skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"Alexa, I want to throw you in the garbage." is probably the phrase I say the most to that device. I use it as a kitchen assistant, and that is pretty much the only thing I want to use it for. All the extra crap that amazon keeps pushing on to the device just makes it worse. My main uses cases are: grocery lists, listening to music, setting timers, viewing recipes, making meal related announcements to the house. I really don't want to see any advertisements or other content it thinks I might be interested in. Just stop doing it please.

The only reason that I haven't moved to homepods is because apple can't figure out how to do shopping lists that any one in a family can access.

"Alexa - Add bread" takes one second. "Hey Siri - add bread" takes upwards of twenty seconds for the homepod to figure out who you are, and if you have permission, and add it to the reminder list. I really would just throw away the alexa's if apple could get that one thing figured out.
I think we are kind of on the same side of this particular argument :-)
You’re Now a ‘Manager.’ Forget About Overtime Pay
Synthesia: Create videos from plain text in minutes
Sports venues, too. They have the Amazon version installed at Climate Pledge Arena and a few baseball stadiums, but I've seen something similar at a walk-up beer fridge during a Nets game at the Barclays Center.
> Is that an issue with the store concept, or an issue with not making it clear to users that it’s a non standard drop off location?

It's a flaw with how Amazon communicated drop off locations for returns.

You would say, "I want to return this." And they would respond with, "Take it here!" no additional information about having to have an app.

If you take a return to The UPS Store, for example, you just bring the item you're returning and a little QR / UPC code they scan and you're done.

If you take a return to the Amazon store... they won't even let you get to the point where you can return without having an app on your phone. It was annoying.

Especially if you were taking someone else's package back with your own. Or... more accurately, returning something for your girlfriend since she bought 3 tops with the intent of only keeping one and had to do a return like every 3 days because of her shopping habits. And she just assumed it worked the same as returns at The UPS Store... and then when you got there to drop off the package you couldn't even sign in as her. Ha.

I feel the original posters frustration around this. For a company that has always said, "It's all about the customer experience..." it was REALLY BAD customer experience. And, because it wasn't me setting up the original returns, I got sent to the dumb little "make you log in before you can enter" store a few times by mistake.
Because you don't care about the number in your bank account, you care about what you can buy with that number.

Park your cash in a 5% instrument for a year and you can still afford 3-4% less stuff than you could at the beginning of the year.

That's fine for me with a mortgage, but less retirement headroom for many older people.
Speaking on Sim City, is there a chance anyone has a collection of Japanese Sim City 4 bat files? I saved a bunch of bookmarks but link rot has destroyed most of them, hoping someone collected them all.
Google Translate is unreliable for that use. You'll need another professional translator to check that with certainty. DeepL is much better than Google translate, and also free.
In my head I just replace "Maybe later" with "Maybe never".
Daytime Pokémon Go used to be filled with so many retired people plus a few SAHMs.
Does anyone think Mastodon can or will go through similar fork-and-spin-off storms as Bitcoin? I feel Mastodon is at a pretty okay stage in terms of general completeness right now, but all those devs won't just switch into maintenance mode, I assume? Seeing the various (also angry) reactions to this PR, it starts to smell a bit like someone may want to fork off into a more barebones edition.

I made an analytics tool for it, just in case brands decide to use it more, but now I am starting to get worried this could very well end up as yet another multi-fork-what-is-available-here-and-whats-not kind of headache.
Role models are useful! An acquaintance worked as a (somewhat) low-level volunteer at a (somewhat) large sports event. These things are run according to a schedule that is detailed down to the minute, but my acquaintance determined it was unsafe to send the competitors onto the field due to a screw-up by the organisers. (Concurrent event close by occasionally spilled over.)

Despite enormous pressure, he remained firm in advising the competitors to stay inside until the problem was fixed. And they did.

It reminds me that if you're not an ass, and a team player normally, and essential to the operation, you have a surprising amount of leverage even under pressure, and when your formal authority is low. It's okay to politely say "not now" until you're actually ready.

(The difficult bit is, as always, knowing when you're in the wrong!)
So is this is something that can be incorporated into the next generation of video encoders? Will h.268 or whatever require decompressors to come with a 1GB pretrained model?
With Clojure you at least have the Java ecosystem to rely on.
People on Twitter are jumping to the conclusion that this allows you to read someone’s mind but maybe all it does is allow to you to reconstruct something similar to what they are looking at.

For example if you recorded the activity of every cell in the retina, you would be able to do good image reconstruction but no one would interpret this as mind reading.

It’s possible that this is a similar story but instead of the retina, the decoder is just getting all of its signal from early visual cortex and therefore it’s not doing anything that a well placed camera pointing the same way as the subjects eye couldn’t do.

Yes, in principle it’s possibly doing more than that and using signal from eg inferotemporal cortex, but how much? There is no evidence it is doing anything beyond simply leveraging the retinotopic organization of primary visual cortex here.
Comparing car design and operating conditions to that of airplanes is kind of silly. The operating conditions of aircraft are far better defined and restricted.

Additionally, aircraft airframes are regularly inspected and fully radiographed at certain intervals. Components that develop flaws are changed out when the flaws are detected. The same is not true of cars.
> for a single player game

But that's the problem: it was really a multiplayer game, sold to a crowd who wanted a predominantly single-player experience. So users were effectively angry from day 1 simply because they were being sold something they didn't want; the fact that this also precluded them from salvaging a bit of entertainment from it (since you'd be booted out even if you had little or no intention to ever interact with other players), was a further slap in the face.
Successful people who are teams
Surprised this is the top comment. It's so oversimplified as to be absurd. What employers are allowed to do is heavily limited. There are countless laws on the books restricting employers in the US. And in many countries in Europe there are far more restrictions. Does that make us not free societies? I don't think so. Companies at scale have a lot more leverage that individual employees so unions and laws are needed to keep them in check.

Whether this particular complaint about a lease is in the realm of legal limits is unlikely but you have conflated two issues.
volkswagenitalia
Minisketch: an optimized library for BCH-based set reconciliation
Top server maker added to US blacklist
Pretty sure the vast majority of therapists have left the academic ivory tower and build their practice on years of secular experience but okay.
>How long did humans and mammoths co-exist?

The research seems to indicate that the overlap was from ~150,000BC until the QME crash ~10,000BC that you describe.

So, the answer would be "for the majority of anatomical Human's history until they all died off"
I'm imagining the "Well akshually" guy as the person you're responding to.

Sure the name was "SimCity". But this is about the 2013 game, not the 1990s game. Clarity is preferred over 'Wellakshually Correctness'.
International Relations Grey-Zone
> The main problem was that the actual simulation was being done on the servers

While that was the marketing line "simulation so complex it can't run on your PC", I remember there being an offline crack shortly after release and later one of the official patches even enabled it officially.
I’m really cool with just music, weather, and a timer. Not everything needs to have a ton of features.
It is funny you mention that, but it seems some companies are already making moves suggesting some level of adjustment ( commercial properties in Chicago suburbs seems to be sold at a discount, while residential properties become a hot item ). I can only point to individual instances so it is hard to call it a trend.
> "Every time they would unblock one pinch point, then they would just discover the next one," says Librande. "You were unblocking the dam and then the flood goes and hits the next dam. Then everybody scrambles, tears that one apart, ok, but it keeps going".

Apple hit this problem a lot too in the early days of the iTunes and App stores. Marketing wants a huge midnight release with all the hype but the scale just isn't there.

The only way to go imo for this sort of thing is a staggered release, an invite system, or an open beta.

And it also sucks that stupid management and marketing decisions killed such an important franchise in gaming history.
> "Reddit is currently the most popular search engine. The only people who don’t know that are the team at Reddit"

It's more that it's the current blogsphere. All those things that were there at the organic distributed web didn't completely go away, they just became walled, and Reddit is the only one with walls low enough to be discoverable.

It's not a search engine, it's only the place with a full link quality enumeration.
With the amount of housing turnover in the past few years, to me it seems that plenty of people can afford to buy. Actually an unfortunate amount.
One of the Main limiters with underwater intelligent life would be industrialization. How are you going to use a steam engine underwater? What do you burn to heat it? Given that geothermal vents would be the source of life for such a species - capping them for machinery would also be unwise.
Asp.net Core 6 vs. Asp.net Core 7 vs. Fiber(Go)
The AI revolution is coming for your email
Exactly. I often regretted that I said something, rarely regretted not to have said something smart. You can always say what you have to say asynchronously.

On the other hand, you can't dismiss all questions addressed to you.
The last lines are the best...

But just to be sure, I got in touch with a friend of mine who works at a research reactor, and asked him what he thought would happen to you if you tried to swim in their radiation containment pool.

“In our reactor?” He thought about it for a moment. “You’d die pretty quickly, before reaching the water, from gunshot wounds.”
As someone who works from home, and hopes to never work in an office again...I think this doesn't do justice to the Office people's argument.

The Office people think the WFH people are poisoning the company culture. It's like if you had a neighbor who dumped sewage into your shared pond: "I prefer not to dump sewage into the pond, they prefer to do so, so let's accommodate both groups and allow each to do what she wants."

It's important to make the case that WFH does not poison the company culture--that it can result in a more successful/effective/healthier organization. I think it requires a change in mindset and/or working patterns for certain manager types to see things this way.
Good to see - when I posted this every comment was about Musk. I guess it just takes time on Hackernews to filter the worthwhile discussions to the top
> Tip your Amazon driver

Ha ha, what? Is that a real thing?
Using AI to turn the Web into a database
> with the advent of LLMs, amazon has a chance to dramatically upgrade the capabilities of alexa

This is a terrible idea. NLP, with or without LLMs, isn't remotely close to being able to interpret commands in someone's house. And who would want a non-deterministic voice assistant anyway?

Imagine you say, "Alexa, turn up the air conditioning," and Alexa interprets this to mean you want to increase the temperature. There are uncountable and unforeseeable failure modes.

Note that this happens even when talking to humans with near-perfect NLP/brains.

The major flaw with voice assistants in general is that they only make sense if they have a pretty narrow and pre-defined universe of accepted commands, which is incredibly confusing to someone who mistakes them for actual NLP.

It's just a really, really bad UI. I use mine all the time, but only to set timers and turn lights on or off.
> I always think when rich-text is allowed it is the first step down. Usually when that happens "ne'er-do-wells" start arriving :)

That would be terrible
It's not the same thing. In the book "fast" and "slow" refer to two distinct modes of thinking, it's not about speed in the way the author of the post is describing.
Yeah, but ask for developers to do better documentation and you will get angry answers ;-)
Remote work requires higher seniority, more independence and more decision making on worker side, but a lot of people don't want to make decisions, so there is a lot of meetings, calls and similar stuff which is replacing normal in office interaction. Things which were solvable in office by going to someones desk are now in need of coordinating some meetings, finding time which fits both sides and so on. Stuff which was done by talking during walk for lunch is now meeting. Meeting in person which took 30 minutes are taking 60-90 minutes because people are not build to use simplex channel where only voice is transferred. Stupid things like drawing something on whiteboard is impossible.
Working from home you don't have all this stuff which is happening next to watercooler.
IMHO WFH is making people also less happy, it is more comfortable, but makes people more miserable.
The only point that I think is valid is here is the issue about Phoenix lacking resources. Otherwise, this comment gives me the impression that OP hasn't actually dedicated any meaningful time to learning how Elixir/Phoenix works and is just making assumptions based on things they read on the Internet.

> The barrier to entry is gigantic.

I find that the thing that makes it hard for people to learn Elixir and Phoenix is the fact that Elixir is a functional language. Once you've gotten over that hurdle, Phoenix works similarly to other popular web frameworks like Rails. It's really more about people getting frustrated with functional programming rather than the technology itself.

> Deploying Phoenix is a nightmare when compared to Laravel.

Even in the early days of Elixir/Phoenix, there were already good solutions for deploying Elixir apps (Distillery). Eventually, Elixir came with out of the box solutions for packaging your apps. Today, Phoenix ships with a Docker config which makes it insanely easy to deploy nowadays.

> In Phx you have to reinvent a lot of things and often, of course, choosing the wrong path.

Can you give some examples of this? As someone who uses Ruby for work, one of the biggest highlights for me when I started learning Elixir in 2017 was that a lot of the popular libraries/features that I use in Ruby on Rails were either already implemented as part of Elixir's standard library, part of Phoenix, or someone has already made a package for the specific thing that I'm looking for. This made the switch so much easier for Ruby devs.

A good example is GraphQL support. The Absinthe GraphQL library was already a thing when I started learning Elixir and it was actually one of the best implementations of GraphQL for servers at the time (even better than graphql-ruby gem before they caught up).

> Sure try the chat demo apps Phx is famous for but beyond that it's a pain in the ass unless you are very good Elixir programmer and can bug fix and reinvent-the-wheel things out.

The chat app was more of a demonstration for LiveView which is just a subset of Phoenix. Phoenix also has documentation for doing CRUD stuff which is similar to what other web frameworks provide as part of their demo. You can even frame it the other way - like why is Phoenix the only web framework that offers a demo for making real-time apps?

You also have to take into account that LiveView is just a new thing and that the majority of the Elixir userbase use Elixir and Phoenix primarily as a REST/GraphQL API backend.
Show HN: Serverless API gateway powered by OpenAPI
Zuplo is a fully-managed, serverless API gateway that runs at the edge (over 200 datacenters). We just launched our native OpenAPI support to simplify the workflow of customers that leverage OpenAPI or want to improve their API design-first workflow.

Like most gateways and API management platforms, we had a simple OpenAPI import or converter, but this created a lot of challenges around 'the source of truth' and keeping things in sync. With our native support for OpenAPI you can now have confidence that your API is truly aligned with your OpenAPI spec (because it's powering your gateway) and our merge functionality allows you to easily make updates to your OpenAPI doc using other tools, and patch those changes in without overwriting your gateway configuration.

If you're not a user of OpenAPI - you won't need to learn it to use Zuplo, but you'll be taking the first step to better understanding your API and adopting the most popular standard for describing APIs.

To celebrate, we have a week of OpenAPI content with folks who work on the specification itself too. Check it out.
That link contains an unwarranted assumption. It's true that particular "mega" species declined and went extinct over the very long period you cite. There's no reason to believe, however, that such a decline would reduce food available for humans. Rather than eating a ground sloth, a tribe could eat ten deer or a hundred turkeys, or more likely some mix including deer, turkeys, etc. The absence of a giant herbivore like the sloth might mean fewer large apex predators like saber-toothed cats, but these are unlikely to be regular food for humans anyway. (Often we'd expect the relation to be reversed.) The foliage that the sloth would have eaten was consumed by other herbivores instead. We might speculate that it's easier to relax for a few weeks after killing a sloth than it is to kill a turkey every day, but refrigeration didn't exist and killing a wild animal that weighs a ton is not easy. After all, turkeys and smaller animals may be caught with snares that a single human can easily fashion from available materials. Giant ground sloths... that wasn't an option.
From my experience, saying "I'm thinking" actually makes it worse. Instead of thinking for a response, I internally start to panic (mainly thinking whether I have considered everything and the response is correct). After a few seconds of "thinking", I eventually give a response that is no different to my knee-jerk reaction.

I do find replying with an email to be extremely helpful. Even if the response is not correct, it does show you have put in the effort to reflect on the meeting after it has finished.
There is nothing in the modern hardware ecosystem quite as satisfying as the feeling and sound of a 3.5 inch floppy ka-chunking into a floppy drive. Sure, everything being silent magic these days is nice, but I never felt so in touch with a computer as I did as a child dragging files off a floppy drive and hearing the drive start to buzz and hum. It was like being able to touch the data itself.
Yeah and then any mod with half a brain sees you're spamming things everywhere and bans you.
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Pest-resistant tomatoes finally available after 30-year wait
Show HN: A Simple Style Editor for Google Maps
Yeah, the part that were simulated online was the trade between the cities, a task so trivial it demanded nothing of the servers.

The server side simulation was a joke. It was mostly an excuse for why the game performed poorly and the cities were so small.
Record-Breaking Boreal Fires May Be a Climate ‘Time Bomb’
Their only Hope at long term viability is something like the wall between advertising and editorial at old school media companies. Yes, it’s fashionable to be jaded but it really did work that way.

Google needs its product people to not know or care about as revenue. They need to make search as efficient as possible, without regard for whether a good search result reduces ad clicks.

Revenue would go do, but not catastrophically. And they’d have a sustainable business that would be hard to disrupt.
I'm not opposed to rich text, but I feel this is repeating emails mistake of having poorly defined ad-hoc per-implementation html subsets instead of formulating a widely accepted spec. This means that over time it will be increasingly difficult to ensure that implementations are actually able to process the content correctly.
> we have a very good chance of avoiding a recession

Not sure that's the case, I work in RV, which is a leading indicator for recession and recovery. RV volumes have been getting hammered for the last 8 months. OEM mfg numbers are down over 50% year on year. [1] Sure it's just one small segment of the overall economy, but things are getting strange out there.

[1] https://rv-pro.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/01/Shipments2.png
Mastodon adding rich text support? Sounds like they're trying to catch up to the social media platforms of yesterday. MySpace? It's funny how things go in cycles. First, we had the simple text-based internet, then we added flashy graphics and animations, then we stripped it back down again with minimalism and flat design, and now we're back to wanting more visual stimulation. But hey, why not embrace the nostalgia and bring back some of those retro features? Maybe next Mastodon will add a customizable profile background with your favorite song playing in the background.
The Office as Architectural Touchstone (2008)
Next: LLMs impove themselves by modifying their own code.
Given that the median age of a home in 2019 was 39, that puts half of today's housing stock as being built in 1980 or before. So most of "today's houses" are literally the same houses that were present in 1989, just with three decades of additional depreciation. This is even worse in older, populous parts of the country like California and the Northeast that haven't built as many new homes as in the Southeast. In California and New York, for instance, people are squabbling to pay $1m+ for 43-60 year-old homes. People today are paying more, and getting less for their money.

https://eyeonhousing.org/2021/03/age-of-housing-stock-by-sta...
In spite of its flaws, I still enjoy watching 2010. I had the good fortune to see it in theater with many Sci fi friends.