skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> I hear about various "work from home" jobs actually being scams, but what's going on there?

There's a lot of variants, but a couple of the most common ones are:

1) "Welcome to ScamCo! Here's a check for $X to help you pay for these work supplies, send us back the extra after you're done." (The check bounces; the repayment of the remainder doesn't.)

2) "Welcome to ScamCo! You'll be my personal assistant, please buy me some gift cards / cryptocurrency / whatever." (The payment to cover the cost of the cards bounces; the gift cards / cryptocurrency / whatever are unrecoverable.)

3) "Welcome to ScamCo! You'll help me move money between my bank accounts." (The bank accounts are stolen; the mark is working as a money mule.)

4) "Welcome to ScamCo! You'll help us reship packages." (The packages are stolen goods.)
This got me thinking as I do not remember Satoshi having a bitcoin.org domain for the announcement... There must be someone who knows who Satoshi is right? The domain registrar? Or at least they know someone who knows who Satoshi is. Also to whom did Satoshi transfer the domain and when?
Recent and related:

Handwriting but not typewriting leads to widespread brain connectivity - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39364576 - Feb 2024 (191 comments)
Technologies for Non-Programmers (2019)
> No offense, but how do you know this? It seems like you're assuming other peoples' thoughts and intentions.

No assumptions, it's because my team are asked regularly by the 20+ year experienced developers to fix their problems so much so that it causes problems for my sprints, mostly because it's unplanned work.

> And how much does it actually matter?

Because other people have to carry their work instead of doing their own work.

> Programmers today are expected to adapt way more frequently every passing year.

This is how it's always been, but it doesn't take much effort to learn the Java syntax invented in the last 10 years, or a new Java API that looks useful. Keeping up to date in your own field, programmer or not, is just good practice.

It shouldn't be necessary to point out use of a broken/deprecated Date API, or annotations that have been in Spring for 15 years that does the same job as roll your own bodge a dev cobbled together, without tests, over an entire sprint (to get to PR late for a deadline) and now has hacks across a code base everyone has to work with.

> The idea of software was to make our lives better, not for our lives to make the code better.

I agree, but some of us chose to wrestle with the devil so users don't :)
What do you mean? SWIFT payments are usually pretty fast and cost pennies.
What’s the difference between a house on a ‘wooded’ lot and a cabin in a forest? Seems an artificial distinction.
The big mac index seems a bit trickier to calculate now that mcdonalds app users pay half price for one.
I think the point was that code is not inherently limited in the same way as other kinds of engineering.

If you tell someone to engineer you the arm for positioning a desk lamp, they aren't going to give you the hydraulic arm for a 12-ton backhoe without anyone noticing. There are physical and cost constraints that will prevent that from happening pretty quickly.

In software, there are no comparable constraints. A few MiB of software contains extraordinary amounts of complexity but could easily fly under the radar and ship, and then become a maintenance nightmare.
There's nothing provided here other than Jeff Dean gave a stock entry-level presentation to students at Rice, therefore "The depth of institutional knowledge that is going to be unlocked inside Google is actually frightening for me to consider."

You should see Google's turnover numbers from 4 years ago, much less now.

It's been years, it's broken internally, we see the results.

Here, we're in awe of 1KLOC of C++ code that runs inference on the CPU.

Nobody serious is running inference on CPU unless you're on the extreme cutting edge. (ex. I need to on Android and on the Chrome OS Linux VM, but I still use llama.cpp because it does support GPU everywhere else)

I'm not sure what else to say.

(n.b. i am a xoogler)
That’s no secret anymore, is it?
Wait, so you didn't read it and posted this comment?
Unless they use it to buy something, that’s just “investment”.
I still love the whole "we know our data is wrong, but we sell it as fact, and know that that information is used to impact cost to you, but you're required to constantly check with us, or pay us to tell you when we're lying". Yet somehow this isn't extortion, and somehow it's not illegal defamation.

The moment credit agencies started running their own monitoring services, it seemed like they were openly admitting that they were defaming people. I still do not understand why this is legal.
Ah, yeah, I prefer the Faber-Castell Pitt's with the fine point to the Microns as well. The Microns do seem to be easier to find here in my end of Canada though, so there are tons in the house and my wife enjoys them as well.

Have you tried the FC Pitt brush pens [0] at all? They seem like a lot of fun for diagrams and doodles.

[0] https://fabercastellshopcanada.ca/collections/pitt-artist-pe...
Rise of crypto mines in the South raises concerns for electric grid and rates
I might be misinterpreting the aesthetic you're talking about, but I think it was similar to (and probably directly inspired by) the graphic design that The Designers Republic was doing in the 90's (think the Wipeout videogame). Their aesthetic spread pretty rapidly at the time.
Techstars CEO responds to former Seattle lead, tells him to check his facts
Same here, but to be fair it was a totally different age. These days anyone selling consumer antivirus is right up there with people selling "hydrogen water" to rubes. The whole landscape of PC security has changed so much!
> They'll write: "look, people used to think we'd have blockchain-based economies and that AI was about to take over the world! How silly they were."

I get the wider point of your comment -- which is that most people don't agree with the wild predictions of futurists -- but I wanted to respond to this quote in particular. I think a lot of people mistake being cynical with being clever. In particular, treating blockchain and AI like they have the same potential as one another is maybe overlooking what each of them does. I'm going to quote from this: https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/heuristics-that-almost-alwa...

He comments on the latest breathless press releases from tech companies. This will change everything! say the press releases. “No it won’t”, he comments. This is the greatest invention ever to exist! say the press releases. “It’s a scam,” he says.

His the best futurist of all. Everyone else occasionally gets bamboozled by some scam or hype train, but he never does. His heuristic is truly superb.

But - say it with me - he could be profitably replaced with a rock. “NOTHING EVER CHANGES OR IS INTERESTING”, says the rock, in letters chiseled into its surface.

[EDIT: I think my original comment was a bit uncivil and missed your wider point, which remains an interesting one]
Canadian author Spider Robinson had a cat that spontaneously used a tool. The cat selected a narrow wedge shaped piece from a woodpile, carried it to the other side of the house, jammed the small end into a door crack, and levered open a locked bathroom door.
100% this. He is going to be the first one laying folks off. The interview specifically mentions eliminating the need to shoot on location, and his use of AI makeup. I guess he didn't feel bad about the makeup artists he put out of business.
The flipside with this particular application is that we're going to be seeing some excellent indy movies produced by enthusiasts who never had the means before.

But yes, there's about to be a massive shakeup. You can blame Perry, but someone has to fund these tremendously expensive human efforts. If everyone else is underselling him with cheaper AI productions, where does that leave him?
Americans are used to everything being compartmentalized “if you want to go for a walk drive to the park” but there are people out there that still want to exist and have a sense of real place - the ability to physically move through it is important.
Things don’t quite add up with this article, why did AMD kill a project that benefits it in the AI space? Was it underwhelming? Was it violating any license terms of Nvidia?
It should be noted that the Internet Archive is blocked by some libraries because it can be used to circumvent parental controls (I.e library control)…
Coincidentally I posted a link to an article from 1893 earlier today: On Electric Spark Photographs; Or, Photography of Flying Bullets, etc.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39479222
Research on news websites blocking AI crawlers
Here's the blog post that she is responding to by Chris DeVore:

https://www.founderscoop.com/2024/what-went-wrong-at-techsta...
Any job paying 12.50/hour with an amenable schedule meets the requirements.
Way easier to add the watermark to the real ones, ha.
Or he deleted the keys.

Also can you choose a smaller subsidy? Wouldn’t that be an invalid block?
Just pick the one with higher saturation.
Not sure if this is of any value to you, but Ryzen 7 generates 2 tokens per second for the 7B-Instruct model.

The model itself is very unimpressive and I see no reason to play with it over the worst alternative from Hugging Face.
I can only imagine this was released for some bizarre compliance reasons.
Very low-hanging fruit article. Perhaps interested for a mainstream audience but any IT professional would know all this even if Windows isn't their main thing. It isn't for me, I'm mainly Linux and Mac but I still abhor Microsoft accounts so I always bypass this requirement when I do have to use windows.
> we need a universal basic income and progressive tax rates urgently if we want to avoid the world turning into a Gotham City kind of inequal shitshow.

Not really. IMHO the idea of universal basic income is not an actual solution, it's a soporific to passivate people until all their power is drained from them. What we really need is a Butlerian Jihad, to make technology and technologists subordinate to society, instead of letting society be subordinate to technologists and their technology (and the capital they serve and/or control).
It's not random. Most of the fake videos are taken from OpenAI's recent Sora demo.
The mailbox? On your property? that you paid for an installed (or bought off the previous owner), is government/usps property and they'll steal a parcel that someone else has delivered to it?

That's insane lmao
These comments appear to be about Gemini's image generation, IIUC. Gemma, however, is a language model -- whilst I believe that a larger unreleased version of it is used as part of the Gemini product, it doesn't seem relevant to these criticisms. Also, the Gemma base model is released, which doesn't AFAIK contain any RLHF.

The impression I have is that you're using the release of Gemma to complain about tangentially related issues about Google and politics more generally. The HN guidelines warn against this: "Eschew flamebait. Avoid generic tangents... Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something. Please don't use Hacker News for political or ideological battle."
Does it actually fully stop telemetry? I tried it in the windows 10 days and it didn't really stop everything, sadly.
This page taught me Zig not only has _an_ implementation of Kyber, but an implementation of Kyber in the stdlib.

There's also ECC, numerous hashes, stream ciphers... impressive!(?)[0]

[0] https://ziglang.org/documentation/master/std/#A;std:crypto
Some people choose to blindly trust the government and decide whatever it does is for the best and has no downsides. To quote someone I asked (unsuccessfully) for a referendum signature against a surveillance law, "If I can't trust the government anymore, then who can I trust?"
I'm curious how a voltage spike would have gotten through the computer PSU conversion to DC, and then only damaged 1 drive somehow?
> tbills have a specified lock up period, like a month or more

What is this referring to? I've bought and sold T-Bills in the same week, and have never encountered anything about a lockup.
That's a helpful pointer. Thank you.
I'm curious how you find the people to ask that?

Market research, talking to people in line at the post office, sending a nice personal email to an existing customer?
TBH the automation and push for cashless are so aggressive that many people take only smartphone to the grocery store.
Even if this was the case, the contents of this list might change significantly between the time of manufacture and the time of use. The forcing of updates basically makes sure that the newest list is always written to the drone as soon as it is released.
yeah, that makes a lot of sense

however, the downvotes on my comment upthread are making it clear that this is not the kind of place where it's safe to discuss questions like whether the selective pressure for more melanin from sunburns is stronger or weaker than the selective pressure for less melanin from rickets
The ability to do that is what allowed London to prosper while older European towns turned into tourist theme parks. It is one of those wonderful things. You make money as an American and you are like a God to these Europeans, their luxuries are trifles.

At some point people wish to become ossified and want their homes and cities to become tomb worlds visited by gawking tourists.
Military tracking high-altitude balloon flying over Western U.S.
Anyone can sue anyone for anything. I assume that if you trip on a rock or a tree root on a trail on someone's land, suing would be a man bites dog thing--but so could any number of events. Obviously if you deliberately put some hazard of a trail crossing your property, that could be different. (Though probably edge cases--tricky natural hazard on a well-established trail you didn't do anything about.)
> And while the average, unmotivated and undirected kid might do better in a private school environment statistically, I don’t think there’s anything a motivated kid needs to do well on the SAT that isn’t available in the vast majority of public schools in the US.

How many kids are self-motivated? I certainly wasn't. I did the required work, the minimum expected of me, getting by on raw talent. Nobody ever pushed me, and I kind of regret that now. I didn't acquire self-discipline and motivation until my mid-twenties. My observation has been that the majority of "driven" kids are driven by somebody else.

> In fact, the SAT is probably fairer than most of those other metrics, because it tests a pretty lowest-common denominator set of math, vocabulary, and logical reasoning skills. It doesn’t rely on books some kids might not have read or advanced math that might not be available at particular high schools.

Ok, but what if colleges eliminated the "non-objective" factors and made the standardized test the sole criterion for admission? You can't just change the system without consequences. There would probably be more perfect SAT scores, because everyone would be focused on the SAT as the sole source of college admission, ignoring grades, extracurricular activities, recommendations, etc. Prestigious colleges would start to require perfect SAT scores for admission, given the pool of candidates with perfect SAT scores and the lack of other criteria; after all, with only one criterion, they couldn't justify letting in someone with a lower score than other applicants. In that scenario, it's questionable whether the SAT could even remain as "easy" as it is currently. They'd probably have to make it more difficult in order to produce a wider range of scores.

> Because parents who can afford private school are smarter and more sophisticated than parents who can’t.

How exactly would that matter? Many parents who can afford private school are also very busy, sometimes absent. We're not talking about home schoolers. Regardless of wealth, most parents seem to rely on the schools to babysit their kids.
Same here, 30+ years experience, programming's always been easy for me.

The hard part is suspending disbelief to ignore how bad nearly everything has gotten. Every language, every framework, every operating system, every hardware platform, every paradigm like the web/mobile/AI is so riddled with obvious mistakes and missed opportunities that it takes nearly everything I have each morning to start working. I've reached the point where I know what the mistakes will be before I even see the tool, and then experiencing them over and over and over again is like a never-ending slap in the face. I'm basically crippled now with unending anxiety and loneliness from living in a world where nobody can see how hard I work, and I have no way to explain to them how all of my work is due to this unnecessary friction that apparently only I can see. And that I even know how to fix the issues, but having to work steals all of my time, so there will never come a day when I'm free of obligation long enough to ever demonstrate what's possible.

The real kicker is that after going through several healing and growth processes, I know that I have it in me to step into this other life where things work and I'm productive. But that's the fallacy. The actual truth is that the horrors I perceive are in the world now. Wealth inequality has passed a point of no return. Along with environmental collapse, the rise of authoritarianism, the worship of ignorance, the lack of empathy, the painful sense of unfairness that so many feel so profoundly that causes them to lash out and perpetuate the injustices that they've suffered onto the world rather than work together collectively to solve them.

The only thing that can save us now is help from above that isn't coming. Billionaires could pay their taxes. People could love their neighbors instead of buying guns. We could all stop feeding the financial institutions that have captured every government. Instead, we're sold this bill of goods that our salvation is in our rugged individualism. So we spin and stew and contemplate the worst while the rich and powerful divide us so they can laugh all the way to the bank. I just have this sense that the only salvation is to get out of tech entirely and I dunno, move to the woods or an island somewhere and live the gratifying life that's been denied to us. Correction - that we have denied ourselves for reasons we don't even understand.
macOS also has this passive aggressive "finish setting up your Mac" if you don't sign in to all apple's toys like iCloud.

I never use a vendor account on my devices (even on Android, I sideload everything) so it's pretty annoying when the system preferences box has that red badge again and I think it's an update but it's just that stupid reminder again.

It's also got the same telemetry crap. Even when you turn that "off" it's still extremely chatty to Apple.com domains in the background.

I don't think it's much better than windows except for the truly hostile stuff in edge like the shopping bar and pay later schemes
And in the US, access to waterways isn't guaranteed. I'll have to look up the details, but there are sections of the James River in Virginia which are private and the right to privacy was granted in the colonial era.
Glass Health (YC W23) is hiring across multiple engineering roles
FTX declared bankruptcy in November '22. At the date they did so, any debts anyone had against them were essentially frozen and converted into dollars at the rate of that day. As FTX converts their assets into money, they will pay back all of their creditors in order of priority, with taxes coming first, then customer deposits, then normal debt, and last what remains goes to holders of the stock (leaving out a lot of nuance here).

Normally when a bank (or whatever FTX was) goes under with customer money missing, people lower in the pecking order don't really expect to see any money back, so they would be looking to offload whatever FTX owes them to anyone dumb enough to buy it, at whatever valuation it would fetch. The play is that if you are a savvy investor who knows that FTX holds an illiquid rapidly appreciating asset that might be valuable enough to pay every creditor, toxic FTX debt sold at pennies for the dollar might suddenly look very enticing.

For the private equity to make bank here, then all retail investors have to first be made whole (to the dollar valuation of whatever they held in November 22 at that time), but they are not going to see any profit. The profit goes to whoever who managed to buy debt at low valuations. If Anthropic shares appreciate enough that FTX makes every creditor whole, the rest goes to the stockholders which are mostly FTX employees and also mostly going to be in prison, which is a weird outcome.
My Shiba has learned the days of the week. I have a family member that visits every Thursday, and he sits by the door waiting for them (only on Thursdays).

And god forbid I work a weekend or do something off schedule, he gets stressed out thinking something is wrong.

I often joke he would be a more normal dog if he had a lobotomy. Sometimes I wish he were a bit dumber :)
> the moment the topic moves even slightly away from technology.

and sometimes when the topic is strictly about technology.
Olaf Stapleton "Sirius"
https://www.themeateater.com/conservation/public-lands-and-w...

TIL this is a real thing. I thought it was a HN thought experiment.
>Work with honest, intelligent people

Not too many of them around, are there? You can have either honesty or intelligence but not both.
Yes, or most abstractly, the mathematical definition would be the set of points satisfying a constraint - namely sum of distance to foci is constant.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ellipse?useskin=vector#Definit...

Or for the n-dimensional generalization: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/N-ellipse?useskin=vector

So in that sense an ellipse is a function `ellipse(p_1, ..., p_n, d)`. But given the foci you can get the vectors and vice versa. So one representation isn't necessarily 'more fundamental' than another. They just have different (equivalent) perspectives that lend more easily/naturally to certain problem contexts.

(for example, the set of points definition is a lot less directly useful than the matrix A if you're trying to do linear algebra)

The unit ball isn't really an inherent "identity element" for ellipses. It's more of a special case where the foci are equally spaced (eccentricity is zero).

If you want to go that route, the eccentricity is a more fundamental descriptor of all conic sections, of which ellipses and circles are just two. In fact, all conic sections can be described as `conic_section(p_1, ..., p_n, eccentricity)`. So maybe you'd argue that's more "fundamental" because it's more general.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eccentricity_(mathematics)?use...
Yeah, I've encountered sites that charge a 1% fee for using a credit card, but I get 1.5% cash back.