skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> None of the current SaaS apps I use can come close to the experience of using softwares from that era.

I'm afraid you're looking at the past with rose-tinted glasses. In general software back then sucked hard. User experience did not existed at all. Developers bundled stuff around, and users were expected to learn how to use software. Books were sold to guide desperate users through simple user flows. Forms forms forms forms everywhere, and they all sucked, no exception. Forget about localization or internationalization. Forget about accessibility. Developers tweaked fonts to be smaller to shove more controls into the same screen real estate, and you either picked up a magnifying glass to read what they said or you just risked it and clicked on it anyway.

Software back then sucked, and sucked hard. Atrocities like Gimp were sold as usability champions. That's how bad things were.
Seems obvious how that makes it worse.
> “I can be sorry for these people, but at the same time when we look back, when the Second World War started, all the Japanese population living in the United States were under a strict monitoring regime as well,” said the Czech president. “That’s simply a cost of war.”

And I thought people were ashamed pf this… well it seems like not enough.
No AppDomains are not as good as processes, I have tried to go that route before, you cannot stop unruly code reliably in an app domain (you must use thread.abort() which is not good) and memory can still leak in any native code used there.

The only reliable way to stop bad code like say an infinite loop is to run in another process even in .Net.

They also removed Appdomain in later versions of .Net because they had little benefit and weak protections compared to a a full process.
Big tech internal incentives really exacerbates this. The entire performance system incentivizes engineers to create imaginary problems and solve them. Honestly, I think a good chunk of engineering activity are along these lines. Literally just imaginary problems being created which compound into more imaginary problems, all which are used by engineers to justify their existence.
I really don't want to join another Discord server.

Double for Slack and Microsoft Teams (even if they are arguably slightly better than Discord at managing multiple identities across instances.)
Show HN: Debian-based home router
I don't think casting aspersions on people and calling their reputations into question is a small thing at all. The argument on this thread isn't about semantics: it's about demonstrably false inflammatory things you said in your post.
My advice to you is that if that's your view, don't take advanced drugs, but get out of my way if I want or need to, and get out of the way of others. You can pursue your path and I will pursue mine.
Did you just assume no hallucinations?
It seems rather obvious to me that when Nielsen is talking about AI enabling users to express intent, that naturally lends itself to being able to remove steps that were there only due to the nature of the old UI paradigm. Not sure what new essence you’re proposing? Best UI is no UI is a well known truism in HCI/Human Centered Design.
Yes but you can interface with Linux kernel without being required to use GPL license.
Big government should not decide how public universities spend their money.
Good luck, op.
I hope he can find some happiness. What he and the team have accomplished is crazy. Its also crazy to think that no job opportunities have come out of it. Wishing him the best!
IKEA furniture is so cheap that we'd have to actually charge more to dispose of it than its new price, for that to work. I'm not opposed to that in principle.

The real problem is, the people most likely to dispose of IKEA furniture are young millenial apartment dwellers who move every 2-4 years. Apartment buildings don't usually have a way to measure each resident's trash, so they usually just split the entire building's trash bill evenly among all the residents (the lease contracts actually specify that it will be done this way). In that scenario, if there are 100 people in the building, everyone including you just pays an incremental £0.50 instead of £50 for your trashed furniture. The result is lots of people trashing furniture.

The people living in houses don't move often, don't change furniture often, and usually tend to invest in higher quality furniture than IKEA.
Frank Wilhoit: “Conservatism consists of exactly one proposition …There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect.”
This isn't the government telling a private institution what it can and can't do. This is the government deciding that it, the government, is no longer going to do something that it used to do. I struggle to see how you can label that "big government". (You can perhaps label it unwise, bigoted, a bunch of other things, but not big government.)
They do, you just gotta be a bit more creative, which will also save you money.

Pro-tip for desks: don't buy them in the office section, buy desk legs from there, but the desk top itself from the kitchen section. Solid wood, no frills, cheaper pricing, and you can get some esoteric configs you cannot get from the office section. The choice of materials and shapes is much larger too. Hell, I imagine you can even get some marble-like top workdesk this way (though you might want to consider rethinking the desk legs and get something sturdier, marble is quite heavy).

Around 2017, I wanted a long desk that could accomodate a workstation + area for printer/working on models/3D printing out of solid materials without breaking a bank. Going the approach I described above, I ended up spending under $200 total (and that's including tax) for a solid wood butcher's table quality workdesk that was long enough to accomodate 2 multi-monitor workstations very very comfortably (or 3 workstations, just a little bit less comfortably). Needed 6 desk legs for this one, but I eventually replaced the middle ones with a cheap Kallax storage piece (from IKEA as well).
What problem are you alluding to?

These offices are unnecessary. There is nothing “progressive” about making making decisions about admissions or hiring based upon irrelevant things like race, gender, or sexual identity.
There are mass shootings almost every day, and they do not seem to be limited to 'an inner city crime problem'. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_mass_shootings_in_the_...
I'm sincerely happy for their success, and it an important feature of the US that some sharp, driven people are able to create a substantial fortune for themselves.

In some ways this is in direct conflict with working-class people being able to assemble a stable life where they can depend on being able to work diligently and have some stability in life. I think the total wealth of society could be greater if we adjusted some laws and the tax code to make it more possible for working class people to have a real shot at a stable life through diligent, hard, work.
The usability of a system is mostly irrelevant. The measure of a good UI is how much money it can get the user to spend, not how intuitively it enables the user to achieve a task.
> Oh, also, functions cannot be recursive (without passing in a function to itself), because we won't have the function bound to a name in the local context when defining itself. Fun, right?

The startup accelerator that runs this forum is named after a pretty neat thing you can do with a language that only has anonymous functions:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fixed-point_combinator
Thank you for your feedback. There are many people that have a different opinion. WE can start with the 500k fsbos in 2022. But there are other folks like the college investor[1] that has done some research and wrote about it on a blog. You may be right. To the best of our knowledge no one has built a product like PropBox to tackle it. Lots of startups fail for a variety of reasons and we are aware that it is way to early to know if we will be a victor or a victim. Only time will tell.[1]https://thecollegeinvestor.com/9084/real-estate-agents-anymo...
And then JJ Abrams put Enterprise underwater, ostensibly to hide it from a stone age civilization.

Such a hack. Ruined both of the biggest and beloved scifi franchisee. smh
> It has a very obvious "autotune"

To me it has a very obvious "Hindi is my native language" accent. I mean after literally the first sentence: "The research team at Meta is excited to share our work...". Ouch. The "our work": just ouch. I was wondering why it wasn't a native english speaker presenting the video when the video is precisely about generating speech.

The first seven seconds are particularly bad.

Don't get me wrong: I've got a lovely french accent when I speak english.

This has either been trained on too many audiobooks spoken by non-natives or they've used their own tech, where the "reference audio" given as input was from a non-native.

In any case something is seriously off.

At 1:59, the "Hi guys, thanks you for tuning in! Today we are going to show you..."... That is obviously an Hindi speaker speaking (it's an example of fixing a real voice by removing background sounds).

I think that the main voice of the video was done by the same person who did the example at 1:59. And I think that they used their example of using a "reference audio".

And that person ain't a native english speaker.

To compare: when the reference audio uses a proper english accent (the example with the "diverse ecosystem" at 0:52), then the output from the text-to-speech sounds native.

I think they just fucked the demo video and it may already be ready for prime time.
I am not defending Bush (a Yale grad, but that's beside the point) and the like. Unabomber was a psychopath who purposefully murdered people.

"he did less damage" - "then a lobbyist or McKinsey" is a wild statement. He was a purposeful murderer. Trying to lump McKinsey consultants and politicians (horrible people, most of them, I am sure) with a serial killer is normalizing murder. Murder is a line that, I imagine, is drawn in concrete for any person who expects to be welcome in the modern society.

I will take my chances in being the subject to damage done by any randomly picked lobbyist vs Unabomber. Won't you?

What is going on with HN if this is the kind of discourse that's getting upvoted and approved.
An Outline of Intellectual Rubbish, Bertrand Russell (1943)
<unpopular-opinion>

Bardini's book about Doug Engelbart recaps a conversation between Engelbart and Minsky about the nature of natural language interfaces... that took place in the 1960s.

AI interfaces taking so long has less to do with the technology (I mean... Zork understood my text sentences well enough to get me around a simulated world) and more to do with what people are comfortable with.

Lowey talked about MAYA (Most Advanced Yet Acceptable.) I think it's taken this long for people to be okay with the inherent slowness of AI interfaces. We needed a generation or two of users who traded representational efficiency for easy to learn abstractions. And now we can do it again. You can code up a demo app using various LLMs, but it takes HOURS of back and forth to get to the point it takes me (with experience and boilerplate) minutes to get to. But you don't need to invest in developing the experience.

And I encourage every product manager to build a few apps with AI tools so you'll more easily see what you're paying me for.

</unpopular-opinion>
I agree. Think if the website picks up more traffic I'll add that
You know what a database is, do you? It is the place where you store your mutable global state. You can't kick the can down the road forever, someone has to tackle the complexity of managing state.
Public universities. Who else is going to decide how they spend their money? They're part of the government.
Trumps bankruptcy were legal maneuvers and his bankrupt casino was likely money laundering gone well.
Technically he got it published buy promising to stop bombing. He drew attention to it by stopping terrorism.

Not trying to excuse anything. Just sayin'.
Even a lot of those who identify as white speak Spanish most of the time.
I think there's a clear difference in how people relate to the on-line communities, but I struggle to find words to name or even describe it.

Maybe it's partly ADHD thing. I specifically don't engage with any chat-based communities, because from experience I know that

- I only have mental space for ~1-2 such communities at a time,

- If I engage with one immediately, it'll capture most of my attention, to the detriment of everything else I'm doing or caring about, and

- It stopped being sustainable around the time I started working full-time in the earnest.

I have enough trouble staying off HN, and that's a relatively slow-moving discussion board. A Discord equivalent? I just know I won't stick around, I couldn't possibly maintain active commitment to it for more than few days. As for more transactional cases - like, e.g. (real case) official Clojure community Slack, which I joined once to ask about some underdocumented aspect of a library I've been dealing with at work? It's something that I'll do only as a last resort - i.e. if Google, Kagi, Reddit search and Algolia fail me, re-reading the docs and the sources yield no insight, and the problem still remains something I need to solve - only then I'll bother with Slack/Discord, as the entire endeavor feels increasingly costly. It takes time to join and find one's bearing, and then asking the question several times until I do it in the right timezone so the right person sees it, ... I'm feeling exhausted just from thinking about it.

And, FWIW, I also don't lurk in communities, in the sense of regularly reading it while not participating. Rather, I pop in, look for specific thing I need, and close the tab after I found it. I love when this process is seamless and doesn't require any commitment, or bothering other people. Also, when in the process I read something interesting/useful, I love it when I can go back to that same place a week or month later, and still find that thing I read. Something that's nigh-impossible with no indexing or broken search.
Moderna mRNA-4359: https://clinicaltrials.gov/ct2/show/NCT05533697.

BioNTech has a similar treatment that's also been apparently slow to launch Phase III trials.
Even without the problem of reddit restoring deleted posts and comments, a user upthread noted that this is insufficient for another reason: it can't delete comments in subreddits that are currently private.
I know the public universities in Texas will lie and say they followed Abbott's order, while still doing what they have done for decades.
Go to Fastmail and don't look back.
> If side-loading appears I expect a race to the bottom as apps attempt to move people out of the App store and into a progressive web of predatory dark patterns that eventually kills all trust in the platform.

Surely Android is an absolute cesspit at this point then.

I think you over estimate how many people actually utilize side-loading. To your other points, an overwhelming majority will never turn on side-loading if it's added. They will continue to use Apple's walled garden app market. The barriers to even install a side-loaded app will cause most to give up in frustration.
Last I checked, training for slippery conditions was part of the mandatory driver education for getting a license in Finland, so "new driver" is a relatively poor excuse for that over there.

(The annual rear-ending fest seems to mostly cater to the "I've driven this route to work for years" audience.)
Digital currency can be a powerful tool in the fight against corruption. But the people in power in Kazakhstan are probably not that interested in using it.
That's what it sounds like to me as well. Either that or it sounds like really shady accounting.

My assumption is that I'm not understanding something important about it, but I can't figure out what that is from the explanations in these comments.
Maybe this is also why they underline in the preamble that it is suitable for running over Tor.
Cloudflare could build a product that not only caches, but transfers S3 to R2 on usage.

- Since non transactional data is likely to be on GitHub or somewhere, it should be easy to re-hydrate that on R2.

- Once enough time passes, there could be a sunset on unused data, or a strategy planned to 1-time exit write-off for S3 with those assets not on R2.

Standard migration procedure.
Dad asks me for a lot of money to help him buy a time share, I’ll feel ok saying no.

Dad asks me for a lot of money for a snake oil cure that might prevent him from dying from bile duct cancer in a month or two…how am I going to say no to that?
Meh. All secure systems are alike, each insecure system is insecure in its own way. Like, yes, there are absolutely systems whose code is weak enough that I trust them less than the US authorities (I wouldn't say the FISA courts - isn't that the court that's declined like 3 warrants ever?). But that doesn't make having a presence in the US any less dangerous!
I've been working on that for my hobby writing project. I'm using Elevenlabs' API and homegrown scripts to automate audio-generation and synchronization between text and audio. I have separate voices for the characters (and the narrator, when the narrator is third-person speaker). Below, there are some links to a section of a chapter that you can download and judge for yourself.

This is a huge boon for independent authors, until AIs replace us as well :-) .

Things I have learned:

* A good human narrator could do much, much better, but the quality obtained this way is not totally terrible.

* The possibility to produce a section in a matter of minutes is a huge plus. The thing with a book is that it's never totally finished. If you discover a problem after you have submitted your text to a human narrator and paid $ XXXX, there is nothing you can do.

* Currently, there is no platform that I know of distributing and selling books like this. Audible only accepts audiobooks narrated by humans. To my knowledge, platforms that accept ebooks don't handle epub with media overlays. Well, Apple Books say they do but I haven't gotten it to work. There are no alternative platforms for audiobooks that I know of, but I haven't done a ton of research there.

* The possibility to have more control over emotions expressed in the speech could be a bonus, particularly for small, overly dramatic parts of the narration. Coqui TTS new editor is a step in the right direction, but their TTS doesn't sound yet as good as Elevenlabs. Voicebox seems promising, but there is no way to use it at least for now.

* Cost is a big deal 1/3. With my scripts, I pay almost nothing when I fix a typo, since most of the audio is stored in little bits in the database, and only what changes is submitted to the API. But the human time of a narrator costs much more, as it should.

* Cost is a big deal 2/3. As a reader, I have learned that how much a book sells tells me nothing about how much I will like it. But only books that have a potential to sell can afford audiobooks. If I want to listen to a story too quirky to be mainstream, or from an independent author that I follow in Twitter, the chances I'll find it as audiobook are next to none.

* Cost is a big deal 3/3. Voice narration is not the only aspect one needs to pay for. A good story needs an army of editors, proofreaders, and designers. Generally, the more an author or a publisher needs to disburse on those, the more bland and mainstream the book must become to sell and justify the investment.

-----------------------------------

Note that this is a WIP. Book chapter with automatic narration:

An epub with media overlays. It requires an epub reader that supports that standard feature of the epub 3 specification. Currently, and that I know of, there is Thorium and BookFusion for iOS.

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1U8XUB9xhu86JuketGH5WchM0obN...

An MP3 track from the epub above:

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1-u89ee52VZzGZ0oTGC_az5Uqbfs...
I thought about an algorithm with weight adjustable by the user.
Now, the API returns a field with the distance between the post and the query (the square of the Euclidean distance). It's used by the interface to rank results by relevance.

Perhaps I can compute a score for each story, where each field has a weight and rank the results using this score.
For example, the score could be 0.2 x score + 0.1 x comments + 1/distance - timestamp/ 10^9.
The stories with the highest rank would be shown first, and the weight (0.2, 0.1, 10^9) could be adjusted by the user, as some might prefer recency while others prefer popularity.
While I agree you should always have said signed contract there's usually only a technical difference as most job offers mention that you have a probationary period during which either side can get out at any given time without consequences.
Quebec sells a huge amount of electricity to New York at market rates. They then take that money and give it back as a dividend.
The growth mind-set: Why friends, family and work make a difference
HN needs a simple feature: a weekly digest view that shows the top 30 most commented posts (it should completely ignore flags and votes).
Talk about a live demo going poorly, sheesh.
The "controversy" section [0] of its Wikipedia entry summarizes it better than I could:

> The accounting treatment for goodwill remains controversial, within both the accounting and financial industries, because it is, fundamentally, a workaround employed by accountants to compensate for the fact that businesses, when purchased, are valued based on estimates of future cash flows and prices negotiated by the buyer and seller, and not on the fair value of assets and liabilities to be transferred by the seller. This creates a mismatch between the reported assets and net incomes of companies that have grown without purchasing other companies, and those that have.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodwill_(accounting)#Controve...
And you seem to forget that the Supreme Court had a case called Brown vs Dept Of Education in 1954 - not 1854 or 1754 but70 years ago.

Do you think enough time has elapsed to make the issue moot in some US states ???.
RAID6 is passable for a low performance small scale bulk storage, but the performance hit is worse than RAID5 and the rebuild times are even longer.
<Replies to own comment as it is too late to edit>

There was a reply here correcting me and saying Kaczynski DID in fact have a plan: to target weak points of the modern industrial economy, disable them in a co-ordinated attack, and then rely on the fact we would then lack the tech to do high tech work and have already used the resources available with low tech tools (eg we have mostly exhausted the easy-to-access mineral deposits, so removing our ability to access deeper ones would force humanity back to pre-industrial life.

I have only come across this idea in Atwood's Oryx and Crake (fiction). I wondered if it (a) true as an idea (the examples I've seen are very unconvincing) and (b) what he was actually proposing...
Better past facing than ridiculously fast pacing.
https://join-lemmy.org/news/2023-06-17_-_Update_from_Lemmy_a...

> ...

> For the past three years dessalines and I have been funded to work on Lemmy full-time by generous support from the NLnet foundation. These donations are paid out when we implement certain new features. But now we are busy answering questions, reviewing pull requests and urgentlyfixing problems. That means we are unable to work on the milestones agreed with NLnet, and won’t receive payments from them. We are increasingly reliant on user donations to pay our bills. These donations currently add up to 1500 Euros per month, which is not even enough to pay minimum wage for the two of us. Hopefully more users can consider donating, so that we can put our full attention to making Lemmy better for everyone, and possibly add more developers to our worker co-op in the future.