skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
While parked or double parked cars can get in the way of emergency service vehicles (that seems to have been the case here with an unoccupied police car contributing to the blockage together with the two Cruise cars), in most cases human drivers will be in the car and can generally be cleared out with the use of a siren.

As to Cruise cars themselves, it's been happening often enough that SF emergency services have been repeatedly complaining about it.

In defense of Cruise though, the pedestrian that died here was struck by a human-driven vehicle, and presumably such pedestrian strikes would be a lot less common if human drivers were replaced by Cruise cars.
Ask HN: What it be like if phones could only recieve calls/texts from contacts?
A few days ago, I had a question: what would it be like if phones only recieved calls and texts from people in your contacts? I imagine this could end phone scammers once and for all, but at the same time, it could be really hard for the end user; Person A may have gotten Person B's card, tries to call Person B and gets declined.

What do you think?
> I wish their parental controls didn't require using iCloud.

I don’t believe they do unless you want to be able to configure them from your own phone. It actually seems to be more reliable[0] if you do an entirely offline screen time setup. You can also use Apple Configurator to create configuration profiles that definitely do not require Apple IDs to use (though installing Configurator on your laptop does require an Apple ID since it’s distributed though the App Store).

[0]: https://www.forbes.com/sites/gordonkelly/2023/08/05/apple-io...
It’s not going to be popular to highlight the less than hoped for successes of Lenat’s greatest project.

But I think that is one of the things he should be admired for. How can anyone know how an ambitious approach will pan out without the great risk of going all in?

Anyone willing to risk a Don Quixote aspect to their career, in pursuit of a breakthrough, is someone who cares deeply about something beyond themselves.

And recognizing the limits of Lenat’s impact today doesn’t preclude both the direct and indirect impact on future progress.

I found him inspiring on multiple levels.
Wait, what? Absolutely!

I speak with my friends on my phone. Sometimes I may speak and laugh for two hours with an old friend I, for family/life reasons, haven't seen for years but with whom I have this ability to instantly resume our customary banter.

I read books on my phone. I do prefer a physical book but after I started a job where I travelled a lot I actually started buying the electronic versions, and once I got a phone with an OLED display it is quite okay to read on it in the dark. I read at least an hour a day.

I think the "problem" is that any phone usage looks the same. If you are sitting with your calculus book you look "usefully busy", but not if you're studying on your phone. If I read a thick novel I look serious and smart, but with the book on the phone I look like I'm scrolling on Facebook or whatever people use nowadays. If I watch a lecture on computer science I appear the same as if watching anything else. Is "phone" itself bad, or is it just that it looks the same as if one is being "lazy"?
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Keeping it out of the bedroom is another good one— get an old school clock radio and leave the phone charging on the kitchen counter.
Although, not all elevators are autonomous, for now anyway...

https://mleddy.blogspot.com/2023/08/goodbye-fine-arts-elevat...
This is true. But if everyone else in the world is using smart phones and you and your kid are the only people in the world NOT using smart phones... your kid will still think you're full of shit.

Clearly.
I thought you were kidding.... and then I saw a Wikipedia page for it.[1]

It's not going to be much power, that's for sure.

You might be able to get a commercial system that delivers 1 watt at 24 volts. [2]

Given the optical power required, and the sensitivity of the human retina, I'd say this is a bad idea in all but the most demanding circumstances. If you've got to send power with extreme electrical isolation(i.e. lightning strike proof), consider something like compressed nitrogen powering a very small turbine, or a rotating fiberglass shaft between motor and generator.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Power-over-fiber

[2] https://www.fiberopticlink.com/product/fiber-optic-isolation...
Today's devices and apps are designed to be addictive in a way that my old Commodore wasn't. Of course it was designed to be appealing, I don't deny that. But I doubt that ProTracker or Sensible Soccer had marketing teams focused on maximising "screen time".
Yes, all these stopped and immovable Cruise cars would certainly be safer for pedestrians than moving human-driven cars.
I know exactly how Oakland votes.

Therefore I'm glad they function as a magnet for people who are up to no good. Keeps the rest of us safer.

Once they vote to rejoin and participate in our law abiding civilisation, I'll be concerned with their plight.
I'm using Rsync for this stuff.
You didn’t ask something novel enough and/or the LLM got “lucky”. There’s plenty of occasions where they just get it flat wrong. It’s a very bimodal distribution of competence – sometimes almost scarily superhumanly capable, and sometimes the dumbest collection of words that still form a coherent sentence.

The mildly entertaining YouTube video below discusses this.
https://youtu.be/QrSCwxrLrRc
>hedge funds that return 15-20%

This is always a scam. Madoff died in prison, you know.
If the new rate is better than the old base rate, the point is that we could be making progress?
That's already the de-facto situation on iPhones a lot of the time - you can set it to only ring when called by a contact.

The downside is that I've missed important calls with that setting on. I'd love the option to opt into only allowing calls from some kind of verified white-list.

Or we could just have an FCC that does it's job.
Peanuts was like Calvin and Hobbes for a different generation. It wasn't mainly about the funniness.
Yes? Please don't make us pull out the model trolley set again.
It would be nice.

You could work around the no call from a desired but unknown number issue by whitelisting approved pay phones (which you'd have to bring back) where someone needs to traipse down to one in person to make a call. Probably would also have to require whitelisting from professionals like doctors, lawyers, etc. But then politicians would want to also be whitelisted too.. so maybe nothing would change other than the fact you'd get fewer calls from overseas to tell you that Microsoft needs you to update your car warranty or you'll be arrested.
One of the problems with trying to do this with fatalities is that fatalities are actually pretty rare per passenger/mile.

Consequently, the amount of testing required to prove that the fatality rate of autonomous vehicles is lower than human-driven one’s is astronomical.

Non-fatal accidents are more common but the statistics are far more rubbery.
Is it perhaps a bit more nuanced?

Green threads à la Go with channels would be a way to deal with several communicating "event loops" at the same time via coroutines, hence the name goroutines?
I worked with Doug on Cyc from ~85-89 (we had overlapped at PARC but didn’t interact much there). The first thing undid was scrap the old implementation and start from scratch, designing the levels system and all the bootstrap code.

It was a fun time with a small core team (mainly me, guha, and Doug) but over time I became dissatisfied with some of the arbitrariness of the KB. By the time I left the Cyc project (for my own reasons unrelated to work) I was somewhat negative towards the foundations of the project, despite the tight relationship we’d had and the fact it ran on my code! But over time I became smarter and came to appreciate once again its value. I had too much of a “pure math” view of things back then.

As I moved on to other things I lost touch with Doug and Mary, and I’m sorry for that.
Being able to handle 5 mph bumper to bumper traffic jams is hardly a Tesla-specific feature. It's quickly becoming a standard feature in cars, and such driver assistance features are rather independent from the conversation about full self-driving (whether via Cruise cars or Tesla FSD).
My main distraction/entertainment is reading on the internet (like HN), and I cannot do that on the watch. And it’s difficult to message back and forth, plus I have those notifications off.

Same thing when going to sleep, I don’t take phone near the bed, just have the watch on which has my alarms to wake me up with vibrate function.
Godot can run on the web. Blender couldn't be that far from it.
Turns out it might just be my phone, what a weird bug.
In normal circumstances, this would be easy. Just look at the base rate of deaths and see how the needle moved after these were introduced. This is how we know, for example, that automatic emergency brakes are saving lives.

Unfortunately, the pandemic through normal out the window. :( Probably still possible to find some natural experiments where you can control some variables. My gut would be that their are some comparable cities that differ mainly in whether they have these cars. That said, it will be a lot harder, as the impact of the pandemic was pretty massive.
I am on Chrome.
I like this app, and would love to see it succeed, but the offline app flow is a huge downgrade from my map app of choice (Here We Go; formerly Nokia Maps).

I just tell it what countries (or states / regions) to download, and it downloads them. Then, if cell coverage will be spotty, I tap the “work offline” slider, which disables traffic, but also means that search is on device and instant.

This is how literally every map program I used before MapQuest worked. I don’t understand why modern interfaces don’t support this.

For reference, California’s maps (including business listings) are 856 MB. The total map size for all the regions I have taken this phone to is under 3GB.
> The best thing Cycorp could do now is open source its accumulated database of logical relations...

This is unpersuasive without laying out your assumptions and reasoning.

Counter points:

(a) It would be unethical for such a knowledge base to be put out in the open without considerable guardrails and appropriate licensing. The details matter.

(b) Cycorp gets some funding from the U.S. Government; this changes both the set of options available and the calculus of weighing them.

(c) Not all nations have equivalent values. Unless one is a moral relativist, these differences should not be deemed equivalent nor irrelevant. As such, despite the flaws of U.S. values and some horrific decision-making throughout history, there are known worse actors and states. Such parties would make worse use of an extensive human-curated knowledge base.
Brain’s Weight Switch Found: Eat What You Want, Lose Weight with New Treatment
> Audacity is an indispensable utility. It’s great to see it and other “real” software on the web.

It's been a very long time since I used it, but didn't Audacity turn evil, add a bunch of networking code it never needed before, and start spying on people? (https://fosspost.org/audacity-is-now-a-spyware/). I remember people reverting to older "safe" versions.

I guess that doesn't much matter for this web app since it's collecting your IP and data by design (their privacy policy seems very vague and handwavy), but for the desktop app it seemed like kind of a big deal at the time.
How to edit your own lousy writing (2017)
Plenty of people who own performance cars take them to racetracks where driving above 100mph is entirely legitimate. So doing this wouldn't affect zero legitimate use.
Old meets new: hybrid search
I've had "silence unknown callers" turned on for like two years. If I'm expecting a call from a number I don't know in advance and I remember to, I'll briefly turn the setting off. Otherwise if it's important they'll leave a message (which gets transcribed) and I call them right back if the transcription doesn't read like spam.

Most spammers won't leave messages, but the few that do are easily identifiable at a glance, so I haven't felt the need for more aggressive filtering (ie, automatically discarding phone messages that include "warranty" in the transcription, etc)
Unicode 88 (wrongly) assumed that Han characters in current use are small enough (see p. 3 for specifics). This turned out to be massively incorrect because they have an extremely long tail. Same goes for Hangul.

EDIT:

> Beyond those modern-use characters, all others may be defined to be obsolete or rare; these are better candidates for private-use registration than for congesting the public list of generally-useful Unicodes.

I do believe that the initial estimation was not very off. IICore 2.2 [1] contains 9,810 Han characters across all relevant countries and even assuming that every character should be encoded in two ways (to account for simplified-traditional splits) and IICore had some significant omissions we could have just encoded ~40,000 characters. If everything went well according to their plan.

The reality however was that PUA for rare characters was an old concept---pretty much every East Asian character set has one---and proven so ineffective. PUA is by definition not interchangable, but rare characters are still in use and they have to be interchanged anyway. So people avoided them like a plague and argued for bigger character sets instad, East Asian character sets had to be ballooned up, and at the point of Unicode they became so large that a naive vision of Unicode 88 no longer worked.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Ideographs_Core
well...yes? For example: wouldn't you be more upset if a collision was caused by a drunk driver than by a driver who was paying attention? That's because drunk drivers are known to be dangerous and should not be operating.

If self-driving vehicles overall increase safety, then I am not as upset as I am if they are known to overall decrease safety, because the fact of their presence being just or unjust is pertinent to the case.
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I'd assume that a large part of the data that makes up the "mile" portion of the passenger per mile is large trips. So, look at traffic deaths in some dense cities and you will probably find much larger numbers than you'd expect.

As a quick check of this idea, looking at "vehicle passenger deaths atlanta" in a search gives numbers around 100 for many years. (And Atlanta isn't that dense, all told.)
Cats took over the internet a few years ago, now they are going after the phones
1976 was the last time it snowed in San Francisco. I wonder if the Waymo software has logic for precipitation/temperature i.e. shut it down. I'm guessing it requires human intervention although hopefully in a timely manner.
I believe it's possible on recent versions of iOS and Android to screen all calls from unknown parties or direct to voicemail.
Looking forward to the showdown between wfo, wfh, hybrid, and all the hybrid spin-offs in the next 5 years. Covid shattered the old 5/day wfo consensus and now we're in uncharted territory, and it's going to be really interesting to see what becomes the new normal.

Personally I wouldn't mind seeing a sustained diversity of models and allowing people to join companies which fits what they are looking for.
Explaining the Postgres Meme
The only fault of Unicode is 4 (and we have eventually solved it anyway). Everything else is a natural complication from human writing systems.
This is pretty much the best marketing for IPFS. The availability and number of backups of any price of data is directly correlated with the number of people that use it.

For example, if LLM NN model weights are distributed with IPFS instead of corporate infrastructure (basically zero redundancy) the popular models would be very available, and have essentially near zero chance of being lost.

To state that again, the llama models likely have tens of thousands of downloads, which would mean tens of thousands of servers and backups of the data, versus what we have now, which is essentially just one.

We need IPFS for data distribution. Tightly knit integration with git repos is an obvious match as well.
Validating Security Boundaries in AWS Firecracker
I haven't read much by Lenat, and haven't seen anything that would lead me to believe he was particularly blunt, I disagree with attributing bluntness to intelligence. Some of the most intellectually blunt people I've met were some of the most conversationally blunt, and some of the most brilliant were absolute social butterflies. Making people needlessly uncomfortable when communicating is a shortcoming regardless of your intellectual capacity. Even if difficulty communicating appropriately and intelligence are correlated somewhat through common neuropsychiatric profiles, the relationship is not causal.
In 1978, the initial proposal for a set of "Universal Signs" was made by Bob Belleville at Xerox PARC. Many persons contributed ideas to the development of a new encoding design. Beginning in 1980, these efforts evolved into the Xerox Character Code Standard (XCCS) by the present author, a multilingual encoding which has been maintained by Xerox as an internal corporate standard since 1982, through the efforts of Ed Smura, Ron Pellar, and others.

Unicode arose as the result of eight years of working experience with XCCS. Its fundamental diferences rom XCCS were proposed oy Peter Fenwick and Dave Opstad (pure 16-bit codes), and by Lee Collins (ideographic character unification), Unicode retains the many features of XCCS whose utility have been proved over the years in an international line of communicating multilingual system products.
We aren't going to agree on this.
As I said, that's been attempted for decades, and zero progress has been made over decades with billion spent. If you have an idea that hasn't been tried or isn't being tried, Im sure they'd love to hear it.
I hope Mayor Breed and the San Francisco DA hold the family of the deceased pedestrian accountable for their loved one's actions, and for any damage this negative publicity does to the reputation of Cruise self-driving cars.
https://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/coroutines.html

int function(void) {
static int i, state = 0;
switch (state) {
case 0: /* start of function */
for (i = 0; i < 10; i++) {
state = 1; /* so we will come back to "case 1" */
return i;
case 1:; /* resume control straight after the return */
}
}
}

Huh, I didn't know you could put case statements arbitrarily anywhere inside a switch block in C. Past the initial WTF, it's a nice hack for implementing coroutines.
Qualitatively, I rarely encounter Americans who have traveled outside the country.

Quantitatively, only ~33% of Americans have a valid passport.

Both are depressing and embarassing.
True, but who knows? A scammer could possibly be calling from an approved pay-phone.
>Where is the data for this claim? The data I see doesn't list OC as growing.

Home prices are a good indicator. I'm talking Irvine specifically, home prices have skyrocketed in the last 15 years.
For mechanical reasons as well. My dad was a resident engineer at the Chrysler automatic transmission plant. He would send early production runs of transmissions to cab companies in San Francisco for stress testing...
Yes, and it was glorious...

https://www.sfchronicle.com/projects/san-francisco-snow/
Would tweaking PeerTube not work for that?
It isn't going to compound though, at least that's what long term rates imply.
FlagLookup: Search flags based on color or design
The web definitely needs more whimsy like this!
I run 200+ production clusters across EKS, GCP and MSA. In a nutshell - running your own clusters and being responsible for every aspect - autoscaling, storage, upgrades - it's not fun. Using managed Kubernetes allows you to run a cluster knowing all those bells and whistles are already taken care of. Hard to go wrong with the following setup:

1. A cluster VPC with public and private subnets.

2. A managed control plane on EKS.

3. You can opt between self-managed and managed nodegroups. To be fair, self-managed nodegroups give you more control, but you'll need to be careful about updating them yourself.

4. Use AWS controllers - the AWS Ingress Controller, the EBS CSI Driver - stuff like this will ensure your cluster can provision and manage load balancers, storage and so on.

5. For starters use cluster-autoscaler to dynamically manage compute capacity on your nodegroups. As your platform builds up and scales, you can look at Karpenter as a viable alternative.
Online acquaintance is not really "meeting people" is it? Maybe seeing people, discussing? Can it not wait until 16-18yo when folks get access to these things regardless of what parents want?

I had a few gay friends in high school, and we all knew it. No one really cared. Didn't require smartphones as they didn't exist.
> too many cars

Compared to where? Singapore is probably the best example of ubiquitous public transport on earth. Owning a car in SG is more a flaunt than sensible decision from a financial or health point of view.

> There is a third issue (freedom-of-speech)

As an ang moh can relate but what exactly is stifling you from speaking your mind? Here we are talking about it. The young are rising up in the country and it's great to see, there's been windbacks on laws against gays along with other pretty stark sentiment changes in the population, there's a real fear in the ruling party about being the first to lose government and they are quick to bend to the whims of the populace.

The main outlet for an everyday person is online and here we are. No one is stopping you, no one is certainly stopping r/singaporeraw

> small, dense, urban environment

Borneo, one of the most biologically diverse places on Earth is an hour away on a plane. There's untamed jungle trails an hour across the border if you care to walk them.

> it's hot

For the first few months, then you adapt.
The amount one must sacrifice is rising, regardless of the pay off. Everyone has their own threshold, yet the minimum needed to birth and raise kids is going up while buying power is decreasing.
Back when I was in IT, I'd basically be waiting for things to break... I'd spend a lot of time reading HN, /., MetaFilter, etc.

How I got to that point.... when I started, things broke often enough that I had a 40 hour work week... as time went by, I got everything running smoothly, and had less, and less to do as the years went by.

I tried to do upgrades to their production database, Smiley... 3 different times, with the 3rd attempt even having provisions for running the new and old versions at the same time... but they just wouldn't bite.... so I gave up after that... just waited for things to break.
It's only a workaround for passwordless/unattended FDE, right?

Regular password-protected FDE wouldn't be vulnerable this way.