skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
A big part of product and marketing is “differentiation”. You have to give the customer a reason to select your product over N other possibilities in the market.

If your functions are a subset of everyone else, and your only benefit is “it works better”, it’s a tough sell. And in a lot of cases people don’t care - eg if your appliance product lasts 5 years compared to 3 years, but studies show on average consumers will upgrade every 2 years (maybe they receive one as a gift), then you don’t stand out at all.

It’s just basic product/marketing that if you can say “hey ours has a timer and no one else does” you can draw a lot of customers. It’s your foot in the door, but you should also strive to compete in the fundamentals
Show HN: Tortoise TTS as an at-cost open-source pay-per-second API
Tortoise TTS is the best TTS available today. We built an open-source, at cost, pay per second API for it. The quality of intonation it generates is unparalleled, and we hope our at-cost API will make it easier for people to build on top!

This allows folks to run via a single API call - it costs $0.03/query. The WAV file is downloadable, we apply no restrictions.

We're open-sourcing all our work — we made Tortoise run 30% faster, and have more improvements coming. If you're keen to contribute we can help with ideas, pointers, compute and data; just DM us. Our fork with the improvements can be found at https://github.com/metavoicexyz/tortoise-tts. The deployment code can be found at https://github.com/metavoicexyz/tortoise-tts-modal-api.

There are already great alternatives for using : i) @mdnest_r's awesome Huggingface Spaces, ii) original Google Colab, iii) host it yourself. Our work should accelerate those who need an API, don't want to spend time/$ hosting and need a scalable infra backing them.

We're especially excited about combining text-to-speech with content generated from LLMs, and about how it fits into video creation tools.

Tortoise in its current form is also inaccessible to non-technical users, which is why we are also providing a simple UI on top (also "at-cost"): https://tts.themetavoice.xyz

To use, generate an API key on https://tts.themetavoice.xyz and call via POST request. Or use the web UI. Or run your own deployment.
Everyone ends up having to do this kind of stuff, and so the best tools are ones that take this in stride and make it easier to pull off even if it is at the expense of more pain for trivial project; and like, if you are going to try to build a baby version of the tool for beginners, you probably aren't the right person to even figure out what is required of that tool if you wouldn't normally use it.
Hauptwerk beats Kontakt in this department, I'm afraid. Certainly the latter two can't compare to the full-featured models that are on offer for Hauptwerk, which include wind models for tremulants and all. If you're not after trying out all registrations, but just want the sound, Kontakt is good enough.
A lot of new construction in the urban US is similar - once you reach a certain level of density.

I live in a row-style apartment building in NYC built within the last decade, which is 6 floors, 2 apartments per floor, steel frame with concrete floors. There is a single interior stairwell, also all cinderblock. We have restrictions on what can be stored in common space.

NYC categorizes this type of construction as "fireproof" - which basically means that in case of fire, unless the fire is in your unit, it is expected to be safer for you to remain in your apartment and await evacuation than to enter smoke-filled hallways. Any fire is expected to be contained.

The city's other category of dwelling is "non-fireproof", and non-fireproof buildings require multiple forms of egress. You need multiple ways out because the fire is expected to spread.
That is about like saying photons can display quantum interpretations given that photons are the entities that interact with double slits in the first place.

Or event to get more eccentric, your ocular lobes can interpret quantum because they receive photon interactions with the rod cells.

Just pointing out the obvious problems with tongue-in-cheek.
I don't think any Dragonlance content was ever published under the OGL, FWIW. The covered content is limited to the rules and the core(-ish) monster stat blocks. The fiction was never part of the deal (nor should it have been, IMHO).
I have been wondering that for some time and I have notified the authorities but so far it had no discernible effect
How an Enhanced Geothermal System Works
I liked the article. It was rightly critical of their treatment of employees, but I wonder if it’s possible for a restaurant like noma to exist with fair wages and have a menu price low enough for people to show up.
Ask HN: How does Apple convince people to buy so many iPhones?
Apple generated $365 billion revenue in 2021, 52% came from iPhone sales (240 M iPhones sold that year alone). The iPhone and smartphones in general is a mature market at this point. How does Apple, who updates the iPhone with small and incremental updates annually, entice so many people to still buy iPhones each year?
I see you, and raise you:

What if they encrypted the parameters with a one-time pad ?
I still fail to understand: is slapping an escape ladder on the side of the house THAT expensive?
Thanks all for the interesting and useful replies!
Exponential growth with finite resources invariably yields a sigmoidal growth curve. I don't know how singularity crazed futurists still don't get that.
> First, you bought that over-complicated appliance for the same reason everyone else does: it has more features, and you like features. Everyone wants features. If you want to sell an appliance today, you have to cram in more features, and do it more cheaply than the competition.

Is this true for all appliances?

The toaster and the refrigerator seem functionally complete to me.

More features = more problems = I don't want them for my toaster.
Ah so this is why my hobby open-source project of 6+ years has been getting a surge in traffic :) https://github.com/opendnd

Totally unrelated to this of course, but very cool to see all the same. The OGL has been a cornerstone of innovation in this space and without it a lot of us would be dead in the water.
You've just invented video game passwords! This reminds me of transferring over my save data from Golden Sun to Golden Sun: The Lost Age by typing in a 260 character password.
> Studies in this stuff have shown that consistency in grind matters more than the amount of money spent on the grinder.

But what's this super consistent 'basic cheap grinder' you have? The people buying expensive grinders know this too - that's why they're buying them, for their 'conical burrs' or 'ceramic' or some other promise of a great (consistent) grind.
I don't know what to tell you then. My father was the assistant manager of our local supermarket for 10 years, after being a sub-department manager for 20. In the many years he has bragged about making that store's shrinkage the smallest in the state, including being befriended by the CEO of the international company that had a partnership with the stores in the state and eventually bought them all, he never once talked about shoplifting as a driver of that shrinkage. It was ALWAYS waste, or backroom theft, or poor stock handling and planning.

This was also in a dirt poor community where small time crime was a regular thing for most people, think "White trash" area.

This anecdote should clearly not be generalized to the entire country, but average retail shrinkage is supposedly around 2% which includes pretty much any reason you can think of, including someone returning a box of bricks instead of the product, a minimum wage employee dropping a bottle of soda, a customer putting the frozen peas on a random shelf instead of back in the freezer, etc. Shoplifting as something that harms a store's income is an extremely local thing IMO.
That exclusion zone is mostly unnecessary. You can go there with a geiger counter and you'll find it's not much more radioactive than e.g. Utah.

Most of the "measures" were completely irrational.
How important is it to stick to the D&D franchise? Why are third parties married to something like the OGL?

I understand D&D is to RPGs what Windows is (or used to be) to operating systems. But unlike an operating system, D&D's grasp on roleplaying is more fragile. There are plenty of RPG systems that are (subjectively) better and owe nothing to D&D's imaginary setting or rules. In fact, the largest innovation happens outside the D&D franchise.

There are very innovative "lite" RPGs like Trophy Dark or Risus, but also heavier and "crunchy" systems that owe nothing to D&D. Why risk your business by tying it to a franchise owned by a competing business?

(Again, I understand riding the success of D&D's popularity. But unlike with computers and hardware, the "vendor lock-in" pitfall is easier to avoid with something as intangible as an RPG)
Yes! I've been a web developer for 16 years!

I'm sure Chrome and Firefox issue trackers also have plenty of bugs which will never be fixed - that's just generally what happens with long-running software projects.
Kali Malone’s “The Sacrificial Code” is my favorite musical find of the last year, and is entirely on pipe organ. Very mysterious and meditative.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=bpZqFa0Qiro

For a midcentury, modal, classical bent, I love the music of Rayner Brown, who was a church organist in Pasadena. Recordings are rare but worth it to track down. There are a few good examples on YouTube; here’s one:

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=xL8p-MuwzDY

In that same vein, Leo Sowerby: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=9O55UTNhHk4
That's not my experience. Granted, I've only relatively recently reached staff level, but I've been working with other staff engineers (and higher) for a rather long time, including through some re-structuring. Their role seems to have stayed similar, and they still "architect".

But more generally, I think what you describe can always happen, whether you have the "staff" label attached or not. Especially when you get a new manager or management chain, they can always have a different idea of what you should be doing. If anything, I feel that as a staff level engineer I'd have more pull in resisting those changes (if unwanted) than otherwise.
Ask HN: What career moves should tech workers be making in an economic downturn?
Lützerath
> probably one of the most common questions our support team would ingest was "can product X do thing Y?" which was even just a quick online search away.

That's a very biased way of looking at it. Just because some customers were confused by the feature list doesn't mean most customers were. You just never hear from people who don't have questions.

> It justifies expenditures, can be correlated to growth/progress, etc. For specialized products, e.g., coffee makers, I have personal doubts that a substantial amount of buyers care much more than reading a few reviews to confirm that the product "makes good coffee" or " is easy to clean".

The claim that feature lists can correlate with growth, but also that customers are not interested in feature lists, sounds like a contradiction to me. If customers are not interested in feature lists, then there should be no correlation.

> What sells is what the company effectively SEO spams and price-points well within the market. Let's not forget Juicero's history and how well it sold until someone did the groundbreaking journalism of actually using the device and showing how ridiculous it was.

Doesn't Juicero actually show the exact opposite? Despite all the advertising and multiple price reductions, Juicero was an absolute slow seller.

> There are a lot of tricks that can be used to make hot garbage a top seller; Amazon is raking in billions doing just this and has been for years, despite constant outrage articles and proof of the garbage-ness of the services.

There are few online stores with such a wide range of products and such fast delivery as Amazon. Garbage-ness is relative when everyone else is garbage-er.

To me the "build what sells" theory sounds much more convincing than the "it's all about advertising" theory.
Came here to say Moccamaster, but I have the full one. Have done most every manual prep (Chemex, French Press, Aeropress, pour-over, etc) over the years but switched to the Moccamaster a few years ago and never looked back. Someone hit the motherload of coffee prep gear at my local Goodwill a couple of years into my Moccamaster purchase.

I have the ten cup and put 67g of ground coffee into it every morning. Once fully brewed I reserve half of it into a Stanley thermos to have over the course of the day and then have my morning coffee. Always excellent and above all, consistent.
mmmh.. Paving the way for ML-generated/immitated stuff..
IMO same thing in music, recent years. It's easier and easier to produce yet-another-immmitation.
Interesting. Does that mean If I loosely follow the rules (say mages use mana points which change by shape of moons) and don't use the stats (after all it's just a Ultima spinoff), I probably don't need to worry anything about licensing fee? I really don't think it's going to make any meaningful money anyway.
I always felt the inverted method was invented just for the sake of being difficult.
Do you find it easier to explain things by speaking?

If so, get yourself a dictaphone (or use an app that does the same). Record everything you want to say, spoken out loud - it doesn't matter if it's disjointed or informal, you can fix that later. Then play it back and type it in.

If it helps, imagine you're explaining things to another person (or a rubber duck) when you're doing the talking.

Your only task then is to edit it to be more in written style than spoken style, which hopefully will be much easier.

The only other thing I can think of is, maybe you are too stressed to write words down? From what you said, it sounds like you are very anxious about making a mistake.
> I simply want an app that I can trust.

Sure, we all want that, but we’ve learned that trusting apps does not scale. Even if you like an app and trust it, it can be updated to break that trust. Capability based security puts you in control so you don’t have to rely on trust.

> But it shouldn’t be able to send that image to a destination unrelated to my use case.

Capability based security could do this, and you don’t have to trust anyone to implement that feature for you (or to not silently remove it via an update). You would create a capability that would require camera and network access. Any app that needs both resources could take such a capability and be restricted in where it can send photos.
Hey, just contact your local church music director. You don't even have to become close friends, just explain politely that you would be super grateful to have access to organs. Most of the time things can be arranged if you or the music director aren't obnoxius persons. Being a queer or self-taught musician with no degree is of no interest for anyone involved in this kind of arrangement.

I'd assume not being a member of the said church is the biggest obstacle you can reasonably have here, and it can be non-issue too, especially if you are not hoping to instantly gain regular access. Don't be an ass about your lack of religion and hope that they are not an ass about having a religion. I know a few music directors in churches and they are definitely not very religious and it's mostly just a job for them and they are always eager to talk about organs to everyone interested, of course things vary a lot. One must also understand that giving access to expensive instrument that isn't even their own like organs (especially unsupervised) requires high trust and sometimes it's just too much to ask even if you are a lifelong member of the said church. But asking is cheap, don't hesitate to contact your local church music director(s) if you are seriously interested.
> Vote with your feet, and your wallet. Companies build what sells.

This is the defeatist attitude that largely explains why we're stuck in this race to the bottom.

A lot of the mass produced stuff we surround and find ourselves surrounded with has gotten worse. This is not because people want worse things. It is because of hidden and opaque incentive structures that are completely misdirected. By leaving it to the market with such a pithy attitude, we divest collective responsibility and instead assign it to some mystical process.

Coffee makers are the least of it. Our material surroundings absolutely suck. Like, in america, it's absolutely degrading how the wealthiest society ever on this planet is basically made real in plastic, disposable, malfunctioning shit. For my own sanity, I have to reject that this state of affairs is the expression of our collective wishes through the workings of the market.
I'm yet to watch the movie (reconsidering after reading this), but now I have to ask: does the sequel involve humans, and if yes, does it explain why the original antagonists didn't do the obvious thing, which is to drop a thermobaric bomb on that stupid tree, or otherwise sterilize the whole area from orbit, and then get back to their mining operations?
Unless you make over $750k, nothing. https://www.dndbeyond.com/posts/1410-ogls-srds-one-d-d

This is Wizards trying to walk a fine line. They want a cut of the profits from the big-name D&D-based content creators, but they don't want to kill the entire creative community. I'm not sure they're going to succeed. Pissing off the biggest names putting your product in the spotlight in return for a couple bucks seems a really dumb idea to me.
Yep, this is an all-too-normal letdown from WotC. They really are trying to milk their franchises, without concern for their longevity. That's too bad.

For me, this is more reason to continue with the D&D 3.5 and pathfinder ecosystems for my RPGs.
Are you even aware of what safety nets exist in New York and New Jersey? Can you say without looking it up what happens with health care for someone who is laid off in those states? What’s the unemployment benefit? I assume you know the answer based on your confident assertion.
This seems silly. Any company that is in the business of storing tons and tons of DNA data will probably be recompressing it for archive purposes using better algorithms already. If they're not, their loss.

For smaller players where maximum tool interoperability is important, gzip seems good enough.
What Frozen Woolly Mammoth Meat Tastes Like
I suppose the Mac pro will come with more RAM than the other models.
Seconding this suggestion; no ads, good speed, and complete control over the look and feel of your blog. You can even point your domain at it.
add "jebany chuj" and would be close
This is some sort of meta joke, right?
Can you provide an example? First time I've heard that.
I came across a nice YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCEg4_mU2CqqtQxWwzL_uh-w

It posts videos (history, poetry, and similar) by Tameem Al-Barghouthi, a PhD in political sciences from Boston.
I don't think a title of just a version number helps anyone. The biggest part of this release is multiple AV1 encoders which can give great quality for the size of the video.
Ah yes, on second read, your interpretation seems better.

Decades of practice and I feel like my reading comprehension just gets worse :(
My coffee maker is a ceramic cone with a tiny hole in the bottom and a handle on one side. Best one I've ever had, and I can't imagine using anything else to make coffee. It'll never become obsolete, never need descaling, and has been 'running' perfectly for over 10 years now.
The Dragonlance universe is one of the more complicated examples you could have picked, because there's been some lawsuits about the rights. Also, video games have always required additional licensing, so you picked an almost entirely orthogonal example. The OGL covers printed (or digital "print") content.
I think people are mostly worried about old material which will fall into a grey zone distribution-wise if Hasbro revokes the previous version of the OGL.
It depends on the input cost. For energy? Not likely soon. For other things that experience demand destruction? Yes.
I haven't read all, but Attack no. 6 requires access to unlocked phone. IMO, if that is the case, I wouldn't consider this as an attack, at least not as something that would stop me using the service
Some unions have successfully negotiated collective bargaining agreements that constrain or disincentivize the behavior you describe ("respond to small changes in the macroeconomy by instantly throwing thousands of people onto the street").

One of the most common is a mandatory base severance payment (e.g. twelve weeks of of base pay) plus a certain amount for every month of employee tenure (e.g. four weeks of additional pay for every year at the company up to some limit). This gives the employer an incentive to consider a longer time horizon when hiring.
You can try a refresher on Jacobians. If you're following everything there well enough, you probably have what you need to move forward (and pick up the rusty parts that you need as you go). If you're completely lost then you probably want to go back for a quick refresher.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sneaker_wave
Why are customer deposited considered “assets” ? Is the money in my checking account included in the assets for my bank?
Threema has responded:

https://threema.ch/en/blog/posts/news-alleged-weaknesses-sta...
New Paper on Old Threema Protocol
I have two blind family members and iOS changed their life and is adding new features with every update. Android on the other hand is an atrocious mess of half-assed features. There is no implementation either from google or third parties that come even a smidge close. Until that gap is fixed, I will hand my money over to apple and will lobby everyone to do the same.
5% of their investment of the company per offense.
At what point, when a meeting drags long, can we start griping?
Sometimes managers schedule team meetings for an hour at a time. What is the appropriate time and way to say, "hey, this is keeping me from doing my work"? When they drag on to 90 minutes?

I am new to this organization, and am not used to these long team meetings. I suspect half the other attendees are just multi-tasking anyway (emails). Yet I suspect they are not proactive enough to reach out to the manager about this. Has anyone successfully got a manager to re-think their meeting scheduling?
I completely agree with this.

I’ve started to put more of an emphasis on “active” reading (for lack of a better word) in which I take what I’m reading and think it through for myself, rather than just passively accepting it.

It is certainly slower than passively reading, but the result is that I actually understand the subject much better.

You could read a dictionary definition of the word courage and vaguely understand it. You could read a full page with examples and understand it better. But when you read Socrates’ dialogue Laches on the meaning of courage, your understanding will be far deeper. Even if you don’t agree with the arguments made, the act of thinking through all of the arguments helps you understand what your own views really are.

Obviously most books aren’t written as Socratic dialogues, but if you take the arguments and stories that are presented throughout the book and actively think on each one, your understanding and retention will really improve.

And this is not to say there aren’t bad books and that many aren’t bloated. But providing you with the opportunity to think on a topic from many different angles through the use of different examples can be invaluable.
I live in Vienna and almost all buildings are single staircases with 4-8 floors. Almost all house fires are in old housing stock. In new concrete apartment buildings it is usually a single apartment that burns out. It is an almost absurd fear compared to eg traffic related deaths.
Come up with side project{s} that will make you some extra money and not wholly dependent on your day job.

The less dependent on a single stream of income, the more resilient you will be.