skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
TigerBeetle – distributed financial accounting database
> We should decide whether we like free market capitalism or not.

Nothing should be treated as absolute. The man considered as one of the fathers of free market capitalism, Adam Smith, directly appeals to humanity and sympathy in his other popular book, The Theory of Moral Sentiments. Yet for some it's like, either we have full on free market, with child labour, capital having all the power and all, or a command economy.

How about a middle ground with a free* market with regulations restricting the worst abuses of the greedy human nature? That's what already exists btw, it just needs more tuning. With more regulations to stop newly found abuses - today it's not child labour, it's pollution of all sorts, or disregard for (near-)slave labour, or optimising for short term profits at any cost.
Why is recession relevant when the company is raking it in?

Is the management of google so incompetent they cannot find a profitable application to a large part of their workforce?
I assume Pachai's response will be essentially, "Well, like, that's just you're opinion man." This is a letter that lays bare exactly nothing new about the investor id, which is the capitalists id: more money, more money, more money! That means more profit. There are only two ways to get more profit: increase revenue or lower costs. Canning 100k people doesn't mean anything. Investors are simply avatars of a fundamentally indifferent universe, a human mouthpiece rendering a (surprisingly simple) equation.

Personally, I'd argue that naked indifference represents a wholesale abandonment of the good (cooperate/cooperate) Nash equilibrium for the bad (defect/defect) one, and rationally society should punish those advocating for this phase change of society at any level, since it represents an overall loss of productivity and profitability at a societal level. Andor (great show, btw) points out that seeds of rebellion are constantly forming in tyrannies, but the converse is also true, that the seeds of tyranny are constantly forming in liberal societies. This seems like such a seed, and it's worth asking what mechanisms are in place to undermine such seeds before they have a chance to grow into trends, into movements, and into the world in which our children find themselves. How about shame, guilt, reputation? Communal responsibility is always the first casualty of income inequality, which leads to a positive feedback loop of less responsibility, more wealth inequality.

In summary, Christopher Hohn should be ashamed of himself, people should spit on him in the street[1] and in his food, he should be sneered at and verbally abused by everyone in his community for being a greedy, inhuman monster that would destroy 100k lives for his spreadsheet. That this type of recourse is generally not available is a failure mode of our society that should be addressed through enacting any and all policy changes until this type of recourse is online once again. If this mechanism for basic humanistic correction isn't possible or practical, then Christopher Hohn and others like him should be taxed into oblivion.

1 - He looks like this: https://duckduckgo.com/?t=ffab&q=christopher+hohn&iax=images...
> anything that a computer does can be construed as making a copy.

but that's not the point of contention. The training data set has been granted the right to be distributed (by virtue of it being available for viewing already - it's not hidden or secret). The proof is that a human can already view it manually. Let's call this 'public'.

The question is, whether using this public training dataset constitutes creating a derivative work. Is the ML model sufficiently transformative, that the ML model is itself a new work and thus does not fall under the copyright of the original dataset?
I kind of feel they should be. I cannot remember what their last major customer-facing AI product launch after Google Assistant. Sure there is AI in photo tuning and many interesting features for the Pixel phone, and there is Gmail autocomplete but I remember I used to really following every Google product launch when I was a kid: there is Google Reader, Google Drive launch in those days. That excitement was kind of gone: all the new AI products feels like polished but conservative.

The GPTs and Whisper really get me excited again these days though. But Google pioneered this field.

I love their JAX, but in a way many people would love pytorch but not so much in the META company.
Sure, but I could write a program to spew out an unbounded number of images containing random pixels. It could create an image that is identical to a copyrighted image, but if I just keep that image on my hard drive, have I violated copyright? I don't think I would be, but if I started distributing them, yes I would.
"Due to supply chain issues, oxygen prices are at a decades-long peak. Consider mixing up to 30% CO2; also tout your commitment to combating climate change."
Corporations talk only BS for the past 10-15 years, words have no longer a meaning. Failures are usually rewarded, not punished, failing upwards is the norm in many places. Expectations of real responsibility, actions, etc are for people from other times, that are old or retired.
Being fired means you were terminated but the position is still needed. It’ll be hired for again.

Being made redundant means the position itself is no longer required, so you’re let go because your job isn’t there any more. Depending on the law in your country or jurisdiction this will also mean you can’t hire for that position again for some time.

There are more legal protections for the latter and businesses can’t just fire hundreds or thousands of people at once and claim it’s not a redundancy process.

Beyond all that thought, ‘impacted’ is just a euphemism for ‘laid off’ or ‘made redundant’.
You enforce exactly the same way — at conversion to local currency. If you hold US currency abroad, there is nothing Argentina can do about it.
>Offering child rearing incentives like free childcare, education, outright money, etc does not seem to work, such as in the Nordic countries. People who grow and experience wealth simply don't want to have kids.

Pay large sums of money to promising young intelligent couple to have kids.
(and no, the govt should not do it)
Dividends are taxed at the same percent as income in the Uk. So he is paying a lot on that.

Unless he isn’t resident in the Uk. Which I don’t know.
Was it? I wanted to support mgaunard point, hence the "/s".
You'll find that people in the West have an unfounded arrogance about the QoL in Western countries (by which I mean primarily the Anglo-Saxon world along with some "white" European countries).

Many countries have better QoL than the West, because it turns out crime and filth don't have to be normal nor accepted. Specifically in the case of Japan, you'll also find that people are much better behaved in general.
A little bit off topic here but this guy must be fun at parties....
Funny timing. 3 days before this they had a major product release[0].

One wonders how related those are.

At a minimum, I suspect there were some GTM folks working pretty hard on the launch the last few weeks who 3 days later are out of a job…

[0] https://www.prisma.io/data-platform/accelerate
I'd never heard of this either. I used to play something like it as a kid where each player got to secretly arrange their back row for each game. Maybe even up to 3 rows with pawns in front. We called it Chessterfield.
Reminds me of the Fifth Element scene:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r0mO6UY6uTg
I just found out this framework on the day my pet civet died.his name was Happy and he was 3 years old.
https://archive.is/YRsLH
>You don’t need to. It’s implicitly assumed, by virtue of publishing in a public forum, that the author is providing permission for people read their comments and ideas, and remix them as they wish. That permission doesn’t include exact replication, but reading and understanding is assumed, otherwise why did the author publish it?

Following this logic, isn't training AI on Github or Deviantart 100% fair game then? It's not like OpenAI is infiltrating computers and reading hidden away data.
Absolutely it maps one to one with Hemingway, idea. It also works very well for personal projects or projects that you rarely have time to dedicate but want to use any opportunity to make process you can
*Don't want to do for low wages anymore
> I feel bad for the people on work visas, but that's a problem with the American immigration system, not Alphabet

If Google had even 10% of the resources working on lobbying the US to fix the immigration system as it did lobbying the US to not antitrust it to death, I would buy this.
Turnmills gone but Fabric still reppin
Rachel by the Bay would hate this:

https://rachelbythebay.com/w/2012/08/30/pain/

https://rachelbythebay.com/w/2012/08/31/lines/
"noon" and "poop" make pretty good squares.
Many high-level languages with good string support are implemented in C. The C standard library sucks but it's not your only option for handling strings.
I think 12k is just the start. The overall number will higher.
People’s reactions suggest they too believe themselves to be overpaid. The harm to the laid off Googlers is they will not be able to find a job paying anywhere near as much because they are not each adding $300K plus benefits to the value of the company annually.
Thing is, short of mathematical definitions, everything is subject to some bias, any sufficiently-complex statement is just an interpretation of various signals. Moreover, the threshold for "sufficiently-complex" isn't really so high.

In other words, there aren't really facts (in the sense of being "absolute truths") but just Justified True Beliefs, which means Google essentially has to solve the Gettier Problem (https://iep.utm.edu/gettier/).

Examples:

There is no medical fact that smoking is bad for you but there is medical consensus that smoking shortens your life expectancy. Of course, the consensus does not preclude that there might be some nonagenarian in Fiji or Japan who's smoked a pack a day since he was 20 and is still chopping woods for fuel.

I don't know what exactly GP is saying about Snowden but pre-Snowden, it's a justifiable belief that, among other things, your webcam will only turn on when you tell it to. Post-Snowden that belief might no longer be so justifiable.
I suspect one of the strategic reasons FAANG keeps us around to work on bullshit projects is to prevent us from going on our own and making awesome competing products.
How are you planning on proving a particular licensed work was used in a sufficiently large model? One of the commonly mentioned issues with current ML is the inability to reverse the output to figure out 'how it got there'.
Isn't that like terrorism 101 ? Those are like the most obvious targets if all you do is to generate some mayhem
What is interesting is that value creation isn’t discussed at all in the letter or comments. That would be a far more interesting cross section of Google to discuss.
Could you provide an example of what you're asking for? It appears to work well for me. I would estimate that 80% of the answers are very good, and 10% provide at least a glimpse of the information I was seeking.
> They have absolutely no obligation to keep tens of thousands of overpaid people on their payroll.

Who says they are "overpaid"?

It always baffles me how worker solidarity ends at the slightest sign of someone making good money.
Gemfile of dreams: the libraries we use to build Rails apps
I am not a fan of software such as this putting in an arbitrarily "safety" feature which can only be disabled via undocumented environment variable. At least make it a flag documented for people who don't have an issue with nudity. There isn't even an indication that there is a "safety" issue, you just get a blank image and are wondering if your GPU/model or install is corrupted.

This isn't running on a website that is open to everyone or can be easily run by a novice.

Anyone capable of installing and running this is also able to read code and remove such a feature. There is no reason to hide this nor to not document it.

Also the amount of nudity you get is also highly dependent on which model you use.
Were there no downside it would be a default. Perhaps ask "isn't it a no-brainer to use large pages" rather than declare it is without saying why you think so.

Edit: I did a quick search. upside of less TLB thrashing, downside of potentially more disk thrashing as pages are paged in and out.
Very weird to assume that Google is still a growth company. Advertising is slowing down and it’s only real business is ads. GCP might eventually make money but that doesn’t require a huge speculative investment. It should be treated like a utility.
Probabilistic Filters by Example
A recession is defined as three consecutive quarters of negative growth. A single quarter of negative growth doe not meet that definition. Even technically.
Hum... Is that whitespace eliminator still on sale?
I get that too - I know plenty of people who are very happy about their choice to have kids, despite the lack of what they used to call fun since having them.

I understand that having dependents give you purpose, and that purpose is (for whatever reason) something that us humans need to be happy.

What I don’t agree with is that you can’t find purpose without having kids that gives you the same satisfaction. If the problem being solved is that in the philosophical sense life is pointless, then your children’s life is as pointless as yours and having children therefore cannot create purpose for that life.

If “purpose” can be reduced to “something challenging that you care deeply about and dedicate your life to” then there are things other than children that can create it. For example the quest to perfect a skill (perhaps in sport, or in art, etc). What matters is that you care about it and it is challenging enough to create failure and the satisfaction of overcoming failure.

Travelling and partying are not things that meet that criteria (what difficulty is there to overcome? How do you know if you’ve succeeded?), so on their own they are not a purpose.

Those are my thoughts on it anyway, I know everyone has different feelings about this.
Last i checked he was a non-dom....
I can feel bad for tens of thousands of overpaid people because being laid off sucks. Choosing Alphabet is also choosing for presumed job security. Among tens of thousands, I can bet 100% that among them will be visa holders, people paying off huge medical debt, people with disabled dependents, people with huge student debt, people who are trying to get their children through school, people with complex medical conditions that now risk changing their medical support system due to insurance changes, people who will struggle to do the interview grind because of being a single parent, etc.
And I'm always baffled by people who fail to understand arguments. If a country can't regulate currency, USD is far superior to crypto. If a country can, neither works.
Ooo a PCR user in the wild! Glad you like it haha. At least development on it won't slow down since I don't work at Prisma in the first place.
That depends on how you define "running fine". It wasn't running fine for 3rd party app developers and now they are cut off completely. DMs and like counts have been screwy ever since the layoff. There have been major outages, whole days where nobody could log in, other days where people were forced logged out. It's only "running fine" I'm the sense of how Twitter ran 10 years ago.
> Certainly it worked better in the 80s.

This is such an American/Chinese perspective. Both countries where the growth and promising future gets people excited. You are being dazzled by the growth and bubble. Bubble era Japan indeed had that same appeal.

In 1980s Japan young families were worried about ever being able to afford homes. Land and houses had been exploding in price since the 1970s. Yes everyone felt they were getting rich, but assets went up in price faster than wages.

Japan now is indeed the anti-thesis to the bubble era you are glamourizing yes. Now homes are affordable. Jobs plentiful. Overtime has decreased massively. The 1980s had overtime common which would be illegal now. Train lines are plentiful. The bullet train network built, and paid for. You can get a taxi ride at anytime without the need to bribe drivers.

The flash and dazzle of the bubble was fake. The practical affordability and livability of Japan now is real.
> You don't automatically have the right to take my content and do whatever you like with it.

actually you don't have the right to restrict the content, except as part of what's allowed in copyright law (those rights a spelt out - like distribution, broadcasting publicly, making derivative works).

specifically, you cannot have the right to restrict me from reading the works, and learning from it.

Imagine a hypothetical scenario - i bought your book, and counted the words and letters to compile some sort of index/table, and published that. Not a very interesting work, but it is transformative, and thus, you do not own copyright to my index/table. You cannot even prevent me from doing the counting and publishing.
You could argue your point the other way round. When times were good these companies clearly overemployed staff. That is very unfair to investors. Cutting back at this time finally prioritizes investor goals, and it’s pretty minimal anyway.

Not to mention the insane benefits these employees get, these are the best employers in the world. It’s clear employee happiness was much more important during good times than any investor sentiment. Investors just shut up as the business was still growing.
I agree too. AoE is more a cookbook than a textbook.
> I kind of like this version better than the altruistic fantasy.

Same, although to be fair, in this day and age the altruistic version is the more realistic one; it's a lot easier to guerrilla garden some fruit trees than it is to run a commercial nursery. Which is why most of the people who run small independent nurseries do it as a second career, and don't start until their 60s or so.
Well if you check the web, not a lot :D
Was the pig offered therapy?
In the anglo-saxon world, I have not seen significant successful program since the industrial revolution that has helped or softened the impact of a new process on an affected lump of people[1].

The weavers were left to rot when the automatic looms came in. (there were in flanders east england and northern france incredibly rich and influential class)

Furniture makers were left to rot when steam power tools came in

Farm labourer were left to starve when steam threshing/harvesting came in.

enclosure was another tragic note in england.

The green shirts were lobbying for "a share of the domestic profit" in the 20s-30s, in the 60s they were convinced that we were going to be working 2 hours a day by now, with robot servants cooking and cleaning for us, and no-one would be living in poverty. Even Orwell has written on this.

Instead we see productivity in the western[2] world dropping. Meaning for every human hour worked we make less money. because I suspect in part to the rise of servant-as-a-service jobs(food/shopping delivery/cleaning/elderly care etc etc) all of which are long hours and low paid.

[1] well, DDR everyone had a job, but lived in permapovety and were likely to be disappeared if you spoke out.

[2] specifically the US and UK, who appear to be snorting financial inequality by the metric fuckton
I donated 1% of my salary to a charity for a while, which I got back via tax deductions. Some guy transferring some of his wealth to some organization has nothing to do with a corporation trying to cut expenses during a downturn, though. It's a weak strawman.
Yes, that's true.

However, even if you're not using ECC RAM, you're much better off using ZFS or btrfs, because due to their frequent checksumming and checksum validations, these filesystems will usually detect memory corruption much sooner than if you didn't use them.

This could be immensely helpful in scenarios such as the great^4-parent poster.

Note that bad hardware is not limited to non-ECC RAM. ZFS and btrfs help just as much in detecting other kinds of bad hardware, such as bad SATA cables, bad disks, bad disk/SATA controllers, bad CPUs, bad power supply, etc.

But of course, once these checksum errors are flagged by ZFS/btrfs, it's a signal to test and fix/replace your hardware, not keep using a machine with bad hardware.

And yes, while ZFS and btrfs cannot fix errors that happen before the checksumming takes place (e.g. due to bad RAM, bad CPUs, etc), they can still detect these kinds of errors (in some cases, at least), especially when they happen after checksumming already took place. And they definitely can detect and fix errors in the rest of the data-to-storage-and-back path (e.g. bad disk cables, bad disks or disk controllers, etc).
I've been living in Tokyo for many years, and this article is completely spot on.

And no it is not "the same in many other countries" like some HN comments would like you to believe.
Sitting by my bed is a copy of Michael Pollan's book "The botany of desire" he discusses Johny Appleseed in depth well worth the read.
Their staffing is off by that much though. The bulk of google is working on non revenue non profitable ventures
Funny. I interviewed at a company that doubled down on development in a downturn and subsequently ate their competitors when things came back.

Maybe it's just doing what investors want, or using that as an excuse to trim some fat. But when you're profitable I'm not sure it actually makes sense to slow down just because the economy has.
Have you tried Trilium (https://github.com/zadam/trilium)?

It's a generic note storage (with a DAG based model) that's very extensible and comes with a demo task manager implementation: https://github.com/zadam/trilium/wiki/Task-manager
> Upholding Prisma’s culture of openness and transparency

We will disclose the bare minimum amount that we can get away with, plus things that would end up biting us in the ass if we didn’t.
I’m going to wager that the percentage of people in our society who would like to extend copyright to restrict these tools, favoring the needs individual copyright holders over the needs of the public domain, is much smaller than you realize.

By the time this reaches judgment and goes through the appeals process there will be a vast industry of non-infringing uses that are clearly transformative and in fair use (Sony v Universal)

You cannot say that the person using ChatGPT to control the lights in their garage is infringing on anyone’s copyright in any manner whatsoever. The point of copyright is not to gain a permanent monopoly on certain speech. The point of copyright is not to make sure that people are fairly compensated for their work. Their work might be terrible but contain a good idea that is later reimagined in a better way (Baker v Seldon) but that’s for the market to decide.

The courts will probably concur that these models are fair-use and I will agree with their judgement.
> They could get multiples of that $10B back if they sold it to investors now.

Maybe so, but MSFT is not a mark-to-market / opportunistic trader.
I work on a cross platform P2P encrypted filesystem - Peergos:
https://peergos.org

https://book.peergos.org

https://github.com/peergos/peergos

Features:

* audited by Cure53

* protects metadata (directory structure, file name and properties, file sizes, social graph)

* fine grained capability-based access control

* built-in social media

* sandboxed 3rd-party apps: e.g. word doc viewer, calendar, text editor, games etc.

* FUSE bindings

* CLI

* cross platform

* browser client
Original Credit Karma was nice, but they went overboard with geolocation: didn't allow to log in into my US account while in Canada, so had to stop using them.
Smithfields is already offices. I used to work there.