skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Even if one believes that zero Microsoft software is malware, it seems indisputable that Microsoft software is the single greatest attractant for desktop/laptop malware, from any source. (Perhaps Android is an even greater malware magnet, but not on desktops and laptops.^1) The goal is popularity and profit, not user control (cf. non-commercial options).

The ideal user to Microsoft appears to be an uninformed one, not interested in control and apprently willing to reliquinsh it. Not all Microsoft users are uninformed or disinterested in control. There are profound exceptions. Some of those exceptions will read this comment and respond accordingly. But hundreds of millions of non-exceptions will remain uninformed and disinterested, to the benefit and delight of Redmond.

Obviously, malware can thrive under the auspices of uninformed, oblivious users, Microsoft's ideal customers. Microsoft will purportedly protect them, when it wants to and assuming it can; of course, it won't protect them from Microsoft itself. For those Microsoft employees and users not reading, commenting and/or voting on HN, enjoy the ads injected into Windows. Microsoft is happy with the result.

1. Worth noting perhaps, Microsoft was making an estimated $2B annually from patent royalties on Android.
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/microsoft-may-relinquishing-b...

(The point that commenters/voters appear to be missing is that it is the nature of the customer/user that creates the attractant for malware as much if not more than the software itself or the size of the user base. GNU regardless of what one thinks of them is AFAICT advocating for user control in this communication. That implies users who care about control, not the average Microsoft user. Users who are paying attention and who do not blindly trust companies like Microsoft. One can argue it is the "insecurity" of the software or the number of users that creates the attractant, and there is certainly some truth there, but it makes no sense if, e.g., the user base is a large number of paranoid users who read HN. They are going to avoid/prevent/detect malware better than a random sample of Microsoft users. User behaviour is relevant. If 9 out of 10 users who run program X on operating system Y are careless, then program X and/or operating system Y is arguably an excellent target for malware.)
It's like when I got bored playing SimCity and would just trigger all of the disasters.
You can only use that trick so much. The island I live on (Australia) has a population of 25.6 million (1/13th) of the USA yet also seems to get on the fine with no school shootings (and very restricted gun ownership)
> I don't want my personal morals to control what others can pay for.

You don't want your personal morals to prevent others from paying for child prostitutes, hitmen, nerve gas, fissile material or smallpox samples?
It's almost like there is a shadow government [1,2,3] which uses these people as puppets for the citizenry. Of course the puppets are clueless. They just need to approve everything the shadow government has on its agenda.

In the Western world there is enough bureaucracy that shadow government operatives can operate from within government institutions freely and unlike the Taliban which projected its power in occupied territories through the overt threat of violence.

[1] https://www.wsj.com/livecoverage/live-afghanistan-taliban-ne...

[2] https://odi.org/en/publications/life-under-the-taliban-shado...

[3] https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2018/06/21...
> it sounds like Apple is still coming out way ahead

I disagree for three reasons:

1. Apple Ads are incessant about their own services. Why is (or was?) not having iCloud set up showing up as a permanent notification badge over Settings? It was a while ago, but I remember I subscribed just to shut iOS up. It worked for Apple I guess, but only in a shortsighted way.

2. Ads are big business. Microsoft didn't start with shameless ads, and I don't think Apple would stop at current ad levels. They have to show growth quarter after quarter, so in all likelihood, like we have seen with other companies, it's only gonna get worse. I would love to be proven wrong, but I would also be surprised if I do.

3. The gap between "no ad" and "low ad" feels much bigger the gap between "low ad" and "more ad". Just replace Apple and Microsoft with Netflix and imagine how we would feel if Netflix started showing some—not too many and not too outrageous—ads. For me at least, it moves the service from the "no ad" category to the "with ad" category, and I hate the latter category. So at least in my view, the gap between Apple and Microsoft in this regard is not "way ahead", it is "slightly ahead and getting closer". So while I would be happy to spend an extra X$ for a "no ad" product compared to a "with ad" product, I wouldn't feel the same about a "low ad" product. The Apple premium makes much less sense now, and I am not sure if I am gonna go with Apple for my next phone or computer purchase.
Do you get bird flu from eating birds?

That doesn't make sense.

Does anyone eat raw birds?

Wouldn't you just get it from being around birds?
No clue what you people are smoking, but may I suggest packaging it for export?
It’s plausible that the above quote made it a closer association for GPT to come up with.
> As a big plus, your Win VM's disk C:\ is stored in a file, which you can backup and restore any time you want and not care about viruses/trojans/malware.

A little-known feature of the Windows bootloader is that it can actually load VMDK disk images from NTFS drives and boot them.

I still wouldn't use that for backups though, there are more practical incremental backup solutions for that.
This is just a list of compromises where Microsoft is prioritizing something other than what this author wants. It turns out a lot of users want to have a secure system, not lose all of their files when they forget a password, can work with legacy systems, etc.

Calling software malicous because it prioritized security over freedom just reads to me as being ignorant.
Pause Giant AI Experiments: An Open Letter
> And honestly, excluding counting-related answers is pretty arbitrary. It sounds like you've decided on your beliefs here, and are just rejecting answers that don't fit your beliefs.

Just because LLMs are known to be flawed in certain ways, doesn't mean we understand how they can do most of the things they can do.

I will address your central point: "LLMs are not capable of original work because they are essentially averaging functions." Mathematically, this is false: LLMs are not computing averages. They are just as capable of extrapolating outside the vector space of existing content as they are interpolating within it.

> Are you saying that if I look this up, I can understand how ChatGPT does this? I thought you were trying to argue that we can't understand how ChatGPT works?

We understand how tokenization is performed in such a way that allows the network to form new words made out of multiple characters. We have no idea how GPT is able to translate, or how its able to follow prompts given in another language, or why GPT-like models start learning how to do arithmetic at certain sizes. Those are the capabilities I referred to as "emergent capabilities" and they are an active area of research.

I suggest you look at the paper I linked about emergent capabilities without trying to nitpick aspects that can be used to argue against my point. "Gotcha" debating is pointless and tiring.
Probably 9/11. The resulting wars in Afghanistan and Iraq were largely fought by Millennials (with some gen-z nearer to the end, I think—but the initial invasions heavily involved "elder millennials" [EDIT: and x/y "cuspers", especially for Afghanistan], with younger millennials involved in the long middle period). Though Vietnam (among other wars, but it seems most-comparable) was easily within living memory at the time, so I'm not so sure about "once in a lifetime" for the wars. That kind of wildly-successful attack on the US, though—that part might more-or-less qualify.
> Not all nomads work remotely for FAANG.

Also FAANG aren't particularly flexible for nomad work.
Try YouTube. Plenty of Westerners there posting videos of daily life.
Veritasium did a great video on the opposite direction turning. They even show a bike that prevents you from turning the wheel one way to show that its essential.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9cNmUNHSBac
Since we fixed the number of house seats by statute in 1927, we should just ratio up by 2020 population vs 1924 population, giving us about 1100 Representatives. This would water down the highly undemocratic Electoral College, make it harder (or at least much more expensive) to "donate" legislation into existence, and give FL, TX, NY and CA residents, and urban areas in general, a fair voice.
Thank you so much for your questions!

- As a managed service there are some overheads. We need to auth, validate and parse the inputs, fetch the index that is getting queried as we then need to use the index’s model to generate the embeddings. Then if the index is fine tuned/customized, we need to transform the embedding to the new vector space, to then call our vector index. We then fetch the metadata of the results from the db and parse the response to send it back.

- We’ve only tested upwards of 1M vectors ~ 1500 dimensions. But, more formal testing is required here and we plan to do so. I’m particularly curious about pg_vector and how it stacks up with other players as keeping the data central is a significant upside. We started with these lower vector indices to get something out there and iterate as a startup. But, scalability is part of what we want long term.

- We see both; we’ve had to turn down a very early lead with 100M+ vectors because it would derail other engineering efforts while we were starting. We’re now much better positioned to tackle that challenge as we have all the foundations.

- We haven’t considered this, but it’s an excellent idea. We’re currently discussing this with the team.

We would love to chat more; we appreciate your questions and feedback. Always happy to riff with someone who has seen issues around these use cases, like yourself. Feel free to reach us at founders@getmetal.io !
> I've failed to see why concerns over Facebook handling your private data is worrying when they don't have a product you need to have.

I have at least two concerns.

1) Viscerally, it would be intensely creepy if someone started following me everywhere. Why would I want a company doing the same?

2) We are in an era of diminishing freedoms, and it's impossible to prove that data Facebook has on us can't be turned against us in the court system in the future. Women's menstrual cycles are being weaponized, for Pete's sake.
"I Know you are but what am I" is not productive. The US has been stealing Chinese IP and reneging on trade deals for the last 2 decades?

No it hasn't. It admitted China into the WTO (only to have China go back on pledges to open their economy), stood up multiple industries domestically in China with expertise only to have all foreign entities kicked or squeezed out.

Why would anyone think China would go along with any international agreement ?
i saw a stackoverflow survey that said something like 75% of developers use windows as their main dev environment
Barney Frank and his role in the banking crisis
We don't catch bird flu from eating infected birds, we catch it from being exposed to live birds who are sick (or to their droppings, as I understand it).
That's the beauty (?) of statistics for you!
just try it. roll perfectly straight and lean to a side. It accomplishes the same thing as countersteering, which is to put weight on one side of the bike, so when you turn that direction, the bike gets under you and you don't fall.
I hit 90 km/h on my recumbent as a fat bloke loaded up for touring. It was on a downhill though :).
Did ya’ll get your daily well actually out of the system?
I think most classical music, by virtue of having been written along time ago and having been recorded rather well already, has no need to keep being re-recorded.

I blame the nature of digital assets for this; all we gotta do is keep copying all those files into brand new digital media and we can listen to what's been already recorded forever.
That's an argument for banning all psychological manipulation. Banning TikTok individually, solves nothing.
Unplug The Evil AI Right Now

https://www.change.org/p/unplug-the-evil-ai-right-now
Now there's an idea!
I imagine there is opportunity, but it's gonna be for a big company like Amazon, and essentially be a modern Sears. A place where you can go in and buy now, get it if it's there otherwise it's delivered.
There may be several layers of grouping, particularly for opera. There are multiple acts per opera, multiple scenes per act, and there may be multiple songs per scene. If you try and list these as a single "album" you end up with abominations like my favorite recording of Die Walküre with 53 tracks. They try and stick everything in the track name, but on mobile this sometimes hides important information behind the "...".
I'm not trying to use a trick. It's just pointless to compare Iceland to a country that's three orders of magnitude bigger. Lots of bad things and lots of good things happen in the US that don't happen there. Places like Australia or Germany or Mexico could be more reasonably compared to the US.
US regulators are also choking money laundering and trying to freeze an entire industry out of banking services.

Is this a good thing or a bad thing?
*CJ noises intensify*
The whole point is only the ultra-rich (or woefully ignorant) are paying the full retail price for college. Very few people are paying $65K to go to Wake Forest. If they want you then they'll make it affordable for you. If they don't want you then the retail price should drive you away. If you're a sucker then they'll gladly take your money. That's the game colleges have been playing for at least the last 40 years.
It was pretty bad from the get go, though. It was a trivially occurring bug without a good workaround. You literally could not fully trust floating point divisions on that CPU, and you could even see that by just using the Windows calculator or Excel.

There were others, like the F00F bug[1], that were bad, but even before someone found an ingenious workaround, it wasn't that relevant to e.g. single user machines.

[1] http://www.rcollins.org/ddj/May98/F00FBug.html [2]

[2] If you enjoy that kind of thing, you will enjoy that website in general.
Aliens from US generally find bullshit english-teaching work visas in eastern europe they go to few weeks and then get two years of schengen visa.

Knew two guys from Indiana abusing this trick, they complained 24/7 how difficult it was for them to live in Europe (jobless) legally, but never hear them mention it's the same for foreigners in their country.
Leveraging transfer learning for differentially private image classification
It shouldn’t be hard for someone making these claims to show whois data before and after. Maybe the whois before requires some foresight, but the whois after does not. I will note that despite putting “Confirmed” in the title of their Reddit post and saying they did a whois search that showed Namecheap had bought the domain, the user has not provided that whois data, nor the domain name so that others can independently confirm.

The price of a domain registration going up in real time as you’re trying to buy it is obviously a frustrating experience. Domain name frontrunning is a legitimate concern, shady registrars have done it in the past (e.g. NetworkSolutions), and there are many other entities besides registrars that might do it as well.

Trying to register a domain name is notably not a hygienic process at the best of times, the information that someone might be willing to pay money for a particular domain name could leak and be exploited at many different stages of a typical search process. Unfortunately, the user only finds out they’ve been exploited when they try to pay on the registrar’s site. Registrars concerned about being unfairly accused might find that providing some transparency into the process can assuage this reaction - perhaps a “why did this price go up?” button/link that shows excerpts from your log history of whois calls for that domain name, or if the problem is the gTLD provider changing their prices on the fly, maybe a log of that information over time.

(Exhaustive potential conflict of interest disclaimer: I hold ~$40/year worth of registrations through Namecheap and another ~$30/year worth of registrations through Gandi. Besides these two aforementioned purchases, I do not and have never been employed by, held an investment position in, or maintained any other kind of financial relationship with any domain registrar [lookup service, TLD provider, etc.] in any form.)
It successful by same reasons as well known flavoured sugar water, child friendly high calories processed fast food chain and tabloids. They sold lies.
Moderated groups were possible, although rare

I'd imagine the offenders were laughed at, and if repeated people just filtered out messages from them.

It died because pretty much new people went to blogs and social sites, not some obscure tech needing special client, same way many "desktop" apps were more and more often used in web form.

But I'd imagine if it lived longer the spam would kill it. Lack of moderation and lack of any kind of algorithmic favouring works well in small focused communities, and not when there is relentless amount of spam and let's say "uncultured" users, as netiquette is essentially dead now
I see, it was a deliberate choice: https://old.reddit.com/r/Zig/comments/123jpia/blog_post_zig_...
Some of my network has gone straight into military/defense companies. Quite a bit of recruitment going on since they've been in contact since 2019 too
Thank you. That is exactly how people do in countries where splitting payments have been established and common for a long time, making everybody live on the edge in order to prop up consumer spending.

If you actually save your money to only buy things when you can afford them, you can more easily purchase more expensive stuff with cash, since you've already saved up a chunk, and you are also much better prepared for unexpected costs.
That doesn’t make sense. The comparison is the $1000 being gone today.
No one has succeeded in doing that, despite a number of attempts by companies that have operated in the country for decades. Microsoft was the most recent to give up by stripping the social features from LinkedIn in china a few years ago.

The laws on paper might be entirely fair, but what those laws say doesn't matter.
Why Islamic specifically? What differences do you see from the above linked Arab Christian's writings and what Muslims might write? Is there a specific difference in theology betwen Arab Muslims and Arab Christians that translates to physicians/polymaths that you are interested to explore? I know there are artistic differences but I'm not aware of medical/mathematics ones?
Same. Let the GNU fight this fight and we benefit. It's about choice.
Entirely off-topic, but I immediately noticed that the website uses Fira Sans for all the text. I appreciate open-access journals using open-source fonts.
Wow 6 weeks is not good. Monzo Flex is 3 months interest free. PayPal Credit is 4 months interest free.
Bitcoin isn't anonymous, its pseudonymous. Unless one is extremely careful and takes a number of secondary steps, bitcoin won't protect your identity.
Wild that I can’t rule out whether or not this is because they can’t get an FBI agent onto the internal content policy team.
PHP isn't generally process per request these days (for precisely this reason).

Each request is "fresh", but extensions can persist state between requests, including connections to databases etc.
Classic Teams vs. new Teams side by side video
I am one of the people vehemently defending the position that many of us will not be replaced by AI in the near future, as we will have other "better" things to do.

It isn't clear to me, though, that any of those things will be possible unless we have a solid background in logic and thought, which we humans improve on by doing symbol manipulation (writing, math, coding, etc.).

Which has the unfortunate effect that, even if we aren't forced to go away, the world could devolve quite quickly if we surrender it by simply deciding that kids doing stuff computers can already do is pointless, even as a training exercise.

FWIW, I want to also not be too concerned about this issue with essay writing, as we already have had this problem for a while now in math with first calculators and then stuff like Mathematica, and somehow we keep learning math?...

...Though, I'm honestly not quite so sure we have been learning math as well in the past 10 years or so, so maybe I'm wrong; and, since I also am unsure how you are right in my stead (I'd need an explanation of what children will do to prepare themselves for the future other than learn to write), maybe we're doomed :(.
> And they're not a security threat to China because they're controlled by their shareholders, not the government. Shareholders who will not want to throw their entire investment into the toilet.

Bytedance is majority owned by foreign shareholders:

> ByteDance says 60% of its shares are owned by non-Chinese investors such as U.S investment firms Carlyle Group and Kohlberg Kravis Roberts and Japan's SoftBank Group. Employees own 20% and its founders the remaining 20%.
Not sure if that was a typo or the joke, but hilarious nonetheless
Cerebras has an efficiency advantage at generating LLMs (assuming IP is open).
This is going to be fun to be a part of.
I don't know labor law, but if you're right, it's completely ridiculous. I know for a fact that union employees are allowed to receive benefits and pay increases that non-union employees don't get. If the other side of the coin is illegal, then the law is insane.
You can’t close down GPL code as you see fit. Irrevocable openness is scary for AI community, it seems.

Telling…
I’m sorry you’re going through this. If it helps, I’ve worked in software for over a decade with an unrelated college degree and it’s never held me back. All anyone ever wants to know is that I can do the work.

> How can I justify the high cost of COBRA health insurance with limited funds, so my high school teacher wife isn't burdened by my potential medical debt while being our sole provider?

I can’t help you figure out how to deal with this financially, but you should absolutely write your Senator and Congressperson and let them know that COBRA is an absolute joke.

The existence of employer-sponsored healthcare for workers like us is frequently used as an excuse for not reforming the USA’s absolutely bonkers healthcare system. The system supposedly works for people like us, and we vote, so politicians are too afraid to upset the apple cart.

Anyone who has ever gotten the bill for COBRA after getting laid off knows that it’s basically useless. And what’s worse is that the other options — an exchange-based insurance plan, or Medicaid — might also be either too expensive or unavailable.

You can make a huge difference for everyone by speaking out on this subject. Tell your representatives that the system doesn’t actually serve you. Tell them that we need a system that’s not based on the highly variable generosity of individual employers, or the assumption that you’re putting money away each month to assume your employer’s share of your health insurance plan if hard times fall on you.
Here is the problem with that: Apple would have a public-facing online search engine. The article addresses the advantages for Apple of having Safari users use Apple's search engine, but does not mention what the strategy would be for non-Apple users. Would they make a full-fledged search engine that optimises advertising for users who are not using Apple devices?

That's not to say it's not a good idea - a lot would depend on the quality of the search that Apple would be able to provide.
Feeling the Heat: Railway Defect Detection