skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> Mastodon absolutely does not scale that far

Maybe?

> and this should be considered fact.

I see absolutely nothing about ActivityPub that is inherently hard to scale. Adding more points of presence & smart fan-out seems like it could keep scaling indefinitely, from what I can see.

> Costs will forever go up

Let's simplify follower-ship and assume instead a simpler model of bi-directional friending. If you ahve M users each of which have N total friends, the naive fear is this: that costs will keep growing terrifyingly. But I expect it's actually more a sigmoid curve. As you grow into millions and especially many-millions of users, more and more you'll have your people following the same person - which reduces traffic - and more and more of your people followed by multiple people on another server - which reduces traffic. The actual growth curve here is more sigmoidal, with a big variability depending on the number of active instances fediverse instances out there.

> You do not have to generally worry about your entire account and content being gone because some mod gave up.

To get listed on joinmastadon you have to promise to give at least 3 months heads-up, during which time users have to be able to activate an account transfer to other systems. There was a case where mastodon.au nearly pulled the plug with a short notice, but someone else stepped up to take over the system.

The potential for this to be a huge problem is absolutely super real, but in practice, I have almost no real concern over this and think it should be broadly disregarded. The server I was on shut down, but the mod gave us almost a full year of continued service, and another year of read-only service during which we can transfer. Trying to drum up fear & doubt over the instability of this system seems irresponsible & premature, given how well things have gone.

> The idea that a bunch of enthusiasts can replicate this, is misplaced.

I agree that there are huge advantages & I think we absolutely have taken much for granted. Right now you're looking at this through shit-colored glasses though, and I think it's naive to wish so hard for this all to fail. It's convenient & easy to say it'll never work.

But there's so many strategies where we can start to turn the scale into something useful. If servers publish WebBundles of user's feeds, users can p2p distribute the signed http content among themselves, perhaps via WebTorrent. Rather than live in fear of our users and our scaling, we can rely on our users to help us tackle scaling. Yes we can, man. It's totally doable. Get off the ledge.
This looks great in principle, but I don’t trust Samsung enough to connect my frame TV to wifi - I just use a USB stick to upload artwork.
> most of it is about managing process variability.

Yes, and this specific article acknowledged that and stated that this is a niche reflection "about [how Deming's] work goes far beyond the data tools and statistical methods of Statistical Process Control (SPC) he helped introduce to the practice of business — and in many cases, seem in direct opposition to those ideas." As in, this is the thesis statement of the article. Some notes in the article:

> Editors Note: This is an investigative note, and only nominally part of the Becoming Data Driven in Business series. A fair warning — this essay is not intended to be as useful as prior essays in the series.

The author also notes this article will be incongruent with the prior articles in the Deming series of articles. The "official" list of articles in the series don't even list this article:

-3) You Aren't Learning if You Don't Close the Loops — An article about the Plan-Do-Study-Act cycle, sometimes called the ‘Shewhart cycle’ or ‘Deming cycle’.

-2) Process Improvement is Trickier Than You Think — The organisational and political dynamics you’ll face when you attempt to due process improvement.

-1) The Disaffected PhD Skunksworks: A Story About Process Improvement — What it's actually like to due process improvement when the organisational dynamics work against you.

1) Goodhart’s Law Isn’t As Useful As You Might Think — Goodhart’s Law says “when a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.” It turns out that the field of Statistical Process Control have long developed methods for protecting against this effect. We look at those ideas, and then examine a particular instantiation of the approach in the context of the Amazon Weekly Business Review.

2) How to Become Data Driven — What does SPC have to say about becoming data driven? The central idea it uses is deceptively simple: in order to become data driven, SPC practitioners argue, you need to understand variation. We talk about why that is.

3) Operational Excellence is the Pursuit of Knowledge — Knowledge is defined as ‘theories or models that allow you to predict better’. It turns out that the mindset necessary for operational rigour stems from the pursuit of ‘knowledge’. The beginning of ‘knowledge’, in their view, is a deep understanding of variation. This piece covers the practical implications of this mindset.

4) There is No Truth in Business, Only ‘Knowledge’ — We look at some of the more philosophical implications of pursuing ‘knowledge’ over truth, particularly in business. As it turns out, assuming that there are no stable truths in business is a pretty good hack.

(Idiosyncratic numbering intentional, negative numbers are the "pre-series" to the series. This article itself was published 20 days after the "final" article of the series."
I don't see the cost-benefit justification when an Apple watch costs $400-$800 and is (at least IMO) is yet another device to complicate my life and invade my privacy.
This is so alien to me. I’ve been using Apple Pay for years. I don’t even know where my wallet is half the time. I certainly don’t carry it on my person. If you have an Apple Watch it’s even faster.
Text-to-visual LMs are making children's book illustrators go the way of harpsichord tuners and whale oil hunters.
The "Expert" toggle switches it to GPT-4. You can tell by how slow it responds then (note that I've seen it switch over to turbo when you ask followup questions recently).
There is actually a book which you can get for free (or could, at one time):

https://www.amazon.com/Computers-Nobody-Wanted-Years-Xerox/d...

we can call it "the book nobody wanted." /s

Strassman tells how he offered the PARC people a very good deal on an SDS machine, and they turned up their noses at it. They wanted a PDP-10, but they weren't allowed to buy from DEC, so they built their own lookalike (Maxc).
> "If AI companies are allowed to market AI systems that are essentially black boxes, they could become the ultimate ends-justify-the-means devices. Before too long, we will not delegate decisions to AI systems because they perform better. Rather, we will delegate decisions to AI systems because they can get away with everything that we can’t. You’ve heard of money laundering? This is human-behavior laundering. At last—plausible deniability for everything."

This has already fully happened under the name of 'algorithms.' Not necessarily like classical computer science algorithms but like 'the algorithm rejected your loan' or 'the algorithm said your insurance rate is $517 per month' or 'the algorithm declines your registration application'.
Trudeau says Canada is 'serious' about reviving nuclear power
If I move off iOS I lose stuff I bought on iOS. Software licenses aren't portable across platforms, and there's lots of iOS software that doesn't even have an Android version (or vice versa). The software industry has fought tooth and nail to criminalize any attempt by users to resist this. Emulation software is legal, copying software you own to run it on different hardware is legal, but the digital locks designed to keep you from pirating apps make it illegal to migrate your apps even though it would otherwise be legal to do so.

If you try to create a third mobile platform to compete, you will fail. We know this because of Microsoft and Amazon's failed attempts at making phone OSes. In Amazon's case, they actually used the same OS Google did, but Google refused to support it. And you can't legally port licenses over from Google Play to get Google's apps running on Fire OS. So the Fire Phone - a phone running Google's OS with Amazon's tweaks - could not use any Google apps. Anything on a Google service had to be used through the web browser. Windows Mobile was even worse: nobody wanted to support it natively. And again, you can't sell something that isn't an iPhone or Google-blessed Android that lets you buy App Store or Google Play apps and run them.

This is the same situation for everything else, too. Amazon has a monopoly on books because Kindle and Audible books cannot be copied onto non-Amazon devices or reader apps. So nobody wants to buy books outside of Amazon's platform, because it'll split their collections. Nintendo spends extraordinary amounts of time and effort legally harassing anyone who publicly uses their games on non-Nintendo hardware. Same for Sony and Microsoft.

To bring this back to your deli thing, imagine if you weren't allowed to have your deli's wine and other wine in the same apartment. There's chips in the wine bottles that will poison the wine if you do that, and there's a federal law prohibiting you from removing the chip, and prohibiting even discussing how to remove the chip. So you can switch wine stores, but you have to throw out all your wine that you already have. That is the current situation of software distribution as a consumer in 2023.
When I go to a hotel I put my bags and clothes in the empty bath and never put anything in the room where bugs could hitch a ride.
For a 10 year old.
Pointing out two-stroke engines produce dangerous amounts of ozone is great. Using a numerical comparison to cars in order to generate fear in the reader is moronic and manipulative.
I have been to the cloak room and got your coat.
"Near East" is not used in academia as simply a geographic classification. It is used among historians as a standard term for a cultural realm and a specific time frame. "Middle East" is another standard term for a more expanded realm and a different time frame. By analogy, "the West" does not connote a precise geographic territory.
There have been white label phone manufactures since the original Windows CE based phones. HTC use to manufacture close to 80% of Windows CE phones sold by different brands.

https://www.fiercewireless.com/developer/htc-to-shed-white-l...
If Andreesen-Horowitz disappeared overnight, would it really make any difference? The capital would flow through other companies. What has it actually contributed that only it could do? Are you sure its prominence is really any different from that of, say, the Kardashians? I.e. a socially driven expression of a power law?
Same; also, it’s just a double-press on the side button on my Apple Watch and the Wallet comes right up.

Great when you’re in self-checkout in a busy supermarket…
Track Anything: Segment Anything Meets Videos
Besides the performance problem, I’m happy to use Teams daily since it’s integrated directly with Office 365 apps. Easy to open, share, manage, note, meeting…
Do it with a significant bump in the minimum wage, then peg it to CPI.

Even aside from that, most employers for hourly jobs — restaurants, retail, factories, whatever — will still need to operate the same amount of hours, so they’ll either hire more people or have to pay overtime.

This wouldn’t cause a competitive disadvantage, because just like the original shortening from 12 to 8 hour workdays, everyone is in the same boat. Companies will adapt to higher costs and lower profit per employee, in the same way modern workers have adapted to automation+a decreasing real dollar pay per hour (i.e. inflation).

Not that all of this wouldn’t cause a shock to the system, because it would, but there is absolutely nothing magical about the 40hr/week threshold.

The 8 hour workday was itself a shortening from the 12 hour workday. I think we can all agree society as a whole, including hourly workers, is better off in every regard working less than 12hrs/day— even if technically an hourly employee would make more if they worked 12 hours.
SA3D: Segment Anything in 3D with NeRFs
Very true.

And AI will only accelerate the trend.
> Under this formulation, the court found that Apple has a 52–57% market share in the “digital mobile gaming transactions” market.

Is this true in the U.S.?
The infuriating thing is that Amazon has its own app store, and I would happily install the Amazon app from there for a less frustrating experience, but the Amazon App Store doesn't even have the Amazon app.
> Step 1 is to clean every tiny little crevice of your bed frame, bedding, box spring, and mattress and if possible, get a mattress bag. Step 2 is to put bed bug traps under each leg of your bed-- they can't jump or fly, only climb. Step 3 is to make sure no part of your bed or bedding is touching the wall or floor. Step 4 sprinkle diatomaceous earth around the base of your bed and the edges of your room.

I can confirm this through personal experience. I had a bad bedbug infestation two years ago, did the first three steps and haven't had a problem since (I didn't use the diatomaceous earth in Step 4).

You basically turn your bed into a castle. No bedbugs currently in your bed + defenses so they can't get onto your bed = no future bedbug problem in bed.

One good trick I used is that you can make "bed bug traps under each leg of your bed" yourself by putting little plastic containers under each leg that you fill with an inch of baby oil. The bedbugs can't get passed it.
People interested in this article might also like this one: https://acloserwalknola.com/historical-context/benevolent-so...

It's an article describing the benevolent societies and social aid and pleasure clubs that were a necessity in New Orleans during and after slavery and segregation. These societies were formed so that people could ease the burden of poverty and allow for their dead to be buried during a time when white funeral home owners weren't keen about allowing black bodies into their establishments. The result is still a huge part of the fabric of New Orleans area culture to this day.
> the awkward interaction for selecting the card

Do you juggle a lot of different cards? My guess is that most people have a default.

> how often do you have your phone in your hand when you’re checking out somewhere?

Pretty much always when I’ve been in line at the grocery store.
Same goes for 3D printing. Unless you have a specific purpose for it, you will probably just print upgrades for your printer. Or useless trinkets.
Oh man, I'd love to donate my time and labor in exchange for training in auto mechanics. Wish we had one of those around here.
I do some triathlons a couple to times a year, and I find it enjoyable to beat people on a steel frame bike with lower quality / older gear.

Also riding a recumbent really gives you perspective on what a fast bike is. No amount of carbon fiber can beat the more streamlined and comfortable position.
> when phones were first introduced in the previous century, people assumed that nobody would listen in on their conversations.

That’s entirely false. The majority of telephone lines were party lines through the mid 20th century.

The lack of privacy became a topic of pop culture of the time. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Party_Wire
This was doubly amazing in a recent vacation to Japan. We were able to provision a local transit card (Pasmo) from within the Wallet app and load funds with a credit card we already had in Wallet.
Even if you have many workspaces, keep a gmail account too. This conundrum has been true for many years now.
What do you think Snapchat built all over their mapping functionality by hand? Of course Snapchat is sharing your location with third parties. They always have been.
Do you have any recommendations for more resources like this?

I've had a hard time searching for patterns and tips for modeling common data/features for web applications.
I got my waitlist acceptance today. I requested it late last week.
Apple is right on the law, wrong on the morality.

Change the law.
Specifically against the HN guidelines:

"Throwaway accounts are ok for sensitive information, but please don't create accounts routinely. HN is a community—users should have an identity that others can relate to."

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Neat! My mind-blown moment with GPT-4 was realizing that it will often be able to tell you the output of the (unique, not available in training data) scripts it writes for you.
If I recall correctly, needing to have a majority market share is not even srictly a requirement to have monopoly power. I have looked up the actual law before, and it's just that majority market share is the more common way to obtain monopoly power but not the only way. If I understood what I read correctly.
If argue it's when one has "more leverage than any single other party", either on the buying or selling side. And it could be based on a raw percentage of units or market revenue, whichever portion is bigger.

Say one buyer/seller with 51+% of a market by unit or revenue would be subject to anti-trust scrutiny. Perhaps another tier requiring more drastic measures, such as breaking them up.
How do they know they can "just" do something that came out a year after they invented Imagen?

Especially when getting it wrong once might mean Europe makes AI illegal. Making things illegal is their favorite hobby.
My impression of Deming was that he was all for measuring and optimizing processes but not for using the same methods on people.

From what I've read, operationally rigorous management of people originated on the cotton plantations.
You don't seem to have much appreciation for how elegantly handled email is.

I for one have awe & respect for works like Dovecot, which can elegantly decompose a couple different ingress-email pieces of work into special-purpose daemons that each can be scaled & operated independently. The system is practically ancient at this point but a model of how powerful & amazing clearly separated concerns & loose coupled systems are.

You've been persistently negative & calling this all a mess. But it's unclear what you think is elegant & graceful, that does work well. And most of your accusations about things being bad and awful and messy and wild west and postel's law fallacy... none of them have refutable claims. None of them make a position that anyone can argue with. You just spread negativity around & insult thinks in vague terms. It's not very hackerly of you to make a bunch of mean-spirited assertions that arent even backed up enough for anyone else to go verify or test.

Cut the FUD man. Adjust your attitude some. Don't be Mr Rain. Not cool. Be cool.
Responding with bans won't help -- their whole identity is tied to victimhood (a lot of them wear a symbol to that effect). I think the only way to truly resolve this is to elect better representatives/school board members, or become one yourself.
Agree, used it a few years ago and it brought joy to my grandpa.
May you have a powerful machine?

I have Intel i7 U series 16GB RAM work laptop it's very slow :(
The problem here is the most vocal users are often not representative of the whole userbase. As a concrete response, I'm fine with the 1Password subscription, I think the new Electron rewrite is at least as good as the old one, and the cloud hosting is the whole reason I'm using 1Password. I just don't talk about it because what is there to say? They really wouldn't know except that I keep paying my bill.
Or, to say a bit more about this -- I guess the basic principle here is "it's OK to use auxiliaries?" Introducing a larger number system is no different from drawing an auxiliary line in geometry (for instance). There's no rule that the proof of a statement may only contain the entities appearing in the statement! You can introduce whatever auxiliaries you like.
But not having a way to get in touch with actual human support makes it harder to trust a company (sure, there are more reasons to not trust Google, but lack of tangible support is subtractive to the totality of their trust).
> The AI art models are rapidly eliminating most artist/photography jobs.

Automation is associated with increased employment.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox

> Revenge porn and CSAM are trivially solved by community moderation methods like Midjourney

Please don't go around saying things like entire safety departments being trivially solved by anything. Community moderation isn't a legal solution to CSAM, it's arguable the community users are committing crimes by looking at it. (Extra difficult because this depends on the country.) And they're certainly not getting healthcare benefits for it, so they could probably sue you.

This is the reason they're on Discord though, it's because Discord handles the legal compliance for these things.
My first job was at the world leader in chainsaws. They were operationally rigorous but also a great place to work. It’s actually very nice when things work as they should.
HOSNeRF: Dynamic Human-Object-Scene Neural Radiance Fields from a Single Video
If DMT were Coca Cola, we would have a Haddon Sundbloom and it would be settled what Machine Elves look like.

But of course, everybody knows they should look like David Bowie as Jareth the Goblin King or Ziggy Stardust, for that matter.

A labyrinthine space oddity.
I notice this with YouTube personalities. It takes a lot of effort to run a high quality YouTube channel, and you often see people stop being competitive in their sports and start being youtubers instead. Some of the most well compensated sports people aren't even competing, they just teach on YouTube.
> Would you mind explaining how a company could hold monopoly power while not actually holding a monopoly?

Quite arguably, you can’t, but monopoly power (particularly, its expression as pricing power) can be observable (and itself proves an actual monopoly) when monopoly would not be clear by other means.

The ability to price without sales going to a competitor demonstrates the absence of actual competition, regardless of the superficial apparent competition in a described market.
It would, except that they aren’t using them for namespacing the packages, just as some kind of search tag. E.g.: https://pypi.org/org/pallets/
One of the notable features of the Apple Card is that it is the only credit card available in America that promises not to sell your private information or transaction history.

I would trust my data to Apple more than any other financial institution.
I use apple pay a fair bit since it means I don't need to carry my wallet, but when I have my wallet with me, I do find it much more convenient to tap the card.

Android lets you tap and pay without re-authenticating, I wish apple would allow the same.

Apple pay on the web is also very convenient, whenever I visit some cafe that has a QR code menu, it saves me entering in my card details.
Are there a significantly larger number of people who die by electrocution (GFCI concern) or electrical fires (wirenut concern) in the US/Canada versus France?
Breaking Free: How I Self-Hosted My SMTP Server with Haraka
I self-hosted an SMTP server using OSS Haraka. The post shows how you can also do it and understand few components about SMTP.
This is similar to other types languages no ?
Graduated licensing is normal in many industries.
That’s such a disingenuous argument because the books that the ”book banning” critics are talking about involve visual depictions of, among other things, fellatio between men. It’s hardly anything a grownup that’s not engaged in grooming would show a kid.

Calling it ”book banning” as if ideas are being surpressed or something, is very dishonest and it’s getting quite transparent at this point.
The weird thing is that even if you set up a separate hardware key it still prioritises your phone for some weird reason - it should not be like that.

(And no, enabling "advanced protection" doesn't count. It's well-meaning but it's too restrictive.)
*silence*