skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"Many of the people running Alexa had been there since 2012. Its was tyranny by those who started in that organization first. Backstabbing, politics, bad engineering, nepotistic promotions. The scientists were so far behind, almost all models were off the shelf implementations pulled from Github. Huge amounts of capital flushed down the drain."

Wholeheartedly agree. Any time a team or individual had a good implementation that deviated from that core Alexa group, they stole it and fired the people who designed and implemented it. Nevermind the amount of personal customer data they leaked in the process. Embarrassing.

People who left Alexa to go to places like Meta actually showed return on investment. The people who ran them off? They're still at Alexa, they probably aren't the ones being fired, and you can easily recognize their work in projects like Amazon Music and Prime Video. Some of them even have the nerve to boast working on "AGI," as if the echo of their Titan flop was not loud enough.
Mastodon or Twitter links don't make for good HN posts anyway, except for a few rare cases when the comment itself has some bearing on current events.
The rule is there to eliminate a 3rd -s noise. James's is fine. Moses's or Jesus's is less so (but you can do it if you want).
I suspect ignoring them is more effective than essentially complaining back.
Man everything was against this ship.

Afaik, it was undergoing incredible mismanagement, a series of mechanical faults and poorly maintained systems. It meant that its air defense was down or severely limited, and their communications systems busted, they had to choose between communications with the crew or command. Once the ship was spotted, it couldnt defend against the missles and after the impact the crew could not communicate to address it.

All that from memory, im sure i got some details wrong but what a mess.
GitGuardian has the ability to passively and non-intrusively verify credentials as well.

Public patterns for sensitive and highly used credentials have a lot of false positives, because they are overly broad. Internal knowledge about token structure that would reduce this isn’t something companies give out willingly.
Related reading: https://begthequestion.info/
Also the complete lack of infrastructure to park and lock your bike. Sounds great - take your bike to the grocery store. Wonderful! Where are you going to park it? Where are you going to lock it? The problem is even worse with e-bikes since they're so much more valuable. A regular, recreational bicycle is less likely to be stolen but an e-bike? It's going to be gone!
How often would ChatGPT hit the exact API you expect with the exact request you need in 1 shot. People I know will still very often try 5 prompts before they get what they wanted from LLMs, that doesn't work in a Siri world (or its just as frustrating)
> tekla 10 minutes ago https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=tekla

> Only on HN will you see a recounting of a massive achievement of humankind dismissed offhandedly like this.

I'm not dismissing an achievement of humankind. I'm dismissing the PR piece they put out about it.

Do you struggle to see the distinction?
VPNs and Shadowsocks Named in Leaked Russian Blocking Document
To be clear I did not aim anything at you or your posts otherwise. Last I was on Mastodon, it was too much about taking a piss at Elon Musk and Twitter, and not a whole lot else going on. This is why this post got me meta-excited.
When you are hiring at those high rates quality goes out of the window. The companies were so big and growing fast that all external leaders would hire their loyalists. The hiring quality was dropping steadily and then dropped sharply. There were some well intentioned special hiring initiatives which were in theory supposed to preserve the same quality of hires, but in private the HR leaders responsible for the initiative would send everyone a private message saying "Wink wink, this hiring is for special initiative, please please keep that in mind". The thing is if you don't have immediate customer feedback and the company is not in survival mode, empire building just takes over. I have worked at multiple of big tech comapnies and all just daily remind of "Yes Minister"
That example is not thread-safe _behavior-wise_ under the GIL. The block is composed of several individual operations, and the interpreter can preempt a thread between any one of them.

On the other hand, it is safe from a memory-access perspective; the read from `self._next_id` will never dereference a partially-mutated invalid pointer or read a partially-mutated value.
I found it interesting to learn that possessive apostrophes are more or less an English language only thing. Possessive word endings ("Tomes pen") used to be a thing, but I guess got abbreviated so much (Tom's pen) they no longer exist.
In the long run the development of AI is far more significant than relatively minor skirmishes of American Imperialism.
> why the fuck does Google Assistant still exist if you have Bard???

Because an integrated smart home assistant is a different problem domain than a general purpose chatbot.

ChatGPT was a revolutionary technology that released less than a year ago and surprised the world with its capabilities. It’s going to take some time to integrate that technology into an ever-present integrated assistant that leverages your personal knowledge graph to take actions on your behalf, but they’re working on it.

And Assistant imo has a huge leg up because of the investment in software integrations made in the pre-LLM world. Meanwhile when I ask Siri to show me photos of myself, it does an image search of the web and returns pictures of the word “myself”
If you don't want to potentially cause people to get into serious trouble I would caution you to do anything that reveals the IP address or any other information about the participants. I've run a cam site (ww.com/camarades.com) for close to two decades and the privacy of your participants should be your very first and top concern.
Related:

John Richards, self-confessed pedant and founder of the Apostrophe Protection Society – obituary, 24 April 2021

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/obituaries/2021/04/24/john-richa...
Very stable. Libvirt is supported. So you can now use a GUI
[0] [1]

There's a few web control panels too if that's your thing.

I can't fault it. A bit rough round the edges and manual in some places but as expected. Has tackled everything I've thrown at it from Windows Servers to Linux, VPNs to Routers all very well.

You won't get the bells and whistles of an enterprise hypervisor, however for a Tier-2 hypervisor, it's smooth sailings.

[0] https://people.freebsd.org/~rodrigc/libvirt/virt-manager.htm...

[1] https://libvirt.org/drvbhyve.html
Zoning reform is a necessity but it won't resolve infrastructure problems extending to transport so quickly. Climate change (exacerbated through growing emissions) is a near-term problem.
I’m not sure what math you’re on, usually the metric is 1-2 months to match ownership.

I recently hired a small car for £20 a day. Not a special deal, that’s just the price. A week would make that £140. An old car would cost almost twice that in taxes. Then you have maintenance, insurance, MOT, and devaluation.
I wouldn't sweat no 4-year AI degree. If a person wanted to advance the theory and innovation within AI, they'd prob want a PhD.

But sounds like you're talking about becoming a practitioner who leverages AI.

The great part about new technology developments like what's happened with AI the past few years is that there is a small pool of people who have experience in the tech.

So if you invested the time to learn and build prototypes on your own, you'd be very attractive to any employer seeking to add the skillsets you practiced.
It isn't as dire as you suggest.

The language reference at https://docs.python.org/3/reference/index.html "describes the syntax and “core semantics” of the language.".

There has been a distinction between Python-the-language and CPython-the-implementation ever since JPython back in the 1990s. For example, reference counting is a CPython implementation details. The reference manual says only:

> Objects are never explicitly destroyed; however, when they become unreachable they may be garbage-collected. An implementation is allowed to postpone garbage collection or omit it altogether — it is a matter of implementation quality how garbage collection is implemented, as long as no objects are collected that are still reachable.

(Quoting https://docs.python.org/3/reference/datamodel.html )
Exactly. The data is "cooked." We are literally told to make the numbers work, or else.
Some mildly interesting information about Wizz Air's grounded planes
A "Linux interview" is in of itself a huge red flag

Only at a hyperscaler should any job description be "Linux" - otherwise you should be interviewing for solving business problems - the solution to which could include Linux (but probably should be at a much higher level of abstraction)
I love python.

But not entirely sure it’s as new as go or rust. Old isn’t bad.
Which adds salt to the wound because car traffic in denser areas is largely caused by the surrounding suburbs, as the locals can get to places by walking and transit, and often don't even have a car.
Racists/sexists such as yourself that try to erase the individual and pretend "being white and cis = powerful" are not really helping perceptions.
FWIW: the GitHub project description says “GPT-like”. It’s the title here that dropped the “like”.
There are a fair number of dissenters on this within the Democratic Party.
No problem.
There does seem to be quite a bit of good stuff these days, though it's not easy to get much engagement (I'm probably too dull).
Playing FF VI for the first time right now having wanted to play it for past two decade and loving it. Also played Earthbound for the first time earlier this year and agree with this sentiment. The music was also amazing
I figured as soon as I shared my own anecdote a bunch of others contradicting would follow. This perhaps makes it even more frustrating - I promise I enunciate well and don't verbally abuse the voice assistant!
I'm glad wifi exists. It's very useful. It isn't always 100% reliable, but I don't really expect it to be. I have 7 wifi routers around my property for different uses. 5 of them are for IoT devices so they can live on their own network. 2 of the wifi routers are for my family's personal devices.

But every computer I use other than my laptops are wired with cat6 or better. I even run an ethernet line all the way out to the separated garage because I have a backup computer out there.

Ethernet is great, but wifi is also pretty great, they each have their use cases.
Lights that take a long time to warm up are more about establishing an arc or gas temperature for full operation. They still respond to power fluctuations more quickly than the time it takes them to warm up.

E.g. I have both fluorescent and HID lamps with this characteristic; they take a couple minutes to reach full brightness, but still will dim when a big load kicks on and turn off immediately when I flip the switch.
Nice design work on Urlbox
That's helpful that that's explicitly documented as such then, rather than just a "lol GIL" implementation detail that people have been able to take advantage of since forever— not carrying a documented guarantee like that over into GIL-less python's stdlib would be a nightmare.
Heavily disagree with that humans aren’t meant to live on top of each other. We are a tribal species. We all slept together in caves, huddled under the same furs, building housing that expands to fit all our elderly and our young under the same roof. But we were also meant to roam, our toddlers literally run nonstop. We’re not built to yield to concrete paths bearing metal beasts. The issue is that our children cannot play tag wherever they please out in the open, under the watchful eye of a community to make sure Bob doesn’t pull Sally’s pigtails again. The community cannot keep an eye out for SUVs whose sightlines seemed design to hit children.
FYI, it listens.
Money, brains, and a perceived existential threat from the Soviet Union.
Why was that flagged?

It's real. The Internet Archive captured this page.[1] First seen September 16, 2023, and archived several times.

This isn't some tiny company. CMG is the Cox Media Group, a major owner of TV stations, radio stations, and newspapers. They also do direct mail. Their innovation was to combine all their media into a unified marketing machine, which began in 2009.[2]

Their pitch:

Active Listening can make that happen for you! We know this sounds like something from the future, but we are there! We can customize your campaign to listen for any keywords/targets relevant to your business. Here is how we do it:

Create Personas: We create buyer personas by uploading past client data into the platform.

Identify Keywords: We identify top performing keywords relative to the type of customer you are looking for.

Tracking: We set up tracking via pixel placed on your site, so we can track your ROI in real time.

Listening: Active Listening begins and is analyzed via AI to detect pertinent conversations via smartphones, smart tvs and other devices.

Analysis: As qualified consumers are detected, a 360 analysis via AI on past behaviors of each potential customer occurs.

Create a List: With the audience information gathered, an encrypted evergreen audience list is created.

Re-targeting: We use the list to target your advertising via many different platforms ...

This needs more publicity.

[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20230927000839/https://www.cmglo...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cox_Media_Group
This is what bothers me about all of this "investment" into AI now. Is it the same thing? Just purely CEO performance art to mollify stupid and uncreative Investment Banking analysts so they can fill in the cell in their spreadsheet that makes stock price go up? "Yes. Mister Johnson at Goldman, we, also have an AI strategy for 2024, very similar to BigCoXyz who you also model..."

It seems that companies don't have to do anything anymore--they just have to spin a story for Wall Street and make sure they lap it up.
And what about PEPs, which describe (in pretty good detail) what changes will be made?
I'd love to understand what you are trying to say.
The only share links you need
Open Letter from Richard Dawkins to Ayaan Hirsi-Ali
>I see nothing combative here, and nobody is forcing you to write replies you don’t want to. I disagree that simply making a naked claim is ‘reasoning’.

This is false. Read what you wrote:

>Actually you didn't provide any reasoning. You just made a statement without any supporting logic.

This is just rude. And you know it. You're just trolling now. I literally said not to post book links and you just did.

I'm ending this thread. I don't appreciate statements like this.
You see the same sort of resistance re: societies that recently emerged from more than a generation of government oppression. People have said with a straight face "why hasn't Haiti improved its lot? Its been more than 10 years since the US military forced them to finally pay off the debt[0] they owed France!"

I think if you're not already thinking about generational trauma, I'm really not sure how to convince you its a thing.

0. a debt for "stealing" slaves - that is freeing themselves - from the french. The debt demanded was, adjusted for inflation, more than the war debt demanded of Germany following WWI.
Which is also available as a poster: <https://angryflower.com/aposter.html>
I'm not well-versed in this area, but from what I've been reading, it doesn't look as if NATO simply acceded to Russia's demands- From the NYT in November of 2008:

"At a NATO meeting in Bucharest, Romania, in April, the United States failed to persuade NATO to offer the usual application process, known as a membership action plan, to Ukraine and Georgia. Instead, NATO leaders agreed that one day each country would join, without committing to a timetable."
(Edit: I haven't been able to find much to relate the failure to convince to an accession to Russian demands.)

I get what you're saying about being disinclined to accommodate after Russia's adventure in South Ossetia / Georgia in August of that year; the Nov 2008 article focused on the US push for NATO membership:

"The United States has started an unexpected diplomatic initiative in Europe, urging NATO allies to offer Georgia and Ukraine membership in the alliance without going through a lengthy process and fulfilling a long list of requirements, NATO diplomats said."

I need to take the time to find more unbiased information on the conflicts of the region over the past 15-20 years. It's complicated, with a lot of issues in play that seem to go back at least a century. My knee-jerk, scratching-the-surface opinion is that while I believe Russia is ruled by oligarchical mobsters headed by Putin, I can understand, if not sympathize with, their reaction as Western powers have established footholds in bordering countries.

Honest question, for I don't know the answer: If NATO had dissolved 30 some-odd years ago, and the US had fallen from a world to regional power (albeit with nuclear weapons), and then the Warsaw pact had established bases in Canada and Mexico, would outcomes be more or less stable?
If you're defining efficiency as energy required to travel a distance, then an electric bike that doesn't require effort from the rider is going to be way more efficient than walking or cycling.

That was one of the exercises I had when studying - calculate the energy intensity of various modes of transport. It turns out that if you calculate the whole energy requirements to get the extra food into someone's mouth that they'll want if they are walking or biking, then it's not much different to the amount of energy that would be used by just driving a car. Making food is energy-intensive, and the conversion efficiency into mechanical output by a working person is very low. In contrast, an electric motor and a battery can both be made extremely efficient.
My bike commute to work is almost exactly 10km. It's great, and often faster than driving would be.
Will Smith's memorable character in I, Robot: Can you compose a symphony? Can you turn a blank canvas into a masterpiece?

Sonny: Uh... yes?
> Fortunately we do have cheap, dense batteries that are being deployed on a massive scale with new solar.

I would not consider that cheap. I would not consider that highly efficient. It is a step in the right direction, but it's not enough

> The idea that we are not currently, today, deploying massive amounts of batteries everywhere with today's technology is just plain ignorance

Nowhere did I say we weren't. They just simply aren't good enough for our needs. We can't get there without this intermediate step - and it _is_ doing good and helping humanity. But we're simply not there and won't be for at least a decade.

> take Texas's grid, which is one of the few places where storage is allowed to compete on its own cost merits

You mean the Texas grid that keeps failing and sticking people with $1000 monthly power bills? Not a great example lol
Containers have been around for 15 years. They are not "newfangled" anymore.
I mean this is hacker news so I assume most people have at least an inkling of what’s happened to San Francisco since Covid hollowed out downtown.
Microsoft tweaks AI image generator over Disney dogs poster trend
Electric cars cost like double what a normal car costs, thus making sure only the wealthy can afford to drive one, while the plebs can get around in public transportation or whatever.
> flush out legacy employees and make room for hungry young workers

Super ageist attitude, my observation is many experienced engineers are the ones who would like to improve things. The "hungry" people you refer to are just as likely to be ladder climbing, job hopping, cutting corners for quick wins, and playing politics.
Lots of money, only landing two people in a foil can with very little additional payload capacity, and not staying very long.

Apollo cost something like $300 billion in 2023 dollars.

NASA's contract for the Starship landing is $2.9b. SLS development has been around $12b with a marginal cost of $4b per launch.

All together the Artemis program (SLS, Orion, Lunar Gateway Space Station, and Landers) is estimated to cost around $93b through 2025.

The Apollo LEM had a payload capacity in the neighborhood of 1T. The Starship Lunar Lander is supposed to handle 100T+
I assume they mean the first scene with Celes in South Figaro where she's being tortured. Rape isn't mentioned or even implied, in either Japanese or English, though.
I spent almost an entire year e-biking to work 7 miles and back 7 miles. I can tell you, all the issues you mentioned are correct.

I think, if we had dedicated bike lanes that were away from the main roads, at least we can address the safety issue. that would go a long way towards getting me back to commuting on an e-bike.

One more big issue for bikes is the cost of it. I've commuted almost 1100 miles on my ebike and already have had 3 flat tires! That's a cost of about 10 cents a mile which means that the cost of flat tires is twice as much as all my other bike commuting costs (depreciation and repairs). So, we also need to address the nails and screws on the paths issue. i think that would be greatly solved with increased bicycle adoption.
Colorblind Accessibility Manifesto
I can't wait to mandate tabs over spaces, haha :D.
It's WebRTC. It's all over the web and well implemented. What are you exact concerns? IP isn't GPS
Think more like 2400 or 9600 bps actually :)
Counterpoint: "The JRPG label has always been othering[0]," by Kazuma Hashimoto[1]

[0]https://www.polygon.com/23677598/jrpg-label-history-othering...

[1]https://twitter.com/JusticeKazzy_
He warned about the military industrial complex swallowing up funds which could be better used for schools or to fulfill other public services.
That's fine and dandy, but that will still produce the core problem - increased traffic... which would make your 30min commute, a 2 hour commute. And "build more roads" has been proven to not ease traffic at all.

Meanwhile, even with issues with public transit - a 30 minute commute is still on average a 30 minute commute.
aitch
Ask HN: What are the most interesting takes on Generative AI you've come across?
We are tens of months into what looks like the AI age. (If you disagree, I'd love to see interesting takes on why that is). It is too early to tell how the landscape will evolve, because the landscape is vast and we do not know what parts are going to get terraformed. Would love to hear about interesting takes/predictions/uses that go beyond the usual breathless twitter/x listicles. Please do share!
> Yes, but not for contractors.

Sure, but it’s not like the consulting firms are paying their “contractors” more, they just siphon up the difference for their shareholders.
> building the future around cars of any kind is completely unsustainable

But it's potentially profitable in our highly financialized economy, and nothing else is.

> If we're serious about meeting the 2030 "halve our emissions" and 2050 "zero our emissions" goals, EVs will not get there

Their purpose is merely to rescue the coastal urban California real estate prices by displacing the pollution to a less wealthy geographical area. The rest is just marketing.

> I get that whole economies are built around producing/maintaining cars and related infra, but it was wildly disastrous.

Wrong. Whole economies are built around profit and that is what's disasterous.

> We're well into sunk cost fallacy territory here, like, on a species level.

You're wrong again to think we had a choice. Capitalism pits everyone against each other in ruthless pursuits of profit for the sake of survival and life meaning. It's more than economic gridlock; it's social gridlock.
And then people can hack into it (because it isn't that difficult), and you don't know your data/service is compromised because Amazon nor Ring discloses that to you.