skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: Steelman why my voicemail app needs permissions?
My voicemail app on my android phone just refused to let me listen to any existing voicemails until I gave it permission to see the location of nearby devices.

Can anyone give a steelman version of why a voicemail app might legitimately need such permissions? Because to me this just looks like nothing but information harvesting.
Liters and fuzzing are not about cosmetic things.
Still, if recharged once a day, that's 3 to 10 years, what's completely in line with the time durability. The time degradation will just bias the lifetime into the short end of that interval.

If you have an electric car, and don't use it often, then your numbers will be worse. But if you use it weekly (what is normal for lightly used cars), you need about an year and half to reach the OP's number and become better than the next best alternative.
>Meanwhile you're defending a company that made 93 billion dollars in net profit last year.

Yes
I work for a hedge fund and we source holiday calendar from this firm. Highly recommend them.
Companies are compelled to develop features all the time. Mostly so far in the EU these features have been around accessibility, safety, and crime prevention, but there’s an awful lot of precedent for companies being required to develop something specific in order to be able to sell their product in the EU.
I can’t wait to see what happens in Russia post-Putin. I mean, the guy is 71 years old. Maybe he will hang on for another 10-15 years. I can’t wait to see what happens then. As far as I can tell none of his biological offspring is being pushed as next leader.
Right, and not only that, but Yellowstone has a long history of being fucked with by humans and the ecology basically falling apart, because humans just wanted it the way they wanted it. And because it's so accessible, people continue to dump their trash, play loud music, fuck with the animals, etc. It's not nature anymore, it's Disneyworld with animal exhibits.

There's room enough for both man-made parks and wilderness areas, but to keep wilderness wild we need to stop making them human-accessible. I mean the whole point of wilderness is that it's not accessible, helpful, friendly, easy. The wild is harsh, dangerous, remote, unkempt, challenging, but also beautiful, tranquil, awe-inspiring, soul-filling.
curious as to why this is getting downvoted. Is it because people here don't like Tesla?
If that's the case the name should come with an asterisk and footnote. Keeping "Open" in the name is not genuine. Its would be like a superhero group called themselves "Hero Squad" and decided being superheros is not profitable as villainy, but still calling themselves Hero Squad despite the obvious operational changes.
At a job I had a few years ago, 95% of my time was spent on reddit/HN.

There was corporate in-fighting over who would would be responsible for some work, and my team lost, so my team no longer had any work to do. My manager quit, but his manager didn't actually know what we did on a day-to-day basis so basically left us alone. He was extremely occupied with the work from another one of his teams, anyways.

It was actually kind of stressful. I was always waiting for the day that my acting manager would discover that we had no work to do and would eliminate the entire team. I ended up leaving and getting a job where I actually had important (to the company, anyways) work to do at a significantly higher salary.
I believe it was Helen Toner who claimed an OpenAI lawyer said they were at risk of breaching fiduciary duty if the company fell apart because of the ouster.
OpenAI email announces Mar 8th switch to pre-paid only API access
Ladders 101
> new concurrent primitives

You could make a case that concurrency primitives weren't mainstream in programming languages at the time. But there's not a strong case for saying that Go introduced new concurrency primitives unless you just ignore the history of programming and programming languages. Nothing in Go's concurrency model was new. Not quite mainstream, sure. But not new. [EDIT: By primitives I take you to mean built-in to the language, not brought in via libraries like pthreads or something.]

I'd also question the statement that "native binaries" were not mainstream. That seems to ignore a lot of code out there, including the C++ code that Go was (in part) meant to replace at Google.

Defer as syntax is maybe new? But some form of finally construct was in a lot of languages used at the time Go was developed. Defer flattens the code by reducing indentation levels, but it introduced nothing new in terms of concepts that weren't already being used by programmers of mainstream languages.
func (o Operation) IsValid() bool {
if o == Unknown {
return false
}
return true
}

Why, oh why don't people just write

return o != Unknown

This is so common in the code that I'm seeing on the Internet, on GitHub etc. Is it because people don't understand booleans?
The second movie did not at all shy away from islamic references.
Safe Rust has 0 UB, but the person you're responding to qualified that with:

> that must be enforced at non-zero runtime cost.

Some of Rust's behavior that permits this is not zero runtime costs. Bounds-checking, for example, has a non-zero cost: the bounds check!

Now, I greatly prefer Rust's approach: I'd rather have the marginal CPU cost: I value my time far higher, at least until the profiler speaks up, and in many cases the optimizer is pretty good at eliminating checks that I myself might look at and go "but I know $condition is true here!" — so too does the optimizer. (And these days, Godbolt makes testing that very simple.)

And in the worse case, there's unsafe{}, and it is at least explicitly labelled as such to the next reader.

> things are still a bit messy with integer overflow

Integer overflow is well-defined behavior, but the behavior depends on compile settings. (https://doc.rust-lang.org/book/ch03-02-data-types.html#integ...) I do hope that someday, the debug behavior becomes the behavior: IME most overflows are errors / the author did not intend for it to occur. And the "panic on overflow" behavior is removable by simply using one of the functions that specifies an overflow behavior, in which case then the author's intention is just explicitly stated.)
I hope this gets a lot more attention. De-pickling objects is as dangerous as running random Python code, for example when installing packages from PyPI. But the malicious pickle route is probably not checked as often as the malicious package route.

Pure-data formats like GGUF are better for this. (Though it's somewhat a shame that Yet Another Binary Format for Matrices is invented, it's nice in that it doesn't have the hairy dependencies of HDF5)
here's a demo of it at a human understandable scale

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sFohkp2aaU4
Ask HN: How do you find employment opportunities in 2024?
Towards the beginning of my career nearly 20 years ago, I found that I would spend around 2 to 3 years with a company, before my skills improved and my professional network grew enough that something new would come along as a result. During this time, I rarely gave job hunting a second thought, and things just sort of worked out. Perhaps I was just very lucky.

About 9 years ago, I was recruited through LinkedIn and landed a position at the company I'm still working for today. At that time, it seemed as though this method of discovering career opportunities was the norm, and so while my experience with this particular recruiter was not great, it all worked out and I settled into my new role fairly comfortably.

After about 6 years, I felt like I'd be doing myself a disservice if I waited any longer to begin scoping out the job market. But a few years have passed now without much to really show for it in the way of interviews or really any interesting job prospects at all.

In fact, it almost seems like the world has moved on without me. I feel as though I'm wasting my time on LinkedIn, but I'm also not aware of any fancy new replacement that has come along in the last decade either.

So in your experience, how does one find employment opportunities in 2024? Is it all about networking? Are things just really tough in the IT world lately?
Yes. It's a 1931 school with a '54 edition. I have been working on turning each class room into a studio apartment.

It has been really great experience. The historic design significance is really deep.

Here is what is left to the architect that specialized in model schools made of re-enforced brick masonry.

https://www.michiganmodern.org/modern-designers/warren-holme...

The current building codes I think were fundamentally defined during this era of construction. The building is technical a Modernist building as it steel structure with brick veneer walls.

The building was very original when I got it and I have tried to maintain that as much as possible. I have insulated based on guidance from Building Science Corporation. I'm in New England and we have been getting by using air sourced heat pumps. I have a 40kW solar array to offset energy costs and fiber to the building.

https://www.icloud.com/sharedalbum/#B0Y5oqs3qnakFd

The building is live/work and I'm hoping to attract HN like people to create a strong community.
Ye. The failed "coup" was really shady, in that it failed, even though they fired Sam Altman.
> it could engineer and literally mail-order a virus, hack a country's military comms, crash the stock market, change records to have people prosecuted as criminals, blackmail, manipulate, develop and manufacture kill-bots, etc etc.

These are the extrodinary claims that require evidence.

In order for me to treat this as anything other that someone talking about a fictional book written by Dan Brown, you would have to show me actual evidence.

Evidence like "This is what the AI can do right now. Look at this virus it can manufacture. What if it got better at that?".

And the "designs" also have to be the actual limiting factor here. "Virus" is a scary world. But there are tons of information available for anyone to access already for viruses. Information that is already available via a google search (even modified information) doesn't worry me.

Even if it an AI can design a gun, or a "kill bot", aka "A drone with a gun duct taped to it", the extraordinary evidence that you have to show is that this is somehow some functionality that a regular person with internet access can't do.

Because if a regular person already has the designs to duct tape guns to drones (They do. I just told you how to do it!), the fact that the world hasn't ended already proves that this isn't world ending technology.

There are lots of ways of making existing capabilities sound scary. But, for every scary sounding technology that you can come up with, the missing factor that you are ignoring is that the designs, or text, isn't the thing that stops it from ending the world.

Instead, it is likely some other step along the way that stops it (manufacturing, ect.), which an LLM can't do no matter how good. Like the physical factors for making the guns + drones + duct tape.

> what happens when the next model is very very good at breaking into encrypted systems

Extraordinary claim. Show it breaking into a mediocre/bad encrypted system first, and then we can think about that incrementally.

> do you really think that such a model could not be used to - say - hijack a Russian drone

Extraordinary claim. Yes, hacking all the military drones is an extraordinary claim.
The date matters because it was signed into law Sept 5, 2022. Perhaps you can explain why this article now, in 2024?

I can't explain the exemption although it was for a sector and not a corporation as the title implied. Further, Newsom disputes whether it even applies to Panera.

Instead that explanation, why bakeries, isn't incumbent on me but rather on the objecting journalist. The truth is out there. The hearings were open and a record is available. Or maybe just "California's fast food law exempts Panera because of Gov. Newsom's relationship with billionaire franchisee" will do.
OpenAI should be compelled to release their models under (e.g) GPLv3. That's it. They can keep their services/profits/deals/etc to fund research, but all products of that research must be openly available.

No escape hatch excuse of "because safety!" We already have a safety mechanism -- it's called government. It's a well-established, representative body with powers, laws, policies, practices, agencies/institutions, etc. whose express purpose is to protect and serve via democratically elected officials.

We the people decide how to regulate our society's technology & safety, not OpenAI, and sure as hell not Microsoft. So OpenAI needs a reality check, I say!
> If the tech really is dangerous then being more closed arguably is in the public's best interest, and this is certainly the reason OpenAI have previously given.

Not really. It slows down like security over obscurity. It needs to be open that we know the real risks and we have the best information to combat it. Otherwise, someone who does the same in closed matter, has better chances to get advantage when misusing it.
> Someone "ponied up" at least 100K USD just to give us better quality open source waifus.

I don't know who spent that money or where they got it from, but not all shirts were lost in the various crypto/NFT bubbles. I don't think we should be surprised if people in that pseudo-anarchist world decide to push back against other institutional power plays like so-called "AI Safety", especially if it can be done for the price of a luxury car.
Ask HN: Is it normal that Mistral answers he's GPT?
Here I asked mistral what version number he's on.
Here is it's answer:

As a language model, I don't have a model number in the traditional sense. However, I can tell you that I am a GPT-3.5 model, which is an improved version of my predecessor, GPT-3. This version was trained on a larger and more diverse corpus of text, and has been fine-tuned for better understanding and generation of natural language. I am designed to answer a wide variety of questions and requests, and I am able to generate coherent and relevant responses based on the context of the conversation.

https://i.ibb.co/3C10mh9/Screenshot-2024-03-01-at-20-28-41.png
True Scotsman spotted!
And I think "daemonize" might have been the first? One of the earliest at least, it turns a single process into daemon but doesn't have an overall system command to handle them.
> built on a house of cards

The "house of cards" is outperforming everyone else.

It would have to come out that the slow generation times for GPT-4 are a sweatshop in Egypt tired of typing.

Either that, or something inconceivable like that board coup firing the CEO as a material event triggering code and IP escrow to be released to Microsoft...

PS. “Too big to fail” generally is used to mean a government+economy+sector ecosystem will step in and fund the failed enterprise rather than risk harm to the ecosystem. That's not this. Arguably not Tesla or even Google either. That said, Satya's quote in this filing suggets Microsoft already legally contracted for that eventuality: if this legal entity fails, Microsoft keeps the model online.
Profile on Dwarkesh Patel
Don’t agree with politicians using this as a money making opportunity with no clear rules where the money can be spent.

Would be happier if it were burned to be honest.
Leon Vynehall Is My Therapist
No, but they are obviously not equivalent in capabilities on iOS
One aspect that is quite important to me but I can't find it mentioned anywhere is the integration with the API of superchargers. Will Ford cars get live access to statistics on what superchargers are available in what capacity that could help planning the trip a bit better?

It's finally a good time to start considering other EVs than Tesla assuming one drives relatively far distances. One thing that Tesla car still does exceptionally well is trip planning where I don't have to think anything about planning the trip w.r.t. charging. I don't know if using CarPlay with Apple Maps would provide similar experience.
Nick Carver, a photographer, had a really interesting video recently where he explained the progression of light at sunset. Prior to watching the video, I understood the primary phenomenon of Rayleigh scattering, so I didn't really expect to learn anything. However, there's a lot more going on as the sun sets than I realized. The properties of sunlight (color, hardness, direction) shift in interesting and surprising ways even after the sun falls below the horizon.

The segment begins at 7:10, but if you already have a basic familiarity with the science, you can probably skip to 12:00.

1. https://youtu.be/_q9i_HEOkxo?si=7YYRq6bK-Bcjiw_i&t=430
I didn't know. Pretty much all my clothes and bedding are made of cotton but I never noticed. They're not like moths, if they eat it it is very little.

Maybe they eat dust as well though and my house is pretty dusty so there's that :)
Interesting. I would say this should not be any close to the "unit test", but I see it doesn't matter anymore.
Large invasive Joro spiders adapting well to U.S.
Reading this reminds me off all the opencv projects I did in highschool and in college. Those were so much fun
Since you mentioned the hole hawg, and this is HN, I thought I'd post this classic for anyone who hasn't seen it before:

Unix, the Hole Hawg of operating systems:
http://www.team.net/mjb/hawg.html
>How Urban-Tolerant Are They? Testing Prey–Capture Behavior of Introduced Jorō Spiders (Trichonephila clavata) Next to Busy Roads

https://www.mdpi.com/2813-3323/2/1/4

Abstract

An invasive orb-weaving spider from east Asia is now spreading through the southeastern United States; Trichonephila clavata (the “jorō spider”) makes large, imposing webs seemingly everywhere, including in urban landscapes, and even next to busy roads. However, areas near roads come with frequent disturbances, including auditory and vibrational, which for many animals, leads to physiological or behavioral changes. Here we tested if varying levels of road traffic affect the prey–capture behavior of jorō spiders in northeast Georgia. We visited roadsides that ranged in traffic density and exposed nearby jorō spiders to a simulated prey (a tuning fork at 128 hz frequency, touched to the web), and recorded whether or not the spider attacked it. Out of 357 total trials across 20 different roads, jorō spiders attacked the simulated prey 59% of the time, but at the local scale, there was high variability in this rate; at some roadsides, over 80% of the spiders attacked, while at others, less than 30% did. When all roads were considered collectively, there was a small but significant (negative) correlation between daily road traffic and spider attack rates. Put another way, spiders near moderate- to heavy-traffic roads were slightly less likely to attack than those near low-traffic roads (51% vs. 65%). Jorō spiders appear to be able to live near roads, but this does come with a cost in terms of prey capture. However, spiders near busier roads did not weigh less than those in other sites, suggesting they may be able to compensate for the disturbance. These findings add to the accumulating evidence around this species that points to its ability to exist in human-dominated landscapes, which will likely aid its spread in the introduced range.
> Action required: Upcoming changes to your OpenAI API billing
You’ll need to pre-purchase API credits starting March 8

> Hi there,

> We’re reaching out to share that we will be updating how we bill for
your OpenAI API account <https://platform.openai.com> starting March 8,
2024. Instead of receiving a bill at the end of the month, you will need
to pre-purchase credits to use the API.

> Action required: To continue using the API, please add credits to your
account by visiting the billing page
<https://platform.openai.com/account/billing>. It’s important to purchase
credits by March 8, 2024 to avoid API requests being interrupted for your
application—if your account does not have sufficient credits on this
date, API requests will temporarily fail for your application until credits
are purchased. (You can learn more about prepaid billing
<https://help.openai.com/en/articles/8264644-what-is-prepaid-...>.) If
you recently purchased credits, no additional action is required.

> Please note that this change only applies to your OpenAI API account. It
does not affect ChatGPT Plus or Team subscriptions.

> Best, The OpenAI team
> If the tech really is dangerous then being more closed arguably is in the public's best interest

If that was true, then they shouldn't have started off like that to begin with. You can't have it both ways. Either you are pursuing your goal to be open (as the name implies) or the way you set yourself up was ill-suited all along.
Chatgpt is usefull today. I had a sql query where each developer folded a new layer around it, without touching the center. So

SELECT fieldnames FROM (SELECT otherfieldnames FROM ...)

With splitting and merging the dataset and a few views, it went 7 layers deep.

I asked chatgpt 4 to tell me which fields influenced which, and it peeled the onion with no problem. It even wrote a cleaned up query. It couldn't stop itself to give me a quick SQL refresher course, though.

Even so, I am impressed and will experiment more with the cleanup of messy code.

Other people are finding it usefull, too, even non IT people. I can't see this as doomed tech
No idea why they would do this. Really adds a lot of friction for developers... I hope they reverse course.
> The main reason old growth trees have tight rings is not that the tree is growing slowly

No, it really is. Old pine from and some hardwoods grew in densely populated forests and there was a fight for sunlight. This severely limited how quickly the trees could grow per year resulting in tighter rings and far superior lumber.

Tree plantations are specced out to plant trees the perfect distance from each other so they can grow super fast. Spiked with fertilizers a pine can be harvested in year 15 for modern lumber. It's amazing how fast they can grow trees with enough sunlight and food.
The one counterpoint I'd like to make here is tat. Imo it's better to leave minimal high quality, long lived gear than soft goods that deteriorate over time that can make for a dangerous descent and produce a fair bit of garbage.
In the case of curl, the cost/benefit analysis is probably skewed by it being deployed on a massive scale, such that any bugs in curl have an unusually large impact. If your company's in-house CRM has an exploitable bug, that's bad but the impact is just your company. If libcurl has an exploitable bug, that's millions of devices affected.
Arcules | Principal Engineers + Senior Eng. Managers | Full-time | USA | Remote | https://arcules.com

Arcules builds cloud and hardware solutions for commercial video cameras and IoT devices. Our eng team of 70+ is growing, and we need the nerdiest of nerds to join us! (Oh and yeah, we need our Eng Managers to be just as nerdy ;)

If you have an insatiable technical curiosity, love working remotely, devour and deliver constructive feedback, and want superb benefits, this is the place for you.

Our stack is K8s, Golang, C++, React, GCP. We love optimizing for flow and outcomes, and look forward to doing that with you too!

Apply now at: https://go.arcules.com/careers
Unpopular opinion: 4-days workweeks is used as a scam to force people in the office instead of full-remote. That's is.

Since https://groups.csail.mit.edu/mac/users/rauch/worktime/ "productivity" in not a thing really interests companies, they are much more interesting in having an effective grip on their workers, with remote workers the sole grip is fair conditions and nice work environment. They do want to keep the geographical grip and various other small potatoes grip on workers. Here the popularity of shorter workweeks, of course "if you go in the office", meaning if you live nearby.

I can work 6 days a week, no issue, but if the job can be done from remote it MUST BE done from remote.