skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Hardware is very expensive. Alexa dot is $14 on Amazon.com right now, i bet they are selling it at a loss for that price.
Thank you, very kind.
Maybe it could softly whisper it, like a gentle breeze: “buy more shoooes, buy more shoooes”.
It's my Dad's 60-70's record collection, probably early 80's at the latest.
This is a declassified section from the National Intelligence Estimate 2002, which was used as one of the primary justifications for the invasion:

--------------------------
Iraq's Continuing Programs for Weapons of Mass Destruction

We judge that Iraq has continued its weapons of mass
destruction (WMD) programs in defiance of UN resolutions and
restrictions. Baghdad has chemical and biological weapons as
well as missiles with ranges in excess of UN restrictions; if
left unchecked, it probably will have a nuclear weapon during
this decade. (See INR alternative view at the end of these
Key Judgments.)
We judge that we are seeing only a portion of Iraq's WMD
efforts, owing to Baghdad's vigorous denial and deception
efforts. Revelations after the Gulf war starkly demonstrate
the extensive efforts undertaken by Iraq to deny information.
We lack specific information on many key aspects of Iraq's
WJMD programs.
Since inspections ended in 1998, Iraq has maintained its
chemical weapons effort, energized its missile program, and
invested more heavily in biological weapons; in the view of
most agencies, Baghdad is reconstituting its nuclear weapons
program.

https://irp.fas.org/congress/2003_cr/h072103.html
--------------------------

Here is reporting from WaPo and NYTimes on what you're saying you saw as Colin's "dog and pony show."

Washington Post - "Irrefutable" : https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/opinions/2003/02/06/i...

NYTimes - "Irrefutable and Undeniable" : https://www.nytimes.com/2003/02/06/opinion/irrefutable-and-u...

In the midst of war, if you dared to call such thing a "dog and pony show" you'd be called a Saddam shill. War propaganda is a hell of drug, and we often only realize what's happening long after its over. And then we rewrite history in some sort of cognitive dissonance, failing to learn from the past.
... So I concocted another approach, starting from a foundation as small as possible and defining a small set of bricks with which to build the data and control structures common to all languages, which will always serve as a guide in their learning. You will forget lambdatalk, the language that accompanies me in this journey, but you will keep in mind some of the essential concepts that underlie the act of coding. At least I hope so.

And if you are allergic to the "horizontal" format, in columns, click on the red "vertical" button at the top right of the screen.
By definition, no software goes down until its lifetime ends.
Some of those 9s come with an assumption that someone is around who knows what buttons to push when it really goes awry.
Japan gov begins Unification Church probe amid anger over ties with ruling party
He rolled in, sold most of the fire extinguishers, and made a big show of trying to make cherries jubilee while shoving his dick in one of the few remaining fire extinguishers. Let's be clear, it isn't just the erratic layoffs it's Musk's incessant meddling that's going to be Twitter's downfall. He literally took down SMS based 2FA because "microservices bad". He fired the payroll and tax departments (HR too?). He's scared off Twitter's main source of income while saddling it with significant debt.

As an SRE I would have been shocked if Twitter failed catastrophically (well moreso than broadly disabling authentication) in short order. However failure is pretty much inevitable at this point given the damage that E-Lon is actively doing.

Whatever. Twitter and Musk deserve each other.
Every click online is recorded and especially every search, which might be carrying more information than an Alexa command and a few random false positives for the trigger word.
Medical dictation probably follows a pretty standardized pattern? Easier for the software to work well when it knows what to expect.
This is because data isn't taxed, Alexa is prob one of the most successful data gathering operations since social networks and the patriot act. Amazon will write off a fat chunk of its taxes, and keep the millions of voice recordings and customer datapoints. Win win.
Bizarre how Carmack is idolized as being some sort of genius for reading a few research papers and applying an existing technique. What about the academic who actually invented the technique!
Yeah, but I think a judgment is being made that having the service be less reliable is tolerable.
Do you see how the name "smart contract" makes no sense? They aren't smart. In fact, they are obviously dumb. They do what the code says. They aren't a contract in the legal sense. Smart contracts are neither smart, nor contracts.
Well, I'm surprised he has the time/intention to do that in between for us mere mortals. Here are a few references;

- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bellard%27s_formula

- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fabrice_Bellard

```
In April 2021 his Artificial Neural Network based data compressor, NNCP, took first place out of hundreds in the Large Text Compression Benchmark. To write the compressor, Bellard wrote his own Artificial Neural Network library, LibNC ("C Library for Tensor Manipulation"), publicly available.
```
that's surprising actually. I'd expect my sites to run for about a year if i suddenly died. maybe longer. certs will renew themselves, servers will restart themselves. everything is on autopay.
the thing to kill it would probably be api breaks by 3rd parties.
maybe disk space would kill me eventually too.. i don't have auto resizing for my sql database but its got a long runway yet. or god forbid my site grows on its own and the qps kills it.
I'm surprised to hear it's not sortable. Why can't they just memcmp it?
> With Twitter getting a much better balance sheet, what would stop them from hiring more great folks again in 3-6 months?

Because hiring is hard, and there is little reason to think their balance sheet would be much better. And because some of their advertisers are leaving, reducing their income. And because a lot of these "great people" probably wouldn't take Musk at his word due to his unreliable leadership the past year.

Things like personnel and advertisers don't turn on a dime. It's not like cloud computing - Twitter will face long term consequences in the slower moving fields because of Musk's current decisions.
War is bad, subservience to a bloody dictator is worse.
Would you enter a four-way game where three of the players were tipping their hands to each other with hand signals and brigade betting against you?

In an online game, how do you know other people at the table aren't side channel communicating? How do you know some of the hands aren't player bots that work for the site where whatever money you lose and they win goes to the casino site? How do you know they don't know the precise order of the "random deck"? Or that they don't know what your hand is?

Now, consider the same for voting machines.
I work in Retail and I’m pretty sure this isn’t true. I don’t know what AWS charges Netflix but there is an internal rate card and I’m pretty sure it’s just based on what it costs to run the machines.
Why do you even need to talk to a timer? Why do you even need electricity? Timers can be built from gears and a spring.
I would say fart noises are the comedy equivalent of fart noises, but in any case, I sure do love people getting upset by the comedy equivalent of fart noises. Speaking of which, I would actually pay Musk $8 if it meant he would post a video of himself doing the old underarm fart noise thing and I could see all the fantastic "well I never" reactions from everybody who got upset by it.
I don't think it'd work.
Jesus Christ.

Every US president since the end of the cold war has authorized eastward expansion of NATO, an alliance whose enemy no longer exists.

The current president was brokering arms deals with Ukraine. The previous president was delivering on those deals.

After the 2014 coup, a major Ukraine energy company, which was cozy with Putin, hired the Vice President’s son in order to cozy up with the new America-friendly regime.

The previous president was impeached for asking Ukraine to investigate corruption by the former Vice President.

Putin warned that arming or granting membership to Ukraine’s belligerent new government was a red line Russia could not tolerate. NATO did it anyway.

The players in the great game fucked around. Pretending nothing happened prior to 2022 is willful ignorance.
Louis Rossmann said something like "there's a difference between people showing up to laugh at you vs. laugh with you."
Almost every database algorithm is based on ordering and binary search.
The root problem is that there is a troubled subset of our population who delight in smearing shit on the walls. We’ve all seen it in real life public toilets, in that literal fashion, but it also comes in the form of ratfucking, like Stone, and in QAnon-style promotion of crazy conspiracy theories, and in many variations in-between. They engage in acts of destruction against the public good; they are destroyers of peace, of reason, of society, and of democracy. Some are legit mentally ill, but other are very savvy and are doing it with deliberation. Social media has broadened their reach and increased the volume of their smear.
Is it possible the person in charge of Alexa is less good at disinformation and corporate politics than their peers?
Definitely seems like that, outside of the crypto space. The industry still is treating 10+ YoE engineers like rare finds.

I do expect competition for entry-level is going to be fiercer than ever, though.
From what I understand, contractors were used for moderating.
I don’t know if this is a general trend or just me, but Alexa hardly gets my music commands right anymore. I tell it to play music and almost always it insists on playing something similar sounding from the younger generation’s zeitgeist… like it thinks my tastes are too old and and thinks I should be listening to more popular songs. It’s a really bizarre experience recently. Alexa used to just work and play the music I expected. Now I have to specify things almost exactly, and even then sometimes it doesn't find the music I’m looking for. Is this what it feels like to get old?
Has no company ever been mismanaged? Have they they ever grossly misallocated funds? The answer is of course yes, that happens all the time. Corporate leaderships are not not infallible.
Not far off here -

1. cooking timers

2. fart noises

3. add X to my shopping list (used when shopping in a physical store)

4. Weather forecast

5. Turn off the tv

That's enough that I'm happy 'she' was built into our tv sound bar, but yeah, I don't think alexa is making any money from me.
Apple Deletes All Tweets
Sure, that's how to fix the BRK site.
But I was replying to your comment:

> I want to make websites like this and run into the same problem every time: phones exist now.

If you start from unstyled HTML it works. My question is what are you adding in your development process of making simple websites that breaks it for phones?
Alexa is popular with all my kids.

The toddlers love yelling at it and getting it to play songs they like. The older ones, well, I guess do the same thing but with different songs, and occasionally Wikipedia-style quick answers.
It would be funny for Musk to share privately with friends. It is a deeply strange and inappropriate thing for the CEO of a billion dollar company to post publicly. Something is deeply wrong with Musk's decision making process.
> However failure is pretty much inevitable at this point

I'm pretty sure there will be no failure at all, and Twitter will work just fine.
Also anecdote, but twitter has historically been pretty unreliable for me.

Without a reliable twitter systems status history pre-acquisition, the reports of failures, like the issues with the 2FA system, don't mean a whole lot.
> There's no way his/her view was "shrug, organizations tend to bloat" while racking in extremely competitive + good pay as somebody whose main job is to drive a company towards maximum growth/profitability.

> There's no way the CEO was able to convince a majority of people responsible for paying him (the board), to pay award him $30m/yr in stock options, while he was also "bad at his job enough" to let the organization bloat without as much as an afterthought to it.

Why not? Why would those board members have ever called him out? The more they're paying him, the more they can pay themselves too.
Isn’t number of commits a very weak measure of activity? All these metrics depend greatly on the size and maturity of a project, the base language the majority of code is written in, and the culture of the company or community behind the project. I would tend to use them to look at a single project over time rather than between projects.
DiffusionDet: Diffusion Model for Object Detection
taste might be defined wrong

taste is not your sensoric input on your tongue

taste is a combination of this with smell and visual (eg. color), but also mood, expectation, environment, time, stresslevel, atmosphere, temperature, viscosity and people around.

with this in mind, the exact same thing can taste like 100 times differently without changing the chemical side.
There are a few key differences. PE tries not to massively overpay, it'll put more effort into targeted layoffs, and it'll maintain enough of a "business as usual" posture to not scare away advertisers. Edit: they also put in a CEO whose full-time job is being CEO of that company.

But yes, this is very bad execution of the PE playbook.
This is a dupe and spparently they don't tweet.
Sorry, I should be clearer. The ads I’m referring to are for Wyze’s add-on features. “Try Cam Plus”, “Get Cam Protect”, “Home Monitoring”, etc. Not any third party ones.

And somehow I always seem to either click on the ad rather than my first camera, or click on a camera listed above my targeted one as the ad appears just as my finger lands on the screen.

And also to be clear, the axe I grind is small. I generally like these Wyze cams. For $20 each they’ve done a decent job. But knowing there is third party firmware out there is promising.
I used to play that game a lot when I was a kid and never finished it once.

I just tried this and won the first time, with the last peg in the centre hole!

This made my day.
Weren’t Twitter moving out of Mesos to K8s?
English speakers, here's how to pronounce 'Qatar'
He's long been extremely active on Twitter.
Twitter didn't start yesterday. There was a time when Mesos was all the hotness and k8s was this new thing that looked promising but wasn't nearly production ready.

Apple is also a big Mesos user, but also moving to k8s.
I think this is not too far wrong. I also think in addition that the really competitive job market of the last 2 years and the hiring they were doing inevitably resulted in some highly paid people who were not good fits or good at their jobs. I think that covid wage hikes and job competitiveness is doing a bit of reckoning now as there is finally enough data to evaluate performance relative to output.

OTOH, at non tech companies, all the research interviews and surveys I have done recently continue to show a talent shortage and fears of losing tech staff, so maybe it is just that Tech companies are saturated and have too much capital for their creativity.
It sounds like you're saying that anybody who diverges from your status quo opinions is some sort of mental terrorist. Excuse me, "stochastic terrorist."
Riiight. But what happens when there's nobody on that oncall rotation? I've worked at FAANGs, and I'm just thinking what would happen if there was a problem with an upstream team and nobody there. Maybe it's ours now. Maybe there's a principal engineer who worked on it back in the day that's still on the payroll? Maybe we're just going to try to bring it back up with no idea what is going on? What if you have a bug that silently loses data?
You should generally ignore sunk costs.
The previous president was impeached for taking aid from ukraine lest they investigate invented allegations of corruption.

That putin warned of something is meaningless. Are we expected to roll over whenever a foreign country makes a threat? Most of these threats are empty; even when they aren't, some things they have no right to threaten us about. A country arming itself to protect from a (demonstrably) belligerent neighbour is one such thing. I'm surprised people eat this ridiculous excuse from putin so easily.
well, those are outright abandoned
As OP said, no one with a clue believed it. Hence the demonstrations. Big demonstrations.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protests_against_the_Iraq_Wa...

> According to the French academic Dominique Reynié, between January 3 and April 12, 2003, 36 million people across the globe took part in almost 3,000 protests against the Iraq war.

> In the United States, even though pro-war demonstrators have been quoted as referring to anti-war protests as a "vocal minority", Gallup Polls updated September 14, 2007 state, "Since the summer of 2005, opponents of the war have tended to outnumber supporters. A majority of Americans believe the war was a mistake."

Edit:

My bad, I should have clipped from the good-sized section down the page that list numerous pre-invasion protests. Lots of your fellow citizens knew the war was bogus, the excuses invented.

Outside the US I daresay most knew it was bullshit. Hans Blix’s opinion was widely published, “because his daddy didn’t win” was the memed reason, and the coalition that supported Bush’s prosecution of Osama was not all on board with expanding TWOT to Iraq.
Not OP but... there's the debt problem.

https://www.njspotlightnews.org/2022/05/nj-state-owes-bondho...
> What’s the benefit of having the primary key before the row is stored in the database?

If I have a set of linked records in a relational schema representing a complex object, I can create them all with one round trip rather than multiple.

Also, large numbers of clients can insert in that way without contention, whereas if you use a sequence generator for PKs, it becomes a resource around which there is contention when creating rows.

> You’d have to trust the client to give you a “good” UUID

Sure, this lets you scale, e.g., backend service instances (which are db clients) without (as much as otherwise) contention in the db layer, its not usually something you would do with external, untrusted clients.

> I know both Twitter (called Snowflake iirc) and Google have unique ID services for this use case.

Snowflake was one of the inspirations for the newer (draft) UUID versions [0] (though, unlike them, it had a design constraint of fitting into 64 instead of 128 bits.)

[0] https://www.ietf.org/archive/id/draft-peabody-dispatch-new-u...
It looks like direct messages may also be buggy at present, according to a couple of anecdotes on r/Twitter at: https://old.reddit.com/r/Twitter/comments/z1b4zc/cant_sendre...
Isn’t it no.2 there on cmc?
> but this episode with the academic papers and the binary space partitioning is the justification I think of first.

Subtly amusing considering carmack is not on favour of academia. But everything he uses is made possible by it.
One interesting dynamic here. Literally everyone who tries to give him advice has less money than him.
This is a appeal to imperfect authorities that make mistakes all the time. By that logic, Elon was able to convince banks to loan 14B to acquire and gut Twitter. There was no way the staff and shareholders of those organizations, much larger and more proven than Twitter could have been so complacent and ignorant to make such a mistake.

Elon himself is a CEO with a better track record than Parag, why is he not more legitimate if we are pretending leaders can't make mistakes
The Mesos detail struck me as a risk for the reason you stated.

Also, the article seems to suggest Twitter only has two datacenters. That seems surprising for the global reach of the company. Perhaps there are other smaller datacenters that are not prepared to handle the entirety of the site’s traffic.

My current thinking is there’s time to figure out how to operate the current system before it runs into issues that would render it degraded for a prolonged period of time. I noticed TLS certs have already rotated for instance. That was my best guess for simple thing that could fail if managed poorly.
Sorry, but how does one interact with that page?
You do know that you can block Elon's account.
> But, I think it's a bit rich to call it the origin of fast food.

Particularly when we just got finished talking about fast food in antiquity. I suppose that explains why nobody said such a thing.
Yep, and when one of the SEVs rolls around that would have been small (say 5m of downtime fixed with a flag flip), it instead will have a nontrivial chance of escalating into a major multi-hour/multi-day outage without the right institutional knowledge.

I'd guesstimate that Twitter probably has dozens of services that are in the critical path of an average user interaction. It's hard to keep even logically optional dependencies truly optional in large scale systems involving many people.

However Twitter didn't die in the past when fail whales ruled its day, so they probably won't kill it now. It's just not that kind of business. (In contrast, a one hour outage had me directly apologizing to our largest customers on the phone). That said, Twitter can only be unstable and lack feature growth for so long before something else takes its place, so Musk is on a clock.
> But given that NTP (either ntpd or chrony) tends to give me an estimated error of around (tens of) 1e-6 seconds

Is that a hard bound or an average? If it's an average, then what are the limits of the bounds, both in magnitude and duration?

> and PTP can get down to 1e-9 seconds

We use it for audio, and the reason it works well there is because there is no exponential backoff with your peers, allowing for even small timing slips to become enough to notice. 1ms of latency is far too much for our application, we typically aim for 0.25ms.. and we're only running 96kHz. If we lose PTP sync, we notice within a few minutes.

Another advantage of PTP is it can operate as a broadcast and, as the article notes, switches can be PTP aware and help update the timing as the broadcast flows through the network. Conveniently, PTP also allows for multiple timing domains and masters to co-exist on the same network.

It's also an absurdly simple protocol, you can build a receiver for it in about 200 lines of C code. I've actually become quite taken with it since it was forced into our space about 10 years ago.
Ask HN: How to write good developer documentation
Hello,
I’m trying to improve the documentation of our current product and we are moving away from confluence to git and markdown solution for our developers.

What tools should i use and initially i was planning to use MDbook
And even if you do invest in proper documentation and support, you still have to overcome the hurdle that people just _don’t want to spend time learning your one-off language_ - there’s nontrivial opportunity cost in learning something that won’t be useful anywhere else. So people will just do the bare minimum which will lead to misunderstanding and bugs.
I don’t see how that’s relevant to anything in my comment, but since you brought it up I assume you take both of those notions as a given - but they aren’t necessarily concerns of all programmers.
This is correct, but also: a sudden decline in maintenance is a kind of change in its own right. Even automated processes have humans in the loop and manual sign-offs; there's always some cronjob or short-lived certificate somewhere that a human was dutifully maintaining.

Those things aren't going to fail any sooner than they would have anyways, but they're going to fail a lot harder due to the loss of institutional knowledge.
For couples. Making $250k at FAANG for a software engineer is pretty common.