SilasX

>Oracle does not have any proprietary IP that OpenAI depends on. That means Oracle is providing commodity services to OpenAI.

Huh? Is Oracle's plan with this funding to provide compute services for the big AI specialist companies? I assumed it was a buildout for their own AI services, as you're right, the former wouldn't make sense. (At risk of making a trollish, low-effort comment, OpenAI/Anthropic are savvy compute users and would have to be insane to risk getting entangled with Oracle.)

I read the article and I couldn't tell from it which of these is the case.

I meant the "vulnerability" that planes, especially early in the flight, also contain significant fuel that causes cascading damage beyond the impact.

I get that my comment probably didn't reach the "insightfulness" threshold for HN, but geez, go easy on me.

Just to address the elephant in the room, that was also the "vulnerability" deliberately exploited in the 9/11 attacks.

Exactly. The US tech hubs draw heavily from the subset of very talented Americans who aren't seeing the typical dumbed-down part of the education system, and from immigrants, who are over-represented. If anything, they're constantly complaining that they can't find enough talent domestically -- which, yes, is partly "we don't want to pay them enough", but when you consider the costs to sponsor an immigrant, can't entirely be about that.

I know it's tempting to put this consent-banner anti-pattern all on toxic ad-driven platforms, because their motives are bad.

The problem with this view, though, is that even the very agencies propagating these rules do the exact same thing! You can go to any site from an EU arm and get the same banners.

At this point, you can't really blame it on bad-faith actors, you have to accept that it's a bad rule. Which is not to say I know a better one!

I can't find it now, and I'm pretty sure it was featured on HN, but there was a board game like this where you had to cooperatively add housing to the Bay Area under all the constraints you have to operate under, and, when playing, we discovered that the only way to do it was to massively upzone some remote East Bay city.

Onion parody: consumer product diversity exceeds biodiversity:

https://theonion.com/consumer-product-diversity-now-exceeds-...

Okay, the biggest confusion I have is the part about the time your candidate got to correct you on TDD[1].

This seems like something you could and should have caught in the moment, without having to use your feedback technique. If they answered, and only mentioned the high-level tests, and you expect them to have low-level tests, then just ask, right then, if that was all of their tests, rather than silently assume the worst and move on.

Heuristic: if a remark seems outrageous, double-check before making a major decision on it.[2] This is not just in interviews, but life in general.

Example: Your friend says "Hey can you toss me through the window [of this skyscraper]?"

Your version: Call their family and 911 to report them as suicidal. Give a long speech about why they shouldn't kill themself. Then explain why you did what you did and ask if you misunderstood anything.

Sane, heuristic version: You reply, "You... want me to throw you to your death?"

Friend: "Oh jeez, no, that's just an expression we use here. I want you lift me up onto the balcony."

[1] Quoted in full:

>I gave one candidate feedback along the lines of “when you explained the app that you built, you talked about the testing that you did at only a very high level, so I’m worried about your depth of testing knowledge, particularly around Test Driven Development (TDD)”. The response was along the lines of “Oh. You’re right. I didn’t really delve into detail, but here’s how I went about doing the testing and here is my general approach in other examples”. The candidate then went into significant depth explaining how they had done TDD over the last 10 years, which clearly demonstrated their understanding and maturity of the practice. Misunderstanding corrected.

[2] Which, to be clear, you are doing by using your technique ... it just feels oddly delayed and lets a misunderstanding accumulate much longer than it needs to; my example is an exaggerated version of the failure mode.

Again, they do it even when those prerequisites don’t hold. And your second sentence is agreeing that it’s a different usage than the normal definiteness.

That's not how definiteness works otherwise -- it's always for a case where the other party would know which one you mean. This "selecting out of possible other choices" protocol is not a thing.

Third time: I'm not imposing some kind of prescriptivism, and I know that it's common. You're not bringing in any new information here. I'm saying it deviates from the usual pattern of using "the" when the noun has definiteness.

To repeat another part of my initial post, it's like the use of "the" in "the bigger they are, the harder they fall". It's clearly a different usage/meaning/sense of "the" -- in fact, most other languages use a different word for that sense. (German uses je ... desto.) It would be very dubious to explain all uses of "the" as "oh its when the noun has definiteness". It wouldn't cover that case, and it wouldn't cover (the typical use of) "I went to the store".

You don’t have to apologize, I don’t like it either.

>When you're talking to people you live with it is true that they know which store you are going to.

But again, people use this even when I have no reason to know which store they went to.

I’m not necessarily saying they should stop doing this, but it’s clearly not the usual kind of definiteness implied but the use of “the”.

I avoid making exceptions to the rule, but in the vernacular, people definitely break from it! You'll see e.g. "an historic event", usually justified because the first syllable is weak and close enough to being vowel-started.

FWIW "an Nvida employee" sounds better than me an "a Nvidia employee" because the latter has two vowels with no consonant separating them ... and I don't get repetition there because the vowels are different.

Well, on that note: the construction “I went to the store” has always felt wrong to me as a native speaker. People say it even when that store lacks definiteness in context (ie the listener has no reason to know which one you mean). At the very least, it counts as a separate usage of “the” that doesn’t follow the usual pattern, like when you say “the bigger they are, the harder they fall”.

Edit: Here's a frustrating HN thread where someone tried to claim it makes sense, but it turned out his argument hinged on "well obviously all native English speakers regularly go to some store, right?" Screw the homebound.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32620015

I’d say it’s more about confronting the ways in which art is just posturing, hype, and status games, and what it’s like to find out you’re in an “Emperor’s New Clothes” situation.

Earlier HN discussions about it (both got flagged):

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48158110

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48134400

Sure, but you generally those are separate conversations in which you don't need to appeal to the duality of encryption and authentication or apply the analogy to the latter.

Yeah, that always bothered me about the terminology. My fix would be to call it a lock -- everyone understands that you can share those and it doesn't make them any easier to open.

So you agree it's a problem, but still characterized the situation as "all is good" in your first comment. I would not call that good, and I would be have used different words to characterize/trivialize this situation.

Hm I've seen keyboards where INS didn't appear to do anything, but that was because you had to press a different button to activate the set of keys that includes INS, and you might have been looking at a case of that.

Reminds me of another story about older scripts being hard to read:

I found a paperback with Blackstone's Commentaries on the Laws of England[1]. In the intro, it explains how they made the deliberate decision to render them as pixel-for-pixel copies of the original texts, so you could get the most pure, unadulterated form.

I'm like lol whatever, you act like you're doing the world a huge favor by not transcribing it into something legible for modern readers, forcing them to navigate around stuff like the s's looking like f's. No, dude, anyone who actually needs that level of authenticity is a scholar who already knows how to find the originals. You don't want that in a publication for a mass audience.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commentaries_on_the_Laws_of_En...

Heh, I have a variant of Hanlon's Razor: Never attribute, to bigotry, that which can be explained by misanthropy.

That is, don't assume that bad behavior is because of someone's membership in a particular demographic, when it could just be a general instance of people being assholes.

This has been a source of tremendous frustration for me. I was really happy to discover c. 2009 that you could get browser extensions that let you do anything on a website (like clicking links) from the keyboard. But increasingly, they're failing at making items detectable as clickable. Which is like, why? How do you go through the effort to make a framework to automate the process of putting in UI elements ... and somehow fail to comply with basic standards that would allow interoperability.

I suspect that a lot of the resistance to disability compliance in websites[1] is due to how it would let you bypass ads. If a screen reader can cut through the cruft to get to what you need, then everyone can use software that does it.

[1] like in the Domino's case https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21188092

Similar, when you get an advantage and a disadvantage at the same time, I've proposed "bonalty": bonus + penalty.

No, I used it by the standard meaning. The fact that you prefer doesn't make it not a breaking change, or a good idea in general.

Notepad addresses a specific use case (dumb text editor). If you have a different use case, there are other applications that handle it.

"Breaking change" is a pretty common term, especially here, so I don't get the confusion about what it means. It means an interface-breaking change, so that the same input produces a different output, and is generally to be avoided because it forces the user to have to adapt and means the new version isn't strictly better[1].

The inclusion of autocorrect (that I mentioned) would be example here: previously, it would accept whatever text you gave it verbatim. Now, it will sometimes change non-dictionary strings to dictionary words.

(Another thing that bothered me was that, on the update, it forgot my font settings and I had to work to re-find them.)

I'm happy to admit my phrasing was confusing, but not enough so that you would be unable to see the relevant failure mode.

[1] https://stackoverflow.com/a/21703427

Even Notepad isn’t a dumb app anymore! They made breaking changes after 40 years so it has autocorrect, rich text, and Copilot.

If I wanted all of that, I would have used a different app!

Meter does matter to me, and I do enjoy music. Just the every-other-syllable stress with natural stresses in iambic pentameter doesn't resonate.

In the lightning talk, I contrast IP with ska music, which I like, and which is characterized by stressed off-beats (which resonate with me) and mis-stressing the syllables to fit the meter (which also resonates with me).

Edit: Another thing about the high school experience: Shakepeare kind of fit a pattern of "stuff everyone professes to like but whose enjoyment seems to be fake/performative" (along with pop music, sports, and the taste of alcoholic drinks). I joke that if I were gay, I'd include everyone else's apparent heterosexuality in that pattern.

Thank you for recognizing the situation I was in! (Nit: "to be or not to be" is probably a bad example of something that depends on iambic for memorability.)

Also, when I tried rewriting that soliloquy for modern ears, it didn't even occur to me to keep the meter; that never registered as a noteworthy aspect of it.

One other thing: keep in mind what it's like to be in high school. For the vast majority of your life, you're told to do things "because I said so". So the idea that there might be an actual good reason for stressing Shakespeare the right way ... didn't stand out as an obvious hypothesis.