skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> There is no point to having a large backlog because the bigger the backlog, the higher the unvalidated assumptions, and the lower the chance that it creates any customer value. I have made too many mistakes assuming that something is valuable, when nobody cares about it. A large backlog should be looked at with an extremely high degree of skepticism, as the size of your backlog is inversely proportional to how often you talk to customers.

This needs a gigantic "YMMV, depends on the type of product and customer, etc" attached to it.

I used to be the PM for a large and complex set of developer tools. The only reason a very large backlog would be filled with unvalidated assumptions is if someone filled the backlog with unvalidated assumptions.

In my experience, a very large backlog can also be filled with validated assumptions, and the way one does this is by talking to more customers.

I can understand an early-stage product having things in the backlog that are unvalidated that probably came from ideation and spitballing sessions in the early stages of planning.

But I would strongly disagree with the premise that "Backlog size is inversely proportional" is a reliable rule of thumb.

I agree that it is critical to make sure the things a team is building provide actual value and will benefit real customers. I think this would be better framed as "Talking to customers is critical to ensure you're building the right things".
Wow, so not speaking up at the right moment is a bigger thing that I would have imagined. So you were the only one on the plane noticing a burst tyre during taxi out?
This is why you think ahead and price this in the market - so to speak. Take everyone’s advice lightly as they could be corrupted and make your own critical decisions
Thieves will remove the wire. Bet on it.
This only works if you can only get like half of the assembly in spares. Otherwise, all I have to do to undercut the literal manufacturer is find cheaper labor to assemble the final product.

I like capping the cost of the replacement parts, but you have to factor in the additional labor cost of individually packaging, inventorying, storing, and shipping pieces that are going to go to final assembly either as a kit, or bulked in such a way that a spare-parts shipper cannot just part them out efficiently. So the total cost, before shipping and tax, of a stack of replacement parts to fully rebuild widget X should cost more than the fully assembled thing, but should probably cost less than 2 or 3 widget Xs.
One of the reasons I never felt I had a place in academia was because of the publish or perish type culture; how can one ensure that their work will find novel discoveries worth publishing? It's hard to imagine staking my career on that bet and dealing with that level of pressure. Perhaps it turns out that people who did pursue that path aren't much better suited to it than I.
Entertaining to compare that 2007 mark (what I would have naively assumed) to the sibling comment talking about during Hurricane Sandy, which was ~5 years later and people still couldn't reasonably work from home. In many ways that was a lack of preparedness by IT departments, but to some degree it was also a lack of generally available and well developed services. Skype worked pretty well for phone calls in 2007, but it wasn't a MS product yet, so it would have been much more of an adventure to conference call a bunch of people for all hands meetings an the like.
Just use Cromite. Brave already proved they can't be trusted.
That question is for the investors to worry about, as long as the public and government aren't the ones footing the bill for compute.
Trezor security alert: Stay vigilant against a potential phishing attack
I believe much of the EU has done that. The US is going in a similar direction with FedNow, although at typical US pace.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OoJsPvmFixU&pp=ygUZc21hcnRlc...
It caused problems with dark mode for me. All sites displayed in light mode so I had to disable it.
By looking at it through a tinted glass, and noting down the apparent size of the core disk, then assume its a sphere, and calculate the diameter from that?
It took me several months to cancel. Once I found out it was a certified letter and I had to go wait at the post office I made https://byebyefitness.com
Thanks for your response. The IEP article is especially helpful.
Hard disagree. This sort of conspiratorial dismissal of plain evidence has been going on since at least the moon landings, probably since the dawn of time.

Ignoring the evidence of your eyes and ears is just part and parcel for members of political groups. It’s a bit silly to think that people actually believe these things due to logical reasoning when you look at the reasoning that’s gone into all the other things they believe. If not AI it would be “taken out of context” or crisis actors, or a hoax by the elite, or communists, or aliens, etc.
What kind of 'AI' is he talking about? The AGI kind? The Superintelligence kind? The chatbot which can't easily be ridiculed using esoteric word incantations kind?

I want one which can instantly calculate numberwang[0] and get it right every time

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6ofnDdi-vfw
Google Chrome V8 CVE-2024-0517 Out-of-Bounds Write Code Execution
> the history of technological development provides cause for optimism in the long run

I think it actually provides cause for pessimism: in the past those people had other kinds of jobs to move to. But this AI revolution makes it much harder to move to another job other than a menial one because a lot of the lower level office jobs are affected all at once. This creates a lot of downward pressure on fields that were already paying peanuts and where employers have realized they can now squeeze even further, either by cutting wages directly or by having more desperate entrants in the race to the bottom.

Going from agricultural work into technology was an improvement, going from office work to unskilled labor is a regression. Upward mobility is limited because there is less room there anyway and there too there will be more competition for fewer jobs.

So for the moment I don't really see the upside on a societal scale, even if for some individuals there are upsides.
No, the relevant pigouvian tax would be about the waste stream from products which aren't feasible to repair and which are trashed, and the environmental damage in producing and transporting replacements. When we all have microplastic _in our bodies_, and we're on a downward spiral of making ever cheaper, shorter-lived products, it seems really bewildering to hear someone claim there are no externalities.
The Introverts Have Taken over the US Economy
The amount of negative stories about Harvard lately tingles my information operation senses. It’s possible that because of name recognition, the average person is more likely to click on a headline with Harvard in it, which drives creation of more Harvard content, but it smells inorganic. How would we be able to tell if it was?
That's well and good but isn't the article about the impact of businesses going cashless? I talk to a lot of homeless and other low income people through some work I do and they generally have a Venmo card or something like that and don't have an issue with cashless transactions.
> People shouldn't have to work.

So if everyone decides to produce fee stuff then who is paying tax to fund all of it?
Besides what the other commenter said (Apple adds support for things like this with a long lead in front of the use-cases they really intend it for), everyone I've talked about it with loves spatial audio. There really is something compelling about music that sounds like it comes around you in the environment rather than just from inside your head.
> honestly, as long as DNA is used to confirm the suspect, I'm ok with it.

I'm not. This sequence of events should in no way meet the probable cause standard. "DNA face prediction" is not even remotely an exact science (and is realistically more artistic than scientific), so you have this barely-to-not-credible face image, and then you run it through the next snake oil of "facial recognition" which has so many issues, bugs, concerns, and failings, especially with minorities and so on, and you're okay with demanding whatever comes out of that is something that can be used to compel a DNA sample out of someone?!?

I don't know how much more vehemently I could oppose this.
Well, you may be waiting a while. Those "stages" models are fake news. Great myths have been built up around them, but they've never been validated. Anyone who works with grief can tell you, it won't work like that.
> average american has 6 months of savings for unemployment. I don’t think there’s any cause for optimism on that timeline

That's 6 months more than during the agricultural and industrial revolutions. The world isn't great, but it's getting better in the long run.
Yeah, people have hacked together all sorts of mod loaders for games, even on consoles from notorious companies like the Switch! See the botw modding community.

The only instance I can think of where the dev brought out the lawyers for such an act is Grand Theft Auto V, which is a somewhat understandable extreme case. I can't even imagine an indie dev doing it, for so many reasons.
I wonder if services like YouTube / Netflix / Spotify could work together to choke out / stifle the adoption of this or any new platform by deliberately choosing to not make their apps work on it
> A recent Bankrate survey shows basic monthly service fees range between $5 and $15. Beyond these steady fees, banks earn $4 to $5 each time people withdraw cash from an ATM or need services like getting cashier’s checks. Unexpected bills can result in overdraft fees of about $25 each time an account is overdrawn.

are there no free bank accounts in the US?

in the UK you can pay to be ripped off and have a "premium" bank account with added benefits such as crappy breakdown/mobile phone insurance

but most have a free bank account with no monthly fee

withdrawing from almost all ATMs is free (non-bank owned ones charge everyone, e.g. in an airport)

all but very large transfers (>£1 million) are free and instant

overdrafts are optional and it's difficult (but not impossible) to go overdrawn without one

and no overdraft means no credit check needed
I want to highlight an adjacent point: The Bank Secrecy act was established in 1970 and the $10k back then had the same buying power as $78k now. Its fucking bullshit that this law has not been repealed. With crazy inflation over the past few years $10k of cash is a fairly trivial sum. In SF, if you paid 2 months of rent in advance your landlord would have to go through extra acrutiny.
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I just pass a "diag" struct to functions that may need to return an error context. It was weird at first but then it dawned on me how much less friction I experienced being able to create error variants on the fly. There's also something to be said for seeing all (or most) of the relevant logic inline vs jumping around trying to make sense of separate definitions.
Energy production capacity in the US is relatively flat for the last couple of decades. The renewable installation is offsetting the decommission of coal. The capacity installed in China is not really accessible to Open AI due to recent security competition (both export restrictions on AI and a desire to import less energy). The capital costs of power are also quite high so I think he is pretty accurate considering the expectations of a startup to hockey stick.
Shouldn't you omit `-s` in the last one? I think you're just effectively testing an empty loop, since you're only actually creating the list in the setup phase.

On my machine, the tests that actually do work are:

$ python3 -m timeit -s 't = (1, 2, "a")' 'list(t)'
5000000 loops, best of 5: 44.8 nsec per loop
$ python3 -m timeit -s 't = (1, 2, "a")' '[*t]'
10000000 loops, best of 5: 22.9 nsec per loop
$ python3 -m timeit '[1, 2, "a"]'
10000000 loops, best of 5: 23.1 nsec per loop

...compared to the empty ones:

$ python3 -m timeit -s '[1, 2, "a"]'
50000000 loops, best of 5: 5.43 nsec per loop
$ python3 -m timeit ''
50000000 loops, best of 5: 5.8 nsec per loop

(11th gen Intel i7 laptop, Python 3.10.6)
Dumb guy question: why does the US government not offer all citizens a bank account? Is there some constitutional reason against it?
That's the Big Tech playbook: go towards technology so expensive to run that competition is impossible. Tech that cannot be replicated. And of course the main fuel is our work, our content.
And your government forces you to compete with the third world.
Given this, why doesn’t spaceX jack up its prices? I mean it could double them on these numbers and still be less than half the competition. I’m not into cult of Elon but he’s no fool. What else is going on here?
They've updated the documentation with the release and put out guide videos as well like this one https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MQejylcuAeU
That's what my 1960's JennAir does. It has two clocks you can set in addition to the one that tells time: one to turn on the oven at a prescribed time, and another to turn it off.
Status quo bias is pretty huge--though I admittedly was mostly remote by 2007. I did go in more for a while when I switched jobs in 2010 but I've effectively been fully remote for years.

But to my basic point, most office workers wouldn't have been able to effectively work remotely most of the time until somewhere between the late 90s and the mid 2000s or so no matter how questionable going to an office would have been as a matter of health policy.
>The FDIC calls people without a bank account “the unbanked.” People with a bank account but who primarily rely on alternative services such as check cashing outlets are called “the underbanked.”

>The next time you see a sign in a shop or restaurant window stating “No cash accepted,” you’re really looking at a business excluding many unbanked and underbanked people.

Speaking of the US, I would like to know how much overlap there is between businesses that don't accept cash and people who are unbanked or underbanked. My limited exposure to no-cash businesses suggests these establishments are not losing/excluding customers as these were not places that would be patronized by un/underbanked consumers. But I'm not confident where I live and where I have seen this practice is indicative of generalizations.
Because we don't live in a world with UBI, so we have to decide how to allocate finite resources. The alternative to using some arbitrary standard of commercial success is some other arbitrary standard (unless you introduce UBI).

If we want to optimize for enrichment of people's lives through art, "how many people are willing to pay for it" seems like the best proxy we have. Not to mention that people with some financial success will be less costly to subsidize.

Like, if I had to choose between subsidizing two musicians projected to make half of living wage and a single musician earning nothing, to me that's a pretty obvious choice. The musician earning nothing might be a true visionary who will be recognized in the future, but the odds are far more likely that the music they produce just doesn't hold much appeal.

Now, commercial success is of course not a perfect measure for "enrichment", but, again, what's the alternative? Currently it's some government body deciding, though this holds the quite elitist assumption that the taste of the art establishment is better.
Yeah, I've always been a suspicious of how extreme the difference is presented but actually working out the honest comparison seems like too much work.

You get similar from the "self driving" car people where they say "we are safer per mile than human drivers", but "self driving" systems have a wide array of rules limiting the use of the system in a wide number of conditions, specifically those conditions where most crashes happen. Then there are things like them reporting accident as being the result of the human driver if the system disconnected moments prior to a crash (my opinion here is that if a crash happens within 30 seconds of the driver being informed the self driving system is going to disengage it's the system's fault).
Only? That seems remarkable for this point in its lifecycle. It feels very much like there is still a product-market fit to be determined here and many app developers are likely still trying to determine how this new device fits with their product
Czech republic sets IPv4 end date
That's a definite risk. You really want to get a holistic understanding of customer's problem domain, where their pain is, plan for getting a pilot success and being able to parlay that to delivering much more value, etc.

What you don't want it one person going in, trying to play it as a salesperson, misunderstanding half of what is said, attaching too much weight to bikeshedding and random offhand remarks, not asking whys, almost mirroring everything customer says and promising to deliver it, etc.

Treating it as smarmy sales might be how an entrenched company that already has a semi-credible product can close some enterprise deals, but it's death for a startup that wants to understand the problems, and figure out a good solution they can build.
Why are businesses no longer accepting cash? What are the positives and negatives for businesses?

What are the positives and negatives of accepting cash for businesses? Other then 6 million people across the united states cannot buy from your shop.

I can guess at reasons for both but I do not run a business.
I can undersrand that he's not the worst.

I answered that here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39097051 and here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39097193
AC makes sense as a video game trying to be fun, but it can't at all be taken as some kind of system that could be used in reality. Having someone build you a house which takes thousands of hours in exchange for some foraged junk with minimal utility could never work.

Imagine if the Nook store was not just a void where items come and go infinitely but it was an actual market networked with other players. The value of most of the items in the game would drop to 0, the game would become significantly harder and less casual.

No one would exchange their gold nuggets for clumps of weeds, no matter how many weeds you offer.
I see lots of help wanted signs. 6 days should be be enough.
Data Science versus Econometrics
well... what we have an an LLM doesn't is state and feedback and restraint, a sense of time.

We have an internal state of some kind, an LLM cheats having a state by having every input be the entire conversation + one new input. making the context grow overtime making that state unsustainable.

The other thing an LLM is missing is proper feedback, it receives text chunk prompts and output text chunks. since it's output will never 'change the llm's internal state', it can not have a feedback loop. It can mimic one with the trick of refeeding messages as context, but that's untenable after a certain size input.

Another is restraint, we human's don't have to respond to everything. we can choose to ignore input entirely, leave people on read, etc... LLM's respond to each input regardless of it is appropriate, and they only respond to stimuli (maybe we do as well, just subtle real world effects).

last is a sense of time, which I don't see how the LLM can manage at all. It has no clock.

Give an LLM a rich state (okay, maybe rename it too), have it be 'always on', give it a camera and microphone feed for inputs, give it a robot arm to control (pass the output of that back into the model for feedback), give it a second brain to decided to talk or not, and give it a clock too... and what comes out would look leagues better than current AI.
The iPhone launched without an App Store at all, and it did just fine
Perhaps it is simply that our government is too small or incompetent to stop them?
Ahh, i get your confusion now:)

I was only responding to the quote that asked if they had insurance, not whether or not insurance would help in this case.
> i just have no idea how you begin to create a global system of "generic parts" beyond screws and bolts in a world of globalized supply chains, with specialized production in every country.

As the article points out, sometimes the spare parts are extremely simple things like bolts and screws, which should really be standardized across all industries.

Things like motors/switches and other simple electric components can also be (and should be) mostly standardized. It's only once you get to circuits and complex electronic boards that you will run into issues, because they can be custom.

Most consumer products aren't complicated, and if they are, they are only complicated because the company is trying to create huge markups and prevent people from repairing items.
> this AI revolution makes it much harder to move to another job other than a menial one because a lot of the lower level office jobs are affected all at once

If we automate away administration, there is a bonanza to be had. Every person would in essence be a start-up team. That's enough surplus to figure out a transition. I'm not optimistic about every political system finding the solution. But some will, and then it slowly spreads.
Yes there are free accounts. And yes there are accounts where you can get money from an ATM without paying a fee.

Like everything else, there are a multitude of experiences.

Some places have fees. Some don't. Some pay better interest than others. Some have better web options.

Source: I've never paid a fee and have had a checking and savings account for ~ 4 decades.
There’s plenty of free bank accounts. Almost every bank offers them, too, or they’re free with stuff that the “average” person would do (ie, have 2 direct deposits per month).

Overdrafts are another story, many bank accounts allow overdrafts and even do predatory things to increase the amount of overdraft fees. Bank of America got sued for this behavior.
I'm not sure how many of those are valid any more.
How about xvideos?
You must not have sales people where you work
In Germany, all banks have to offer you a girokonto regardless of your credit status or your occupancy - a basic account where you can deposit money, receive/send money and make payments from.
> Reality is more nuanced.

Indeed, which is why the actual policy that was adopted, as described in the article, is not what you describe. It is "the mission commander locks the hatch as soon as the Shuttle reaches orbit, and doesn't unlock it until deorbit prep". Whether to implement that at all on a particular mission appears to have been up to the mission commander, but if it was done, it was done that way, not the way you describe.

> the related rabbit hole is "How do you assure that commanders are maximally reliable?"

You put them through a much more rigorous screening process than payload specialists. The article explicitly draws this key distinction. Obviously no process is perfect, but the track record of the screening processes that are used for the things you mention is, AFAIK, extremely good. And, as the article notes, later on in the Shuttle program the process for screening payload specialists moved closer to the process that was already used for other crew members, and that had a positive effect.
> It works fine now […] many sites i visit have a "Deny All" button

That’s not fine. It’s anti-thetical to the very idea of the web. Accepting this shit as a compromise is exactly what we did with adblockers and that battle is still ongoing, and not solved. Whenever the greasy finger of corporations end up inside our browsers, whether it’s fingerprinting or meaningless consent screens, or tracking cookies/pixels/scripts, things are not dandy, imo. I don’t have a solution. Just saying.
The Decentralization of Davos Man, etc.
How KYC do?

Was 'homeless'. Bank say no bueno, could be terrorist. I can legally carry gun no problem without papers in bank though, lmao.
THAT is awesome. Good job my dude.