skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This reminds me of countries who send pregnant women to antartica to (somehow) strengthen their land claims: https://medium.com/good-to-know/why-11-babies-have-been-born...

Like antartica, I'm sure someone with guns will tell us who really owns the moon as soon as it actually becomes relevant.
> I know Sundar has been great...

Think the execs responsible for this were excused en masse or quit: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2021/08/google-pay-team-repo...

Some founded a fintech company that now also does AI, because why not.
Reddit had ads long before they destroyed Apollo. Thanks for providing additional evidence for my point.
Ask HN: What do I tell people who don't get how big AI is?
I keep hearing from a bunch of folks that AI isn't really that big or that it's just another tech fad.

People keep pointing out to IoT or Data Science being a total snoozefest a couple years back.
Unraid Moves to Annual Subscription Pricing Model
Maps used to expire after 30 days (no idea why), and the auto-updating while on wifi wasn't great unless you were in the app forcing it update. Nowadays they last 365d.
Libraries are on the front lines of America's problems
> Do not keep a sourdough starter. It’s a waste of time for a busy person like you. Try a poolish instead.

Everything else on the list was good, in my opinion. This one I had to look into more...

"Poolish is a preferment where you mix one part flour and one part water with a small amount of commercial yeast, resulting in a fairly wet sponge that is left to ferment for 6 to 16 hours."

I don't think traditional sour dough actually takes much time at all. It's so hands off - I mean sure, I guess I can see the point. I'm making pizza tonight and the dough has been cold fermenting for many days. But it's so hands off and takes very little actual time or effort. Just requires some planning ahead.
It’s a good idea for large companies to use their profit to stay profitable, and if it supports their cloud business…

Where it’s a No-No is in accounting: those should probably not be counted as “sales” but as gifts in nature or some particular category. Bill Gurley and Brad Gerstner are investors, so naturally, they balk when they hear that the documents they read, financial statements, have a creative take on reality. Still, I don’t think they think that lowers Google’s overall value. They just want that in a separate column.
Just replace “safety” with “puritan” in all of these announcements and they’ll make more sense.
I think the reality is that it's a mix - but people tend to follow others with similar views.
HR overheard that, and now they want a meeting tomorrow :(

Apparently getting out of your seat early at lunch and announcing to your coworkers that you’re gonna go “tickle my pickle” is “inappropriate for the work place” and “completely unacceptable behavior”..
If storage is a problem, couldn’t Blusky add a size limit to video uploads?
In addition to other comments: You see it for much longer than if you are in one place.
I really like the fresh ideas in Bluesky, in this case especially the different ideas regarding federation in comparison to Mastodon. I've tried Mastodon extensively and it is lacking in so many ways.

There's no algorithmic feed other than "popular" (on large instances) which shows the same 10 people posting for months in a row, daily. Hence, discovery of people and content is very hard. No content or people are recommended and search is broken. Ordinary people not belonging to some cultish niche have a very hard time compiling a good feed, if they even understand it at all.

Federation itself is broken. The boosts and comments to a post do not accurately synchronize across the network, it depends on some complicated logic regarding whom from your instance follows anybody else from the other instance. The bottom line is that you may see 3 boosts whilst the original has 12. You may not care about boosts, but it's a disaster for comments/replies. Everybody is seeing a different subset of replies to the same damn post. It drives the OP mad because there will be 20 people replying the same thing because they cannot see that others already said it.

Instances have too much power over moderation. They control whom the instance federates with server to server. You may be following somebody on another instance but your instance owner defederates and now your connection is gone. This ability to not just moderate content but heavily impact your social graph isn't seen anywhere else. And this ability is heavily used as Mastodon is a network of activists.

Combine this over-use of moderation with the idea that instances go under all the time, and the only sane thing to do for most people is to join the default instance. Here you'll have reasonable "mainstream" moderation and the biggest federation reach with other instances/services. Which kind of defeats the point of a distributed social network.

I'm still impressed by what Mastodon has accomplished given its grass root origin and shoestring budget, but it's no social media of the future.

I don't know if Bluesky is, but at least it has a better design regarding nomadic identities, a user's ability to self-moderate, content protection, etc.
There's the Google Pay service that processes payments.

There's the old Google Pay app that got rebranded as Google Wallet.

And then there's a newer Google Pay app available only in the US, Singapore, and India. This is the one getting shutdown.

See also:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Pay

And a very helpful chart:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Googlepayments.svg
Agreed. Doubly so for ggplot2 over matplotlib.
Why do people value their data so highly?

Can’t you just be ephemeral and delete your posts after a few days? Seems like nothing good comes from having a huge history of things you posted on a social network.
Yeah, that's what I do, was just pointing out that the loudest mastodon users are like.
Yes. I like the wool and first personal shooter more.
40-90% new digital products don't succeed
Annoying stat but true. The main thing the underlying companies/teams fail on is foundation, the product vision. It's not clear and the team can't align let alone cater to it.
Product development relies on the whole team having clear direction on where they're going, why, what features are needed, how it will work and what the journey/experience is like.
Foundation is key. They always say, 'roadmap to success'.
Delphi was the first GUI-based development experience for me back in '96-'97. It was the next step after learning Turbo Pascal and writing command line programs. I still get warm feelings every time I see it mentioned somewhere. The built-in and third-party components were my favorite part.
Tell HN: Stripe will never have real competition
It'd wild how payment processors don't want to do business with you until you've already made money within some threshold...but then, why would I need you?

Make it make sense.

This is why Stripe is so massive.
I think an underrated way to deal with this phenomenon is proper self-marketing. Talk endlessly what you have done to prevent catastrophe. Describe the avoided catastrophes vividly so that people get a clear picture.
managed hosting perhaps? It works in the email industry at least (Google and Microsoft nearly dominate the email biz)
Was the list of city names known? Could you statically pre-build the Trie structure?
Google's history with their payment apps/platform is almost as convoluted as their history with message apps/platforms.

I swear they have gone back and forth on Android Pay/Google Wallet/Google Pay a half dozen times.
When you share a public post on Mastodon, you are by implication licensing that content for redistribution. Because other Mastodon servers have to redistribute it in order for anyone on another instance to see it. Hope that helps you understand the basic stuff here.

(Either that or every Mastodon server in existence is a massive copyright violation, which is frankly quite possible given how bad copyright law is)
SomethingAwful putters along under new ownership, with fairly decent moderation.
Now it says "Disallow: /"
I loved them all - but I can see your point!
They discuss the Directed Shares Program on page 224.

https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1713445/000162828024...

Briefly - Users & Moderators will be invited on 6 phased tiers. Accounts created on or before Jan 1st, 2024.

T1 - Users identified by us who have made meaninful contribution to Reddit community programs.

T2 - 200,000 Karma / 5,000 Mod actions

T3 - 100,000 Karma / 2,500 Mod actions

T4 - 50,000 Karma / 1,000 Mod actions

T5 - 25,000 Karma / 500 Mod actions

T6 - All eligible users

Class A Common stock, # and % appears redacted.
Yes, because they are getting fired!
You'd basically get Boa Constructor[0][1] and the fact that it mentions that it is based on "wxWindows"[2] and the last release was in 2007 is probably a good indicator of how much Python developers would be interested in such a program.

(incidentally there was also Visual Tcl[3] which was quite interesting in that while it had a Delphi/Lazarus/BoaConstructor-like interface, you could modify the program while it was running)

[0] https://boa-constructor.sourceforge.net/Screenshots/

[1] (the name is probably a play on C++ Builder)

[2] old name of wxWidgets before Microsoft asked them to change it

[3] https://vtcl.sourceforge.net/
> For such a supposedly revolutionary advancement.

The technology is objectively not ready, at least to keep the promises that are/have been advertised.

I am not going to get too opinionated, but this seems to be a widespread theme, and to people that don't respond to marketing advances (remember Tivo?), but are willing to spend real money and real time, it would be "nice" if there was signalling to this demographic.
Imo the concept using the excess capacity of independent data centers is cool, the pool/supply should be much larger and if they deliver the promise on prices (just checked the website - $0.99/h for a100 is a steal) then I'd love it! Lambda Labs is constantly fully booked, so the more cheap providers the better.
Pedantic lepidopterists of the world, unite!
> It was meant for the public to see, not to bulk copy it en masse to somewhere else.

Except literally the entire design is for other Mastodon servers to bulk copy it en masse to somewhere else.

> There aren't technical means that let me allow humans to read my stuff without allowing LLMs to ingest it

Yes there are. Don't make it public.

> However, I reserve the right to think someone's an ass for doing it.

Of course! You can think anyone is an ass. You can think anything you want. That doesn't mean that person did anything wrong.
> You fully control how to store the TOTP seed

Sorta. The seed still needs to be issued to you in some way.
You have your history very confused. Nearly 20 years elapsed between the end of the Chinese Civil War which left the CCP in power and the commencement of the Cultural Revolution.
can you point to a garage startup NOT in the US?
> And centralized.

Yes. Too much of routing is centralized. Since phone numbers are no longer locative (the area code and exchange number don't map to physical equipment) all calls require a lookup. It's not that big a table by modern standards. Tens of gigabytes. All switches should have a database slave of each telco's phone number routing list, to allow most local calls if external database connectivity is lost. It may be behind, and some roaming phones won't work. But most would get through.
What stands out to me among the examples is that amazing things can be achieved when a small number of highly motivated (obsessed) people get together in a space with few distractions and plenty of freedom to experiment.
>The vast majority of people have not worked in managerial positions with high levels of responsibility to understand the decision-making and interest balancing processes required for a large organization to operate.

There are some of us who have and still see the facades and illogical reasoning for many decisions, decisions that if made in the lower wrung of the company would definitely lead to someone getting fired. People ignore good evidence even at the highest levels all the time because their incentives are not aligned, for example. I witnessed this before. I've been in director+ levels multiple times, at small and medium organizations. I'm not convinced that my peers were any smarter than lower level employees when it comes to making decisions given all the available inputs.

I will say, that in mid sized organizations I've been apart of, you do see sometimes that lower level employees have no concept outside the department, and that leads to tunnel vision. They don't see the complete story all the time, but I always viewed those as communication failures most of the time.

I "made the sausage" at my previous job reporting directly to the CTO[0] at a 1000+ person company. It was alot more volume of information, and I talked to alot of different people all the time, but I think you could take any whip smart employee, elevate them to that position, and they could do a reasonable job.

That experience has left me really jaded to be honest. Whatever humanity I had left to endure corporate life had sunk by the end, as it were.

[0]: This is why I was raising alarm bells in the first place, because I knew it'd be heard. Fact is, it was ignored.
Not all of it. My credit union's interac services still worked.
This is actually true. Cutting people automatically causes a cut in scope of work. Teams become more picky and focused about the work they would do in the next few quarters.

BUT - the cut has to be management. Management is overhead. They are the reason why red tape exists. Every manager in the company adds more reporting, more paperwork, and more bureaucracy for people doing the actual work.

By cutting layers and layers, companies can become very efficient.
Holy crap this feels so real.

Excelling at school & career at an early age, while being absolutely trashed at home/family time, gave me the anxt from sticking my head out of the room. But, at the same time, while out and about, already working on something, subconcious power trip in most interactions.

Like, when I am already on a roll, I have this vivid vision of the tasks to take & tools to use. I am quick to decide and to come up with solutions and at the same time very loud about it.

But every time I wake up, I feel worthless, scared that I am not enough, that one step into the world, means step between thousands of angry faces that want to hold my face against a gutter.
My university had a radio station. Still around: https://www.icradio.com/
It's almost as bad as when they put the Castile flag on the Santa Maria!
I likely lost touch with some friends over the years because of general confusion over Google Talk, GTalk through GMail, Google+ Hangouts, later Hangouts, GChat (which I understand to be separate from the current Google Chat?), and Google Chat. The ones I've kept in contact with all agreed to move back to SMS and email.

Meanwhile ten years after Apple supported adding boarding passes to their wallet, I finally managed to force a plane ticket into my Google wallet by taking a picture of the barcode, so there's that.
Not that the following necessarily negates HN's dislike for such one-liners, but here's a little context on the above comment, for people outside NZ:

The single city of Auckland, which is located at the northern end of New Zealand's 1600km long landmass, holds about one-third of the country's total population.

By contrast, for example, the entire South Island of New Zealand - which is about 60% of the country's landmass - holds about 23% of the country's population.

The somewhat extreme geographical population spread means that there is a constant undercurrent of "Auckland, and The Rest" in NZ culture. It is this to which the above poster attempts to make humorous reference.
> Stripe will never have real competition

They aren't even the largest payment processing platform, so how can you say that?

IIRC Adyen (who we rarely see talked about on HN) processes a higher payment volume that stripe.
> The "single most economically important task" that a machine which can operate at a human (or superhuman) level, is "make a better version of itself" until that process hits a limit, followed by "maximise how many of you exist" until it runs out of resources.

Lot of hidden assumptions here. How does "operating at human level" (an assumption itself) imply the ability to do this? Humans can't do this.

We very specifically can't do this, we have sexual reproduction for a good reason.

(Also, since your scenario also has the robots working for free, they would instantly run out of resources to reproduce because they don't have any money. Similarly, an AGI will be unable to grow exponentially and take over the world because it would have to pay its AWS bill.)

> If I imagine a world where every task that any human can perform can also be done at world expert level — let alone at a superhuman level — by a computer/robot (with my implicit assumption "cheaply"), I can't imagine why I would ever choose the human option.

If the robot performs at human level, and it knows you'll always hire it over a human, why would it work for cheaper?

If you can program it to work for free, then it's subhuman.

If you're imagining something that's superhuman in only ways that are bad for you and subhuman in ways that would be good for you, just stop imagining it and you're good.
Live: Lunar Landing of Intuitive Machines-1 (Nova-C / Odysseus) [video]
These are just the initial limits while we work out any issues. It'd be bad for everyone if the network was immediately overrun with spammers launching PDS hosts with millions of fake users/posts, etc. Even though our infra might be able to weather this kind of abuse, there are many independent feed generators (custom algorithms) operated by individuals that would likely fall over.

The plan is to increase limits sufficiently to account for all legitimate usage.

(It's also worth pointing out that these limits only apply to our Relay service. The expectation is that there will be other Relays on the network in the future.)
Better yet, be in a work culture where people happily give credit to and praise others.
> This is how it already works, isn't it?

I think so, yes. Thinking about Fahrenheit 451, and the memory hole of
Nineteen Eighty Four it always seemed implausible for any regime to
completely expunge the past. That said, one our commenters (fong? who
I presume is Chinese) was telling me how, between the end of the Qing
dynasty and Mao, 5000 years of cultural history was more or less
erased. What I see with AI is a much stronger possibility for radical
revisionists and deniers to use "guardrails and "safety" to airbrush
out all the distasteful bits of history.
The only obvious conclusion is that to start the next unicorn company you must get access to the best garage possible.
Uber charged me $90 for a subscription. Haven’t used the app for a year or paid this before.
Attempting to rewrite history and racism regardless of the race involved makes me uncomfortable yes. Do you disagree that Google had an agenda when they programmed their AI to do the things it does?
Running Postgres in Bun
Well, this actually happened. A guy with a death wish decided to commit suicide by blowing up a nuclear reactor, and he succeeded [1].

Well, actually we don't know this for sure, because the guy (obviously) did not survive to tell the story. It may have been intentional suicide, or simply an unintentional operator error.

But it does not matter. Since then the design of nuclear reactors evolved in such a way as to make it very difficult for an operator to be able to intentionally or unintentionally trigger a blow-up or a melt-down.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SL-1
Are these magic rocks for sale?
Jesus Christ that chart. What is going on over at Google???
I could quibble by saying that making Flash games was a gateway into programming for many of us on this platform, and I don't see similarly useful skills being exercised by making TikTok videos.

On the other hand, our elders by and large didn't see the value in computers, either, and thought we were wasting our time. So, that opinion might be me being an old man yelling at clouds!

Or, more interestingly, our generation created (helped create; yeah, I know there are grey(er) beards than me on here) a world that highly values the skills we cut our teeth on messing around with Flash; the kids these days will have their turn making a world in their image, which may (read: will) have different values. I can't say what our generation's done with / to tech (or creativity in general) has been an un-alloyed good; what comes next will certainly be different, but different doesn't imply worse. The kids making TikToks right now won't think it is, and I expect that in some ways they'll be right.
Web repeating actually feels like a good fit for these current gen multimodal agents.

Unsure if the code was provided (logged out I only see the one post) so unable to speak to the code or how it runs, but judging by the poster’s profile I think I can trust they know when code runs correctly. Though it does appear they’re currently working at this specific agent’s parent company.

Honestly, this impresses me more in the work the selenium team has been doing than the llm that used their api.
Mswp, a Python decorator that clears local variables upon function execution
Python functions often create temporary variables for intermediate computations, which can clutter the local namespace and potentially lead to memory leaks if not properly managed. mswp addresses this issue by providing a simple yet powerful decorator that automatically cleans up temporary local variables, ensuring an efficient execution environment.

You can install mswp via pip:
pip3 install mswp

To use mswp, simply decorate your functions with @mswp. This ensures that any temporary local variables used within the function are cleared upon completion, promoting code cleanliness and efficient memory usage.

from mswp import clear

@clear
def my_function():
temp_var = 10
# Your code here
return result

Features
- Automatic Cleanup: mswp automatically clears temporary local variables after function execution, preventing clutter and potential memory leaks.
- Simplified Syntax: With a simple decorator, mswp streamlines code maintenance and promotes readability.
- Error Handling: mswp provides robust error handling to ensure reliable execution even in the presence of exceptions.
Stability has to make money somehow. By releasing an 8B parameter model, they’re encouraging people to use their paid API for inference. It’s not a terrible business decision. And hobbyists can play with the smaller models, which with some refining will probably be just fine for most non-professional use cases.
If JS had that pattern for hiding `this` and facilitating late-binding like that would it have still needed the `class` keyword?
I didn't bother to try, so not sure. There would probably be some challenges and I don't see how I'd accomplish it without some branch instruction in the custom hasher.
For what its worth I've yet to see any spam at all in my Mastodon feeds (regular user for about a year, accounts on multiple instances). Much respect to the admins for staying on top of it.
Work for yourself. The fewer bugs you create, the faster you iterate. And the faster you iterate, the better your chances of finding product/market fit.
A theory for the reported Verizon/T-Mobile issues is that when AT&T went offline, all of those phones went into SOS mode and tried to register on the remaining available networks (Verizon and T-Mobile) to allow 911 calls to be made. The surge in devices registering at once may have overloaded some parts of those networks.
Vice Media to Stop Publishing on Vice.com, Plans to Cut Hundreds of Jobs
Nice. This is a class of error with the delightful acronym TOCTOU (Time of Check to Time of Use) which is present in an astonishing number of places.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time-of-check_to_time-of-use