skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
My terminal contents are not able to be sent out. We do have Siri disabled as part of our MDM profile, and legal feels that our protections are adequate for the os layer. We're extremely limited to what software we can install, and we have os level protections on what endpoints our devices can even communicate with on the wider internet.

Yes, it's overkill, but legal's stance is that anything that can possibly talk to a third party AI service is forbidden regardless of the other technical solutions in place preventing information leakage.

FWIW, anything that has telemetry to third parties (crash reports, usage stats) are also forbidden, with extremely limited exceptions that legal has approved.
> something I don't think anyone predicted

It was definitely predicted. Marshall McLuhan basically coined the term ‘information overload’ in the 60s. The sci-fi novel ‘Stand on Zanzibar’ also published in and 60s has chapters that are akin to a Twitter feed that give a sense of the wider world
You could also just buy an actual timer ;)

https://www.amazon.com/s?k=pomodoro+timer
Arguably, allowing anyone to create very believable lies is a world-changing superpower.
N100: Intel entry-level CPU with 6M cache, 6W TDP, up to 3.40 GHz and 16GB RAM
I encourage you to look through this case: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Midler_v._Ford_Motor_Co.
There's more to onscreen keyboards than you think. At least on Apple's side, they don't just check which key you've tapped, they also check where your finger is on the key relative to its neighbors. If you want to hit a d but hit an f by accident, the keyboard remembers that the tap was pretty ambiguous and you might actually have wanted a d instead. This information helps it choose the right autocorrect candidate. If you only register which key was tapped, but not where, typing accuracy goes down considerably.

All of this was described in detail in Ken Kocienda's book about his time at Apple working on the keyboard for the original iPhone.
This looks great! I hosted some discussion about open source cad late last year on this GitHub discussion board. People tend to say that building a new CAD kernel would take ten full time engineers ten years. I like where truck is going and I’m curious to see what its current limitations are. Sadly I haven’t had as much time as I’d like to evaluate the various options. (The other promising option for a complete package is Ondsel).

See that discussion forum here:

https://github.com/tlalexander/open-cad-foundation/discussio...
The stable version cannot. 1.5 Alpha can do it. It can also index properties (as in resolution, author, song/movie length, etc.)

So far I would recommend that one, it has tons of new features (including a change journal that shows renames, moves and deletes in real time) and I didn't experience a single bug yet. And it is even faster.

https://www.voidtools.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=9787#new
I think there's a difference between "clever" and complex.

You can express a complex algorithm or pattern with simple easy to understand code - complexity doesn't have to manifest itself as unreadable or incomprehensible code.

To me "clever" code is more about they way you are doing something than the complexity of what you are trying to do. Clever is the opposite of straightforward and easy to comprehend without a detailed explanation.

For example you might be "forced" to write clever code as an optimization to calculate something in a non-obvious way, maybe also based on some non-obvious pre-conditions that have been assumed and make this a valid approach.

You don't normally want to write "clever" code - you want to write easy to understand straightforward code, and on the occasion when you feel compelled to a clever implementation, for the sake of future you or your teammates, you better precede it with a block comment prefixed with "here be dragons" and a detailed explanation of what it is doing and why it is doing it in this non-obvious way.
Ondsel has developed an LGPL 3D assembly solver at
https://github.com/Ondsel-Development/OndselSolver
It is being used in FreeCAD and Ondsel ES.
you get one vote. corporation boards and their representatives can hand write, hand deliver, and have unlimited laws enacted by lawmakers they have in their pockets. voters have no such equivalent. pretending that isn't the case is plain silly and makes you sound like a 7th grader exiting their first civics course.
Steve Jobs gave Woz half of the base amount, which is what Woz agreed to. Jobs withheld the fact that he was going to receive a bonus on top of the base amount, and did not share any of that money.

Was it an ethical mistake? Sure. He should have at least disclosed that he was receiving the bonus money, even if he didn't want to share it.

But claiming it was a "major ethical mistake" seems fairly out of touch with reality.

And of course, taken in the context of all of the good things they did together, it was completely insignificant and Woz has said as much.
I've noticed I love the clever, elegant abstractions I invent, because I understand how they work and they give me a really neat and readable way to organise my code. And I hate the clever elegant abstractions others create, because I the code is so abstract I can't tell by looking at it what it does, and I don't have their mental model of the abstraction in my head.

Cleverness is fine if you can make sure the reader gets the right mental model in their head, but not if not. And because nobody cares about your documentation, your options are to either explain it to everybody (sounds stupid but can actually work -- for a while), or to make your code explain it for you. And that limits how clever and abstract it can be.
Amusing Idea: The DoJ should start talking up the possibilities of prosecuting the AI on CSAM charges. Then watch the panic, backpedaling, etc. by all the companies and zealots currently pushing hard and talking big on the AI front.
Kernighan's Law:

Debugging is twice as hard as writing the code in the first place. Therefore, if you write the code as cleverly as possible, you are, by definition, not smart enough to debug it.
Yea. She is interested in flags and so I could sneak it in that way.
Spoken like someone that has just started to run a business and has not yet gotten burned out from asshole patrons/users/clients that absolutely ruin the experience. In my experience, it is the middle of the spectrum of users to shoot for. The upper to top end expecting so much stuff to be given to them and expect way too much babysitting and pampering at the expense of other customers and give lots of attitude. The middle segment just wants the service at a fair price and to be treated with respect and are typically polite about it. Then the lower end wants the same services at the lower price tiers and complains that there are other things not included at the base price. There's no way to make everyone happy all the time.
How do you know what the effects and importance of current gen AI will be?
Right. If the operators of this service are slick about it, they'll copy the model of a lot of attorneys who sell access to city hall/DA's office/regulatory boards/etc. You don't frame it as getting the employer to do something outside the scope of their job any more than an advocate is telling the city council to grant a permit that shouldn't be granted. They're just "drawing the employee's attention to some important facts", as two friends might over dinner, and the employee can apply the usual rules.

The direct compensation to the employee does look a little bad, but then this isn't bribery if the employee is just doing their job. It has the appearance of impropriety but maybe not the legal force of a bribery charge, tortious interference, or similar.
If you had picked someone with a less disctinct voice you may have a point, but ScarJo's voice is very distinct. I'd bet on 10/10 people who are engaged in pop culture and 5/10 general people guessing correctly.
This is different and there is existing case law, see this other comment on this post

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40435274
... and Wikipedia does not consider itself a reliable source. Rightfully so. Open any politics-related article and you'll see why.
No, but nobody is obligated to contribute to or support them either.
Yes. A relevant quote from Alan Kay in his talk “the power of simplicity”:

> one of the things that's worked the best the last three, or four hundred years, is you get simplicity by finding a slightly more sophisticated building block to build your theories out of. its when you go for a simple building block that anybody understand through common sense, that is when you start screwing yourself right and left, because it just might not be able to ramify through the degrees of freedom and scaling you have to go through, and it's this inability to fix the building blocks that is one of the largest problems that computing has today in large organizations. people just won't do it

https://youtu.be/NdSD07U5uBs
Yeah, my initial response was: this is wrong on so many levels, and I love that it is out there for public to see

100 art points.
The elevator enthusiasts and their quest to preserve old lifts in Singapore
"This is a typical "move fast and break things" mentality.. " with a big dash of “there’s no such thing as bad publicity” thinking thrown in for good measure.

Staying relevant is all that matters these days.
The day of the demo, Sam posted a one word tweet “her” (the title of the movie, starring Scarlett Johansson as an AI Assistant, that people bring up when talking about the idea of AI companions). Minutes later his company debuted an AI assistant that sounded a lot like Scarlett Johansson, performing an assistant/companion role similar to hers in the movie. The association was noticed, widely discussed and definitely increased the value of the product through the implied association with (and implied endorsement by) Scarlett Johansson.
I don't think this is an apples-to-apples comparison.

The movie producers didn't produce a simulation of Britney's voice and attempt to sell access to it.

However you feel about an probably-unapproved celebrity cameo in a movie, it's not the same thing as selling the ability to impersonate that celebrity's voice to anyone willing to pay, in perpetuity.
This kind of de minimis artistic use is what fair use was invented for, and god knows they licensed her likeness regardless.
Qcad is commercial software. The author is doing his best to ride the line between commercial and OSS, but most free software developers don't want to play. LibreCad was forked from an earlier version of Qcad and fell behind. Now they're doing a whole new LibreCAD but it's been years in the making.
They are saying that YIMBYs "really want to build in your backyard, not their own" which is nonsense.
Maybe the author just independently came up with this, thought it was cool, and wanted to share?

I don't know if "please do a thorough literature review before showing me things" is the right sentiment here.
So, the people complaining at an all hands are likely to be completely ignorant about the facts on the ground. They're not working on these systems or processes. They're just gullible enough to believe what they read on the internet, and take action on it.

The team responsible for the account suspensions / content takedowns / etc on the other hand will have the numbers to show that they're doing a good job, and the expertise to predict what the implications of doing the policy changes asked by the complainers would be. Not just how much it'd cost directly, but the second order effects on abuse from making different tradeoffs.

So let's say that you want to give high-touch customer support to billions of free accounts? Not only is it going to be fabulously expensive, but it's going to be abusable as hell. The abusers will quickly learn just what kind of sob story will have the best chance of fooling the humans, and get their accounts falsely unbanned or even use it to hijack the accounts of others. The only way to avoid this is to make sure the customer service reps have no agency. But then you're paying tens or hundreds of millions / year just to have humans execute a script.

And these predictions will be a lot more credible than those from random employees parrotting social media posts and making vague claims about potential brand damage or loss of trust. Ignoring the complaints is going to be a pretty easy choice for an exec.
This feels like some sort of HN April Fools joke. At this point it’d be impossible to actually parody this place.
The MacBooks have an NPU too. Just nobody has done anything with them.
This has been my experience as well, although I’ve started hearing folks complain about wanting a slightly slower pace of life after living in NYC for a couple of years. Especially those who moved out of the Bay.
Date sharing should always be opt in
Let me see if I can sway you.

The nice thing about both the ternary and the list compression is that they become statements of the form derived_thing = some_computation. The code flows better when you’re skimming it at a high level and thinking “then we get this”, “then pluck this”. You can think more about your reformed data and less about how it was reformed.

The alternative is that the branching obscures what you’re trying to create at each step.

Sometimes I’ll even use 2 list comprehensions instead of a loop (even though it’s slower) because it’s clearer to read something like:

odds = […]
evens = […]

That’s my experience, anyway.
Perhaps its just me, but I feel like a lot of users are missing the forest for the trees here. Services such as these only pop up when legitimate solutions prove ineffective at addressing the problem.

To me, these services are more indicative of "Big Tech" failing to create effective appeal processes to meet their consumer's demand... While I'm sure there isn't a lot of money in it, it'd be great for Big Tech to examine how they could improve on this front.
mactop
It's highly optimized, but it still needs quite a bit of RAM when the index is large. But RAM is cheap nowadays.
It's the only thing I really, really miss when I am on Linux. (there is FSearch, but it's not quite as great, yet)
There's a whole statement-of-principles thing that at least implies that the intention isn't to cannibalize the existing offerings: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Enterprise/Princip...

Though I imagine that only works so far as you feel you can trust the Foundation to stick to those principles, so that's complicated. :D

There's also a bunch of FAQs here that sort of get at how the funding streams are supposed to integrate into the existing structures and how it's supposed to avoid pushing out the free services: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Enterprise/FAQ

(As I said elsewhere, I work for the WMF but I don't work on anything related to this so I'm just commenting as someone who has more experience searching through our public info than most HN commenters would...)
>have little to nothing to do with monetary policy.

False. A monetary policy that prioritizes universal access to basic needs leads to less overall crime. It may not be sufficient, but it is a major factor[1].

1. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-020-80897-8
I keep to a simple rule: smart code is an asset, clever code is a liability.

Smart code is usually simple and clear, while also being short and efficient. Achieving this is not easy, but reading, understanding, and using smart code is easy. (Otherwise it's not smart, but, well, ordinary.) An example of smart code for me would be the merge sort algorithm, or the Lisp interpretation loop.

Clever code is usually some kind of last-resort hack, a trick, applied in dire straits, or to achieve a unique effect. An example would be the inverse square root hack, or the Duff device.

Beside the actual writing time, code review time is good for making code smarter and less clever.
This comment makes no sense. You dismissed the C# code, and then wrote the same thing in Rust, but with an extra non-conceptually-meaningful boilerplate step.

May as well ask, "where did x come from, and why are you so sure you can iter().sum() it?"

C# has generic types, so yes, C# arrays of numbers have a Sum method.

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/2419343/how-to-sum-up-an...

Don't make bold dismissive comments about things you are ignorant of. It makes you look Blubby.
In that case, as I understand it, the voice actor intentionally mimicked Waits, purposefully using his intonations, style of speech, and phrasing, all of which were not natural to the voice actor. He was intentionally mimicking Waits. I doubt the same claim can be made of the Sky voice actor.
He knew there would be blowback, he just didn’t care. Look at how many people are talking about it.
This is true. That's why the software engineering recruitment process is completely broken... They select for people who revel in unnecessary complexity.

What kind of person enjoys spending their time practicing many variations of pointless complicated coding puzzles instead of working on useful side projects or learning new concepts and technologies?

The big tech recruitment process is all about puzzle solving under time constraints though. Pragmatic engineers have no chance of competing against the puzzle solvers.
> since it free now there is no need for self-hosting.

It's awesome that you're offering this for free for now, but I don't think that means there's no need to self-host. There are many reasons people might not want to hand over data to a third party.
> I wouldn't be surprised if some Wikipedia editors balk at their volunteer work being actively marketed and reformatted for ease of LLM training

As someone who avidly edited Wikipedia for 6-8 years, I am happy to see my volunteer work used for LLM training. I also agree some other editors likely aren't.
> 2. There is no middle ground: either it is end-to-end encrypted, or it is not. "Sniffing" encrypted messages is not a thing, period.

Yes, but ... it's also never truly end to end encrypted as humans can't do encryption in their heads. Thus there is an analogue hole at both ends. All you need to is install a spy app at the end points to access the unencrypted version.

And lo, I present to you the Australia "Assistance and Access Bill (2019)". It demands that companies that develop the endpoint software shall "assist" them in writing spy apps that are undetectable. It also demands those same companies shall use their "auto security patch" feature to silently install those spy programs on the targets devices.

I have no idea what the EU is proposing, and yes I agree if they are proposing we all use "breakable encryption" then it won't succeed for a whole host of practical reasons. But, I suspect they are smarter than that. And if they adopt the Australian solution, then while:

> 3. Make all the laws you want, criminals will always be able to use end-to-end encryption. Those laws will only prevent honest people from protecting their communications.

is true, it's also moot.

There is a way around the Australian version because it insists the government shall not introduce a "systemic weakness", which translates to "you shall not break the security our society depends on". Because of that they are prohibited from installing their spy software on everyone's devices; all installations must be pre-authorised by a court. That in turn means the software company must be able to target the targeted individuals devices, and only those devices. That's simple for the likes of Google, Microsoft and Amazon of course because they insist you create an account.

So the ways around it are:

1. Use open open source software, because the anonymous security updates make impossible to target someone. This is very difficult to do for most people.

2. Use a Chinese phone. They have been banned from using the closed versions of software, so they base their products on something like AOSP. You will probably get spied on by the Chinese government instead, of course - but if you live in the west why would you care? This is the easy one to do, so that's what will probably happen.

I find the ironies of the directions these proposals take us in absolutely delicious.
A bit of a clickbaity title, but I'll bite

I think "cleverness" is a function of your (and your team's) experience in a particular language / domain space

I worked with teams where verbose Java is considered "simple, straightforward, and easy to understand"

I also worked with teams where terse Haskell is considered "simple, straightforward, and easy to understand"

and of course these codebases look nothing alike
It’s not clever at all. It doesn’t solve the core issue, which is identity / ownership verification. You’re conflating clever with “something I’d find personally useful”.
It's like a joke, but isn't funny.
1. The case is from 1988. That’s the year I was born. Societal norms are in a constant state of flux, and this one case from 36 years ago isn’t really an indication of the current state of how case law will play out.

2. Ford explicitly hired an impersonator. OpenAI hired someone that sounded like her, and it’s her natural voice. Should movies be held to the same standard when casting their actors? This is about as absurd as saying that you’re not allowed to hire an actor to play a role.
I wrote one of those! https://github.com/bakkot/MenuBarVolume

I still cannot imagine why Apple decided that you shouldn't have a visible volume indicator in the menu bar when you have headphones connected. I mean, really?
Given:

1. The plot of "Her" (guy falls in love with synthesized voice, played by Johansson)

2. Altman's affinity for the film (the article says he's called it his "favorite movie")

Reaching out to Johansson about cloning her voice, then doing so without permission feels like Altman is creeping on her.

The sooner this bubble pops, the better.
Secret codes being used in recommandation letters are an urban legend. HR people have no incentive to create a secret code for them and their potential rivals, let alone teach it to new HR people while also keeping it secret.

This legend comes from the fact that HR people cannot be too explicit about the fact that you've been a pain in the ass (you could probably sue if it's too transparent), so if they have nothing positive to say they will commend your punctuality or something equally as mundane. It's not secret codes, it's like... "bless their heart", but in HR talk. Plausible deniability if you want to sue, I guess. "But it's a good thing, your honor! They were always on time!"
There have been a few research OSes designed around a concept of "all memory is persistent". Iirc this allows some simplifications. For example, no need for a file system: the copy-from-disk-to-RAM is pointless when there's no difference between RAM & disk.

This didn't catch on as the tech to make it practical wasn't there. And existing OSes were 'good enough' due to memory-mapped files, smart caching techniques etc. Plus boatloads of software using that.

But if all background storage were treated as one giant RAM, I could see some cloud/AI big boys crossing that 64-bit size boundary. Or some science/engineering projects like CERN.

That said: it's the apps, really. If OS + biggest app working sets easily fit in a 64-bit address space, then why throw 2x the bits at it? And disk <-> RAM transfers (+filesystems, cache etc) are a solved problem.
Issues arise when you're dealing with multiple languages. Say, if you're working on a Java app (which uses camelCase) backed by a Postgres database (which uses snake_case).

Postgres in particular has case-sensitivity quirks if you try to force the use of camelCase table names.