skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> I fundamentally disagree with the premise that friction is desirable. It's not.

I agree that too much friction is terrible.

But what I was saying, and the article seems to be implying, is that too little friction is terrible too.

Using Stable Diffusion is lower friction than sketching or painting. But the latter two are better.

The difference is that there is friction that leads to a good outcome, and friction that does not. Mixers with bread hooks are eliminating bad friction, whereas Stable Diffusion is removing good friction.

And in fact, there's actually more friction when using Stable Diffusion if you have an end in mind; trying to get it to output what you want is high in bad friction.
> I'm first interested in the more straightforward situation of the people who worked on a less-lethal weapon system, which they might've anticipated would be used in exactly this way. What do they think about that?

It seems easy to justify it as "it will take the place of lethal weapons", as with tazers
My experience is that the main problem with online documentation is that it doesn't include links to separate tutorials, but has plenty of links to more documentation, leading you to wander from page to page without destination trying to find that one page that actually explains what you're trying to do or infer it from fragments of information scattered around the documentation.

For example, in Qt you have a view class, a model class, and a selection model class, and none of their pages tell you how to actually select something programmatically. You have to guess or ask ChatGPT these days.
>For a long time, the US announced that it wanted a world order based on democracy, capitalism, and the rule of law.

Yeah, that was still bogus. It collaborated with dictators (they are good, as long as they serve it's interests, they're a "regime" when they dont), brought down democratically elected governments, funded orange "revolutions" and opposition parties, and of course bombed, invaded, etc sovereign nations.

Further more, it's no place of any single country to try to build "a world order based on democracy, capitalism, and the rule of law". Even if that wasn't transparently and extremely self-serving hypocritical, not every people share its ideas about democracy, or about capitalism, or what are good laws.

>And when other countries saw the outcome, they sometimes changed their priorities and chose to support the American world order.

Oh, sweet summer child.
Everything short of the worst we've ever done is totally OK? What even is this argument?
They could try innovating and actually supporting an economy of entrepreneurship so individuals are incentivized to build better tools in their home country instead of coming here. Too bad VC _almost_ exclusively exists in the US. What Europe calls VC is a joke.
The images are also irritating and jarring when you notice that the bokeh is fake and that they're all AI generated (and AI generated images have really headache inducing depth of field effects).
See "Inventing on principle" also by Bret Victor on YouTube.

Great watch.
Their ai summary really eats shit when it comes to slang heavy, short messages.

It’d be genuinely useful if it kicked on in threads with high amounts of unread messages
The end of ZIRP is necessary for us to return to economic reality. As Henry Hazlitt explains in "Economics in One Lesson," proper capital allocation is fundamental to a healthy economy. During the ZIRP era, market signals were distorted, which led companies to invest in frivolous projects, creating enormous bureaucracies and god knows how many bullshit jobs. Real economic growth requires solving meaningful problems, which in turn creates genuinely meaningful work for us techies. So, I guess it's good that "good times" are over.
Have you used latest FSD on HW4 recently? If not, please try it out for a few days and then come back to correct your comment :-)
Good points...

For me personally a similar thing was when Ableton Live transitioned from having a more "direct" interface to having popup menus for absolutely everything, and it took time for me to adapt to it for live performances. To be fair I never really adapted and just moved to something else.

Rather than coming up with creative solutions like they did before they just kept adding things to those popup menus. The app went from magic (by enabling me to perform live effortlessly) to frankly difficult (by having the interface become difficult to memorize and getting in my way).

Coincidentally was when they also started racking up bugs so much that they needed a couple years without new features just to clean up bugs.
Small Archives
Their cameras have better dynamic range than humans, not to mention the neural net can consume multiple exposures simultaneously. From surround video.
I want to clarify that I'm considering the legal system as a whole. When I say completeness I'm referring to the legal system's ability to render a judgement: is something legal or illegal? That's different than having a law for every case. We can have ambiguous laws and still have a judge say that something is legal or illegal.

What we don't have or can't have is a court case where the judge says, "The legality of this is indeterminate." Our ability to always render a judgement is completeness.
>There's a few large truck trailers I've seen completely covered on a side with a picture which could be interpreted as a road / sidewalk / smaller car / whatever.

Truck trailers are typically 3-4 ft off the ground, and have obvious borders.
You're right. On Dec. 27, 1999, Microsoft's market cap hit hit $614 billion.

I might have confused it with some "inflation adjusted market cap" I read somewhere.
NYPD -- https://gothamist.com/news/city-settles-lawsuit-protesters-w...
Think of it in the positive way. They also don't attribute all rights reserved works.
Interesting article but I'm not sure some of the statements chime with how things looked at the time (IME ofc).

I got involved in IT as a profession in 1995 and even then Lotus 1-2-3 and Wordperfect were going pretty well, so the idea stated in the article that :-

"a monopoly in operating systems and office suites was inevitable before 1990 was over."

seems a little overdone.

My memory of what really tipped it for Microsoft in the office suite market (at least in the UK) was that they started giving away a full office suite with every new PC. So even though competitors might have better functionality, it was a tough sell to get past the price of "free".

Definitely in the SMEs I worked in this was the reason that Office became the defacto option for office applications.
My wife was threatened with not being allowed into the country due to a DUI (in the US) from five years ago. We had to pay a $250 fee to spend three days in Victoria.
How GitHub engineers learn new codebases
I've seen some contexts where this is what's happening. IKEA instructions would be one, or I've also seen it in some board games, where things like cards will use icons so only the instruction book needs to be translated.

But in UIs you usually have to have some text equivalent somewhere, on hover or long-press or in a menu or just as text for screenreader users, so you don't generally get to avoid translation even if you take visible labels away.
> what would you be doing at my age

Go to college and become an astrophysicist instead of someone who's work is EOL in two years or less.
And you think one can not modularize C code and encapsulate critical buffer operations in much safer APIs? One can, the problem is that a lot of legacy C code was not written this way. Also lot of newly written C code is not written this way, but the reason is often that people cut corners when they need to get things done with limited time and resources. The same you will see with Rust.
Why do you say that? The autopilot of an airplane doesn’t dodge obstacles either.
The title of the video says “Self Driving Car” which can and is misleading viewers into thinking it’s a test of Tesla’s “supervised Full Self Driving” product since they do not sell other products that use that term. FSD at one point had a significantly more advanced video to voxel model as part of the perception stack that possibly could have detected this wall (though I believe their planner is now end to end and only gets video input, so I’d be really interested to see if it fails here)
I think in a year LLMs are better at writing Wiki articles than the p90 quality Wikipedia page today.

They have access to _huge_ volumes of information—books, research papers, PhD dissertations, newsletters from experts, peer-reviewed articles. They're getting better every day at organizing it. Claude has a (beta) citations API, which forces the LLM to directly cite sources and use direct quotations.

They'll get better and better at managing translations—maybe not them translating, but them finding resources in other languages, using a translation tool, then pulling in that information.

Will they be perfect? No, but good lord is Wikipedia not either. Will they hallucinate, probably sometimes, but, again, the median Wikipedia author does not have a New Yorker fact checker at their side.

I think we overestimate how good humans are at this. And it's far easier to validate cited sources than it is to consume and craft the original writing.
Doesn't look like they are paywalling existing feature, just some new AI back functionality. Considering how much is costs to run those sorts of features I can understand.

Plus, there are lots of alternative app that are free and easy to download and install.
> Even validators have bugs

Yep! For example, https://github.com/Speykious/cve-rs is an example of a bug in the Rust compiler, which allows something that it shouldn't. It's on its way to being fixed.

> or miss things no?

This is the trickier part! Yes, even proofs have axioms, that is, things that are accepted without proof, that the rest of the proof is built on top of. If an axiom is incorrect, so is the proof, even though we've proven it.
So people still use notepad and paint? One of the first things I do with a fresh install is install notepad++ and paint.net.
It is legal and safe to drive with 1 working eye.

Humans have many ways of modeling distances in the real world that do not rely on stereoscopic depth.
The Gemini based assistant has been getting better... It was weird to see the massive step backwards though.
I think I already had this discussion on HN. I am not sure why most people think autopilot is hands of the wheel without looking. There literally is no autopilot, which does not require constant attention from a human. This is true for planes, ships and cars. Hell this true even for most drones.

FSD is very much correctly named. It does not say you can go for a sleep. It just means, the vehicle is capable of full self driving, which is true for most conditions and something most cars are not capable of. How would you have named it?
What if I buy second hand? I heard there's quite a few Teslas available on the used market.
It does seem like they should have left these bits out rather than take a known product and turn it into Spirit Airlines of an app. Even if it is an actual bonus feature, nobody likes this kinda vibe.
A human is not just a NN, but I do wonder how well a human could drive given the Tesla camera feed. Seems like it would surely be worse than behind the wheel.
With the way things are working, all decrees have a two week half life. It is impossible to make long term plans in this environment.
To be fair, the Tesla did definitely demonstrate full emergency breaking.
I still use gulp for a side-project: it works and it’s simply not worth the effort of replacing.

But I remember back in the day immediately preferring gulp to grunt once I became aware of it.
You only lose those guarantees if and only if the code within the unsafe block violates the rules of the Rust language.

Normally in safe code you can’t violate the language rules because the compiler enforces various rules. In unsafe mode, you can do several things the compiler would normally prevent you from doing (e.g. dereferencing a naked pointer). If you uphold all the preconditions of the language, safety is preserved.

What’s unfortunate is that the rules you are required to uphold can be more complex than you might anticipate if you’re trying to use unsafe to write C-like code. What’s fortunate is that you rarely need to do this in normal code and in SIMD which is what the snippet is representing there’s not much danger of violating the rules.
I agree and binary exploitation/Vulnerability Research is my area of expertise.. The whole "Lets port everything to Rust" is so misguided. Binary exploitation has already gotten 20x harder than say ten years ago.. Even so.. Most big breaches happen because people reuse their password or just give it out... Nation States are pretty much the only parties capable of delivering full kill chains that exploit, say chrome... That is why I moved to the embedded space.. Still so insecure...
Estimating variance reduction in importance sampling
> The models are incredibly adept at providing a proof-of-concept. But it's often a monumental endeavour to cross the gap

That's not just with LLMs. This has been an Achille's heel of demos for decades.

It's usually quite easy to make a demo of something sexy, but making it ship, is a very, very different thing.

This is made exponentially worse, by managers thinking that the demo means "we're almost ready," and even by the engineers, themselves, who are often not experienced enough to understand that demo != ship. Also, it has been my experience, that researchers that come up with amazing ideas, have absolutely no appreciation for what it takes to turn their ideas into ship product. Since Apple is all about ship product, they have to bridge that gulf. They are trying to commoditize something that is mostly buzz and raw research, right now.

I'm really pretty jaded about ML and LLMs in general, right now. I feel as if a whole bunch of really sexy demos were released, creating a huge level of buzz, but that the shipping product is still a ways off.
I do love Odilon Redon, there was an excellent exhibition of his work in Copenhagen a few years ago that I managed to catch: https://www.glyptoteket.com/exhibition/odilon-redon-into-the... . Unfortunately etchings aren’t house style for covers, we typically go for oil or watercolour-indistinguishable-from-oil.
I'm learning javascript as my first programming language and I'm somewhere around beginner/intermediate. I used Chatgpt for a while, but stopped after a time and just mostly use documentation now. I don't want code solutions, I want code learning and I want certainty behind that learning.

I do see a time where I could use copilot or some LLM solution but only for making stuff I understand, or to sandbox high level concepts of code approaches. Given that I'm a graphic designer by trade, I like 'productivity/automation' AI tools and I see my approach to code will be the same - I like that they're there but I'm not ready for them yet.

I've heard people say I'll get left behind if I don't use AI, and that's fine as I'll just use niche applications of code alongside my regular work as it's just not stimulating to have AI fill in knowledge blanks and outsource my reasoning.
It is quite easy for C++ and Rust to both be faster than C in things larger than toy projects. C is hardly a panacea of efficiency, and the language makes useful things very hard to do efficiently.

You can contort C to trick it into being fast[1], but it quickly becomes an unmaintainable nightmare so almost nobody does.

1: eg, correct use of restrict, manually creating move semantics, manually creating small string optimizations, etc...
Apparently used multiple times during Black Lives Matter protests:
https://www.globenewswire.com/news-release/2020/06/04/204368...
I have some local coworkers who’ve been “working from home” for months at a time from their various home cities in India when visiting relatives.

Whenever they un-mute their microphones in a Teams meeting there is an instant cacophony.

At first I was asking if they were working from a cafe table on a street corner or something, but no… invariably the answer is that they’re indoors at home!
It's not even to the level of Apple Intelligence. If I tell Siri to set a timer for 5 minutes, it goes off, and I say "Hey Siri, stop alarm," it stops my daily wake-up alarm, not the timer. It feels like Siri hasn't gotten any better in the past decade.
Well the obvious answer is that LLMs are more then just pure search. They can synthesize novel information from their learned knowledge.
Are you prepared to try that the "obvious border" is enough? Would you fully trust that there will be no issue?
> It does not say you can go for a sleep.

That means, by definition, it's not "full" self driving.
At 95, He's the World's Oldest Speedskater. He's Gunning for 100.
Yes - we've got a long way to go with regards to these technologies.
Here you go: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long-range_acoustic_device#Uni...

Was an especially commonly discussed topic in 2020 during the George Floyd related protests. Some notable video resources on how to defend against these devices and what one can expect: [0] and [1]. To save you time, if i remember correctly, the most effective is one of those plastic riot shields held in reverse to direct the sound back at the sender (notably pretty difficult when you don't want to just hit other protesters, or don't know where the sound is coming from and/or are getting hit by reflections).

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CXKTBQBugIA

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3sqIvak-4Ek
> Costco is a subscription business.

I don’t think that’s accurate. The membership fee is a trivially small percentage for most members, and can’t be a significant margin driver. Especially for those members who have a pack of kids and shop Costco regularly, spending hundreds of dollars per visit.

I personally think the membership fee exists as a gating function to keep less-prolific customers out of overcrowded stores on weekends.
> Camera feeds and a neural network are not enough for self driving

I guess we should ban humans driving then.
An unmarked van could park in front of any arbitrary public neighborhood house with street parking for a few hours and nobody would care. As long as people aren’t visible in it.

Multiple days would be suspicious but that would be true of even the “sewer inspection” cover van
Thanks! Knew I was missing something. I guess in my mind tutorials and howtos merged :D
> Serbia is one of the Russian-controlled Governments

Serbia is a major weapons supplier for Ukraine [0][1][2] and has backed Ukraine's stance on Crimea as it has implications for Serbia's stance on Kosovo.

Vucic only cares about Vucic, and will work with any country (Germany [3], Russia, China [4], America [5], Turkiye [6], UAE [7], etc) to continue to hold power and balance alternatives.

By becoming close with every major player in the region, it makes it easier for Vucic to continue to crackdown on opposition without dealing with condemnations (eg. Germany will remain silent because of the billions in FDI).

Orban did the same thing, but after grinding the EP to a halt, patients for Orban grew thin. By remaining outside the EU, Vucic can continue to hold power while not burning that many bridges with European leadership.

> USA is not controlled, any more than say China is controlled, but is an authoritarian regime (so no real elections)

Huh? Serbia is a night and day difference to the US. The best comparison to the US is probably Israel.

[0] - https://www.reuters.com/world/leaked-us-intel-document-claim...

[1] - https://www.economist.com/europe/2024/09/19/ukraine-is-a-boo...

[2] - https://www.ft.com/content/136ed721-fd50-4815-8314-d9df8dc67...

[3] - https://www.politico.eu/article/serbian-president-aleksandar...

[4] - https://apnews.com/article/serbia-china-xi-jinping-visit-nat...

[5] - https://amp.dw.com/en/serbia-and-us-the-next-great-trans-atl...

[6] - https://www.dailysabah.com/politics/diplomacy/defense-at-for...

[7] - https://www.mei.edu/publications/serbias-best-friend-arab-wo...
So does RedReader.
Have they managed to fix the "parking sensors"?
Something like protecting the capitol from being stormed by a mob?
I wonder how long until techniques like Depth Anything (https://depth-anything-v2.github.io/) provide parity with human depth perception. In Mark Rober's tests, I'm not sure even a human would have passed the fog scenario, however.
Obligatory & highly relevant:
Humane Representation of Thought by Bret Victor: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=agOdP2Bmieg

And of course: https://dynamicland.org/
By the way, loading 92 MB of images to make me read 6 KB of text is brutal

That's what I get for wanting to read the article before the comments here. Waited minutes only to be greeted with mediocre AI-generated images too, to add insult to injury.
https://archive.ph/6WPWv
My wife and I built a zero-based budgeting app called Ranger. One frustrating UX problem we hit was vague bank transaction descriptions — stuff like AMZN1234 $14.99 that makes categorizing purchases tedious.

We solved it by allowing users to connect their Gmail accounts (where online receipts live), then using AI to match these receipts with bank transactions. We use OpenAI’s structured outputs mode combined with Zod schemas to reliably parse and summarize emails into fully type-safe transaction descriptions for online purchases. This makes categorizing transactions way simpler: transactions like AMZN1234 automatically become "Shoe Dog by Phil Knight (Book)".

The biggest issue was controlling costs around input token count, since HTML emails can be huge — especially when you’re passing multiple emails into the AI simultaneously. We optimized by:
• Prioritizing plain-text email content whenever available. Not only is plain text easier to parse, it tends to have ~1/100th the character count of a modern HTML email.
• Aggressively truncating HTML emails at a reasonable character limit.
• Prioritizing the oldest matching email first, since that’s typically the actual order confirmation.
• Using ChatGPT 4o-mini. It's super cheap and does a great job with this specific challenge.

I'd love to hear how others deal with this UX issue/if you've encountered it.

If you’re curious, Ranger is at rangerbudget.com. (Free trial, no CC required.)
ba-dum tish
I don't remember the details. I had bought a (modest) vehicle with exercised gains (and maybe employee stock purchase). Don't remember the residual tax impacts being a big factor in general--may have been timing of some sort. But a $100 stock went to about $4. Went back up a bit and then only became somewhat OK through various subsequent acquisitions and spin-offs. But, yeah, a lot of people got clobbered when they took profits and then held onto the stock--and other scenarios like you say.

When I left not long before dot-bomb, I'm glad I didn't go for all the stock options they were offering me but I had already made the decision to leave. The company I went to cratered but, as I wrote, someone I knew picked me up.

But, yeah, making it through dot-bomb was incredibly lucky. The situation in tech broadly may not be great today but it's not like 2001.
Does your team have an embedded QA Engineer?
Just curious to other engineers in the industry, does your daily standup team include a dedicated QA engineer to help walk through customer and business use cases as tests like when you build a feature?

I'm not talking just a tester like an engineer who knows the code but is in charge or testing for the feature.

Or is QA it's own separate pillar within the org that you hand off to when your code is done?

In my first job QA was more embedded in the team and the business I think functioned more smoothly because of it.

Curious to see what others experience here is.
Clickbait. Doesn’t definitively say why.
https://archive.is/tLOkA