skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The infra part particularly resonated with me. Leadership caring about high level metrics deprioritize "in-the-weeds" dev experience. At <redacted applied ML place>, I was working on data infra, but pressure from above made it impossible to have time to focus and instead focused on short-term deliverables. It was hard to convince others to adjust their priorities for "the greater good".

The only way to make things better (in my mind) was to use my own time to improve the infra, and because the metrics don't track these infra improvements I don't get rewarded so I just became burned out.

Part of me think this is the reason why you want bloat in orgs, so that motivated people with enough redundancy will actually feel comfortable chasing longer term incentives.
iPhones are packed to the gills with accessibility features including for contrast, text size, bolding text, filters for the color blind, text to speech and color inversion.
I can jump in on the data source question - we can track specific accounts and keywords on Twitter, we aren't paying for the full firehose yet. We also track those original ransomware and dark web sites and blogs being referenced and just figuring out how best to cluster them all into the same event. Thanks for checking it out!
I don’t use X/Twitter, but I am surprised it wasn’t always this way. People should be able to have a degree of privacy and anonymity while participating online. Cancel culture is very harmful to discussion, especially on politically controversial topics.
Their fully reusable rocket concept is pretty cool. Like a mini Starship.

More competition is always good, glad to see them progress quite fast.
Blockin' Bots. – Ethan Marcotte
Come on, this is crazy talk. If we empowered the EPA, they might decide to further regulate companies, and those companies might subsequently capture slightly less profit for shareholders. How can you even suggest this? Won't someone spare a thought for the resource extraction company shareholders, if only just for a minute?
Talking Tech and AI with Tim Cook [video]
Further killing the network effects that made the platform so powerful. Power users know how good it was on Tweetdeck with the Activity tab surfacing all the great tweets you wouldn't necessarily see. If likes are private now does that mean the For You tab will have even less powering it? Just so a bunch of ppl can creep on some 'questionable' tweets? Weak
Good read and really just highlights the complexity and tension involved with huge corporate organizations. I would not have ever guessed that Alexa alone would have so many teams and engineers involved, because from the outside it seems like the only iterations were on the physical models. The voice assistant didn't seem to change in any meaningful way for a very long time. It even seems like Amazon employs some form of internal start-up model, but that still struggles because of the internal politics. Maybe when it comes to individual products, its best to keep the teams small and nimble.
Jury finds Just Stop Oil supporters not guilty in petrol pump case
People are talking about angry founders and angry employees, but there is another side to this post:

Prospective founders who work in big tech companies and have a family which depend on them. I include myself in that group, and I thought I needed 10 years worth of savings to venture on creating my own startup. But from the discussion, in about four years it is possible to match big tech compensation.

I feel more motivated to start a company now.
I don’t use Facebook, and I’m not required to use Facebook or anything adjacent to it when I chat with my friends who do
Reading this kinda makes one question the incentives and competency of government investigation programs. All they did was ask “given the reliable info, where could the car be”? And they display better deductive reasoning than professional investigators, and achieve results with a budget of pennies. I know you can’t win them all but still I’m a little disillusioned and question whether investigation agencies should be publicly funded and operated when I read these type of stories.
In the most charitable interpretation of this comment - I can understand the feeling, when so much of social media interactions are in the form 'It's post a picture of you as a baby, 10 year old, and current age!'. Those and many other instances can bring out excessive skepticism

But the people involved in this haven't signaled that they are in that path, either in the message about the challenge (precisely the opposite) or seemingly in their careers so far

So I guess I don't share the concern but a better way to phrase your comment could be -

"how can we be sure the human-provided solutions won't turn out to be just fodder for training a RL model or something that will later be monetized, closed and proprietary? Do the challenge organizers provide any guarantees on that?"
This is the “startup myth” that lets the scam perpetuate.

The world has changed. Google IPOed just a few years after it founded. Now Stripe, objectively one of the most successful startups ever, still hasn’t IPOed after 15 years.

Liquidity preference
Dilution

Even the F in FAANG had a major movie made about early employees getting shafted by dilution!

FAANG is 5 companies founded a long time ago. Since then VCs have completely rewritten the rules of the game. But they’ll still point to extreme outliers in the old rules. The fairy tale of the Google masseuse has probably cost tens of thousands of engineers millions in compensation.

You need to get things in writing and do the math and startups make it as difficult as possible to do that and then the math never adds up. So they resort to fairy tales.
This. It might not actually be rewarding, but it plays off bygone glamour, so there are always more young people willing to make that trade.
My guess is that there is going to be all this investment and research poured into AI voice assistants and in the end the result is going to be the same.
It's a small fix, but the original flame emits mostly UV light. It's just almost harmless low energy UV.

The issue with magnesium burning is that both the UV light is way more energetic, and it tends to also be very intense.
Neat Site. Because I was curious, and it's relevant to the sheer number of oil wells that have to be dealt with. Here's a picture of the Odessa / Midland area of West Texas.

FracTracker, West TX, Oil Wells (purple) https://i.imgur.com/PpPzDeM.png

From: https://ft.maps.arcgis.com/apps/webappviewer/index.html?appi... (if you want to look at other areas)

With how many there are in West TX, I could almost believe the ground is collapsing. Drilled and vacuumed out so much, its like foam underneath. There's a known issue with sinkholes also.

https://blog.smu.edu/dedmancollege/2022/02/28/these-monstrou...
I assume you don’t cut tile with a tile saw very often without a respirator so its a non issue.
Glad NLKit might be helpful in the future!

On memory: You're in luck, we do support conversation history and we're actively working on improvements like lazy loading for long conversations.

Best practices: Spot on! The project docs have tips for building assistants that hide the underlying LLM ( Feature: Assistant personas - https://docs.nlkit.com/nlux/examples/assistant-persona ). Plus, docs cover LangChain integration (supports any AI backend!), Next.js, HuggingFace (access to thousands of models at your fingertips), and any custom backend.
Not sure about Texas, but this absolutely a thing elsewhere. The GOP is currently working on making this easier in my state: https://www.yahoo.com/news/recent-changes-ohio-easier-force-...
I built a web app for a bike valet service at a local hospital. Hundreds of people use it each day to make their bike commute to work easier!

The app lets them scan in/scan out with their employee badge and assigns them a parking space and sends an email to them. Then they can just leave and the valet attendant puts their bike in the right spot.

As they're leaving work they can tap a link in the email that texts the valet attendant that they're on their way so their bike can be pulled to the front and ready for them.

I originally got paid for it but now do maintenance/small updates for free or trade to have them do maintenance work on my bicycle.
Preferably the latter but if the agent can use a crappy app for you (maybe using accessibility APIs in some cases) that’s better than the bad experience that “download our app” usually is.

Better yet the system should know about all the commercial options available to you and be a partner in getting food you like, taking advantage of discounts, all of that.
> A 2022 Science investigation found evidence of a broader pattern of fabrication and data manipulation in Newmaster’s speeches, teaching, biographical statements, and scholarly writings over 2 decades. Evidence also suggested Newmaster embellished or simply invented findings or accomplishments, as well as claimed credit for work by others.

What I find puzzling about this kind of stories is that the pattern of behavior is usually obvious to all who know the person. Yet, it'll take years before they're found out. We all know people like Newmaster. They may not be scientists, but we recognize the more than usual tendency to exaggerate their accomplishments, the padding of the truth, the selective amnesia about giving credits where it's due. Even if you're just getting to know them, hang around just for a bit and you'll see it, even about meaningless stuff. It's what they do. And if you see it even just once with someone, it should be enough to raise your bs alarms about anything they say.
Champion barred from professional eating contest over Impossible Foods deal
I’m not sure if I’ve misread the article but it seemed unclear as to whether the concrete needed to remain soaked in potassium chloride? Surely keeping a whole foundation soaked indefinitely would be impractical?
People of a certain social class also tended to belong to clubs. It's still not rare in places like NYC.
That _is_ an interesting paper, I'll need to give it a read through.
Also bake in the fact in your calculations that 9/10 startups will not see the kind of success you are talking about. And the authors point still stands.. the founder made some money at liquidity event at round A vs … making even more money later if he doesnt sell?
I am a very bad person, yes.
Really? I'm genuinely unaware, what would make it difficult? In what situations would it require a rewrite?
There are plenty of applications where a single load would be more convenient for one way or another, but it's possible to do it in multiple loads with a final assembly step at the destination.

Nobody is going to spend months of planning and many millions of dollars on alterations to save a few grand on a one-off project. But hey, if someone else has already done the planning and alterations, why not piggyback off of that and save yourself some money?
Show HN: AI Facemash with Phoenix LiveView, SDXL, Openskill and Deepface
I'm not saying the rest-of-world status quo is ideal or even desirable; I'd also much prefer an open and federated network, or at least interoperability.

But what I wanted to highlight is that SMS/MMS and generally carrier-based messaging is just as much of a weird communication island at this point as all of these OTT messengers are, from a non-US point of view.

RCS would just be a continuation of that, so I'm not sure if it's worth cheering on Apple for taking this path, further cementing Google's hold on Android messaging in the US – they run almost all the infrastructure and get all the message content, after all!
I don't know. I find that sitting is just as bad. I wish planes had treadmill seats....
Long-haul for a middle eastern airline actually sounds manageable because there are fewer boarding cycles, the schedules are more rigid, and you're less likely to get stuck in a random city because of weather or delays.
I disagree. There's already a function for sharing the stuff you see

Turning a "like" into a sort of soft retweet was a bad move. Personally it made me much less likely to interact with stuff

I don't want it to surface every action I take to people who follow me

Does anyone actually even like the For You tab? All I ever see is "I was wondering why I was seeing so much garbage in my feed, turns out it changed me to For You and I didn't notice"
Interesting my entirely innocuous post was flagged killed by the users of HN.
It's not discrimination to say "the message you just sent is green because it went over SMS (and now RCS) and we can't verify the E2E encryption, deliverability, etc like we can with iMessage".
Exactly - Amazon wasn't the only company gutting their conversational UI teams because they couldn't figure out how to make money with them. My guess is 99% of conversational UIs are some combination of:

1. Set my alarm/timer.

2. "What's the weather?"

3. "Turn on/off my lights" for those with connected lights.

etc.

We've had voice calling for over a century, yet it feels like the majority of us prefer to text most of the time these days.
Draft Legislation to End Federal Dependence on Insecure, Proprietary Software
Because the core team never took it seriously. You can let packaging solutions grow organically if your core team doesn't want to do it, but then you need to find those who start a project, help guide them, point people toward them, help it grow and improve. You can't just throw your hands up and hope somebody else solves it.

Perl has the best packaging community I've seen. Ironically I don't think they even have binary packages, but they do have a system that tests both core Perl and most of the CPAN archive on like 20+ platforms. The packaging fits the community, it's robust, and sets conventions that the rest of the community follows that improves the entire ecosystem. It has definitely evolved over time. But I don't know of anyone who has ever said "Man, Perl packaging is a huge pain in the butt, I wish someone could solve this". If there's a problem, usually there is just one solution that everyone adopts, builds on and improves (which is ironic considering Perl's motto)

Whereas with Python, if there's a problem, someone tries to solve it, but it's not perfect, so somebody makes a second solution, then a third, fourth, fifth, etc. Python never established the convention of reusing and improving existing things. Python has a forking/independent culture. So there will always be 20 different ways to do something and none of them all that great (which is ironic considering Python's principles)
You check a lot of boxes in this comment:

- dissing on $platform because $expensive_platform is better

- implying that the only reason to use $platform is because you're to poor to afford $expensive_platform

- employing bulshytt [1] to characterise $platform as inferior to $expensive_platform

- attempting to pull in sexual attraction - or lack thereof - in regard to the use of $expensive_platform vs. $platform

- adding a gratuitous Musk diss to show your team colours just like football fans do for their teams

If I were to take this seriously I would refrain from using $expensive_platform given that its users seem to be insecure adolescents who have yet to find their place in society.

[1] https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Bulshytt
Makes sense. I used to tell people that I didn't really need to read compiler output flying up my screen, but watch for the "shape" to change to know something was different. They looked at me like I was insane.
It's literally weak. Destroying network effect so that edgelords have a safe space to edgelord in. Musk is doing this literally to cover his own ass, which keeps liking some gross gross shameful shit (plenty of replacement theory likes, for example).

The discovery value cannot be overstated. Being able to take a smart networked person & go look and see what they like, being able to crib their best follows, is the express train to having a great social networking experience. I cannot imagine the damage someone has to have to snub that, all to go protect some silly edgelording.

Maybe an option to hide your likes is ok. But throwing this away for everyone is absurd. Throwing away so much good to protect the bad is a value system I cannot respect.
> Apple is sticking to the GSM spec and in their original announcement said they were going to be working with GSM to improve the security and privacy

One of the aspects of RCS that was supposed to be a feature but turned into a problem is the spec supports varying profiles which include a bunch of different capabilities. The GSMA publishes a "Universal Profile" with a base set of features but notably absent is E2EE.

Google runs their own RCS infrastructure that Android phones can use but not all do. It becomes a shit show when a Google RCS user sends a message to a carrier RCS user. While they might get the nice RCS features, the conversation is not E2EE since the carrier doesn't/can't implement Google's custom RCS profile with E2EE.

If Apple hosts their own RCS infrastructure they could make a custom profile allowing E2EE between Apple RCS users but not between Apple and Google or Apple and a carrier. Unless the GSMA includes E2EE in the Universal Profile and gets carriers to actually implement it, RCS is just MMS with better quality.

RCS is such a crap standard, it is very much the sort of standard you'd expect from telecom carriers. There's no E2EE built into the core service and its use requires a SIM. Sender verification is also limited to business messaging so there's no inline mechanism to verify messages from normal users.
I imagine Musk wants higher engagement metrics to brag about, and removing barriers to liking content is one way to achieve that - which applies to many people and not just Nazis.
3am is the best time for random projects.
The first paragraph of the first section of reasons given is:

> Alexa put a huge emphasis on protecting customer data with guardrails in place to prevent leakage and access. Definitely a crucial practice, but one consequence was that the internal infrastructure for developers was agonizingly painful to work with.

I really don't want this to be a message companies are hearing right now -- that being conscientious about customer data is a lethal barrier to progress, in the "AI" gold rush.

Also, without knowing anything about the organization, I'd expect it to probably have a high level of dysfunction, being at a company known for being excessively metrics-driven from the top, and for ruthless stack-ranking and related HR practices... trying to organize a large coherent cutting-edge R&D effort against that cultural backdrop. Like suggested by this bit elsewhere in the section:

> And most importantly, there was no immediate story for the team’s PM to make a promotion case through fixing this issue other than “it’s scientifically the right thing to do and could lead to better models for some other team.” No incentive meant no action taken.
How is this different from Interpres?
Indeed; I just wanted to break it into sequential steps so that in case of issues, I can conveniently add debugging steps in the middle as needed.
I agree - they've recently repositioned it vertically (as it would be launched). I was at the museum a few weeks ago and it is definitely smaller than you'd think.
When it comes to vaccines in a comprehensive scope, I suspect there is no Human that is not at least somewhat ignorant (or not all knowing), and delusional to at least some degree. The "science" aspect is but one part of a much more complex picture.
Amazon could be at the late Sears and Robucks phase already where it cares more about people subscribing to Prime than it does selling things.

It’s painful to see them give up a good brand just as the moment when a change in technology could have given them wheels…
A tangential topic, but anyone have recommendations for proof-checking languages? Lean, Isabelle, Coq, Idris are the few I know about. I've only ever used Isabelle, but can't really tell the difference between them. Anyone here used more than one, and can tell why people pick one over the other?
Worse computers require better programmers.
The fact it could ride piggyback on a 747 shows either how small the shuttle was or how big a 747 is. Either way, it was cool to see
That's SMS's fault and partly the reason the rest of the world moved on, it's old and janky and you never know when it works, just use Whatsapp like everyone else in most of the world.
Hey, cool. I won and learned some stuff.
Sorry, it's been 35 years since I've read that ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
What many people don’t seem to realize is there are a lot of early stage but already well funded (10M+) startups who are desperately looking for top quality people. Once I was approached by a founder who offered 500k base salary (wasn’t a good fit for my area of expertise).
ah! this took me a second to grok, but from #2 above: "we just want to send the email service a request that we want to be processed in a month. The thing that hangs around ‘in-flight’ wouldn’t be a journal of a partially-completed workflow, with potentially many steps, but instead a single request message."

I'll have to think through how much that solves, but it's a new insight for me - thanks!

I like that you're working on this. seems tricky, but figuring out how to clearly write workflows using this pattern could tame a lot of complexity.
Thanks for checking out the update and getting back to me. That's very odd — the only way the Magic Number should get into the 20s (on addition mode at least) is if you have longer equations enabled in the settings.

Glad it's not happening anymore, but I'll look into it, thanks for reporting.
I went this route and now have a resume of inflated titles. I learned a lot and believe I can do some things in the top 10 percentile, just not the things many companies are currently hiring for (top 10 percentile in a narrow development skillset such as ML, or a specific language, or algorithms).

Im cynical and ultimately an rebuilding my dev career around a platform that will give me opportunities for entrepreneurship AND individual contributor work as an employee (Apple Ecosystem - iOS client development + product dev/mgn).

If I were to do it over again I 100% would've avoided startups early in my career when I could lean on junior positions to grow in a more mainstream manner. I'd have more money in my pocket, less stress, and less cynicism.

--

The problem is there is objectively zero way for fresh grads to learn these lessons. Even with prominent threads like these being available to some, the bearish attitude in every other thread will be more appealing to a fresh grad.
When you subscribe to one of their bikes, will that be referred to as "taking a Whizz"?
You could simply turn off WAL for a simple application database, if you were really worried. You lose some performance and scale, but it should work fine.
> My greatest annoyance around likes was how my feed would include "So and so like this" type tweets. Maybe that still exists, but if they removed that too, it'd be a welcome change.

Couldn't agree more

I didn't want to see "so and so likes this" and I don't want others to see "bluefirebrand likes this"

If I wanted to share something then I would retweet it

It was also baffling that people could turn off seeing "so and so retweeted this" but not turn off seeing "so and so liked this"
Maybe you don't, and I respect that, but I wanted to push back on GP seemingly responding on behalf of all Americans, somehow ("we prefer to keep our messages out of the hands of Facebook" is evidently not true).
I don't believe the word 'ego' appears anywhere in the article.
Which makes the omission of high-contrast message bubbles even more puzzling. Cui bono?
The ThreadDeath Error in particular is interesting because it is catchable but not "handle-able" - if you do not rethrow ThreadDeath in your exception handler, the JVM will do so for you.

Despite Thread.stop() being deprecated, it is still used in things like application servers to deal with user code which is not completing in a specified timeframe.