skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I think this is a learnt skill. If you're not constantly engaging with new material, asking questions on what you're reading, learning with intent, then your brain isn't going to evolve from this baseline on its own randomly.

I say this as someone trying to move the needle towards this same thing.

Some days I am suprised at my motivation to learn new things, and questions I ask / relationships I form - much more so when i've been putting in time deliberarely practicing how I learn each day.
Ask HN: The story of Google competing with YouTube
Hi HN,

Are you familiar with the story of (failed) attempt of Google competing with YouTube? I vaguely recall seeing on Twitter a leaked email exchange where a PM wanted to hire "a Java guy" to be ready to compete with YouTube.

Are you familiar with that story? Any tips on finding this on Twitter? Is this something Grok is good at?
Reminder for those in the UK and Europe... this is illegal.

https://ico.org.uk/for-organisations/uk-gdpr-guidance-and-re...

> Article 22(1) of the UK GDPR limits the circumstances in which you can make solely automated decisions, including those based on profiling, that have a legal or similarly significant effect on individuals.

"legal or similarly significant effect on individuals" includes discrimination based on any protected characteristics.

AirBnB in any defence will have to prove that race, age, gender, sexuality, disability, etc were _not_ part of any automated decision.

As the article mentions that this is being deployed to the UK I have cited a UK specific article.
It's a metaphor.

But living beings aka people do operate the company and make the decisions.
Hmm, you seem to be well versed on the problems with over regulation but maybe AirBnB should push you towards stays with poor sanitary conditions so you can appreciate the benefits of regulations better. Part of the well rounded citizen program of course, first stop parties then stop the other troublemakers. How do you feel about that?
Other than being open source, and having cross-device sync at the free tier, I think Obsidian is superior. In fact, I simply put my Obsidian vault in a dropbox folder, and it effectively cross-device syncs quite well for me.
Yeah that's another issue. You're also dependent on the moderators on your instance being reasonable people and being fair to those using it.

But sadly that's gonna be a problem with instances of any size. If Twitter or Facebook or Instagram close your account, your data is probably just gone as well.
> I mean is it a gimmick

Yes, but no.

It's a gimmick because invariably it becomes over-used in some streaming TV shows as a "special effect", which breaks the immersion.

However, it's not a gimmick as used by hundreds of millions of people.

Something I noticed with the new HDR support in Adobe Lightroom is that proper HDR "simply works" by default, whereas it is actually SDR that takes a lot of manual "color grading" and general fiddling about with sliders to not look terrible.

HDR is essentially more faithfully representing the light as it is in reality, whereas SDR is a combination of aggressive tone mappings to make it "fit" into a tiny gamut.

I went back to look at some Nikon RAW[1] photos from as far back as 2013 and turned HDR mode on. Those photos instantly looked not just better, but more correct, as if I had spent an hour adjusting them in Lightroom!

This is why Apple iPhone photos just look better (on other iDevices!). They're not using AI magic[2] to colour grade them like a Lightroom professional, they're instead leaning on the HDR mode to simply show the photos accurately, without the need to aggressively tone map them.

This is why HDR photography is actually the vast majority of photography now, easily outnumbering professional photographers (and videographers). It's the path of low resistance to a good quality outcome, which makes it very attractive as a consumer image capture/display technology, especially mobile phones. The vast, vast majority of mobile phone users tap the shutter button, and will never adjust the colours, contrast, or any other image setting. It is HDR mode that enables this to "just work" and not result in photos that look like they were made with a potato.

[1] Most professional photographers and serious hobbyists shoot in RAW format, which has always been a "HDR" format in all but name, typically capturing about 12 bits per channel instead of the 8 bits typical of SDR.

[2] iPhones do actually use a lot of computation photography and AI magic, but the point is that for tone mapping and colour grading they need a lot less than they would have without HDR.
Countercultures of course exists, but the main question is whether there is a gradual erosion over time that makes them harder to establish
Yes, though a ‘visit from the police’ in the UK is not the same as an arrest. It can be to give a warning, or simply be to help the police with their inquiry. Certainly can be used as a threat though.
This feeling is connected to memory formation and the fading out and fading in of action potentials aka neuronal spikes. Little research so far.

I'm certain it's strongly connected to dopamine and serotonin (of fucking course) circuits and global receptor states and depending on intensity of the sensation and level of awareness of person probably linked to schizophrenia, paranoia and other fun stuff.

I can't remember the name of the study but I believe it was posted here on HN a short while ago. If anyone is in the mood or has it stored in memory or bookmarks, please provide. Thanks!
I was actually also impressed with the mobile app, one of the smoothest React Native-made app I used so far.
Sales is the gateway to money. Parent never said it wasn't important to build a great product, they said that even if you have the most amazing product if it doesn't sell there is no money coming in.

To your point, the goal of "trustworthiness" is to translate into more future sales.
Check out how perfectly integrated Android App support on mobile Linux can look
I felt this back in the late 90s after only a month in SE Asia. That authoritarian edge, with stern demands to conform-or-be-noticed, becomes really obvious when you spend some time out of the country.

I thought this was great writing with some very telling observations.

Then I got to the Subscribe Here part. I suppose it was inevitable and more credible than "Send me a fiver through the post and I'll send you home-printed and photocopied articles every month or so."

Cognitive dissonance, even so.

But is it even possible to have a disintermediated digital economy? Bitcoin was supposed to be that, and look at how quickly that aped[1] corporate ethics.

[1] Ha.
> PS: I'm kinda surprised that a shipped Unity game contains that much human-readable information for reverse engineering. Is there no symbol stripping in .NET?

I'm pretty sure Colossal Order (the developers of the game) purposefully makes the game easier to decompile (or at least doesn't employ methods to make it harder) as modding is a large part of the game's community. They want it to be easy to mod.
Tesla blamed drivers for failures of parts it long knew were defective
Whenever I see Electron, I say ‘thank you very much’ and ignore the project, obviously. Even VSCode, I cannot use it for that very reason.
Apple meets "you" Masimo (friend/acquaintance) and the employees ("girlfriend") then behind the back of the boyfriend asks out the girlfriend.
Accompanying blog post: https://blogs.gnome.org/jdressler/2023/12/20/a-dive-into-jol...

(Also apologies for mangling the post title - had to fit it in the length limit.)
> However, Python doesn’t have the compile-time check, because it’s an interpreted language that is dynamically-typed, which means its only real place to check is at runtime

Pet peeve: Python is compiled (into bytecode), so it could theoretically do checks at compile time. The "dynamically-typed" part is correct and is the real reason.
>especially with how easily theories of predeterminism tend to enable unproductive, nihilistic outlooks

That's an essential claim, not doubt. First, you're wrong that determinism is a synonym for predeterminism, science doesn't support it, because predeterminism contradicts the second law of thermodynamics. Next you're wrong that nihilism is bad. Is it a dogma? What if you're wrong? Especially since you know yourself your knowledge about nihilism is fragmentary and you spent only microscopic amount of effort to understand it and can't make grand conclusions about it. Then you also imply that delusion is somehow more constructive than truth. That's counterintuitive and needs proofs.
Mediocre compared to who?

I’m pretty sure the worst professional player in your local team could beat me and my whole five aside team by himself.

The skill gap between professional and good amateur is huge.
Can Anyone Stop Paris from Drowning?
Huh, Orthodoxy is very old and widespread. Ofc during Communism, it tended to be suppressed, but as a bedrock of the society, Orthodoxy definitely prevails in Serbia, Rumania, Bulgaria, Macedonia, Belarus and Russia at least.

Ukraine is more complicated, a nation sewn together from very different regions; Greek Catholics are an important minority, mostly present in the formerly Austro-Hungarian western part of the country, which also seems to be the most nationalist one.
I encourage the author to try any Korean city with CCTV on basically every corner, or a Japanese city where you're not allowed to do anything outside of pre-established rules.

Of course, the Western world is obsessed with "anti-terrorist acts" and similar nonsense, but there is plenty of space around that is still free from these obsessions
Agreed - my response was deliberately exaggerated simply to point out that the article wasn't claiming to cover the entire world
> People don't listen to me because I'm a good programmer, they listen to me because I'm a good writer.

I think this point extends beyond the idea of guarding ourselves while reading the contents of good writers; it's also about how we should approach our jobs. Being a good writer will most likely improve your skills in dealing with other people. As software developers, writing and communicating with others is crucial to our work.

I would also recommend beginners to write about the challenges they have encountered, their experiments, and their thought processes, among other things. If possible, they should write essays. This will prove to be a really useful skill later in their careers.
Commission designates second set of Very Large Online Platforms under the DSA
If you're in a position where you know you need a different allocator, and you have your own allocator, plugging it in should be relatively easy in comparison.
> No, that's not a problem. If there is demand -- any kind of demand -- whether it's for people's primary residence, a vacation home, or a short-term rental property, you build more.

In Spain, there was high demand for property prior to 2008. In areas in the UK, there was high demand for property across most of the country. Then credit became harder to get after the GFC, and suddenly the demand just wasn't there. In Spain, property prices in many area more than halved within a year. What happened? Suddenly everyone moved out? No, the demand was just demand from a different source.

Actual house price increases outstripped rent increases by multiples, but suddenly all of that demand to own just disappeared when the credit driven boom went bust (not everywhere).

There is often more to it that just build more.
Airbnb should be back to what it was at the beginning, a way to rent a room in your own house, everything else should be banned.

There's a shortage of housing everywhere, there's no place for Airbnb in such an environment.
> Airbnb brought in anti-party measures last NYE that saw thousands of people globally blocked from booking an entire home listing on the platform, including approximately 63,550 people in the United States, 13,200 in the UK, and 5,400 in Australia.

Generally speaking, unless you're in the EU, you won't be successful in suing a company that blocks you and doesn't provide a reason.
That is true, but cities themselves are very slow to regulate (and prevent) this.
That's the real difficulty with these systems. A decade or so ago Atlanta had the most surveillance cameras per capita in the western world but inevitably each time there was a crime near one, it would turn out that the video wasn't available. Sometimes because the cameras were broken and never fixed. Sometimes because the feeds aren't recorded and no one was watching them. Sometimes the recording equipment was broken. They had endless cameras everywhere but hardly anyone was watching them. It was another case of a government that loves new initiatives that lets them spend a bunch of capital but then doesn't allocate the required operating funds to keep things going.

Companies like Ring already use machine learning and related buzzwords to help filter doorbell camera feeds. That might be the big thing that these huge networks of government cameras in public areas need to meet their full potential (good or bad).
I agree all casual sport is good, and that physical sports are better than sedentary ones.
(Of course, since this is undefined behaviour - https://www.open-std.org/jtc1/sc22/wg14/www/docs/n1570.pdf , section 6.4.5 para 7 - literally any behaviour from any implementation is perfectly compliant.)
You don't need to store your data. It's already there in PI. Find the location and pass it to your descendants.
I think that Dell Computers was taken back private, and it's doing strong.

Not being beholden to show growth every quarter, no matter what long-term consequences it may have, should be liberating and beneficial.
Regular hard drives are storing data through magnetic voodoo. Which means they will lose charge and thus data over time. And time here is measured in decades, not centuries. In fact, regular hard drives are even worse than SSD. Though, it all depends on the specific devices, how you store and handle them. There are also dedicated archive-HDDs, which are supposed to hold a bit longer than normal HDDs, but even they only promise decades. In general, for Anything longer than 50 years, don't even think about HDDs and SSDs.
Also, by and large, they're just awful — Airbnb's across Europe is a game of chance if it's actually a nice flat or if it was someone who has divide a regular-sized residence into 3 very small rooms with plasterboard dividers.

I opt for hotels as much as I possibly can, but when travelling with a group or family, hotels are perceived as "anti-social," which I think is really the only thing keeping Airbnb alive at this stage — the social norms.

Apartment rentals on booking.com/hotels.com is, at least, a bit closer to what I want — but most are still tailored around the long-stay/corporate travellers... Airbnb does fill that niche well.
The finite-differencing time-domain method [1] (sometimes also called leap-frog [2]) is easy to implement and robust for scalar and electromagnetic waves. This other book by LeVeque [3] is a great introduction on finite-differencing methods for linear equations.

--

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Finite-difference_time-domain_...

[2] https://math.mit.edu/classes/18.086/2006/am53.pdf

[3] https://epubs.siam.org/doi/book/10.1137/1.9780898717839
> They're quite keen on account-walling everything.

They appear to have undone this, or at least they have in Europe (Go to threads.net, select “Use without profile”). It’s possible that it’s only in Europe, though, for DMA compliance.

Twitter also, for practical purposes, does this these days, by the way. If you go to a twitter profile, you’ll get either four random old tweets, or it will redirect you to a login page, apparently at random; if you go to a tweet it will show you the tweet, but no context or replies.
I agree that RAG doesn't have to be paired with vector search. Other types of search can work in some cases.

Where vector search excels is that it can encode a complex question as a vector and does a good job bringing back the top n results. Its not impossible to do some of this with keyword search (term expansion, stopwords and so forth). Vector search just makes it easy.

In the end, yes this is a better search system. And thinking about this step is a good point. I would go a step further and say it's also worth thinking about the RAG framework. Lots of examples use a OpenAI/Langchain/Chroma stack. But it's also worth evaluating RAG framework options. There might be frameworks that are easier to integrate and perform better for your use case.

Disclaimer: I am the author of txtai: https://github.com/neuml/txtai
I think the term they meant is "end-to-end encrypted" (e.g. the service has zero knowledge of your notes' content, only your own devices).

Then again, even popular services like CloudFlare use that term wrong, e.g. their setting where traffic is encrypted client-to-cloudflare and then separately cloudflare-to-server is called "end-to-end" in their dashboard.

Once technical terms become marketing points, you can expect them to be used for a whole new variety of meanings.
Yes, I meant pointer (and array) notation. To give a view examples of notation in other languages:

Modula-2, p: POINTER TO INTEGER

Nim, p: ref int

Odin: p: ^int

Go: p: *int
This is insanity, you still have a long and arduous process to design and test your changes. Software isn't a shortcut that bypasses the processes that lead to "legal and safe"
I would assume this is easily accomplished with minimal ai. The obvious demographic to target would include young adults, college students, urban dwellers, individuals with outgoing personalities, those who enjoy socializing, and people within certain professions like event planning or entertainment.

The psychographic target is also not some mystery advanced ai has to unravel… Individuals who relish social settings, finding joy in connections with others, often possess an adventurous spirit, embracing novelty and pursuing thrills. Typically extroverted, they thrive amidst lively atmospheres, delighting in music, dancing, and various forms of entertainment commonly found at gatherings. Prioritizing fun and relaxation, these individuals treasure parties as opportunities to unwind and savor life's pleasures. Some among them exhibit a willingness to take risks, drawn to experiences that provide an adrenaline rush and a sense of adventure.

With all this said, airbnb is literally attacking the majority of the user base that made airbnb what it is. Sounds like airbnb may need to rebrand to Auntie BnB and start charging micro-transactions for small thrills once their user base is thoroughly oppressed.
De-identification of clinical free text using natural language processing
The home page title has the word zero knowledge, I guess?

Their GitHub has slightly more info regarding this, but I agree that stuff like this should have at least a page dedicated for it that explains how they've implemented their security.

> Notesnook is a free (as in speech) & open-source note-taking app focused on user privacy & ease of use. To ensure zero knowledge principles, Notesnook encrypts everything on your device using XChaCha20-Poly1305 & Argon2.

https://github.com/streetwriters/notesnook
Ugly Bags of Mostly Water
Well it's public now with many analysts who presumably estimate it is worth something.
Pushing a software update is a big process, it's not some simple thing. There's a lot of process behind updating the software of a car where a bug could kill the occupants.

For what it's worth: the physical buttons being linked to certain functionality from the beginning is the whole point, and is the defining characteristic of "good usability".

When your buttons change arbitrarily, you will always require eyesight to identify the buttons, which is radically unsafe and creates a horrifying UX since regulators have not yet banned all touchscreen use while a vehicle is moving
Yeah, because it's tough to say no to free $$$.

Our elected leaders in charge of regulating this are often the ones directly profiting from Airbnbs and overinflated housing markets.

They often directly or through family and friends own several properties in desirable neighborhoods. So why would they?
It's everywhere, they clearly were on to something out there.
Just wait until this is deployed against people with the “wrong” political, religious, etc beliefs and tuned in a way that legally skirts the 1st Amendment.

Update: For the down-voters, my wife was banned from Airbnb for being from the “wrong” country despite her being a naturalized US citizen.
I am not sure if fancy airbnb holidays are necessarily the place where political movements are born or get amplified.
I’ve wondered how they deal with theft. But if you take a scooter and put it in a faraday cage now, in a year or two, will they will track them when you take it out?
It was very nice originally, when they sold themselves (at least in the EU) as a way to stay "at home", even share some time and meet the locals renting you their room, all for a fraction of what a hotel costs.

But soon enough they diverged from that into the "whole buildings bought by deep pocket owners to build apartments for Airbnb" thing that hurts neighborhoods and is a net negative for cities.

Also now with the big service fees they charge, I usually just prefer avoiding Airbnb altogether. Between their +80€ creeping up from nowhere after having chosen a place, and the "cleaning fee" (for nothing because owners will just clean a bit) that ends up being another +50€ or so, makes most places I see in Airbnb hardly competitive against hotels or proper tourism-approved apartments in other platforms.
And who is the source? Capitalism, the economic and political system? BS.

On Wikipedia, you can find that:

>Economic pressures of capitalism are driving the intensification of connection and monitoring [...]

Which is partly truism and partly straw-man. Truism because "Economic pressures" are "driving the intensification" of everything, yet we don't use terms [something]-capitalism anywhere else. And straw-man because capitalism is only one of many possible sources of economic pressure.

If all you want to is distinguish the source from state-actor surveillance then "for-profit surveillance" or even "surveillance marketing" are much more fitting terms.
I had a similar thought this morning.

Investigations into the reproducibility crisis and the golden standard of treatments in psychiatry - mixed with bis of the big pharma industrial complex, the psychology of the masses, the madness of crowds, economic nudging and the exploitation of peoples biases, fallacies and emotions - are imperative before "we" nail "AGI".
NASA gathered noise levels of the Moog S-250 aircraft this summer
Sadly, cannot compare. Notesnook is a decent product but Obsidian does everything better except for syncing. However, there's the Obsidian Git extension that completely solves the issue.

Obsidian all the way.
* Ninefox Gambit by Yoon Ha Lee

* The Color of Distance by Amy Thomson
I keep an eye on this app from time to time to see if they make their server self-hostable as they promised in 2022 but still no progress as shown in their road map. I understand the reasons that might make it less priority or even something that they wouldn't want. But at least it should be obvious. They rejected a a feature request for sync over webdav because they will make sync server self-hosted soon.
Explainable AI works, but only when we don't need it
From my extensive browsing of their website(/s… less than a minute… ) I couldn’t find their server/sync component being open sourced. I did see they open sourced all their clients though.