skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Backblaze Hard Drive Lifetime Annualized 2013-2023
a bit off topic, but do you know of any good resources on tuning battery life and CPU fan control for system76 laptop?
The Turing test lets the examiner have whatever conversation he wants with the machine. So the examiners can ask to solve math problems, recognise shapes, interpret poetry, perform whatever task. It doesn't matter either if the machine fails or succeeds at the task, it matters if it fails or succeeds in a way that is recognisably different from humans. And if some new task comes up that the machine has a hard time with, it is only natural that the examiners are going to ask that particular task. So yes it is completely allowed to move the goalpost in the Turing test, that's why it is a hard and interesting test to pass.
The challenge is that in America, it's hard to find fulfillment elsewhere when the middle class is disappearing, you're working so hard to make up for it, and constantly stressed about staying afloat (most Americans are not even floating). It's not some inherent "American mindset". It's the situation American is in.
Try the demo here, you record a video of yourself and it does voice cloning and a comparison:

https://seamless.metademolab.com/expressive/?utm_source=meta...
Pirx the pilot
Why Did NEPA Peak in 2016?
Meta's Seamless Models can't be used in Illinois or Texas
If you scroll down to the bottom, you see the following text:

"By checking this box, I understand this research model is not intended to be accessed by residents of, or those accessing the model from, Illinois or Texas"
I've been under the impression that putting the motor on the wheels increases gyroscopic forces which can cause handling problems.
Did you notice that the grand parent is promoting instant interruptions with remote meetings? You're talking about being able to ignore your coworkers requests easier.

Seems pretty contradictory, no?

I also do wonder what the real value of it ignoring live requests is. You personally get to stay on task but what about what's lost? If you block two or more people isn't it worse overall?
The article's description of the Aharonov–Bohm effect seems kinda misleading to me. It's not that particles are being affected by a field that's not there, it's that the particles are affected by the electromagnetic potential, which can be non-zero even though the field is zero (the two are related through some simple equations).
This is exactly the tradeoff, right?

By definition this is more efficient communication when you can ping someone irl, interrupt their flow, and get an immediate response.

And yes, it’s significantly worse for deep work.

In exchange for losing deep work, you no longer have to write a detailed thought to your PM, wait 5 hours for them to ping back “sounds good to me”, then begin working on it the next business day not feeling sure if they even read what you wrote.
Ego-Exo4D: A dataset for video learning and multimodal perception
Learning how to work with a CyberTruck door isn't the problem.

The problem is when it refuses to work. Say on electrical system or battery failure (and exhaustion), in cold weather, such as snow/ice build-up, and getting out in case of emergency.

The door literally can't open unless a few small motors spin the right amount with the right force. That's a ridiculous overcomplication for something as basic as opening a door. Existing Teslas already have this problem across all their models, and people HAVE gotten stuck in them during fires and crashes.

I don't think Tesla is learning, because this looks even worse.

Oh also... if someone decides to close the door while you're opening it, you'll be left with no fingers. Best. Design. Ever.
An auth layer for GPTs [video]
GPTAuth.app, a tool I developed to safeguard access to Custom GPTs.

Highlights:

Email-based authentication process.
Quick, unique code generation for accessing GPT.

Would love your thoughts and insights!
A psychological test to see how strongly the profile matches human emotional-cognition? Can we call it the Voight-Kampff Test?
Any more info about the watermarking? Only Meta can make the determination?

Edit: I can’t find the weights but if I’m reading the paper right anyone could train their own detector.
You're describing a legitimately hard problem faced by honest researchers. This case, it seems like we have enough evidence to suggest that we are not dealing with honest researchers, but rather deliberate fraud.
I like Ruby for my own projects because of how descriptive it is for when i come back to code later and need to understand what i did, and it requires possibly the fewest keystrokes of any modern language, which is a plus for my RSI hands.

But, for large projects I've learned I don't care for it. Not unless the project, and team working on the project, follow guidelines and conventions. Otherwise it will devolve into a mess, guaranteed. And too many rubyist are hesitant to simply use rubocop to enforce this at a PR or something similar. It's like most of them forgot about `rake` and just having a formatting or linting task.

But i digress. I like all these changes, but it's just me (i wouldn't use them on an actual open source project yet). So Matz is right to know the `end` may end ruby (seriously, my students just _hate_ it) but i'm more curious to see if the community will agree and follow along.

Also, endwise is a great extension to abstract away most those `end`s being typed anyway.
If you have strong opinions, you're dividing people. If you're Bezos, you've got a lot of influence. If you then dump them out of opportunism, you're ignoring any morality.
The Sword of Safetyism
Surfingkeys: Supercharged Vimium with JavaScript Support
This would require/requires a total overhaul of how the current academia works. E.g. PhD would be unattainable with that publication criteria. Tenure and funding criteria would have to be totally overhauled.

I'm all for the overhaul of course. But it's not fixable solely by publication criteria. In fact publishers benefit from poor quality. The publisher system makes no sense and is actively detrimtal to science and disseminating information.
Indeed. One could write a book on all the ways "DevEx" has stomped over "UserEx".
The issue with that is that manufacturers would obviously work to make sure their cars score super well against those specific objects. Would you be able to make sure it translates well to collisions against real life cars in real life situations? I'm not sure - usually when you start judging manufacturers on a certain metric they make sure to do well on that one metric at the cost of everything else.
I had pretty terrible results when I tried English -> Swahili I'm using the Huggingface M4T V2 spaces, it pretty much doesn't work most of the time and I just get English back with a different voice, Expressive on the other hand only has a few languages it seems.

It would be nice if they could layout what exactly is missing in terms of data to make a language work better, while the actual AI bit is out of reach for most of us maybe we could provide more data.

There is also a 60 sec limit and wonder if this is HuggingFace limitation or Seamless?
imho the "def" keyword saves it from being too ambiguous, since it's clearly defining a function/method.

def [functionname] = [body]

seems fine to me. The big flaw (that it can't tell the difference between the end of the body and the end of the statement line) would be the same with any token, I think.

From what I'm seeing, though, they should've made parentheses mandatory around [body] until they could fix the parser problem. They could easily make them optional in some hypothetical future where they've corrected the issue.

That said, it seems like C# wins at solving this problem, where the `=>` syntax is used for both lambdas and one-liner functions.
The duct tape parts are probably a fantastic moat in itself - ASML's institutional knowledge of where and how to apply such duct tape solutions might be the most difficult to replicate by another company.
I wonder if there is a more productive form of it that helps learn/practice difficult technologies in a short amount of time. Say a combo of Ray tracing in a weekend, a game with reinforcement learning etc that helps people learn disparate technologies that they may not be familiar with while staying grounded on practical yet difficult problems.

FWIW AoC is great and anything that keeps the core CS spirit going seems like a good thing!
The nature cure: how time outdoors transforms our memory, imagination and logic
We should call it "space"
I haven't noticed a difference since I first heard of the site. They may have corrected factual inaccuracies, but the overall organization and prioritization of information is not for me.
Not accounting loss in transmission lines over long distances and cost of building even-higher voltage lines than those already used in the normal grid that's optimized to serve consumers closest to power stations, else Africa would be powering most of Europe.
It's very impressive what simultaneous interpreters can do. They don't wait for the end of the sentence.
Can anyone help demystify the licensing?

Besides the ACCEPTABLE_USE_POLICY, there's a CC BY-NC 4.0 (NonCommercial) license, a 'SEAMLESS_LICENSE' (NonCommercial), but also an MIT license? It would seem these other licenses contradict the MIT license, could somebody help clarify how these all interact in practice?
NASA's 6-Pack of Mini-Satellites Ready for Their Moment in the Sun
I am 50+. I call people often and encourage people to call me without the typical hours long build up per chat "Hi", "Hi", "How are you?", "Good", "I have a question", "OK", "Can I call you?", "Yes", "Now?", Yes" and so on. I think remote work loses a lot of agility if you communicate only through chat.
I was going to comment that I took offense to calling table-based layout a hack in the first place. When tables went out of favor, and I saw many, many front end dev teams waste cumulative months of time creating a much less understandable web page fiddling with float nonsense all over the place, solely so "purists" could keep their religion in tact, I learned a valuable lesson. Joel Spolsky calls them "Architecture Astronauts" in a great blog post - the types of developers who forget that their job is to actually produce working software that does something well with the least amount of effort (architecture astronauts also gave us the ridiculousness of the first EJB spec, and stuff like the widely derided AbstractFactoryBuilderConstructor nonsense from Java). I feel like I've done a good job over time recognizing these architecture astronaut personalities and staying far away.
100% agreed. I've noticed major differences between companies that are deliberately organized to facilitate remote work, and companies that deep down wish they could convince people to RTO.

The difference is palpable in, for example, whether and how explicit norms around asynchronous communication are implemented, whether office budget is repurposed into services and materials that enable remote work (including, for example, company offsites), etc.

It's obvious that certain jobs require in-person presence, but I think the big reveal is that most white-collar jobs don't.
> Whenever I see...

LORDY, yes. The only solid "scientific" theory which Economists seem to have developed is the millenia-old one of predicting which "truths" each emperor / prince / nobleman / etc. will want to be told.
Scientific fraud robs the community twice: the first time by wasting research funds on fraud, the second time because experiments with the appearance of success funnel more dollars to them, taking away funding from other areas that might look less sexy but might have yielded a breakthrough of they'd been pursued. Grant issuers should insist on some form of end-to-end third-party data custodianship to prevent tampering with data during analysis. Seems better than the many billions of $ being wasted on fraud and subsequent missed opportunity.
I have so much respect for how Apple does things. The tight integration of hardware and software is not only better for the products and consumer experience, it also means higher margins for the company. There are not many companies that dare to take it so far. I was disappointed to hear that the baseband modem project has been killed off, but I suppose you've gotta pick your battles.
The mirrors and lasers are not the hard part, the secret sauce is the light source and getting the machines to perform at a level that makes them economically viable.
Yesterday I had to tell a couple of people in our extended team meeting: "guys, stop arguing via email over several days with 10 more people in copy, pick up the phone and clarify the problem in 10 minutes". This is not a sign that I am over 40 (I am), but I know a bit better what are the most efficient ways to communicate in different circumstances.

The people in that argument were located on 2 different continents 7 hours apart, that would be a non-issue if they were in on the same floor in the same building. This is not an argument for working in the office, just to adjust to the environment.
This is simply not true. Business exist as legal constructs and there are many things that are good for the business but bad for almost everyone else. Business also do not exist to serve users, whatever definition of user you might have.

Business, unfortunately, exist to serve their owners. In most cases (I'm talking primarily about larger companies, not <5 people micro-businesses) the owners want money, so everyone at the company is there in order to get the owner more money. Happiness of anyone else, let alone the users, is entirely irrelevant, unless it happens to correlate with revenue. The only other universal incentive inside a company is self-preservstion, so besides doing whatever makes money, decision-makers will also take their own job security into account when making decisions.

Employees won't leave, because the company will make sure they're happy enough. It's surprisingly easy to keep people working for evil and/or faceless organisations if you pay them well, make them feel like part of a "community", etc. (see any FAANG office for an in-depth catalogue of these HR tricks)

I agree that this is "poisonous" and that such a company "shouldn't exist anymore", but this is how companies work in practice. This is not a sign of any kind of decline, but of a mature and healthy business that can keep going for decades. Execs change, products change, even owners change, but the business remains.
Lari’s current project subverts that structure. The bamboo homes, which combine mud and limestone facades with inner bamboo skeletons or bamboo roofs, are designed to be copied and pasted across Pakistan and perhaps, beyond its borders. Her foundation’s free YouTube videos show how to build the homes.

https://www.youtube.com/@HeritageFoundationPakistan
Using AI to detect similar issues
I disagree. I can move through quite alot, quite well, when I can work in a deep flow. 2-4 hours of deep work can be incredibly productive end to end and we follow TDD pretty strictly, which lends itself well to really thinking about problems and their solutions in my experience thus far, but it requires the ability to really walk through a problem space.

Our code quality here has improved significantly around this, and we are shipping faster than ever.

That isn't to say I'm unavailable (or anyone else) its that there is an acceptance that not all things are urgent, and if they are, its warranted to break through any focus periods.
One downside I've encountered: some crosswalk buttons in Arlington VA make very loud robo-voice announcements about their status only after you've pressed them. Very good for the visually impaired, I assume, but irritating for me. And the signals are on a timer, so it doesn't help to press them.

Yeah, it's not much. In any other circumstance I press the dang button.
Auntie BEEB: The History of the BBC
Does it work on deno?
In the head-to-head comparison, what is the goal of the human talking to the judge? Are they trying to fool the judge into thinking they’re the AI? Or are they trying to make it easier for the judge to spot the AI?

Because this really matters. If you put me up against ChatGPT I’m going to talk briefly and informally, with lower case text. I’ll answer their questions succinctly without much elaboration. And I think most judges would then easily spot ChatGPT due to its formality and perfect grammar.

On the other hand, there are chat bots designed to pass the Turing test which speak informally and even ignore questions. They tend to fool people into thinking they’re a bored teenager.
Why do you doubt working conditions are better? What other jobs have you held? I try to compare this to other jobs I've done. Right now, I'm in a lull due to waiting on hardware I can use for a customer engagement to connect to their systems, so not a whole lot to do, and I'm here sitting on my couch with a warm cat in my lap, reading Hacker News, getting paid. I've got no specific hour-by-hour requirements. As long as I get done what needs to be done in a particular week, I can nap half the day for all anyone cares.

Previous job I was an Army officer in a tank unit. It's certainly not a bad job. National surveys consistently showed military officer as the second most respected profession behind medical doctors by the general American public. Camaderie is great. Sense of purpose is there. But the material work conditions? I regularly worked 100 hour weeks, got an hour or two of sleep a night, sometimes outdoors when it was -14 degrees, sometimes outdoors when it was 130 degrees (both Fahrenheit). Inhaling diesel fumes all the time. Doing ridiculous nonsense like carrying telephone poles up and down a bunch of hills at 1 AM for 20 km to earn the right to wear silver spurs on my boots on Fridays. Couldn't see my family for months at a time. Ended up with ten screws in my spine from all the bodily damage. You think stack ranking is bad in the tech industry? In the military, you have a hard deadline that puts you in a cohort where you're up for promotion, and depending on personnel requirements at the time, you either get one chance or two to get promoted, and you're out of a career otherwise. There is no other military you can apply to if you get laid off. People are fired if they get fat. Your boss is not only allowed to verbally abuse and publicly humiliate you, it's basically expected and normal as a motivational tactic.

It's very hard for me to imagine considering what I'm going through now to be bad working conditions.
> This research demo is not open to residents of, or those accessing the demo from, the States of Illinois or Texas.

Interesting mix.
Sure, and that's on the private funders to ensure they are getting what they pay for. Google pays for plenty of research--since they are the payee, it's their responsibility to ensure it's accuracy to whatever degree satisfies them. Institutions like the FDA are supposed to regulate private research when it comes to market (.i.e pharmaceuticals and the like). Whether or not the FDA and related agencies are effective is a different, but just as important question. Taxpayers desperately need a formal, funded system to verify the science they are paying for--particularly for biomedical research where the incentives for fraud are so high.
I have first hand experience with multiple businesses ranging from smaller software houses to tech teams in huge non-tech companies - resumes without a relevant 4-year degree are simply discarded. It's automatic. There is simply never such a dearth of applications that a 4-year degree stops being a feasible first-pass for pruning the numbers down (despite how many great candidates it throws away...).

In fact, it may be the opposite - that huge tech companies are more likely to drop that requirement.
My basic opinion is that there are really no great desktop operating systems currently being made anymore. Mac OS used to be it but started losing me after Snow Leopard to be completely honest.

I feel both desktop producing companies that actually matter (can run all the productivity apps I need to do my job) have put this space on the back burner for cloud (Microsoft) or consumer electronics (Apple).

No year has ever been the year of the Linux Desktop and all the Desktop stuff for Linux is too Linux specific to work well portably on FreeBSD.

All I can say is I hope Apple makes iPads able to run full development suites because the desktop appears to be dying a slow death in general.

Or, maybe I’m wrong (would love to be) and things start getting better again.
Why would distance from earth influence the speed of expansion of a distant galaxy?

Does that suggest that our awareness of the galactic bodies itself is somehow influencing them, as in the double-slit experiment?
> failed to authenticate. (access_token request returned 429 Too Many Requests)

Hope it's just a temporary issue!
Games have reached IP prestige parity with movies, music & books. Before they were perceived as some combination of ’geeky waste of time’ and ’unhealthy obsession’.
Oh for a time when haters had self-awareness and humor.
Are you in HEP?

I think that's actually a good thing. Makes publication metrics unusable (which is a good thing) and sidesteps many gaming strategies.
> In enterprise software, you cater exclusively to management, they will turn a blind eye to 99% of issues as long as the team is able to get the work done.

Again, you can exclusively cater to management, but you don’t have to. Look at Datadog. It’s a great product, but still ultimately purchased by management.
> How do you know we wouldn't be off even better with less alienation and exploitation?

Just because somebody is doing something that you personally can't imagine doing doesn't mean that they're exploited. "Exploitation" is how Asia was able to lift billions of people out of extreme poverty. A country of 99% subsidence farmers doesn't get antibiotics and electricity by tugging at their own bootstraps. They get it because they made their countries attractive places for capitalists to make a profit. Even leftists will suddenly acknowledge this when they blame socialists countries' lack of economic development solely on trade embargos.
You may have it backwards though. A book is around damn near forever and has potential to reach way more people than a TV show.
Perhaps. But if it's so obvious, won't it be an open-and-shut case?

It should be a big deal. We really don't want drug companies being able to skip to a position on effectiveness that is convenient for marketing reasons.

It's not like Pfizer are short of cash to defend themselves.

If it starts to become a money pit, then it means there's a knotty issue to be solved, and that's important to know about.
Also, between the lines there. Why was there a software bug that existed for a year, where was the checking. Researchers also do not care about any kind of software best practices, or the value of software. So it is all, fast and dirty hacks.
Google does not have a degree requirement. I'm having a hard time thinking of a tech company that has such a requirement.
If the world did work that way it would be nice, lol. I imagine such a proposal in the US would be met with "we're trying to destroy the EV industry!!!!"
Millions of new materials discovered with deep learning
Tldr: Breakthrough in application of machine learning with chemical science to generate novel materials.
the find solution rather than optimize nice
On the other hand, the collections (books, journals, etc.) of college libraries are typically vastly superior to those of public libraries.

I really miss the access now that I'm no longer in college.
The voice cloning worked pretty well for me. From english to spanish I noticed that the first few words sounded more like me than the last few words. Also it doesn't sound like how I speak in spanish but that's expected.
SVGs are, alas, also rectangular.