skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
the customer has just as little experience fighting in a staircase as the tourist hordes

You’re talking about a customer who most likely received a rigorous sword fight training, and probably participated in numerous knight tourneys. And spent his life living in castles, walking up and down those stairs. And who most likely knew someone who had personally engaged in castle offense or defense (the world was a lot smaller back then). Somehow I think this customer would know a thing or two about defending castles.

You could be right about the sales tactics, but comparing a medieval castle owner and a 21st century tourist is a bit much.
I mean John fucked up the delivery of the message, somehow the cheapest pricing scheme I've ever seen was interpreted by the customers as an example of dastardly extreme greed, and the fix was to roll out a much more expensive pricing scheme. Something was lost in the sauce and that was all John's fault.
But who proposed those changes? Ultimately the CEO is accountable.
James M. Whitehurst is new CEO, previously at IBM, but originally CEO of Red Hat. He joined IBM after they acquired it.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jim_Whitehurst

He wrote a book about open source software while running Red Hat, The Open Organization: https://www.redhat.com/en/explore/the-open-organization-book

He is an MBA, but he got his undergraduate degree in CS from Rice.
If you like your penny take a look at Typesense https://typesense.org/ - nothing to complain here. Especially nothing complain about pricing.
What model printer?
Tiobe Index for October 2023 – C# is getting closer to Java
Currently the salary is not competitive however Poland is the shining star of Europe given their growth and everything else these days. I might go there if science funding becomes more inline with other European countries.
Its interesting how much stuff we have in Linux now to make OOM decisions (even userland daemons) yet on every modern distribution it still ends up killing your desktop environment instead of the fricking C++ compiler jobs that caused the problem in the first place.
? VST is a cross-platform plugin format, supported by Ardour. I have no idea what you are looking for...
I think people underestimate how cheaply products are made.

> Making USB reversible to begin with would have necessitated twice as many wires and twice as many circuits, and would have doubled the cost.

Adding more wires, even if it is a few is not the cheapest one and therefore not the one that wins. The relative convenience of a feature is always trumped in early days by cost-to-produce.

USB-C recently introducing the symmetry of the connector does not imply that manufacturers will use it... ie you have a symmetric connector that performs differently based on how it was plugged.
I didn't ask you to complete a sentence, though. Just to read them. Then I asked a question.

I think you've made my point quite well.
Unfortunately the chat link doesn't show the custom instructions that I've set.

User message:

> Be terse. Do not offer unprompted advice or clarifications.

> Remain neutral on all topics.

> Never apologize.

Model message:

> Outline key points
I'm in awe that you linked to the FTC fine as evidence of our government taking action to protect our user data.
> Resolve is free, which is a massive deal to amateur filmmakers.

Also, Resolve Studio¹ is just a $300 one-time payment. So far, updates have always been free.

¹ https://www.blackmagicdesign.com/products/davinciresolve/stu...
Things inflation made so expensive that they're no longer worth it
> Are there any pre-eternal-September warriors still sticking Emily-Post-like to their 1992-era netiquette standards in the face of modernity?

Have you ever heard of that site called HN?
Who do you see as a customer? And why would they not use notepad, obsidian or onenote?
Just say it… Brain Fuck

Let its syllables echo through your body

Let its phonetic oomph roll off your tongue
Bending a pin stunk. I remeber jamming a flat head screwdriver into the port to try and straighten
Reminds me of this blurb from djb's qmail security guarantee [0]:

> I've mostly given up on the standard C library. Many of its facilities, particularly stdio, seem designed to encourage bugs. A big chunk of qmail is stolen from a basic C library that I've been developing for several years for a variety of applications. The stralloc concept and getln() make it very easy to avoid buffer overruns, memory leaks, and artificial line length limits.

[0]: http://cr.yp.to/qmail/guarantee.html
This is a logical fallacy itself, no? Correct me if I'm wrong, but it seems like you're making the argument for infinite capabilities with LLMs. This is almost certainly not true.
Right now, I'd imagine Unity is more concerned about placating their investors that the company isn't going to fall off a revenue cliff.

Appointing a "developer-friendly" candidate would have caused more uncertainty.

As a temporary pick, I'd guess Whitehurst is intended to message "We realize we screwed up, but there won't be any sudden changes."

The reaffirmed guidance for current quarter is hilarious though, given any changes would play out in future time (e.g. developer flight for next project).
I recommend Bret Devereaux's series on medieval fortifications, specifically the manpower problem [1]:

> While sapping (tunneling under and collapsing fortifications) remained in use, apart from filling in ditches, the mole-and-ramp style assaults of the ancient world are far less common, precisely because most armies (due to the aforementioned fragmentation combined with the increasing importance in warfare of a fairly small mounted elite) lacked both the organizational capacity and the raw numbers to do them.

Overall, medieval armies just didn't have the resources to siege for as long and as intensely as the Romans and other ancient armies did. Until the early modern period and gunpowder artillery, defenders in castles had a much bigger advantage over attackers so often attackers just didn't bother. They were more common than actual pitched battles though and most ended through surrender rather than successful assault.

The book Devereaux mentions Soldiers’ Lives Through History: The Middle Ages is a great resource for further reading - there's a whole chapter on sieges. It starts out describing how much worse the life for siegers often was compared to the besieged.

[1] https://acoup.blog/2021/12/10/collections-fortification-part...
Or that the only thing standing between humanity and the ability to build space craft capable of colonizing other planets is getting the right numbers to plug into a ‘gravity equation’?

Having been sold on the movie by people telling me the science was “realistic”… the reality was disappointing.
It's not Limited Self Driving? I see that abbreviation fairly often now.
> The news isn’t a surprise as Unity angered a lot of its loyal game developers a few weeks ago after pushing through a price increase based on numbers of downloads — and then retracted it after an uproar.

I thought they only slightly adjusted the new pricing scheme due to uproar, rather than retract it.
One of the ideas to deflect a planet killer asteroid would, if we had time, be to land there and build a base and assemble such a mega-bomb deep underground.

Problem: Giant-sized asteroid on collision course with Earth

Solution: Build giant bomb and nuke it

Problem: 843 medium-sized radioactive asteroids on collision course with Earth
Really nice interface, good work with this.
Okay, but in this case software verification like with Coq or F* could help
Nah, this was mass hysteria.
Sorry, just added it. Brother MFC-J485DW
Ah, the token ring connectors. Not reversible, but genderless.
China allows social media that complies with Chinese law. Google, Facebook, Twitter, etc exited China because they were being heavily criticized in the US for supporting the Great Firewall. It was closer to a US export ban than a Chinese import ban.
echo 3 > /proc/sys/vm/drop_caches

Last time I ran into this was a couple of years ago on a stock Arch system. (Disabilities forced me back to Windows). Every time, the largest memory consumer was the web browser. Also every time, the system became nearly unresponsive due to swap thrashing (kswapd at the top of the CPU usage list, most of which was I/O wait).

Last time I complained about this problem, someone suggested installing zram which did stop it from happening. However, this does not change the fact that there is some pathological failure case that contradicts the central thesis (not to mention, smug tone) of this website and makes searching for solutions to the problem infuriating.
The sense data your brain ingests does not map perfectly or even particularly closely to the real physical world we inhabit.

Whether it’s through language, vision (which feels quite “real” but is really just a 2D projection of light that we interpret), sound or anything else, it’s all just some byproduct of the world that we nonetheless can make useful predictions with.

There is enough information to build "a" world model in all the text ever written by humans about the world. Not necessarily the "one true model" that is your own personal life experience of the world since birth.

>Understanding the physical or emotional world solely from human language is more like trying to use the Othello LLM's state representation to establish the colour of the board

Nobody truly understands the physical world. Don't you think the birds that can feel the electromagnetic fields around the earth and use it to guide their travels would tell you your model was fundamentally incorrect ?

Certainly, LLMs are more limited in their input data, but it's not a fundamental difference. and adding more modalities is trivial.
Yeah, I think this could definitely be one explanation.

Other commenters in the thread have also given good thoughts / potential scenarios in similar veins - essentially that this was actually a failure of messaging, sticking to the plan, and / or both, plus some other combination of "no, seriously, we need to make money and become profitable, nothing else matters as long as the boat still floats, make it happen and keep this ship going."

And I do suspect that Whitehurst will likely be a better fit for that. A seasons gaming industry executive (regardless of investor / revenue focus) may actually be a negative if that's the goal right now... I'll be very interested to see how this all turns out.
> there's a convention in that ecosystem that power flows from the A connector to the other end

That's not just a convention, it's a vital part of the specification :)

USB-C devices go to significant lengths to make it hard for users to violate that invariant using an unsafe combination of otherwise safe adapters – that's why there is no USB-C-to-A adapter, for example (because that would let you build an A-to-A cable, and USB-A hosts are not required to detect possible loops/short circuits; USB-C hosts are).
Well, what did you think was gonna happen...the stock tanked hard!!!
I don't think going down was a priority. When you are under attack, you want your archers to rush up to the walls, with some extra fighters for good measure, and you don't want them to go down until the enemy has decided to leave. At that point, the speed of your archers going down doesn't matter much.
> Are there any pre-eternal-September warriors still sticking Emily-Post-like to their 1992-era netiquette standards in the face of modernity?

Plenty of people continue to comment inline. I wouldn't have quoted your comment except it's a humorous way to make this point :-)

It may be the kinds of people I hang out with, but I have observed:

1. Business people top post; they seem to want the top post reply to be short enough to read on the phone without scrolling and want the subject line to provide enough context so AFICT they never look the the quoted message.

2. Mailing lists I'm on have a mix of top post replies and inline replies; I've learned that the top-post responders can by and large be ignored.

3. People born after around 1998 tend not to reply to mail at all. I forced my born-in-98 kid to learn to write a good email (and boy was it a struggle) but when he was looking for a job he told me it was a superpower because the folks he was competing with couldn't/wouldn't do it.
there's an Irish blog dedicated to testing their post service like this
https://www.meversusanpost.com

My favourite is still the one addressed to "gobshites", which was delivered to their parliament as the sender intended
Good point. University of Lausanne is nice too I hear.

Definitely stay away from places like France or UK. They both have terrible salaries and culture (at the university).

I would say Germany is a mixed bag. Your salary can be nice in Berlin. The same salary in Munich, and it will be the same, is unliveable.
We’re also building billion-scale pipeline for indexing embeddings. Like the author, most of our pain has been scaling. If you only had to do millions, this whole pipeline would be a 100 LoC. but billions? Our system is at 20k LoC and growing.

The biggest surprise to me here is using Weavite at the scale of billions — my understanding was that this would require tremendous memory requirements (of order a TB in RAM) which are prohibitively expensive (10-50k/m for that much memory).

Instead, we’ve been using Lance, which stores its vector index on disk instead of in memory.
The board
You're right. And I think a side effect it's being gateway product for their hardware software ecosystem like their PCI cards, color correction surfaces and cameras.
The national security risks are three-fold:

1. Anyone who puts an app on your phone can track your behavior, especially your coarse location, but additionally (for TikTok) the trends that you follow. This is actually a huge security risk (affecting basically all devices with any 3rd party apps) that is generally ignored.

2. TikTok allows a foreign government to choose which topics trend which allows them to influence the political and social discourse of other countries.

3. TikTok could be used as a botnet or for network surveillance with a presence on many different LANs.

These problems are mostly not specific to TikTok, but are indeed true for all apps. TikTok just happens to be the most popular app that is developed and managed outside of the USA, making the US more paranoid about it.
In regards to that, i assume that manufacturers have to apply for a cert for their device and then embed that cert, correct? Then if the device is found to be stripping HDCP the consortium can revoke that cert, but how? Sure you can do it for PCs and consoles, but are blu-ray players connected to the internet and auto-updated nowadays? Otherwise it'd be pretty easy for Chinese manufactures out of reach of the DMCA to just release one every few years and have it work for all devices prior.
awesome article! curious -- why clojure?
Me too. I would write out a basic program on lined paper at school, and then when I visited my brother I would type it in to his Ohio Scientific Challenger 2p:

https://www.vintagecomputer.net/browse_thread.cfm?id=372

I remember the moment it clicked that "if statements.. strings... I can make a text adventure!"

It feels like that experience helped me develop, but on the other hand, don't we all think that about most of the hardships we experienced when young? It's hard to know for sure.
Interim CEOs generally tend to be either a board member or a C-level executive that take on the role just to manage day-to-day CEO duties while the board searches for a more permanent replacement.

In this particular instance, Whitehurst isn't a board member, but per the press release[0] he is a "Special Advisor at Silver Lake". Silver Lake is one of Unity's largest shareholders (~10%) and Egon Durban is on the board.

EDIT: Also worth noting Silver Lake, along with Sequoia, committed an additional $1Bn into Unity at the time of the IronSource acquisition in the form of convertible notes with a conversion price of $48.89 / share[1], which is at a slight premium to the price at which Unity's stock traded then (7/15/2022) and at a meaningful discount to their current share price of $29.70 -- which supports the (admittedly speculative) argument that SLP's voice on that particular board is all the more prevalent today.

——————————

[0]: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20231009494331/en/Uni...
[1]: https://investors.unity.com/news/news-details/2022/Unity-Ann...
This is not always true, and not all ports are horizontal anyway.
I assume some combination of: they don’t have the same incentives to try and draw in international talent as the multicultural US does, and US k-12 schools don’t produce students that would do well on their admissions tests or whatever. Also we have pretty good engineering schools here in the US, so I don’t see why anyone would take them up on that offer if they decided to make it.
Kinda. You need access to a decryption key. The ones known to be leaked will be revoked, so you need one that cannot be revoked, because the financial fallout would be too painful. That's why WEB-DL rips are typically made using the DRM keys extracted out of very popular consumer TV models.
Maybe the repo hasn't been made public yet and it's a clean up before release.
Given the information posted about Whitehurst in another comment, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37825689 , I strongly disagree with your assessment of him.
Yeah I know the overall context was not as negative as indicated.

But someone who thoughtlessly refers to their customers as "the biggest fucking idiots" really has an attitude problem that goes deeper than he claims.
I think the word "missing" is.. missing.. in your post.
> That only makes sense for an online store that's going to ship you something, in which case asking for the destination ZIP code up front solves that problem

Tax boundaries do not follow zip code boundaries.

To actually find the right tax rate you need the full address, including suite or apartment number because there are cases where a tax boundary runs between different suites at the same street address.

Also this is not just for online stores that ship something. It also applies if you are selling a downloadable good like a game or music, or selling memberships to your site.
for a brief period I had to correspond with a lawyer whose mail program generated them; I discovered that you could simply double click them in Apple Mail and they would open.

Given that APple preferes to rewrite rather than bug-fix/upgrade I have no idea if that's still true; haven't seen one in many years.
"interim replacement / transitional CEO is someone with a pedigree that, on the surface, seems even more management consulting / investor / revenue focused than Riccitiello was himself.
To be clear, I know essentially nothing about James M. Whitehurst other than what is readily publicly available (IBM / Red Hat, advisory roles, etc.)."

To me, it seems he has plenty experience with managing companies.
Agreed - the reaffirmation of guidance almost felt to me like a "seriously guys, why are we down 22% up front, you know this doesn't impact short-term revenue..." which... definitely misses the point.

It's interesting that after-hours / future trading doesn't seem to have responded positively (yet). Maybe that's just another symptom of lost trust as well.
Ask HN: What do people mean when they say transformers aren't fully understood?
I am not a computer scientist (let alone an ML specialist), just one of many interested observers trying to understand how LLMs work. I am familiar with many of the sources that are recommended for coming to terms with the transformer model, such as "The Illustrated Transformer."

However, in online discussions about transformers -- including on this site -- I frequently see references made to some kind of mysterious, unknown element; basically, the idea that "we don't REALLY know how transformers produce such good results, at least in detail."

My question is: is that claim truly accurate? I am struggling to understand how a technology that is not fully understood, at least by specialists in the ML field, could be harnessed to such great effect. Thank you!
> Fate/Grand Order is one of the most profitable games on the mobile phone market, it literally makes millions

Small correction: FG/O makes billions. Over 7 billion, in fact. https://gameworldobserver.com/2023/09/11/fate-grand-order-hi...
Yes. The lit sign outside and obvious product placement decals were changed but decals on the windows in the background were not. (I just checked my copy.) Product placement should cost less than the cash you get for it although it does still work for the joke in the movie.
I think people really need to think about USB Type A in the context of the connectors it was 'competing' with: DSUB9 (VGA), RS-232 (serial), DB-25 (parallel), PS/2 (keyboard/mouse). These were, by modern standards, complete garbage connectors. Huge. Didn't stay plugged in securely unless the connector had screws. Only went one way.

USB 1 stayed plugged in, required no screws, had higher bandwidth than any data port you'd find on a typical PC, the wires were much thinner, and it could even power low power devices! Yes, a design that doesn't take three tries (my average) to get right would be nice, but it exceeded every existing port by miles. Audio jacks were the only ports that didn't have a direction back then.
"are blu-ray players connected to the internet and auto-updated nowadays?"

Some blu-rays force you to update before you can watch them. Also, the key revocation lists can (I believe) be included in the blu-ray itself to make them work offline, too.
Easier to just recover via camera at this point.
I'm going to be completely honest, I still don't know what your point is.

That humans are capable of memorizing text? Is that a thing anyone was debating?
I'd suggest joining the Scottish tech club discord and posting there
https://www.scottishtechnology.club/
https://web.archive.org/web/20231003192321/https://www.theat...
Yes I lived in such a street, 1at number 11. 1960s street.
XGBoost2.0
"We are excited to announce the release of XGBoost 2.0. This note will begin by covering some overall changes and then highlight specific updates to the package..."
> If the buffer doesn't have a width of 256, 65536, or 4294967296, then you're out of luck

Why so much hyperbole?
You’re not out of luck. You can atomic increment/add the unsigned no matter the buffer size. You don’t worry about overflow like you would with a signed type. You can mask after.

And you continue to avoid answering the simple question: what is the advantage of the signed type. I’ve already outlined the one with unsigned, especially with atomics.
Yes in fact, I have spent hours debugging a system from the console. links/lynx is a godsend. I agree though, reinstalling is certainly easier. This is more of a philosophical argument than a practical one. I installed Arch to really learn Linux, not just to get work done. If I just wanted to get work done, I'd have used Fedora, Ubuntu, or Debian.

Anyway, no judgement, just my POV.
That's not what I said; sorry if that was not clear. The parent company requires RabbitMQ, we are using Kubernetes because managing 40 microservices without it would be hell. In the article, I only showed 1 user-facing API, but it's actually multiple services, I just did not want to complicate it too much.
I find that task priorities in general are not strict enough under Linux. Try running a cpu heavy but very low priority task in background and it still manages to measurably affect the latency of the more important process. And this is just the CPU, not to mention disk utilization and network usage.

I was too lazy to find a proper solution, so I just used mlockall after allocating a massive heap and pin the process to a core that is reserved only for this specific purpose.

I think cgroups has very flexible tools for reserving system wide resources, but haven't had the time to test it yet.
Our street just went from 11 to 15.