skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Why did the transmission line require replacing the vehicle? I've replaced them on a cargo van...it was cheaper and easier than a pair of rear drum brakes, a normal piece of routine maintenance
Mac OS X in the Browser
I know you are sharing some interesting observations, but can we all stop talking about employees as the "fat" of companies and firing of employees as "culls".

> underperformers lying about to cull

is not just bad wording. By definition, there will always be underperformers. A profitable company only has "too many" employees if you think it has to pay a larger dividend to its owners / shareholders or that future growth is mandatory.

Why is it not fine when a company is more or less breaking even but paying good salaries to its employees?
As an amateur artist (oil painting), coder, and user of generative AI. I find people's rejection/revulsion of the use of generated images in art odd for several reasons:

- art has always been about taking existing images and ideas and tweaking them to make them your own. As Grayson Perry says "I believe in the Chinese whispers approach to art, I see something, copy it and then I make it a little better"

- very renowned artists such as Peter Doig use 'found images' i.e. a photo of people in a boat as the prime subjects in his paintings. Yet if I generate 100 images with my own prompts then that is somehow cheating?

- as the article says, artists have always used whatever tools they can find to make better art. If a trained random number generator helps me produce the image I want to produce then how is that any different?
K8s Simplification Video
No, it did make an impression on me he does constantly say something edgy or (an attempt at being) funny and then looks around for approval, that isn't there.

This is no surprise. Aside from his Twitter bubble, he's in a bubble even offline. Tesla presentations are full of people profiting off Tesla YouTube videos, selling investment "lessons", crypto bros, and fanboys.

They DO laugh at all his jokes. They DO clap at everything edgy he says. And so he, almost reasonably, believes the rest of the world is like that, and the mass media just hates him for dropping heavy truths with a hammer.

He's deluded.
You read my mind. I personally think that the length of copyright and patents in the USA is too long.

Length of time for copyright right now is life of the author plus 70. Which seems insane to me.

Length of time for a patent is 20 years now.
My perspective:

I was your everyday ordinary CRUD developer in 2020 with leading a few projects under my belt at mostly unknown companies who had two years of AWS experience and was 46 years old.

A recruiter from Amazon Retail reached out to me on LinkedIn about interviewing for a software engineering position.

At 46 years old there were a number of problems I saw with that “opportunity”:

- I hadn’t done a real coding interview ever and had no desire to spend a few months “grinding leetcode”

- I had no desire to have the thought of moving from my nice big house in the burbs of Atlanta that I just had built in 2016 to move to Seattle “after Covid lifted”

- I had no desire to uproot my life to work at Amazon knowing their reputation both from reading online and seeing what one of my best friends went through working in the finance department.

But we kept talking and she suggested I apply for a role at AWS Professional Services it would be fully remote and more inline with my experience.

I said sure why not? I got the job knowing from day one it wasn’t going to be a long term thing.

Long story short, I went in with a plan. It was my 8th job out of college and my sixth since 2008.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37969302

I made my money, got PIPed 3 years later, got a nice severance package and had a job in 3 weeks. Yes it pays about 20% less in total comp. But the lack of stress is well worth it.

If I had known things were going to turn out like they did:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37963988

I still would have worked for Amazon. It was just my 8th job out of nine and another method to exchange labor for money to support my addiction to food and shelter. Nothing more nothing less.
The University of California has all but dropped carbon offsets
Yeah, but advanced languages are also a problem for long-term maintainability.

Remember, Go was developed at Google - jokingly, while waiting for stuff to compile. They deal with tens of millions of lines of C++ written by thousands of engineers with varying skill levels and career paths. The advancedness of C++ did not reduce the compile times or readability of the code. At those scales you can't rely on being familiar with a particular section of code; you need to be able to drop in anywhere and know what's going on, without having to learn which subset of the advanced language they used for that particular feature.

Go is not advanced by design.
Certainly would've been less easy without large community contributions.
Not simple, but qualified majority, would be better than a single country being able to stop any process. The Polish Lithuanian Commonwealth learned this the hard way, where every Sejm member could veto any legislation, so the country stagnated until it was picked apart by neighbourds.
Using Common Lisp in Emacs
> profitable companies and making sure their customers were actually happy

These two are negatively correlated. Google and reddit and other companies were awesome and very user friendly when they had investors pouring in money and they could afford loss.

All the VC hate in HN is weird given we are in a platform owned by VC.
Taylor Swift is also a fun example as she refused to be on Spotify for some time because of “artists get paid pennies” reason. But then she signed some deal eventually to increase payouts basically for everyone. Now it’s been a while, and Spotify is way more used nowadays, so I’m not sure where the power balance is anymore.
There is no such thing as mass scanning. Because the cost of scaling anything digital is almost 0, every ability to break encryption or scan is mass by nature.
In terms of absolute numbers, pedestrian deaths are low (but increased a lot in the past 15 years), but in terms of percentage, trucks/SUVs have 25-45% increased fatality rate. https://www.reuters.com/world/us/tall-trucks-suvs-are-45-dea...
My video streaming wishlist for the next 3 to 5 years
I work in the video streaming space and curious on others thoughts. Here's my wishlist though

1. WebTransport and WebCodec becomes the primary means for client to server real-time video delivery (e.g. compositing, off-device analysis)

2. No more vendor lockin with WebRTC (WHIP and WHEP might help here). Build a solution once on the client and if I don't like my provider just change the endpoint URL.

3. Google MediaPipe or a high level API on the browser to run AI models easily for audio / video. Right now it seems like most solutions for simple things like blurring are just minor abstractions on top of MediaStreamTrackProcessor.

4. Optimized headless browser for cloud rendering. Too many terrible solutions at the moment using CEF and chrome that then use ffmpeg or gstreamer, XVFB and pulseaudio.

5. Plug and play pipelines in the cloud for video processing (like zapier for video). I can plug in any processing I want in between the source and sink without a convulted mess of trying to push audio and video around to different apps either in network or across the internet.
I was looking into the state of that in the last week or so and I believe the answer is: not really, it's still generally recommended to use the LTS version (3) for projects targeting web/HTML5.
In some sense, a constant pressure from the lawmakers to compromise privacy is vital for encryption to evolve.

No law should be able to break into private messages, and so I think CSAR should be passed, because as a consequence, new encryption schemes would be developed to counter it.
While I'm generally in favour of sampling and remix culture,

> The Winston's (the famous amen break) were also happy the track got such wide acceptance.

I wouldn't say that was the case:

> Neither he nor Coleman received royalties for the break, and Spencer was not aware of its use until 1996, when an executive contacted him asking for the master tape.[3] He was unable to take legal action, as the statute of limitations for copyright infringement is three years in the US.[1]

> Spencer condemned the sampling as plagiarism and said he "felt ripped off and raped".[2] He said in 2011: "[Coleman's] heart and soul went into that drum break. Now these guys copy and paste it and make millions."[3] However, in 2015, he said: "It's not the worst thing that can happen to you. I'm a black man in America and the fact that someone wants to use something I created – that's flattering."[2]

> Coleman died homeless and destitute in 2006.[2] Spencer said it was unlikely he was aware of the impact he had made on music. In 2015, a GoFundMe campaign set up for Spencer by the British DJs Martyn Webster and Steve Theobald raised £24,000 (US$37,000).[2] Spencer died in 2020.[9]

It's actually one of the greater travesties of modern culture, I think. The amen break is a fundamental part of today's musical culture, but its creators received no compensation and did not benefit from it. The one financial contribution that occurred was of no use to the break's creator -- as they were dead -- and its recipient died a few years later.

In any case, this is going to get much worse in the years to come. I'm very much in favour of AI being able to train on our societal output, but it's also extremely likely to worsen existing inequities. We're going to need to dramatically shift how society functions to accommodate this new reality, and it's not something you can solve with royalties or a training fee. When everyone can create, what will happen to the existing market of creators?
Learn! You aren't hiring people to learn. They must know everything they will ever need on day 1. (Forget what it says about your company - you only do things that people at other companies have been doing for years...)

I once got rejected because my solution to an interview question didn't use recursion. I had spent the previous 5 years doing embedded work on hardware where stack overflow was a real possibility - we had a real aversion to recursion if we could avoid it.
I love my ecobee.

However with switches I go hard opposite. Reproduction push buttons, with antique brass plates acquired at auction.

The downside is perhaps that when someone encounters them for the first time, they spend 10 minutes flipping them on and off.

I would however install in a moment motorized blinds like you describe.
Thanks for clarifying! I use `git grep -IPn --color=always --recurse-submodules` many times a day, every day. I hasn't yet let me down, but I don't search for unicode when working on source code. I do use regex though, using the -P switch.
The 1st amendment only exists because it’s an ideal which many Americans value.

It doesn’t matter if “well it’s not technically illegal because it’s not the government”, people don’t like censorship either way.

If your only defense of [corp/group] is that “well technically their suppression isn’t against the law” you’re probably on the wrong side.
This is terrible advice LOL.
> The first amendment prevents censorship, by the US government

How would lawsuits work without the government being involved?
invented at ge
Great to see another release from the Godot team. I've been using Godot 4 a lot over the past few months and it has always been a joy.
The reason behind Sam Altman's ouster leaves OpenAI staff uneasy after his retur
I love that a ripgrep article has such a deeply nerdy coffee thread…

> Add one or a few drops of water to your roasted coffee beans

Ah, RDT (Ross Droplet Technique)[0].

A little atomizer (“spritz” bottle) of plain water serves well here. NB: this is for single-dose grinding - e.g. measuring a small amount of beans loaded into a grinder to grind immediately. If you have a grinder with a “big” hopper on top that has (e.g.) the weeks worth of coffee (even though you grind on-demand for ea. espresso/french press/aeropress/pourover/drip/…) this isn’t for you.

[0] https://thebasicbarista.com/en-us/blogs/topics/how-rdt-broke...
I'd be totally happy with C or C++ here if the attitude to type checking was "you've done weird things so you're on your own, be careful". Things like mutating a vtable could be fair game, just do it carefully.

However that's not the setup. C++ in particular, and increasingly C copying from it, optimises assuming you never do anything weird with pointers. This makes application code that doesn't do such things faster in a separate compilation world. It makes system code that does do such things undefined, forcing either compiler flags (fno-strict-aliasing and friends, aka writing in a different language that looks like the nominal one) or taking care around separate compilation to make sure the compiler never sees both sides of the boundary at the same time.
It is surprising behavior, because if the code can be accessed inside the scope, it is safe to assume that any modification to it will change the state, since it is still inside closure. If they throw `s++` with accessing undefined variable error, it will be much better. It'll be better if they can catch it during compile / validating / linting level.

And yes, PHP's behavior is surprising too. Unless we're doing scratch PHP without any classes or frameworks, any temporary variables become non-intuitive.
If you told them clearly about the behaviors and you need to start a PIP, I assume you took a few weeks to tell them and waited at least a few more weeks until you started the PIP, and if the behavior kept going for all this time, again, I can't see how the PIP will help anything other than being "this is what we do before we fire someone".
They already did in some domains, for example AlphaGo's move 37. The article's author is coping hard.
I wouldn't want to catch any of Adobe's figma
"-fsanitize=undefined" helps uncover this kind of UB and more. While you're there, pile on with ASan: "-fsanitize=address,undefined".
Microsoft Paint's OpenAI-powered 'Cocreator' image generator is here
I disagree, this is not some junior manager drinking the company cool aid. They are a middle manager with hundreds of indirect reports - in HR, no less - fully aware of what they're doing and with a metric to hit.

So they lined up potential candidates, made them the same deal and tested their level of docility and loyalty to himself. Some of the candidates demurred and they got the boot, the author played the loyalty game and then "backstabbed" his superior and screwed the stats.
Why does every distro mount USB mass storage devices differently? "/run/media" vs "/media/" vs "/mnt/"
If that's how much he earns, I'm not sure his point does stand.

If he's making $350k from Spotify, I'm guessing he makes about that much from all the other streaming services combined. $700k in income from what is essentially an advertisement for your tours and merch feels like a pretty good deal.
It's maybe hard to fathom for individualists, but it's probably humans that are quite mediocre on average. These AI models simply represent that.

And on the value of generative AI, the same argument against new trends has been made on previous inventions. For decades, a typewriter was still more practical than using a word processor on a computer. For more than a decade, calls and SMS were more practical than online messengers and forums.
Did it, though? Apparently you can buy i586-on-a-SoC boards, they seem to be quite popular in the retro/vintage gaming community.
The Model is blackmailing the Board? It got addicted to Reddit and HN posts and when not feed more...gets really angry...
The article and excerpt are about the AI systems that do actually exist, not the ones that might someday exist.
140km/h is automatically reckless driving in many states like VA. In only 15 out of 50 states can you hit 140kph without doing 17+ mph over the speed limit.

Also, if all you’re doing is speeding down interstates all day what’s the point? Might as well just fly.
PIP Plan

ATM Machine

PIN Number

Is there a term for these sorts of things?
Top 10 summer movies 1982-1989 - 25% are sequels. In the 2010's that ticked to over 50%[1]

This is way beyond AI. Culture just repeats itself, from movies to fashion to music. In case anyone was wondering - in the never ending loop between oversized baggy jeans and skinny jeans, we are right at the very end of the baggy era, looping back to skinny in a year or 2

So is this article complaining that instead of looping between baggy and skinny we should all be wearing silver spandex space suits? I guess thats true, but also Im good with just jeans personally

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/05/24/business/medi...
They may be geniuses, but some - mainly Ken Thompson - are also luddites, eschewing things like syntax highlighting. I mean they have a point - if you need colors to make your code readable, your code isn't readable.

But yeah, I love how everything is well thought out and they just say "no" a lot.
Have we completely decided as a culture that "inception", which once meant "beginning", now means "recursion"?

I liked to think that words had meaning.
> we tend to forget the "Unix" precursor of Linux comes from the data centre server world.

Indeed. When I first encountered Unix back in the Dark Ages, not only was it common to be working on the same machine with a dozen other people simultaneously, we also had an environment where many programs were hosted on NFS filesystems, and we would have paths like /usr/nfs/alpha-dec-osf1 for Alpha binaries, /usr/nfs/decstation-ultrix for MIPS binaries, /usr/nfs/sparc-sun-solaris, etc. You would make sure your profile scripts included the right architecture path.

Even modern UNIXes (like Darwin/MacOS) include write(1), if you want to start a chat with someone else logged into your MacBook, I suppose.
Perceptions of Hybrid War in Russia
I've been unable to find an instance of the European Parliament vetoing legislation
Yes, we're trying to go this way! As far as I know RunwayML and Pika don't have APIs but we will try to find other ways.
I'm not talking about Native Americans. I'm talking about this https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mexican%E2%80%93American_War

Are the people who are descendants of the Mexican citizens who survived the ordeal and now are US citizens better off than current Mexican citizens or not?

As for Poland and Baltic states it has nothing to do with any principles. It's about US weakening Russia. If US didn't have a business in that those countries would have zero support for their aspirations for independence. And they wouldn't be better off under the Russian rule because I'm not claiming it's always the case just it's sometimes the case. And only when you are subdued by more civisationally advanced country.
> If you walked away during the Pivot or anytime before you had your investment before it was there for you, you would lose it all. And I'm not talking a little bit of money. I'm talking: I had a couple hundred thousand dollars coming to me.

What exactly are people in HR doing to warrant getting over $200k in stock grants? Even spread over an entire vesting schedule (and it's not, it's just the final vest) that's ludicrous for the work they do.
From the employee's perspective, this is a pretty terrible idea in many places, including some in the EU (depending on the company's and subsidiaries' jurisdiction, it might be a terrible idea for them too)

If you try this sort of thing in Australia, you violate the Alienation of Personal Services Income Act 2000, and will be in a world of pain. Many other countries (including e.g. many post-2004 EU members) have similar laws against "stealth" employment, enforced with varying degrees of eagerness and effectiveness, as common in that region.

If you're only serving a single client, you're usually not a contractor. If you pretend to be, and if the tax office ever decides to scrutinize what you do, chances are they'll tear you a new one. Insist on having an "employer of record" that does things by the book, and knows local regulations, tax codes, and mandatory insurances.
Ghouls Using Answer Set Programming
This is a gem; thank you.
Semi off-topic, I've coded a ncurses-frontend to navigate and filter grep-like results which might be of interest to some of you: https://github.com/gquere/ngp2
grep is a general purpose tool for searching for text in all types of files, baked into the standards for UNIX. Some programmers use it to search source code. Other people use it for other types of text searches that have nothing to do with source code, they rely on it in scripts, they don't use it as part of a text-based programmer UI, they rely on it to never crash, etc.

ripgrep is a specialist, opinionated tool, designed primarily to search through source code repositories.

There's not much you can add to general purpose text search to make it faster; you can make it use mmap() at the risk of it crashing on truncated files, you can reduce the expressiveness of regular expressions so they can be computed faster. You could throw out general support for all locales and charsets and hardcode support for only UTF-8 / UTF-16, but you shouldn't.
Yeah. I forgot this.

I also forgot how much she's liked in the middle aged, white male demographic, so I'm not likely to get much sympathy here on HN.
I've got my own opinions, as a musician, about Swift and her music, and in point of fact we are probably on the same page (despite me being that middle aged white guy that you stereotyped as liking her).

But man, does this take feel... whiney.
Ah, I was thinking more about hydrogen fuel cells and gaseous hydrogen (which I've seen discussed for the plane replacements) not cryogenic liquid hydrogen.
Google not being awesome has nothing to do with VC. They could be wildly profitable while continuing to innovate on product and providing excellent customer support. Instead they're wildly profitable while their dysfunctional organization is sending their product quality to shit.
Its a bit of a dance
Right, the LLM is more like the zip algorithm than the zip file. Yes, if you feed certain bits (the zip file) to the zip algorithm, you can get a copyrighted work out, but that means the zip file is violating, not the zip software.
The future of this is the same as what happened with PCs. The specificity will initially be thrown away, added back later as an accelerator, and eventually, brought back into the fold as an automatically used accelerator. It all comes full circle as optimizations, hinting, tiering, and heuristics.

AI will be used to select the net to automatically load. Nets will be cached, branch predicted etc.

The future of AI software and hardware doesn't yet support the scale we need for this type of generalized AI processor (think CPU but call it an AIPU.)

And no, GPUs aren't an AIPU, we can't even fit whole some of the largest models on these things without running them in pieces. They don't have a higher level language yet, like C, which would compile down to more specific actions after optimizations are borne (not PTX/LLVM/Cuda/OpenCL.)
> mediocre but quickly producible content swamped the market

I hear stuff like this all the time. It feels odd, given that pulp fiction dimeback "novels" exist for over a century. Some of these series run into several thousand issues, with authors expected to write a new novel each week.

The "mediocre but quickly producible content" has existed for ever, and it hasn't drowned out the "serious" novel market. Why should it now?
Mediocre ideas are a dime a dozen. Meanwhile to me at least it seems as if good ideas are increasingly rare.
It does have a meaning. It's a pop culture reference.