skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I implemented a Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) on AWS with Elastic Container Service (ECS) using Terraform so that I could run Docker, and it ended up being about 2 orders of magnitude more expensive than Hetzner after all of the services were configured. For example, something as simple as AWS NAT Gateway costs $30 per month, and it can be challenging to get everything right if you don't use one. I haven't tried Heroku, but expect similar prices and nearly as high of a configuration burden.

So what's the point of all that? Seriously, one server with 16 cores and the memory bandwidth and storage speed of SSD drives should be able to serve many thousands of simultaneous requests and millions of users per month. I can't help but feel that the cloud infrastructure and microservice movement of the 2010s was.. a scam.

I just need a place to run Docker, similar to what we had with Linode for running a shell 20 years ago. And don't tell me how to set it all up. Just give me a turnkey Terraform (or Ansible-inspired declarative configuration management tool) setup that has stuff like load balancing and some degree of more advanced features like denial of service protection out of the box. What we used to think of as managed hosting, but open source, and with sane defaults for running standard suites like Laravel, Rails, etc.

I have to assume that I'm just terribly out of it and something like this already exists. Otherwise I can't understand why someone doesn't just offer this and provide a way for us to pay them the millions of dollars we lose to spinning our wheels on cloud infrastructure with 1% utilization.
I understand that the "persistence" in GPT chats is just "feed the chat history back in before the new prompt."

If that's true, the "history" feature here might just be "you are a grocer, here is your backstory, and here is your chat history, now GO."
I wish my chromecast could turn my tv back off when done with it. It can turn it on. And then when done with an app it wastes power telling me the weather with random photos of graffiti and mountains.
I've been in a lot of social contexts where it was expected to respond with a lot of words. Defying that expectation never seems to hurt and often pays of handsomely. Particularly when writing to people who receive a lot of similar messages.
Yeah, supabase is great. I think if they could get the auth story a little more polished (it "works", but its definitely weak/buggy in some aspects compared to alternatives, and hard to use), and made some advanced use cases with Prisma easier to do (or better documented) since that's such a common pairing, they'd be even easier to recommend.

Right now I still use Supabase because I think they're a solid "Postgresql as a service" offering, but they're just SO CLOSE to being so much more than that. They have all the pieces, they just don't all work quite the way folks expect. They'll get there, I'm sure.
This wisdom is a bit outdated, especially on heavily modded servers.

Minecraft is limited by a single thread, but some stuff does run on other threads. In addition the JDK will do compilation and GC on other threads now, which is especially apparent if you run GraalVM like you should.

Minecraft wont scale to 16 cores. But if you buy a 2C/4T instance, you are going to get less performance than you would get on a wider one.
I bet their iphone was running android
Primarily, because NPR affiliate stations service areas where there aren't incentives for private stations. Meaning, without these public radio stations, these areas would be without news and the entertainment broadcasting NPR provides.

This isn't true for stations like WNYC, but it is true for much of the US.

The small affiliates need subsidies, because it costs a lot to run the stations.

NPR has done like, a million segments on this. It's interesting stuff. Easy to learn about!
>> The standard of human interaction will either be meeting IRL or signing communications biometrically.

Isn't Sam Altman involved in some Crypto company trying to collect biometrical data, using some orb thing, in exchange for worthless crypto? No idea if he still is, but I am more and more convinced that some folks took every single cyber punk story not as a satire or warning, but as a playbook and something to strife for.
I've got a friend who works for a government agency up here in BC, Canada. She's been all remote for years, but they now want her (and everyone else) in the office 2 days a week, likely going up to 3. Problem is, the office is almost a 2-hour drive, one way, from home, and she's not doing anything there that can't be done from home. Her manager (who has no power over the policy itself) thinks he has a solution though; there's a different government office in her city that she could probably work at instead, at least most of the time. She doesn't know anyone there, and there's no work done there related to her work (let alone anything she couldn't do at home), but they think it could check the "be in the office" box.
> who WANT to have a VR work setup that gives them screens the size of walls.
I saw that in the tech demo last year and would agree with that sentiment. Yet I wouldn't want to wear headset for a full day to achieve that.
Is this what you were looking for?
Are you genuinely asking for examples, or are you just declaring your opinion in bad faith?

NPR reports on DNC mishaps and criminals all the time:

- https://www.npr.org/2017/11/16/564593737/sen-al-franken-accu...

- https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2016/12/12/505309059...

- https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2017/05/19/529119721...

- https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2017/12/04/568336597...

- https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2013/02/20/172480780...
Mastodon just recently reached a 10 million user milestone[0]. Say what you want about it, but it's the future. If it scales exponentially over the next few years, we're looking at a true contender to Twitter. It is "for the public good" but as with any online service, it has its caveats. But with instances, you get different 'camps' who have different agendas, and you can filter those away with a blacklist if you don't want to engage them.

This is something Twitter doesn't have: the ability to silence entire political agendas and categories like porn, although porn still slips through the cracks on Mastodon, so it's not a given that you won't be ambushed by it.

[0] https://www.itworldcanada.com/article/mastodon-passes-the-10...
Given I wasn't the only person confused, I suspect this web page could be improved by just coming out and saying "sometimes I want audio to come from the TV, but want the screen to be blank." The tiny screenshot was too hard for me to read, so I skipped over it, and was a bit confused about the purpose of this project.
From the cited paper:

> The high risk of bias in the trials, variation in outcome measurement, and relatively low adherence with the interventions during the studies hampers drawing firm conclusions.

Statement from the publishers: https://www.cochrane.org/news/statement-physical-interventio...

> The original Plain Language Summary for this review stated that 'We are uncertain whether wearing masks or N95/P2 respirators helps to slow the spread of respiratory viruses based on the studies we assessed.'
Your problem is that you think we need to sell generative AI to Joe for it to be significant.

> video games

Cool. There is a very real chance that he will have more of those because they will be cheaper to make. He won’t be using the generative AIs, he will be consuming content made with them.

> my wife and I can enjoy retirement

Joe doesn’t have to worry about retirement. Someone will use a combination of these AI technologies to make his wife fall in love with a perfectly attentive, smoky voiced older guy. When this AI powered person suffers a terrible car accident on a business trip she sends a significant portion of their savings to him. When Joe finds out he immediately calls his bank. There an other AI powered agent handles his issue. It takes a while for Joe to be understood, because the agent he is interacting with is heavily biased towards trying to upsell Joe on a new mortage.

Eventually he is able to claw back some of the money, but the stress and the implied emotional infidelity ruins their mariage. He talks with the assistant of a divorce lawyer (another AI). She collects all the information from him and the lawyer (this time a real person, albeit one heavily supported by various AI systems) sends over all the paperwork. The AI of Joe’s lawyer agrees with the AI of his wife’s layer about the details and once that is done the humans sign the papers and they are divorced.

Joe still has some money left. He can rent a bungallow and maybe he can spend his retirement there, but unfortunately Joe picks up a nasty addiction to online porn. (What Joe doesn’t know that the booties he is looking at are generated exactly to his taste, as measured by his pattern of clicking on the free samples.) This is the last straw, the addiction sucks Joe’s wallet empty and he dies destitute. Many many people with generative AIs have Joe’s money now.

To his last breath Joe doesn’t really understand what this AI thing is everyone is talking about on the news.
Sometimes it takes a few tries before they get it right, the iPhone also wasn’t the first touch based screen only phone.
They get this source of funding because that is how they were created and entities that were created through a different mechanism (for instance: to become the mouthpiece for a political stream or for commercial reasons) are a different kind of animal.

The government allocates funds to many things that it may consider useful, such as health care, infrastructure and education. This does not necessarily imply that the government does this to create a mechanism of influence, as opposed to their counterparts in countries that are run as dictatorships. Naming the NPR in the same breath as the Chinese, Russian, Iranian and North Korean state media is mistaken at best and maliciously dishonest at worst. Knowing what I know about Musk it is a fair bet we're looking at the latter.
> I'm sure that if he had to decide on a direction to pivot to today, it'd be towards generative AI.

I don't think so -- generative AI doesn't really provide strategic advantages to Facebook/Instagram/WhatsApp the way it seems to hold promise for search (Google/Bing) and productivity software and certain jobs. Same way crypto isn't strategic to Meta either.

You don't have to pivot your company. If you're still raking in cash, it can be much smarter to just continue that, rather than make a giant bet that might ultimately sink everything.
ChronoScope World
C# has channels as a library and not a language construct, it lives in System.Threading.Channels namespace.
now connect the timer to the network so it can be activated with certain conditions, eg: I'm leaving work, the live traffic estimates 87 mins until I arrive, start the machine so it finishes when I get home.

Or: Energy will be cheapest to buy at 2:30am, start then.

Or: There is currently enough excess solar power to run the machine only using solar (bonus points for checking weather forcasts)
Which of the dozens of definitions is the right one?
PIN all the way to the end of times. Preferably without any device being connected to the cloud.
When I turn on my TV my receiver also turns on, but when I turn on my receiver my TV doesn't. My apple TV (connected through the receiver) turns on both. Same goes for off in all cases.
I've played with elevenlabs' solution; its really good, but I don't think it could believably emulate the voice of someone under panic duress. The voices it produces have a pretty believable, but flat, affect. Maybe it has options I haven't played with, or maybe you could train it to add panic to the voice.

Idk, something about this story feels fishy to me. I don't doubt that we're headed toward this kind of future; but we're talking about very high level spear-phishing to accomplish this today (knowing the individual isn't home, having samples of their voice, highly sophisticated AI knowledge to make the voice and add elements of panic duress, to actually succeed you'd also need to compromise lines of communication to the individual, e.g. do this while they're on a trip to the amazonian rainforest or something). This feels more like an AI hit-piece than an actual done-with-AI story.
> It all comes back to how Meta makes its money - data collection.

They make their money selling ads _using_ that data.
1. Consistency models are a new type of generative models designed specifically for efficient one-step or few-step generation. They achieve high sample quality without adversarial training.
2. Consistency models can be trained in two ways: (1) Consistency distillation: distilling a pretrained diffusion model into a consistency model. This results in high quality one-step generation. (2) As a standalone generative model without relying on a pretrained diffusion model. This still achieves strong performance for one-step generation, outperforming other non-adversarial single-step generative models.
3. Consistency models allow trading off compute for sample quality by using multistep generation, similar to diffusion models. They also enable zero-shot image editing applications like diffusion models.
4. Empirically, consistency distillation outperforms existing distillation techniques for diffusion models like progressive distillation, achieving state-of-the-art FID scores on CIFAR-10, ImageNet 64x64, and LSUN 256x256 for one-step and multi-step generation.
5. As standalone generative models, consistency models outperform other single-step, non-adversarial generative models on CIFAR-10, ImageNet 64x64, and LSUN 256x256, though not GANs.
6. Consistency models share similarities with techniques in deep Q-learning and momentum-based contrastive learning, indicating potential for cross-pollination of ideas.
7. Some limitations and future work include:
- Evaluating consistency models on other modalities like audio and video.
- Exploring connections to deep Q-learning and contrastive learning in more depth.
- Developing more sophisticated training methods for consistency models.
- Improving the efficiency and stability of the multistep sampling procedure.
Netflix was never a BigTech company based on any objective matter - revenue, market cap, ecosystem or influence.
The original screen saver is still covered by copyright for at least 61 more years, and Berkeley Systems previously sued the makers of an Opus and Bill parody screensaver. So it is understandable that xscreensaver doesn't have a faithful replica of the original.
All mechanistic attempts at evaluating intelligence are doomed to fail.

I am way more concerned about the people making philosophical arguments about intelligence without any foundation in philosophy.
In the past, I was very skeptical of NLP efforts. Thought it was mostly full of cool toys.

I was dead wrong.

I am similarly skeptical of RL, in the sense that for most cases you are better of using optimal control techniques, and maybe sometimes a combination of RL and optimal control.

I am aware of AlphaZero and other impressive achievements in certain games. However, I am still left with the feeling that it is very expensive to train an RL model and it is insanely specific to the task at hand.

Are there recent breakthroughs that point at promising generalization in the RL community?
> In general, I’d say that GPT-4 was strongest on true/false questions and (ironically!) conceptual questions—the ones where many students struggled the most. It was (again ironically!) weakest on calculation questions, where it would often know what kind of calculation to do but then botch the execution.

It'd be great if chain-of-thought / show-your-work type prompts became the default for anything involving complex, multi-step calculations or logic.

GPT-4 would have almost certainly gotten a higher score on the calculation questions if those methods were used.
That's in reverse. Trump was Fox sponsored. Fox wasn't Trump sponsored.
Fox doesn't need a "Fox affiliated media" label.

Maybe it needs a "NewsCorp/Murdoch affiliated" label.
NPR was founded by the CPB, which was created with an act of Congress and is governed by a board of directors selected by the President. If it's "mendacious" to claim NPR is state affiliated, presumably it would be completely accurate and correct to state NPR, an entity that was founded and continues to be funded by a federal government body run by presidential appointees is "not state-affiliated"?
As a farmer, I was extremely angry to hear that the Farm Bureau negotiated with these terrorists. Their MOUs were not worth the paper they were written on, and I am glad to see some legislators saw through their machinations (as mentioned in a sibling comment here).

The Farm Bureau should be ashamed for its part in this, and this caused them to lose my own trust that they will represent farmers in other important matters. It actually makes me embarrassed to be a member.
Where do you address the fact that npr says that “stable” funding represents only 1% of total funding?
> tech is not their primary line of business.

Because "tech" isn't a business. You don't sell "tech". Microsoft as an example is heavily diversified and as a software publisher they sell ERP software, operating system software, business productivity software, etc. Technology is what allows them to produce and run that software.

> A media company is the thing that produces media

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mass_media#Internet
I'd expect most economists couldn't do a good job either. It's black-box magic, suitable for wizards.
> State funding of media, regardless of how it’s structured, creates an obvious conflict of interest with editorial freedom.

How is this not true of any funding of media?

At least with government funding—even if there is outright editorial control—in a democratic country, you as a citizen have the ability to vote on how you think that funding and control should be exercised. Furthermore, it is massively easier to get laws in place that mandate transparency for government-funded entities than for private ones, so whatever influences there may be on their reporting would be much more visible.
You can run your own from a vps and an ssh socks proxy.
People did care, and probably tried to tell you, but you probably weren't paying attention.
The use of public chargers is easy to avoid with some basic planning and awareness of your phone's battery habits.
Some TVs (LGs for instance) allow you to turn off the screen while keeping the audio on. Perfect for podcast or songs.
> Let's say it did what they claimed at the start and stopped transmission 100%

This claim was never made.

No vaccine works 100%, ever.
I'm pretty technical, but neither of those were the reasons I quickly abandoned Mastodon.

I don't care about federation, and I want algorithmic discovery. Specific I want to follow all sorts of people from around the world (on multiple mastodon servers) and have more people suggested to me based on that. Mastodon can't even reliably search across servers.
>> I never imagined letting people commit crimes with no fear of any repercussions.

>This is a myth. Police everywhere prioritize violent crimes.

I was speaking mainly to petty crimes. I should have been more clear.
> I believe the reason people keep arguing with you is that you keep saying "must" instead of "my preference is that...".

No. The reason is because a lot of the people on this thread are also people who take these huge photo albums that are full of just random geometry and devoid of animals or people. As with 99% of humanity, people take negative opinions or criticism against them as a personal attack. That's just the way people are. People need to get defensive rather then face a possible reality that their hobby and personal works are just not good.

> and you keep insisting that your ideas "must" be followed.

They don't have to be followed but they "must" be followed for the album to be "good" in the eyes of the general public. There is a shared reality here that exists outside of peoples individual preferences. Good books exist, good movies exist, but also Bad movies exist and horrible books exist that represent a sort of mass social group consensus on a topic. You either acknowledge that reality or you live in a delusional bubble.

I am saying this. For most of these photography albums taken by software engineers that are devoid of people and only contain inanimate objects, most honest people will think those photo albums are boring and not good in general. You can make make a point that I am wrong about this general consensus. That many people actually find those photo albums to be amazing.

But to call me arrogant and disrespectful? That's wrong. I respect everyone, but that does not preclude me from sharing my opinion however negative it is. I will not lie. "Must" is an appropriate all encompassing word here in expressing a general consensus on the topic I am addressing.

Additionally you should know that I have a lot of upvotes on the parent comment because people agree. I have downvotes on some of the branching threads from people who took it personally. Overall the evidence on this thread supports my thesis in that the general population agrees with me.
This article completely ignores evidence of the categorical advantage males have in most sports, and how even after a long course of medication to suppress testosterone, significant advantage remains. See Hilton and Lundberg (2021) for a comprehensive review of this: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s40279-020-01389-3
Hi Hacker News community,

I've been looking at a validating a virtual store concept for metaverse/AR fashion shopping, and I would greatly appreciate your feedback.

Here's a brief overview of the idea:

- A self serve platform for eCommerce fashion brands to create virtual stores to offer an immersive and interactive shopping experience.
- Customers will be able to explore a 3D environment and try on virtual clothes and accessories using AR, creating a unique and personalized shopping experience.

To validate the idea, I have developed a basic demo of the virtual store concept, which you can see here: https://creatar.xyz. I'm seeking feedback to further refine and enhance it.

I'm particularly interested in hearing your thoughts on the following questions:

• How do you feel about the concept of a metaverse/AR virtual store for fashion shopping? Does it sound intriguing and appealing to you?
• Do you believe that small and medium-sized eCommerce fashion brands would find value in such a virtual store concept?
• What are your impressions of trying on virtual clothes and accessories using AR technology? Do you think it would enhance the shopping experience?
• Are there any specific features or functionalities that you would like to see in a metaverse/AR virtual store for fashion shopping?
• Do you have any other feedback or suggestions to help improve the virtual store idea?

I'm grateful for your feedback, as it will be instrumental in refining and enhancing my virtual store concept for metaverse/AR fashion shopping. Thank you in advance for your insights and ideas!

Note: This post is solely for gathering feedback on a virtual store concept and does not promote any specific virtual store or brand.
> Personally I predict that generative AI is going to be the next Metaverse and crypto.

A common thread tying those three things together is that, in large part, they're all impressive technologies in search of problems to solve.

Technologies like that are pretty much always overhyped and oversold.
WBUR is an NPR station, not only is it not difficult to find out the writer is an employee of NPR, it's out in the open and advertised as such. Do writers need to disclose on every article that they're employees of the organization they're writing for?

https://www.wbur.org/about