skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> Especially since McD is moving their POC to GCP

McD has been using GCP for sometime now so it's unrelated to this fiasco [0]

The IBM-McD Voice Assistant project was actually a startup that McD acquired in 2019 that was sold to IBM in 2021 [1][2], and was even a thread on HN a couple years ago [3]

[0] - https://corporate.mcdonalds.com/corpmcd/our-stories/article/...

[1] - https://www.verdictfoodservice.com/news/ibm-mcdonalds-mcd/

[2] - https://web.archive.org/web/20180902173557/https://www.appre...

[3] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18151768
I have search for "VMC" but I am not sure what you mean. Do you have an example of a VMC that you recommend?
Yes, but it also messes with a lot of normal intuitions. Some examples:

“Because rationals are dense —between any two rationals there are infinitely many other rationals—there are actually vastly more spaces between rational numbers, than rational numbers themselves. These spaces-between are the real numbers.”

“Because every finite text document can be converted to UTF-8 and thus then an integer, it is only possible to describe 0% of the real numbers between 0 and 1 with text.”

“Since most numbers are indescribable, there are (discontinuous) functions which have the value 2 for almost all numbers, but any number that you actually can describe and try to evaluate the function on, gives 1 and not 2.”

You start to appreciate that logic itself is this Lovecraftian eldritch-horror abomination, and that we only live in the Bliss of Sanity because we live in ignorance, never staring into its depths lest the abyss stare directly back into our souls.
College curriculums are barely teaching skills that are directly relevant in the industry today, let alone 10 years from now, and that is by design. The best approach to your career as a student is to get a solid knowledge of the basics. Coding, data structures, algorithms, statistics, combinatorics, proofs, compiler design, computer architecture, cryptography, operating systems, databases. And work on the non-technical areas as well – teamwork, communication, technical writing.

All of this will provide a foundation that you can build on for the rest of your career, no matter which direction the industry happens to go in.
That was not my experience with Node.js and C++. The options were to either accept mediocre performance and all JS/TS or start writing the important bits with the Node-API.
IMO this addresses what has been Cloudflare's biggest competitive advantage for years - Fastly was out of budget for hobbyists meaning it was much harder for developers to kick the wheels on it.
This sounds like you are saying colonialism was a success story?
> Are you also worried about the sky being full of aircraft?

Very much so. But with aircraft we at least have the ability to regulate where they can and can't fly and when etc. via local governments/democracy. The satellites can affect anyone in the world and there's absolutely nothing they can do about it.

> Which is precisely what SpaceX is trying to fix.

Haha, sure...
What does that actually mean? Until "any of that" is "withdrawn"?
Because they are BIG and they understand how BIG works.

It’s very hard to be small and understand it.
How long till a stand alone OS that makes AI usage its first class citizen?
Did you send out mails directly from your ISP? (Than I could unterstand Microsoft.) Only your MX must send out mails. And only it should be in the SPF record.

It would be crazy of Microsoft to look at all Received-Hearders and want everything mention there in the SPF record. If that is what really happens, than you should exclude this information from the header.
(mask-src on Opensmtpd. Pretty sure Postfix has that option to, but haven't used it in a decade, so I can't tell you the syntax.)
That’s what they always say

Miata
Is
Always
The
Answer

Though, if I could afford an old air cooled 911, that’s what I’d do.
For some reason that feels so weird that it would be that late "discovery"... Once you define a square(sides same length) the length of diagonal is one of the first questions. And this being very weird number is something I believe someone must have thought about long before that point of time.
I am currently working with a very large company that has this problem. They are highly risk adverse and are happy to pay $100 up front to avoid a $1 accidental loss.

Of course, all the processes don’t really protect them, they just get slowed down by a factor of 100 or more.

The successful people take on as many simultaneous projects as they can, because any one project will move at a snails pace.

I have told them tales of working on some internal document processing and classification systems in a fintech a few years ago where we would release to prod multiple times a day to test out different algorithms and approaches.

They flat out think I am lying.
This is interesting and I think it's smart to focus on marketing integrations first with out of the box connectors.

I'll put you on this list: https://github.com/Snowboard-Software/awesome-ai-analytics

One thing I find odd: On Mobile you write: "Trusted by 2000+ growth teams worldwide", in the Desktop version it says: "Trusted by 3000+ growth teams worldwide". Anyway, it seems a bit high for a company your stage (Snowflake IPOed with 3000 customers), but what do I know.
Yeah, that was the other half of the equation - nobody wanted to provide the necessary volumetric data at several clients, and the expectation was that it would somehow… just work. We even tried to make it really easy via an exception based workflow, sanity checking for wrong units etc., but nah. Whole thing was a boondoggle unlike anything else - folks had no problem rearranging their entire warehouses to come up with more efficient pick routes, but measuring boxes was a bridge too far.
I know this is being used as an "AI bad" parable... but it seems like a really poor understanding and use of the technology? I'm not a subject matter expert but this seems like it would fail immediately.

Audio in controlled scenarios is really difficult, and the drive through experience can often go wrong with audio for real live people on both ends... why would they even expect this to half work?
The point isn't the models but the structure. Let's say you wanted AI to compare Phone 1 and Phone 2.

GPT-3 was originally a completion model. Meaning you'd say something like

Here are the specifications of 3 different phones: (dump specs here)

Here is a summary.

Phone 0
pros: cheap, tough, long battery life.
cons: ugly, low resolution.

Phone 1
pros:

And then GPT would fill it out. Phone 0 didn't matter, it was just there to get GPT in the mood.

Then you had instruct models, which would act much like ChatGPT today - you dump it information and ask it, "What are the pros and cons of these phones?" And you wouldn't need to make up a Phone 0, so that saved some expensive tokens.

But the problem with these is you did a thing and it was done. Let's say you wanted to do something else with this information.

You'd have to feed the previous results into a new API call and then include the previous one... but you might only want the better phone's result and exclude the other. Langchain was great at this. It kept everything neatly together so you could see what you were doing.

But today, with chat models, you wouldn't need it. You'd just follow up the first question with another question. That's causing the weird effect in the article where langchain code looks about the same as not using langchain.
Wang Labs made an amazing (for its time) calculator, the LOCI-1, quickly replaced by the much more capable LOCI-2. They were from 1964/1965 and were built with core memory and discrete transistors, 1200 of them, no ICs.

It operated with 10 digits of precision, and its native hardware could add and subtract. Rather than doing multiplication and division and square root directly, instead the calculator was able to compute logs and antilogs via successive addition and subtraction. Multiplying two numbers might return 199.9999999 instead of 200.0, but since this was built for engineers who were mathematically literate, it was acceptable.

There were other calculators that could be programmed to compute logs and antilogs, but they were slow. On the LOCI machines, the results were instant (on a human timescale).

Description of the LOCI-2:

https://www.oldcalculatormuseum.com/wangloci.html

Just found this description of the log algorithm -- it used only six constants in its iterative add/subtract/shift algorithm to compute logs and antilogs:

https://osgalleries.org/journal/pdf_files/20.2/V20.2P51.pdf
> I'd prefer importSync() to having require() cover ESM files.

My only criticism is that in order to do incremental conversion, both need to work. At that point, you'd might as well just eliminate the cognitive overhead and have one function.
Make it cheap, have high risk ppl get it free and eradicate it
I would somewhat agree with first launch, first moon mission and so on, but N-th in a row ain't building no new empires. Its business as usual.
Damn good point. Sure, there’s no point in microcoding something if it is just doing the same steps as a hand-coded version could do.

But that doesn’t mean we just, say, stop implementing floating point operations!! We just make the hardware do it better than hand-coding can.
As a foreigner a lot more useful to learn Russian.

Given that the state language is Ukrainian, and its overall dominance in media and culture -- there's no way this statement could possibly make sense.

Everybody speaks it in Ukraine.

This gets repeated a lot, but it's just not true. It's true that virtually everyone has some working comprehension of Russian because of earlier Soviet influences, and because the two languages are so similar (and in many parts of the country, the "Ukrainian" that is spoken is highly Surzhyk-influenced).

But realistically only about 70-80 percent of the population speak Russian fluently and comfortably. Given a choice, the vast majority would clearly prefer to speak Ukrainian (and many people have been switching voluntarily as a matter of preference since 2014; the government's mildly coercive efforts having nothing to do with this, really).

Even at our university in Ukraine, Russian was the main language amongst foreign students.

Probably because it's the only one among the two that they were able to study before coming there (and because they saw Russian as being more useful in other countries, as you say).

And even so, this applies only to certain universities in certain cities.
People in big companies hire external services so that the contractor is culpable when things go wrong and they can’t be personally blamed. Most of the cost and value to them has nothing to do with the actual work. Nobody has ever been fired for trusting IBM. The same reason companies will pay big money for a commercial Linux distribution even if there is a free one that is better.
Ask HN: Is there an ARM equivalent to Intel XED?
If not is there a reasonably similar open source library?
There were a couple of standard "invisible inks." [0] I assume Invisiclues used one of them--most likely baking soda given they didn't use heat to reveal. No idea how stable either of those were as inks.

[0] https://www.chem.ox.ac.uk/files/secretstoppers1pdf
I have run a couple of support operations.

Yes, you certainly can automate 90% of the support. It's the last 10% that you can't ignore. Those problems are not only more complicated to solve, they're also some of the more important problems to solve.

If 10% of Facebook's users have a problem, and 90% of those can be automated away, that's 30 million support tickets that need human intervention. They've decided just to ignore that as an issue, because it would be expensive to fix, and they can't throw software engineers at the problem.
What is fms?
Post Office Horizon scandal: Why hundreds were wrongly prosecuted
You first example is irrelevant.

Not sure why you want to label what to me is a distinction without a difference. You care about the motivations of a few at the top, I care about the local police and their supporters, which are acting like religious extremists not authoritarians.
Self-driving Waymos secure final clearance for expansion beyond S.F
They were early to the scene, made the decisions that made sense at each point in time. Initially I (like many other engineers with no AI exposure) didn't know enough to want to play around with the knobs too much. Now I do.

So the playing field has and is changing, langChain are adapting.

Isn't that a bit too extreme? Goodwill burnt up? When the field changes, there will be new abstractions - of course I'll have to understand them to decide for myself if they're optimal or not.

React has an abstraction. Svelte has something different. AlpineJS, another. Vanilla JS has none. Does that mean only one is right and the remaining are wrong?

I'd just understand them and pick what seems right for my usecase.
I think plastic should be labled as carbon sequestration method and dumped into old mines to wait for some generation in the future that can figure out how to properly used it for something.
Is it really much more difficult or inefficient than the US and Canada shipping arms? Is that extra worth it?

Considering that Russia and North Korea are increasing ties, announced at Putin's recent visit, it's likely in SK interest to aid Ukraine so that Russia has to allocate mil hardware to their fight rather than selling it to NK. This just happened with India, who decided to go with US hardware because Russia has continuously delated delivery of systems they already bought.
Presumably about the same as they did prior to their first launch. Space travel is not like commercial air travel. This is part of the deal.
The promotion thing seems severely overstated. At the higher levels for IC and management this is basically how all tech companies that build products are run. But you don't see this said about Microsoft or Amazon, even though they also have hundreds of new features and discrete new products per year.

My theory for why Google is different remains unpopular, however.
> The actual important thing that we hardly ever get much visibility into is - how many potential failures were called out by how many people how many times.

I'm not sure that's important at all. Every issue raised needs to be evaluated independently. If there is strong evidence that a critical part of a space shuttle is going to fail there should be zero discussion about how many times in the past other people thought other things might go wrong when in the end nothing did. What matters is the likelihood that this current thing will cause a disaster this time based on the current evidence, not on historical statistics

The point where you "have to make a move" should only come after you can be reasonably sure that you aren't needlessly sending people to their deaths.
Yeah, it was a snarky comment, and not my proudest moment, but it does apply to a significant number of folks. I tend to enjoy the contributions from folks that don't have that priority.

The demoralizing part, is folks that are getting screwed by The Big Dogs, and totally reflect the behavior; even though TBD think of them as "subhuman."
few days I've spent a few hours with prescheme, but was stopped in the end because there where gcc errors. I've felt a little guilty to have have spent some quite some time, but not have achieved anything. But thats the thing with Prescheme, so fascinating I could not resist. I mean look at its history, at all the cool and unique features.
Anyway, very cool to read this news, I'm also a little relieved not to have burnt all this hours into nothings. Very glad to see the story continues.
I think ultimately the problem is of accountability

If the risks are high and there are a lot of warning signs, there needs to be strong punishment for pushing ahead anyways and ignoring the risk

It is much too often that people in powerful positions are very cavalier with the lives or livelihoods of many people they are supposed to be responsible for, and we let them get away with being reckless far too often
Poor person unable to afford a 20$ movie ticket to the megacorp’s blockbuster slop grabs a cam online.

Piracy is not theft.

Megacorp steals the art style of a poor artist to promote the abilities of their “job disruptor”.

Piracy is not theft.

One of these is different from the other. I’ll let you search it.
semantic search doesn't really work. Looks nice in little POCs. With real world data it's sort of a mixed bag. Embeddings are just to general, and documents within a narrow domain (finance, medical, etc.) are all "similar"
I've never been great at working my way all the way through games. I think I may have completed that one--mostly because I could get hints from the author :-)
It will be very niche because most people who spend time in nature seem to be either:

- Car campers, vanlifers or people living in a place permanently, which can just use the heavy Starlink version or go where there is LTE coverage

- Thru-hikers who hike every waking hour and want to be as light as possible and for which this system isn't even remotely light enough

- Casual weekend hikers for which it's going to be too expensive and also unnecessary since they'll have Internet access on Monday again.

It's only really a consideration for those who regularly go on multiweek trips or live long-term in the wilderness and move camp on a weekly/monthly frequency (rather than daily or never), and these people seem to be relatively rare.
Time to get grandpa Johann von Wolfhaus's ashes to Munich. Goodnight, popo.
What I'm really complaining about is people with poor risk assessment and self control skills causing a tragedy of the commons for carefree sex, because people don't want to hear that they need to behave responsibly. In modern society it's pretty much a taboo to tell someone that they are too sexual, even when it's true and they are at highly increased risk for getting and subsequently spreading an STD.

I think you and I are in agreement about how awesome sex is. It's not about that. It's about people acting stupidly. I don't want a dating pool full of STDs but we're getting there. There's pros and cons to everyone leading a short-term-pleasure hedonistic lifestyle.

And yes, I'm happy about this PrEP development. Because when treatments and cures get better, it changes the risk calculus, and makes behavior which is today risky, no longer as risky or maybe even not risky at all.

I empathize with people who simply love to fuck a new body every week. They have their reasons for not picking a person and sticking with them. But I can't realistically say "well that's their business" because it's not just their business, it's the business of our whole society.

Food for thought: why is short-term greed looked down upon when it's about finances or business, but it's looked up to when it's sexual in nature?
If I understand correctly, the way these work is that microorganisms create a biofilm, and then the biofilm filters the water. The pore size is incredibly small, so particulates and bacteria and so on are filtered out.

In which case, I wonder if you could make a more space-efficient version by producing biofilms, or something similar, on an industrial scale. Whether in bioreactors optimised for film production, or just by making great sheets of agarose gel or something.
Large companies only talk to large companies. So it is accenture, ibm and others. But it is amazing how their absolute garbage that they produce has no effect on their business going forward. They just keep racking in the millions upon millions.
I’m a native English speaker, and French (and some very rusty Latin) was my bridge into that cluster - they’re absolutely heaving with common cognates and structures from my experience.

What I will say is that my French has become much harder to access since - I will find myself lapsing into a creole for the first few days when I switch from one to the other.
Younger people don't vote. I'm not surprised no one competes for their votes.
Graduating with an EE degree in 3.5 to 4 years is basically the norm? I know dozens of people from my own state school that did that.
> most of modern Europe

This is relatively recent, and has proven itself quite fragile. Democracies elect dictators. Dictators of powerful governments commit atrocities. There is no "don't elect dictators" solution. The only solution is to disempower the government. Also European nations are relatively small and relatively culturally homogenous. There is no functioning liberal democracy of a large multicultural state.

> All societies impose involuntary obligations

There is a vast difference between outlawing violent behaviour and mandating cooperation. The latter is indistinguishable from slavery. Free societies don't compel the cooperation of their citizens beyond the strict minimum necessary to maintain liberty itself. Even being conscripted into the army, which is slavery, can be justified if it is to defend against a foe who would destroy liberal society.

It is however categorically not justified to mandate contribution to various insurance schemes and welfare programs. There is no picking and choosing here. I want my interactions with the state to maximize for consent[1]. I want the ability to out out. I am not owed medical treatment if I'm sick. I would like the ability to choose whether to incur an obligation or not.

> freedom to do whatever the hell you want

Yes!

> no obligation to the liberty of others

No. My rights to wave my fists around end where your nose begins.

> freedom from hunger, freedom from fear, freedom from homelessness, freedom from pain

These aren't freedoms, they're obligations. Obligations on others to provide you with food and housing and emotional support (freedom from fear? really?). Obligation is exactly the thing that free people aim to be free of. Being free isn't the same thing as being taken care of. It's about being able to do whatever the hell you want, and interact with others on a consensual basis.

1. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oQbei5JGiT8
Large organizations don't improve by innovating. As the article mentions, they focus on sustaining the existing business model, anything that diverges from process potentially destroys the revenue source. Instead, they improve by acquisitions. Of innovative companies.
For a history of IF between 1972–1999, see the Inform Designer's Manual Edition 4, Chapter 46.

https://www.inform-fiction.org/manual/html/s46.html
Went into a McDonalds recently that was all touch-screen ordering. Could maybe get someone at the counter with enough patience.

It made me feel so unimportant. It took a REALLY long time for orders to be fulfilled, and it was just me and a crowd of other customers standing around awkwardly hoping the touch screen listened to any of us.

Awful experience, avoiding McDonalds for a while.
According to Van der Warden "Science awakening"[1] Ancient Greeks treated numbers as some kind of "dirty" (Real) model of a platonic Ideal of a quantity. Numbers were invented by filthy traders and accountants while wise philosophers used geometry to reason about quantities.

This attitude to numbers can be felt even now when we are taught to solve straightedge and compass construction problems. Greeks had no issues dealing with square root of 2 with geometry or "geometric algebra" how Van der Warden names it.

[1] https://archive.org/details/scienceawakening0000waer
The answer was always "with immigrant labor" wasn't it?
Setting aside the feasibility of an amendment and whether an administration would follow it, even just the ability to say yea or nay to anyone accessing information is chilling.