skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Seriously -- we don't have military commitments to "underpin the global order". We have military commitments to "protect our political and economic interests" -- and who do those benefit? The American people? Nah, not really. But the American people are the ones footing the bill for it, choosing to reduce our own quality of life in order to exert power over other nations (and invade them at will).

Of course, it's our political and economic interests. We're a hegemony. This is not controversial. Unless you want China and Russia, the other two nations on the permanent security council, deciding what goes. That would be not for the benefit of the American people, but for their benefit.

Beside, it's not like there's a lack of spending in healthcare. Our healthcare spending is very high. According to wikipedia, it's something like nearly 18% of GDP.[1]

Universal healthcare will probably reduce how much money we spend on healthcare and making it affordable for everyone while improving health outcome.

It's a false dichotomy between military spending and our domestic needs, and the government is always in charge. You should read about the last supper and the peace dividend. The government downsized spending after the cold war and now we have a less robust defense industrial base. Some form of downsizing is inevitable especially if we want to reap the peace dividend but it's clear that we had gone too far in the way we downsized.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Health_care_finance_in_the_Uni...
Display was stunning!
Elon Musk's SpaceX, Already a Leader in Satellites, Gets into the Spy Game
That actually makes a lot of sense. If a companies tries to capture non technical users, telling users what kernel the system you’re trying to sell makes little sense
All West Coast states have free healthcare (medicaid) available if your income is below a certain threshold. And there is no time limit on that. It won’t help with rent, but at least these folks won’t be completely without healthcare access.
They are profitable regardless in the face of 9/11 and COVID because we will bail them out.

What they don't seem to be able to weather is significant changes in the structure of pension obligations, and dramatic fatal crashes.

There is also an impending shift into electric short-haul flights that is going to cause some changes to the business model, with whoever can't adapt exiting those markets.
Vibing off the name of the post’s title, I think the fact that Apple sends all Siri and Dictation’s transcripts to Apple without the ability to disallow that behavior, even if all processing happens on device kind of sickening.
Yeah, a really basic and relevant example might be if I have a meeting coming up on my calendar, an agent can pull info from my LinkedIn about the participants, check their socials (so I can make small talk and chat), research info about some of the topics in the meeting (e.g. pull stats, recent articles, etc.) and summarize it to prepare me for the meeting.

Like, that's actually useful but probably not super sexy.
The problem with DropBox is that it can't really compete with Google, Microsoft, Adobe, Amazon Drive, etc. It's too narrow of an offering.
Recursion, Tidy Stars, and Water Lilies
Spider-Man belongs to Marvel, but is on conditional perpetual loan to Sony, who can optionaly loan it back to Marvel/Disney.

Sony has to release a Spider-Man movie every N months, or they lose the license, and will probably never get it again, since Marvel started making their own films and now they're part of Disney. This is why Sony keeps making reboot trilogies. Better to shovel something out than to lose the license forever. It does make a nice backstory for the Spider-Verse though.
It is basically showing that company is out of ideas, so only thing which they mange to do now is bean counting.
Russia fines Google $2.5 x 10^33
Maybe Roberts and the Altair are becoming obscure to younger people, but in the traditional story of the personal computer neither he nor the Altair were "secret" or obscure. As the article mentions, Microsoft was founded by Gates and Allen to sell a BASIC interpreter for the Altair.
I'm not in cyber but "Risky Business" ( https://risky.biz/ ) is a good podcast to keep up to date.

They always have a lot of outgoing links in their show-notes that should get you started with the rest.
Yes, sorry, you are right to point that out. I meant 30 mins!
Just fyi since UV generates a virtual environment in .venv you can just point to the .venv folder in VSCode and stuff should work

(I highly recommend using direnv and sourcing the virtual environment in a .envrc file though… when your editor has support for that it works so well compared to bespoke shell tools)
Or they hire Accenture.
how about you estimate a software project to within 20% accuracy? I've never seen it happen once for anything beyond the most trivial thing. have some humility buddy
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ned_Ludd
Astral's tools (Ruff, uv) are awesome, I'm a big fan. I'm using them every time I can and recommending them everywhere. I use them for my open source projects (FastAPI, Typer, SQLModel, etc.) and also for private things, small and big, even small scripts, everything. Also, they have great docs, and I'm kinda picky with docs. I'm looking forward to whatever they build next, I'm pretty sure I'll like it. By now, it's not just by chance that they built one great thing, it's a trend, they build great stuff.
More generally, from a public policy perspective, how do we tax product externalities, not merely population health impact of product use, but additionally the environmental impact, inclusive of production and disposal, wherever those costs may be incurred across the globe.
I think what people forget about layoffs is that all those "excess" employees who have been there didn't sit around doing nothing during the time they were there.

Those 20% of Dropbox staff wrote a bunch of code, made a bunch of sales, and did a lot of other tasks that will have an impact even after they don't work there anymore.

Even though they are being laid off, their contributions still have a positive impact on the company. Even the government treats it this way from a taxation basis: software that is written by engineers is treated as a depreciating asset that is amortized over 5 years.

In other words, if I write some code that consumes $100 worth of my labor, that engineering work is considered by the IRS to be an asset to the company with book value from now until 5 years from now. If I'm laid off, the company still has that $100 asset on their books, which depreciates over 5 years.

It's perfectly normal for a business to plan out their future based on uncertainty and risks. If they only hired people they knew 100% they would need forever, they'd miss out on a lot of opportunities.

Extending this logic far out enough and we could say ridiculous things like "How could IBM be so irresponsible to hire hundreds of thousands of engineers to make business mainframes when their marketshare will dwindle to a sliver in 40 years?"

The truth is that businesses need the employees that they need at a point in time, and that number is constantly changing.
An appetite suppressant does not have a symbiotic relationship with the food industry.
Steam has an uncontested monopoly position in the PC gaming market
Can I just point out the self gazing nature of this post?

Short form: I made an Advertisement in AI, I promote it by making shitting all over Apple (get more viewership using Apple) and then finish off to say I watched my own video in amazement 5 times.

What a beautiful self promotional world we live in.
Even if you magically had your own DSN, would anyone but NASA even know exactly where they are with enough precision to communicate with them? In a way, that's now your layer 1 authentication key. The coordinates of where to "point" your DSN.
Really enjoy using pdm. Might make the move when there’s more maturity on uv, but for now it does the job and I just switched from pipenv to pdm. Too many changes too often.

When I would be excited for is an actual LSP alternative to pylance. Pylance is basically a proprietary monopoly. Kind of crazy for Python to not have its own high performance LSP.
Public company CEO pay is almost always paid by shareholders not by the company itself.

It's so misleading that these "CEO compensation is 100x employee pay" stats always get kicked around like it is an apples to apples comparison. It's not.

CEO's get paid in stock which they need to redeem from shareholders. Employees get paid with cash which them redeem from the company's checking account. They are different sources of money.

It's so annoying that this keeps getting repeated, on and on and on. It's totally disingenuous.
5 or 20 workers (and their families) who don't get jerked around for stuff way outside their control is an absolute win.

Right now, there is no actual downside for executives. Just less upside. Did they earn XX Million this year or XXX Million. Some tangible downside would be nice.

I mean, heck, why aren't they fired? And really, it's more then middle management where that'd make a huge difference. If bad performance led to actual shakeups in the entrenched middle management, we might actually see business practices change rather than continue on through the established fiefdoms and petty corporate politics.
At my current company, we used Postgres with pgvector so the text is co-located with the embeddings on the same rows. At first, I was a bit apprehensive about the idea of getting so close to the nitty-gritty technical details of computing vector embeddings and doing cosine similarity matching but actually it has been wonderful. There is something magical about working directly with embeddings. Computing, serializing and storing everything yourself is actually surprisingly simple. Don't let the magic scare you.

Recently I've been doing hardcore stuff like taking an old hierarchical clustering library and substituting the vector distance functions with a cosine similarity function so that it groups/clusters records based on similarity of their embeddings. It's funny reading the README of that 10 year old library and they're showing how to use it to do tedious stuff like grouping together 3-dimensional color vectors. I'm using it to cluster together content based on meaning similarity using vectors of over 1.5k dimensions. Somehow, I don't think the library authors saw that coming.

How great is it to come across a library which hasn't been updated in 10 years and yet is flexible and simple enough that it can be re-purposed to serve a radically more advanced use case which would have been beyond the author's imagination at the time...

I think the most surprising aspect about the whole experience is that working with the embeddings directly makes it feel like your database is intelligent; but you know it's just a plain old dumb database and all the embeddings were pre-computed.
That hasn't been my experience. I usually see the senior people with higher salaries being laid off.

At one company I worked at, a whole division got laid off because the director didn't like the manager of said division.
Forget about lying, this is just amorally stupid and pandering.

I find the hypothetical universe where that guy is going to get anywhere good suggesting what his boss should “undertake” unbelievable. (Also not a good demo).

And we’ve been in this GPT world nearly 2 years. The boss is obviously supposed to be smart, he’s a black guy in a suit after all. Is this the first time he’s ever received something that was obviously from an AI. What’s he confused about?
Democratising publishing
> Is there any future for the gaming/enthusiast PC segment? Feels like it's dying. Becoming an ever-smaller niche.

This meme of "dying PC gaming" is being repeated since like 1998 while the actual sales numbers show consistent growth of that market over last years.
In theory it could be improved, as Go also has most tools for that, with exception of having to manually dive into SIMD, as discussed in previous threads.

Even though I am not a big fan of Go, I feel that in the spirit of the guild of systems stuff with GC languages it always deserves some cheering nonetheless.
You have different areas of security. Sadly our space is full of grifters and wanna be security "experts". For a very technical security podcast I recommend Critical Thinking Bug Bounty [1].

[1] https://www.criticalthinkingpodcast.io/
> This is an incredibly uncharitable and shallow take,

So is yours.

> We don't operate in a perfectly legible world, especially more so when it comes to people. It's all bets and risks and whatnot.

What bet was dropbox taking by overexpanding their workforce by 20%?

> If you or anyone has the power to create perfectly aligned and efficient organization, I'm waiting here to see you build large multi-trillion dollar companies. Let me know how it goes.

This is an interesting statement. Dropbox is a single digit $billions company, not trillions.
Xilinx, I guess, although I don't know how the accounting works on that.
And public transport timetables, which were the original reason timezones were introduced in the first place.
(2023)

Some more discussion then: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38680698
Open the "More" menu in your Dropbox interface and I think you may be surprised at how many different products they have.

I am sure they're not trying to be a Microsoft of Google, but they're trying to make a niche in document handling, file sending, password management, a lot of those little things that are something of a pain for many businesses.

I think if you compare what Dropbox is offering at $15/user/month to Microsoft 365, there are a bunch of things that Microsoft isn't really covering or isn't covering as well (and vice versa, to be fair). For example, the ability to take e-signatures, document watermarking, facilitating out-of-organization file transfers, etc.

I also think they compete quite well with Amazon Drive, considering that Amazon Drive was discontinued.
> I’ve watched that little [Canonical] animation several times, and they tell a better story in a minute twenty-five than all of Apple’s AI commercials combined.

I'm afraid I disagree here.

While I do find the Apple ads a tad obnoxious, they speak to the problems of normal people and how Apple Intelligence can directly solve these problems. How many people haven't forgotten a birthday, forgotten someone's name or felt stupid while writing an email?

The Canonical animation on the other hand, while cool, doesn't communicate to me that it understands my problems and is going to help me fix them.

Here's the full transcript of the Canonical ad: "Modern, Private, Performant, Secure, Supported, Certified, Everywhere, For Everyone, for You".

This is comparing apples to oranges.
I don't think people care about the CEO's compensation, I think its just getting old seeing these companies treat hours of labor as KPIs and not what labor actually is, people.

Mom and Pop businesses have to be careful when hiring because if they have to do layoffs they will be penalized by the office of unemployment insurance, and could make their rates soar to the point where they won't be able to hire again when things change. These consequences prevent mom and pop businesses and other mid size businesses from playing fast and loose with the people's livelihoods they provide. These tech companies budget in the severance, never even deal with the regulatory agencies that are meant to prevent this type of fast and loose hiring. I think companies like Dropbox and others need some sort of regulatory oversight in regards to how they hire and fire (if they are going to keep this pattern of hire and fire every cycle).
They are lovely indeed.

Apple seems to be big enough to make fun of the AI fiasco.
The Ray-Ban Meta glasses seem like they're actually gaining moderately useful abilities. https://www.androidpolice.com/ray-ban-meta-smart-glasses-5-t...

Why not highlight those in the ad rather than the useless stuff?
The problem with "AI" is that when it is well integrated, and useful, it is often invisible to the user. Many people, for example, benefit from automatic (and instant) transcriptions in live Zoom meetings. This is pretty much complete magic -- and yet, boring. You don't notice it. You focus on the result, which you need, rather than the fact that it's "AI."
I've recently swapped out my dumb TV with a smart TV. The choice to go smart after clinging on to my dumb TV + old-school Chromecast was only motivated by advances in display tech. In retrospect the smart TV is a considerably worse experience UX-wise than the dumb TV + Chromecast. The built-in Chromecast in the new TV requires the TV to be logged into accounts for all the "apps" that the TV has. I can no longer just cast something from any device connected to my network and have it "just work" like it did before.

I know in this case you're working with HDMI and hopefully have managed to set the TV up to just display an HDMI output on bootup, but did you run into any of these infuriating "smart" TV things?
Supermicro’s stock price is down 30% today, wow. This was one of the big AI boosted stocks just earlier this year as I recall.
I feel the ads I've seen are precisely what you say. I will say this though I have a kid on the spectrum and if I could teach her how to integrate her thoughts with the glasses it may help her in social settings. But for others who simply already know I, like you, don't see the value.
With the weirdest inhabitants like the legendary Lord Howe Island stick insect, AKA tree lobsters or more informally sausages with legs. A 20 cm long halloweenesque black beauty.
The abridged and edited versions were somewhat disappointing to me. I remember looking through these books as a kid and how there was so much in them.

While they are dated, there are insights in some of them. If they had a bakery, they also had a mill where the flour was ground, and that required wheat which was gathered.

The houses had cross-sections showing the pipes and where water came into the house and distributed to the faucets/showers. It connected to the fireplugs outside.

There was an inter-connectedness to this world that is still simplified, of course, but so much deeper than anything else I can think of in that format. The only thing vaguely comparable would be the DK books which are packed with info. Most kids books are ultra-simplified and not meant for exploration, they are just a linear "show this".
Getting tired of being sold what may exist or will exist sometime in the future. How is this legal and now Apple is doing it? How is the fake it before you make it (make the actual product a reality for consumers to consume) strategy legal?

This video was posted a month ago even when Apple Intelligence wasnt available at all and in any form https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TPe8revsg3k . Even present day after it was launched Siri can not do this.

Start-ups and other tech companies are doing the whole fake it before you make it so Apple is too. Some recent examples...Open AI demoed and sold if you sign up you might get access to their version of H.E.R. yet Many months later its nowhere to be found yet surely that juiced their revenue. Does it really exist or it was a fake it before you make it demo? Similarly with Musk bringing out those robots implying they were AI driven yet later we learn they weren't. Isnt this all something called false advertising??
> // we loose the chance to handle the previous one.

lose?
Because, ultimately, I'd like to continue to think and solve on my own. If I want to leverage a chat model, which I do, I can do that very easily on my own hardware. I don't want it so far shoved down my phones innards that I'm paying for hardware that is useless outside that use case.

Imagine the next 30 years when the majority of the population has no clue on how to function without cloud connected models answering questions on the daily. Very Black Mirror.

I also don't trust any of the frontier model vendors at this point so there's also that. Especially Sam Altman / OpenAI.
Reminds me of Austin Powers where he has a TV in his car in the 70s to talk with his boss then wakes up in modern times (the 90s) and has shitty, fractured streaming video. "Skating where the puck is going" is a great strategy for businesses - not so much for end users.
maybe this will finally get people to actually be able to say my name :,)
MacOS Mojave was released in 2018 and the stock Safari browser does not support WebP, even when updated.
I don't think this is gross, I think it's hilarious. My phone is supposed to be a heat sink for other people's B.S.
How's This Project Idea?
I'm creating an API where the endpoint is "get_images", where you specify the parameters about what dataset you want to generate (it could be lung cancer CT scans or so) and the number of images in that category. It'll make the process of getting dataset much faster and convenient. I'm thinking of expanding it to support all other such category types.

If anyone is interested in scaling it, please contact me at mukund@prognosic.com.
> Actually, I know why. It's because they have too much money and when you have too much cash, you start splurging without thinking and then one day the chickens come home to roost.

But that view might oversimplify things from a business perspective, especially beyond the case of Dropbox.

When a company has ample cash reserves, a common strategy is to leverage the opportunity cost. This can mean growing the team or investing in ventures with both planned and unplanned outcomes. Take Microsoft or Google, for instance: both have a long history of projects and acquisitions that might be considered failures, but these bets were possible because they had the resources to try, even if some failed to pay off. This approach acknowledges that some investments will succeed, while others are simply part of exploring new growth avenues.

Time is the resource that you cannot recover.
> but this could 'solve' daylight savings time

This ignores the easiest solution to daylight savings time.

Stop doing daylight savings time.

My preferred solution would be permanent standard time rather than permanent DST, but I'll take what I can get as long as we stop changing the clocks twice a year.
Here's the prototype that I've developed yet: https://www.prognosic.com/
So head count can only ever go up in a company, never down, regardless of circumstances?
Yes! He failed.
They are still holding assets which are at risk of loss.

Unless they are using derivatives or something to fully hedge loss, it is absolutely not equivalent to a sale.
> Show that to someone with no understanding of Apple and it's products, or AI, and you'll have someone equally confused.

Apple is selling a magical button that unprofessional idiots can press to be perceived as professional. Who in the world is going to be confused by that?
> Jokes aside, how do you end up having more than 500 excess people than what you need?

Twitter fired 80% of their staff; and they've been releasing features faster than when they had 4x more people. I suppose work can expand to occupy whatever available headcount - nobody cares whether it's useful work or not.
My writing ability might not be good enough to make them flashy here on HN, but I am sure that each of the scenarios could be made very flashy or moving with a bit of imagination & Apple's still-excellent production quality.

One of my favourite ads is a very simple story that is made gut-wrenching by creating an emotional connection and some great production value: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a2lv_Xl1e4U
I just get a sense from all this AI marketing hype is that AI is yet another grifter tool. The Ubuntu video was meh and I dont think it worked well to describe the story. A better video would be to show perhaps someone getting their kid an ubuntu laptop and how it shaped their mindset and future. Or Ubuntu on your grandma's computer and now we can enjoy coffee instead of fixing computers... etc etc.
Music is a strong word for the contents of those tracks.
Nice seeing you guys on the front page. New York can't stop, won't stop.