skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I've been a casual birder for a couple years now. I've been hearing about the Merlin app for a while, but never installed it until this past week. It has profoundly changed my experience of looking for birds.

If you're unfamiliar with the app, you can start recording on your phone and it will tell you in real time which birds are singing nearby. I haven't used it for positive identifications, just for knowing which birds are nearby. I've had numerous experiences already where a species I had no idea about was nearby, then a few minutes of looking confirmed the species it had identified. If you're a birder and you haven't tried Merlin, I highly encourage you to give it a try. It has also opened my eyes to a few species that spend almost all their time in the canopy and in heavy brush, which are really hard to spot unless you know they're around, and make time to look for them in those areas.

Using the Merlin app has also led to interesting conversations with people about how ML models work. People assume there's a bank of recordings that the app is constantly comparing your live recording against, which I don't believe is the case. The "bird packs" you have to download do contain a bunch of sound files, but those are available so you can play songs for birds you're interested in. I don't believe the identification algorithm is actively using those recordings.

https://merlin.allaboutbirds.org
Watch any youtube channel where people post such videos. Many times poster is actually an offender...
> Apple is very good at marketing, but they did not invent the concept of PDA (that's how these devices were called back then) with the iPhone - they just came up with a yet another PDA which was decent, and were very good at marketing.

The term Personal Digital Assistant was coined by John Sculley while CEO of Apple when describing the Newton MessagePad, so akshually they did invent the concept.

Yes there were Windows CE devices that predate iPhone. I had a few, including the hx4700. They universally sucked.

I know downplaying Apple’s role in computing history is the cool thing to do on the orange site, but get real. The mobile world completely changed when Apple announced iPhone. We know that Google pivoted on the acquired Android OS. Would they have done so as quickly had the iPhone never happened? Given their track record, probably not.
Culverts, aqueducts, etc, yes. It all has to be maintained. Even when it's designed well (and the current design is minimal); all those measures have to be kept clear of obstructions. In this case they were not, and very likely still are not.
I really hope you never have to experience it, because it is a very nasty rug pull. No, it's not a silly fantasy, it's a deadly reality. As long as you produce value, you can enjoy momentary security. But take away anyone piece of your capacity to produce money: maybe your hands to type, or your brain to think- and all that security rapidly comes undone. Maybe you're lucky enough to have a rich family to fall back on or you live in a country with a generous welfare. But barring that, you absolutely will find yourself out on the street given the right circumstances.
At this point it wouldn't surprise me if it turns out humans don't have a consistent model of the world and our knowledge; if the part of me which sees a ball incoming and moves to catch it is a separate mental model of physics to the part which predicts where I want a ball to go and moves to throw it, and if they are separate again to the part which uses language to explain the ball catch/throw, and separate again to the part which could once upon a time do basic math modelling of a ball following a parabola. Not one consistent worldview but several brain areas having differing "physical models" for different uses, piled up higgledy piggledy into one basically workable creature; isn't that how biology does lots of things? Retina with optic nerve coming out of the front instead of the back, frontal lobes layered on much older brain parts, nerves going from brain to neck via a loop around the hearts, etc. etc.

We talk as if humans build a single coherent model of the world and LLMs don't, but humans can have conflicting and overlapping beliefs; would it be so strange if we are actually lots of individual memorised patterns layered and overlapped and bodged into a somewhat coherent worldview? If LLMs are closer to the way humans think than we want to admit? We're fine with apples falling from trees, but even uneducated people deal with birds, aircraft, clouds, smoke, and the Moon not falling down, they don't go into an "incoherent physical model panic state" until they've learned about buoyancy or air pressure or orbits.

And we don't default to our spoken and written languages having simple rules as you might expect if we were pushing internally for simple single models; instead we're fine with exceptions, strange plurals, strong verbs, odd pronounciations, we just learn them. They're only annoying when learning a foreign language and seeing it as a chore, natively we try to extract some pattern and layer on exceptions all over the place.
It's no different than trying to unearth the identity of a random twitter or HN user. It's not about regarding them as a standalone entity; it's about not upheaving the psuedonymity that can be granting them their free expression.
Essentially do you mean it’s
More efficient to ask to be a teacher?

any specifics on these high productivity thinking skills?
"GIGO at GBps" as someone put it.

LLMs remix and sling BS in infinite ways to create more of the same.

We are entering a golden-age of Bull
Don't sweat about it. You either completely identify with a server or you go with .social or .cloud

In the first Mastodon wave I thought about setting my own server with my domain and it sounded awesome, but of course, I never did. In this second one, I just went the mainstream way and was done.
I like it. The Twitter algorithm loads up my TL with viral posts. Posts from users I actually follow just get lost in the churn.

I don’t care for viral posts. I want the things I read to be informative. It doesn’t need to drive clicks or make a lot of revenue from me.
If the salary range is a percentage of the compensation then of course the ranges are the widest for the highest paying jobs.
The US destroyed it's chemical weapons stockpile in the 1990's and 2000's. After the fall of the Soviet Union, there's no use case for chemical weapons and precision weapons are more profitable.
are they getting better every month? a company like Waymo may have good data on this. Tesla updates seem to be doing more like a random walk.
people hate the word 'privilege' but privilege is literally what social status buys and what people spend their life chasing
The long lineage of private equity's looting
I think that part of this can be explained by the behavior of likes. If I like on Mastodon, I know that's not contributing to the algorithm and showing up in my friend's feed with my name on it.

On Mastodon, if I enjoyed something I can share that with the author without all sorts of side effects. That leads to higher visible engagement on Mastodon. I believe this is why Twitter had to share the viewer stats--people have stopped liking as frequently.

I really think that sharing activity without an explicit user-driven action is poisonous to the platforms that do it.
https://archive.is/Z8ilN
That's a great way to read it to get the most useful value.

I find using ChatGPT to be similar in that if you add/fix the bits it's missing or gets wrong it can be a good time-saver and useful.
Go-critic: the most opinionated Golang source code linter
One aspect of real estate investing is the utility of being able to control local property values.

Investors looking to build generational wealth, with deep pockets, are able to drive down property values of seemingly entire cities, buy up land at a low cost, then change policies and turn low value land back into high value land.

There are many ways to do this sort of real estate market manipulation, most of which rely on controlling levers of power in various levels of government.

Do you think that behavior is, or should be, considered by us as plausible, probable, real, illegal, irrational, or immoral? Do you think that it's conspiracy theory?

Personally, I look at real estate market manipulation as standard fare. Of course it happens everywhere. Politicians love to direct public funding towards public works and infrastructure in areas owned by them and their friends (and voter bases). They do this legally. When too obvious and well documented, politicians using public institutions for self enrichment might be unpopular among voters (unless these same voters also benefit). I'm not angry about this, I think the system works extremely well.

But, I protest against vulnerable people being weaponized for real estate investors' needs. It has happened to a greater or lesser extent. The extent to which that has occurred is extremely difficult to pin down or prove.

This is what conspiracy theory does. Without too much worry about proof, take irrational behavior and patterns and construct a framework to try to explain. Does it make sense?
The US paid $15M for terminals and services, and paid 3x the cost of what SpaceX sells them for to general consumers. Musk and SpaceX claimed otherwise but the USAID replied with receipts.

https://mashable.com/article/elon-musk-spacex-ukraine-starli...

https://www.theverge.com/2022/4/8/23016670/starlink-spacex-u...

Any "free" service was always to demo the usefulness of the product to the DoD for them eventually to pay through the nose. Musk got flak for his comments because a) it was a half-truth b) he made it very publicly, c) he started promoting Russian government accounts on For You pages, and d) he started echoing Russian sentiments and/or falsehoods about the war.

If he had not done any of that he would have still gotten the money and not looked like a fool. No one expected Starlink to lose money on the deal, and they haven't.
Yep-and the fact that it can be inherited is both obvious and troubling to many.
I've been using it for a month or so now and have really enjoyed it. It's got to the point now that I have renamed my mobile phone to "bird recognition device" and am actually taking it with me when I walk.
Software Glitch: The Cost of False Cancer Alarms
I think it’s more akin to virtual because the vast majority are passive consumers or their reality. Reality is created by political propagandists, social media entrepreneurs, and soon AI.

Consensus seems to imply that it’s a grassroots thing.
Bill Gates says "AI could kill Google and Amazon"
Examples or even anecdotes. There aren’t allegations in the article of any sort of union busting, other than someone is suing without details of what the person is alleging.
(2016) with broken links
This, along with the insect and amphibian apocalypses, require MUCH more attention.

While it gets less attention than climate change, and is intertwined with it (rapid habitat change, destruction, etc.), the real threat here is a collapse of the food web, which has far greater and faster consequences than climate change. Our species is entirely dependent on the planet's food web, and without it, our population drops to single-digit percentages really fast...
In the short time I've used Mastodon I've had more interactions than I did in years on Twitter, even as someone with no blog presence or anything of the sort. That along with the chronological feed that shows only people I'm following have made it a rather pleasant experience.
> In the US we are almost to the point where liberals and conservatives cannot even have a discussion because they have no shared context.

I don't think that's because of tech.

I'm still optimistic about tech and the internet; I think the split society that we seem to have arrived at has other causes.

The internet and cheap computers made it possible for kids to invent cool stuff in their bedrooms, without having to invest in expensive manufacturing machinery or employing people. That's still possible; CPUs, memory and storage are cheaper and more faster than ever, and 3D printers have democratized the prototyping of physical objects.

I think the problem that hit tech was big money. Nowadays, if you invent something cool, one of two things will happen: either you'll get a cash offer so generous you can retire at 25, or you'll get hit with a meritless lawsuit that it's pointless to defend, because your adversary is backed by megabucks, and can litigate until you're bankrupt.
> It is a average of ~80,000,000 miles, or ~5,000 years of regular driving between fatalitys

That's actually not a very big number. 5000 years of regular driving is about the lifetime driving for 100-150 people. Which means one of them will have a fatal accident within their lifetime.
"1.4% of all cancers"

This actually seems large to me.

Although that is suspiciously large. Looking at the numbers I think it should be much lower. A 51% reduction doesn't mean it helps 51% if the people. In this case it looks like about 10% of the people are effected given the 88% vs 78% survival rates, right? Maybe something like .28% of all cancer?
Should have could have whatever. I completely understand any reasonable apprehension or general delay when on one side of the table you have Elon Musk who shows such little reverence for the integrity of the union (i.e. pissing his half assed thoughts in all our mouths about work and devotion) and on the other side you have the most powerful military force or bag of money. It probably took a while for trust to be established. I’m glad it’s happening. No notes. Go Ukraine.
Because it is* much farther away from Earth and closer to the sun at that point.
When it comes to oil wells, Pennsylvania has a law for that: The Oil and Gas Act of 1984. A lot of wells are still just abandoned¹ by companies (in the usual ways companies shirk responsibility).

¹ https://stateimpact.npr.org/pennsylvania/2021/10/18/orphaned...
I think it's been trained on enough data that if it had reasoning skills, one should expect it to know humans need oxygen and cyanide is bad.

However, I don't think these models really have reasoning skills as a human would understand them.

It has a lot of safeguards coded around it, so it has strong opinions on politically sensitive topics, "both sides" a ton of topics, and is happily lead around its own programming with simple A->B->C prompt sequences.

I mean how many prompts lead to 5 paragraph solutions ending in
"Ultimately, whether __ or not depends on how you define __ and the context in which the question is being asked. It can be a matter of personal interpretation and perspective."

So many prompts result in inanely stupid "idiot savant" type answers if they weren't hardcoded already. (Pound of feathers vs pound of bricks is hardcoded obviously), but these all got dumb responses -

"what has more caffeine a pound of grinds or a pound of beans"

"what has more caffeine a single shot of espresso or a latte with one shot"

"is water wet" then "is rain wet" and finally "is water or rain wetter"
On twitter i use only the “following” tab, not the “for you” one, and other than promoted posts, I only get things my direct followees posted or retweeted. Then again my list is very heavily curated - I follow fewer than 50 people and ruthlessly block accounts I find objectionable or just annoying.
"Dimmi con chi vai e ti dirò chi sei" in Italy.

(On the same subject we also have "chi va con lo zoppo impara a zoppicare", which is probably not pc-enough to safely translate these days.)
If they block them, will they restart generating blocks from point of time when there was none on the chain?
My two favorites, and I think they're a complementary pair, both published recently (2021)...

* The Status Game: On Human Life and How to Play It by (the best-selling author) Will Storr

* Status Games: Why We Play and How to Stop by Loretta Graziano Breuning
You can also describe something outside of A & B and it will be taken into account.

Pretty repetitive thougt
What is AI training but “parsing content” for “delivering generalized insights”? They intentionally use slippery language that can defend their practices.
I like Mastodon, but I feel it hosts just one of my bubbles (dev).

I miss the scientists, journalists, comedians and even, though it pains me even to type this, the politicians.
Why go through all this trouble vs just using a normal domain name on a gTLD? (Or your own country's ccTLD if widely used?) I've owned domains on .com, .net, and .org starting over two decades ago, and then more recently on new gTLDs like .dev, and never had a single problem. I don't see the appeal of hijacking poorly run ccTLDs for other purposes.
Tesla says “ we count any crash in which Autopilot was deactivated within 5 seconds before impact, and we count all crashes in which the incident alert indicated an airbag or other active restraint deployed” https://www.tesla.com/VehicleSafetyReport

But even without that, there are no allegations of such FSD beta related fatal or incapacitating incidents, who would say it even if the beta put the human in harm’s way 10, 15 seconds earlier. The black box in the car includes both the dash cam camera and whether auto steer is activated, so any fatal crash would still leave such evidence of Beta being active.
Any rumours of a 5?
I think that’s up to you. My Mastodon is all lawyers, comedians, and journalists. I specifically don’t follow tech people.
Signaling Error Causes Mass Casualties in India- 275+ Confirmed Dead
I considered my hp100 and then hp200lx far superior devices!!
Aviation is even more doggedly clinging. You can still buy brand new airplanes with carburetors. The industry is being dragged kicking and screaming into the FI era, and we're also starting to see electronic ignition and even FADEC systems emerging, mostly in the Experimental category.
Prior to this machine existing, was ballast just not cleaned and there were more frequent derailments?
Yeaahhh ... the secure enclave seems to have pooched the idea of a USB stick booter. Restore Mode works fine.

I used to use CCC (Carbon Copy Cloner) to make a mirror, but it doesn't like to boot from the mirror (it does, but I can't use any of the secure stuff). Also CCC destabilizes my system. If I have it running all the time, I crash -a lot-. Since I yanked it, I haven't had a hard system crash in months.

These days, I just make sure the Time Machine backups keep going, and I'll use CCC on a one-shot basis to make occasional disk clones (makes for a much faster restore).
I'm shocked that there are only about 10k species of birds. I had expected there to be more, for some reason.
> The information we learn only comes from aggregated data

It seems pretty clear to me that this means they're allowed to use private repos to train copilot, etc.

I wonder if any researchers have tried putting fingerprinted source code into a private repo, and then (after it is retrained) getting copilot to suggest stuff that could only have come from the injected supposedly-private source code.

That would make a nice paper. I hope someone does it.
Show HN: Ukoreh – A tool to deploy any Flutter project as a web app
Hi HN

For GitHub + Dev.to 2023 Hackathon we made Ukoreh, a tool to assist Flutter developers in testing open source projects without having to clone the repo and build the app locally.

It works because most Flutter projects are compatible as web apps. The process of getting it live is really simple:

- Developer copies the project url and pastes in the tool
- The tool then sends the url to a Cloudflare Worker, which itself uses GitHub API to trigger a GitHub Action workflow
- The workflow builds the project and publishes the web app in GitHub Pages.

The best thing? Everything is free, because GitHub doesn’t count usage of actions for public repositories.
You increase productivity by working with others. You yourself cannot increase productivity by large margin. So peers, the internet, forums, places like this, teachers -- the more you can interact on useful matters, the more productive you will become in general.

Thinking skills: You can develop high productivity thinking skills only when you can recognise someone with higher capability (not necessarily a living person; biographies, for example, can supply inspiration). The first step is observation and acceptance. Deep within you must accept - this person can do something better than me. That is the source of motivation -- "I too want to be more skilled at this, like this person". Then you can learn to think more like them, if you're sincere, consistent and determined. A good place to start "thinking about thinking" is Marvin Minsky's book "The society of mind" [1]

[1]: http://aurellem.org/society-of-mind/
Digging into the study now. It was very small: the subjects were 16 office workers. They analyzed between-subjects rather than within-subjects, which seems a little suspicious given that within-subjects is more interesting and given Wansink’s history of p hacking. Finally, the results comparing visible vs non-visible food (the part alluded to in the HBR article when it says “seeing is eating”) had a p-value of 0.03, so they barely reached significance. My gut says this study is not likely to replicate.
Ukraine was not paying for the service, that was the entire point of the worry that SpaceX might pull out. They obviously have no reason to complain if they're getting paid.

It was mostly donations. There were some third party sourced terminals which were being paid for, like the ~1300 provided by the UK of ~20k total that were in operation, (over which CNN started the blackmailing lie) but the service has thus far been mostly paid for by SpaceX itself.
Some Thoughts on Writing (2022)
In an anthropological framework, social capital can be built up and exchanged for other forms of capital (including economic capital). There are even brokers who have the role of facilitating these transactions[0].

[0] https://bertrandlaurent.substack.com/p/monday-converting-soc...
> She said a detailed investigation will reveal whether the error was human or technical.

It’s both technical and human regardless. The system should have had fail safes before and even if this was immediately a human error there should have been further fail safes to prevent that.

Now, a simple train failed and killed near 300 people. What do you think is going to be the result of all of these self driving cars that have to account for infinite different logical conditions?
Something to consider is that any services the Ukraine is funding comes in part or full by using other countries money, not only their own

https://apnews.com/article/fact-check-us-aid-ukraine-money-e...

I add that only for context though, not to address your main point which other commenters have done.
> SpaceX was mostly just saving face publicly about not directly working with the military and only doing it for civilian purposes. Which makes a lot of sense from a business perspective as they are a global business operating in plenty of countries. Once the DOD rolls up and offers a bunch of money those dynamics can change.

Wasn't the actual issue was that they can't allow their tech to be used with weapons. Ukraine was using it to use drones with explosives attached. Allowing that would have made Starlink something controlled under the weapons export laws. Therefore, they can't allow it. Or was that another of the many things with Starlink and Ukraine?