skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Spotify has 31% of the music streaming market[0], and now they're using their market share in that market to leverage out other creators in another market.

This isn't really much different than Amazon using sales data from third party products to decide what Amazon Basics products to create, and then also featuring those products higher in search, recommending them over third-parties in recommendations, and so on, and then never featuring those third parties in any of their lists or categories unless you explicitly search for them.

If Spotify's behavior wasn't inherently sketchy and full of underhanded motive, they wouldn't be hiding what they're doing and lying about everything. They wouldn't be manufacturing fake artists and publishing one artist's creations under a dozen other names. They'd just create a store brand playlist, like "Spotify Essentials", label everything that way, pitch it as "a curated selection of tracks produced and mastered exclusively for Spotify listeners", and then maybe make a cheaper subscription tier for just essentials, or stream those tracks at higher quality.

Instead, what they're doing is one step better than just mass-generating AI slop, but I guarantee you that as soon as the technology is there that's what they'll be doing: training an AI on all this music that they own the rights to and using that to produce more music so that they don't have to pay anyone else for theirs.

[0] https://www.statista.com/statistics/653926/music-streaming-s...
I've definitely experienced the first half of the story: banks really will do dumb things like this and then be surprised when someone is upset by it (anti-fraud protection tends to be the worst: a text-message from a random unaffiliated number with another unaffiliated number to call, where you must then provide account details in order to get your card unblocked, and trying to call the official number and go through the phone tree does in fact, eventually, tell you that it was legitimate, but only after hours of being batted between departments).
I know that at some point in tbe last few years, oil and gas companies invested in uranium mines so they could continue their game of "you base your entire civilization on the stuff that only we can dig out of the ground, so pay up." That was the same time these comments started appearing all over the internet.

Also, I don't want another Chernobyl next to me house, so those reactors had better be properly made, therefore expensive.
Overhangs are considered exterior shading in the industry/practice/academia. Any obstruction that prevents solar gains by blocking radiation from entering the window falls within the general category of external shading, whether that’s a fancy high tech actuated shading system, a grille, a simple awning, a structural overhang, vertical fins, etc.
This is just magical thinking on your end. I’ve met some of these “literal geniuses” making 500k at faangs and most of them are completely socially maladapted once you’ve taken them out of the pipeline they’ve lived in since high school to getting their first job mid or late 20s after their masters or PhD.

Secondly you started off this chain with talking about how someone working hard for 15 hours a day for decades is going to be more valuable and they’ll just be able to pick up every skill a human could have or need because they’re “geniuses”.

If they’re really geniuses why do they need to grind?

If you’re implying that they are only part of the set of geniuses that grind that long and there is another set of geniuses that didn’t, then how does that track with geniuses being a very small fraction of society?
You aren't required to only listen to their music. You are free to make your own playlists with the artists you like. But Spotify publishes playlists with artists they would prefer you listen to, which is kinda annoying, but is hardly them "deciding you only listen to their music."

Like, I get why this feels scummy, but I use Spotify often and have literally never used one of these playlists. They haven't forced me to listen to anything.
That's the charge for energy usage, but there's another charge - the Standing Charge - that's charged per day just for having a connection to the grid.

In 2021, for me this was £0.236 per day, today it's £0.60 per day.
Horrific. This type of short term gain goal in capitalism is a major pain point we should address.
And crucially, we should figure out how to run society without culling unnecessary humans.
just like layoffs, this just part of the tech culture, as long as we reward managers with promotions for riding their teams (and no doubt I'm sure those middle managers are working their ass of too) this culture doesn't change.

in many cases deep financial bets have already been made before the code is even written or the idea properly sounded out. culture is culture..

human desire to appease the social order is stronger than rational decision making
If it were possible to go the wrong way on the expanding brain meme, this would be it.

Nobody is buying consoles for the hardware. 99% of the product is software. The accounting that you are using, a popular one, is so opppositely-informative that people who make consoles - and smartphones for that matter - clearly do not make decisions with it. It is 200% wrong to characterize it as dumping. Nothing is being dumped.

Here’s a simple idea for you: show me the vibrant market for Xbox 360 2005 era computer hardware. There isn’t any right? What about Xbox One 2013 era? And yet we still play games that were developed earlier than 2013, like League of Legends. The product is software. Nobody loses anything by being unable to run Linux on 2013 hardware today, and nobody loses anything by being unable to run Linux on the Xbox One in 2013 because, if they wanted cheap computers then, they had plenty to choose from!
It also states that SMS is not "phishing-resistant." I've received SMS messages that were phishing attempts at stealing my authentication credentials. It's also possible to re-route SMS messages via SIM swapping, SIM hijacking, or other methods (https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2021/03/easy-sms-hija...).

SMS is just not designed to be used as an authentication mechanism. We have more secure mechanisms now.
Do we know anything about the Cix people, whose core this is? I've never heard of them before!

I'm really glad to see ARM finally after decades have something semi competitive versus buying an x86 mini-pc.

One question, hoping the x16 slot has bifurcation support. But this seems like such a perfect board for a SSD NAS. If the slot can be divided into x4 or ideally down to x2 lanes. I'm not sure what bifurcation support entails, what it requires: anyone know?
100% guarantee that, once the technology is solid enough and the library is big enough, Spotify is going to train an AI off the tracks they own the rights to so they can mass-produce this music without paying anyone (except nvidia) a dime.
No, it's making people whole for real monetary and property damages caused by PG&E's negligence. It's the settlement of a lawsuit, because PG&E was negligent and caused damage.

Whether those people rebuild in Paradise, CA or move somewhere else with the money they received from the settlement is an entirely different proposition. This is not "subsidizing people in the country side". PG&E fucked up and now they have to pay. PG&E is choosing to pass the cost to its customers rather than eating into its profits, which is a decision that California allowed them to make.

EDIT: You and the GP I originally replied to seem to be making the argument that after PG&E burned all these people's homes down they should have been allowed to just tell them to get bent so your utility bill wouldn't go up in the city? What happens when it's /your/ home that gets burnt down? "Sorry bucko, but your house is worth $0 as it's just now a smoldering ruin. No soup for you. - Thanks PG&E"
Very cool, thanks for sharing! I’m a huge fan of this Super-Scaler inspired style, and had never heard about this!
> The UK has achieved the fastest rate of grid decarbonisation among advanced economies. A lot of this progress occurred when renewables were still expensive, so we are stuck with a cost hangover. Luckily, renewables are getting much cheaper, so the tradeoffs in future policy are very different.

A silver lining at least. I’m old, so won’t see the benefits of this I’m sure, but it’s still nice to know we’ve made some tangible progress toward a cleaner future
How Confident Are LLMs? (Ranking People Part II)
English rule thrives.
If the only jobs available are to help kill more Chinese people, what does that say about our society?
Yeah I've always thought that the point of much of the design was to have obvious places to put machine guns to mow down protesters.
> But Java can be embedded in native code or embed native code. It has a specified FFI in both directions.

Most languages have an FFI, but I am talking specifically about the C ABI and the platform calling convention; or more specifically, about starting from scratch, and what is necessary to do from there until your code can finally run.

Anything more complex than the C ABI is what makes people say there is a runtime. It's some layer between your code and the other language's code, inserted there by your language. There's usually no way to remove it, and if there is, it severely limits the language features you can use.

> What "starts" Rust's garbage collector?

Nothing; it doesn't start unless the function itself wants to start one, and the function can choose which one to start, through your code (rather than what the language's required runtime provides).

> A Java program can easily expose any method via the C ABI to be called directly if the process has been started from Java

In that case, the runtime has already been started, and is being reused.

> Going the other way, i.e. embedding Java in a C program, is somewhat more involved

That part is the most important part, and is generally why people say Rust has a minimal runtime; it can be embedded with very little setup. The code you write starts executing almost immediately. Java calling C may add a management layer on Java's side, but C/C++/Rust/Zig/etc need very little (hence, minimal runtime).
> as long as latency is known?

Ah, but how do you know latency, without accurate clocks? :) Accurate clocks facilitates measuring latency, which is used to calculate distance. :)
Do you agree or disagree that the authors should advertise their paper with what they know to be true, which (because the paper does not support it, at all) does not include describing the model as purposefully misleading interlocutors?

That is the discussion we are having here. I can’t tell what these comments have to do with that discussion, so maybe let’s try to get back to where we were.
They also make what you’re describing.
Thank you! I think how something is made, and the decisions that got it to where it is, is just as important as the thing itself.

One of the delightful things about the web is we can all bring our own ideas and designs to problems.

I haven't written about this yet, but one thing on my mind is the importance of good import/export features. With good import/export features, we can all move around and try different softwares to see which ones we like!
Political content of all kinds often gets flagged on HN as lots of people don't like it and flagging is the easiest way to express that disapproval and impact front page placement.
I went through the report, and they reference other studies that consider my points, but they end up only measuring incident numbers, don't specifically say how comparable were the driving conditions (iow whether they are representative). If anything, they could have removed incidents by human drivers which did not happen within their operating constraints, but I did not see that mentioned.
I like brutalist architecture. And I am not the only strange one: r/brutalist has 174K members and the original fuckyeahbrutalism on tumbler.

Think of it like being a fan of 486 PCs or pixel art.

I do hate this architecture, though: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bowellism
Commercial energy broker here - the only 2 'real' costs in your price are the wholesale and supplier costs. Choose suppliers that offer a fully-fixed electricity contract, so that made up variable costs such as distribution, network, etc are all factored into the unit rate that the supplier charges you for your contract. Avoid smart meters at all costs. Renewable / green contracts are always a lot more expensive than standard contracts. I help businesses across the UK get the lowest rates in the market, if it's something you need help with reach out to me - yousaveutilities.co.uk
This is very useful if you plan to do business in the EU!
There's a WGBH podcast about the Big Dig and the first episode I think helps you appreciate why some of the interstate connections and routings around Boston are so weird. https://www.wgbh.org/podcasts/the-big-dig
>It is very much a thing of modern times to be lectured on for instance, desktop design

Where did I lecture you on that?

> when I am fairly confident I've used more different desktop environments

Does using more desktop environments makes one's opinion on a specific desktop design more valuable than everyone else's? It's not like you're designing them, you're just using them, just like me and millions of other people.

>than the person accusing me is even aware exists.

Care to point out what exactly did I accuse you of?
Honestly, this whole "how we warn other people in 100000 years" is nonsense.

Just bury the materials several hundred meters below the ground and then pour concrete down the shaft. Then just landscape the area to look normal. If a civilization is savvy enough to dig thorough hundreds of meters of concrete, then they are going to be savvy enough to know what the radioactivity is.
Show HN: Bloom – Building Web Components with Asynchronous Generators
Reminds me of Orange Data Mining but with a nicer UI.
Ask HN: Cool New Shells?
I found fish around a decade ago and stopped looking much at other shells. I heard about nushell last year but haven't tried it out. Is it worth playing with? Any other new shells you've found that were worth the switch?
Someone in another comment said that artists don't even get paid if they have <1000 streams. I wonder if Spotify does anything to spread things around to try to keep as many artists as possible under that 1000 streams cap so that they don't have to pay for them.
> physically proximal to the device and have a fresh battery available

I think it's also worth saying, these batteries aren't the standard AA batteries most people on hand, they're 2032 (I believe? or 2025) "quarter batteries" which isn't something a lot of people just keep around. So in addition to being physically proximal, once they've figured out how to open it up and being surprised by the "weird battery," they've also got to remember which it was when presented with a wall of similar looking "quarter batteries" at the store (see: my lack of assurity even having previously replaced these).
"Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive"

Please go to reddit if you want to post easy one liners for quick karma.
I also encourage you to think carefully about your physical location. Think about proximity to tech jobs, family, quality of life, etc. After 10 years, chances are you may have acquired a spouse, in-laws, mortgage, kids, and friends. It becomes much much harder to move to a new location for career opportunities. So choose while you still have freedom of motion!
Right :) Until enough misperforming software is in. Then you start hitting cloud limits and then people start asking: what? how?

So, I guess all I am saying is that you are not alone in these concerns.
> use more subtle and inadvertent signals like the slight movement to the line telling me they're likely about to switch lanes

For what it's worth, this was explicitly taught in Northern European driving classes, especially in the context of turns. It would literally translate as "grouping" or "making a formation". You "group right" to make a right turn (think aligning text left/center/right). You can look at a line of cars and immediately know which ones are preparing to turn, even from an angle where turn signals aren't noticeable.
> Swiss Re study: Waymo is safer than even the most advanced human-driven vehicles

on Waymo.com. No conflict of interest, whatsoever. /s
(Intel is also better than AMD on benchmarks on intel.com)
I guess, to me, what about the popular counter-example: Trader Joes. A popular mid-cost supermarket that mostly stocks their own store brands. That behavior does not feel anti-competitive or deceptive. People know that Trader Joes sells mostly their own brands, which seem to generally be thought of as good deals and quality-competitive.

I totally agree that Amazon doing this when they claim to be an open market is way scummier, but I am divided on the Spotify example. If they were somehow stopping you from playing non-house-produced music that would be one thing, but it seems fine for them to put together playlists with house-produced music and offer them to users?
Lessons from the Demo Scene [video]
There is a bit of overlap but military reactors designed for propulsion have little in common with civilian reactors designed for efficient power production. They are optimized for entirely different priorities.
Human drivers also sometimes forget to turn their signals off, to the same effect as the described Waymo behavior: uncertainty of intent.
I tried to use this before, but many parts didn't really work right, lots of conflict between dependencies, especially the server parts. I had to abandon what I wanted to do with it. Shame because many ideas were interesting, but felt it was a bit untested.
But why do you need smart meters at the level of individual houses? Wouldn't putting them on substations get the same benefit with much less cost?
What are other choices? Heat pump is obviously the best but any other thing is just electric heater with 100% efficiently of heat generation. Pushing some bits around doesn't change that. I guess for some applications you might prefer higher temperatures but for residential heating crypto mining is as good as anything else, right?
They show Llama 3.2 1B with chain-of-thought that outperforms Llama 3.1 8B and 3.2 3B that outperforms 3.1 70B. It’s less clear whether you actually inference time is faster for CoT 3B using 256x generations vs 70B if you have enough RAM. Basically a classical RAM/compute trade off
Create a reader like Artemis and wait for people to upload their own bookmarks?
Did PG&E cause the fire? They are legally obligated to serve those customers. It would be safer if they simply didn’t do that no?

Wait till you read the facts behind this $41m bailout for 20 homes in one of the richest burbs of LA: https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2024-10-29/feds-to-...

You could argue that nobody should be living in a place guaranteed to be destroyed, whether by landslides or wildfires, but the government tried that in Palos Verdes and got sued, lost, and now is bailing out those homeowners to get out of services obligations all the same.

Suffice it to say, you have bought into a very well marketed point of view. There was a lot of ceremony to enact procedural blame on PG&E, but it obscures all the far simpler solutions, that are far more just. People in San Francisco are paying higher rates, no? So PG&E may have been responsible for something somewhere, but the liability is being borne functionally by taxpayers, via a compulsory payment for energy, to balance the books on assholes living in places at risk of wildfires with overinflated asset values. Ultimately, the government here has decided that you should get government-guaranteed-risk-free market rate returns on owner occupied real estate.
None of those disqualify you, necessarily. They are first and foremost concerned about 2 things: can you be honest with them, and can you keep secrets.

Even if both of those were false in the past, you could still pass.
> Research by Atlassian found that 78% of respondents struggle to complete their work due to excessive meetings and a shocking 67% of people at the director level and above report having to work overtime due to meeting overload. Seventy-six percent of respondents feel drained after days packed with meetings, and 80% believe they’d be more productive with less meeting time.

Parkinson's Law – "Work expands to fill the available time"

If we don't ratchet back the work week through reduced total hours available ("4 day work week" colloquially), that time will be filled, regardless of value delivered. There is no mechanism or pressure relief to push back against unnecessary work. But, because of those whose identity is tied to their work (one example [1]), it is a challenge to institute this system improvement.

> Leaders play a crucial role in either perpetuating or breaking the cycle of toxic productivity. Unfortunately, many leaders model the very behaviors that contribute to this unhealthy culture — sending emails late at night, forgoing time off, and glorifying overwork.

You have to put leaders in positions of power who recognize this.

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/wellness/2024/dec/18/boomer-men-...
They must be working on a LLM backend for it so it isn't dumb as a rock.

Nothing makes sense otherwise, agreed.
It can, but not necessarily.
Ah yes, you're right, I meant "was against the .com not the foundation" but even I got confused ...
No. The actual meat is mentioned once, and then completely dismissed as irrelevant and inconsequential:

--- start quote ---

In reality, Spotify was subject to the outsized influence of the major-label oligopoly of Sony, Universal, and Warner, which together owned a 17 percent stake in the company when it launched. The companies, which controlled roughly 70 percent of the market for recorded music, held considerable negotiating power from the start.

But while Ek’s company was paying labels and publishers a lot of money—some 70 percent of its revenue—it had yet to turn a profit itself, something shareholders would soon demand. In theory, Spotify had any number of options: raising subscription rates, cutting costs by downsizing operations, or finding ways to attract new subscribers.

--- start quote ---

This is what so infuriating about all these articles: they never ever address the actual problems in the music industry
> wine

Thank you for a most excellent example illustrating my point and demolishing yours.

Alcohol is estimated to cause 4.5% of all cancers in Europe. It's a Group 1 carcinogen, yet it is privileged because of tradition.

https://academic.oup.com/eurpub/article/33/6/1128/7295464
For defensive purposes, FWIW. I suppose they might create some mirror molecules to test defenses, but I believe gus_massa's point stands that you don't need to generate full, functioning cells for that purpose.
Though none of the Brutalist IM Pei buildings at MIT were as bad, my understanding that they had to retrofit a revolving door in one of them because the wind tunnel effect could make it really hard to open the doors.

https://nowiknow.com/the-curious-problem-with-mits-tallest-b...
What makes clone lines no longer able to propagate?
The MacBook choices today seem relatively clear?

- Pro if you need maximum CPU/GPU power.

- Air if you want something lightweight and don't need the "Pro" level CPU/GPU power

If you're only doing email/web, you should probably go Air. (There are no bad choices with the Apple silicon Macs for general use, it's mainly a question of how slow you want your video rendering chores and Xcode builds to be.)

Then multiply by screen sizes, which determines the overall size of the machine.

Edit: formatting. HackerNews support markdown challenge.

Edit 2: fuck, forgot non-Pro. Maybe you're right.
As an aside, it's weird (and annoying) that they call him "Elon" rather than "Musk".