skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I love audiobooks; I've listened to a massive number of them, I've read, recorded and edited for Librevox, I briefly looked at moving into audiobook production while I was a dubbing mixer on TV programs - and I'd still love to do it if I could.

But audiobooks suffer from some of the same malaise as the publishing industry in general - in that it's both blessed and cursed by Amazon.

Audible has a stranglehold on the audiobook market - but as Brandon Sanderson recently said "The deal Audible demands of ... [authors] ... is unconscionable". The fact that they only pay 40% of the sale price to the author for an _exclusive_ deal (25% if not exclusive) is frankly criminal.

It's bad for authors, but the knock-on effects on the industry where one player has a 90% market-share and a exploitative relationship with the creators is considerable.

About 12 years ago I spoke to one of the leading audiobook production studios about contract work editing audiobooks. The hourly rate they paid was terrible - barely a working wage. Worse still, the rate was based on per finished hour rather than per hour worked, so the liability for a poor quality reading / recording was entirely put on a contractor who had no control over it. Other engineers who were working in the field basically did the job for beer money between other gigs.

So - I can't imagine that AI won't replace a great deal of audiobook production - but that's because even now, with best-selling authors the economics barely work thanks to one behemoth of a player. With lower volume books it'll be a labour of love or an AI reading that is the only viable means of production.

[1] https://www.brandonsanderson.com/state-of-the-sanderson-2022...
> Expensive to maintain: dunno, but I pay <10€/month for mine, so it can't be that outrageous

I agree with this and all your other points. Surely it is cheaper to a put up a few mobile masts than to dig and install cables everywhere. In fact, this is the exact reason the government is using this strategy to get internet to rural locations rather than using cables.
Not OP, but I used tmobile ISP for over two years during the whole Covid era. Worked pretty good for what it is, managed to get about 200 Mbps down and 20 up. I hit 500 Mbps but moved away from that area at one point. I only just switched to fiber recently because a 1G fiber line was installed and only cost $60 a month.
> They already have cryptographic authentication for parts

What if a genuine part is modified. I am not sure it is a solvable problem?

> First they are indeed not exclusive options, locking parts when the phone is locked is a possible option.

If that is technically possible I am all for it (but if I had to choose between no integrity protection and integrity protection that makes it harder to repair, I don't know what I would choose). However if you are a phone, how would you distinguish between a legitimate repair and malicious swapping out of parts? Sounds like incompleteness theorem would say you can't
Doesn’t remove sponsored ads, doesn’t remove suggested/related videos, doesn’t let you chron download to files on a schedule that works for you.
This is a great way to unpack that phrase, thank you! I started the article with that phrase because of the insincere absurdity of it exactly as you describe.
The number of paywalled publications linked from here could easily be over 10 or 20 or even 30. YMMV, but IMHO it wouldn’t make sense to subscribe to over 10 publications just to read an article here and there when it happens to be linked from HN.

I personally subscribe to four dailies, but most of them are regional and very unlikely to surface here.
Not sure of what the downvote is about because this is an accurate representation of the post-dotcom time. Enrollments in CS went down, programmers would be offshored to India, nobody wanted to be in tech anymore, unemployment was high. Hard to belive now but people enrolling in CS at this time were mocked and ridiculed.
I think the ambiguity in inflammable lies in in- prefix rather than in the second part. If someone told me that incombustible and inflammable used to point at the same property at one point, I’d believe that.
> They’ll be initially annoyed at changes, then adapt.

I tried to adapt, but never really could. Instead, I stopped using software that forced me to use a ribbon.
I'm happy to see even further performance improvements towards rich-text CRDTs but at this point, I think the barrier to adoption isn't speed or compactness but instead integration with existing backends and databases.

I have a hunch that we're reinventing the wheel by creating new B-Tree implementations in Rust when we could be figuring out how to make an existing database do the hard work of storing and retrieving characters in the correct order. I know Martin Kleppmann has looked at Datalog being a potential solution to this problem but until we have a good full-stack solution to collaborative text editing, I don't think we'll see major adoption of these CRDT solutions.
I have something weird with my Edifier speakers. Maybe a ferrite bead can resolve my issues.

I have my setup as follows:

Lenovo P1 --[hdmi]--> Samsung monitor ---[3.5mm]----> Edifier speakers
Desktop computer with Creative Soundcard --> [3.5mm] --> Edifier speakers
--[displayport]---> Samsung monitor

I don't have any noise or scratching when I work on my Lenovo. I don't have any noise or scratching when I work on my desktop without having the connection from Samsung monitor to speakers connected. However, when I have everything connected I get a slight noise and scratching sound which gets more pronounced when I start to load my GPU more, for instance when running a game.

At first I thought this was a ground loop, but the noise isn't constant, and isn't directly coming from my computer or sound card but indirectly via the Samsung monitor when I start to game and my computer draws more power.
The sadder thing is that someone was once enamored by this institution enough to care.

Maybe this is good for the UK taxpayers and parliament to know. I don't think the rest of us - or anyone - should spend any more energy on this. Most publicly funded institution engaged in an affinity grift. News at 11. Stop funding it, the end.
> manufacturing limitations mean you can't easily have those per-pixel while still keeping the whole thing cheap

“can’t easily” seems to imply it is possible. If that’s true, Apple, with its deep pockets, should be able to do it.

Also, I don’t think Apple will be bothered much with “keeping the whole thing cheap”. They will want to prevent it from getting expensive, but likely will accept intermediate costs if the result is much better.
> "aesthetic requirements" in the building code that are not motivated by safety concerns. So far, you haven't pointed out any.

Yes, I have [1]. Communal water, toilets and showers.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35989481
https://archive.is/ksxP5
Disrupting the 2nd law of thermodynamics has proven hard, yes. I for one wouldn’t bet against it.
This discussion is if the United States has an issue with poverty, and the answer is: no it does not.

A tiny fraction of people dying from cold is not an indication that the US has a poverty issue.

Sure help them, no one is disputing that, but that's also not what's being discussed here.
That's not been my experience. I work for a small company and we have less than 100 1Password licenses, but I still have an account rep emailing me to set up a quarterly check-in. They've escalated technical questions to engineers for us and everything.

That's not to disclaim any problems you've had with them. Just saying, they've been solid for us.
Over 100ms most of the time, it worked fine for WFH when I had meetings. Terrible if you want to game.
Will you add the campaign monitor?
I wouldn't say I've played a bad one, but they did get bogged down in a strict formula for a while. Twilight Princess is where I quit for a while.
Fun in the sense that it has great functionality packaged in an absolute insane example of what I'd call an "academic UI".
There's a better way.
Apple notoriously hinders it's own potential so it doesn't cannibalize it's own market share. They have no incentive to turn off the iPhone faucet, so why would they make a product that devours smartphones?
Ampere Gets Out in Front of x86 with 192-Core “Siryn” AmpereOne
I can elaborate with a very precise example. Of course standards are fine and important. But the amount of red tape they require is mind-boggling. I know of a small company who invested about 1 million € to build their software; they then took 18 months and another million € to make it stamped with some standard, to be able to sell their software to some government administration. The second million was spent entirely on legal fees, documentations, etc. They didn't change a line in their software. Nobody checked that the software actually does what it's supposed to do; only that it facially complies with a bunch of bureaucratically defined requirements, that may or may not be of any use or significance for the people using the software in the end.
In theory, yes, and a lot of lower income people do put that into practice and live in my same apartment complex. These people also usually own cars. The nearest grocery store is about a mile away, and the nearly bus stop is about the same distance. I occassionally bike to the store and have a bike trailer for groceries, but I have felt like I'm risking my life when carefully biking a trailer-full of groceries across the six lane 'street'.

Apart from Uber or hitching a ride from a friend, there's no good transportation option to our airport but I get your point. I think in most cases, given the option between a walkable (to work and restaurants) neighborhood and no car (and no good public transit), and suburbia with a car, most people would choose suburbia. Ease of getting groceries, ease of access to recreation, etc. What's really missing is the transit investment.
No true gamer fallacy
At some point they reacted to the "murder simulator" hysteria by pivoting from action games to sims.
That could work, but I’m not sure it will ever happen.

In this comment 'dang explains his thoughts about keeping HN a “non-siloed” site:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27608856

I would imagine that reasoning extends even to paywalled articles.
I agree, this is a distinction without a difference, especially if your aim is to prevent influencing discussion and policies.

An ad targeted at "young democrats" and sending targeted emails to "young democrats" has the same effect (one could argue that the ad would be more effective since it's less easily filtered out)
> “Our chatbot Amy deals with lots of customer queries already,” he added.

> Jansen also said that around 10,000 fewer people would be needed to service and repair digital networks

I believe this is what C. Doctorow would describe as “enshittening” customer support operations.

It doesn’t require AI or any other magic, just a juicy performance-based incentive and a big parachute. The next CEO will focus on “improving the customer experience”.
>The notion that FireWire was an Apple-only thing is little more than a HN cliche.

Nobody on this thread claimed this, so I don't know why you have to make up your own straw man and start a fame war. Famebait is against HN rules.
I dunno. The UK has right-leaning (Daily Mail) and left-leaning (The Guardian) and even publications that seem to dislike the current incarnations of the Tories and Labour (The Economist) which could best be described as “Libertarian”.

It does bug me though that the discussion around the media does frequently revolve around “bias” leading to the ideal advertised by Ground News, that good coverage should reflect both the left and right views as a topic while it seems that right and wrong have nothing to do with the current left and right alliances.
I said, "non-hacker" :D

Thanks, though.

If someone wants to turn this into a cell-phone product with a finished case (importantly not 3d printed with odor- or toxin-emitting plastic), audio, etcetera, I'd buy at least one, as long as it could be added to an MVNO plan.
What people loosely call “passing the Turing Test” isn’t much like Turing’s imitation game, which is much harder, assuming the humans are playing to win.

More: https://skybrian.substack.com/p/done-right-a-turing-test-is-...
I don't think my grad program read my narrative evals. Their process is to basically make a stack of applicants and anybody with a GPA lower than 3.5 or so is rejected without any further inspection. An application without a GPA would also be rejected immediately. Fortunately, my conversion table ("Excellent = 4.0, Very Good = 3.5") made the cutoff!
This. My recently-laid-off partner received an offer from a company in Germany (we're from the US), and they offered a guaranteed contract of at least 2 years salary and a short probation period. That's an easier thing to stomach... You mean you _have_ to employ me for at least 2 years? Okay!
Oh yeah, it's not for the Mario Kart crowd - it's a lot more hardcore than that. But for those of us who liked fast, technical racing games, F-Zero was a dream. Would love it if Nintendo released an F-Zero with an easy mode, and a hard mode.

F-Zero X had that mode that generated new tracks randomly. If only that could be packaged into a modern game.....
Data is ridiculously overpriced in the US. In the UK, I'm currently on a 12GB plan which costs £7.99 month. But you can get completely unlimited data including tethering for £20/month or less from lots of different providers. Never heard of unlimited for less than £15 though (unless its a temporary offer).
At least in the field of computer vision, there seems to be lots of algorithmic progress too. The algorithms improve every 9 months by an amount equivalent to a doubling of compute budget.

https://epochai.org/blog/revisiting-algorithmic-progress
Amazing how after all these years, you can start a flame war in one second by mentioning FPS. Let's all move on.
I noticed this as well in Germany, lots of asian girl profiles that pretend to be from a rich background and that have some sort of investment advisory team working for them and claiming they will give you some tips for forex trading you just need to register on this website and transfer money. or similar stories.

I once made a remark to a profile like that, that I might as well be talking to a hairy fat philipino. I got a barrage of Japanese text back, that when put into an online translator roughly translated to something like: "I am a proud japanese you idiot European, your farts smell like shit, go fuck yourself". So it seems I got under someone's skin there. Since then I'm wondering where this operation is based. the profiles are so similar in style that it must be organized somehow. I wonder how and where.
Personally I thought that Spirit Tracks was much worse than Phantom Hourglass. The whole train mechanic and being restricted on how you could move in the overworld really wasn't fun. Between that and the re-implementation of the recurring temple so that you could only temporarily disable the guards, the whole game felt like a semi-stealth mission where you either timed the enemy movement right to slip past them or died instantly.
I'm not sure what your point is other than complaining.

It is impressive to make a great game with broad appeal. It isn't easy or trivial to do and companies that get it right should be recognized with good reputation and customers. I haven't heard other Studios whine and cry, but if they do it's not my problem so I don't care or mind if they do.

Nobody is forced to buy bad games, so I don't really understand the complaint there.
UK vs USA. You’re not wrong at all though. It’s also very interesting the lack of salary transparency that exists in the Uk. If you don’t poke your head around London, you can be blissfully unaware of the salaries that are available in Finance and broader tech scene in London. Given that many great UK universities exist outside of London, there will be PHDs who are unaware or don’t care about what they could be earning.
Wow! You just reminded me that our Roku stick is still plugged in after 3-6 months of being forgotten.

I wonder how many TB of "family isn't watching television; advertise funeral homes to relatives and travel insurance packages to primary user" it has sent home in that time.

I'd be interesting to know what percentage of internet routers are plugged in and forgotten on a disused internet connection at any given time. I'd guess ~ 1%, and that the percentage will increase as wireless broadband gets more popular.
It's not actually the essence of the problem, it's just one of many complications...
It could also be a client issue; I configured my access point to choose the best channel for 5GHz and sometimes when it picks a DFS channel, some devices just can't connect.
Canada's internet companies are basically crown corporations. Squashing competition doesn't help the consumer as much as you might imagine.
> Yup, do this. "Young people who can't afford anything else" in New York are a population comparable with that of Atlanta [1].

You can't just link to the age distribution and cite the number of "20-24 year olds in NYC" as evidence that there are half a million people in NYC who can't afford to live in anything other than an SRO.
In the case of Virgin Media, they said each year it will increase by RPI plus 3.9%. It's ridiculous and I'm not sure what they're trying to accomplish, cynically in thinking they're anticipating a vicious cycle of rising prices, people cancelling, so upping prices on whoever is left.
The good BLAS libraries are MKL and BLIS nowadays, I’m pretty sure.

BLIS is C and assembly if I remember correctly.

MKL is a big library, Wikipedia lists the languages used as C, C++, Fortran, and I think it is also pretty well known that they’ve sprinkled some magic assembly in there.
‘In London there is no space at all’: the rise of self-storage as rents soar
A lot of people get student loans. A lot of people never end up making enough to even begin repaying their student loans if they've taken a degree that's not in demand, or they never end up paying it back before it is just eventually written off. The student loans aren't like a normal loan. Yes, it may be to the sum of what you could put towards a downpayment on a house, but it isn't the same as that's something someone would have to repay, regardless of how much they were making.

As a lot of people can access further education, they take the opportunity even if it isn't necessary for employment. Most students work whilst studying, even with a student loan, because the loan almost certainly doesn't cover their rent, food, transport and textbooks for example. Most young people you see working in hospitality are probably in university studying.

What's the alternative to make ends meet for students? OnlyFans?
I don't think you need AI for this, VSCode and lots of other applications already have a "functionality search bar" built right into the program. (Often euphemized as a command palette).

I myself don't use them much but I can see where they are useful to the "new users" the article speaks of, to discover and unlock features as the user gets more comfortable with the program.
Ah, I have a story about the opposite of this.

One company I worked for was merged with a bigger one, which ended up dictating the IT policy and they didn't liked supporting Linux. Unfortunately, our best devs were on Ubuntu. This was followed by six months of pure agony. Previously simple tasks were now complicated or impossible. Productivity went down, and at least one project was killed.
Commondore with battery and migraine triggers.
YouTube, Netflix, music streaming, most video conferencing, and general web browsing all work fine on a 1.5Mb/s link in my experience. It's certainly not fast, but it's fast enough to do the basics.
I see a juggler handling five balls.
I succeed at three balls.
I fail at four balls.
Have I proven that it's impossible to juggle five balls at once?
Anecdotal, but back when I was playing with spark gaps, my housemate's USB game controller would disconnect from the host every time I shot a spark. It would refuse to reconnect until they unplugged and replugged the cable back in. They switched to a better cable (with a bead), and it stopped happening.
This is a very fair challenge. My understanding was that the main ones in use were fortran and it is very interesting to see that may not be the case. Love to see any benchmark or other comparisons on the options, if you know of any good links.
Ask HN: Does Android not allow LAN-only WiFi?
I was trying to troubleshoot the Asus router issue yesterday, and at one point had to use my phone because my laptop wasn't available.

Surprisingly, even if I disabled mobile data on my phone, the system automatically disabled the WiFi access point when it detected that it didn't have internet access.

As as result, I couldn't even go to any a LAN IPs or services, and couldn't access my router interface.

Is this a thing now, are there any workarounds?
It would be nice if the Democrats would tear this down, but they seem happy having the opportunity to spy domestically now that it's in place.
Nintendo is rarely a slouch in this area either, Splatoon is firmly "classic" now and I suspect we'll see sequels to both Ring Fit Adventure and Arms on the next console.
And I didn't mention the problem of people who can't afford to take precautions, which is why this is a collective action problem.

And sure, SARS-CoV-2 did end up in animal reservoirs, but nipped early enough in the bud this either wouldn't have happened, or would have been controllable (with respect to animal-to-human transmission).
1) Need of society
2) Necessity for survival
3) Individual determination
4) State priorities

I think one can trace back most of the inventions in human history, to be an outcome of a scenario where more than one reason above is true.

So going by this, even if we had a determined individual in the Alan Turing institute, but none of the remaining three scenarios were true, his chances of success are slim in comparison to his counterparts at other places like Canada or the US.

Look at china and you can easily find an environment where a determined individual under state priorities gets funding abd support for critical technologies.

Probably now the state priorities will change and in future you can expect some new breakthroughs happenning in the institute as well.
One more tool to accomplish this is lmt [0] which, despite minimal documentation, is quite pleasing to use.

[0] https://github.com/driusan/lmt
I can see this in progress. Needs windows, but we also need more residential, so happy to see it.

https://nypost.com/2023/04/24/longtime-nyc-home-of-the-daily...
China Puts Spymaster in Charge of U.S. Corporate Crackdown
This isn’t free?! Feels like 1Password is the main beneficiary in this relationship.

Consider: 1pass owns the auth, and who knows how they’ll wield that power (need to deliver a return on their massive $920m VC round!), the burden to educate users about “passkeys” is on web developers, not 1pass, and guess who gets stuck providing customer support when a passkey doesn’t work?

I’m a 1Password user and constantly run into edge-case bugs (for example there’s a UI flow that suggests a new password to use during google’s password reset, then doesn’t save the password - really!).

I get that they don’t have the full support of OS developers, so there will be edge cases. But these problems keep e.g. my parents from sticking with password managers. It’s just easier for them to keep a password journal. At least they don’t reuse passwords in the event of a leak.