skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Indeed, the persistence layer is sensitive, and we do take this pretty serious.

All data is persisted via RocksDB. Not only the materialized state of invocations and journals, but even the log itself uses RocksDB as the storage layer for sequence of events.
We do that to benefit from the insane testing and hardening that Meta has done (they run millions of instances). We are currently even trying to understand which operations and code paths Meta uses most, to adopt the code to use those, to get the best-tested paths possible.

The more sensitive part would be the consensus log, which only comes into play if you run in distributed deployments. In a way, that puts us into a similar boat as companies like Neon: having reliably single-node storage engine, but having to build the replication and failover around that. But in that is also the value-add over most databases.

We do actually use Jepsen internally for a lot of testing.

(Side note: Jepsen might be one of the most valuable things that this industry has - the value it adds cannot be overstated)
Did you forget we recently spent over 30 years of military operations in Iraq? Or our current military support of an ongoing genocidal religious massacre? What exactly is your threshold for fucked up shit?
> As a European, I do find Indian English more difficult to listen to. But that's because I have less exposure to it (or rather had less exposure in my formative years - it's omnipresent if you work in tech these days). But that doesn't mean there's anything wrong with their variety of English or "accent".

There's nothing wrong with Polish either, but a call centre agent speaking Polish wouldn't be very useful (for all but a handful of people on earth).

So I'm not sure what your point is?

> It merely reduces some of the friction introduced by purely profit-seeking cost cutting measures.

Reducing friction is good! Cost cutting is good, too. Seeking profits is normal for companies. Otherwise, why start a company at all?
The scamming industry in Brazil seems to have grown a lot since the pandemic. I get calls almost daily.

Three types of scam are really common lately:

1- You get an SMS pretending to be from the Post Office saying that you have to pay tax for your packet to get through customs;
2- You get a call from someone saying they're from your bank and they need you to confirm that you bought something expensive like a TV;
3- Someone says they're your lawyer and you need to pay them to get your settlement (this one is nasty, because they look up people who have something going on in the justice system).
I'm not paying oracle for cloud services, I learned my lesson the hard way, they're still emailing me about random cloud stuff despite me telling them to stop contacting me.
250 sounds like Banana R4 already won. Seeing different no-name boards such specs should be way less or we should have 2 10G fiber, 4-5 10G copper and some great specs in terms of computing... Did I miss anything?
I'm not sure I fully understand your point. You say the Indian accent isn't "challenging" and then basically acknowledge you find it challenging yourself. Accents are challenging when you're trying to get something fixed and move on with your life - I'm Indian and I grew up in the 90s without much exposure to American media, and I certainly did find the American accent challenging for much of my life. Most accents are challenging for most people, and acknowledging that is different from labeling them as "bad" somehow.

I can sorta see the "dehumanizing" aspect from a philosophical perspective, but honestly there are so many other practical, day-to-day dehumanizing aspects to these jobs that need fixing, that this fades to nothing in comparison. For eg. maybe this will reduce the need for the "accent training" classes that employees in these centres go through, which is more dehumanizing and also cuts into their already meagre paycheck a lot of the time.
What roenxi is saying is that if heatpumps weren't being forced on people, they wouldn't be controversial. If solar panels were forced on people, they would be equally opposed.

Transition to solar/wind is temporarily costly to the individual in itself because energy prices are no longer fixed 24/7. So maintaining your energy budget means adjusting your usage to different time periods.

When the individual citizen's energy expense is further increased because they themselves have to buy equipment, then that becomes an issue of funding rather than the technology. They would not be equally opposed to large tax-funded energy systems, so it's not a criticism of the technology itself.
Looks really neat on first glance, thanks for sharing.

I'm working on some browser based piano learning software. Is this open source?
Everyone understands Indian accents if they are just accents and not poorly spoken English as well. See the demo. Both are perfectly understandable. It does not enhance communication.

So what would be the point? Maybe to disassociate from Indian scammers. Maybe to enhance trust by fooling people into thinking that they are talking to a person from a similar culture (the AI doesn’t sound not Indian by the way though) them instead of an outsourced worker on the other side of the world.
Trained on TikTok I guess ?
For quick trips where you don’t want to screw with cables, or where you don’t want to override your passenger doing the connect. I like wireless for CarPlay eve though my phone isn’t hard plugged into the head unit bit is still charging from the car. So for me a cigar lighter power plug is still better for charging the phone even though I have CarPlay wireless active
Read up on how economic development works.

Ask any of the Asian tiger economies that were formerly victims of colonialism how they economically developed out of poverty.

Developing trusted institutions leads to outside investment. Outside investment leads to growth. Growth leads to not being poor. When nobody will invest in Nigeria because nobody actually trusts they won’t get bamboozled, this is a fundamental chicken and egg problem.

Again, I would strongly suggest re-examining the luxury robinhood narrative you have in your head.
Apple also ships bloated buggy software with a massive TCB that makes it almost trivially easy for state actors to break in.
We shouldn't pick on minorities because the attributes that make them a minority have nothing to do with anything worthy of scorn or... well, anything negative at all.

Police extensively abuse their power, and even the so-called "good" cops rarely speak up against their fellow officers when they do awful things. It's not prejudice to state established facts and patterns of behavior.
If its Hetzner, they have a bad mail reputation as a result of failing to address issues with their shared resources in a timely manner.

They had at one point a persistent downgrade in mail reputation to the point where it was almost impossible to keep a working mail server with them that would be accepted by any major ESP.

They weren't particularly receptive to addressing support issues where their systems were breaking guidelines/RFCs impacting reputation, at least when I spoke with them about one of my servers a year or so back (which I promptly migrated to another provider).

From what I understand, there were egregious issues. Some of the rumors included source address validation not being done allowing DDOS and spoofing originating from these shared servers on the network block, issues with published PTR records, and a few other things. All of which heavily contribute to mail deliver-ability issues.

> They are sending us email, we forward it, Gmail throttles it because it looks like spam and then they don't accept the bounce for example.

If you are acting as a relay and forwarding mail from Google, to another Google recipient, you need to follow the mandatory guidelines.

https://support.google.com/a/answer/81126?hl=en

Naive relaying or forwarding can/will clobber headers, modifying the from header will also set off reputation issues. If you forward you need to be using ARC headers. The milter is a total pain to set up, validate, and get working.

High volume sending also has stringent requirements. You can read all about it at that link.
He mentioned native allies at several points actually, though he doesn’t emphasise them and their purported numbers are still like 100x lower than the forces they are facing.

> And that they overemphasize planning and tactics and downplay being at the right place at the right time through no foresight of their own.

Mentioned by the author

> Another point is that the failed conquistadors are given little consideration.

Also addressed by the article.

> That book explicitly says that it is not a racist or chauvinistic history of how Europe became so successful. But critics claim that it still manages to be chauvinistic in how it wrongly claims that the conquistadors vanquished their enemies while being comically outnumbered.

I feel modern academia (and also Guns Germs and Steel FWIW) desperately try to do the opposite these days - to claim that the natives where not militarily, technologically or logistically inferior to Europeans despite getting conquered by Europeans in what look like very lopsided battles. I feel that is just as dishonest as the opposite. Nobody does this to the Mongols or Huns or whatever. Their superiority is accepted at face value.
Some discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43509923

(800+ comments, front page)
Im curious how you are currently writing those comments. Other than most of the hardware is made in CN or TW, there is not so much records targeting normal people.
Also you get good hardware cheap, it just works and helps us going forward. Enterprise crap from companies like Intel (especially their server disks) are nightmare for years now and last Juniper and Cisco hardcore bugs in software causing soft-drops without any metrics rising on-device - good luck with that.
I’m more than happy using CN stuff than imaginary safer and better US crap.
So, as call centres are already dehumanizing, it's OK to let them dehumanize their workers even more than they do now?

This is terrible.
> Wait, if I recall correctly, covariance has long been established as a mistake.

Perhaps you're just missing some words here, but, just for clarity: it doesn't make any sense to say that covariance is a mistake. Covariance applied in specific places, like Java's mutable covariant arrays which leads to unsoundness, can be a mistake, but covariance itself in fine and essential in languages with subtyping. Function parameters should be covariant, function returns should be contravariant, mutable data structures should be invariant, etc.
> iWork... It's good enough

I would argue it is not just good enough but better than Office for normal consumers. For 99% of my usage and SMEs, Page is insanely better at layout. Numbers are much better for simple chat, formulas and comparison. Keynote.... well i haven't touched powerpoint for 20+ years so I dont know.

The only thing Office is better is when you need slightly complex formulas in Excel or some enterprise that has been using Excel for so long you need to use it to guarantee absolute 100% compatibility. For business Excel usage is still king. And will continue to be for at least another 10 - 15 years if not more.
GraalVM Demos – Javac on WebAssembly
A list of the AI tools I regularly use.
Not sure how that refute the GP's point. You're just saying that what the GP has seen is a smaller part of all the bad stuff that really happens. Which they acknowledged.
Linux Mint with Lutris and Wine.

I completely removed Windows from all of my personal notebooks and workstations.
I just realized I missed an important part: The primary durability for the bulk of the state comes from S3 (or similar object store).
The periodic snapshots give you like an automatic frequent backup mechanism for free, which in itself is a nice property to have.
Andrej Karpathy on the State of Web Development
Interesting, thanks for correcting me. Do you have any sources or further insight into this?

That theory always intuitively made sense for me, so I never questioned it. But of course a lot of theories like this are repeated precisely because they sound plausible, regardless of the actual truth behind them.
It is going to be perfect for Indian scammers, but then again, we already had this where you could use anyone's voice, called voice cloning, voice synthesis.

Scammers already use the relative of the target's voice at times.
Bro. This might be technically correct but you are far from the first person who posited these questions and won’t be the last to be swamped with responses trying to “save” you. Let the morons be morons and just stop poking the hornets nest.
Yes, I also intuitively agree. But now explain to me what is wrong with it.
What’s bad is the lack of ability to look at one’s own area of the world and recognize the faults in your own backyard while wailing about equal faults in other areas of the world as if they are unique.
If op is a Kiwi he should be covered under the Consumer Guarantees Act.

https://www.consumerprotection.govt.nz/general-help/consumer...
Given that LLMs are literally trained on huge amounts of human-originated text and taught to model it, informing our intuitions regarding their external behaviour through a frame influenced by anthropomorphism... actually makes sense.

I really don't see the controversy here. My prompts, including ones meant for actual hard productivity (programming, image OCR and analysis, Q&A and summarisation of news articles), behave very differently when I introduce elements that work on the assumption that the model is partly anthropomorphic. We can't pretend that the behaviour replication isn't there, where is demonstrably is there.
L3 would make it $49k...
I don't know what you imagine perceptions of the British empire to be but most people don't think the UK sent 10000 ships to India to zerg rush the existing power structures.
Interesting use case, but I can hear lots of audio artifacts in the demo video. This doesn't seem consumer-ready just yet.

Apart from that, it also raises some ethical question. Your voice, the tone and its expression, is probably one of the most important features that define you as a person. I cannot imagine anybody being psyched about their voice being changed in a way that's out of their control.
I guess it feels plausible because it sounds similar to how advertising works: discount supermarkets and dollar stores intentionally try to look cheap and tacky because it makes customers expect their prices to be relatively lower than the competition (whether that is universally true or not). They specifically want to attract people looking for cheap, so they try to look cheap - in their branding, advertising, print materials, etc.

Of course scammers aren't literally looking for people trying to be scammed, so the comparison breaks down there. Plus of course there are other strategies than just spray-and-pray (where lower upfront costs by not investing in good copy or plausible design may actually be a good strategy because you can't handle too many marks at once) and with many of those better quality investment definitely increases the chance of success (e.g. spear phishing or whaling).
So your position is that it's also unacceptable to say "cartel members are violent, abusive thugs"? I don't think I agree with that.

I do think it's a bit strong to say police are all violent, abusive thugs.

But there are many police officers who share unfortunate characteristics with violent, abusive thugs, and nearly all of their fellow supposedly-good officers are unwilling to call them out and enforce any sort of consequences for being violent, abusive thugs. That's nearly as bad, in my book.

So maybe let's stop policing (heh) people's specific language, and instead talk about the actual issues.
Yeah in the examples, while the demo is good, it is, at the same time, noticeable and there's a different type of distortion

(I know they don't do this, but it would be funny if it converted the customer accent back into the agent's accent)
If you're familiar with Rust it's what's different about Box<T> compared to T, if you know Java, all their "objects" are boxed it's the difference between Integer and the primitive int type.

In C++ it's approximately std::unique_ptr<T> in a lot of the high level languages (indeed Java I mentioned above fits this if you're not familiar with the details) boxing is silently done for you and you are unaware of it unless you care about fine details.

Think of an arbitrary type Goose, where "is" the Goose? Assume for a moment there's data associated so the Goose does need to be stored somewhere, the two usual candidates are "the stack" and "the heap". If you've no idea what those are then I'm afraid you need a bit more CS to really engage with this conversation. Boxing puts things on the heap, typically with just a pointer to that box kept on the stack.
Sorry, but your attempt to reframe my response was not successful. If AI is harmful to society, the “winning” of the AI race may not be beneficial to that society.
Never even though of the implications for AI+AR for mundane seeming applications like hearing aides. Really cool. Even when you remove the flood of johnny-come-lately, "just add AI" marketing - the amount of things that can be enhanced to legitimately make peoples lives better truly does seem staggering.
I think the pitch is that you can make Texan and Scottish customers both think the call centre is local.
The stock market (and housing market) is the sock puppet of both the left and the right.

Whenever a democratic policy or action affects the stock market, then “it’s a pain we should, nay must, endure for the betterment of our society and country. The stock market will correct itself. There are billions of poor gay immigrant trans Americans families with student loans that are struggling. Once a new generation grows up under this policy, the stock market will rebound. You should be DCA`ing and only investing what you can lose anyway and THE STOCK MARKET ISNT THE ECONOMY”

When a republican policy or action affects the stock market it’s “wHaT aBoUt the sToCk mArRkaT. It dIppeD lAsT wEek. THE STOCK MARKET IS THE ECONOMY”
> The language can just have an implicit conversion rule for convenience

the presence of an implicit conversion rule `T -> T?` amounts to the observation that `T <: T?`, where <: is the subtyping relation

> make an unboxed integer nullable ...

I don't think any language allows this, in any case disallowing nullability for unboxed types amounts to the observation that `P !<: P?`, where !<: is "does not subtype"

I believe (unless I have misunderstood you) that both your examples are subsumed (heh) by subtyping
Bitcoin's God. Years of studying Satoshi led me to a new prime suspect
I only buy my Levis used and preferably pre the 90ies. Lots in good condition and they will literally last for my entire life
"With their command decapitated, there was little resistance."

This happened over and over again, and indicates that the strictly top-down structure of the Incan empire, while probably very advantageous during their conquest of smaller neighbouring polities, was ultimately a huge weakness.
I think the idea of shaming people for being successful conquerers is ironically very western. Ask what the Mongols think about their conquests or the Han or what the Turks think about the Ottomans or the Russians about their history…
> Synology NAS

That's still NUT, just an older version with limited configurability through the DSM UI.
Full un-shortened headline:
In Pursuit of the Bitcoin God. Years of studying Satoshi Nakamoto led me to a new prime suspect. What if crypto’s creator is just a jerk?
Building a search engine from scratch, in Rust: part 1
> Before Windows Defender was built in you had to buy an anti virus software from sneak oil Windows security industry, and likely get somehow scammed in process.

And now you get the same from Microsoft. Clearly an inprovement.
Or maybe there's something to the idea of police being a corrupt, rotten profession, full of people who either a) do violent, thuggish things, b) help cover up the abuses, or c) stand by quietly, too cowardly to ensure the awful ones among them face consequences for what they've done.

I think police as a job, as it currently exists, absolutely should be socially stigmatized. They have the ability to clean up their act, and show that they are worthy of the power and authority we give them, but they choose not to.
Against charging horses even a phalanx of long sharpened (and hardened in fire) wooden sticks would be enough.

Ropes with stones flung under their legs.

Killing them with arrows - really that part confuses me.
The horses had in some cases some armor - but why didn't the other horses not fell from the missile barrage?
"could" being the point here - as Joe Bloke, you're not going to get yourself into a legal dispute with Google, but it's not very hard to return an electronic device as an ordinary end consumer when it's still under warranty.
not sure what is the distinction you're trying to make between owners and investors
It’s a minor (but annoying) issue to make the reason to migrate 1,500 users. Who many of which would still need licenses for Excel anyway.

Microsoft being annoying and frustrating and having so many issues is why I have a well paying job in IT.
> the presence of an implicit conversion rule `T -> T?` amounts to the observation that `T <: T?`, where <: is the subtyping relation

Not necessarily, because you might consider it acceptable for the implicit conversion to change the memory layout in this sense.

> I don't think any languages allow this

Plenty do, e.g. Rust's Option works that way.

> in any case disallowing nullability for unboxed types amounts to the observation that `P !<: P?`, where !<: is "does not subtype"

Saying the same thing with fancier words doesn't explain anything. The point is you can't simply treat non-nullable as a subtype of nullable in general, because this case exists.
Your assertion that sodium channel logic and silicon trace logic are 100% identical is the primary problem. It's like claiming that a hydraulic cylinder and a bicep are 100% equivalent because they both lift things - they are not the same in any way.
I've successfully replaced django.contrib.auth multiple times. It it not easy, but it is not too hard either. Honestly, everything else they do could be a regular Django app. Looks to me like forking a big project became a marketing move rather than technology necessity.
That's nice, but the main problem with current voice turn-taking is different. It's that these systems don't know when it is their turn to speak.

When a human speaks to another, the second person will listen and interpret and guess when the first person is finished talking. For voice agents it doesn't work that way at all.

The text-to-speech system just seems to have a hardcoded "pause" detector, e.g. 2 seconds, and if 2 seconds of silence are ever detected, the "end of message" token is sent and the LLM will start talking. Even if you were just collecting your thoughts and weren't finished at all.

So the semantic content of what you are saying is completely ignored for turn-taking and no analysis takes place which would determine whether the user is likely to have said everything they wanted to say.

Instead of the rigid pause detector, it would actually make more sense for the end-of-message token to be sent when you explicitly say a specific phrase, like literally "over". Which was of course common in half-duplex radio where only one person could transmit. LLMs are half-duplex too: they can't listen and talk at the same time.
Nick Cave's thoughts on a ChatGPT poem (2023)
They tried with windows S. No one bought it and if they did by mistake they returned it.

>Windows is no longer a product for users, the users of Windows are the product for Microsoft to be shoved into the Azure sales funnel.

So true. I won't be running win11 outside of a VM and anything but win11 IoT. You know where to find it...