skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I really don’t understand why it’s taking so long to recognise Apple/Google as a monopoly.

I develop internal apps for small companies. Apple still forces each update - to an unlisted app - to go through a review process.

Google on the other hand have just told me they need to collect my address, phone number, and ID documents next year or they will delete my developer account.

I shouldn’t have to jump through hoops, wait weeks for reviews, and have my personal data collected & sold, because I distribute private software to people who use one of the two vendors that make up 99.99% of the market.

“Ohh it’s not a monopoly because your clients could just carry around a lenovo running linux instead of a mobile phone”. How is this argument still passing the bar?
IMHO Apple will thank EU for this because Digital Markets Act will save Apple from itself.

I'm a huge Apple fanboy and I'm happy with the walled garden HOWEVER Apple begun engaging in rent seeking and missing out on innovation and I really, really want Apple to succeed because they are the tech company that cares about user experience over false metrics like megapixels and screen to body ratio.

Apple's rent seeking on NFC already causes me bad user experience because when I'm not somewhere where Apple Pay is supported, I miss out on banking apps that support NFC.

Also, governments(UK, EU, USA - all of them) are eager to turn the tech companies into a police and there's a war in Europe and political turmoil all over the world where you and hundreds of millions are at risk of falling at the wrong side of the aggressive dominant political movements.

I'm sure Tim Cook and anybody at Apple wouldn't want to be the tech suppliers who helped governments to enforce policies that some time in the future might be viewed just as badly as the German policies around 1940s.
At this very moment, Apple might believe that they are on the right side of the history but what happens if Trump wins in a year? What happens if the far right in EU begins dominating the politics? They are angry and they want vengeance, they go after people all the time. Maybe Apple was able to say F.U. to the UK and said it will not implement spying into its iMessage&Facetime services and leave UK if they have to but can they do the same in USA for example? Can Apple say no to Trump admin and leave the US markets if they decide to ban encryption so they can hunt down the "enemies of the state" and "dry the swamp".

Very dangerous times, no company should be in position to become the police.
Our agent presumably got $23k for finding our house. But actually, she didn't find our house, we found it. (to be fair, it was outside of our self-avowed search criteria because we had to settle on a 3/1 when we wanted a 3/2).

But I suppose she got an easy sale. I'm not sure if she actually showed us any houses in person, or just showed us listings. She definitely had to spend a lot of time helping us sign the 150-or-whatever pages of the offer letter, going back and forth with the seller, etc.

But still, it was probably 5 hours of 'visible' work, so I'll be generous and say 20 hours total invested.

Had we spent 6 months showing us houses, she'd have invested a lot more. And, of course, not gotten a dime more out of us. So, you win some, you lose some.
It's a drop in the bucket and mostly symbolic, but my state recently passed one: https://wabikes.org/index.php/2023/04/26/electric-bike-rebat...
RC vehicles, balls with an eye bolt & string w/ a sling shot, and fish tape/poles were key things for the miles and miles of network cable I ran in a previous life.

To add on to the pull string.. if there is a remote chance you have to run a cable the same direction again in the future, try to leave a pull string in place when you pull all the cables initially.
Ask HN: What's the difficulty of a mid-career pivot from engineering to AI?
This may sound naive, but the lack of viable career paths/jobs that aren't lateral or backwards moves in electrical engineering/product after 12 years of work experience seem to be non existent in the present market, so I am reaching for other ideas.

I realize AI is the hot thing right now, however it also appears to have the importance and utility to create a phase shift (a lot like the internet) in how we work and interact in daily life.

Without any prior knowledge (outside of news and some dabbling with ChatGPT), is a mid career pivot to move into AI possible from technical but non-software roles? Would the VC backed firms even consider a resume that doesn't include extensive AI research from a 4 year school? What syllabus or resources would help move a career in that direction?

Thanks in advance.
It's true – your devices are listening to you
...according to an ad (now deleted) by CMG Local Solutions, reported in this Mastodon thread.
45% percent of households use wood as the main source of heating, electricity is 24%. https://www.ambito.com/uruguay/con-el-precio-la-lena-aumento...

And obviously this reduces the consumption of electricity, making it easier to cover the electricity needed with renewables.

Doesn't take anything away from it, it's still great that this is happening.
I wonder if she considered making "extensions that are a bit taller than the vertical distance of the hangers and then you could get even more stuff on one rack as you stagger the shorter and taller hangers.
This is next level at big tech where at one point the money seemed near infinite so nobody cared what was done. I remember seeing presentations from VPs and Directors which were totally misleading and just plain lying if you had any clue about the subject matter.
I can imagine the opposite.
Uhh... Win 2008 DCs as well I assume I should be grateful for, right? Right?
Open Source Projects should take inspiration from how companies pay people. There are some very good ideas in how companies distribute revenues and compensate individuals. We just need to take the best parts of this approach and blend them with our open-source principles, and we will have the best of both worlds.
I don't know... Possibly because your life circumstances made it that?

But hey! Talented people doing their best to break out of poverty is clearly a novel idea to you.
I've come to see this as a feature, not an issue (I accept this as my "punishment" for refusing to install Zoom's app, and instead use it through my browser). Frankly I don't care all that much about what people see on the other side of my webcam. They're universally crap quality anyway. If I really needed decent camera quality for a video call, I'd use my phone, and a dedicated video conferencing app.

(Sure, if you've specifically bought an external webcam so you can have high-quality video chats, that's another story. But I don't think all that many people do that.)

Outside of the webcam issue, I've never had any problems using any of the GSuite webapss with Firefox.
If that were true, you'd expect suburban houses to be more expensive than those in the city, but in reality it is generally the opposite. Here in Seattle, we watch the urban population grow in lockstep with the availability of new housing, year after year, while the cost of that housing continues to rise - much faster than the general rate of inflation. Simple economics suggests that city life must be very desirable, and that the urban population would be growing even faster if more housing were being built: therefore, some fraction of those people who end up in the suburbs are moving there not because it is their preference, but because wealthier people have outbid them for the more desirable city life. This is what people mean when they complain about gentrification.

You cannot be sure Americans actually want to live in suburbs when that is all that most of them have to choose from, and that is the case because American zoning codes adopted in the mid 20th century made it difficult to build much of anything else. Car dependency was created, by law; do not mistake it for revealed preference.
You're going to make the excuse that your company's accounting mess is because you founded it before the IRS existed?

Good... Luck with that.
I yell at Alexa when this happens: "NO ALEXA STOP! ALEXA STOP! BAD ALEXA!" and etc.

I like to think someone at Amazon is reviewing these recordings.
In Pakistan at least, sometimes you can donate to charity etc by texting a special number [1]. That subtracts some fixed amount from your prepaid mobile balance (which the vast majority of people use) or adds to your postpaid bill. I imagine its possible for some business to charge customers this way as well.

Then again, instant C2C and C2B digital payments using mobile phones is growing extremely fast in most of the global south.

[1] https://www.app.com.pk/national/pta-introduces-9999-sms-code...
site worked fine for me, but Im curious as to why 7 seconds without blinking and what significance of that is ?
You're not. Nothing about this system was designed for regular people, it was designed for media firms and Hollywood. It's absolutely archaic and the fact that the only update to it in broad terms has been the DMCA explains why it's such an unmitigated disaster.
Once again we parade the "it just predicts the next token" around as if it was some deep insight. The magic of it all is how it does it, which we don't quite now. There might be some world model involved, there might not be, who knows. All we know is that "predicting the next token" is a simple objective that requires a lot of complexity inside the black box to work as well as it does.
I think they imagined it would be used for well-known products that the user was already very comfortable with, where they already have done all their comparisons and are know the cost/benefit tradeoffs with.

I could imagine doing that myself, but the voice interface seemed so clumsy and a little scary that I never got over the hump of trying it. There are things that we would routinely buy on Amazon without any real comparison after the, for example, 10th time we've bought them -- but we still never buy them on Alexa.
The Rise of Autonomous AI Agents
To be honest I really liked Alexa with Ring. I know there's controversy with Ring, but it's just amazing how I can setup some cameras outside my home and then buy cheap alexa monitors to place around the house which show a camera preview whenever there's movement detected. In the past this would have required much more hardware that would have cost thousands.
Another riveting article from the geniuses at 404media
Yes that’s how it’s supposed to work. Supposed to, because as you’ve noticed there’s a long list of oom related patches in the kernel because it’s doesn’t always kill what it should kill !

Theory and practice unfortunately…
Fine tuning. You can autogenerate all kind of factual questions with one word answers based on these triplets.
Cool tell me more.
A friend last night floated a similar idea re: cutting off too fast - it'd be great to get sent a slo-mo of them blinking. I think you're totally right that it cuts too quickly and would gain a lot there.

In general I am very very quick to cut and I think that contributes both to the experience feeling worse and to some of the bugs (there are definitely bugs!). The blink detection is also super finicky - blinks are just really fast, and if I dial down the sensitivity it's super easy to miss obvious blinks entirely.

I'm glad this is resonating with some folks though. I wasn't sure before building it if it would, and this gives me a reason to iterate on and improve it :)
And yet skinny houses in dense neighborhoods are always scooped up the moment they hit the market in my area.
It would also be a lot closer to how we function as humans.
For the budget end: I have a Rad Runner, and it is great. I've ridden super high end e-mountain bikes, and, yes, they are better but not $5k better. I happily use my Rad bike to run errands covering 20-30 km, no problem. For the price, I'm not sure that you could do better.
I'd prefer to write extensions to my IDE using TypeScript rather than elisp, but my attempt in 2018 or so to move from emacs to vscode failed, despite there being extensions that made keymappings largely compatible.

Emacs has a much more focused UI than vscode. It's not obvious to me how to make all the extraneous things I'm not editing disappear.

The emacs-compatible extensions as far as I've seen still haven't been able to make switching files in vscode as fast and convenient as switching in emacs. I spend more time maintaining software than writing new code in a single file, so this is a noticeable slowdown.

VSCode doesn't feel as fast. I never fully investigated all the reasons. But I might make another attempt to move to it after it has a few more years to improve.
nurple said: "their creation is held behind legal walls in order to create, by definition, an artifical scarcity from which it derives its monetary value"

In my example "their creation" is a textbook, and "legal walls" would be copyright/DMCA.

There is also Getty/Universal Music/etc. attempting to enforce artificial scarcity in an area where real scarcity existed (in addition to plenty of artificial scarcity) but is beginning to be overcome.
And what has failing audits led to in the past?
The sustainable route for open source projects is individuals being paid by an company to implement functionality that the employer wants in a given project, and then being obligated under the license to share those changes. Those individuals could be employees of the company, or contractors, including the person who wrote the software in the first place.
This won't crumple anything other than the most rigid/starchy of clothes.
Nobody is chopping down old growth forest to burn in electrical plants.

What happens is that combustible waste and young growth (especially the bits unusable by the lumber industry) get burned. This is a cylcle, not to be compared with coal or oil.

Yes, it's still polluting.
The other way to look at it is that the EU isn't in thrall to big tech companies and the world is lucky that there's somewhere that their power doesn't reach.

The US has many reasons NOT to limit the power of companies that employ Americans and help balance the trade deficit.
Who do you think pays for all of that?
"What, do you think we spent 10 grand on a fire extinguisher?"
I've always known that the mirror never lies.
More likely, the EU will demand that alternative stores be regulated and that override controls exist, precisely so that they can outlaw E2EE and block other apps they want to restrict.

The EU isn’t doing any of this to support some principle of end-user freedom. It’s all just a consequence of lobbying and politics. They aren’t going to do anything that reduces their own control.
Right'o! A relative of mine whose school was formerly an English Tudor mansion related to me a fire he witnessed, and it occurred to me that it would not be impossible for this to be the same event.
Life is a compromise. I'd love to own 100 square miles of land, with my front door on New Yorks Time's square. That isn't physically possible, but it is what I want in the ideal world. (I don't live near New York so I don't know if times square is really where in New York I'd want to live, but it is an iconic place that at least gives the sense of what I mean - you could pick downtown of most large cities). Cars enable more people to have both the benefit of rural life while also getting the benefits of the city.

This isn't unique to cars - trains could give the same, but we already have a road network.
I have been using ed for decades now, because it is the standard.
throwing money at the NYC subway seems to have a generally great track record (albeit one featuring less efficiency than throwing money at other global subway systems). NYC could not function without it.
> It is a metaphysical question, not a scientific question.

Well here I soundly agree with you. I believe that's what I was trying to communicate at the very start, when I said "those 'why' questions are exactly what math and science do not answer."

I suppose our difference relates to how we conceive of other kinds of "why" questions.

> Mathematics is constantly proving things true.

Also agreed with you there. That's one key difference between math and science, in my mind. For that reason, I suppose I'd put theoretical physics more in the "math" realm than the "science" realm, at least w/respect to the theorem you mention, and similar.

Small aside: thank you for the tenacious-but-respectful discussion — I always worry when a thread goes 3+ replies deep that it'll just become an angsty flamewar, so it's nice to have a counterexample in my training set (:
Well that's not actually how it works - they are just getting a model (WikiSP & EntityLinker) to write a query that responds with the fact from Wikidata. Did you read the post or just the headline?

Besides, let's not forget that humans are also trained on language data, and although humans can also be wrong, if a human memorised all of Wikidata (by reading sentences/facts in 'training data') it would be pretty good in a pub-quiz.

Also, we obviously can't see anything inside how OpenAI train GPT, but I wouldn't be surprised if sources with a higher authority (e.g. wikidata) can be given a higher weight in the training data, and also if sources such as wikidata could be used with reinforcement learning to ensure that answers within the dataset are 'correctly' answered without hallucination.
Wood is the main source with a margin: https://www.ambito.com/uruguay/con-el-precio-la-lena-aumento...
If even discussing that some people may begin to prefer alternatives to cars in some situations is equivalent to a declaring war on cars, then I really underestimated how insecure the pro-car argument is.
I have 10Gbps between my home server and desktop. Is it overkill? Sure, but I do use my home server for networked storage in Lightroom etc so having it be even slightly faster is nice.
"all of them"

Works for me in response
This comment is not reflective of ground reality. Most of current workers (90% easily) at big tech, both US Citizens and Visa holders are far too removed from the hacker ethic and can't do more than using the company RPC framework to write boilerplate stuff. People act shocked when told about basic insights of computer science. Mind you I am talking about both low and high level engineers and management.
On top of the integrated support for this in Firefox as of recently (that a sibling mentions), Mozilla has offered an extension for this for quite a while now.
…why? My napkin math says a pair of observers, one at sea level and one on the top of a 14,000ft mountain, will drift by about 15 microseconds per year.

In other words, the approximation that time is not relative breaks down at this level of accuracy - there’s literally no value in trying to synchronize things this closely.
> What "green flag" questions do you like asking?

Though it wasn't a direct question i asked, i once turned down what would have otherwise been a dream job because the interviewer claimed that they worked at "an athletic pace." i.e. they ran like hell for too many hours per day. In my 20s that would have not bothered me, but i was close to 40 at the time and reaching the point where constant overtime was in no way appealing.
My guess is that money is fungible (as a concept, ignoring serial numbers on bills) and you can't prove the money lost to a casino is the same money stolen from those employers.
I agree, but as I said in the article, the first stage of the demo failed, and after some frantic attempts to tear down and rebuild the cluster, they gave up, moved on to later stage of the demo, and then came back to it.

Which is why it's incoherent and doesn't fit together.
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In this MVP, we have tried some techniques to elevate mood when something is bothering. Chatbot is powered by chatGPT, and we would be very happy to hear your comments on our product!
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If I had the funds I'd run all the training set (GPT4 used 13 trillion tokens) through a LLM to mine factual statements, then do reconciliation or even better, I'd save a summary description of the diverse results. In the end we'd end up with an universal KB. Even for controversial topics, it would at least model the distribution of opinions, and be able to confirm if a statement doesn't exist in the database.

Besides mining KB triplets I'd also use the LLM with contextual material to generate Wikipedia-style articles based off external references. It should write 1000x more articles covering all known names and concepts, creating trillions of synthetic tokens of high quality. This would be added to the pre-training stage.
The big benefit of LLMs is that speech to text isn't perfect, but Whisper is pretty good (still gets typos) but GPT 4 is able to understand what I meant to say even when they're multiple typos or completely the wrong word.
What can we learn from the cactus thieves
I can emphasize “feels”, but if you’ve ever parked a moderately expensive bike in a dense city center for a few hours you know the feeling. Especially if you’ve had a few stolen. If not the bike, the saddle. If not the saddle a wheel. If not the wheel the battery. Etc etc.
It’s all really annoying trying to get home not matter the insurance.

I had two strollers stolen from my backyard while at home last year… it’s kinda crazy over here!
Having an indexed database of facts not half-facts and half or untruths is the only way AI is ever going to be useful; and until it can fact check for itself these databases will need to be the training wheels.
Starting pay for cobol in finance was around 350k last time I glanced. Nobody wants to rewrite a working system which will likely be much more expensive than finding one person to maintain the project.
Setting aside that your opinion is not data, this is how you mentally entrain the future of society in a terrible moment in an unsustainable industrialization ramp.

What people want is incredibly malleable. To behave otherwise at a policy level is to enslave yourself to the lowest common denominator.
In the last part of the series from 2013 we have a chart that shows the Pentagon had spent over $10b modernizing their accounting systems (that was through 2013, no idea how much that number has grown.) I can't imagine anyone would miss a few million of that going to COBOL developers. The money scale for Pentagon projects is mind-boggling to me.
> I think the fallacy in your argument is that you're blaming contributors for noticing that they aren't being compensated for the work they've done, rather than blaming others for using that work

That's the exact opposite of what they are doing. They are blaming the users for expecting more than they should. They should expect nothing more than literally just the current version of the code, as is.
it does mean they're about "language" rather than knowledge

Language in part encodes knowledge.
You are getting the issue now. Energy reliance on political enemies is a big problem. I'd also be happy the day the Saudis are gone.

So yeah solar panels imports are also a big issue, I'm worried that China will close off the exports at some point.

As for nuclear, it's not as big of an issue as you think, most of the value is in the plant, there's lots of countries exporting the raw material which are not much related and storage is pretty easy. (Conditions may apply of course, some nuclear grids are much more dependent than others but it's possible to be relatively independent with it)

Fossil fuels are a diplomatic, environmental and economic issue, even if you don't care about the environment, three's lots of other downsides.
I'm using it for exactly the same things I used it to back then (99% kitchen stuff: timers, conversions and playing music, 1% setting the lights and asking for the weather), it's not as if I expect more now. But she has more issues understanding me.

Luckily I'll get my first rPi zero on Monday to experiment with replacing her.