skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I think subscriptions are a "dark pattern" on the web. Often they start after a free trial with minimal knowledge. This could be one category of subscriptions that are not cancelled.

Personally on my projects I never auto-renew anything. If you find value you'll take the time to come back and pay again. I wish by default subscription services like Netflix would not charge you for months you don't use the service (I.e. if you never logged in once)

I know this probably won't happen because forgetting to cancel is good for the bottom line but if your company is truly customer obsessed, I don't know why you would charge your customers for a service they're not using at all.

Edit: Also, omitting the "cancel subscription" button from your website if it's that simple and instead redirecting users to call a number that's hard to find in your Help section is another "dark pattern" of subscriptions.
This is a very mechanic-ist way of looking at things.
This is why VPN and Squarespace/Wix ads are so pervasive on youtube: lots of ppl forgetting to cancel.
I’m curious as to why Rabbit has an ‘all sales are final’ returns policy. It doesn’t imply confidence in the product.
Similar to you, chargeback is a concern (triangle fraudsters using stolen credit cards and all). We're not the merchant, normally that's a brick and mortar retailer. In addition to chargeback Generally, I really hate the idea of seedy users exploiting the service and feel obligated to root that out.
Exactly. My cards have been getting replaced on average once a year, either due to expiry or some new security feature or whatever else. It would be a monumental pain to keep updating every online account, so I'm glad this feature exists.
Maybe abstractly, but if you were in the room designing them, killing humans wouldn't be one of the metrics. Rather, aesthetics, weight, sound, lifetime, etc. would.

The cheapest way to kill humans is drones with co2 canisters, a nail, and computer vision.
Seriously now, with all this information now available, shouldn't all the people that lied and rewrote statements be prosecuted for perjury?
I guarantee LLMs are a big piece of it. Not necessarily ChatGPT-like interfaces but instead dynamic interfaces/behavior that intuit what you want the device to do, especially on mobile where the user <> device interaction bandwidth is quite constrained.
Rich Hickey's glossary and decision matrix
Who’s saying we definitely have a way to do this? Very few. Nobody’s trying to prove that we definitely do right now.

But the “presumption” that we can’t is silly given our advancements
Of course it is. The overwhelming majority of the knowledge in the world is tacit and all the models are still limited largely to explicit knowledge in the form of text/audio/video, that's like 1% of the actual 'knowledge' in the world. Embodied AI is still in its infancy, that's why bus drivers have jobs.

The test for artificial general intelligence is simple. Literally every human job can and is being done by an artificial agent, all of us could stay home. The stock market value of every non-AI company goes to zero, Ai companies go to infinity. The currently most valuable AI company is worth about as much as Honda. The moment we can mass produce generally intelligent agents, we're not going to sit at 3% GDP growth and complain about the demographic crisis.

We should talk about artificial intelligence the way we talk about an artificial heart. What makes a successful artificial heart? You can literally replace an organic heart with it. What we have is metaphorical intelligence, not artificial intelligence.
There is still a bulk of our modern economy which relies on combustion engines and oil. You are out of touch with this reality if you think Nuclear is a quick replacement for anything but basic power generation. We are generations away from electrifying everything.
Ugh. I feel you, which is why I unfortunately had to hedge with l "Often one or two of the reviews...". I think the best way to handle that is to understand you'll have to separate wheat from chaff, period, that's just the price. The good news is, once you learn to ignore comments like that you don't really need to worry about it ever again.

Sucks to go through that learning period.
You could also argue that someone who was arrested, but never convicted, is even less likely to be a criminal.

After all, the not inconsiderable resources of the state were focused specifically on that person and their behavior, and the state determined that there wasn't enough evidence to even proceed with charges.

A person who has never been arrested has likely never had someone who is deeply incentivized to find wrongdoing look into their actions. It would seem that, logically, we should look most suspiciously at those who have never been arrested!

This is of course a naive view of the justice system. We should perhaps treat an arrest as nothing at all since we know that plenty of innocent people get arrested, and the noble thing to do is presume innocence absence a conviction instead of presuming guilt on a weak signal.
They very first report I randomly clicked in your linked page was for a hydraulic failure that very clearly states at the end "Aircraft Fire: None" so I'm not sure your query, or at least the link you supplied, is very correct in searching for "fires".
This reminds me of a recent commercial where a father is looking at a phone bill and complains melodramatically that the family is wasting money, only for his wife to condescendingly tell him to switch cell phone plans and show up for dinner. Um, I think people who scan the bills to find services they don't need are on the right track...
> Domestic Firearms

You joking?

We go to prison for possession of Pepper Spray! Almost make Russia look like a free country!

https://petition.parliament.uk/petitions/577568
While this is a shame, there was neither good content nor engagement. I mean, when you run a search for "DesignerNews", the first sub-result is "DesignerNews is almost dead", which seemed to always be true.

I do have a Google/Alexa/something app published that reads the top stories from DesignerNews, which will definitely break, so I'll have to dig around and take it offline.

Are there any alternatives?
sorry, i apologize for using the term milquetoast without context ;)

it just kind of means "overly apologetic, meek, timid, unwilling to ever voice anything that may be even mildly controversial", etc. It apparently originates from H.T. Webster "The Timid Soul"
I set up a workflow at $DAY_JOB for building the rootfs as a container and then "promoting" it to a vmdk and creating the ovf metadata file to allow it to be imported into VMWare as its own machine.

This was ~3 years ago and at least at the time I was annoyed at how little established tooling there seemed to be for doing an appliance image build offline— everyone was just like "why? Boot some public cloud-init template and use that as the basis for your terraform/ansible/whatever. If you actually need an OVF then export it from VMWare and be done with it."

On the other hand, once I got down in the weeds with things, I did find there were some bits that were a bit hairy about the promotion process— especially with "minimal" containers that have no users or init system, not to mention of course no filesystem, kernel, or bootloader, there is a fair bit that you have to do with a typical container to ready it for becoming a real boy.
>Speaking of gyms, it's an anti-user business model. The perfect gym customer is one who pays for a membership and never uses it.

My gym managed to find itself in a great little niche by being the complete opposite: they'll call you if you haven't been in for two weeks, then bug you to either start coming in again or pause your membership. The result is a dedicated membership base of regulars who seriously want to be there, which sustains itself on word-of-mouth referrals.

Of course, this is a small-time operation and not a national chain like Planet Fitness.
this site says 0.4% so they would need to extract 3.5B tons of rock

https://thethaiger.com/news/national/thai-lithium-deposits-o...
no, this is bad advice . Credit cards are better because the dispute process is more favorable to buyers and longer dispute window. A debit card has worse buyer protection.
They clearly would rather do wireless charging than change the port right now.
If you do both, then you are spending at least some of your time sub-optimally.

Education, applying to jobs, entrepreneurial ventures, etc, all of these have higher expected value than cancelling subscriptions.
Japanese Novelist Scoops Literary Prize – Then Reveals She Used ChatGPT
Doesn’t seem to be the case —- https://www.theverge.com/2023/8/3/23818462/meta-ray-ban-stor...

Less than 10% retention after two years.
> You think just “parents” are the people with the strongest grasp on the issue of CSAM?

That's not what I said. I said parents are closest to the issue of how to protect their children from predators.

> There are a ton of people who dedicate their careers to monitoring and combatting child abuse imagery. As far as I can tell, they’re unanimous in the view that E2E encryption is a huge, huge help for predators.

E2E is a huge help for predators to hide from Big Brother surveillance, yes, of course, that's obvious.

What is not obvious is whether Big Brother surveillance actually helps protect children from predators. Asking the people whose salaries depend on Big Brother surveillance whether that surveillance actually helps protect children does not strike me as a good way to evaluate that question.
I can edit video in Final Cut Pro on my 8GB M1 Mac Mini while doing other things.
Pretty much every single University prof has tested their new tests against GPT-4.
There seems to be a stream of people that strongly against colonising mars. Why?
Buried water ice at Mars's equator?
Kim Stanley Robinson fans rejoice
This was because Evo was running again even when their constitution forbid it, basically every latin american president dream of eternal reelection.
No humans, just trees and dinosaurs. That's the life I want now.
Asthma Drug Still Being Prescribed to Kids Despite Potential Mental Health Risks
it wasn't even clear to them precisely what they were doing, let alone "for whom".

Sergey Brin dropped out of the doctorate program at Stanford in 1995 to spend more time working on his search engine. He and Page founded Goggle a few years later. Their and their company's close relationship with 3 letter agencies is well documented.

Draw your own conclusions but to claim he didn't know what he was doing defies credibility IMO.
So willingly going to netflix.com, picking a plan, entering your credit card info, hitting subscribe and watching TV for the next month is the same as getting pickpocketed?
I'd like to call out ZenBusiness on this one. They allowed an LLC (which to be fair we weren't using actively) to enter a delinquent state, but continued to charge the registered agent fee for 2 additional years until we noticed; each year we'd get a "your XYZ LLC is going to automatically renew" email from them, with no mention of the fact of outstanding annual reports due. After that they had the gall to charge penalty fees to reinstate the account, on top of the state fees. Definitely moving to a competitor at end of year when it comes time to renew again.
> here on HN we talk about how prisons don't work

I don't know who has argued that, HN is a community of people all with different views. That's a big part of why I am here!

I think the current crime rate in El Salvador, which is now supposedly lower than in the US, is a pretty clear illustration that prisons do work. Of course, there are also a lot of negatives and injustices with mass imprisonment, but it sure looks like it works to reduce crime.
The "final" 747-8 was delivered about a year ago. Demand has been low since the turn of the century but there had been a small backlog and trickle of orders from cargo carriers.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boeing_747#End_of_production
Marijuana reclassification proposed over lower public health risk
Nor the "world wide web", ask the younger ones what www stands for and they get really confused.

If you notice nowadays all websites use just https:// rather than https://www.
Not the OP, but thanks for the heads up!

Just recently started a new project with a .so domain, but looks like I'll have to pick up another one. No point introducing more work for ourselves just for a domain name.
GPUs!
I'm looking forward to see what extractions from this will land on rails. For example: https://github.com/rails/rails/issues/50454
To an extent, this is basically the norm for most software projects. Often you know there are bugs and issues in a piece of software, but don't consider them enough of a blocker to delay the release date for. That works okay for something like game development where the stakes are very low.

That does not work for a piece of software where people's lives and finances are on the line, especially not when you still accuse people of committing criminal actions knowing full well that it could be the fault of your system's bugs rather than their actions.

Some might question if this 'move fast, break things and ignore bugs that aren't thought to be complete showstoppers' is the right move, but the way they handled it on a business and legal level was definitely the wrong one, and the majority of the problems came from the dodgy actions of the execs and business folks trying to cover things up.
What kind of costs are you thinking of? Payment processing could be significant, maybe 3% or a bit more if the average amount is small. But isn't that about it?

Like bandwidth becomes essentially free at a certain scale, but even if we're paying s3 retail prices, that's under $0.001 to transfer the average (~40mb or so) iOS app. Compute should be less than that.

There would also be fixed costs to develop the service etc, but Apple earns something like $80 billion / year in App Store revenue, so if a competitor could capture a nontrivial portion of that, any reasonable development costs should be pretty negligible by comparison.
The latest 2 out of 3 for 2023 did not have fires. They had mentions of the word "fire" for fire department and fire trucks, where a fire truck was dispatched for a plane hitting the tow truck on taxi after pushback. The one fire-related was an engine reporting a fire.
I think what happened is that for the longest time people believed that in order to be able to interactively converse with a computer in a recognizable way you need human level AI and now that we've found that that is not the case there is some re-arranging of our prior assumptions required. But AGI is - hopefully - just as far away as it was before the current large generative model revolution. In the meantime, you can expect plenty of damage from that current crop (along with some benefits as well). In that sense it's 1712 all over again, we have this new invention that we have immediate practical uses for but we can't see over the horizon to realize exactly what we've got an how transformative it will be.
> I've got to give it to Bezos on how Amazon could maintain its culture, or at least could slow down the dilution of its culture for the past 30 years.

Really??? Bezos only left the CEO role in 2021. I've already seen tons of posts and commentary talking about how "It's well into Day 2 and beyond at Amazon", and the founder has only been out of his post for not even 3 years.

Perhaps in plain years he kept things going longer than at Google, but that's just because he held the reins more directly.
I can't wait for services like Privacy to enter the mainstream. It's coming. (I'd like to think that it's coming.)

When 90% of your user base is using super-easily-createable disposable credit cards from valid BINs that self-destruct after your free trial's over, the way free trials work will have to change.
Improved Domains Page
I already live abroad, seems pretty OK.

Many languages are really irrelevant though. Objectively. Like under 20m speakers total.
BO and VG didn't go orbital, which is the real test of capability.

Being able to shoot straight up and fall back down isn't anywhere near as useful or hard as orbit.
Normally I'd agree, but that poor woman was really railroaded during that hearing. She didn't take the bait and was labelled as smug for it. They wore her down and eventually got her to say something they could condemn her for. When cops do this shit we call it abuse. When Congress does it they get to call a black woman with integrity an anti-Semite.

She'd been there all of six months and was being pressed to publicly support Israeli's "defensive genocide" in her capacity as a useful idiot. Let her play the oppression card since nobody seems to care about the actual truth-- Ackman is a villain with stellar PR.
And I'll add my controller hacking as well:

https://imgur.com/a/Mu43dqg

As a poor college student, I home-built a dance pad for Dance Dance Revolution, out of wood and foil and by soldering the connections into a controller. Worked perfectly!
Interesting, has anyone found the tail number of this one?
We absolutely have a way to get there. A sufficiently large neural network can approximate any function (the universal approximation theorem), which has been mathematically proven. LLMs are trained to predict the next word in a sequence; doing this to a high enough level of accuracy requires building an internal model of the world; the ability to reason about it. Eventually we'll have LLMs trained on visual and audio input too (and be trained to predict what happens next), so they can receive an arbitrarily large amount of training samples. If the models keep growing and being trained on more and more data, we'd expect them to become at least as intelligent (good at modelling the world) as humans.
> Everything. I don't doubt that Apple extends a ladder to these developers,

So you don’t have an example…

BTW, Apple put in the necessary functionality for third party navigation apps in 2010 before Apple Maps offered navigation.

> And on NetBSD as well. A screaming testament to the success of cross platform web browsers.

You said that Apple restricted cross platform apps. There is an existence proof that that isn’t true.

> Surely. If you ignore Apple's mistaken hostility towards cross-platform graphics libraries and failure to provide a stable development target

Game developers build on top of third party game engines. Those game engines have been available for the Mac for years. Heck the Unreal engine started on the Mac.

No matter how great the graphics library is when most Mac users until 2021 were using Intel graphics and there was a small market share, game developers weren’t going to port games to the Mac.

> What's someone gonna do, write a DirectX translator

Well first someone did….

You might have heard of the company…

https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/apple-built-a-directx-1...

But DirectX isn’t “cross platform”
There are unlabeled, very slick looking LIDAR enabled cars driving around the Mountain View area - I've been told by a few folks on HN and IRL that 'everyone knows' they're Apple vehicles.
More/related:

Fixing Horizon bugs would have been too costly, Post Office inquiry told

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39039712

Fujitsu is sorry that its software helped send innocent people to prison

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39038263
The codec is extremely simple (hence why it's relatively fast even with such unoptimized code) and as such doesn't even use any entropy coding backend, which is what allows for the incredible scalability. Now, obviously, that means that when going for high quality output, it can't really match JPEG-XL, but that's just a tradeoff - using context-modelling would allow it to beat JXL, but then you couldn't really have byte-granularity scalability. So you can tell it to match the exact same file size of your JXL image, and compare both.

At nearly perceptually lossless quality levels, even if it doesn't match JXL, it usually is quite acceptable also, and at extremelly high compression ratios (think over 250:1) it's usually better than JXL, which is important, otherwise the scalability would be a moot point.

It was designed with a particular use case in mind - simplifying the process of serving visual content in a responsive environment. Instead of encoding the same image at 4 or 5 different resolutions and then serving the appropriate one based on the requested specifications - which usually would mean either storing those multiple versions or reencoding on-the-fly on an as-needed basis - you encode the image only once, at a quality you deem matches your maximum requirement; it can even be completely lossless.

Then when you receive a request for an image at a lower quality/resolution, you can simply send only the first 1/10 of the file, or 1/8, or however you like. You can literally just truncate the file at a random offset and when you decode it, you just get a lower quality version of the image, but which is still exactly the best the codec could have done at that file size anyway. The requesting party can then simply downscale the lower quality image, hence why it's important to have good details even at high compression ratios, so that the downscaled version will look good. The format allows for all that, even progressive enhancement, but the provided library for now doesn't support all of this.

There are other formats with similar scalability, but they're usually a lot more complex - SQZ is basically just a fancy run-length codec, in a single file header for C/C++.
Money likely spent on crap.

Apple is now a really bloated company that barely innovates, and now with plenty of governments breathing on its neck.

Just look at how many IPhone models exists nowadays, Steve Jobs would be shocked to see Apple in 2024.
> I think that description already applies to the latest crop of LLM models

I think you're using a completely different definition from everyone else.
In different terms, think about when you go shopping. Do you take only the prettiest apples? Personally, I will take about any apple that doesn't have soft spots, damage, or mold.

(Before you argue damage is cosmetic, a significant break in the skin molds quickly)
I hear people complain about this, but they never place it in context with the damage from, say, iron or copper mining.

I've done lots of web searches, read lots of articles, and there's never definitive measures of harm or comparisons to what current mining does.

In a standard f150, how much damage is done from mining? How much damage comes from oil extraction compared to the one-time cost to extract lithium?
Actually being trapped in a non-functioning mind or body without knowing the problem would change many minds. Don't read too much into an offhand high school thought experiment.
I do not disagree at all, but we've got 40+ years of lax anti-trust enforcement complete with backing doctrine and underpinning philosophy to overcome to get there.

If Microsoft in 1998 wasn't a monopoly deserving of breakup, I don't think anything except a strict 100% of the market, with precisely 0 competitors, owned by a single, comically scarre and universally loathed tycoon will count.
This is a beautiful app, well done!
https://www.phoenixnewtimes.com/news/valley-monkey-has-37-un...
Sure. It's a tradeoff to avoid wasting huge amounts of memory once the list gets huge.

No matter what the growth factor, you want to set the capacity up front if you know it. But 2x and 1.25x are both reasonable.
German is not one of the irrelevant languages though.
But: imagine having a company selling workstations and tuning your memory a bit too much on the fast side. Having you computer behave incorrectly is much worse than it just being a little slower that a similarly specced computer.