aleem

It mostly boils down to this: delight customers and iterate as fast as you can.

This is maybe the second phase after AWS found a fit and built a consumer base? Once I am in the housing market, I have a need for everything (mortgage, building contractor, construction materials, designer, hardware and accessories, upholstery, decor, etc).

My entry to AWS started with EC2 in the very early days because it of its commodity nature (any size and shape, for however long, with per-minute billing) and instant availability. The elastic nature solved scale. A lot of people didn't move to RDS until later but it was inevitable.

Everything else followed on from there, cross-sells and up-sells for reliability and convenience were always a click away for captive consumers who were already onboarded.

The only thing that didn't sit well with a lot of people about the leaked memo is that it ignored the quality of GPT4 vs GPT3 and made claims that all LLMs were poised to be on par, yet that isn't true till now.

What it also ignored (along with some of the comments here) is data ranking. Google didn't just build a search engine by crawling more of the web -- many search engines before it had already done that. Google managed to rank what's relevant and what isn't. Relevancy is hard. Similarly, not all scientific publications are ranked equally. Or for that matter, even publications with a lot of peer reviews or citations can become obsolete through new discoveries.

Reddit's data has value in that it can fill in a lot of the gaps left by more qualitative sources and furthermore the data is user-ranked by a trusted community. This also has implications for specialised querying, for example training on just r/fitness could be fairly useful for that community.

As a side note, other valuable data stores are not just text but voice/video as well. YouTube and podcast transcripts are readily available, for example to Google. Data and ranking is valuable all over again.

The video demonstration of the coding is worth a watch: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UCo7YeTy-aE

Most likely, just as happened with Stable Diffusion, a community of models will emerge. You could use a pre-trained model for writing chrome extensions, or a model for writing material UI using tailwindCSS, or a very specific model for writing 2d games for Android.

Since a lot of this is trial-error, improving on each iteration the feedback loop (compile, deploy, run, etc) will matter a lot more. Real-time development workflows like React should be interesting at the least. Exciting stuff, truly.

They need to take this and similar AI and come up with better dubbing for movies in other languages. Netflix should really lead the way here with the amount of dubbed content that they currently possess.

A bit late but I have a problem with whichever icon search sites I've come across: it's hard to find a set.

For example if I search Facebook, I get dozens of icons. Now how do I find the same style of icons for Twitter, etc. If you can fix that, it'll truly make you awesome.

Three worst addictions: Heroine, Carbohydrates and a monthly salary - Nassim Taleb

It's more common for people who are in-between jobs to take things that would be otherwise compromise their monthly salary income. It's less common for someone to quit a high paying job and take on a risky endeavour.

Relatedly, the Tarzan strategy is another way to mitigate this risk (side projects or finding your next gig before just quitting the current), etc. Called Tarzan because you hang on to the next rope before letting go of the current one.

Point this thing at the stock market and see how that game plays out.

On what should you be:

This guy has gone to the zoo and interviewed all the animals. The tiger says that the secret to success is to live alone, be well disguised, have sharp claws and know how to stalk. The snail says that the secret is to live inside a solid shell, stay small, hide under dead trees and move slowly around at night. The parrot says that success lies in eating fruit, being alert, packing light, moving fast by air when necessary, and always sticking by your friends. His conclusion: These animals are giving contradictory advice! And that's because they're all "outliers".

But both of these points are subtly misleading. Yes, the advice is contradictory, but that's only a problem if you imagine that the animal kingdom is like a giant arena in which all the world's animals battle for the Animal Best Practices championship [1], after which all the losing animals will go extinct and the entire world will adopt the winning ways of the One True Best Animal. But, in fact, there are a hell of a lot of different ways to be a successful animal, and they coexist nicely. Indeed, they form an ecosystem in which all animals require other, much different animals to exist.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=469831#up_469940

The problem, as with all things in Karachi, is systemic.

It results from lack of ownership which makes accountability hard (politicized institutions with diverging agendas). During these rains, an entire township (Naya Nazimabad) sank underwater and many areas are still waterlogged. This township was built on top of a low-lying lake that was reclaimed. The approval of such projects involves dozens of authorities, each of whom charges an "expediency fees" and corruption is deep rooted within them. An officer who comes in for a 2-4 year tenure on low government salaries is incentivized to maximize his earnings during his short tenure.

The second is the lack of engineering involvement. The government sector doesn't exactly attract the top talent at good salaries. The tenders on the other hand are awarded based on nepotism and personal gain. There is a long list of botched projects in the civil sector. None of the desalination and water treatments plants are operational, in the entire city, for example. They have not been for years now.

The sewerage infrastructure in many parts of the city, as exists right now, is worse than the French sewers built in the 14th century[1]. These sewers are open-top and become dumping grounds for garbage due to lack of a garbage collection infrastructure. The encroachments around and above these sewers fall victim to Tragedy of Commons[2]. The whole thing is a mess with no easy solution and if this years' heavy rainfalls become a future trend, the situation will be unsustainable. Many homes were waterlogged for days and weeks with no power or connectivity (cell towers have around 24-48 hours of standby power after which they went down).

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paris_sewers [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tragedy_of_the_commons

Sometimes it's better to seek forgiveness than to seek permission.

Saturday 3AM shift with a 5 minute downtime would work just as wwll. Unless this server has had historically 100% uptime this would go unnoticed.

Nowhere does it mention "usage data".

Services revenue in general is where all devices are going. If you subscribe to Netflix on your smart TV, the TV maker gets comms. Again, this referral/conversion model is pretty dated. Otherwise TV maker has no incentive to pre-bundle your app (same as Windows, some Android phones, Lenovo laptops, etc).

This is probably the desired effect that Dropbox wanted. There is little reason to remove the symlink feature that worked perfectly well - it is a strategic move at best.

Reversing the symlinks means Dropbox becomes the source of truth and the dependency on Dropbox increases.

Personally, I used this to easily backup my Downloads and Documents.

They just broke all clients using this feature.

Similar story, 2 keyboard-only replacements and one main logic board + keyboard replacement on a MacBook 12". A week ago it failed again and I'm nowhere near an Apple store so gotta wait it out. It's been about 2 years.l since I bought it for my wife who uses it for light browsing.

I bought a brand new Pro 2019 model but haven't opened it yet and hoping to resell it since Hong Kong doesn't do returns -- where it was purchased. It's keyboard was already listed in the replacement program, even before I bought it. My current Air is 6 years old and chugging along (i7 1.6Ghz with 3.1Ghz boost). The new MBP won't last beyond 4 (Apple support expiry on keyboard replacement).

Not sure how a minor membrane change can help alleviate the keyboard issues. CPU throttling is another known issue. Best to wait it out for the new Air with scissor keys due up later this year.

Apple has squandered a lot of its goodwill. It reminds me of my relationship with Microsoft products. As long as they were shipping, they were making money in the short term because people were coerced to buy in.

For 5 damn years the Air didn't get a Retina display. Right now, I can't buy 2.8Ghz Macbook Pro unless I get the TouchBar. I can't buy an Air unless I settle for much lower specs.

The dongles and USB-C are a mess. The 2-meters-at-most charging cables are a downgrade which will mean shorter battery life due to lesser plugging in. The lack of Magsafe is a downgrade, they removed a feature. The lack of any port variety which my 2013 Macbook Air did exceedingly well is a major downgrade. Consumers must carry a variety of dongles because the laptops don't offer a variety of ports.

Profits are fine as long as they don't lead to perverse behavior. Apple needs to stop playing these fucking games and ship some pragmatism.

The Apple of Cook is reminiscent of the Microsoft of Ballmer. He is totally out of touch with the product -- the very thing that Jobs inculcated.

If a single regex can take down the Internet for a half hour, that's definitely not good -- for a class of errors that can be easily prevented, tested, etc.

The timing is unfortunate too, after calling out Verizon for lack of due process and negligence.

I'm sure they have an undo or rollback for deployments but probably worth investing into further.

They also need to resolve the catch-22 where people could not login and disable CloudFlare proxy ("orange cloud") since cloudflare.com itself was down.

Privacy centric messaging apps like Signal don't work either and that's a real shame because the iPod touch is inherently more secure than the iPhone.

­ support has been around for at least a decade and it can be done server side with any logic.

It's probably not needed today but when I first used it the logic was along the lines of adding it at the 5th 7th 9th characters provided there were at least 4 more characters after each ­ or some such while being wary of hanging the last word etc.

It's a soft hyphen meaning the browser will break if needed otherwise ignore it. It's an HTML feature rather than a CSS one which also has implications.

From a comment I had left on a related thread,

Though very uncanny, this is rather easy to extrapolate even using the basic facets FB has available. But the most overlooked is photos. They are offline beacons and are to offline tracking what websites are to online tracking. For example you and a group of 10 other people took photos at the same location which FB sees as a small gathering of intimate friends. It will need to qualify the location is not a public restaurant to be sure its an intimate gathering. The chances of you connecting with that person are then really high. And if you are and the other person are in each others photos, then it's almost a certainty you will end up connecting on FB should FB recommend the connection. The more connected FB's network is, the more it can extrapolate based on commonalities from the first degree graph of your network. It's also the reason why Google is betting so heavy on photos and offering free unlimited storage -- remember, there's no such thing as a free lunch. Google wants to build a social network graph based on location and facial recognition to draw on proximity. With AI this will get even more uncanny. For example a wedding will have a certain photography profile (number of pics taken, the time of day, the location and venue based on Google Maps or past photographing histroy, the lighting in the photos, etc). Once you throw AI into the mix you realize Google doesn't need to draw out any conclusions. It can throw all these parameters into the AI engine and draw up proximity. In this case, Google or FB will not be able to tell you how they drew the connection, because even they won't know. All you can assume is the AI engine will take dozens of parameters today and hundreds tomorrow. Google's deep investment in AI infrastructure is a bigger testament to this.

It no longer exists in sheets either. Definitely miss this.

Displacing millions of dollars with DJI drones + CV... can’t wait to see what’s more in store.

Can hi-res cameras mitigate the need for close-proximity fly-bys?

Are there any companies doing home security drones? Like circling the property routinely, auto docking to recharge, reporting human thermals around the perimeter etc. Maybe even neighbourhood-watch, crime-fighting drone fleets in the near future

So much potential, can’t wait for it to unleash.

Compunode | Senior Engineer, VP Sales & Marketing | Remote | Competitive Salary + Equity

We are turnkey publishing platform company catering to newspapers and magazines in digital publishing in the Pan Asia region and looking to expand sales and engineering. We are setup out of Dubai.

- Engineer: We have openings for multiple developers. Our technologies and skills include: PHP / Laravel / JavaScript / ORM / AWS / React / Docker / Git / Bootstrap. Of these PHP & JS are mandatory.

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Please mention HN and email: topcoder (at) compunode (dot) com

I have a few things that have been bothering me forever.

Push Notifications Prompts break the back button. Many times I hit a search result on Google, find the page is irrelevant but I can't go back. That's because the page has prompted a push notification. I can't scroll either. It blocks the whole UI. That's very disruptive.

Second, while Postman is wonderful, Chrome's network tab is the super convenient. A very small change to allow replay requests to work via a keyboard shortcut would make a significant impact on the dev cycle. The use-case is to modify the server code then replay the request, rinse, repeat. The alternative is to copy-as-curl or proxy via postman, etc.

The headline is definitely sensationalist but there are threats and missed opportunities on Intel's horizon and past.

The lure of mobile is the upgrade cycle as those are much shorter. The same, short upgrade cycles were a boon for intel in the hey day of desktops/laptops.

The bigger threat the article fails to focus on is ARM. Singularity for apps has always hinged on write-once-run-everywhere. Intel hasn't been able to compete with ARM lately and it seems that ARM is moving into Intel's turf. A few months back Microsoft launched windows 10 on ARM -- that's an inflection point. Apple relatively recent iPad Pro also continues to blur the lines along with other initiatives around app continuity (Mac/iOS) or the Nintendo Switch's hardware continuity that offers a glimpse into what the same thing could look like for mobile in general.

It's not for Intel's lack of trying either. It's just that ARM got off to a good start while Intel failed to make in-roads with Atom and whatever else.

I recently got the Jimu MeeBot Kit [1] for my kids which sells via apple.com and costs $130. Two weeks later the Lego Boost launched on Aug 1, priced at $160 [2].

The difference between the two kits is night and day. Lego is leap years ahead in build quality, the app experience, programability and flexibility. It can fire a dart, has vision+color sensor, has a touch sensor and a servo motor. It support 5 different models including a guitar, robot, cat and so forth.

The Jimu MeeBot by contrast comes with 6 servos but no sensors and the build quality is fairly poor compared to the lego. There is little else to build with it.

However, Lego has done a poor job marketing the Boost. No one really knew about the Lego Boost launch, there was no one at the stores on launch day to get one -- it was a complete non-event. The product page for the Boost is a cookie cutter page. This is their biggest category launch in a long time -- electronic, programmable kit for kids with a new app to go with it -- and they failed have a dedicated product page with all the cool stuff it can do.

With all the rage around STEM learning and iOS apps, it's a shame to see the work force suffer for lack of marketing and awareness.

I have been through a couple of stem toys including the OSMO which I really love. Lego could give all of these segments a pretty good run but they just aren't getting their message out there.

[1] https://jimurobots.com/product/meebot-kit/ [2] https://shop.lego.com/en-US/BOOST-Creative-Toolbox-17101

Awesome stuff! Had a lot of questions hope you don't mind am father to a few boys who love legos and have just gotten into logic gaming.

How long have you been programming?

What was your early exposure like? Which language tools, legos, games, etc?

Did you have a mentor or self learning? Anyone else in your family programs?

Does academia suffer as a consequence? (It did for me)

I was self taught at 13 (GWBasic on a Commodore PC10) but had very little mentoring and no internet access which limited my trajectory.

I thought that was fairly obvious.

As per the author's aritcle it is definitely not a direct connection. FB relies heavily on first-degree connection analysis. If you and I end up in the same phonebook (which the author mentions) or the same photograph and FB connects us, we'll never know why. The not knowing why part makes it uncanny.

Facebook is to people what Google is to websites. It is in the business of enriching its social graph in every way possible and then running profiling algorithms on that graph. Google by contrast crawls and pageranks the crawled graph.

FB has literally hundreds of data sources to enrich their social graph and profile data.

A good start is their list of acquisitions [1] in the space of offline applications, social networking aggregators, contact importers, photo management, private conversations, travel recommendations, check-ins/status updates, etc.

Then consider the FB partnerships with ride hailing services, retail apps, music apps, etc.

Then consider it's own apps and features around events, calendering, photos and instant messaging.

Also consider the state of technology in NLP, AI and image recognition.

Also consider the FB integrations with tens of thousands of apps for social auth, share buttons and advertising.

Writing this post, I have surprised even myself as to how much data they have access to.

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

Though very uncanny, this is rather easy to extrapolate even using the basic facets FB has available. But the most overlooked is photos. They are offline beacons and are to offline tracking what websites are to online tracking.

For example you and a group of 10 other people took photos at the same location which FB sees as a small gathering of intimate friends. It will need to qualify the location is not a public restaurant to be sure its an intimate gathering. The chances of you connecting with that person are then really high. And if you are and the other person are in each others photos, then it's almost a certainty you will end up connecting on FB should FB recommend the connection. The more connected FB's network is, the more it can extrapolate based on commonalities from the first degree graph of your network.

It's also the reason why Google is betting so heavy on photos and offering free unlimited storage -- remember, there's no such thing as a free lunch. Google wants to build a social network graph based on location and facial recognition to draw on proximity.

With AI this will get even more uncanny. For example a wedding will have a certain photography profile (number of pics taken, the time of day, the location and venue based on Google Maps or past photographing histroy, the lighting in the photos, etc). Once you throw AI into the mix you realize Google doesn't need to draw out any conclusions. It can throw all these parameters into the AI engine and draw up proximity.

In this case, Google or FB will not be able to tell you how they drew the connection, because even they won't know. All you can assume is the AI engine will take dozens of parameters today and hundreds tomorrow. Google's deep investment in AI infrastructure is a bigger testament to this.

The simplest and most effective trick is to have a link that is not visible to humans but only to crawlers. When an IP ends up on that link you know it's a crawler. You can then proceed to block it. A honeypot in other words.

Typically display none will do but you can also have white on white text with no tabindex or off screen absolute positioning, etc.

Amazon for example values market share above all else, re-investing all it's earnings back into infrastructure and expansion. Google/Android also valued market share. Apple valued profitability.

This has meant that Android has something like 2bn daily actives vs Apple's 700mn across devices. Apple's profits are mostly sitting in cash -- a pretty poor use of capital. And it's a lot of cash, some 250bn of it. It's ridiculous and the opposite of Amazon's strategy. Especially if Apple intends to move to services, it only makes sense to have more active subscribers.

Furthermore, hardware monetisation is upfront but services revenue is recurring (user lock-in, inertia to switch, better forecasting, etc).

Supposing Apple had 1.5bn active devices, their services revenue would be considerable higher than the current 7bn quarterly recurring. That would surpass hardware profits in the long run and Apple wouldn't sit on idle cash.

As the market starts to saturate, customer acquisition becomes costlier. A good example of this is AOL Internet when they were printing so many free Internet CDs (for giveaways) that they took up 70% of the world's CD production capacity. Their rationale was that acquiring customers would never be this cheap again (Microsoft and others were entering into broadband). So if they acquired the customers for cheap today, they could monetise them much more easily (the LTV was considerably favourable in terms of SAC).

It's hard to say what could have been. But what's certain is that Apple is less of a hardware company now and more of a services company as is clearly apparent now from their earnings reports.

At a time when Facebook, Amazon and Google are all vying for market share, Apple seems to take pride in hoarding cash through profits. You have to wonder if it's the right strategy.

This is a short term strategy at best.

Apple generates 7bn from services with 700mn active phones. Without "planned obsolescence" the 700mn number would be much higher as would services revenue.

Edit: services is iTunes, music, App Store, iCloud, etc. 7bn for comparison is bigger than Netflix (2.5bn) and aws (3.5bn)