skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Everything you said is true but it is also true for every other industry. Do you not think companies selling computer RAM for example not have the same motivations? How is that industry much less frustration to deal with than what we are discussing here?

In my opinion the free market should be able to solve this issue but I think therein lies the problem. There is no 1-to-1 mapping of competitor A offering to competitor B offering and that ambiguity is where the extra is skimmed off.

The free market has beaten the RAM industry. They cannot hide behind any ambiguity. RAM stick A has many direct comparisons to RAM stick B. Yes there are still some ambiguity like brand or quality reputation but overall it is very competitive. The market sucks for companies but is great for consumers. Hence we see bankruptcies once in a while when a major error is made (ie. When Windows 8 launched many companies overproduced in anticipation of new PC sales but when OS sales flopped they went bust)

If we can solve the issue with lack of clarity of what is being offered then we can build a mapping of competitor A offering to competitor B offering but this is why I say its easier to send people to Mars.

How are you going to get that info from each competitor? Lets say you managed to get it through regulation or some other mechanism. Then you have to normalize it across competitors. You can somehow try to break it down to literal things such as room size, does it have item A,B,C and then rate it at a very granular level. But then how to do you evaluate more subjective things like the area the hotel is in?
I have an eerily similar story, and a more general one.

1) I bought lift tickets for a mountain resort, and when I showed up I couldn't find the confirmation email to scan at the self-serve kiosk. I also wasn't able to find my online account portal to see my bookings, so I bought lift tickets on the spot on my phone. As soon as the transaction completed, I was redirected to the account page that I was looking for where I found my original booking. At the end of the weekend, I took up the issue at the ticket window, and got the issue resolved (mostly) to my satisfaction: they refunded me the discounted pre-order amount instead of the full-price I paid; normally they only issue an account credit, this was going above and beyond as they saw it. I believe the reason I didn't get an email the first time was that I used a gmail +tag (name+resort@gmail.com) which their system accepted but didn't know how to use.

Lessons:

i) Stop using +tags with my emails, the utility of these tags (maybe tracing what company my info was leaked from) is far outweighed by the possibility of incidents like this. I don't use them to organize my email, like others do, so this habit has only cost me time, money, and stress so far.

ii) Don't be afraid to ask for help, try to talk to a human next time something like this is happening.

2) Booked a hotel through super.com because they had the lowest price. I didn't read the fine print, so when I showed up to check in, I was informed that I owed a resort fee or something that more than made up the difference. I ended up paying slightly more booking through super.com than I would have going direct.
I think for Sudoku there are a lot fewer legal board configs than there are arrangements of the numbers. There’s probably a way to store the solved state as a single number and then just use 27 bits to specify which numbers are revealed. I don’t know what that single number looks like, though, and you’d have to check that there was only one legal solution to the revealed numbers.
like i said above, cats typically tend to "walk on walls, fences, enter other's homes etc" ... the cat strapped with a watch-sized device could be used to monitor/record (not necessary this proj).

cameras and microphones are very cheap these days.

of course if one's not bothered about privacy, then the issue doesn't exist (magic)
I have a folder where I store everything. All documents are named starting with the ISO date, and I make sure the filename contains the relevant keywords. All paper documents are scanned.

That’s it.
https://course.fast.ai/

https://www.deeplearningbook.org/
I cannot speak for anyone else, but when I was pretty young in my career, my first "real" job was doing ColdFusion. Even at the time (early 2012), ColdFusion was largely dead, and PHP had sucked up most of its potential audience, and I was looking to learn a new platform to future-proof myself and make more money.

I had learned the core Java language years before and I knew Java was "enterprise", so I figured that might be a good spot to start, so I bought a book on J2EE development with GlassFish, downloaded all the appropriate SDKs, and after multiple days of spending nearly every minute I could on it, I got something not quite as good as something I could have whipped together in ColdFusion (or Railo/OpenBlueDragon) at the time.

I thought that maybe I was just stupid, and I suppose the jury's still out on that, but shortly after that experience I found a Django tutorial series on YouTube and went through that, and felt like I was productive almost immediately. I was able to build "real" stuff in a matter of a few hours instead of days, and it didn't feel like it was more chaotic than the stuff I had done with J2EE. I then did a similar experiment with Rails, and had the same effect: me being an idiot is not solely to blame for me not really grokking J2EE. Eventually I learned Node.js and did that for a few years, until I was able to (thankfully) transition out of "web development" entirely.

Personally, while I'm sure the Glassfish server, and maybe J2EE has its merits, I don't think they're worth the headaches I went through to try learning it. Java has plenty of cool frameworks now (e.g. Play, vert.x), but I've never even tried using those with Glassfish.
Yep, everyone’s happy until the cosmic rays hit
In the interest of disclosure, do you have some kind of connection to Toyota or the hydrogen industry? You keep saying things about BEVs which aren’t true and downplaying legitimate problems even the people trying to make hydrogen work acknowledge, which is disappointing to see because you’re not only failing to persuade anyone but also not helping the thing you love. Nobody is going to buy a FCEV because some internet stranger trash-talked the alternatives but because it’s better in some way. If you really want hydrogen to succeed, acknowledge real problems and spend your effort fixing them.
Also to add.

Many people don't understand this in the same way that many people don't understand the tweaks you can make to your car engine.

Sometimes they make changes which undoes the settings and sometimes settings are per device. It is quite difficult to keep track of it all.

And sometimes turning off an ad feature cuts out a ton of non ad features. Example I can't turn off Google location tracking ad features without turning off googles ability to show me recent locations I drove to which I find quite helpful.
> I don't follow. All told, OpenSSH is still going strong, and it owes its existence to the right to fork.

Sorry, this was too implicit. What I was alluding to was the period of time when openssh had some showstopper security issues, and everyone realized it was being maintained by essentially one person with essentially no funding.

I don't want to downplay that the copyright owner of source-available software taking it in a bad direction or stopping maintenance or going out of business altogether is a big risk of that model (and of fully proprietary software as well). It totally is, and it is definitely something that the ability to fork solves.

But my point is that it's a trade-off. Both models have failure modes. And they both have (different) imperfect solutions for them.

> Agreed. It's frustrating that so few people or organisations think to contribute to FOSS projects, even ones they deeply rely on.

This is probably where our fundamental difference in philosophy comes from. I don't think it is at all the case that people don't "think to contribute to FOSS projects", it's that the incentives don't work out in favor of it, for most organizations. And I don't think the answer to that is to wish for altruism from organizations and free labor from individuals.

> There are ways to monetise aside from patronage/donation, such as paid support and paid managed services, but unfortunately it seems these are rarely successful in generating appreciable income.

Yeah, as I said, I find all of these solutions deeply unsatisfying. Patronage/donation has the "relying on altruism" issue. Paid support misaligns incentives, because if you manage to make perfect software, you've also managed to put yourself out of business, whereas if your software is difficult to use, that makes it lucrative. Paid managed services would be great, if Amazon couldn't just slap your code behind an official AWS service that 99% of people are going to use instead of your also-ran; but keeping them from doing that requires the restraint on commercial re-distribution that everyone seems to hate.
It took me a moment to see your point: it might take less information to store the entire game using a chess engine by entropy coding than a single position
Stripped from a PAYING account. Wow.
I don't know where the line ends, but it should start with air bags. :)
The failure mode for every plugged in USB-C cable I have owned has been the connector bending on the cable with no damage at all to the port on the device. Cable needs to be replaced but I have had zero USB C port failures at this point having owned around 15 USB-C devices in the last 5-6 years (several of which are Apple devices btw, which is why I'm happy about dropping the last of Lightning).
Google Desktop was not released before October 2004 though.

And even then, what was its significance on the general desktop space? I used it heavily, but I didn't know anyone else who had it installed.
Surprisingly, storing a game (with all moves) can take less space than encoding a single board. This is because you can effectively encode a move in a single byte (as there are less than 255 moves possible in each position). Applying compression to the resulting binary string will allow you to reduce the space even more.

Check out this great blog post of Lichess for more information: https://lichess.org/blog/Wqa7GiAAAOIpBLoY/developer-update-2...

And shameless plug: Using this encoding, I'm storing millions of games on https://www.chessmonitor.com/ There you can link your Chess.com or Lichess account and view all kind of statistics of your games.
Green Energy Starts with 5,600 Tons of Cow Dung
I can't tell if this is in jest or not but blockchains are prolific in software.

Nearly every company uses them to prove the authenticity of deployments in production at one or more layers.
>aging engines

Gaming companies get a lot of crap for this - it seems unfair. The OS I'm using to write this is a relative newcomer at only 30 years old. Obviously, it has changed a lot in that time, but so have the engines. Most software doesn't get rewritten, it evolves.
Navigating down the hyperlinks rabbit hole, I discovered native BCD asm instructions im x86

https://www.felixcloutier.com/x86/aam

Who said that curiousity was bad?
I don't know if this was already mentioned, but I am getting pissed off at how often my Settings get changed without my doing anything.

Auto-rotate: goes off, have to reset.

Screen timeout: gets reset to 15 seconds.

Some programs are able to change your Settings without explicit permission from you. This should be just plain impossible.
Imagine if this was Apple saying this. It would be a top story across the web.
The idea got renamed to ActivityPub at some point?
> space telescopes and sent probes to Mars, the Sun, Europa, Titan, interstellar space... meteorological data.

All of that is great, but how much of NASA's budget is going to the Artemis/SLS boondoggle?
To parent's opinion, I'd respond that bad management is a possibility in any company.

However, a broken revenue model misaligns incentives and makes user-bad decisions a certainty.

Laying it at the feet of management is blaming the messenger -- the root cause was revenue and expectations being strategically unbalanced.

It's surprising how many people watch companies make "dumb" moves and gnash their teeth over "how could they be so stupid?"

They're not being stupid... they're looking at the cards they have in their hand, what they need to win, and playing it the best way they can.

As people have quipped elsewhere in the comments, there were no ways Unity could deliver the financial performance that was expected of them, with a developer-friendly business model.
Huh, I'm not the only one. But then, I also think about ancient Greece.
Thousands of workers go on strike at Ford, GM, and Stellantis plants
Does hydrogen really have much weight advantage? The Mirai is 700 lbs heavier than an Avalon, much closer to a Model S. And the hydrogen fueled Hyundai Nexo is closer in weight to a larger Model Y than the similarly sized Tucson.
My favourite API is a zipfile on the European Central Bank's website
I suspect it would be hard to beat pgn run through a good compression algorithmn.

Or similarly essentially a binary version of pgn. Probably the optimalist of optimal is a binary specifying the starting square (6 bits), and then a minimal-width for the specified piece number that indexes against a standard set of move offsets.

So, for instance, a knight has (ignoring potential exposed checks, board boundaries, etc, 8 possible moves, so to fully encode a knight move you need 6+3=9 bits. 8 also works for pawns (and annoying due to e.p. 4 doesn't). Bishops, queens, and rooks would need a 4/5 bit field. Encode castling as starting from the rook as they have 'spare' moves in their bit set, and kings don't. Encode the end state at the begining.

This is going to use 2 bits for the end state, and then either 9, 10, or 11 bits per move.
I'll go a step further and say there is no self made anything. Just by being born in America you have a huge advantage over someone born in say, Ethiopia. When I hear someone call themselves "self-made", I immediately assume that person does not value the support and love given by those close to them. It also means they very likely don't value how much society in general contributes to the life they live. In other words, if someone tells me they are "self-made" - I'd say there's a very strong chance they are either out of touch, ungrateful, or even narcissistic.
They probably used one of those checkout registers that default to highest tip.
That suggestion seems very reminiscent of the notion that optimally compressing wikipedia is the same problem as what generative LLMs are doing, by virtue of predicting the next letter/word/segment with high precision lets you compress it extremely well.

I think for chess you could get most of the benefit with a relatively naive engine; chessbase has a weak engine built in where you can hit space bar and it does a move which is incredibly useful since there's just one obvious move for a lot of positions anyway; if the move was especially tricky/nonobvious than it's also not what you would want when hitting spacebar to just predictably proceed anyway).
Yeah, perhaps alternatives like permanent address on a government issued ID would be better. But exceptional circumstances should be the exception; the more exceptions are made, the more loopholes creep in
I use that feature for finding my keys and wallet at least 2-3 a week. One of the many things keeping me on an iphone.
Minecraft Java can be run fully offline without their launcher, and servers can be run with authentication disabled. There's no need to rewrite the whole game ...
That's not necessarily true, over the last few years we saw that companies were able to begin pushing prices to increase margins and profits on the same volume of goods instead of manufacturing more goods and making the profit on volume. Some of the margin increase was due to real supply constraints, but not all of it. For instance, when Coke and Pepsi lost ~4% of their global sales by abandoning the Russian market, they just raised prices everywhere else to compensate, because they could, and people were willing to pay. Now moving forward, they seem to be losing their ability to push prices. My point is not all cost increases were due to real constraints - they were in the auto sector, but that's not true of all sectors.

If I know this, I suspect the IMF does too, and incorporated that into the report.
I consider any reduction past the cache-line size (32B) to have diminishing returns as far as processing is concerned. unless of course if you can fit 2 of these in one.
Too bad it can only tile horizontally or vertically. There are no containers like in i3. Kind of a deal breaker for me.
Not to defend the recommendation as they clearly have an interest in trying to get people to use as much as possible, there is a potentially valid reason for this, which is that it depends on the type of water you have.

Water from a municipal supply is generally well-treated and usually soft, in which case you can get by using less detergent. However with hard water (often sourced from wells), more detergent is needed to get the same cleaning effect.

Maybe they could try to explain this, or maybe they just ignore it for the sake of simplicity (of the instructions on the bottle), and the increased sales is just a nice side effect.
Enforcing legal standard weights/sizes for everything that businesses cannot deviate from would be ridiculous... and that wouldn't reduce inflation, either.

List the price per litre or per kg, for instance, for every item in addition to the item's price and people can then compare between different brands on the shelf. This is already done in many cases though I do not know if there is a legal obligation.

People are not stupid by the way, they notice when an item they are used to buy shrinks.
Maybe a silly question, how do you know which side of the board is white vs black?
in person interview for hybrid role.

I began pushing for onsite interviews on a hunch

I can think of a lot of quantum reasons, but more importantly I wasn’t getting job offers and couldn't find anybody to relate (most discussion I found was about not getting a call back, I pretty much always got to technical interview and then got unceremonious rejections)

So I pushed for onsite and did a classic whiteboard technical interview, the first one sent me an offer. I answered as well or as poorly as every other procedurally generated technical interview. After dozens of other companies all I have is the 100% correlation to going onsite.

Is what it is. Might help someone else.
Instagram scaled to 14M users with only 3 engineers
Those metals may not be so exotic after all.

https://www.thestreet.com/travel/a-1-5-trillion-discovery-wa...
The "community edition" version of delphi had no visual editor, no way to build a bpl and it was 32bit only. I don't know thos c++11 compiler's features, it isn't immediately apparent in the mobile site.
The most effective treatments for eczema according to science
Unity's CEO hinted at their intention to change pricing back in May 2023
Loops (YC W22) is hiring a remote front-end engineer
It's not compression in the normal sense of the word. Most parsing is directly to data. So e.g. you know the square of some piece is the next 5 bits. In languages that allow it you can cast directly from the next bit offset to an e.g. byte. This is going to dramatically faster than parsing much more loosely structured JSON. As database sizes increase you also get worse performance there, so it's a double hit. So with these sort of representations you get orders of magnitude faster and smaller. Sometimes there really is a free lunch!

Also I'd add the sizes involved here are kind of insane. I wrote a database system that was using a substantially better compression that averaged out to ~19 bytes per position IIRC. And I was still getting on the order of 15 gigabytes of data per million games. Ideally you want to support at least 10 million games for a modern chess database, and 150 gigabytes is already getting kind of insane - especially considering you probably want it on an SSD. But if that was JSON, you'd be looking at terrabytes of data, which is just completely unacceptable.
Unity boycott begins as devs switch off ads to force a Runtime Fee reversal
Just like the critics in crypto, we also need critics in AI and deep learning that cut through the hype, debunk the AI narratives and present the limitations.

> The key distinction that we make is between predictive AI and generative AI. In our view, most of the snake oil is concentrated in predictive AI. When we say snake oil, it’s an AI that doesn’t work at all — not just an AI that doesn’t live up to its hype; there’s certainly some of that going on in generative AI.

Well there is no problem as long as generative AI is used for creatively purposes.

But then the snake oil sales pitch is shown when generative AI is used to objective and factual information and it is clear that the frequency of hallucinations, incorrect answers and lack of reasoning with also having a human to supervise it, shows that it isn't trusted and that it is also a form of snake oil product.

> So the basic question is, how are you defending against hacking or tricking these AI models? It’s horrifying to me that companies are ignoring those security vulnerabilities that exist today and instead smoking their pipes and speculating about a future rogue AI. That has been really depressing.

The industry knows that they don't have an answer to that good question but to only continue the narrative of 'AGI' approaching us very quickly to raise that VC money 'urgently'.
I've just been re-reading Cyteen.

This, plus the recent news of the "model" fetus and the old news of CRISPR, means we're in for some interesting times.

Khan!Khaaaan!!

https://youtu.be/wRnSnfiUI54?feature=shared

https://americanmilitarynews.com/2020/12/chinas-testing-biol...
My iPhone 14 charges fast enough. Any file transfers go over airdrop, which is fast enough. The port is smaller than USB-C. I can clean it by rummaging around in it with a toothpick and not worrying about breaking stuff.

USB-C is an unambiguous downgrade for me, and I wish they had just welded an adapter into the port for EU customers.
I never said they were the best example. Nor was that really the sentiment of the comment I originally replied to, or my reply to it.
It's definitely possible! Even more so considering Sebastian also started a Coding Challenge for Tiny Chess Bots: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iScy18pVR58
In my experience a rising tide lifts all boats. New "luxury" housing sets a new price for a neighborhood, which attracts flippers and investors who turn the old, cheaper stock into old, expensive stock. The rise in price of the old stock also increases the price of the new stock because of (hand wave) "comparables" and some people just want the biggest and newest house.

Maybe this wouldn't happen if we had all the stock we needed, but from what I've experienced it seems like adding new high priced housing to a supply constrained market increases prices rather than reduces them.
I looked in online real estate sites recently and found $1000/acre land within a few hours of NY City. Land is quite cheap.

I hope you are spending your time attacking farming, which uses orders of magnitude more land than PV (and will even in a PV-powered world) and delivers orders of magnitude less economic value per unit of land.
By the company as a whole making more money, everyone can make more money. But no matter how much more money the company makes, capital and by extension management can make more money by paying the employees less.