skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I get the point that omnidirection treadmills "can't work" in the sense that they can't be a perfect simulation of real walking, but I'm not sure they need to be perfect.

Current generation VR systems are highly flawed and far some perfect, but they offer something very compelling and enjoyable.

I don't know how good an omnidirectional treadmill needs to be before it crosses the "good enough" threshold, but I hope people continue to build and research these to find that threshold
I agree with the transformation part, and almost said one big transistor or computer but don’t think either are right either. I still think switch is closest.

Computers turn electricity mostly into a display (monitor) (I’m not calling out heat cause every computer does that)

The data piped out of data centers almost purely specifically routed packets - so that looks more like a switch to me
Even then, understanding your own limits is a good thing.
>> Ive known several people that died from candles

That can't possibly be true - unless of them all died in the same accident?
Any interesting links or suggestions on critical thinking activities? Thanks!
https://archive.is/4vb8K
Meh. Author's not wrong but their their criticism may or may not apply to you individually. Different people experience different levels of vestibular decoherence.

It may impact the marketability of such a device if only 50% of the population can use it without getting really sick, so that matters a lot. But whether an individual is susceptible varies from person to person.
Wouldn’t a concave dish made of holotiles more or less imitate the same effect? Step forward, you’re on an uphill slope, then the tiles kick in, move you back to the center, and keep you there. Stop walking, and you slide up the back of the dish, then the tiles decelerate and roll you back to center.
> Periodical reminder that copyright and GPL do not talk about linking.

> At all.

GPLv2 does not, but both LGPL and GPLv3 explicitly mention linking in the license text, so this part of your comment is factually false.
However, it's mostly used as an example; I agree any work with strict dependencies to a GPLed work might be considered a derivative even if the dependency is not expressed by linking.
riding a horse doesnt feel exactly like walking so it's a doomed technology
You're just letting "relevant" do the heavy lifting of your rationale. It's a poor argument.

What the audiences make of the art is contingent on the social mores and cultural attitudes of the time - which depend on the socio-political-economic material forces that operate on cultural strata. This is why concepts like commodity fetishism, corporate ideology, and so forth become critical in studying pop cultural phenomena. If you take such a class and don't learn that it is a social studies course in disguise, then you've learned nothing. It's not just merely scholarship about aesthetics and whatever the audience thinks. So the risk here is that these classes are taught wrong. These courses ought to be even more difficult than STEM classes because they require sociology, political and economic theory, philosophy, and so forth, involving open-ended issues and problems about human society. But for some reason (another can of worms) cultural studies is perceived as an "easy" program for academically weaker students to pursue.
Do you not remember when Apple started this trend with iOS 7?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IOS_7
That's what Theranos said
It's an industry with a very specific funding model for a large number of companies... a desire to tap into VC funding. In turn VC's want only one thing: to hit the lottery. The result is a panicky, endless cycle of overpromising and underdelivering.

Everyone wants to be a new Google/Apple level success story, few want to admit that this is an increasingly mature and sometimes moribund industry.
When I start to dislike opening up Anki, it’s usually because my cards are too complex and take too much time to memorize. Creating multiple cards with single cloze words makes the process much more enjoyable. Anki has helped me so much with memorizing programming language syntax for example.
This sounds like motivated reasoning to me. Having an above-average personal tutor that doesn't get mad or tired 24/7 every time seems like a big multiplier
Swap the city perspective for the raw reality of the desert: vast and quiet, devoid of FM radio and cell phone coverage.

I often traverse the vast, signal-sparse landscapes of the western US desert. These stretches are radio silence.

FM? It makes it to the horizon (if it has maxed-out power). Cell and UHF? Line-of-sight.

So, besides satellite radio, information far from a population center is only available from AM.

While the effectiveness of many AM stations in fulfilling their public service obligations is debatable, that's a separate discussion.
I have to agree. For me it’s the headline that particularly bothers me. It’s clickbait and cheapens the real points they are making.

The real problem here is how the media has latched onto it. When Disney showed it, it felt like they showed and talked about it in an intentional way. People took it and severely exaggerated what it can do.

Until we see this technology implemented in something we don’t know what they are really intending to simulate here.
This reminds of the dude who wrote a multi-thousand-word analysis bashing the Apple Vision Pro and how such device shouldn't be able to work because Apple didn't get it right... without even holding said device in his own hands, let alone test it.

Why??

Didn't smart people predict, time and time again, that some new tech would never work because it goes against all rules of common sense and "physics"; only for the people building it to defy all these "rules" and turn their crazy idea not only into a real object, but also into a product that can mass produced and used by millions?

Can't we just learn??
Is pocket actually spyware / telemetry or is this just conjecture?
Kubernetes is declarative. There are now operators published by AWS and azure that you you define and provision managed cloud services like RDS and S3 a CRDs from a cluster.
Spotify CEO Daniel Ek says Apple's new App Store changes are a 'new low'
"Apple Vision" sounds like it has something to do with the Apple Vision Pro headset, but it doesn't. This is related to Apple's Vision framework, which provides computer vision algorithms.
why do you have to do it with a local LLM?
Plenty of extensions do the same stuff with more powerful LLM.
> this is just replacing one silly measure with another

> Not to say anything of your research

The second statement isn't true just because you want it to be true. The first statement renders it untrue.

> I'd rather us start grading developers based on the outcomes of software. For instance, ... errors generated by a service

yeah you should click through and read the whitepaper and not just the summary. The authors talk about similar ideas. For example, from the paper:

> The more Churn becomes commonplace, the greater the risk of mistakes being deployed to production. If the current pattern continues into 2024, more than 7% of all code changes will be reverted within two weeks, double the rate of 2021. Based on this data, we expect to see an increase in Google DORA's "Change Failure Rate" when the “2024 State of Devops” report is released later in the year, contingent on that research using data from AI-assisted developers in 2023.

The authors are describing one measurable signal while openly expressing interest in the topics you're mentioning. The thing is: what's in this paper is a leading indicator, while what you're talking about is a lagging indicator. There's not really a clear hypothesis as to why, for example, increased code churn would reduce the number of production incidents, the mean time to resolution of dealing with incidents, etc.
Natural Language Based E-Com Product or Page Search
Hello Folks,

Has anyone considered or tried using a natural language-based Product or Page content search in e-com?

e.g. search directly in the search box by typing:

1. What is the organic food for a 1-3-year-old kid?

2. How many days are allowed to return the product after receiving it?

Was it helpful and worth using?

Thanks

Roman
Does anyone know how Apple Vision performs on Japanese vertical, right-to-left text extraction? This is my biggest need around some machine translation stuff, but I’ve found Google OCR is the only thing that can do this reliably well, but also that it’s too expensive to run for hobby projects.
I'm slightly bothered that the numbers don't have the same number of digits. The rows are not perfectly aligned!
"Simply" and "it's easy" also fall into this trap too. I now try to avoid them when writing technical descriptions. You think something is easy and simple doesn't mean someone else will. When they read that, then struggle, it can put people off continuing to try. That could be a lost sale for you, or it could mean someone deciding that a career choice isn't for them.
Tangentially related: I'm tempted to buy call options ahead of Amazon's earnings in late April, because they will probably generate millions of extra profit from people that couldn't get through the steps to migrate off of IPv4.

Although looking at their latest earnings numbers [0], even $100M more will only marginally affect the net profit. Hm...

[0] https://ir.aboutamazon.com/news-release/news-release-details...
It's quite interesting how in his "pitch video" (and presumably in his defense now) he disavows any responsibility or initiative of his own and puts all of it on "god".

Presumably he knows that this will appeal to the emotions and sense of morality of his congregation rather than their financially rational minds which may be sceptical of "crypto".

It also "nicely" intertwines the apocalyptical tendencies of crypto with the apocalyptical tendencies of certain Christian denominations.

All in all a despicable human being who obviously had no moral qualms, abusing the massive trust his followers had in him. Yes they probably were more than just a bit naive, but history shows that there is a scam out there for any of us.

Edit: he claims he was in prison for stealing cars and, if that's true, at least he is demonstrating a consistent character and just improved his methods over the year. Theft is indeed easier to pull off if the victims thank you for it instead of calling the police.
It's very strange to me that they do this for job postings in English, but it's probably a consequence of how the equivalent Germam postings are impossible to avoid gendering: Ingenieur is “male engineer”, Ingenieurin is “female engineer”, etc. There's workarounds like Ingenieur*innen but that's an unpronounceable neologism. And I guess there might be an ambiguity there about whether the divers is covered.
But you need to pay state income tax in your home state instead if you work in NH.
You'd be surprised at what the human brain can accommodate for. Most long-time VR users will be able to tell you about instances of the VR causing phantom sensations of touch that come purely from visual stimuli. The human brain does a lot of post-processing of sensory input to conform to its predictions - there's a huge gap between what we think we feel and the actual inputs. Even fancy haptic gloves which only add crude sensation can provide almost lifelike sensations when combined with visuals.
I don't understand why you're presupposing "performance" as a measure of intelligence, and what you mean by it. No one is saying that intelligence alone (above a threshold) equates to demonstrated, or even potential, life outcomes.
100%! code is just an interface. Programming and Engineering means much more.
I've also seen that, often enough that a hardware issue is extraordinarily unlikely. It's almost certainly just a boring old software bug.
Yes! But that does not mean learning to code. Or at least it shouldn't have to
Arc Search
So one of the things we are trying to learn is if there are other type of life forms than what we know from earth. What if do find something, there are no big size living things there but if did find some microbial Mars/X native life form, will we just let that be? Won't we still try to put ourselves there anyway? that's what we do on current planet being top of the food chain.
I find it extremely disappointing when someone who clearly knows what they are talking about tries to do a bit of a reality check on something that is clearly being uncritically hyped by the press - and then instead of someone actually refuting their arguments they get accused of "naysaying".

Yay.

As if laws of physics or biology cared about our attempts to circumvent them or trying really really hard/throwing money at the problem. All that it takes is to work hard and sufficient media hype, right?

That's not how things work. E.g. people are trying to build "free energy machines" and perpetuum mobiles since centuries ago - so schools teaching that it is not possible are also "naysayers"?

I happen to agree with the author of that blog. I have worked in that field for over 20 years, have tried several of those treadmills (probably most of the ones that made rounds in recent years) - and no, they really don't work outside of very niche applications.

Sure, one can make them physically work (aka it somewhat lets you move around) - but the movement is very clearly unnatural to the user, you have to "learn" how to walk on them (and get on and off safely!). Without a restraint of some sort (harness, frame, railing, etc.) they are at a major risk of injury too. Running or jumping on these devices is usually a quick way to the hospital.

It is simply not at all a practical solution to locomotion in virtual reality.

The funny thing is that the Disney project has zero to do with VR and has not even been mentioned in such context in the original article. It is from the "Disney Imagineers" - the folks developing their amusement park rides. There such device has a clear application potential and is certainly a cool piece of engineering.
He is remembered for laffs, but he was a very very compelling composer.
I clicked the comments section hoping to see sivers response because I remember him mentioning it before. I’m glad I did.
Moron disclaimer: I may not be one entirely, but I frequently emulate one.

As a full-time Linux user, I haven't used sudo for years. Rather, I do 'su root'. However, I noticed several years ago (Debian) that upgrades would iterate twice, seemingly accommodating two accounts. Emulating a moron as I do, I never exerted the effort to learn why. I simply began, after 'su root', entering 'sudo su', which despite always having sudo disabled, seems to make me proper root.

I'll often use synaptic package manager when I want a cleaner, easier interface to explore packages. If I only 'su root' it won't open unless I append .... something similar to
'pkex' to the end, but if I do 'sudo su', I can run it using only 'synaptic'. Regardless, I refuse to use sudo otherwise, even when I'm emulating something sentient.

Be afraid. There are morons using Linux, and some are quite productive despite.
Why change what works, I guess
This is helpful! I found some CDK libraries that allows for connecting a load balancer or Cloudfront to WAF with a few lines of code. I'll give it a try! [1] [2].

--

1: https://github.com/awslabs/aws-solutions-constructs/tree/mai...

2: https://constructs.dev/search?q=waf&cdk=aws-cdk&cdkver=2&lan...
The fact that not all trains say please lock the door and the bad UX mean I've seen plenty of people open the door and when they shouldn't have.
People have been pointing out the numbers are bogus [1]. Notice that huge drop in votes between #7 and #8, that doesn't happen with normal voting. It can happen with slate voting but this would have to be pretty extreme. Also, the weird votes are only for some awards like novel.

I don't know what the score means, but notice that for Babel it starts lower and never changes, while the others increase presumably from lower ranks being added to score. I think the only way Babel happens if there were no ballots who put it lower only top position. It is also suspicious that it goes out at the seventh position, just losing out to the lowest slate.

Also, why would they the disqualify it if it had been eliminated. It makes sense to disqualify at the beginning or end of nomination. Also, there is no final vote count, there is nomination count and the final vote. It was removed before the final vote.

1: https://alpennia.com/blog/comparison-hugo-nomination-distrib...
The problem is that they basically all provide negative value.

They cost a lot, they take up a lot of space, they get in the way while using VR, and they don’t do anything to solve motion sickness. The situation is not that they aren’t perfect yet, but that you would be better off not having it at all.
From what I've seen, those are poorly done in practice, usually in multiple ways.

Recently I've been writing code to deal with partial alignment. The desired invariants here typically involves at least 3 variables:

align must be a power of 2. Since this involves only one variable, refinement types can handle this one just fine at least (expression: n && !(n & (n-1)) ).
0 <= skew < align
skew != 0 in some branches, additionally
pointer_as_int(buf.start) % align == skew
some APIs take 2 buffers that should both have the alignment
often if the buffer points to a size-zero span at NULL, the condition does not need to hold however
(skew + buf.len) % align == 0 (only relevant sometimes; sometimes this is a different alignment than other invariants)

Since these are, generally, separate function arguments with completely different origins, how do you apply refinement types here? Additionally, the buffer can have different kinds of external ownership; in particular, Rust's aggressive "I must move ownership without warning" makes it impossible to write a lot of good code. We must not abandon the good parts of C if you want people to actually use your stuff, even ignoring the incremental-conversion problem.

Now consider ABI compatibility, say if we had forgotten to add the skew != 0 condition somewhere. If old code calls the function, it needs to hit a thunk that verifies the condition. New code however should have done that in the caller and thus enter the code directly. Where is the compiler tooling to support this? Clearly, invariants (and pre- and post-conditions, which are just invariants for a finite time) need to be able to specify what version of your code they were first specified in. That's a lot of information to specify in a function type which often gets disregarded.
> "Despite gathering years of NSA-worthy surveillance on the philosophers, Hoover’s agents were never able to discern the ideological program of the French. “I can’t work out,” wrote one in a note in Sartre’s file, “if he’s pro-Communist or anti-Communist."

Honestly, what's crazy about that to me is the idea that he _must_ be one or the other. The idea that every writer is actively and wholeheartedly trying to advance exactly one side or the other of a geopolitical struggle is kind of silly. Maybe sometimes he thought about other stuff besides that?
Two incidents, two families. Happens a lot with Mexican candles.
Space Brie: Our Most Delicious Enemy
In that case you can just get used to a joystick or some other input method.

The whole point of the treadmills was to avoid having to get used to it.
>The materialists will reject this answer, yet fall short of offering an explanation for life beside "bag of electric meat".

That's not an explanation of life, that's a description (perhaps a characterization) of life. What explanation does faith offer besides what's effectively an audible shrug?
It's super hard to resist continuing to reply with inlined 'pac quotes, too!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LiCjD5qVV_U
I just searched for "hacker news" on both kagi and google. Google took about 1 second and kagi took 2-3 seconds. Given kagi doesn't have google's resources, I think it's reasonable.

I speculate it could slow down a lot based on settings. You may use a lot more filters on the Personalized Results tab than my 116. I also disable "instant answers" (i.e. AI summaries), inline video, and search suggestion details.
Those are the bad ones. If you get this one the only mode you'd get is a ramping effect by holding the button to make it go brighter or lower.
I've cancelled my sub for now. I'll use Phind and Bing in the meantime while I wait to hear if ChatGPT improves.
Even that might be a bit overcomplicated, you could probably get quite far with a bowl shaped treadmill (I mean, anecdotally the simple wheel shaped ones do feel like running, their inertia notwithstanding).

If you start pitching the treadmill the tricky part is that you'd probably need to rotate the person around their centre of mass, or somewhere close to it.
At any rate, my point is just that the Italian Mafia in Chicago and the midwest has an outsized influence in the popular consciousness and has for the last 30 years played essentially no role whatsoever in daily life (unless you're an enthusiast --- there's a community of them --- who keeps tabs on the remnants of the old Outfit and who "runs" it today).
> all-in on some first-party toolkit

Adobe on macOS is not really native. It is barely usable bloatware. I only use it when I really need to explicitly collaborate on some Indesign thing now. For anything else it is Affinity.
I had a disreputable eBay seller use a similar trick: The Apple product they sold turned out to be counterfeit (unbeknownst to them, they claimed), so they took down the original eBay listing. For some reason, eBay prohibits you from leaving feedback for sellers on orders from listings that are taken down in this way. So this seller still has like 99.7% positive feedback and continues operating even though they at best wasted the time of dozens/hundreds of people who received counterfeit goods and either didn't notice or had to fight for a refund.
In the US, AM Radio (both digital and analog) runs from 540 kHz to 1700 kHz, packing 116 channels in approximately 1 MHz (with 10 kHz spacing between stations).

That's impressive efficiency for a frequency range unsuitable for much else.
When I've tried codepilot and similar tools, I've found them rather unimpressive. I assumed it was because I hadn't put the time in to learn how to make the best use of it, but maybe it's just that it's not very good.

On the other hand, I use ChatGPT (via the API) quite often, and it's very handy. For example, I wrote a SQL update that needed to touch millions of rows. I asked ChatGPT to alter the statement batch the updates, and then asked it to log status updates after each batch.

As another example, I was getting a 401 accessing a nuget feed from Azure DevOps - I asked ChatGPT what it could be and it not only told me, but gave me the yaml to fix it.

In both cases, this is stuff I could have done myself after a bit of research, but it's really nice to not have to.
Don't use poor economics with physical impossibilities interchangeably.

It's something that my late ICE professor did all the time about EVs in the mid 2000s up until his death in the mid 2010s. He was extremely bright, very knowledgeable and pretty much "the" in his little ICE niche and yet he was always talking about how EVs wouldn't be teh future because [physically possible but outlandish thing]. Energy density, price per kwh, weight, battery management, charging infrastructure. All things that he was all to happy with going on national TV to declare that EVs were a pipe dream. Unfortunately he died at a young age and didn't get to see the EV revolution and the Tesla Model Y selling more units than his beloved Golf in Europe.

The thing is, and that's my actual point, you can't innovate past physics, but you sure can innovate past poor economics.