skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Apple software quality has been really, really, really bad lately.

The initial OTA update for iOS 17.4.1 has an unacknowledged yet widely known severe battery drain problem. A your-battery-is-less-than-50%-by-lunch problem. Apple silently released an update, not acknowledging the problem, with the same version number but a different build number, so it was not available OTA and it was advised (by other users with anecdotal evidence) to update again via Finder, which does detect the update.

It promptly bricked my phone.

The update failed and it simply showed the "connect to iTunes" Ikea-like pictogram, and became unresponsive.

A few reboots later I was finally able to restore using DFU mode but nevertheless this isn't the "it just works" Apple of the bygone days.

This wasn't an isolated incident; hundreds of people reported the same in online forums. Except the Apple support forums, where the self-styled experts would sooner blame the weather than an Apple product be at fault.

My personal favourite was a thread about some Apple TV issues, which does some funky things with wired Ethernet and floods the network with DHCP requests. The "expert" was arguing with a guy who authored one of the RFCs for DHCP, implying that non-compliant behaviour by Apple couldn't possibly be in the wrong.
> That would be illegal

What do you mean it would be illegal? Obviously the corporation prices in all the expected future recalls into their prices. Yes they won't charge you for the recall, but the future costumers will pay higher prices if in the corporation's calculation the chance of recalls (or the cost of doing them) is increased.
I’ve also heard of studies, admittedly I don’t have the link on hand, that schizophrenic patients benefit from smoking. When did big tobacco actively target them? How do you know these people don’t naturally seek out cigarettes as a means to manage some of their symptoms?
There are new VDI contenders still coming up though. This caught my attention recently (due to trialling Proxmox for another purpose):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tLK_i-TQ3kQ

There's clearly still demand for VDI solutions too. A recent example:

https://forum.proxmox.com/threads/vdi-solution-for-proxmox.1...
Doesn't it sound more attention-getting than it would otherwise?
I don't think all enterprise websites are this bad.

Certainly my utility websites (e.g. electric/gas) are a lot more functional and a lot less user hostile, because...those companies would really like it if you paid your bill on time, so at least that workflow is pretty polished.
As susceptible this news story is to humorous takes, I worry that this may soon affect honest seamen and others aboard vessels 50 feet long and below. Or is it happening already but it’s not being mentioned because the yacht stories are juicier? This is troubling.
Just when I finally almost forgot about it, this comment rips it back into my poor brain.
It is only an issue for people who choose to create accounts on huge activitypub servers.
The problem with this is that they haven't done the long term studies (which they admit). They also don't consider that once these are cheap and regular enough you get the change over time which should get you a lot less false in positives.
> meaningful and maintainable engine modifications have already been implemented.

In the last 10 years alone, engine efficiency gains are really being made. I work with people who literally do this stuff. Not all improvements that can be made have yet been made. It was just 2007 that VVT was used in Caterpillar diesel engines [1].

> I'll say it again: performance and efficiency have to be balanced against cost, a large part of which is maintenance.

Most engines are getting better maintenance wise. My 10 year old diesel has a significant number of sensors that allow it to predict issues before significant maintenance is required. These kinds of improvements should significantly improve reliability.

> The operators have done the math, they have been ready for anything that moves the needle significantly to better profit for quite a while, but apparently it will take something more than upgrading the truck.

It's a little more complex than that, it will be investment vs return. If anybody can innovate in this area, Volvo are a good candidate. I personally liked their (petrol) modular engine design [2]. I personally liked the B5254T3 with the Ford modifications.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Variable_valve_timing

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Volvo_Modular_engine
I asked it yesterday if there were any baseball games in town this weekend. It hallucinated a false schedule against the wrong team complete with times, and even linked to the (correct) schedule. I told it I googled it and they're playing a different team this weekend and it then (without searching the web again) apologized and shared the correct schedule.

It seemed like such a simple question, but it just made up a very plausible, but entirely incorrect answer. I asked it several times in different ways why and how I could tell if it is correct and all it could tell me was to look it up myself and cross-reference which enitrely defeats the purpose of using it.
I think there's a spectrum, from actually filming someone having sex without their consent and publishing it, all the way to drawing a picture of someone and never showing it to anyone. The ends of the spectrum are clearly immoral, and perfectly OK, respectively. We need to draw the line somewhere between the two.

Paparazzi take photos of people without their consent, and sell them for money. We tend to think this is immoral but legal, and making it illegal would cause more problems than it solves. There is no restriction about such photos being naked or clothed.

Making a deepfake uses someone's likeness. Is that the same as drawing a recognisable picture of them? If not, where do we draw the line between the two? If it is, should we make drawing a picture of someone without their consent illegal? That seems too far to me.

The law is going to take a while to catch up to this. Meanwhile, making this Google's problem seems perfectly OK to me. You create a ludicrously profitable monopoly on discovery, then you get to deal with the problems that people have with discovery <shrug>.
John Schulman (OpenAI Cofounder) – Reasoning, RLHF, & Plan for 2027 AGI [video]
I disagree, if a decent LLM cannot understand it there is a problem with the prompt.

Imagine someone not knowing chess and explaining it to them. Would they be able to understand it on the first try with your prompt?
Tell us how you really feel.

> They enjoy it and don't really anticipate or care about the consequences.

This is the actual core and it applies to all risky and anti-social behavior. Speeding while driving, sloth, over indulgence, smoking, addictive drugs, ..etc

What's your take on the morbidly obese? Deny food and let their diabetes take hold?
Indeed.
Fear = control
Control = power
Climate risk is extremely unlikely to be existential this century. And the mean GDP hits are pretty low all things considered. 30% or so in 2100.

AGI actually has a plausible case for existential risk and would result in a much greater GDP shift.

I'd put nukes above climate change. See does metaculus: https://possibleworldstree.com/
"I understand these trainings exist solely for the purposes of ass-covering."

This is not really true.

They exist for shifting liability -- which is similar, but also quite different -- to where it needs to be. They exist so that you don't even have to listen to the "but that's just normal", "but we always do that", "i had no idea that wasn't allowed" excuses when a person gets in trouble. They exist because otherwise when someone does something that everybody including the perpetrator obviously knows was wrong, they can say "how was I supposed to know that was bad?" and suddenly you have to start arguing in a context where your opponent can "win" the argument by feigning being an idiot, which is a surefire way to have a shit day.

Consider this: https://dynomight.net/teaching/
You're in low-risk group, then. I think 95-99% of HN commenters don't even need an emotional response to smoking trained into them; just an explanation of the risks is enough, or an appeal to their manners (some people don't like the smell of smoking.)

I personally like the smell of smoke and get a great nicotine buzz when I do smoke. If it didn't cause health issues I'd smoke all day.
The rootcause is the hyper competitiveness od us society. There are only winners and loosees, and loosers do drugs.. So every economic downturn people do what they were told, if success does not happen and self destruct to keep life bearable.
>> What I did get is a cop telling me that my parents having a glass of wine with dinner or a cigarette after work was just as bad a them using cocaine

That cop came to my school too. On a bicycle. He also told us that 50% of us would die in any car accident over 50mph. It was really hard to not laugh at him given the number of us who participated in the local streetracing scene. In a room full of students in jackets and ties, he stood there spouting lies in his spandex bike shorts.
I’ve had very expensive pen testers tell me to do this as recently as last year. They folded instantly at the first sign of pushback, so it seemed to me something that had been sitting in a checklist for years without anybody questioning it, making every website and app they audited worse.
> This might sound obvious but, if we want 7th graders not to glorify smoking, we quit glorifying it in our media

There was quite obviously a concerted effort to remove smoking from movies and shows. It's been going on for more than a decade. It's quite abrupt, go back far enough and everyone smokes, especially the cool guys and gals. Then fast forward and almost nobody smokes, not even the villains. Ads for smoking are gone from my country's TV and cigarette packs by law must display horrifying photos of emaciated cancer patients.
Joke: RSS Completionism is easy when there are so many fewer websites with good RSS feeds these days.

More seriously, a big shift in some of the modern RSS clients is feeding that completionism in tunable ways. I know Newsblur the best because that's what I've used for a number of years now, and it's got a number of tools like the ability to demote/mute certain tags or authors from given feeds or promote other tags or others to a "Focused" feed. It has a concept of "infrequently updated feeds" to bubble up those quiet but powerful feeds you might follow that you want to read first before diving into the river of whatever firehose feeds you also like to subscribe.

Some of the other modern RSS readers have their own similar tools.

The nice thing about RSS is that completion is still possible. All of the newer social media want to give you an illusion of infinite feeds that go on forever to keep you locked inside and "engaged". But RSS doesn't work on "engagement" and there's a natural end of new content each day.
Show HN: I made a bookmarklet to make HN headlines easier to scan
Last night I hacked together a little JS snippet that changes the font size of headlines to their associated score on a log scale. You can see an example screenshot here => https://i.imgur.com/Cr0weKW.png

const SCALE = 2;

const bl_children = document.getElementsByTagName("tbody")[2].children;

for(let i = 1; i < bl_children.length-1; i += 3){
const title = bl_children[i-1].children[2].children[0].children[0];
const score_body = bl_children[i];
const score = parseInt(score_body.children[1].children[0].children[0].innerText.split(" ")[0],10);

const size = Math.log2(score+13.33/SCALE) * SCALE;
title.style.fontSize = size + "px";
}
I miss Sydney :’
Well, yeah, but this was just pseudocode to convey the concept that you should solve the problem in code, not by maintaining separate code branches, deployments, etc. One approach would be to have an implementation of FooService for each sku, and code that uses the right one based on the current user/tenant/payment status/etc. This gets into dependency injection, inheritance, and other language/framework specific things. The actual approach would vary based on the project. It may be that CurrentUser.Sku and CurrentUser.IsPaymentCurrent is sufficient. Or it may be that you need a FooService per SKU, or any number of other ways to handle.
Yeah that's a "how to use it in the simple case", that's not a "here is how this shit works under the hood so you can use it for more than just running userland processes" and it also doesn't state the limitations (e.g. what instructions are supported and which are not).
How Does ChatGPT 'Think'?
Maybe not "accidentally". That pilot may have known the danger, and done it anyway. I seem to recall reading that he did, but I can't point you to a source.
Which have already been made public
That’s not needle in a haystack.

I would note that LLMs handle this task better if you slice the two documents into smaller sections and iterate section by section. They aren’t able to reason and have no memory so can’t structurally analyze two blobs of text beyond relatively small pieces. But incrementally walking through in much smaller pieces that are themselves semantically contained and related works very well.

The assumption that they are magic machines is a flawed one. They have limits and capabilities and like any tool you need to understand what works and doesn’t work and it helps to understand why. I’m not sure why the bar for what is still a generally new advance for 99.9% of developers is effectively infinitely high while every other technology before LLMs seemed to have a pretty reasonable “ok let’s figure out how to use this properly.” Maybe because they talk to us in a way that appears like it could have capabilities it doesn’t? Maybe it’s close enough sounding to a human that we fault it for not being one? The hype is both overstated and understated simultaneously but there have been similar hype cycles in my life (even things like XML were going to end world hunger at one point).
Security release: Element X Android (0.4.12) and iOS (1.6.7)
> along with the suspiciously-timed relaxation of pornographic generations

Has ChatGPT's censoring (a loaded term, but idk what else to use) been relaxed with GPT-4o? I have not tested it because I wouldn't have expected them to do it. Does this also extend to other types of censorship or filtering they do? If not, it feels very intentional in the way you're alluding to.
Illuminating 'The Ugly Side of Science'
One could also say that therapists prey on lonely people who pay them to talk to them and seem like they’re genuinely interested in them, when the therapist wouldn’t bother having a connection with these people once they stop paying. Which I suppose is true from a certain point of view. But from another point of view, sometimes people feel like they don’t have close friends or family to talk to and need something, even if it’s not a genuine love or friendship.
I don't see any value in Google being more transparent here if it was either 1) legitimately a unique bug, or 2) customer error with a Terraform script.

Fwiw -- and I know there are plenty of googlers here -- the OMG isn't locked down and it was legitimately a unique bug. I appreciate the forensic analysis of public statements that the author of this post strung together, but it doesn't really advance the conversation.
>dangerous for mentally unwell users

It's not our job to make the world safe for fundamentally unsafe people.
Unlike race, the fear of global warming is a social construct. Logically, if you are worried about humans, you should be worried about aging, cancer, heart disease. And if you are worried about the rest of nature, you should be worried about geology and human influence (of which climate is a minor part and self-limiting if significant).
Good mathematical estimate.

In the '80's most audio equipment had not been capable of reproducing material which would feature bass as the main element up until that time.

So apparently very few had developed the taste that would have driven them to produce recordings where the singing and melody were less prominent for that reason.

But you can turn up many old recordings on a modern subwoofer-enhanced system and rattle the walls quite effectively, the rest of the instruments will be as equally strident as the bass though, like the producer intended and more like the live concert than the old audio gear would do.
> If anything we should see significantly accelerated plant growth by about 10 to 50%

If that’s true, there should be global evidence of this happening already- are you aware of any publications confirming this effect?

You say accelerated growth like it’d be a good thing, but I don’t think we should wish for it or expect that to mitigate any damage… getting to the point of doubled CO2 would probably be extremely bad. If CO2 levels doubled, we’d for sure lose significant amount of our ice sheets, and some coastal cities along with it. Some of that is already happening anyway, but tripling the radiative effect will make it go much faster and much farther. As it stands, any increase in plant growth isn’t in any way making up for the rate we’re cutting down and paving over all the plants, and it’s not clear that 10 to 50% accelerated plant growth would make up for it either… even assuming that accelerated plant growth actually leads to more plants and a greater volume of oxygen cycle, and not just earlier blooms.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deforestation#Rates_of_defores...

https://www.antarcticglaciers.org/glaciers-and-climate/what-...
Energy is an accounting system for tracking motion over time, to ensure past/future motion lines up.

So by imposing dTotalEnergy/dt = 0, you do indeed get the apparent teleological conspiracy of nature, to ensure that the end 'can be no greater than the beginning'.

Perhaps the rehabilitation of these ancient greek causal maxims lies in seeing them as attempts to phrase principles of conservation.

Since Aristotle would have only thought that these principles apply to the essential basic constitutive properties of nature, later found to be mass/charge/etc., these do succeed.
I’m building a STEM tutor (https://withmarble.io). Right now it works for programming, but next is Math. I’ll test out your library and if it suits, I’ll buy a license. Thanks for sharing!
Maybe we should require a plate for commercial use of the bike lane and use the money to fund more bike lanes.
And the biggest department:

* Oracle legal
Except this work can be done once, stored somewhere and shared. Take a ROM (it means read-only after all) and get native port out...
There’s always a risk calculus that seems cold to an outside observer.

The issue with Boeing and the MAX is that they sort of used the designation of the plane to for lack of a better term, avoid some of the risk calculations.

With the early issues, a pretty cut and dry type training program would have likely prevented catastrophic incidents. They shaved pennys and set many dollars (and hundreds of people) on fire.

If you run a company where low probability, high impact risks drive the operations of your products, setting trust on fire is going to have a real impact on your bottom line. You go from a trusted, admired company to target of memes about assassinated whistleblowers.
These are usually called webinars
Period trackers 'coercing' women into sharing risky information
After making a calculated risk, I left my well-established job in October 2022 to follow my entrepreneurial aspirations. My journey began through freelancing during my job that started earning me more than my regular job, so I thought, why not give it a shot?

Running my freelance business on Upwork was initially a gratifying experience, but as I ventured into the second half of 2023, it became more challenging. I encountered some unfavorable client experiences that were stress-inducing, and my interest waned. I found myself questioning if I was merely being lazy or if the burnout was starting to creep in.

Determined to give my passion a new direction, I wrapped up my freelance projects in December 2023 and dedicated my efforts to my startup from January 2024 onwards. It wasn't always consistent; in fact, it started in sporadic bursts of productivity. However, since the start of 2024, I've put in dedicated, consistent hours towards this project.

The initial concept was an aggregated inbox MVP - a single spot for users to see messages, comments, notifications from platforms like Notion, Figma, GitHub, etc. But after interacting with hundreds of agency owners and getting their insights, I realized integrating and maintaining so many platforms was challenging without proper validation.

One agency owner's feedback turned out to be pivotal. After our conversation, I pivoted the platform to a project management tool capable of tracking issues, time, estimated costs and actual expenses. I retained the inbox aggregation feature from the original MVP, re-envisioning it to convert all incoming communications into issues within projects.

During this phase, I utilized open-source codebases that had issue tracking capabilities and customized it by adding time tracking and cost tracking features to provide a comprehensive project management tool.

In addition to developing the product, I've been busy with marketing activities on LinkedIn, Twitter, and more recently on Instagram and YouTube. While there's been the temptation to spread even further across platforms like Reddit, Hacker News, and Indie Hacker, I am unsure about how many platforms one can handle effectively. I have also managed to list the product on ProductHunt, G2, Capterra, with the hope that these platforms can provide the visibility that my startup needs.

At this point, I have mixed feelings. There is satisfaction in seeing the product shape up, but simultaneously, fatigue is setting in. Thoughts about moving onto a new idea cross my mind, but this time, maybe along with a co-founder.

I realize I may sound like I'm venting, but in reality, who can tell how many people will even read this. And among those who do, how many will share it? Perhaps it doesn't matter, but sharing my journey might resonate with a fellow entrepreneur facing the same highs and lows.
Assuming embedded AI in every piece of robotics - sometimes directly, sometimes connected to a central server (this is doable even today) - it'll revolutionize industries: human-less mining, processing, manufacturing, services, and transportation. These factories would eventually produce and install enough solar power or build sufficient nuclear plants and energy infrastructure, making energy clean and free.

With abundant electric cars (at this future point in time) and clean electricity powering heating, transportation, and manufacturing, some AIs could be repurposed for CO2 capture.

It sounds deceptively easy, but from an engineering standpoint, it likely holds up. With free energy and AGI handling labor and thinking, we can achieve what a civilization could do and more (cause no individual incentives come into play).

However, human factors could be a problem: protests (luddites), wireheading, misuse of AI, and AI-induced catastrophes (alignment).
I've noticed that errors seem to increase the longer the chat goes. I think having too much previous context confuses it. I seem to have much better luck if I occasionally start a new chat.
How does it compare to others products in your use case?