Hacker News Reader

alephxyzon Unity to lay off 8% of its workforce

And they still have a ton of job openings (in Canada at least)

alephxyzon Speed Is All You Need: On-Device Acceleration of Large Diffusion Models

Enjoy https://arxiv.org/search/?searchtype=title&query=%22is+all+y...

alephxyzon Automakers are starting to admit that drivers hate touchscreens

It's not just you. Most touch screens will have some sort of feedback (visual, tactile or auditory) to let you know when you've pressed a button. Those touch buttons on screens and monitors don't.

alephxyzon Snapchat sees spike in 1-star reviews as users pan the ‘My AI’ feature

Or perhaps because it was poorly implemented and made it harder for customers to know what their total would be before reaching the cash register.

alephxyzon Gradients are not all you need

You forgot to toss in a few "state-of-the-art"

alephxyzon Rear-wheel-drive cars are back and we have EVs to thank

Ironically the law pretty much everywhere in north America mandates that bikes have at least a rear brake.

alephxyzon Apollo dev explains how third-party Reddit apps are affected by API changes

Maybe they want to stop NSFW content creators using post scheduling apps to post their content on dozens of subreddits at once.

alephxyzon Monolith: The Recommendation System Behind TikTok

iOS will display an orange/green indicator in the status bar that you can press on to see which apps are currently using your microphone/camera.

alephxyzon What are transformer models and how do they work?

I'm mostly working on fairly simple image segmentation tasks but in my experience just replacing convolutional layers with attention layers + position embeddings works well. Using convolutional embeddings before the transformer encoder also helps.

It still take a lot more epochs to train though, so you might have to decrease the learning rate of your discriminator by a lot.

alephxyzon Canada is seeing violent crime like never before. What's behind the crime wave

That link only has data until 2013. Violent crimes start trending up after 2014: https://www150.statcan.gc.ca/n1/pub/85-005-x/2022001/article...

alephxyzon Andreessen Horowitz is now openly courting capital from Saudi Arabia

Their Vision Fund got 45 billion from the Saudi sovereign wealth fund and 15 billion from the Emirati sovereign fund (out of $100 billion raised).

alephxyzon Samsung's AI photo feature adds creepy teeth to baby photos

You're right and OC is wrong. My Nexus 5 from 2013 could take decent single exposure night sky photos (after post processing the RAW images). The Google camera now just automates most of the manual work (adjusting exposure/sensitivity, stabilizing, aligning and stacking multiple images, post processing) see https://ai.googleblog.com/2019/11/astrophotography-with-nigh...

I'm sure the iPhone is just as capable

alephxyzon Ask HN: AI-generated spam pull requests?

Hacktoberfest should be interesting this year

alephxyzon Can AI-Generated Text Be Reliably Detected?

Only if your detection system is "perfect". Personally I'd be fine with something with high precision and low recall, even if it means forcing users to rewrite their content to make it less AI-like (like /r9k/ on steroids).

alephxyzon PyTorch 2.0

FYI the libmamba solver released last year is way faster than the classic one at modifying environments.

alephxyzon Giving the finger is a ‘God-given right’, Canadian judge rules

Looks like the cops did the right thing there :

>In his testimony, Naccache simply says that the police treated it like a neighbourly dispute and accordingly declined to press the matter further. They were “not keen of processing a harassment complaint”.[11] However, he conveniently omits mentioning what he noted in his written log.

>The log reveals that, to his dismay, the police officer informed him that his brother Ari could have been charged with assault and his father Frank could have been ticketed for driving dangerously. In his notes, Naccache took the officer’s warning as a “threat”. He also complained that the officers did nothing about Mr. Epstein not wearing a COVID mask… outdoors.

alephxyzon Universal Speech Model (USM): State-of-the-art speech AI for 100 languages

This is the 102 language dataset they used for evaluation: https://huggingface.co/datasets/google/xtreme_s

alephxyzon Infinite-Storage-Glitch – Use YouTube as cloud storage for any files

Someone also posted a similar project here a few months back: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31495049

alephxyzon Was the $5B that VCs plugged into escooters worth it?

Bixi isn't subsidized anymore (and I don't think they have been since they went private in 2014). They even got acquired by Lyft last year.

Edit: I was thinking of their international division. Looks like the Montreal network is still run by the city of Montreal.

alephxyzon ‘Sam? Are you there? ’ The bizarre and brutal final hours of FTX

Can you imagine if Bernie Madoff had told the attorney general that he just needed a few more weeks to find new investors in order to make his customers whole.

SBF comes off as an extremely naive and sheltered kid who doesn't understand that committing fraud is still fraud even if you have good intentions.

alephxyzon Airspace over Lake Michigan restricted due to national defense

In WWI the UK developed AA rounds to shoot down zeppelins and balloons. They were basically tracer rounds with a bigger incendiary charge that ignited when fired and set the skin and hydrogen of balloons on fire.

Modern incendiary and explosive rounds fired by fighter jets aren't effective against them becayse they are only triggered by their impact against a hard target, but I'm sure the DoD could come up with a more effective version pretty quickly if it came down to that.

alephxyzon AI Joins Hunt for ET: Study Finds 8 Potential Alien Signals

(spoilers) In the final chapter, the merged AI tells Case it found transmissions from "others" in the Centauri system.

alephxyzon Why would a 21st century warplane shoot a balloon with a missile?

Satellites have to be placed in orbit by definition. To be in orbit at 20km of altitude you'd need to be flying at over 7km/s, so balloons can't argued to be satellites.

alephxyzon John Carmack’s ‘Different Path’ to Artificial General Intelligence

Try asking @ilyasut directly

alephxyzon Open source implementation of Google's MusicLM in PyTorch

Seems to be an early WIP.

alephxyzon SQL should be the default choice for data transformation logic

I've worked with many data scientists whose typical SQL usage was to load entire rows (or with simple 'with' filtering) into Pandas / R dataframes and then do all their work there. I think it's a combination of Pandas and R having much simpler APIs and a ton of documentation on Stack Overflow, and modern hardware just being so good that you can load a big enough chunk of your dataset in-memory on a laptop.

alephxyzon Yann LeCun: ChatGPT is 'not particularly innovative'

He's pulling a Schmidhuber.

alephxyzon Bankrupt crypto lender Celsius allegedly defrauded investors out of billions

Lying to your investors is fraud (look up the NY Martin act) and the evidence against the CEO is damning. https://ag.ny.gov/sites/default/files/mashinsky_complaint.pd...

alephxyzon Ask HN: Anyone else regret leaving an old job for a new one?

Make a list of things you miss about your old employer so you know what to ask about in future job interviews.

alephxyzon Ask HN: Who wants to be hired? (January 2023)

  Location: Montreal, Canada

  Remote: Preferably (2 years of remote work experience)

  Willing to relocate: No

  Technologies: Python, Golang, SQL, JavaScript, Node, Bash, most ML/AI frameworks.

  Résumé/CV: available on demand

  Email: machinus.artifex@outlook.com

  Versatile software developer with 5 years of experience. Looking for small and medium sized companies with interesting problems to solve. 

  Looking for a part time role, and available full time starting Q3 2023.