skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Shopping carts are always broken because the store doesn't give damn. For instance in my current city giant Auchan store has literally every single cart busted, unmaintained and completely rusted top to bottom. Similarly sized Carrefour has normal carts, mostly without any issues, just like Ikea and several other medium and small stores. Kaufland even has some fancy new carts, which not only work fine but have some modern ergo handles. It's just some Auchan middle manager has decided that they aren't interested in the carts and that was the result. And adding more insult to the injury - those Auchan carts have fully indoor use, because parking is inside same building, and Carrefour and Ikea have open parking lots with carts experiencing weather and rough pavement.

We can try to blame weather, people, stack problem, ethics, cart design, economic downturns or taxes, but that's all a misdirection. The blame lies squarely on some middle manager who either enforces maintaining and replacement of the carts or he doesn't.
You have to choose to draw the line somewhere. You can choose no line (absolute free speech), a conservative line that only limits some speech (where most of the West stands, staggered a bit), or a quite restrictive line that tightly controls public discourse (where China stands, to take your example).

I don’t believe absolute free speech is a sustainable option for societies on the scale of countries. Absolute free speech would invite chaos.

Free speech is not a natural phenomenon. It is an artificial concept created by humans, and thus we have the complete power to define it and choose what it means. Different groups choose differently.
> (Oh how I hate Apple-made software.)

The oh-so-"intuitive" iOS, with all it's fucking impossible-to-remember swiping gestures this way and that. Aaaargh! Unfortunately Android has been going the same way for the last half a decade or so. :-(

(And Sailfish -- or whatever it's called nowadays -- looked like a contender at first, but then it swiftly marched into the swipey bog.)
Should we set a requirement that AI models used in certain decision making have to be "static" and "deterministic"? Meaning it would be possible to inspect and re-run cases through the specific version of model that was in use at certain point in past?

You could take the model that was in use 2024-19-02T10:54:00Z, feed in data and get always the same results. Then tinker with the inputs and observe the results to find out for example potential biases or errors.
I was a big of PlanetScale and I don’t dislike them now but I also don’t use them any more. Part of my issues were due to the limitations (1 db per cluster) but I also was frustrated with things like moving from “pay $30/mo + usage, we will handle auto-scaling” to “well $30/mo is for low traffic websites, pay us based on cluster size, no more auto-scaling”.

Additionally they introduced the concept of DB sleeping, something they touted at a feature (no sleeping for branches). I guess I understand, they want to save some costs but they advertised no sleeping then changed the policy. Almost more annoyingly, you must go to the console (or maybe the API) to wake your DB, there is no auto-waking. And waking up the DB takes a good minute or two+.

I ended up switching to Neon, mostly because I could run multiple DBs on the same cluster which is important for my use case. Neon raised their prices and also changed how they charge after I switched which is annoying but still cheaper than PlanetScale. Also their DBs wake in <1s in every test I’ve done.

Again, I don’t hate PlanetScale, it just started to change into something that didn’t work as well for me, I wish them the best of luck.
In my experience, most programmers go way too hard with anticipating future changes and end up creating systems with entirely too much abstraction. Most of the time those changes never occur and the result is a codebase which has been obfuscated with excessive abstraction that bogs down anybody trying to maintain it. Future changes end up needing different abstractions than the ones which were preemptively created, and as the programmer is adding new abstractions to cover their present need they also create new premature abstractions, thinking they're saving themselves future trouble. The cycle then continues.

Better to KISS and leave abstraction for the future when it actually becomes necessary. If you start out with code that is only as complex as it needs to be in that moment, then it will generally be much easier to change it in the future.
While I personally don’t believe in this Ukraine yacht story. It actually sailed from Germany, via Poland, if I am not mistaken. So not sure how the Swedes would have ruled this yacht hypothesis out?
Although true in comparison, it is still relative.

I was born in 1991 in an underdeveloped country. Buying CDs was a luxury and i lived out of torrents and pirated CD copies. I still bought original CDs from time to time.

But the biggest appreciation for me, and maybe for the original commenter, is the amount of music itself.

I love music, is my main hobby and passion. And having all of this available at all times is still mind blowing for me.

Ironically, i still buy my favourite music in CDs cuz i love them, but one would not replace the other.

Spotify (or streaming services overall) is indeed amazing.
The stated purpose of the thing isn't to block torrents. It's to avoid the EU being critically dependent on US infrastructure (and a lot more words), particularly government departments - also the stated reason for the UK version, both of which launched for access from government offices first?

They make it clear on the website that it is optional so that it cannot be used for censorship.
It's different if it's been droned at you for as long as you can remember though.
I think the feeling that it's bad is made worse if you've been a long time user, because I remember that it used to be better.

I dislike that they pushed so much for the liked playlist thing, and that it's now a bit tedious to navigate into just looking at my playlists.

I also really dislike their annoying push for podcasts, and this would really be a super quick and easy opt-out section in the settings of the app. And I think from here it's a good transition into what this makes me feel: I feel like Spotify doesn't give a shit about me anymore and they are just trying to squeeze me. And that really rubs me the wrong way.

But I also have no alternative lined up.
> This is not about “allowing”, but actively blocking.

What's the difference other than semantics? When a government decides to "not allow" something, it's often achieved through active enforcement, or threats of active enforcement.

Remember, the EU is the ones that enacted the single most consequentially moronic internet-related law, the so-called "ePrivacy Directive", which has infected countless websites with stupid cookie nags. Governments tend to be pretty stupid when it comes to technology policy; my advice is to shut up, quietly work around it, and be thankful that they aren't any smarter.
> all while two photos are up on the projector, of two children, one with "less than ideal results" and one with "perfect recovery"

Seems like you still could argue the bad outcome have better a priori estimated outcome with that small sample size though?

I fear "the other extreme" would be doctors chasing fads.
The "local maxima" thing is interesting, because while with Spotify it is noticeable sometimes, it was a lot worse of a problem with Google Play Music which I previously used. By the time they shut that down, I almost felt trapped into listening to nothing but Tycho.
Care to expand? What bad contributions did Darktable accept? Why should one not use Darktable?

Also since you seem to be familiar with both project, is Ansel compatible with Darktable sidecar files? If an existing Darktable user were to move to Ansel what can they expect to carry over and what might be lost?
The flip-side is that most of those metal bands now make almost no money on people listening to their music compared to what they did when they sold CDs through a lot of indie record companies.

I don’t personally mind music services too much. I don’t use Spotify because Apple Music comes with our family plan, but I might use it otherwise. It has value for me because my daughter listens to a lot of different music, but for me personally I frankly only listen to the same old songs most of which weren’t even released in this millennium. So for me spending the equivalent of buying an album every month wouldn’t really be worth it otherwise.

I do think Spotify might eventually suffer from things like Apple and Google bundling music services with other things. I don’t think Apple Music is particular great, but I do like the other things that comes with the family plan so we would have it with or without music. At least until they keep raising the subscription to the point where I’ll actually be annoyed enough to set up something different for storage and purchase sharing. Which is soon. But as long as we have the bundles service there is very little reason to have Spotify, and I suspect we’ll eventually pay for YouTube since I’m the only one in the family who still watches it through Firefox (Adblock), at which point we’ll have YouTube music or whatever it’s called. Spotify hit the market with good timing, but how many young people are going to chose it in the future?
Why do you have that feeling given that the companies explosively claims the opposite?

Buying a bunch of Dell boxes, some vendor network gear and a paying for WMWare is what they want to make easier.
Local files in Spotify is extremely iffy. It has forgot them many times for me.

The worst is on iOS where you have to be on the same wifi and wait randomly. And sometimes without warning the files just go away. This is unacceptable. People need to play music for dance, yoga, exercise classes for their job. You can't just randomly throw away the files to have them discover this when the class starts.
Yes, it has happened to me on Spotify multiple times. More often, they change a song with a different version (e.g. same song from a different album or recorded live performance)
If you want to believe in divers blowing a pipeline in some 60m of water using a tiny 6-8 person sailing yacht as their home base…

Not a very convincing story to me.
Project Izanagi: SoftBank's Masayoshi Son plans $100B AI chip venture
When people don't know how to do something but think it is easy, then it can often take 50 years or more for that to happen. Has happened before in this field.
People may not know what Echo-Nest is. Since I once worked quite
deeply with it, here's my thought on how Spotify might be dislodged.

Echo Nest is a set of music analysis routines that provide high level
information about songs, like tempo, time signature, key, chordal
modes, and other features best thought of as
compositional/musical. Beneath it is a deep stack of low level signal
processing parts, libaubio for example, for onset detection, spectral
flux, timbre analysis, pitch estimation. These build into
intermediates like chord analysis, rhythm classifiers and
whatnot. Above that you can build "genre" and "mood" then cluster into
a similarity space because there's few enough parameters.

It seems to me, more as a "mathematical intuition" at this stage, that
advances in NN for generative work could be targeted at blind
classification, bypassing the whole expensive parametric layers and do
machine listening on the raw audio.

Are there any recommendation and music search systems that work this
way. I expect the training prospect is terrifying, but whoever works it
out first will have an alternative and possibly better route into
music recommendation.
CDNow was amazing before Amazon bought and killed them. Their recommendations were great and turned me on to artists I wouldn't have ever thought about otherwise.

For discoverability these days? Radio, mostly college radio. Much of it is streamed over teh intertubes. KXSF (ex-USF), KEXP (UW), KALX (Cal). Of course there's internet only stuff like SOMAFM or Midlands Metalheads. And there are aggregators like Sound Garden. But I've never once felt that Spotify was something missing from my life.

KEXP deserves a special shoutout because they put a lot of their sessions on Youtube and have an excellent production crew.
In the UK my public library had CDs including metal and that was how I discovered music as a teenager.
China bans BBC World News from broadcasting - 12 February 2021

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-china-56030340

British Foreign Secretary Dominic Raab called the move an "unacceptable curtailing of media freedom".
Don't forget the mob that some of these personalities can unleash upon you if you show yourself to not be aligned with their views.
Those reports based on anonymous sources fail to explain the logistics of lowering several hundred kilograms of explosives in deep water with no visibility.

Meanwhile, the SS-750 salvage ship, designed for specialized underwater operations with a mini-submarine, was operating in the area four days before the blast.
It's shit, but musicians really critical of "the system" have always had trouble with mainstream channels; nobody likes to work with someone who bites the hand that feeds them. Hence the whole punk thing - self-production, indie labels, etc etc.
Very difficult to even identify DNS traffic if it’s passing over DoH. EU moves far too slowly to stand a chance at blocking it.

If your evil master plan involves winning against millions of horny teenagers: it’s bad plan.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voice_of_America#Russia
To be precise, it's most likely Kahan's `expm1`, since Wikipedia attributes it to him. It adds that expm1 was first implemented on an HP calculator in the 1970s.

It became part of BSD 4.3 due to Kahan and one of his students. The documentation at https://archive.org/details/unix-programmers-reference-manua... mentions "expm1" was available in HP BASIC, and mentions the Apple C compiler at the time used "exp1", which you can verify from the Apple Numerics Manual Second Edition 1988 at https://archive.org/details/apple-numerics-manual-second-edi...

That makes it BASIC's expm1 before it was C's. ;)

While yes, Python's expm1 uses the platform libm's expm1 through C, Python's math module will avoid using the vendor libm for cases where the vendor implementation is known to have numerical issues.

For one such example, on macOS the following:

#include <math.h>
#include <stdio.h>

int main(void) {
double x = -1.0;
x = nextafter(x, 0.0); // -0.9999999999999999
printf("lgamma(%.19f) -> %.17f\n", x, lgamma(x));
return 0;
}

reports

lgamma(-0.9999999999999998890) -> 36.25168935623486988

while Python, using its own lgamma() implementation:

import math
x = math.nextafter(-1.0, 0.0)
print(f"lgamma({x}) -> {math.lgamma(x)}")

reports:

lgamma(-0.9999999999999999) -> 36.7368005696771

showing that Python's lgamma is not a pass-through to C's.

FWIW, WolframAlpha says the value is 36.73680056... so Python's is more accurate.

EDIT: Python's math.expm1 was added in version 3.2 back in February 20th, 2011, and did not depend on C's expm1. Instead, it used Kahan's method directly:

/* Mathematically, expm1(x) = exp(x) - 1. The expm1 function is designed
to avoid the significant loss of precision that arises from direct
evaluation of the expression exp(x) - 1, for x near 0. */

double
_Py_expm1(double x)
{
/* For abs(x) >= log(2), it's safe to evaluate exp(x) - 1 directly; this
also works fine for infinities and nans.

For smaller x, we can use a method due to Kahan that achieves close to
full accuracy.
*/

if (fabs(x) < 0.7) {
double u;
u = exp(x);
if (u == 1.0)
return x;
else
return (u - 1.0) * x / log(u);
}
else
return exp(x) - 1.0;
}
Same. It's trash now.
Note that China does price carbon, which the USA does not (though some states do).
somehow a discussion of the EU still ends up about the US and American theories of free speech.
>I listen to what it suggests and just accept that it will go away when it decides to rotate it out. Spotify trained me not to look too hard, to let the flow be, and if that awesome song is gone or removed, don’t worry, we still have a million more.

I just can't understand this mindset. The amount of people out there nowadays who simply listen to/watch/etc. whatever some algorithm tells them to consume, and fully accept being told "you know that one song you really like? well it's not available anymore so you can no longer listen to it, too bad", actually boggles my mind. I can't imagine an existence like that.
Apple reportedly faces €500M fine from EU
Unrelated. The sail yacht was from Germany.
Quick scan on my spotify liked songs, on 331 ~5% is greyed out.
Maybe check out www.foobar2000.org.
> My entire strategy was based on going to a record store and buying whatever had appealing cover art in the metal section. And I did this A LOT.

By doing this, you supported the bands you liked, and supported experimentation by accidentally subsidizing a lot of bands which didn't turn out so great (at the very least, experimentation in cool album covers...)

But you don't actually do that on Spotify. As the article correctly points out, your subscription fee doesn't go to the artists you listen to, it goes to the artists played on Spotify as a whole - that kid playing some pop song on repeat 24/7, that restaurant playing Bangla music in the background whenever it's open, or the spammer uploading 10000 machine-generated tracks and setting an army of bots with stolen credentials to listen to them on random shuffle - they all direct Spotify's artist pool money much, much better than you.
It does remove songs, or at the very least disables some (you can toggle a setting to see disabled songs) presumably due to copyright/licensing issues. But worse, it sometimes _replaces_ a song with a different version, with no warning and no recourse
The fact that you can say "Spotify is pretty much the best thing ever" when they basically pay the musicians nothing is amazing to me. Have we come this far into individualism? "It's good for me, so it must be the best thing ever".
- "What you cannot be is a foreign state..."

But you missed the point: the illiberalism isn't the restriction on the foreign government's actions, but the restriction placed on your own citizens—the restriction that they are not allowed to read certain things: that certain books, prints, newspapers, are illegal for their eyes. That's anathema to open society.

This isn't about "foreign governments' rights"; it's about peoples' rights.

"To suppress free speech is a double wrong. It violates the rights of the hearer as well as those of the speaker."
Aren't you confusing Audacity with Amarok?
I shouldnt endorse Google Premium, but they have replaced Spotify and iTunes for variety, remixes, covers and such. When I like a song, I also get alternative versions of it. And I can avoid Toutube ads.
My mind went to "eventual consistency"... time to switch off the internets
As long as unregulated AI doesn't spend a decade causing opioid addictions, collude to reduce labor supply of doctors, and cause a decline in lifespan while increasing costs then I'm willing to give it a shot over what regulation has given us.
> I found much more variation from other music streaming services where the playlists are supposedly actually human curated.

Like which ones? I tried Tidal and music discovery sucks just as badly there too. I'm really craving a music discovery experience that brings back the humanity. Even when an algorithm suggests a good song, it still feels hollow and divorced from any cultural context.
You laptop and your phone have hardware roots of trust. All the big cloud vendors have it. Developing modern hardware without it would be insane and irresponsible.

If I am gone invest many millions into infrastructure, you better expect that I expect some basic safety features.
Just divide by 2. No need for the 10% bit.

10% is small enough that it does not matter for these types of informal conversational scenarios, and in cases where it does, do a proper conversion.
There are many ways to do this - AI naturally facilitates this very thing in a robust manner. Frankly I have used it to create various "studies" with incredible success when you go deep enough with it. What we really need is MedGPT and not regulations - a ChatGPT that is simply highly specialized and gives warnings out the wahoo.
> Economies of scale in commodities is the thing that makes it so we don’t have to do sustenance farming and everyone gets to have sewn clothes on :)

There are really two different kinds of economies of scale.

One is the one you ordinarily think of, where you're big enough to amortize certain fixed costs over a lot of units so the fixed costs become a small part of the price. But the scale you need for this isn't all that large in most cases, and more than that leads to rapidly diminishing returns.

The other is market power. You're so big that suppliers and customers and governments have no choice than to deal with you and then you can dictate terms. This is where we're supposed to have antitrust laws, and not have regulatory capture by industry incumbents, and on that front we've failed spectacularly.
> Words can't hurt you.

Sorry, but that is absurd. Propaganda has and will kill people. Look at the legions of dipshits who follow Ben Shapiro and Matt Walsh. Sure, all they do is sit at their desks talking absolute horseshit but it'd be deeply unserious to suggest that people haven't been killed as a result.
Censorship:

/'sɛnsər,ʃɪp/

noun

counterintelligence achieved by banning or deleting any information of value to the enemy
That clarifies things, and makes more sense, thank you.
Its height notwithstanding, it's a bar that worked before for liberal democracies.
Thanks - edited
" Blowing up the Nord Stream pipeline was one of the most heinous acts of this century." - I thought uyghur genocide in china is among the most heinous acts of this century, or russian invasion in ukraine where thousands of people are killed and thousands fled their country, or lack of accountability for petrol industry for all pollution and global warming and fairy-tales govts are saying related to being on path to limit warming to 1.5 degrees, I haven't thought that blowing a pipe would be part of the same list for some people...
> The flip-side is that most of those metal bands now make almost no money on people listening to their music compared to what they did when they sold CDs through a lot of indie record companies.

I have a few friends who were selling CDs back in the 90s for their own bands, none of them make almost any money out of it. Even the ones that got some kind of distribution deal to some specialised record shops, it wouldn't sell any meaningful amount to even cover the costs of printing the CDs.

The lucky ones with a label deal got almost no money after covering recording, printing, distribution expenses.

The only kind of people who ever made money from selling albums are exactly the same making money from music in 2024: big artists, with a lot of marketing and hectic touring schedules.

Nothing has changed in that front, at least now musicians can put their songs up for the world to consume instead of just the patrons of a corner shop in their neighbourhood.
How to make a better default Firefox UI
It's also easier to get to the moon than it is to get to the deep ocean. And once you're there, the environment is more welcoming.
I'm the author of Lepton, a popular theme for Firefox.
You can see how I made various decisions from my perspective and how I improved on some of Mozilla's less-than-stellar decisions.

I think that might explain how we improved it and made it popular.

This article is part of a series.
- https://github.com/black7375/Firefox-UI-Fix/wiki/%5BArticle%...