skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
How viable is it to build (or retrofit) "heritage" steam locomotives with electric boilers? I assume it would be very difficult to run off battery, but maybe draw from the catenary on electrified lines? I know it's not /quite/ the same but I'm curious if this is a road things might go down.
The word "efficiency" appears 20 times in this article. Yet not once does the author explain where all of the inefficiency - the layers, the fat, and the lethargy - came from. Nor does he explain the logic of culling employees now.

These are not the words of someone who has learned lessons or who is interested in telling the truth.

So here's a hypothesis: Facebook is not a "technology company," it's an advertising company. And spending on advertising has cratered as businesses everywhere have pulled in their horns in response to their own falling revenues. Facebook lived large during the fake boom. It hired way too many people and a built a bloated, middle-heavy organization that is poorly-suited to the task ahead: taking back territory it's lost to smaller, nimbler competitors. Facebook management bought the economic lies being told hook, line, and sinker.

The party's now over and Facebook faces major headwinds, including savage competition, declining revenue, and the aftermath of a hiring orgy gone wrong.
Show HN: I 3D Scanned Tomb of Ramesses II, City of Amenhotep with Dr Zahi Hawass
I worked for Doctor Zahi Hawass to 3d scan ongoing excavations at the Tomb of Ramesses II, City of Amenhotep III, and excavations at Gisr el-Mudir in Saqqara.

[content warning for burial / human remains]

Tomb of Ramesses II, Valley of the Kings: https://mused.org/en/guided/229/tomb-of-ramesses-ii-kings-va...

City of Amenhotep III: https://mused.org/en/guided/227/city-of-amenhotep-iii

Gisr el-Mudir Tomb and Burial, Saqqara: https://mused.org/en/tours/513/egyptian-mission-gisr-el-mudi...

Blog about process is here: https://blog.mused.org/unearthing-egypt-doctor-zahis-grand-l...

I completed this work with a similar setup to my last post inside Khufu's pyramid: with a Leica BLK 360, Matterport Pro 2, and Fujifilm XT-4. I coded up the guided tours with Typescript and the Matterport SDK. The video renders for the blog were created with Nerfstudio.

(The photogrammetry for the body in the burial chamber at Gisr el-Mudir may load slowly, I'm working on optimizing the filesize!)

In you're in the United States, make sure to also check out the upcoming lecture series by Doctor Hawass here: https://zahilectures.com/
taking 50% paycut isn't easy.
Could Interactive Brokers (IB - https://www.interactivebrokers.com/) be a good alternative? despite is not strictly a bank since it supports multi-currency accounts with good fx-rates.
300$/y is a bit much for hobbyist street scanning though... The linked content marketing blog post shows Scaniverse to be nearly as good, so that's nice to know as an alternative.
> Not sure where their head is at but unless they are oriented around these three things they’re never going to catch up.

But ChatGPT is doing exactly the same. There's more energy spent trying to manipulate the output to be politically correct than actual energy spent making the AI more powerful.
A scientist can certainly circumcise and spank their own child. It is doing it to other people's kids that is a no-go. If they want to traumatize their own kid and write it up then they certainly can, but it will make for a terrible study. I'm not sure what your point is.
With Yuzu and Cemu you get Linux and Windows compatibility for the "Nintendo exclusive" game for free.

I can't run Halo Infinite or Forza Horizon 5 on PS5 either regardless if I wanted to.
The old joke is:

Letter 1: Blame previous management.

Letter 2: Announce a reorg/layoffs.

Letter 3: Tell your successor to write three letters...
Btw people on work visas have no access to welfare, despite paying taxes that fund the welfare just the same.

Permanent residents have some access to welfare, but there isn’t a straightforward path from work visa to green card.

Who is suggesting US welfare has to support 7 billion people?
> The blockchain is a piece of additive technology.

To add it you need to show it produces more value than the problems it causes.

> It doesn't replace existing relational databases, nosql databases, object storage, etc.

Hm. Strange. In a comment elsewhere you literally claimed this, emphasis mine: "The staff still does what they do today, but they no longer need to maintain their own database and IT application."

> Also, just because some data is stored off-chain does not mean you need to run your own infra.

And the people will run the infra for you out of the goodness of their hearts? And of course the data that you store "somewhere elsewhere who knows where" will of course be easily available and accessible in perpetuity because blockchain, right?

Why is it that most NFTs in the world are now pointing to non-existent files?

> Public permissionless blockchains help in easing the verifiability of ownership records, transfer of ownership records, and auditability of transactions.

They don't. Moreover, they only work for the most trivial of cases, and make actual real-world scenarios hard or impossible. I've provide several of those, and you answer? "No one is claiming blockchain is helping in that situation and that's okay!"

> In the digital goods

We're not talking about digital goods.
> On its site, Google says certified peripherals must receive automatic firmware updates over the air and are tested for "quality, reliability, and interoperability."

What the hell. What about keeping hardware I/O thin, and handling "quality, reliability, and interoperability" at driver level?

Why do we keep adding more and more independent software stacks that require updates to our list of worries, and not less.
> writing an email about how you're going to can a bunch of people over the coming year and then droning on about how the results of that are going to be so much better (and insinuate that the current setup, which is 100% a management failure, was a poor setup) is insulting.

Employees ask for transparency. This is what transparency looks like...
Yeah, I've read quite a few stories like that, so that was only half a joke. Even the CPU stuff like Spectre and meltdown are almost as crazy.
It depends, but investing wisely is very difficult and slow once you get into the billions of dollars.
> This seems like a bad move for Meta, just leaving the axe up in the air ready to strike like this.

That may be intentional. I could see a scenario where voluntary attrition helps them get reduce size more organically and with lower cost than a layoff. Meta is still huge and pays good money. They can handle a huge level of attrition and still have enough "A players" left over to work on the thing that truly require that level of operation.

> With numbers in the thousands, it gives me the sense that it might not always matter what you do or how good you are.

Fully agree on this. At that scope, it's broad cuts with a lot of meat going with the fat.
No one thinks that? Really? No, you don't think that. But, frankly, I trust dang to tell the truth about his reasons. I trust him much more than I trust some random green account's judgment of dang's reasons.
Why would you dismiss it as "psychological" while admitting that you don't know what it means? Have you ever fasted? It feels like that.

Re: cows. They have a rumen. And they are aided by bacteria to convert the plant matter into usable energy.
I am just bitter about FF7 Remake and FF16.

Every game that has exclusive content on Playstation

Not because I don't have a PS5, I do. But I refuse to support those types of business decisions. Particularly when there is exclusive content.

Edit: Fixing FF15 to FF16
Trying to frame it in terms of "fault" and "excuses" is petty and unproductive. If 9/10 startups fail, is it "your fault" if your startup fails? You could have picked a better idea, executed faster, gained more skill, done more product-market fit testing, pivoted sooner, charged more, marketed more, AHA! Gotcha! Here's where it's YOUR FAULT and now we've correctly allocated FAULT, we can ... what?

Imagine if you only learned from the experience that you need more revenue sooner instead of using the most fun tech, but you hadn't had it beaten into you that it was YOUR FAULT, that would be ... unfair, right? We'd all be missing an opportunity to put you in your place which you clearly deserve by circular reasoning of being at fault.

Plus it makes us feel better because if it's your fault, that means you weren't crushed by enormous imbalanced forces so that won't happen to us. If nobody can resist the $4Bn/year CocaCola advertising spend on every media platform going, maybe I can't either. But if you're just weak, then I maybe can.
Twitter still working doesn't proof anything. There may be tech debt piling up and after some time they will need some combination of investments and surgery (dropping of non-critical features) to be able move forward without breaking everything.
I'm not in the demographic anymore to be hired by Meta, but I'd definitely choose the second scenario over the first one 10 times out of 10. Managing people is a chore.
I'm no financial expert, but wouldn't hoarding an "enormous cash pile" be a indicator of not using capital efficiently?

Having an enormous cash pile is what allowed Apple to keep paying its employees when COVID shut everything down.

Every good company has a cash reserve. The one I work for has a policy of maintaining enough cash reserves to operate for 18 months with zero income. It saved our bacon when the virus came around.
> Happens to me once in a while on the Macbook.

Same here. Aggravating. Even if the Mac just made a tiny noise when it thinks this might have happened, it would be a great help.
I didn't write it out, but our managers have no idea of the code at all. They have never been programmers. Hence the programmers sit around all day, like posting on HN, and not much gets done at all. But hey they are surely really passionate about managing.
The problem with the speed isn't for the passengers on-board—it's for the rest of the railway.

It's one thing to deal with the operational complexity of relatively slow services when they're freight—which provide a clear commercial and economic benefit—but it's another when it's essentially a luxury service (and I'm well aware plenty of the services aren't really luxurious: but they're certainly too expensive for many, which makes them a luxury).

Their acceleration is relatively poor even compared with many freight services, and when running up the northern ends of the WCML/ECML (both of which are two track railways) the challenges of timetabling _any_ slower services during the day are real.
> now Zuckerberg is the old guard with stale ideas that he railed against so hard when Facebook was founded

how is that any different than most of Silicon Valley?

Silicon Valley is what people thought the future looked like in 1994

It has taken Silicon Valley a long time to realize there is a limit to what you can do with websites and computers
How is that "safe to say"? Purely a guess, like anyone's guess.

Looking at numbers, BTC went up 15.8% in the last 24h, up 16% in the last 7 days. Global marketcap of cryptocurrencies went from 804B USD in November 2022 to 1,121B USD today (~32% increase). If anything, it seems to slowly recover.

Although I agree that NFTs are trash and should be forgotten about. But the cryptocurrency market as a whole seems to be more resilient than many think.
I mean, it's also because no rationalists take Roko's Basilisk intellectually seriously nowadays. There was a period of maybe a few months in 2010 where people were genuinely worried about it, and then they gradually figured out the logical holes in it. Any spread after that has been from outsiders who were fascinated with the idea. Nowadays it mostly persists as a trap for people with schizoaffective disorders.

(Disclaimer: my view is of the forum itself; I don't know how long it persisted in SF circles.)
Can we not pretend people weren't already googling sample emails for this?

It's just more efficient now to grab the same starter email that you then customize. Admittedly, google shouldn't be pretending otherwise, either. But what they also did was make it so you can get the starter email without having to see their ads.

Edited to add: I think a better argument on this could he made about the "draft a thank you note to the team" example they give in the video. That's more the type of thing that should be personal and probably not from a starter template, googled or AI-generated. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6DaJVZBXETE But even here, the reality is people were googling for these starter emails already.
You don't need to imagine. It's enough to have a LinkedIn to receive unprocessed templates like this where I would guess their scraper failed or something. On the contrary I don't think an AI would make the same mistake as easily.
We're so fucked. Everyone will be AI spambots. You'll never know if you're talking to a human again.
> maybe an agency could put up comment periods for specific industries

The problem is there is no agency with a financial incentive to support the individual drivers. The drivers don’t earn enough on their own to create meaningful representation. If the drivers somehow were able to pool their resources under some sort of a guild then they might. But that will take a lot of organizing and someone with resources that can stop driving to spend time organizing.

And therein is the problem. We have a large labor pool that is not protected by employment law and is easily exploited through low pay rates. So how is a driver supposed to find money to fund their own 401k plans when they are barely covering their costs?
Right fuck those people who want to live outside of the place they were born in. /s
My thoughts exactly. Most likely.
Very good point. There is a big difference between random layoffs and laying off the bottom 20%.
Feel free to add that value, this is a public forum
Can we pin this comment to the top of every HN thread?
So could Facebook scrape a title and thumbnail from a link but not actually linkify the post? Great way to ensure no one rtfa
This is discussing a strict carnivore (meat ONLY) diet. I'm not aware of such a comparison.
Or maybe they lowered their hiring bar over the last few years, when employees had no choice to be in-office...
The way FAANG stocks have performed, you've already taken that if you work for one considering how much of their total comp tended to be RSUs (with the exception of apple).
Soon you'll all be fighting for your jobs. Many of you will be dying for your jobs. A few of you will be forced through a fine mesh screen for your jobs. They will be the luckiest of all.

-- Zuck probably.

I feel like 10K people are taking a hit because Zuck ruined VR for another decade with his very boomer like imagination and monetization strategy.

Anyway, it's rough out there.
IMO, there is no simple answer, since many access control elements are involved and implementations vary between organizations.

From my experience I would say that there may be different factors:

- Every developer is an exception

- IAM is challenging to scale

- Lazy IT Teams?

- Visibility of access controls are poor

Some useful references:

- https://sysdig.com/blog/identity-access-management-difficult...

- https://www.effectiveiam.com/why-aws-iam-is-so-hard-to-use

- https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/security/iam-access-analyzer-ma...
Upvote instead of posting noise like this.
> The dangers of AI are theoretical.

What do you mean by this?

Many people throw out the word ‘theoretical’ as some kind of way to imply that something ‘isn’t real’ or worth worrying about. Something might seem implausible until it happens. Gravity waves were once ‘only’ theoretical after all :)

There are plenty of AI dystopian predictions, and many of these are possible and impactful. Many of these theories are based on solid understandings of human nature. It is hard to know how technology will evolve, but we have some useful tools to make risk assessments.

> The dangers of corporations being in control aren’t.

There have been plenty of dystopian predictions about corporate control too. I take the point that we’ve seen them over and over throughout history.
It snows in Florida sometimes, too. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snow_in_Florida

NYC saw the warmest January on record, and measurable snow didn't start in NYC this year until Feb 1, the latest in 150 years. https://www.wunderground.com/article/news/news/2023-01-30-ne...
Hard to know what "center" is in a country where even the "left" is arguably to the right of the "right" in Europe. The US's "right" is so-far-extreme-right, there's no similar extreme in Europe. All as far as I can tell (not an expert).
Wow! Looks like they're determined to catch up!

They're going to open up PaLM & an image generation model (imagen?) through Google Cloud. It looks incredibly easy to finetune PaLM in their environment:

Video (Build, tune, and deploy foundation models with Vertex AI):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yg2yHIKQ7oM
Companies should share these updates in a short and concise way rather than posting such and nonsense articles. Sharing like this sounds really absurd. I tried to read it, but when I saw that he was talking about speeding up build systems at one point, I couldn't take it seriously and continue.
Society should get rid of computers and construction equipment then. Everyone can have a lot more employees.
Blatant propaganda will of course ruin such product for regular people. But subtle propaganda? I wouldn't be so sure.
And it's not only about Nazis.
Can you share an example of Sony buying a company at the scale of Activision and turning it exclusive?

The only recent significant studio acquisitions I can think of already had a long history of making PS exclusives (e.g., Insomniac).
He just didn't even need to say it. It added nothing to the statement at all besides make him sound like a heartless android who sees people and hardware as the exact same thing.
Buffers. Telescope.

I remember learning vim and not understanding how people used it because you couldn't change files. Using buffers, and some kind of search to load files in made it clear.

Telescope is a good option for file search, and this also has grep.
The video is very focused on first order effects. A middle manager automates all their work by writing a few sentences; they produce a "brief" by giving a one sentence input to the AI, doubtless imagining that other humans will carefully read their brief, quietly nodding to themselves and considering every sentence, with passing thoughts about how competent the middle manager is. In truth, the middle manager will soon be replaced by an AI, and the lovely looking briefs produced by the AI will only be consumed by other AIs.

Another part shows the AI creating personalized marketing messages. For a brief time they will work, and then every company will be producing them by the millions, and then customers will stop reading emails at all -- again, the AIs will be writing messages consumed by other AIs.
Would be cool if they add support for llama.cpp
From 1995 to 2018, the US homicide rate went from 8.15 to 5.01. During the same time span, the rate in the UK dropped from 1.55 to 1.12.

The rate dropped 38% in the US and 27% in the UK, which banned handguns in 1996.

https://www.macrotrends.net/countries/USA/united-states/murd...

https://www.macrotrends.net/countries/GBR/united-kingdom/mur...

*I would've used the most recent US number (2020), but I couldn't find that data for the UK to compare apples to apples.
The democratic situation was wayyy better than it is now.

You did not refute the original point. You've only managed to muddy the discussion with irrelevance and noise.
This isn’t true in my experience across a few FAANGs. And promotion is very slow on both tracks once you get to terminal level + 1.
When they say Augment your dataset with synthetic data on https://developers.googleblog.com/2023/03/announcing-palm-ap... do they mean something like this https://github.com/yizhongw/self-instruct ?
Yes, Carlos Castenada's books said it's sufficient just to look at your hands.

I wish I could remember to do this :-O
> but surely having more employees can be of benefit to society.

that is how the Soviet Union worked...they just cut to the chase and had the state employ everyone directly

strange how an economy can fail with full employment...
Tech companies are valued by how they dominate particular sectors/niches and the potential growth of that sector/niche.

Facebook doesn't dominate social any more like it once did. It did so with Facebook itself then with instagram but TikTok is grabbing the current generation of new users.

It can't grow like it once did and usage of its existing services will gradually decline.

It's betting that the metaverse is the next social medium after TikTok's short form video. Personally I doubt that but that's the bet they're making.
What I think i need is something like this, but in bookmarklet form. I click it, it prompt()s me for the prompt and displays the output in a textarea so i can quickly paste it. Thinking of it it should be possible to put the output straight into the clipboard, right?
The use case of course would be email/forum communication.
The problem is that you have to make a UI to embed the API key into the code, because pasting it into an urlencoded script is bound to be a pain.
I am on Switch and only needed Microsoft account to play online though?

But either ways, it's not relevant to this situation. We are talking of game.being made available. Not about whether it has login to the parent company or not.

Let's not forget that Sony was the last to allow cross platform multiplayer on Minecraft.
Well, that's horrifying from the perspective of someone trying to preserve their right to privacy.
I think the market has plenty of choice between Playstation, Switch, Xbox and PC. Xbox and Playstation are even basically the same consoles in a different box and with a chip sprinkled onto the motherboard here and there; it's not like the olden days of special PS2/PS3 chips that all need to be handled manually.

The biggest problem in the video games industry is that all companies that have any kind of control abuse anti-consumer practices to keep their profits up. Microsoft, Nintendo, and Sony are all terrible in their own unique ways.

On PC there are some nice(r) players, but PC gaming is neither affordable nor accessible to people who are fine with their Chromebooks already and just want to play video games once in a while. Right now your choices are often "overpay for a prebuilt computer at your local store" or "find out what a PCIe lane is supposed to be and what the 5 in DDR5 even stands for". If you're not turning on your computer every day, you're definitely getting interrupted with updates from software you don't recognize, and that assumes you managed to set up the right driver (hint: not the one that auto-installed!) for your PC.

I hope Valve's efforts take off, not just in the handheld space. The new Steam Big Picture works quite well and the Steam Deck rarely feels any different from a console. At the same time Linux game compatibility has changed drastically since the days of the Steam Box programme. This would open up the gaming market to new players and make PC gaming much easier to get into.
Was this because when people were allowed to work remote, fewer people quit to move to a different part of the country?
From gaming with your eyes to coding with AI: New frontiers for accessibility
For just $3.99 per month, we can reply also to all the subsequent emails from your manager within 30 minutes! Just give us access to your private inbox and the emails will include your own personal style.
Coincidentally that's also the number of times it was used today, and the number of people with any interest in it !
I read it as just internal company processes holding the company down or back. Large companies collect these as more and more controls are put in place to guide correct behaviors.