skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I moved my MIL to the Apple ecosystem circa 2009-2010 and have mostly been satisfied.

She has a normal (not admin) user account on her Mac. She cannot install applications*. Her Documents folder is synced to iCloud. Everything is backed up with Time Machine, and for good measure I rsync her home directory to my own backup periodically. She uses a locked down Google Worksplace account (this cost more since we pay for one admin account and her restricted account). She can access everything from her iPhone and her iPads.

Surprises: some applications can be downloaded and will install themselves into ~/Applications, these usually are the thousand or so zoom/webex/webmeetinggo variants. Initially we did not lock down her Google Chrome and she kept installing "Extensions that will speed up your browser experience!" which of course were scams, so we locked her out of installing Chrome Extensions (this has made it difficult to legitimately install chrome extensions unfortunately). She has, through what I'm guessing were bad UI questions for someone now in her 80s, wiped out her Documents folder multiple times, syncing the deletions to her iCloud. Minimal actual loss since thanks to my paranoid backup strategies.

Hard: she's been using Macs on and off since the 1990s. Each new recent release of MacOS or iOS has become a bit of a nightmare. While I get the relentless need to upgrade and improve and sell more widgets I really wish there was an LTS strategy we could opt into that was just security or sev 1 style bug fixes.

Really hard: I fell into this because every time she went into an Apple Store or tech shop for support they 1) would ask her what her Apple ID was and then just go off and create another one for her anyway. I found six before I got her to understand it's just her email address. 2) Every tech guy has his own way of doing shit, myself included, and it's utterly baffling to someone who simultaneously has been using computers for decades and yet is very much non technical.

She's in her mid 80s now, I think we're on her last MacBook Air, which I just moved her to in the past year or so. The next upgrade, if necessary, is probably to a Chromebook.
The best, most plausible-seeming description I've encountered is that autism is a collection of imperfectly correlated traits. One may be able to make "often" and "usually" and "sometimes" statements, but probably not "always"/"never" statements.

Is there a better description out there that manages to be true to reality?
Atari Portfolio: Pioneering Palmtop PC
> You fail to understand how software development and maintenance works.

OK, dude. It's not like I've been in software for 25 years, 15 of them being on mobile, both on the OS side and on the third party app side. But, yea, I fail to understand.

On the 3p side, I've heard all the lame excuses, and they are almost all excuses rather than reasons. The big one is that supporting older versions blows up the test matrix (the number of device/OS/API level combinations that need to be validated). I can understand if you're a hobbyist, you might not be able to afford to buy the "myriad of different devices" and aren't staffed to test your app on each one. But if you are any kind of serious business, you signed up for this investment when you decided to write apps. Throwing a couple of older devices running older OSes onto that test plan should not blow your budget, and if it does, you probably shouldn't be writing that banking software to begin with. Also, almost all of your testing is automated, right? (Please say Yes). So it's not like you need to hire more human testers as your test matrix grows. If you are unable to support more than the bleeding edge OS, it makes me wonder what kind of fly-by-night developer shop you are.

The second excuse is about valuing developer convenience over users. "Oh, the new OSes contain cool new stuff that we want to take advantage of, and it's a total bummer to maintain the code paths that support 'legacy' devices." You already have the code that runs on the previous OS or API level, you're choosing to get rid of it, deliberately throwing users under the bus, so that you can clean code up or at least not have to maintain it. Bad tradeoff IMO.

There are a whole bunch of other little excuses for no longer targeting older systems, and most of them boil down to either cost, laziness, or a skill issue. None of them respect the end user.

I have a little more sympathy on the OS side. Sometimes a major step forward on the hardware (particularly the CPU architecture) might make it really tempting to cut off previous versions. I still think both major mobile OSes cut off old devices way too early. I have PCs from the early 2000s that can still run modern Linux distributions, so support for old hardware is usually technically possible, just inconvenient and costly. I'm not asking companies to support devices from 20 years ago, but they could.

Your "security holes" excuse is ridiculous: All major OS vendors already provide security updates to at least 5 previous major OS releases. There is no security reason for an app developer to support only the bleeding edge latest OS.
The unsurprising non-detection of intelligent aliens
I'm continually shocked by the number of people who forget that libraries exist, and what they are.
This doesn't surprise me, Claude 3 beats pretty much anything I use it for.

Still, my wife and I translate erotica at times, and both Claude and GPT-4 refuse to translate a shit ton of content, while Google Translate and DeepL will happily translate anything we throw at them.

I wonder if an uncensored version of Llama 3 would perform better. It's supposed to be on GPT-4 level in certain languages, after all.
Even their own site--don't have access to the actual report--is very unclear whether they're just talking routine maintenance or if they're also talking about (accident) repair.
> in silicon valley rent definitely raised 2-3 times in last 15 years, but blue color workers didn't receive equal raise in wages.

Source? In the last 15 years, SF median rent went up 78% and SF minimum wage went up 93% [1] [2], so it seems quite likely blue color wages outpaced inflation.

I notice a worrying trend where people invent negative economic stats instead of looking at the real numbers [3].

[1] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/CUURA422SEHA

[2] https://www.sf.gov/sites/default/files/2023-02/Historical%20...

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vibecession
Lakes Worldwide Need a Checkup
> On Monday, the Australian eSafety Commission argued that geoblocking did not meet the definition of removal of the footage under the Online Safety Act, which gives Commissioner Julie Inman Grant power to order the removal of materials that “promotes, incites, instructs in or depicts abhorrent violent conduct, such as kidnapping, rape, torture, murder, attempted murder and terrorist acts” if it could “go viral and cause significant harm to the Australian community.”

We do not want to give one person the authority to be able to censor the global internet for everyone.

I hope Elon Musk wins.
Ocean Waves Mist Decades-Old PFAS into the Atmosphere
You know if Putin has a decisive win in Ukraine, he'll be at war with NATO next?
Very cool I've been waiting for this part of the writeup. A few years ago I tried to write a similar microscope pano stitcher and used SIFT features in opencv, not sure I had come across template matching. I also struggled with blending and never got anything to work. From the blog's comments I want to check out http://abria.github.io/TeraStitcher/ next time I'm looking to do this. Seeing the final stitch results makes me wonder how accurate the census technique can be, especially against an adversary. Could they just layer a dummy chip on top?
My wife and I had a 'starter house' built in 2009, and paid it off in 2019. We've talked about moving out of the area, or into a house with a different layout / finishes / whatever. I'm not sure that's going to happen any time soon though - getting a mortgage at the current rates is just too hard to stomach when we had one at 3%, and now have nothing at all.
It's obvious that you're on Android + PC because these is truly an outdated question.
Is it even realistic to expect US fabs to be competitive? I think this article sheds insight into why the US based semiconductor companies like Intel are falling behind.
A developer, a wireshark installation & a great deal of patience later. Still, yet another argument for right to repair.
To answer your questions:

I never manage my reading. Plex manages my watching/listening. I almost never summarize things that I find online and almost never refer back to those summaries. I use a notebook to store knowledge. The most challenging part of managing the notebook is that it takes up limited desk space.

Speaking candidly:

I've tried a number of systems such a Dendron, Joplin, Obsidian, etc. and nothing feels as good as pen and paper. In theory you'd think these systems are fantastic but I've come to the conclusion that taking notes is more than the raw information taken down. With a notebook I feel like I have a mental map in my head of the geography of the notebook, the places different information is stored, how the notebook feels. It's also low friction. At any time I can touch a pen to paper and nothing can stop me.
MacOS + TimeMachine + iPhone/iPad + Chrome/Google + Chrome Remote Desktop is my 'elderly stack'
Leicester streetlights take ransomware attack personally, shine on 24/7
Export size is very important. We got our Godot export (assets + wasm) down to < 10mb after brotli compression for
https://goobershot.winterpixel.io/

I believe the wasm is about 5mb and the .pck is about 5mb.

You can shrink the wasm by disabling unused modules in your Godot compilation and not compile stuff you don't need. You can remove debug symbols, and enable link time optimization as well. We could push our export size even smaller, but I have higher priorities.
North Korea is evading sanctions by animating Max and Amazon shows
OK, I realized it was about something else. I don't follow Uncle Bob, and was referring to some people justifying "unclean"/incorrect shortcuts to gain performance.
Well the difference with the iPhone is the actual phone works for people of all abilities so the keyboard is actually accessible.

All my elderly family running Android have been pwned in some way or another.
Dan doesn't use 98.css (krazam does!). You can tell by the 45 degree angles on the button borders.
As they explain in the article, a row-less layout with columns is quite common in the non-web world. They acknowledge that some people are arguing that it's not needed because nobody's using it (on the web). Nobody's using it (on the web) because it's not possible in CSS.

The argument is that the popularity of the layout in contexts where it's possible is a strong argument for enabling it on the web as well. This is not a layout that they just thought of and are trying to invent.
That's very telling as far as how outsourcing changes incentives.

My experience with outsourcing has always been it becomes a contract game / poor incentives based around contract metrics and in the end a complete waste of money.
The Wikipedia article suggests that it was not Amazon and online bookselling that broke the Net Book Agreement, but big high street chain bookstores like Dillons. One of the references links to a newspaper article from December 1994 saying the agreement is "on its last legs", and Amazon was only founded in July 1994, so seems unlikely to have been very influential in its demise.
I agree that ownership of a physical item general confers both a monopoly on it's distribution and sale. But the inverse (selling or distribution something confers ownership) is not true, see for example selling something on consignment.

It's definitely not true for copyrighted works. Copyright, in the US at least, is pretty explicit about it not providing ownership of the thing to the rights holder. It provides the holder with a legal monopoly over the copying, distribution, and (broadly) displaying or building off of it. It does not state that the holder owns the creative work, much less any specific instantiation of it.
This blog post provides a clear and straightforward guide on how to encrypt various storage devices - including USB sticks, external hard drives, and internal storage - for plausible encryption deniability on Linux. It focuses on using the cryptsetup tool with LUKS encryption, which is installed by default on most common Linux distributions like Ubuntu. The article details how to configure a detached LUKS header, effectively making it impossible for adversaries to prove the existence of encrypted data.
> I would be wary of excluding characters just because they look like other characters when combined

I wish the author would have said more about this. Why be wary?
I can totally understand the quoted comment. I mean, we are talking about CSS as a language here. Anything that is formalized is expected to be implemented and supported by browser engines and vendors. Browser engines are already extremely complex, so it's fair to think closely about formalizing new things when it's not apparent that there is a big enough need.

I'm not claiming this is the case with the Mansory layout; I just understand that adding unnecessary complexity for a small target user base is a valid concern.
Ah yes, probably need to re-read them. I remember how virtually every book introduces a new super weapon that becomes part of the standard arsenal in the next, all the way up to entire 'negative matter' planets that are fired out of subspace (can't recall the in-universe name) at the planets hosting your opponent's base.
>That might be good enough for you, but that's not good enough for society in the least- either in terms of fostering change, or simply in terms of studying a sociological phenomenon.

Alright, but do we need to? I'm interested in equality for all, meaning everybody gets the same chance. If someone wants to do X with their life and you try to stop them, I'm going to be more than a little miffed. But that's not the same as making sure they _do_ X.

>> There are lots of studies on this, and their conclusions are often dismissed as sexist.

> Post them if you've got them

These two from a quick search (but the ones I was initially thinking of are references buried in a massive book by Steven Pinker):

- https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/19883140/

- https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.1811032115
> if you start labelling your products with 1, 2, 3.. and never deviate, then it's fairly easy to take a sample of not many serial numbers and estimate how high they go and therefore how many have been sold.

Also known as the German Tank Problem[1].

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_tank_problem
Yes, Claude may make advances here and there in it's tech. But it's main feature is that it is censored (or "safe). That will forever be Claude's main selling point: censorship.

Any technological gains it makes will just be marketing fodder to get their pre-captured AI into more people's stack.

They are lucky they haven't tried images yet.
> Brakes last forever due to regenerative breaking.

Regeneranive braking is 1/100 of a normal brake ability. It can be upto 10/100 if using resistors instead of the battery as the load.
> Well it's a lack of training problem.

The industry spends billions of dollars on developers writing Java. If they could spend 3 times less by simply training developers to use Smalltalk instead, they'd be doing it.

They're not, because that's not the problem.
Is there a 3d equivalent of the game? What would be different about it?
Japan has some of the best educational results in the world with huge class sizes and modest funding. If everyone speaking Japanese is part of how they achieve that, that suggests immigration is a bigger burden on our educational system than people appreciate.
Yes. That's not setting someone up for success.
Why? When developing standards it's very good to have good gatekeepers.
Not everything should be built inside the browser if you can achieve the same with existing technologies like JS.

Otherwise your browser(standards) might become too complex.
It's been called masonry before Pintrest was even founded.
Having a standing army was considered the norm for most of China's history.

The issue is that usually the standing army stations at either the borders, or at the capital. Rebellions usually start at some place that's far away from where most of the standing army is stationed.

Nomadic empires were effective enemies because they had the "optionality" to wait until the agricultural empire was weak (for whatever reason), and then strike. The nomads don't get wiped out at bad times because nomadic tribes don't have cities or capitals that can be raided or sacked, and they usually live in a vast depopulated land.

Also, after a long time of peace, nobody knows how to fight battles in agricultural societies (or at least there's no way for military officers to prove themselves), and then one or two bad military appointments could just end a civilization. Nomadic people at least get ample training on how to ride horses and hunt.
It's almost like it's a totally unnecessary public expenditure at this point, and those funds could be used for, IDK, feeding the homeless?
What ideas do you have for LLM tech in this?

Data aggregation? Summarisation? Retrieval? Or maybe some ingestion post-processing?

I'm getting ideas of making a service that works as a git origin that you can just push to update and then access in a web UI to get nice features, maybe a project for a weekend.
I love when the people standing up for me have no fucking clue what my life is like or the struggles I face.

It great really annoying when they tell me what my problems are, because I’m clearly a less reliable source than some article on a website.
Consider using Reason and/or Rescript. Ocaml with a nice syntax and clean JS interop.
> a product so uninteresting that Apple couldn’t even give it a unique name.

Because `iPhone` was a super unique name...

I would argue that people are not excited about Apple TV because it does its job. There isn't a major need for new features but if they find a good feature to add to it, it can cause excitement.

The OP is right though, the Apple TV being able to be a hub (which also means it processes Secure Video and how you access your HomeKit devices from outside your home) is a nice features that shouldn't be discounted. It is a Hub that is already in many people's homes and could be a gateway product.

I guarantee you that if Apple announces a new Apple TV with some fantastic new feature, more people will be excited and buy it than there are that follow HA updates.
Meta is the last company in the world that I would allow to have direct access to my gaze tracking data.

The only thing that I can imagine that would be more privacy invasive would be a device that directly reads your brain waves while you are exposed to different stimuli.
Happy 61st Birthday to the Intergalactic Computer Network – Now Let's Build It
What's nice about rewriting as a concept is that bolt-on extensions to make things fast don't have to be awkward.

Built-in rules that take priority over user-defined ones, as well as special variables in Devine's implementation, allow us to gain back speed while retaining some idea of purity. We know these operations can be phrased in terms of rewrite rules, so let's shortcut them and use built-in arithmetic in place.

You'd never know the difference! There's also a lovely arithmetic library built by d6 that you may enjoy. It does arithmetic digit-by-digit, and they're continually improving it to run faster.

https://git.phial.org/d6/modal/raw/branch/d6/binary/arith.mo...
I assume that Google Translate has a much larger usage volume than any of the free-to-use LLMs.

I don't know the average energy/hardware*time usage per query on google translate vs competing LLMs such as Claude 3 Opus but I wouldn't be surprised that a large LLM such as Claude 3 Opus would be much too expensive to be used as the backend model for a free service like Google Translate.

The paper authors do acknowledge this concern and run experiments on smaller models with knowledge distillation. However, as far as I know we cannot know if their distilled networks can compete with the current Google Translate system in terms of energy / hardware usage efficiency.
I use some mix of Obsidian and Notion.

Obsidian for storing raw information and connections, and Notion for my to-dos/trips/lists.
I've used this one for the last ~18 months, self hosted.

Terrible name but pretty solid product.
Questioning whether something new is actually needed is absolutely worth doing, so long as it’s done respectfully.

This is a standard that affects billions of people and many implementations. It’s great to ask if something is really needed or if it’s just adding bloat.

We shouldn’t just grow the standard without first asking if the growth and added complexity carry their own weight. If someone proposing something can show that, then wonderful.

But yeah, just straight up trying to block these people from being able to ask these questions totally is toxic. As long as they’re asking and participating respectfully there’s no need to be a jerk toward them.
I think GP was kind of referring to the (IMHO) slightly awkward way the article presents the concept of "Mandate of Heaven".

I think your interpretation is much closer to the truth.
Does japan run an institutionalized welfare system for special needs people? I don’t believe that’s the case.

Japan has a different set of problems, but delivering efficient and cost effective, high quality education is something they get right. And insofar as special needs people are evenly distributed among various countries populations, we should be able to learn from what they do.
Also voting for Kobo. I have a Clara I just use for reading books.

Really nice device and the price is good too.

I've never connected mine to the internet. I just use it as a giant USB stick with a screen.

Not that I've needed to, but you can take it apart and increase the storage too!

https://yingtongli.me/blog/2018/07/29/kobo-sd.html
Then you put "no" since you clearly can't distinguish when someone is bored.
Neither Google translate or DeepL seem to be good at translating Japanese to English, so this is hardly a surprise to me.

In the case of Japanese, only an LLM seems to be capable of tracking the gender of a fictional character, and since gender is rarely indicated in the original japanese language, Google Translate will alternate every sentence indicating whether "He" or "she" took action when referring to the same character.

This is just the tip of the iceberg in the problems that come up when trying to translate Japanese. LLM's on the other hand have awareness of the "content" -- they understand what is happening in the original story and it auds their translation choices -- and LLMs tend to be superior at novel translation in general.

I imagine the non LLM tools work much better translating between similar languages.
How much coffee have I consumed instead?
[dupe]

Lots more discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40117599
Carter Bays wrote a paper "Candidates for the Game of Life in Three Dimensions" on that back in 1987 [1] and another in 2006 as mentioned on Wikipedia [2]:

[1] https://content.wolfram.com/sites/13/2018/02/01-3-1.pdf

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/3D_Lifex
This is a book ad. Also, all the tips are: if you don't have a nose for adventure, plan ahead.
inb4 instruction (cache) alignment screws everythin up
What is something that you think the average HN user would find useful/surprising about Life? How could it apply to their daily lives?
Fedora Linux 40
MicroUSB was even worse though in my experience - I managed to break the charging port on ALL my MicroUSB phones after enough time but my USB C phones so far have not yet encountered that failure mode.
Linux is great for power users and the absolute lightest users, with nothing but punishment in the middle.