherwise fine.

(It turned out that there was a big wreck up around the curve and various drivers had decided to just sort of stop where they were, hence my surprise obstacles)
I checked out their fee schedule and the "3%, plus a $7 charge" appears to be for international transfer fees:

https://www.mctrpayment.com/pdf/CA_MCTR_Fee_Trans.pdf

For domestic transfers, appears free per your linked article:

"As long as you have your bank’s routing and account number, you can transfer funds to your bank account without paying a fee in the following ways

Transfer funds online at mctrpayment.com
Transfer funds using the Money Network Mobile App
Transfer funds by calling 1-800-240-0223"
You can give v1 of Atomic - AI scheduler (https://atomiclife.app), a try for handling multiple calendars (still in Beta). Working on v2 for client or team meetings and autopilot. It will be targeted for solo developers/ indie hackers / small teams
Still boggles my mind that people willingly put these kinds of devices in their homes.
LIBOR, which is being replaced with SOFR?
There are a lot of times when even the 1% and 0.1% ladders don't have the value you need, and you can usually construct a combination of only two of them to get that value, thanks to the way the ladders are set up.
Having worked at startups that wanted to take Alexa into the enterprise space, I'll say that Amazon has been absolutely opposed to the idea, which feels like a missed opportunity.

Up to a point, I can admire the product discipline that Amazon and Apple (Alexa and Siri) have shown in keeping their voice products focused on consumers. But after so many years, when do we finally get voice for the enterprise? At one time, I was very hopeful about this space, see: "I believe in Enterprise software for the Amazon Echo"

http://www.smashcompany.com/business/i-believe-in-enterprise...

In late 2015 and early 2016 this space, of voice tools, was moving quickly and I thought that surely, within a year, we would see better support for enterprise applications. I was mistaken.

Here is an example of the excitement of those times: "Invoxia will allow Alexa to figure out who is speaking"

http://www.smashcompany.com/technology/invoxia-will-allow-al...

At that time, it felt like we were on the cusp of using voice tools in business. There was certainly a market. For instance, https://www.jwt.com/history/ has about 9,000 employees in at least a dozen countries. They reached out to me to talk about their "Pangea" project, which was a huge internal project to better map what teams and skills and resources they had internally. I had a meeting with them in the summer of 2016 and they asked "We are thinking we could put an Amazon Alexa in every meeting room, and then whenever we need someone with a specific skill, we could ask, hey, Alexa, do we have someone at this company who has this skill?"

At that time, I told them of some of the difficulties, but I was also hopeful that things would change a lot of over the next year. I was wrong.

Among the many, many problems we faced was simply getting Alexa to recognize the names of companies, when the sound of the name did not match a standard English spelling:

TATCHA

L’Oréal

L’OCCITANE

What was needed was a way train specific conversions of phonemes to text, for both Alexa and Siri. There are a small number of tricks that are available, such as programming a glottal stop:

http://www.smashcompany.com/technology/using-a-glottal-stop-...

However, in general, neither Amazon nor Apple wants to give us the tools we need, and there has been little progress in recent years.

I know that many people on Hacker News have read my book "How To Destroy A Tech Startup In Three Easy Steps" in which we were using NLP technologies to try to allow salespeople to send text messages to Salesforce:

https://www.amazon.com/dp/0998997617?psc=1&ref=ppx_yo2ov_dt_...

As you can imagine, we hoped to move on to voice-to-text so that salespeople could simply talk to Salesforce.

It seems to me there is a wave of new startups that are waiting to move forward in this area, but no small startup has the resources to build a voice-to-text system from scratch. We need the larger firms to help set up the ecosystem, so that we can move forward in this area.

Where is the company that is going to give us the tools we need to start building great voice driven enterprise solutions?
I bet a double-digit percentage of California HN readers made too much to qualify for any refund.
Rather than argue about the definition of a word, I'd rather ask what examples of real genius in programming that you can offer.
More than you cared to know about PC fans
Don't sleep on NJ. It has "the highest number of millionaires both per capita and per square mile in the U.S., and hosting more scientists and engineers per square mile than anywhere else in the world."
Mostly just California and New York.
Twitter won’t restore Alex Jones’ account, Elon Musk says
Besides my phone, my echo is the only device I use every day. It's so useful that I would pay a monthly fee to use it. I suspect the must have subscription is coming as a way to monetarize it. I hope it won't be too high.
Are any voice assistants making any money?

The problem with voice assistants at the moment is the same as command line tools.

You have to know what specific prompts work and don’t work etc. I often see my parents make simple queries like “turn off the white lights and turn on the night lights” only to get the response that it can only do one thing at a time.

There will be a future where this gets more and more sophisticated. But in the meantime, it’s not surprising it’s losing money.
Those of us on salary can just consider it overtime.

But seriously, every single strike against one of these ploys is a step in the right direction. A penny saved is a penny earned. And if I don't have clients lined up for the next 15 minutes, this is a great way to spend it.

OP put in the hard work, it didn't scale for him/her, but it scales for Californians.
Ah! Always wondered why they called it a Jersey Barrier but had never looked it up.
> A “days without a $1,000,000,000 security incident” billboard?

no project represents the whole industry or concept, that's the point. its frankly weird that is the level of discourse on this topic, currently.

so you might be able to eek out some dopamine from your kind of humor, for now, but I think more accurate information amongst the non-incident creating projects will help the discourse improve
"only the paranoid survive"
Uh, I doubt many/any of them are “crack a crypto algorithm” sophisticated.

These groups know how to buy exploits, attach payloads, and be persistent. Not trivial per se but hardly PhD math stuff…
Supposedly they had 10k people working on it. Over 5 years that only 200k per person per year just to account for the whole 10 billion.
This seems a great topic to organize around and better your system, or help elect a responsible person(s).

Here in Illinois, the Treasurer Michael Frerichs would beat the crap out of whoever came up with that system and make an efficient method to get you your money. His administration is doing it now for any funds the state owes you where you fill out a simple online form and you know within the 1 POST call if the state owes you anything.
I would've guessed he bills $2500+, niche top law is extraordinarily expensive
I meant a new, separate type, in addition to the defunct existing (u)intmax_t. For that new type, %j(u) wouldn't apply, but of course a PRI* macro could be added for it as you suggest.
I paid 1700 for antibiotics!
Listening vs listening, transcribing, and sending home
Isn't there a limited subset of solutions for this and beyond that it's mechanical and repetitive? So it's not that interesting?

I think an interesting variant would be varying the shape of the board, so all the sudden it's not a one trick poney.

Additionally, maybe add special pegs that could jump over two, combos that give a power up that let you slide an entire row or column by one etc.

disclaimer: I make games.
I don't see anything in the fee schedule that matches up with what you're claiming.
https://www.mctrpayment.com/pdf/CA_MCTR_Fee_Trans.pdf

Withdrawing to an out of network ATM is $1.25, but there's no mention of any fee for a withdraw to an in-network ATM.

Transferring to an non-US bank is 3.5% plus up to $7, but there's no mention of any fee for a transfer to a US bank.

Can you clarify?
DPRK 1%ers get a western education and have normal Internet access.

It’s not ideological, it’s practical; get a cybersecurity degree in the states/Europe and live “lavishly” with your family or flee and never see anyone you love again (they don’t kill them they’re just poor and in NK).
New Jersey's Googleplex

The Gabagoogleplex
Sigh. £6 a bottle of cheapest wine here in UK because of import tax and alcohol tax.

And I could buy British gin in Hong Kong cheaper than in UK
And if the separatist movement had succeeded, we’d be talking about the Yucatán government, sure.
My echo absolutely became less accurate month after month. Simple commands like “turn off the lights” would be 50/50. Very low-value technology and it certainly gives one pause about the feasibility of AI when something so basic with so much capital and years of effort is still fairly poor.
> The absence of evidence isn’t proof of absence. It is, however, evidence. The absence of evidence for black swans doesn’t mean there are no black swans, but it does mean that a theory proposing most swans are black is probably wrong.

Um, the author seems a little confused. Absence of evidence ... is evidence? Excuse me, but no. Absence of evidence means you have insufficient evidence to draw a conclusion which would be favored by the evidence.

Riffing on the black swan example: if someone claims that black swans existed, and someone else is skeptical, the onus is on the pro-black-swan side to provide evidence. The onus is not on the black swan skeptic to believe them.

However, there is a difference between the skeptic saying "I am unconvinced" and "therefore black swans (probably) do not exist." Failing to agree is not the same as strongly disagreeing.
Yes that's another factor. For the cheaper wines (pretty much anything you can get in a grocery store), they're made to be opened immediately and don't really benefit from aging. But the higher end wines need to be aged.

One of the fun things is that you don't really know exactly the optimum amount of time to cellar a new vintage. So there are online forums where people will buy a case and open one bottle a year and report their results on how the quality changes over time.
Just because you've accepted your unfair situation - which, let's be clear, is that you have a second-class status even compared to other foreigners based solely on your country of birth - doesn't mean everyone else in that situation should do the same.

Other H-1B holders who point out this inequity are not morally "wrong", or "crybabies" (paraphrased from another of your comments). Petitioning the government for a redressal of grievances is a very American thing to do. And doing what you have done - accepting the reality of one's situation and adapting to it - is very mentally healthy and pragmatic.

Some people, like you, work around the existing system, while others ask for a better system. Neither group should put down the other, or denigrate the choices they have made. Try to be a better person than that.
I find it interesting people use Twitter for DMs. Will fully encrypted DMs make it hard to create spam filters/tools to prevent harassment?
Huh. At a surface glance, this is looking pretty cool. I especially like all the compiler work that's being done.

Is there any info on the application format/shared object system?

It also looks like they're toying around with a custom programming language (https://github.com/sleepy-monax/udfore) (Older version) from the Brutal repo's branches.
> UUIDs are 128 bits. Which is beat by a 5 character a-z random string.

A sibling gives the actual math that shows how wrong this is, but this doesn't even pass the most rudimentary sniff test. The most common encoding for a lowercase string would be in 8 bits per character, so a 5 character string can get you at most to 40 bits.

And that's assuming you allowed every one of the 256 possible characters. You're restricting it down to 26 characters.

EDIT: I was curious, so I checked. Even if you allowed every current Unicode character, 5 characters only gets you to ~86 bits of entropy:

log2(149186^5) ~= 85.9

As for the original 6 nines claim, I also calculated the entropy for a 14 character random password that allows all 62 letters+numbers plus 8 special characters:

log2(70^14) ~= 85.8

It's not until 20 characters that it matches a UUID v4. So, yeah, I'm okay with OP's 6 nines.
Your statement is nonsensical. Either Apple has the key, or it's end to end encrypted. Both cannot be true. And in fact Apple has the key, even if you turned off iCloud backups in most cases since the person you're talking to probably has it enabled. Which makes the marketing misleading at best, and downright fraudulent at worst.

BTW both Apple and Google have a way of doing end to end encryption of backups with a recovery option in the case of device loss. Apple deliberately chooses not to enable it for iMessage and iCloud photos (it is used for keychain passwords among other things). Credible news reports state that Apple did this at the explicit request of the FBI. https://www.reuters.com/article/us-apple-fbi-icloud-exclusiv...

Also note that Apple policies prohibit anyone else from offering cloud backups for iPhones, so you're SOL if you want cloud backups and privacy. Apple's way or the highway.
Yes but OPs way seems more exciting.
> New York Community Bank has a rating of one star with the Better Business Bureau

Please do not under any circumstances support the Better Business Bureau. Their entire business model relies on companies paying them $x/month PER EMPLOYEE for access to the BBB system where they can mark reviews as 'resolved', which therefore allows them to 'resolve' negative reviews and get them removed from the calculation of their BBB rating. Without paying BBB, the business can't 'resolve' reviews and thus will be stuck with a low rating.
Awesome idea.

You'd have no idea how many accounts they have, who they're talking to, and about what. Perfect privacy!
“Middle class” is surprisingly high in California. The AGI cutoff is $500k
Do they need to be world class hackers?
If you have a HomePod mini and a recent iPhone, it can do all the voice processing locally.

I believe Google is also moving to that model or has, but it’s been a while since I transitioned my devices over.
Yes, but then you are doing a bunch of work — buying a (second?) fridge, paying to rent or own space to put it, making sure the fridge continues to run, making sure you don’t accidentally drink your wine before you meant to. If I cared about this property I would certainly pay someone much more than the cost of storage in electricity terms to not have to do any of that or wait a number of years to get a rolling stock going.
If the attacker doesn't care which account they break into, they could try a different account each time and then account-based rate limiting doesn't help as much.

(Depending on how many accounts there are that they can try.)
It's incredibly intuitive. An adult soccer field is 1.8 acres and a foot is... the size of a man's foot. I can visualize this volume.
Meanwhile, an acre foot is 1283 m^3. I don't have intuition for that volume measurement.
Clearly, the answer is to have Alexa read a random unprompted ad every 5 minutes.
And in states without public health care.
they are technically owners of the company. so yes. that is what activist investors do.
I believe so as well given the structure of the offices, they clearly described that the layout was designed in a way to allow for maximum quiet and concentration whilst enabling collaboration via the shared walk ways and common areas. It's a shame to see they've turned it into a glass walled hellscape.
No, we can start improving car infrastructure right away because, on the types of roads that have guardrails, cars are like 98% of the traffic or more. And the rare roads that have both guardrails and sidewalks should probably have the sidewalks on the far side of the guardrails, at which point improved guardrails also protect pedestrians.

Purely from a safety standpoint, outright prohibiting bicycle traffic on motorized roads would be a massive improvement at the expense of inconveniencing a small minority of people (while improving the convenience for everyone else). I'm kind of surprised more states haven't done it yet. Failing that, it's probably better to also use guardrails to physically separate the bike lanes from the motor lanes, which is yet another use-case for improved guardrails.
When the history is written some decades hence, the possibility of hanky-panky at the state actor level might creep in.
I totally agree. I think it's crucially important that every detail can be backed up by a long term goal and that you have the freedom & visibility in your tracker to make that happen.

We wanted to start by doing the fundamentals very well (tasks, basic calendar, etc), but we are very excited to push the envelope of what a task manager does over time and help align your short term actions with what can most effectively advance your goals in the long run.
Yes, but if I was NSO I will just move all my assets outside the US. They can still use the dollar outside of the US.
Having had to this past week work on scrubbing a codebase looking for hard coded values... I will say, the prominence of the UUID format was at least very beneficial when searching beyond the configuration files. [\w\/_+-]{20,} also worked for finding longer matches, but more noise.

I'm not sure it's worth it to use more than a UUID for some use cases, but for a lot, it's fine. Maybe CUID if there's a decent library for your language/platform.

Aside... Whoever makes such a system that is generating/receiving OAuth tokens at that rate, and won't see/detect/feel a brute force attack of that scale probably didn't do anything to protect their SMS verification codes (only 6 digits), you'll definitely brute force that against a known password breach far more quickly, but okay, in either case.
Christie’s Pulls T. Rex from Auction, Citing Need for ‘Further Study’
You also need to factor in the time value of money: if the winemaker sells you a 2022 release in 2022, they get paid immediately.

Also factor in temperature and humidity controlled storage (a kitchen fridge will not do), insurance against disasters, backup power generation, and so on. If you think aged wines are overpriced, it is easy to cut out the middleman and age it yourself — so my guess is that the market is reasonably efficient.
When I got my first echo device, it was exciting and cutting edge. Voice control was new and it worked reasonably well. A general trend with products like this is that they improve over time, and so I was happy to be along for the ride.

But it never happened. Alexa never got smarter. It still misunderstands basic stuff. You still have to use specific words for specific actions or it gets confused. You still have to maintain silence for a couple of seconds before speaking to anybody else after a command otherwise it will go into a loop of "I don't know that". It still won't play the exact song I want to.

The development experience is also extremely limited and stunted. You cannot run any code on the device, period. You can only define lambda functions that are triggered by voice. The function does not have access to anything from the device, only the spoken words.

You want to incorporate the temperature of the room using the built in sensor? No can do.

You want to know the state of a bulb or a switch? Not possible.

You want to do things on a schedule? Nope, it has to always be in response to a command.

So I'm not surprised they are losing money. They dropped the ball hard. They built an amazing thing and let it stagnate. They've steadily improved the hardware, but totally ignored the software. And software is what's magical about this. A robotic person who talks to you! This has to be pure software play. Hardware is secondary.
The part that was finished was indeed incredible. Unfortunately there wasn't that much of it. Whereas DXHR was more of a consistent good throughout.
I don't think NSO would have office buildings or other physical assets in the US that can't be moved elsewhere.
https://web.archive.org/web/20221121124957/https://www.nytim...
> If you're using them for unguessable random strings then yeah, they're not ideal.

Why? I like to use them for private/secret URLs ...
Let's write a tiny chess engine in Go
It makes pagination much more efficient and possible to completely use an index (re: data is pre-sorted) if you have some sort of increasing id, vs sorting in-memory on request. Even having some sort of indexed "createdAt" field, and sorting on that, isn't super reliable for pagination when the dataset is changing. You usually want a stable sort to make pagination nice, so you add an ID to it, but then this gets very inefficient w.r.t index use if the PK is a UUID since it is not monotonic/sortable.
So you're angry about his roth 401, or something? This seems like a stance that came out some podcast...
I live in wine country. Used to have winemakers in the school PTA, so I got to know some of these folks... I'd completely agree with your professor. I'm not a "serious" wine drinker, but with a couple pointers you can pretty quickly start telling the difference in quality. One of our favorite "party tricks" is to set a budget ($10, $15, $20, etc) and buy a handful of bottles - turns out there's a lot of very enjoyable wines at those price points. Very important to understand varietals - some wines are meant to drink young, others will absolutely change over time for better or worse. Also, often at higher price points you are paying for scarcity - if only a few thousands bottles are being made, they gotta sell at $50+ / bottle to even begin to come close to profitable.

If you get to know winemakers, there are a lot of games that go on to doctor grapes. The chemistry and know-how are commendable. You also start to realize there are wine makers who are making wines they like, but that may not hold mass-market appeal. I had a private tasting with a guy who spent years in Napa and now does custom white-label work. I thought his stuff was absolute garbage - not at all to my tastes - but he's in demand because he knows how to do all the magic to pull out certain attributes that some wine drinkers may enjoy.

And that's the real key - drink what you like, at a price point you feel comfortable spending, and it's totally ok if you bought it because it had a cute label. The company you keep matters just as much as the quality of what's in the bottle.