skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Common Mistakes Driving Up Your AWS Athena Costs and How to Fix Them
In the sense of modern DAWs/VSTs, sure, but in the sense of the synthesizer as a standalone instrument, its absolutely not designed to reproduce the sound of other instruments. Its an electronic device that outputs specified parameters. Whether that happens to coincide with parameters set by other artists/instrumentalists to 'reproduce' other tonal profiles, that's a byproduct, not a feature.

The spirit of the comment you're replying to is admonishing AI's use of pre-existing melodies, harmonies, chord progressions, and musical themes from songs that were fed into it.

Be it Beethoven (which is in the public domain so hey, free game) or Sabrina Carpenter (very much not in the public domain, but arguably not musically complex), its taking pre-existing tunes and regurgitating it into something else.
I'm surprised not to see anything about David Cope, who is the real master of AI produced music. Cope works mostly within the classical tradition, using AI to produce work in the style of great composers like Bach, Mozart etc. To my ear, it lacks the brilliance of the originals, but some of it is quite good. Certainly several orders of magnitude better than Suno's AI slop.
> If I had to think, I imagine the entire point of RTO mandates is to keep cities sustainable.

More like to keep cities unsustainable. If a few major real estate companies went bankrupt, forcing the rest to lower the rents, a lot of wealth would be destroyed. At the same time, cities like New York would become even more desirable due to being more affordable.

NYC is still the #1 city in the world. There are plenty of things you can't find anywhere else. Cities like that – cities that offer something unique – would benefit from being more affordable. Mid-tier cities that exist primarily for economic reasons would probably suffer from a real estate crash.
Instead of a wiki, why not a static site generator.

I have used Pelican[1] for over a decade. Strongly recommend if you know Python. You don't need to know Python, but in the off chance that one day in the future you want to write your own plugin...

[1] https://getpelican.com/
I feel sorry for Matt, someone close to him (family, friend, partner) should help him. It’s not good for him, not good for his company and for Wordpress.
I’ve never used Wordpress and I prefer static sites where I have full control, but this doesn’t mean that I don’t recognize the usefulness end ease of it.
Like many situation, this whole issue would be solved if a couple of the people involved sat down for a coffee, left their ego’s outside, had open minds, and having the willingness to compromise and being sincere ;-)
If you're very rich, not left leaning, and have a big platform, I imagine it's very easy for censorship/woke mobs to seem like the biggest problem.
Most of your needs/wants (in terms of food, shelter, safety) are met, you can mostly do what you want, but people online call you names and some of your posts might get taken down. It's one of the only problems you can feel, and it's obviously because the culture is wrong, because you feel it's empirically established that you are smart and good.

It's a little like people whose exclusive concern in the realm of sexual assault is false accusations; if you can't imagine being a victim or a perpetrator, false accusation is the only part you think can affect you, so naturally your priority is minimizing that risk. Skews your perspective a bit.
If you select the people who come out hardest against RTO, as opposed to the median, or mean, then … you would expect this behavior, no?

You sure you picked the right example category to service your point?
Kirby has ticked the boxes for me, total control of the admin interface.

Block fields like ACF flexible layouts. Modern and fast with total control of the frontend.

Has been fun to switch and fast.
Also as a good joke from that era (and today still holds, as roguelikes have an age of rebirth):

https://www.bbspot.com/News/2003/02/ati_ascii.html
Yup, Graham utterly fails to get over the bare minimum bar of American social justice critique, which is "What side of the civil rights movement would your proposed ideology have landed on?"
Yup. Newer products use various tricks to try to fill in the gaps that their physical reality can't overcome, but ultimately there's no getting around that reality.

I will say that the Sony upright boom boxes aren't to be slept on (and, if one is active, fat chance). They're quite good for their intended use cases (parties, and closed Best Buys during clean-up/inventory).
Control for overhiring during the pandemic. Almost every RTO whiplash I've seen is a shadow restructuring.
> This is also why the Democrats are so fractious internally, relative to the Republicans. Republicans default to trusting each other (not saying whether that's merited or not) while Democrats only make temporary uneasy alliances

The number of votes it took for Republicans to select a Speaker of the House and the effort that Speaker has had to subsequently undertake to keep that position says otherwise.
> If every single office job went remote, what's the point of a city like New York

Yikes, if the only reason you’re in NYC is a job and you don’t go out I highly recommend you find a new job/city.
Can someone fill in the missing link in my understanding here? It seems like the post never gets around to explaining why waiting for 14272 years should make the river passable. (Nor why this river in particular, as opposed to any other obstacle.)

The post alludes to a quirk that causes people not to get sicker while waiting; but it says they still get hungry, right? So you can't wait 14272 years there for any purpose unless you have 14272 years' worth of food, right?

IIUC, the blogger goes on to patch the game so that you don't get hungry either. But if patching the game is fair play, then what's the point of mentioning the original no-worsening-sickness quirk?

It kinda feels like asking "Can you win Oregon Trail by having Gandalf's eagles fly you to Willamette?" and then patching the game so the answer is "yes." Like, what's the reason I should care about that particular initial question? care so badly that I'd accept cheating as an interesting answer?
The paper basically reinforces one of the tenets of transit noise and vibration analyses: if you don't maintain your system (specifically wheels and rails in the case of noise), things tend to get louder over time. BCRTC knows this [0] and they're working on it. As with all things, it's about time and money, but they are trying to be proactive with vehicle and track maintenance via rail grinding and complaint tracking.

[0] https://archive.wheel-rail-seminars.com/archives/2022/rt-pap...
The talent abroad is also moving here for higher quality of life.
>The point is it makes sense, at scale, with the existing systems in place around subsidies and price protections.

I'm not refuting that, I'm only saying that in the context of public health, cheaper corn syrup being subsidized doesn't make a difference when it comes to consumer behavior. That doesn't mean that producers are going to be dumb and buy sugar when corn syrup is so much cheaper. Consumers aren't going to stop drinking coke because it costs 1% more, but the beancounters at coca cola are certainly going to care if they're spending 50% (made up number) more on sweeteners if they don't have to.
This is a paid propaganda article.

There are people that are "anti science." These are people that say the earth is flat, that say the earth is 6000 years old or whatever else. Trying to paint all the rest of people with the same brush, use guilt by association, the CIA came up with the term "conspiracy theorist" to discredit people saying things we all take for granted as true today. Of course, this is the old game and it's effectiveness is waning. Fail to see this at your peril.

The truth is, people asking you to accept the word of others because they have a credential are anti science. The rest of us just want to understand rather than just be told. I'll leave with a quote from the father of modern optics, Ibn al-Hathayam:

> The seeker after truth is not one who studies the writings of the ancients and, following his natural disposition, puts his trust in them," the first scientist wrote, "but rather the one who suspects his faith in them and questions what he gathers from them, the one who submits to argument and demonstration and not the sayings of human beings whose nature is fraught with all kinds of imperfection and deficiency. Thus the duty of the man who investigates the writings of scientists, if learning the truth is his goal, is to make himself an enemy of all that he reads, and, applying his mind to the core and margins of of its content, attack it from every side. He should also suspect himself as he performs his critical examination of it, so that he may avoid falling into either prejudice or leniency.
>Have you tried maintaining a blog with plain hand-written HTML?

Yes.

It's all a lot simpler than dealing with some abstraction framework toolkit, at least for me.

Maybe it's because I learned to write websites in the early 2000s where writing your own HTML and CSS was par for the course. You'd also write PHP or Ruby or ASP or something if you wanted to get fancy.
That is not incompatible with pg's definition, if "raising awarenesss" dominates "doing something about it".
Yeah doors/small and uncomfortable. I wish I could drive people (makes more) but at the same time I got my car for me. It's not a fancy car I wish, once I'm not in debt/have more money I want to graduate to cooler cars like a Lotus Exige.

As an aside, delivery can be fun as far as exploring a city and meeting random people (mostly the food workers) but it's a way to get out. I am destroying my car though putting like 1000 miles a week on it or more.

I think once I'm out of debt I won't drive/donate plasma anymore and just use my spare time for other things provided a have a good paying job like I do now.
Meta admits it deleted links to decentralized Instagram competitor Pixelfed
> 9/10 when people do make those kinds of suggestions it's not objectively better, and 9/10 changing it won't move the needle with respect to maintainability or meaningful performance.

The 9/10 number seems incongruent with my experience, but that could be because I often help set the PR review culture, and encourage people to identify the questions: is it "how" (…is it working), "what" (…is it doing), or "why" (…is it done this way). If you recognize those, it makes it way easier for the author to address the specifics without a total redesign. (How = hard to follow the logic, what = better names needed, why = comments needed).

But sometimes a redesign can be super compelling to everyone, and the question is: do we want to be stuck with the subpar version? Because really, the closer you are to remembering how it all works, the easier it is to rewrite it. Not later, when it faded from memory and overgrew with dependent code.

> Comparing the software we produced before the whole PR review for every merge request thing became common, and the software we produce now, I don't think software quality has improved at all. So for me to change my mind, I'm going to need to see hard data that says the opposite.

The kind of subjective reviews we're discussing (not security, performance, consistency, edge case issues, or major simplifications) are not really about quality, they're about your specific team understanding your specific code. Help your colleagues (just the small circle of maintainers) have more confidence in coming in later to change this code. If you're working alone, this isn't as big an issue.

To collect data on this, you would need to witness what happens when everyone architects their own way, and then you have to find the person who wrote that part to decipher it, and compare the amount of slowdown that can cause. Nearly impossible to measure in practice, I think.

> not everything needs to be asynchronous

I completely agree. PRs provide great tools for discussing code asynchronously so it's good to lean on them sometimes, and discuss the work on a call other times. This is however a big departure from your original statement that PRs are the absolute worst time to review the code.
Are you under the impression he himself has been a meaningful contributor in the last decade?
Yes, Asians are overrepresented in tech. That's why the DSA is not fulfilled if an Asian male is part of the candidate slate for a tech role. The candidate slate needs either a woman or URM (underrepresented racial minority, AKA Black or Latin) in order to proceed.

If there's a different role where Asians are underrepresented, then an Asian candidate could fulfill the DSA requirement.
> We're just talking to each other, shooting the s*, and it was cool to meet some Junior Devs who were just starting their career. But none of that made me a more productive worker.

I solved an incredibly difficult technical problem while grabbing lunch during PAX with fellow co-workers.

Spending time face-to-face with team members as a lead help me keep track of who needed some extra time off, who was at risk of burn out, and who was being harassed out of band by PMs.

One of the most powerful things my team did was have cookies out in front of her desks everyday. Other devs would stop by the chit chat and it let us keep a pulse on how the entire war was doing. My team was able to get a lot more done and hope everyone succeed because we had not just technical connections but personal connections throughout the building.

Those personal connections also let me transfer top performers onto my team, people who would otherwise have left the org due to dissatisfaction with their current team.

Knowing individual developers one-on-one also helps me know what problems they're going to have with their code and blind spots in their technical knowledge.

Finally, there's a fact that trust is earned through time spent together. As a junior member of a team, I was able to propose some radical alternative solutions to problems because of how much time I'd spent talking to the tech leads above me.

That said, the working conditions in most offices are so bad, I see what people want to stay home myself included.

Even Microsoft, who years ago commissioned studies showing the massive productivity gains from individual offices, has gone against their own best practices and resorted to loud open office nightmare environments.

I think part of this is because corporations no longer expect individual engineers to come up with radical solutions to hard problems and are okay with mediocre solutions to everyday problems instead.

In my opinion, this results in massive numbers of employees being hired to create complex solutions. When one quarter of the employees could have got the job done if they were treated well.

Another aspect of everything going wrong is that American cities are so poorly designed with constrained housing that commute times have gotten way out of hand. Even in the early to mid 2000s when I started my career it was possible for people to live 15 minutes from work or buy a house 20 minutes away. I used to have a round-trip commute time of under 10 minutes so of course I didn't mind coming into the office.
what does "performative" mean in this context? I honestly can't tell. It would really help if pg provided an example so we could evaluate for ourselves.

Meanwhile, basically all national politics is performative bullshit. Why are we not calling both parties woke?
Well now you can't go without mentioning sampling machines, a way of taking audio samples from others (or yourself, any audio sample) and using it as an instrument.

.....which also did lead to numerous legal battles around sampling and artists paying royalties for sampling, so in general "society" didn't go "oh sampling is fine to do all willy nilly" out of that, it made artists pay other artists for using their work.
That implies you need to dedicate the 5 bucks a month per instance, when you look at how much things are write once and cacheable as heck, you could easily get customers down to pennies per instance per month.
yeah, I have underestimated the lust for authoritarianism in silicon valley tbh
> What does it mean now? [...]
> An aggressively performative focus on social justice.

sure yup. Performative social justice bad. Now lets continue reading and see what PG thinks is performative.

> I saw political correctness arise. When I started college in 1982 it was not yet a thing. Female students might object if someone said something they considered sexist, but no one was getting reported for it.

> There was at this time a great backlash against sexual harassment; the mid 1980s were the point when the definition of sexual harassment was expanded from explicit sexual advances to creating a "hostile environment."

> In the first phase of political correctness there were really only three things people got accused of: sexism, racism, and homophobia

> Another factor in the rise of wokeness was the Black Lives Matter movement, which started in 2013 when a white man was acquitted after killing a black teenager in Florida.

> Similarly for the Me Too Movement, which took off in 2017 after the first news stories about Harvey Weinstein's history of raping women. It accelerated wokeness

> In 2020 we saw the biggest accelerant of all, after a white police officer asphyxiated a black suspect on video. At this point the metaphorical fire became a literal one, as violent protests broke out across America.

note: it's ok PG, you can say the cop murdered him. no one will cancel it for you (except maybe the right).

Wow you're right PG, all of this IS performative, because none of it has actually helped anyone you know and respect. It's just helped women, POC, LGBT etc.

TL;DR; PG like most billionaires hates when anyone like him is held accountable, would rather see humanity suffer than not be able to say whatever he wants.
There's a reason why it feels like the internet has gone bad
The rail grinding noise of those Mark 1 Skytrain cars are really something. They literally made my ears hurt. For reference New York's subway rail noise never made my ears hurt that much.

The explanation I read online is that Translink (the transport authority) lost one of the 2 rail grinders they contracted, and had to buy a grinder for use. So for a few years, while waiting for the grinder to arrive, the rails were not getting the regular grinding needed that'd lessen the wheels-on-rail noise.

An unverified rumor I heard was that Translink cheaped out and bought a batch of substandard rails that are softer than needed. This means the rails wear out and become out of spec faster. The issue was compounded by the fact that the softer rails were used to replace a large portions of routes with sharp curves.

The rolling stocks use linear induction propulsion, which means there is no electric motor on the train. The trains are very light as a result and require different maintenance.
Well one of those options lets me click a button on the phone in my pocket and play music across multiple rooms without running any wires between rooms. And similarly supports surround-sound audio without running wires around or inside walls.

I appreciate the value in a basic stereo system but there are some major differences in functionality to the end user.
I understand why you would continue driving because of the lack of alternatives, but why would you be happy about doing so?
Calling it performative (aka "virtue signaling") is either mind reading or casting aspersion without evidence.
3 in, 2 out here but I'm in the office for four days just because I work better in the office.

My one bedroom apartment is my home. Not an office to work in.

Maybe if I had a spare room, but I like the feeling of leaving work at work and coming home not to know I need to work here tomorrow.
Usually SEO spam link insertion and generic Viagra spam redirects...
Helpfully he spends most of the article elaborating on what he means by "aggressively performative".
As an Iowa kid at the State Fair in the very early 80s, I remember the fructose table in the Horticulture building (since renamed because nobody knows what "horticulture" is anymore) - it was kitty-corner across from the butter sculptures on the floor below. It was near the honey producers. They both gave out samples. I remember which table the children swarmed around (and it wasn't honey!).

High fructose corn syrup (in a fishing bobber/key chain) was very concentrated sugar. Anyone who's ever made simple syrup knows that can happen with other sugars, too. The source of the sugar might be a useful MacGuffin at best.
I’m all in for fission, but it has a really bad reputation, has many opponents, it creates a bit of waste and hasn’t solved our energy problems in the past decades.
>> Recognizable repetition can be abstracted
> ... which is the whole idea behind training, isn't it?

The comment I was answering specifically dismissed LLM's inability to answer same question with same... answer as unimportant. My point is that this ability is crucial to software engineering - answers to similar problems should be as similar as possible.

Also, I bet that LLM's are not trained to abstract. In my experience they lately are trained to engage users in pointless dialogue as long as possible.
That probably means that recycling is not worth it, so the only responsible way is to reduce its usage as much as possible (reusing or replacing with better solutions)
Oh boy my favorite HN comment

1) It's "surprising" because this is super vindictive unless they're doing it for very good, specific reasons (otherwise it's just competition killing)

2) "Reserved the right" doesn't mean a given thing isn't censorship, especially not at the scale Facebook operates at
> Why is the changing terminology something that needs to be stopped?

It does not. If we were merely talking about the current young person slang word for something good (e.g. rad, sick, amazeballs, etc. (don't ask me for the current one)) no one cares that the terminology changes.

But in this case each change comes with the same reasoning behind it. This indicates that the change has been ineffective and people ought to consider why that is and if there is something else that could be done instead or in addition to be more effective.
A lot of corpsites are wordpress, and are modified once a quarter or so, those should not be running wordpress internet-facing due to its terrible performance and constant susceptibility to vulnerabilities (or that of its themes/plugins landscape due to it being all pure PHP that can do anything). Wordpress is a useful tool to generate static sites though, I've done that before and it's glorious. Use all the friendly authoring tools of WP and then click a button to write out an updated blob of HTML files to be served by Cloudflare or whatever.

As for forums, those almost don't exist anymore, and contact forms and ecommerce are better off being handled by software designed to do that rather than some plugin shoehorned into an early-2000s PHP blogging platform.

For example, contact forms in Hubspot or Salesforce, and ecommerce with Shopify.

Edit to add: If someone's technical enough to be self-hosting Wordpress the open-source project, I would trust them to do a fine job at selecting a more focused alternative OSS project for those "actual server" needs.
To be honest, I almost welcome major collapse resulting from AI intern imploding major US corporation with one bad code submission auto-approved by a contractor.
Coherence Therapy
I firmly believe that use of AI in music production is solely for the sake of monetization. Bona fide instrumentalists are playing their instruments, practicing, getting better, playing with other instrumentalists, and not implementing AI unless generating something they intend to use to make money. No actual musician I know is using AI in a serious musical context.
You should go to the casinos yourself and find out! As someone who's made it to late game Luck Be a Landlord, you will feel right at home!