skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Tell HN: Discovered an Infinite Loop Issue in Google Gemini Pro
Hi HN community, I engaged with ChatGPT and Google Gemini Pro for an article. During a session focused on proofreading, I encountered a peculiar issue where the response entered what appears to be an infinite loop, repeating "hoort" endlessly:

"You hoort hoort hoort hoort hoort hoort hoort hoort hoort hoort hoort hoort hoort hoort hoort hoort hoort hoort hoort hoort hoort hoort hoort hoort hoort hoort hoort hoort hoort hoort hoort hoort hoort hoort hoort hoort hoort hoort hoort hoort hoort hoort hoort hoort hoort hoort hoort hoort hoort hoort hoort hoort hoort hoort hoort hoort hoort hoort hoort hoort hoort hoort hoort hoort hoort hoort hoort hoort hoort hoort hoort hoort hoort hoort hoort hoort hoort hoort hoort hoort hoort hoort hoort hoort hoort hoort hoort hoort hoort hoort hoort hoort hoort hoort hoort hoort hoort hoort hoort hoort hoort hoort hoort hoort hoort hoort hoort hoort hoort hoort hoort" ...

Due to privacy concerns, I'm unable to share the full chat transcript at this moment but am eager to provide detailed information directly to the Google Gemini Pro team to explore this issue further.

My Gemini tab in Google Chrome is around 35%. I stopped the processing after a while and repeated the same prompt that ignited the issue and worked fine afterwards.

By the way, coming from a cybersecurity background, I tend to unconsciously and vigilantly keep an eye out for even the slightest hints of security or QA issues.

BTW2: afterwards I used Gemini Pro to create an infinite loop image with Google colors: https://twitter.com/coinfabrik/status/1758882333824790771/photo/1
what matters
> normal circumstances main-in is for deployed troops and citizens living overseas, who normally are a small minority.

There are lots of other valid reasons to vote by mail. In fact, living abroad is only a valid reason in a minority of states. Depending on what state you last lived in before moving abroad, you may not be able to legally vote at all.

All states let you vote by mail if you are going to be traveling out of your polling district for the entirety time the polls are open on Election Day, or are sick and cannot go in-person. But some states let you vote by mail without a specific reason, and a few states run all elections by mail.
These days, besides the dotfiles and few minimal settings that I remember, I just let it go as I go along. In about a month or so, it all gets to where I want.
You can also set most of these options in a shell script, here is my (shitty and outdated, but it proves the point) script https://github.com/pprotas/dotfiles/blob/main/osconfig.sh

Just run the shellscript when you get a new macos device
The Intel N95 and N100 NUCs are amazingly efficient.
It's alright, you know now for your next submission.

Regarding the dupe removal: I am slightly inclined towards your side, because it's not really a dupe, but, still I understand where the mods are coming from, especially if a good amount of discussion already happened around the same topic recently.
That seems reasonable, but my only real experience with someone depriving me of my livelihood is private equity companies that have come in and shipped my job off overseas. Certainly the military didn't help me there.
If what you say is true then you could find a platform bigger than something like TikTok or WhatsApp that is a PWA. The only one I can think of is Google.com, which technically is built in to your mobile OS anyway.

100+ times faster to start using: are they? I can type in the name of an app into my OS-wide search and tap “get” and that’s it. Swipe down, type “candy crush,” tap “get.”

Easier to market? What’s easier than saying “download the [name] app?” Arguably more complicated to say “go to example.com”

Much cheaper services? What is cheaper than TikTok or WhatsApp? Those companies make more money on the apps because they have more user data collection. Companies like Netflix go around the App Store cut entirely.

With installed apps the desires of the corporations and users pretty much align.
I agree that it has nothing to do with Twitter’s technical capabilities per se.

I disagree that it’s due to political decisions - it’s due to business decisions. To a large extent because Elon dropped the ball when major advertisers were figuring out their ad spend for 2023, but also because of a fear on their part of being associated with more and more unappealing content due to the new policies. Advertisers did not go ”oh, Elon wants more conservative content on Twitter, and because we support the Democrats, we’re gonna stop paying for ads on that platform to punish him”. They are acting in their own best financial interest.

Twitter’s finances are also hamstrung by the large amount of debt that Elon brought with his purchase, so in practice they need to perform even better than before.
Russia attempting to develop nuclear space weapon to destroy satellites with EMP
This has been my reply to most people asking me if I’m going to buy a Vision Pro. It seems like after a week or two I’m going to want to do something, and a TV, laptop, or phone is good enough… I won’t want to go through the ceremony of putting on the headset and entering that environment to do some basic stuff, especially not if there is a remote chance I’ll be multitasking with stuff in the real world.

That said, I tried one on at the Apple Store the other day and the immersive stuff was really cool and I’d like to see more of it. But I think it makes sense to wait for the amount of content to increase and the price to come down.
I almost universally prefer native apps, and I'm also an iPhone user, but it's hard to claim PWAs are unpopular on their own merits when Apple has seemingly deliberately stifled them.

On Android you can go to a mobile webpage and see a fairly unintrusive, one-time banner which will let you install it to the homescreen. Sure it's only two taps on iOS (Share -> Add to homescreen), but for a start your users need to know that functionality even exists, which alone is a massive roadblock to adoption.

As a user, if I want to get notifications and an "app-ish" experience, and the developer is unable or unwilling to create decent platform-specific apps, I would happily take a PWA over a "native" app that is actually just an embedded web view or something trying to recreate the world like Flutter. If I'm not gonna get the benefits of my chosen platform, I'd at least like to not also have to deal with the downsides of App Store apps, like large install sizes and stuff getting held up or nerfed by app review.

I recognise that giving PWAs unimpeded access to the core capabilities that native apps have might result in a worse offering of native apps—as more developers choose to just not bother—but then I'd say it's on Apple (and Google!) to step up and make native a more compelling option. Any veteran iOS developer will agree there's an enormous list of stuff dying for improvement in the development and submission process.
Thanks for the pointer! And yes, there are, but I kind of enjoy going through the comment history while deleting. Memories :).
Even with that, there’s more than enough tools out there to automate setup.

For example, I use https://www.chezmoi.io/ which creates a standard home directory set up (prompt etc), decrypts SSH keys and other private stuff, and installs a bunch of tooling through brew/apt.
Quite a lot of smaller companies do have some sort of staff/principal level, though arguably it’s largely an excuse to pay people they want to retain more, and isn’t _that_ similar to staff/principal roles in Big Tech(TM).

Of course, companies on that scale don’t really have senior EMs in the Big Tech sense, either.
For a lot of use cases, iPads are worse at those things. For video and photos, the iPhone camera is night and day better. It's also easier to hold for taking those photos, while also being portable (so you don't have to carry an iPad around).

For a generation that has been texting on touchscreen for years, the muscle memory for typing on a phone is pretty well defined. In my experience, typing on a tablet requires different muscle memory and is slower.

If you add a keyboard and stylus, the iPad could be more useful than a phone. But at that point, you're spending a lot of money to improve a device that still has all of the limitations of iOS.
This is exactly my point for many years now. Reddit exists because of the free work of the various subreddit communities and their moderators. And in return they get nothing. But the company, the investors and employees will all become rich off of it. It’s weird how no one cares that Reddit isn’t trickling down anything to the people that make the site a success.
Not if you include expected future legal fees. This also seems to imply if you train on Reddit data without a license Reddit will sue you.
Looking for free testers...
Sounds about right. Humans also share this same behavior. Unfortunately it’s not only their familial elders but just any older authority figure.

Little shits.
To quote Gervais' bit:

On Twitter, people sometimes say, “Why don’t you keep your opinions to yourself?” I go, “You’re following me. I didn’t tweet at you.” That’s like going to a notice board in the middle of town, seeing a sign for guitar lessons, and yelling, “I DON’T WANT guitar lessons!” Well, it wasn’t for you.

Maybe hard to believe, but for a lot of people, it's way more interesting than hearing yet another self-proclaimed radical communist go on another rant about people making money.
My work MacBooks have the migration assistant disabled by MDM, it's a pain in the ass to swap, I can live with them for 3-4 years though so not a big problem, just annoying.

For my personal Macs the migration assistant is fantastic, never had a hiccup and when I boot the new machine after migration is almost exactly like the old one, except for having to re-authorise some music software.
It's such a pain keeping track of all the `defaults write xxx` stuff when Apple updates.

My current setup here in case useful to anyone: https://gist.github.com/dbuxton/3ccdfd88b05e1f2807c05fe32f50...

(If anyone knows how to show bluetooth in top menu all the time on Sonoma I'd love to learn - haven't done much investigation but option seems to have disappeared in the UI...)
> I think staff engineers are slightly more common than first level EMs

That’s going to depend a lot on company (and how they define staff vs senior; that varies quite a bit).
> This second is the most dangerous system a man ever designs. When he does his third and later ones, his prior experiences will confirm each other as to the general characteristics of such systems, and their differences will identify those parts of his experience that are particular and not generalizable. The general tendency is to over-design the second system, using all the ideas and frills that were cautiously sidetracked on the first one.

- Brooks, Mythical Man Month

It is always interesting to see v2. I have witnessed cases where they are catastrophic due to feature overload but also cases where they are phenomenal because they are streamlined and lean.

I also wonder, with all the tooling available now at least in the space of web apps, if this quote notion of danger applies as much to v1s as I have seen v1s remarkably bloated these days. I often have to purposefully seek out tools that do less.
For our team, VS Code is reaching that point. The Macbooks can’t keep up with VS Code’s decay.

Unfortunately Zed lacks good defaults (like a way to change tabs without the mouse) and certain vs code features like snippets. Makes it difficult to transition a team which has been dependent on Vscode and which has absolutely no interest in spending our days configuring tools
> That's why I don't understand why in US presidential elections, it takes weeks to get the result.

Only one modern presidential election in the US has taken weeks to get a result, and that only happened because the election was incredibly close - it was decided by a margin of 0.009%, which then prompted an automatic recount by law, leading to court battles.

The next-longest was 2020, which took about 4.5 days, and that's in large part because of differences in process due to COVID-19. The actual election was not close; the counting was just much slower (and specifically slower in several close states).
This subject was already discussed here 2 days ago (819 points, 778 comments) [1] and the top comment highlighted that Apple gives its reasoning in a way that is at least worth considering. From Apple [2]:

----

The iOS system has traditionally provided support for Home Screen web apps by building directly on WebKit and its security architecture. That integration means Home Screen web apps are managed to align with the security and privacy model for native apps on iOS, including isolation of storage and enforcement of system prompts to access privacy impacting capabilities on a per-site basis.

Without this type of isolation and enforcement, malicious web apps could read data from other web apps and recapture their permissions to gain access to a user’s camera, microphone or location without a user’s consent. Browsers also could install web apps on the system without a user’s awareness and consent. Addressing the complex security and privacy concerns associated with web apps using alternative browser engines would require building an entirely new integration architecture that does not currently exist in iOS and was not practical to undertake given the other demands of the DMA and the very low user adoption of Home Screen web apps. And so, to comply with the DMA’s requirements, we had to remove the Home Screen web apps feature in the EU.

EU users will be able to continue accessing websites directly from their Home Screen through a bookmark with minimal impact to their functionality. We expect this change to affect a small number of users. Still, we regret any impact this change — that was made as part of the work to comply with the DMA — may have on developers of Home Screen web apps and our users.

----

There were 451 comments responding just to that [3].

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39388218

[2] https://developer.apple.com/support/dma-and-apps-in-the-eu/#...

[3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39388652
What small PCs would be suitable RPi alternatives? For many/most use cases they'd have to fit the same category -- so similar power consumption, similar physical size, passive cooling.
www.uifaces.co pops up at the top of the search but this is not. WebArchive says it started around 2018 and the domain was registered in 2017.

I remember the services (faces, or avatar, something) but it was since the early 2010s.
If something goes wrong I just plug USB into my regular computer with all my normal tooling and can see the serial console, edit the filesystem, etc.

Or if I'm using something like Circuit python I'll just connect the web console.
The goal hasn't moved, we are talking about ABI compatibility for a full operating system across multiple decades and generations of operating systems releases, without requiring building those applications from source.

Not a kernel booting directly into an application doing straight syscalls.
I'm not morbid with the rules (as said, few and clear) or the pole negotiation. They feel no fatigue to try and move it, but I try to be consistent. Consistency is key as they spot and work on the lack of it very efficiently.
I am convinced that you can educate up to 13 years of age latest. After that, I tend to believe that "games are done" (as we use to say in Italy) and they need to work their way out. I will trust on the seeds I tried to plant in them in their first 12/13 years. After that their individuality needs to - and will - be expressed.
I tried two options — polling and 'docker compose watch'.
How much more time? If the problem is lower bone density or fragile joints it’s already too late.
No mention of on die ECC so far so I'll mention it. It's used in modern RAM (DDR5, maybe some DDR4) to improve yields. A borderline chip may pass tests if occasional bit errors are corrected before being read out. This is transparent to the OS as there is no mechanism that I'm aware of to report fixed bits or unfixable errors.

I'm hopeful that this is going to help fix problems with occasional bit flips from cosmic rays and similar. Since it is used to keep marginal chips in the product stream, I'm not sure if it is really beneficial.

The Raspberry Pi 4B claims DDR4 ECC RAM and I'm pretty sure that's on die ECC.

I'd really prefer full blown ECC RAM and would pay a reasonable increase for it. I recently upgraded my desktop and sticking with ECC RAM would have cost hundreds of dollars more so I skipped it.
Everyone thinks that Apple really cares if you use PWAs?

It came out in the Epic trial that 90% of the App Store revenue comes from pay to win games and in app purchases of loot boxes and coins.

Those apps aren’t going to be PWAs.

If it’s only mean old Apple keeping the great world of cross platform apps using web technologies, why aren’t PWAs more popular on Android?
Would either of you mind expanding on this? What kind of roles have you held?
This is the most plausible explanation I can imagine.
I find it insulting that it is still allowed to submit "links" to Twitter posts on HN. It is a pervasion of the concept of "Links". You are teasing something that might be of interest that then can not be read by a majority of users.

While Nitter still worked at least people here could then post alternative links. Now that Nitter is dead, that's no longer an option.

And therefore people really should stop submitting Twitter links here. Instead contact the author and ask him to at least cross-post to some accessible platform. How hard can it be to cross-post to Mastodon, Bluesky or ... OMG, a website?
> After discovering Chrome are eating my old Mac's battery, I turned to using Edge

What? Have they tried using Safari instead of a Chromium based browser? From my experience Safari is by far the best browser on Mac in terms of the energy efficiency.
Show HN: Learning Chinese and Japanese with graphs and trees
Just for fun, I built a language learning tool. It represents Chinese and Japanese as graphs of characters, with connections indicating given characters can form a word. It can also decompose characters to give clues on how they're pronounced, analyzes words to understand which ones are commonly used together, and more.

It's fully interactive, supports offline use, generates flashcards, has sentences from humans and from AI, and plenty of other features.

Check out the README for details.
https://github.com/mreichhoff/HanziGraph
Thanks for elaborating, valuable advice.
Agreed. I'm sympathetic to the article's cause, but Pfizer/JNJ shareholders haven't done particularly well in the past couple decades.

Since 2000, the CAGR for (PFI, JNJ, SPY, IWM) was (1.56%, 7.68%, 7.79%, 7.63%) respectively.

(Per portfoliovisualizer.com. 2000 is the earliest date with data for IWM.)
Arguably most of the tech is off the shelf. They won't be using their own server hardware, networking gear, peering agreements, or content delivery network, and will also likely be buying the video processing, database, data warehousing, workflows and pipelines, etc. Then they'll be outsourcing payment processing, potentially identity, customer support tooling too.

What's left? Apps, which are branding-heavy, and where companies want to own the UX and a backend which amounts to a CRUD app and is cheap to build.

Yes the apps from these places suck, but they're the tip of the iceberg, built cheaply because the companies aren't tech companies and are buying COTS. Rarely do end user experiences get white-labelled in these sorts of cases.
Along the same lines, I see this a lot

long delay = (5 * 60 * 1000); // 5 minutes, in millseconds

And it's perfectly clear to me. Now, I think the comment is really helpful there (indicating intent), but I don't think having separate constants for each of the numbers there is going to make the code better. As it is, it's very easy to read at a glance, know what it's intended to do, and determine if it's correct (should you be worried about that at the moment). Which is what's important there.
Booksellers on the Seine in Paris Get an Olympic Reprieve
RDIMMs have buffers on the memory lines to improve signal integrity, this is only helpful when there are many slots on the same memory controller channel. (ex. Servers often support 4 DIMMs per channel)
https://archive.ph/yBvAT
No. In my circles, those who are still employed are in positions not easily replaced, e.g devops or security. Webdevs and those in game development have suffered the most. As has management.
I think in 2024 there must be a better way to automatically get your new Mac to the state of your previous Mac.
Really? You think the casino style games are going to move to PWAs without direct access to users wallets via in app purchases?

If that’s the case, why aren’t all of the same games moving to the web for Android?
To me, the odd take is thinking that the point of an app is to look good.
>eating 400 calories as many days as I could endure, and fill myself with water

Wow 400 is insane, good job! I've read that even the most extreme diets are usually 8-900 but 400 is really something else.
I think British, Swiss and French universities top those in Germany for AI/ML.
Netflix would disagree.
I very much don't care if there was any intent when consuming art of any kind, though.

If I see an image that evokes a feeling, it won't diminish anything if I find out it is an AI image. Why would it? The image is the same.

The same is my attitude to my writing: I may have an intent, but whether the reader interprets it the same way is irrelevant - I've written it either way, and got my enjoyment out of writing it. It'd be a shame if they don't enjoy it, but that's all.

Why does it matter? It doesn't change my experience of writing it in any way. It has no bearing on my life at all.

Nor does an artists intent change what I see, or hear, or read in any way.

Your example at the end is just deeply depressing to me. Why does it matter? It looks the same. To lose our on enjoying something nice because of factors other than the art itself feels sad to me.

Furthermore, why do you think the human art is any less the result of computation? To me, that seems like a superstition, and meaningless. I don't feel like it's a distinction with any value.