skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Agree. I don't think there is any signal from the "academic side" of this discussion. All of the detailed relevant information is very proprietary. I know multiple large players in the industry that share huge amounts of data with academics regularly, but not that data. Decision makers are informed by internal experts with just as many bona fides (and more) than academic peers. Having been in both worlds, and admittedly in my opinion only, academics do well to move their technical fields forward into new and exciting and useful science medicine and economics but do little (well nothing really) in delving into or even accessing the actual data that directly informs clinical trial decisions. That said, I can totally understand why Pharma clinical trial decisions are baffling to academics. E.g., why did aduhelm go forward to (conditional) market approval? That one is baffling to me, but I don't have the data:)

[edit] I'm going to add something here. The grandparent refers to "stupidly misleading pre-clinical data." Pre-clinical data informs very inexpensive (relatively) Phase I studies. And there is a ton of it. You might have potentially misleading pre-clinical data that suggests the possibility of an entirely new therapeutic mechanism of action for a huge unmet need coupled with massive amounts of pre-clinical data that demonstrates a near certainty that the intervention will be safe. That's the entire point of moving forward to a Phase I or Ib (or maybe even II) study. The 1000x-10,000x more expensive phase 3's are not relying on pre-clinical studies.
It's a good feature, but still a niche one. It's a bit like choosing Unity only because of DOTS. For a few projects perhaps it make sense. But just a few ones.
A bit curious why you think this. How much do you think the R&D costs were?
You did make me search what a buffer underrun was and I think it was a good read
I think it shows Apple has a vision!
Nice!

(Jarrett's the author of fsrs, fyi.)
We actually want big tech to take swings like Vision Pro. And we should also be fine if they fail.
The parent asked if you meant Tutanota (8 characters) and pointed out that's no longer the legal name (perhaps you haven't caught up). Are you still suggesting that Tuta + 3 characters = Tutanota?

> Tuta fomerly Tutanota
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tuta_(email)
Cost to consumer of 8GB DDR5 is $25
I love Rust, but a crashing released game is better than a half-finished "perfect" game, or a game where you couldn't iterate quickly, and ended up with a perfectly tuned, unfun game.
That must be fun
This reminds me of fasm, the only assembler immediately coming to mind that will do multi-pass branch optimisation by default. Most other assemblers either choose the long form always unless specified explicitly as "jmps" or "jmp short" (and then complain when the target turns out to be too far away), or the short form only if the destination is known when it's encountered (backwards jump).

I've long held the opinion that O0 on all the major compilers should be considered more like an O-1 because of the glaring stupidities it leaves in its output, which almost looks like it was pessimising instead of not optimising.

This article is also only the 2nd time I've seen "relaxation" used in this context. The first was https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10219007 over 8 years ago.
That's true. Go ain't C4 (JVM), ORCA (Pony), HiPE (Erlang/OTP BEAM), or CLR (C#). The JVM and CLR runtimes have been beaten on for years at immense scale in server-side business settings. I wished Go supported embedded work (without a GC), had an alternative allocator a bit more like Erlang's, and had alternative implementations that transpiled to other languages, but it doesn't. Ultimately, I left when zillions of noobs poured in because it was seen as "easy" and started wasting my time rather than searching for answers themselves.

If performance were such a huge concern, I don't see any valid resistance to Rust that completely lacks a GC and makes it easy to call C code other than "it's something different", "there's too much hype", or "I don't like it". Recent development tools like RustRover make is really damn easy to see whats a move value or a borrow, debug test cases, run clippy automatically, and check crates versions in Cargo.toml. Throw Copilot in there and let it generate mostly correct, repetitious code for you.
TVs, computer monitors, actual conversation, and books are just too "good enough" for VR to compete.

After owning a Quest 3 for a while, it's just too isolating and cumbersome an experience. It can't compete with the freedom of my laptop when I want to be in the digital world and it can't compete with legitimate social interaction when I want to be with people.

The biggest place it can compete is games, but outside of a few really solid, and really compelling experiences, most games in VR aren't enough to warrant strapping it to your face.
I'm not sure WW1 could have been avoided. Once alliances started being formed most countries needed to join in, and naturally these consolidated into two camps.

Up to this point (over centuries) Europe had regularly been embroiled in local conflicts. War in Europe wasn't novel, and certainly peace was not the norm.

So you have these two very large alliances, both fully expecting the other to invade at some point. An arms race develops - both sides unwilling to be perceived as weaker. (And fueled somewhat by manufacturers manipulating public opinion.)

All it takes is a spark to set off a series of cascading events. History records it as the assassination of Price Ferdinand, but if it wasn't that it would have been something else.

After the assassination the Austrian emperor -might- have had a more measured response, but that's expecting a lot from the sort of person who is, well, an emperor.

Sure, he might have found a way out, but there would have been another spark sooner or later. There were just too many munitions around, and the profits of war too appealing to the manufacturers of the day.

In the end it's human greed that is the root of every aspect, and consequence of the war. And that never seems to go out of fashion.

The recent adventure in Afghanistan cost what, several trillions of $. That money flows to companies and ultimately people. There are lots of interests in keeping that tap turned on.

Perhaps a more effective tool in preventing that sort of fruitless combat is to report daily not on how many lives we're lost, but rather how much tax money today cost. The public cares a lot more about money spent than lives lost.
also possible it was a typo of msn, as that's where the original link is
I can't imagine they thought it would succeed. My theory is they wanted to get out of VR, concluding it wasn't going anywhere this generation. But they wanted to launch something, whether to recoup some costs or avoid embarrassment. So they raised the price to a point where there would be relatively few buyers to piss off when they abandon it.
For a company as rich as Apple it's hardly a flop. Even if it doesn't do well I'd imagine they can recycle a lot of the R&D that went into it for their other tech areas.
First the car, now this. Apple better come up with something soon to offset losing the phone market in China.
Many Visions, presumably. I wonder if they'll ever change it's MSRP, or if it's such a dud that they'd rather preserve the brand halo associated with premium pricing.
I'm locked out of my Gmail and it still forwards to the recovery email address, but I can't get in to change the settings. They also won't allow me to download all my data, as required by statute, because I can't log in.
US Law often requires power generators to operate separately from distributors. Even when it's the same company, they have to operate as two separate businesses, and it's illegal for them to even mention certain information to each other as it's considered anti-competitive. The purpose is to allow the market to provide competition. This is not specific to NYC.

An Introductory Guide to Electricity Markets regulated by the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission: https://www.ferc.gov/introductory-guide-electricity-markets-...

Deregulation and competition: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electricity_sector_of_the_Unit...
I think it’s entirely reasonable to resent this behaviour. By portraying their musings as weighty and learned discourse rather than unfalsifiable speculation, they’re wasting our time.
And Altman is interested in upholding human rights? And would never push his own personal ethics on the world, right?
Appl is not interest in niche products. they are not in biz to sell 200 products at 400K units each. they are in the biz to sell 20 overpriced products at 30M units/year each.
I can't find a privacy policy and it's free so...
Now my AI can send a resume to the recruiters' AI!
I don't think that's the case. N=1, but I'm usually a quite staunch, and occasionally incendiary, proponent of Rust, because the arguments against it / criticisms of it I usually see seem fundamentally misguided or even disingenuous to me — whereas in this thread, I've been only agreeing, because the criticisms are fair (I agree Rust isn't built for, and is quite bad at, prototyping, fast iteration, flexible code, etc), if I think a bit overblown (I think many of the patterns the author complains about being forced to use like command lists and generational arenas are very good). That could be the difference you're seeing, IMO.
I tried it for the first time last night and I was not too impressed. It felt like a solution in search of a problem.

For the past decade Apple’s product lineup has pretty much remained the same (faster, lighter, etc), while they invested heavily in spatial computing (flop) and autonomous vehicles (scrapped). All while totally neglecting the industry they pioneered (Siri) and should have been perfecting. Instead, OpenAI came along and ate their lunch and Apple was caught completely flat-footed. And now they’re way behind.

It’s shocking to me how bad the above bets and non-investments have played out for Apple. Tim Cook needs to ride off into the sunset. It’s been a good ride. He ran the business well. They need an innovative CEO at the helm that can make better bets.
The public statement to Delta goes something like this...

"""
Dear Ed. Bastian,

Just as Delta has decided to move away from Boeing for the majority of its fleet, so should it also steer clear of AI as it may relate to the rest of your business model.

Sincerely,
The Internet
"""
Maybe Balaji and Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh would be in good company.
In principle, the steelworkers would be like any group of people working together without hierarchy. How would a group of friends decide where to go in the afternoon? If there is more than one option, but only one can be taken, then either they'd split off into multiple groups, or they'd vote on which option has the greater support, perhaps with dissenters leaving.
> When Congress presented a bill to grant retroactive immunity to AT&T, both Obama and Clinton paused their presidential campaigns. They flew back to DC to cast their Yea votes and protect AT&T from any possible accountability.

Your facts are a little scrambled: are you referring to 2008 [0] or 2012 [1][2] or both? I guess you meant 2008 because both Hillary and Obama were running for President; but Hillary was absent from the 2/12/2008 vote, [2] claims Obama voted against it. I located the bill: [3] "S.2248 - FISA Amendments Act of 2008" and that Senate vote record from 2/12/2008, although it says "Clinton (D-NY), Not Voting", "Obama (D-IL), Not Voting"(?). You'd expect journalists to get important facts right. Meanwhile US media barely covered that vote.

[0] 2/2008 "Telecom immunity remains intact as Democrats split on vote" "Obama voted with 30 fellow Democrat Senators, but not the absent Hillary Clinton, to allow the telecom companies to face lawsuits... on the [Bush] admin's programme of warrantless wiretapping. But the immunity survived, with 18 Democrats crossing over to support George Bush." https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2008/feb/12/terrorism.u...

[1] "US Supreme Court finalizes gift of immunity to the telecom giants" - Glenn Greenwald https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2012/oct/10/suprem...

[2] TheAtlantic: "The Supreme Court Isn't Bothered By the NSA’s Warrantless Wiretapping" ... "refused to hear a case that holds telecom companies accountable for letting the warrantless NSA spying" https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2012/10/supreme...

[3]: 02/12/2008 "S.2248 - FISA Amendments Act of 2008", click through on "14 roll call votes" https://www.congress.gov/bill/110th-congress/senate-bill/224...
> The Vision Pro is a big flop

Not to sound like an apple fanboy but is it, though? I don't think anyone expected v1 to set the world on fire. They put a normal-for-Apple amount of time into trying to polish it as best they could be I don't think anyone bought a Vision Pro not knowing it was kind of an experiment.

I'm never going to wear some ridiculous pair of ski goggles as a computer. But I'm also aware that some day we're going to have some kind of functioning AR, and it probably started with the ridiculous pair of ski goggles. Faulting Apple for taking their best shot at a v1 of that eventual product is just weird to me. Yeah, most people shouldn't buy it, but isn't this exactly what they should do? Get something out there, see what works and what doesn't, and start iterating?

I suppose we'll find out if Apple thought it was actually a "big flop" if they never make a version 2, but I suspect they're thinking a little more long term than this blog.
There was a lot of breathless coverage about how Steve Jobs was irreplaceable, and Apple hummed along for years after his death and seemed to do not only fine, but achieved heights Jobs maybe never even dreamed of. But the columns were right - Apple is completely rudderless and has been for years. Apple literally prints money increasingly from “services,” which is made up in large part of rent-seeking. It’s why they’re willing to burn their reputation by fighting antitrust regulation until the bitter end.

Steve Jobs was Walt Disney - Apple didn’t invent products to make money, they made money to invent more products. Now, the bean counters are in charge. I’m an Apple fanboy for 25 years now, and I find their latest products, and the company itself, now completely charmless. Apple Vision was always going to be a flop because nobody gives two shits about how many pixels you can strap to your face; they care about the experience. And Apple Vision gives you precious little content to experience. Jobs would have never shipped this product without the content to make it shine. But he died a lifetime ago in tech…
Apple's sideline product, the Watch, outsells all of Switzerland (at watches only!). They only do huge products.
> If you take "identity" to mean "the same thing"

I don't.

> If you want "identity" to mean "official persona"

Well, I want identity to mean me as a human being.

> I want to be able to have multiple IDs that are not linked.

Fine, but realize that statistically zero other people want this feature in, well, anything. No system which expects to serve more than a statistically zero percent slice of humanity can define identity in this way.
so expect lots of calls from unknown numbers?
And when you get hired, AI will do most of the work
I believe this is incorrect, primarily because this approach has never worked for me. Incidentally, just today I found an article that has put this feeling into words really well:

https://nautil.us/how-i-rewired-my-brain-to-become-fluent-in...
> The idea, he said, is to do to San Francisco what Musk did to Twitter.

This is such a wonderful, perfect metaphor for who Balaji is and the merit of his ideas.

Please leave SF alone. It’s a city with a ton of problems, but it’d be a whole lot worse as whatever, um, this is.

I honestly genuinely hate that I have to push back against non-tech folks hating on tech people and assuming we’re all like Balaji and Musk. However, the amount of people who support them makes me take a step back and realize that I really might not fit in with the tech community at all. Stuff like this disgusts me.
I've been disappointed with Vision Pro for various reasons, such as the lack of investment in content, the small field of view, price and the weight, but this rehash by the self-styled tech critic is insufferable. The first version just shows that Apple wanted to grab some money from rich Apple fans and developers before having something truly useful. They could still salvage it as a media viewer by creating a lot of stereoscopic VR180 content, but the progress has been too slow. I've been using a VR180 camera to create some content myself - I think it's a step forward in capturing memories.
I'll second this. As a firmware dev, I almost never encounter situations where O0 gets me anything in terms of asm readability/debugging that O1 didn't already give me.
Writing a WASM Runtime in Rust
> Jobs would have never shipped this product without the content to make it shine.

This feels like a whole lot of revisionism that ignores the state of the first iPhone, which had an entire feature set that amounted to "new UX paradigm, plus basic media apps and web browser".
Is this an argument for having or eliminating the gold standard, where currency is anchored to a physical good?
When does apple ever publicly predict sales?
Also worth noting they sold about 270,000 of them during the first week of sales, which is about $1 billion of revenue in just the first week. I think if they didn't over-manufacture them against unrealistic expectations that they may have gotten a reasonable profit, or broke even on paper (at least, ignoring their IRR baseline). $1 billion is enough to pay 500 engineers $300,000/year for 6 years.

But I'm sure the cost of components ate a ton of that, and I'm not sure how much of that would be fixed vs. marginal costs. For something like the custom silicon, I could imagine fixed costs were substantial compared to marginal costs. I'm also not sure how much of this can be amortized across future versions of the Vision Pro, or if a huge amount of the fixed costs will need to be repeated.

Maybe for the amount of silicon fabrication tooling, and the complexity of manufacturing tooling for something so unique, the fixed costs required the sale of 2-3 million units to break even. If so, I could see various parts of the organization feeling pressured to deliver analysis which confirmed the necessary level of demand, especially if executives expressed bullishness on the project.
I initially laughed, but this is very cool actually. I love the pluggable/reusable 'component' registry idea.

Kudos, I'll check it out this weekend (or next... :)
Good writer. I enjoyed The long way to a small angry planet. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Long_Way_to_a_Small,_Ang...
? Cyber truck looks like it’s doing great
What if your friend visited your house, and on the way inside, you told them "if you're ever looking for a doodad, it is in the third drawer on the left". What's a reasonable amount of time for your friend to spend looking for a doodad, and how would you treat a friend that asked for an hour to retrieve it?

I assume this is all an analogy for the cost of research, and how not every research opportunity pans out?

I think it's a cute analogy, but we have plenty of drugs that are decades old, research costs long paid off, and people die because they can't afford them. This isn't an economics 101 essay prompt, the costs of medicine have life-or-death implications.

As the go-to example, insulin was discovered in a university more than 100 years ago. The patent was famously sold for $1, so the research "cost" to the drug companies is negligible. The price didn't decrease in the US until 2023, when the government capped the price at $35/mo - an 70+% reduction. The cost in other countries is still less than 30% of the US price. This is basically the equivalent to someone telling your wife where the doodad was, and her pretending it takes 10 minutes to find.

PreP, which prevents HIV, was entirely funded by the US Government - both research and manufacturing costs - and its manufactured by several companies who weren't involved in the research. The average prescription cost was >2000/mo from every source until the government stepped in. That's more than some people's monthly salary. This is basically like someone handing the doodad to your wife, and her pretending it is a full-time job to find.
My theory is that they're planning for 10 years down the line when the hardware is light enough to be mainstream, and are perfectly happy releasing the v0.1 iterations as a way to get a foothold in the parts of the market where Meta isn't.
I bought one and I really love it. It’s the lack of immersive content (from Apple) and lack of third-party dev support (hollowed out by Apple) that makes me bored with it. Apple’s first-party experience is perfect as far as eye tracking and implementation go. It’s very basic with their apps on top of the OS, but that’s ok if the other two things (content, apps) are there.

I think Apple genuinely believed everyone would flood the market for them while they built out the first-party apps. They truly don’t get how much they’ve burned and angered the people they needed to be there. Or maybe now they do, based on the response. I doubt it.
This “there must not be any free lunch” intuition is regularly
defeated across history. It takes for granted the fact that we are standing on top of thousands of free lunches.
I mean, the executive branch can pick and choose who it prosecutes. If they are in favor of the program, they can simply not prosecute.
Apple started out as a personal computer company—which was a radical concept because there was no good answer to “What are regular people going to do with one”. Mainframes and terminals were useful, but personal computers only had minor applications.

The Vision Pro product is inline with this philosophy of building a good product with no clear purpose and letting users figure it out. It is going to take years for someone to come up with a good use. Think about how long it took AirPods and Apple play to catch on.
Which is which and why?
> Rather, mostly folks who had terrible home lives and were basically screwed up from the beginning.

> Folks in far shittier situations than them play their hands far better.

Aren't you contradicting yourself here? If these folks were screwed up from the beginning doesn't this mean they had no hand to play from the start?

There are many, many folks in third world countries that don't make it through life too well either. Life is pretty doomed for you if you're just born in Sudan right now for example. Yet some, very few, of them will succeed in extirpating themselves from the situation.

Statistically there will always be people who fare better than others, through a combination of sweat, blood, and luck. I don't know if it's fair to have "almost no sympathy" for the ones who were too stupid and unlucky to be winners.