EntrePrescott

Xi is head of state as president, but not head of government (like King of England).

Uhm: the king of England (which incidentally happens to be king of quite a number of other territories that have yet to fully emancipate themselves from monarchy) is NOT the head of government in any of the the territories he is king of, but merely the head of state… which in constitutional monarchies is a rather formal show pomp role with very little political power. Conversely, the head of government in the UK with actual executive power is the Prime Minister, not the king.

What I'd like is a good bidirectional Latin <-> English AI translation model, ideally downloadable (though even an online version with an interface like DeepL - which doesn't do latin - would be better than the current situation of having nothing at all). It probably wouldn't be on par with the best human translators, at least not at the beginning, but that's not a problem.

For that matter, I'd even say that it can be dangerous to choose cofounders within one's friend circle. It tends to make people more blind to lacks and red flags (for the needs of a tech business) that would clearly be recognized as disqualifying if selecting someone who isn't a friend, on the basis of a focused rational evaluation.

chicken chicken :-( …… (*)

________

(*) edit: chickenshit: I just spent some time putting together a chicken story made of mostly chicken-related unicode emojis, math/logic operators and "chicken", but the hacker news site apparently doesn't really support emojis and removed most of them, thus ruining the story.

So I pasted it here with emojis: https://paste.ee/p/XbUG3

I'd assume it's an attempt to have exclusivity (and thus a shot at exponential growth) instead of targeting slow and stable growth ?

My guess from the context would rather be that they think (rightly or not) that they can do it cheaper themselves or by paying someone else a fixed cost rather than giving out a profit share like the pricing model in the FAQ says:

Our pricing model is based on the principle that we take certain percentage of the total profit our SaaS lets you drive home.

I would love to see shader compilers merged into regular compiler toolchains

they are already using the same compiler infrastructure: pretty much every relevant shader or otherwise GPU oriented compiler out there is based on LLVM. As for the parts of the toolchains that are different: that's simply because GPUs and CPUs are inherently very different.

so that CPU and GPU code can be easily mixed in the same source file

what advantage would it have to mix together into the same source file the code for totally different targets with totally different parallelism models? I find it cleaner and simpler (apart from maybe trivial one-liner shaders that you can embed in a string) to keep them separated. Also makes debugging much easier.

One could put together a phrase where that one would clearly come out when speaking it out, though not (or not as clearly) in written form, e.g.: "Frag mal den Wirt, welche Alkohol-Konzentration s'Lager-Bier hat"

You project some personal conception of "worth" of x as if it was some normative and objective value inherent by essence to each category x would belong to. It's not.

For whatever x, your estimation of the "worth" of x may differ from mine or that of any third person. The estimation of what x (be it a product, a service, or work time for a job) is worth to someone is inherently totally subjective to the eye of the beholder (be they seller or buyer, e.g. employee or employer… or external observer) and situation: The price that you'd be willing to pay out of your pocket for someone else's development work is likely much lower to the price you would ask for you doing the same work.

You're free to set your personal subjective estimation of what your work time is worth at, say, a gazillion dollars p.a. For whatever reasons, justified or not to others. Doesn't change the fact that it may or may not not be subjectively "worth" that much to people who are in principle interested in buying that work (though not necessarily at that price). For whatever reasons of their own.

There is no such thing as an inherent objective "worth", only subjective "worth" in the eye of each subjective beholder. All of that is totally subjective.

Objectivity of "worth" only exists in the purely observative statistical sense: In particular, "market worth" is simply the term for the value at which statistically two sides (each with their own subjective "worth" estimation) mutually consenting to the transaction find together.

First of all, that line you quote isn't from me.

Then: Ugly as that Google thing was, its intent and effect was to prevent competition ("poaching") by a handful of big competitors. Ugly, sure, but that only represented a small fraction of the tech industry. Equating these "Google et al" of that context with the job market of the tech industry is just absurd. That being said, de-facto-cartel behavior like that on the employer side or like unions on the employee side do make the job market somewhat less of a free market.

What people are worth and what they can get paid are not synonymous.

Aside from the fact that - again - there was no mention of "worth" in my comment, that sounds like you being triggered at the colloquial shortened use of "someone's worth" for what a person can get paid on the job market, because you conflate that by equivocation with some philosophical, emotional or moral notion of personal "worth" (all of which are subjective btw) and feel indignation at the projected idea that those two totally different things would be equal for some people. Well guess what: they aren't. The job market is not at all about what people are "worth" in those senses but only about what "market worth" not they as persons but their work time has, i.e. for what value they can expect to find someone else who will be consenting to give their money in exchange for that work time.

I avoid the term "worth" for precisely that reason: that it tends to trigger by equivocation and thus sidetrack from the rational economic background of the link between individual salaries and the job market, when in reality nobody is arguing that the "market worth" of the work someone is selling would be equal to the (philosophical, societal, or whatever other, let alone financial) "worth" of that person themself. While the former is sometimes colloquially shortened to "someone's market worth", the job market is not about the "worth" of people but about the level at which, statistically, they sell their work time i.e. at which they find someone who consents to pay that much for it.

The job market is not our god

Thank the FSM it isn't. But then again, a god is not what determines the price of any given type of work. That would be not a god but… salary negotiations (at the individual level) and more generally the job market (in the larger statistical view)

Life is not some kind of economic art project.

Neither are salaries. Nothing artsy about them. Instead, they are simply determined by the level at which two sides find together in agreement to the exchange of work against money for a price they mutually agree upon. "Job Market" is just the word for the statistical view across all individual such transactions.

small specialized forum sites (like they were the norm in the days before big centralized social media) - much as I too prefer them to big centralized social networks - do have some big pain points though that are why they lost web share to big social media: isolation from other communities and user account/authentication.

In absence of an easy distributed authentication standard that just works everywhere without relying on centralized big social media accounts, what it really boils down to for the user is: the ugly need to register separately for each of these small specialized forum sites… and they all want to collect data e.g. email address. I've often found myself in the situation of thinking "nah, not worth it."

The fact that many such forums try to force casual passers-by to join with restrictions like "access to documents/images/files/whatever is restricted to registered users" only makes it worse. Makes me hate the site right away and even less likely to want to join.

In comparison, a centralized solution like reddit has the advantage that it lowers the barrier to joining and participating. Of course, that can in theory also be done in a non-centralized way, e.g. federated. But that comes with quite a set of other problems, some of which the article already mentioned for the mastodon case, both for the instance operators and for the users. And federation is much less common among small forum sites for auth than among mastodon/fediverse instances.

Who let the hogs out? - oink, oink, oink, oink - Who let the hogs out?

Why are they called 'feral hogs' in America?

because they are domestic pigs gone feral, plus a minority of boar-pig hybrids resulting from the contact with wild boar.

This is the original wild species of pigs (…) I think wild boar would be better

Feral hogs are not the same thing as wild boar. The latter are the ancestor species from which pigs descended, whereas the former are domestic pigs gone feral plus a minority of hybrids. Western wild boar have a chromosome count of 2n = 36, whereas pigs (including the majority of feral hogs that aren't hybrids) have a chromosome count of 2n = 38. Hybrids typically have 37 or 38 chromosomes.

We also don't call wolves 'feral dogs,'

… because they aren't, just like wild boar aren't feral hogs. Wolves aren't domestic dogs who went feral but just wolves who stayed wolves. So the equivalent of the wolf in the porcine world would be the wild boar, not the feral hog, of which the equivalent in the canine world is… a feral dog.

fun fact: Thermidor - after which Sauce Thermidor and derived dishes like Lobster Themidor are named, is a month in the French Republican Calendar, specifically: the second month of summer, going approx. from mid-July to mid-August.

Nah, I'm not pretending anything of the likes in any way. In fact, the overwhelming majority of apps aren't cross-platform at all, so that's really the norm, not cross-platform frameworks.

All I'm saying is that unlike the native platform-specific frameworks (which are limited to the respective platform, but which the platform vendors make available free of charge under terms favorable to commercial app development), there no cross-platform frameworks that are simultaneously good and not encumbered by totally grabastically shite licensing/pricing terms, thus naturally leading to a wide majority of application developers either going platform-specific… and a large part of the rest (i.e. those who still want to do cross-platform) going with the ugly embedded browser solution (electron and the likes).

The browser-based approach, ugly as it is, happens to unfortunately be the only cross platform solution that is not encumbered by shitty app-developer-unfriendly licensing/pricing terms. Make a good, feature-rich and comprehensive cross-platform UI framework that is suitable both for desktop and mobile applications available under a nice permissive open-source license and you'll see lots of app developers use your framework instead of reluctantly using that browser shite (electron and such).

The dilemma is: who's paying for the development? A good feature-rich comprehensive UI framework is an enormous effort (both upfront and ongoing), and recouping that enormous cost is far from obvious unless falling into one of these categories:

* Platform-specific (i.e. not cross-platform): framework development financed by big platform vendor who makes framework available for free but platform-specific, in order to push their platform and make their money with the latter

* browser based frameworks: framework development cost greatly reduced by re-using a pre-existing browser engine developed by some big player who finances browser engine development because they have a commercial interest in pushing their browser

* Choosing a license that makes the financing of the framework possible by making the app developers pay mucho money… but then it will naturally be avoided by most app developers, especially given the existence of free alternatives (which may have other disadvantages, but those are orthogonal to that problem)

* A big player subsidizing the development cost by some cross-financing from money made otherwise: that has happened for some open source software and libs in other domains, but not for a good cross-platform UI framework so far unfortunately.

I hate embedded browser UIs like electron stuff as much as you do, but you're pointing your blaming finger in the wrong direction:

What do you expect application developers to do in absence of a natively compiling cross-platform GUI lib that is both good and with a nice licensing terms (e.g. a permissive open source license)? To put their application development on ice so as to develop that (which is a huge task in itself)?

If you want this situation to change and shitty browser-based UI to not be the go-to solution (for lack of a better cross-platform alternative for application developers), then feel free to go ahead and develop a native-compiling cross-platform GUI lib that plays in the same league as Qt, and make it available under a permissive open source license (unlike Qt).

The Widgets are easier to work with for pure desktop apps… but they are limited to that purpose. Qt Quick and QML are better for pretty much any application use case that isn't the classic desktop. Especially any form of app for mobile or embedded devices.

Holding the money in escrow […] some jurisdictions prohibit it

Which juridictions?

are there openly available models that are similar for the output i.e. generating speech or singing with a voice set by a given sample, but that instead of a text prompt input would take a speech or singing input and take pitch change and intonation cues from that to generate an output that generally follows those pitch and intonation changes but adapted to the different voice and diction of the provided sample? for example:

* provided voice sample: some clean voice samples from Homer Simpson

* provided prompt: audio sample of the "gunnery sergeant Hartman" monologue from "Full Metal Jacket": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tHxf17yJsKs

* result: that same monologue but spoken out in the voice of Homer Simpson, but otherwise following the dynamic of the prompt sample i.e. shouting, changing pitch or speed pretty much at the same times as gunnery sergeant Hartman does?

Nice, but unfortunately (for people outside the US) very narrowly centered on the US market… as the "American Edition" in the title already points to. Which makes me wonder: Is there also a European edition?

given the fact that the demographics of home/real estate ownership by age group are very much biased in favor of the elderly, one could say that indeed such a proposal featured here on hn just recently: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35588997

poor regional planning forcing everyone into the cities

could you please elaborate on that? What kind of poor planning and in what ways did it force people into the cities?

This makes zero sense to me. By what logic would a salary paid this fiscal year (be it for R&D or any other activity, I don't see why there would be any difference there) not be a simple expense to be fully deducted from the revenue in the calculation of the profit for this same fiscal year?

Kinda refreshing - within the ever growing genre of stories about Heroku's downfall into junk status - to find such an article with a higher level of detail and analysis of the origins of the problem.

There's one thing that somewhat surprised me though: this line:

"In 2018 Heroku was pretty much the only option for a newbie like me to get started with web-development"

Was it? Really? I mean, I'm not saying the author did anything wrong in choosing Heroku at the time (after all, who could have known back then what a dumpster fire Heroku would turn out to be), and the commercial success Heroku achieved before going down the gutter shows that it must have had some good reasons going for it, at least on paper before the users are confronted with problems that make them judge the situation differently…

… but I don't really get where that "pretty much the only option" vibe would come from. Maybe It's just me having completely different selection criteria, but from my perspective, there were lots of other options to "get started with web-development" and Heroku was just one among many. I don't see at all by what measure Heroku would have seemed like "pretty much the only option"?

Son-of-BLIP

maybe even add an "a" for extra spice: Son-of-a-BLIP

If the criterion is to go with what's the most apt fit for the company, then "closedai.com" would be even better, and as a bonus it would probably be even cheaper… (even if they have enough money for a more expensive domain)

Maybe you're just holding it wrong: You're not supposed to let your LLM rest or chat idly while you do the webdev stuff yourself, but to make your LLM do the webdev stuff for you ;P

all the more proof that AI has reached the point where it can replace most web dev. You get what you train for ;P

reminds me of this saying, in different variations, attributed to Aristotle: "He who has many friends has no friends".

that would explain how it came to the Brexit mess.