skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Since June 2022, we have stopped sending conversion signals back to our Google Ads account, and have completely disconnected Analytics and any Google-related tracking code from our site. We also started a new Ads property and retired the old, "enriched" one, starting 100% fresh (we were worried about breaking things, so we isolated the move and were ready to rollback quick).

We have a yearly Gads budget around ~$5-$6M, of which is 95% SEA. We are selling an unchanged service in a very stable, slowly declining market with heavy ads competition for the top keywords. Roughly 60-65% of our customers are paid and come from Google.

Since then, our ROI on that spending has not changed whatsoever. Paid traffic remains stable. Our CAC and conversion rates are virtually the same (even slightly better). Our new customer's LTV has increased compared to the previous cohorts as well, so it seems we're actually getting better quality leads (though I wouldn't attribute it necessarily to Google).

So if reporting more data to Google was supposed to help us target our users more cost-efficiently, it did a piss poor job at it. In hindsight, we have wasted so much time trying to help Google make "smarter" decisions by providing it with more and more data (hello server-side tracking), while the most efficient thing to do would likely have been to do nothing at all.
We have been working with GAds selling the the same service for more than 8 years now, so we have a large basis of comparison to be able to make that case.

Maybe we're lucky, maybe this will turn out badly, but since then I have stopped blindly believing whatever the ads platforms are pretending to do behind the scenes with all this data. If they do anything with it, it doesn't seem to be for the advertiser.

Our next step will be to gradually cut our SEA spending and follow the impact.

And don't get me starting on Facebook's borderline fraudulent ad performance reporting that doesn't match our reality...
Flagging anyways because nothing good comes of a bunch of cis people discussing trans health care on HN. You have no idea what going through puberty with the wrong hormones is like for someone who is trans or how much work is needed to undo that.
I don't think so. The crabs are peers who pull each other down. This is more like the industrial seafood conglomerate that dragnetted the seabed, put you in the bucket, and now wants to push the lid down tighter.
How Much Debt Does China Have?
It is solvable by making the hard decision to move to Python 4 with no backward compatibility. The two core issues imo in Python are the GIL and the environment hell and both simply can’t be solved while still keeping the 3 moniker. We’re in a field of constant workarounds and duct tape because we try pleasing too much
Thanks for this, I never heard of Blue Jam but I do own the Jam DVDs. I had to get a region free player to watch them.
Hmm, I feel like this analysis comes from trying to rationalise what’s happening. From my experience the truth is simpler, and much more disappointing: Advertising is about statistics, and if some wonky new data model creates better conversions the advertisers don’t care how it’s underlying rule sets work.

The cost of pushing ads to people who already have mattresses is insignificant to capturing those that are about to buy them, statistically speaking.

The disappointing thing about this trend is that even if the rule sets are obviously wrong, yet still provide positive results means that their operators have little reason to change them. Statistics don’t work for individuals.

Case in point is credit rating and insurance underwriting
^ https://archive.ph/nqAvb
Don't Meta maintain their own fork?
> Never more than 10m away from someone else is obviously just wrong. That's less than following distance on a motorway.

If you live your entire life in a high-density city, you may never have been on a motorway.
> I think what search engines need to do is tackle the complexity of going through the results of a search engine.

This is exactly what I don't want a search engine to do for me. Going through the list of results and evaluating them is an important part of my process, if what I'm trying to do is learn something new.
1973 United States–Soviet Union Wheat Deal
Until a short while ago it was still very much work in progress.

Right now a lot of work seems to be going into getting a 1.0 release out of the door (the current one is still marked alpha).
Why is Meta obligated to give anything back to these projects?

It was their authors choice first and foremost to publish them as OSS
“This Carolina Chocolate is amazing! I just keep coming back!”
One that I absolutely loved, but which rarely comes up, is Mr Don & Mr George by two Scottish comedians Moray Hunter and Jack Docherty. I think there was only one series, but it has a beautifully gentle, slightly surreal, slightly slapstick humour.

Edit: And for a much more brutal sense of humour, I don't think any political comedy has bettered The Thick Of It.
I wonder how long the diet soda manufactures have been working on this, and preparing for it. I would not be surprised if they already have some thing ready to go to replace it with.
The feeling of being on the dark side, with no radio contact must be something quite special
I didn't phrase that well. How much of the Python community is writing code that would be positively affected by the removal of the GIL?

The entire debate seems to be for code that strikes me as being far and away from the typical Python programmer.
Awesome, thanks for the pointers!
GIL has been a major pain point when training machine learning models, where every library is Python first. The data preprocessing phase must happen quickly enough and in parallel with respect to the GPU operations. The simplest option is doing data processing in several threads other than the one driving GPU operations, but that is not possible with GIL. TensorFlow and PyTorch each has their workarounds for this problem, but many difficulties remain. Removing the GIL will be greatly beneficial to this domain at least.
Twitter hit upon some narrow product-market fit despite itself. It has never seemed to understand why it worked for some people or what it wanted to be, and how those two were related, if at all. But in a twist of fate that is often more of a factor in finding product-market fit than most like to admit

Hear, hear!

Most internet companies have no deep or useful understanding of how they pioneered their early successes, or how to tackle the widespread growth decline that they are now encountering. Reddit is another fine example of this effect.

I think the one thing Musk achieved in his folie a un is putting Twitter on the observation deck for long enough that this fact became painfully obvious to many.

I think what we're learning - in fact, what we already knew in the days of newsgroups, and IRC - is "if you build it, they will come". And 'it' can be pretty much any medium that removes the potential inconveniences of connecting with other human beings and voicing opinions to them.

There really is no product beyond the people and the content. Google did well to realise this and turn itself into a huge parasite pretty much from day one: search aggregated the product, analytics kept tabs on what it was up to, and ads exploited both of the former.

That's why we will continue to see VC money and modern social media companies throw themselves at the wall like spaghetti and, eventually for most, off the cliff like lemmings.

The current fracture in social media may be the best thing that's ever happened to the internet (a few pennies in the hyperbole jar, sure). Look how much competition we have now in the 'let humans get their opinions and memes to other humans' space: Mastodon, BlueSky, Lemmy, Squabbles, and so on.

Sadly capitalism will once again inevitably demand a winner and we'll be back at whatever Twitter/Reddit 2.0 is but at least there's always hope for the cycle to begin again.
Yea, they(we) always say the new code will be better. Yet, eventually the new code becomes the old code and the cycle repeats.

Assumptions and Environment change. New becomes old. And old has maintenance cost.
That's really neat. I'll take you up on that. Will reach out to your HN profile email.
It's easy to blame the boss, but I don't think its the companies responsibility to give back to open source just because they use it. If you think open source is helping you, you could contribute it in your time without expectation to get paid for it. Most open source projects work like this. And if some company needs some extra feature, they should pay market rate for it.

Assuming the company doesn't have clause to not allow contributing to open source. These companies should be publicly shamed if they use any open source code.
http://amir.rachum.com
I don't follow. Simple single-sender-single-receiver would still be 100% secure so use that if it's life or death. Forwarding and multiple recipients can come with a warning that it will be unsecure. Same with the headers. Anyone actually relying on it to be secure would understand the opsec necessary to maintain this, just like any other platform.
I find implementing certain common things in react to be a pain, such as state management and route guards.

Vue is similarly unopinionated, but it is more intuitive to my particular brain.
> I shouldn't be able to zoom in and out on mobile either.

In fact you should be able to.

> user-scalable

> Controls whether zoom in and zoom out actions are allowed on the page. Valid values: 0, 1, yes, or no. Default: 1, which is the same as yes. Setting the value to 0, which is the same as no, is against Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG).
I just assume that they are all fake. Along with most of the products.
They’ve kind of done that with Cinder https://github.com/facebookincubator/cinder. Threads and Instagram lie on top of this and it’s essentially a fork of Python 3.10.

I think the problem there is even a company like Meta wants to rest on the shoulders of the giant Python community. It makes sense for Meta to try to get parts of Cinder into Python.
Having copyright does not serve as an exemption for the limitations of trademark/trade dress.
For sure. The problem though is that the strongest points of SemVer are the “machine-readable”, straightforward rules, in particular the rules about bumping the major version. But (like you note) SemVer also has this soft rules that goes beyond how to do versions and end up really dictating how a project should be done:

1. You should have a 0.x.x period for initial development

2. This is the not-stable part of the project lifecycle

3. After 1.x.x. you should be conservative about bumping the major version (not sure if this is from the specification webpage or if this is just the culture around SemVer though)

Point 3 might be what keeps projects on 0ver.

IMO SemVer itself (the culture around it can’t be controlled so that’s outside the domain of discourse) should have just dictated the machine-readable things. Thus points 1 and 2 are fine, but point 3 really discourages large major version integers. I guess some projects can’t realistically follow that. Not because the developers are bad necessarily but simply because breaking changes are part of the domain, more or less.

It seems that only projects that end up reaching a low major version over, say, a decade, fit into the SemVer culture (meaning that people won’t complain about the versioning practice). Maybe some projects simply feel that they get less pushback if they stay on 0ver instead of going for 1.0.0 and then having to go up to 7.0.0 or beyond.

A specification which only consists of three integers (plus the optional “beta”, “rc” appends) is inherently limited. Which is why it should be very limited in scope. SemVer should have just stuck to dictating the machine-readable part without having any opinions about how large the major version integer gets. (Again, maybe this is the culture around SemVer, not something from SemVer itself.)

EDIT: Less verbosely: SemVer seems to both dictate the breaking change versioning as well as making infrequent major bumps after 0.x.x. I think that is an overreach if you want your specification to be focused and uncontroversial, because in practice people will end up going back and forth about tradeoffs.

See also: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28090144
Spoilers here...

Second warning...

Apparently this is the TikTok of the creators wife, where she has pictures of the house and some of the wall art that show up in the game. She days they're getting a divorce, it seems he channeled some of that energy into the game and it's artifacts. [1]

[1] https://www.tiktok.com/@bananapantsamy
Brilliant answer, and I hope OP sees it. They have nothing to worry about.
Every ML engineer will be impacted. Web server probably less so.
> But then I remember seeing people get weird online about criticisms of Sparta.

Ah yes, you’re certainly right about those, good point. They are indeed a good example of what you say (and of course their specific kind of delusion has been convincingly shown as divorced from any kind of historical reality *).

> All I can say is that my experience doesn't match yours, and I do run into people who glorify history, and I do run into people who glorify Rome.

Using history for propaganda purposes is not that rare, see e.g. Putin doing it with the old Russian empire right now. But my understanding is that they even the people buying into this are happy to rant about how great their country used to be but would not want to actually live at the time they glorify. Even Russian nationalists know how bad life was for the vast majority of the population under Catherine the Great. It’s usually some aspects they want to emulate, it the whole experience. Of course there is the counter-example you mentioned of spartanophile who have too much confidence in their manliness and toughness and who would not be against raping a helot or killing a wolf every now and then…

* https://acoup.blog/category/collections/this-isnt-sparta
Latest decade in software engineering indicate that multi-processing is much preferable over multi-threading. It's the architecture Edge, Firefox, and Chrome uses. So the question is what use cases multi-threading address that are not already covered by multi-processing? The memory overhead that multiple processes cause is relatively insignificant on recent machines with 32GB+ of ram.
> Chrome is slow and frustrating to use, with delayed animations and noticeable input lag, it's such a frustration that I entirely gave up on Chrome in favor of Edge which runs natively

I use native Chromium on my Windows-on-ARM laptop (a couple of generations older than the one reviewed). It runs really well and the only drawback is missing DRM stuff so some videos won't play. YouTube almost always works, but most other non-youtube videos don't. For those I can fall back to Edge. I'm looking forward to Google releasing a native build of Chrome.
If it works with a rabbit brain why wouldn't it work with a human brain?
I was in a digital agency during the first dotcom era, and TVGoHome was one of the thing that kept me sane. Such a shame it took so long for the TV version of Nathan Barley to arrive - felt like it missed the moment somehow.
I can only imagine 2 use cases right now:

1. You are a celebrity or influencer and you are trying to “colonize” the place

2. You have a business that sells products or services to this people: celebs and influencers are your primary target
> We've had this discussion with digital art and photography, and decades ago with electronic music, remixes and sampling

We had very different discussions about all of those things.

There is a certain structural similarity between AI and these past advanced in the form of: new thing disrupts old thing.

But I think it’s deeply problematic to take that analogy much further. Take digital art. I don’t think it’s fair to compare the impact of the advent of digital painting tools with the advent of tools that systematically ingest all paintings and the remove the need for the original artist entirely.

If removing the artist entirely was part of that discussion, I suspect the tooling and legal landscape would look rather different today.

> AI is just enabling this on a larger scale, which will disrupt many fields

“This” and “larger scale” are doing a lot of heavy lifting here.

Nuclear weapons just enable this (blowing things up) at a larger scale. But these weapons also show us that scale introduces risks and factors not present in any prior iteration of the profession of blowing things up.

My point is not that AI art tools are as dangerous as nuclear weapons, obviously, but that “it’s just x at larger scale” breaks down when the shift in scale is large enough.

The result is something entirely new, for which the past rules of engagement no longer apply.
Because Mastodon only has a linear feed, I don't even see the point, you're only going to see what you explicitly followed. It actually takes a lot of time just to build up interesting content to follow. One of the more frustrating things is when someone I find interesting goes crazy posting and the lack of algorithm just means I see way too many posts from them in a row. Maybe the mobile apps improve on this, I dunno.
Simple does not mean easy!

Societies have been dealing with this since the dawn of modern civilisations. ItS ridiculous for us, the most advanced human civilisation by far, to struggle with this. Its dumbfounding!

The solutions are simple, they are not easy because we have a small minority of *** who refuse do or let others do anything that would be actually EFFECTIVE.

I try my best to be civil in the comments but this is one issue that triggers me. ITS CRAZY! How can you guys not see these people are evil or deeply sick... USUALLY BOTH!

One of the most richest areas of the richest country in the world inhabited by the smartest people in the world SHOULD NOT have this issue. ITS ***NG CRAZY!!!
This is exactly what I’ve been wishing for for ages!

The main downside is requiring C++20 since that does make it a bit less portable to compilers which haven’t caught up to the standard — each new standard revision adds a great deal of complexity which even the Big Three compilers tend to take years to finish implementing, so the smaller fish really do get left out of the picture. As I understand it, those are typically semi-compliant implementations of GCC on embedded devices, or on historical hardware, where a library with zero stdlib dependencies would be super useful, but can’t really be used here due to the modern language standard.

So, necessity demands you rewrite this as a C89 macro library.
Do you have JavaScript disabled? It is a deep link into a very, very long forum thread. Instead of pagination, comments outside of a certain window are loaded as you scroll.

https://discuss.python.org/t/a-fast-free-threading-python/27...

Should take you to the first post, which is an overview of the proposal problem and potential solutions.

Mobile Chrome renders the page just fine. No idea about what other WebView you're using, but JS definitely needs to be enabled to load additional content.

In short, GIL is the global interpreter lock, something that is innocuous in single threaded software but a bane for performance in a true multithreading environment. I'd recommend reading up on it elsewhere if you're not familiar with it, as the post elides a lot of detail (the audience is the forum is, after all, people already familiar with python internals).

"nogil", therefore, is a shorthand for CPython running without the global interpreter lock. The crux of the proposal is a discussion on how to achieve it without making large sacrifices to reliability or performance in single threaded scenarios.
> Caffeine and alcohol both available legally, both are mind altering and addictive. Did that lead to a degeneration?

Alcohol: absolutely? How many parents beat their children/spouses under the influence of alcohol, but never sober? How many kill others under the influence while driving?
No, but it means that your previous multithreaded code is no longer automatically prevented from stepping all over itself by having multiple threads accessing the same data:

https://realpython.com/python-gil/#what-problem-did-the-gil-...
And for £18/month. Subscriptions for car features need to die.
Well they're capturing additional text-based interactions associated with your identity and demographic.
The way to measure whether the data-driven ads are a scam is not by saying "this ad is irrelevant to me". It's by the advertiser looking at their ROAS (return on ad spend). If the algorithm is optimizing for showing you an ad, there's a pretty fair chance that the advertiser has done that math and decided that in a world of imperfect data and algorithms, you approximate enough the type of person who is worth showing an ad to... statistically.

In fact, getting to a world where ads are perfectly targeted would be one hell of a privacy nightmare.
In my market in Minnesota, Diet coke with "plant based sweetener" is being sold in small quantities. I'm sure it's a market test, and probably good timing based on this too.
Twat!
Writing "unreadable code" is easy, just as too easy to make your room a mess.

Writing "readable code" is so damm hard.

Readable code leads to maintainable code, which reduces tech debts.

Alright, many engineers just knows how to fix the bug and call it a day. It's a disaster thinking.
> Filtering those people out just saves the advertisers money.

Google Ads specifically has a feature to exclude targeting of customer's you've said have made purchases, ie. only target net new customers.

The platforms aren't as dumb as the post author thinks they are.
That's why it was proposed iCloud or whatever big tech provider does the key distribution, just like they do for iMessage. It would be a big win for Apple if they actually cared about privacy. But maybe it's just a pipe dream.
The setup of this experiment has a major flaw, the business card has only email address and in countries where email was never fully adopted like China or other, people would need to go extra miles to contact the wallet owner.
I stumbled into threads like this one that helped me find AI/ML researchers:

https://www.threads.net/t/CuYdZ_oBX8v/?igshid=NTc4MTIwNjQ2YQ...

Seems bearable now.
Eh, we know for a fact the nitrates in bacon cause cancer, but how many people stopped eating it?
Although I'm not a fan of the common law system, it isn't the problem here. The problem is a culture that so elevates informality that there are no guardrails left to ensure careful, thoughtful, deliberation even in business deals involving tens of thousands of dollars. Next up, declaration of war by tweet.
The actors statements seem to be about their voices being used without permission in any context (AI, etc).

Someone or some group on a crusade against NSFW material seems to be trying to use those actors in their witch hunt.
Copyright as Harassment: The DMCA Attack on IPFS Gateways
why not just use an existing language? ATen (pytorch’s autodiff engine) is written in C++ anyway, so why not use that?

i really don’t understand the trend with launching a new language every time it seems convenient; it may have the advantage of being made at {company}, but this is also its great downside: it exists, is maintained, and used only with relation to the project/company that prompted its creation

for example, swift is only used for swiftui and some other apple specific stuff, and no sane person is going to write an unrelated serious project in it
Tons of use cases! There are lots of concurrent algorithms that use locking and shared memory instead of message-passing. Matrix multiplication or tree search come to mind.
Ten Notes on the End of Affirmative Action