Hacker News Reader

bjornlouseron China has moved people -“border guardians”- to new settlements on its frontiers

"Working with the artificial intelligence company RAIC Labs, which scanned satellite images of China's entire land border captured by Planet Labs, The Times identified the locations of new villages and checked them against historical images, state media, social media posts and public records.

The mapping reveals that China has put at least one village near every accessible Himalayan pass that borders India, as well as on most of the passes bordering Bhutan and Nepal... "

bjornlouseron Another AI company wrote us and here’s our response

"film and video game industries..."

Oh I thought they were talking about silly web comics and random art on the internet that was 'stolen'. Film and game industries of course embrace all types of tech to make money (didn't Disney use generative AI for the opening sequence of a Marvel series last year?)

bjornlouseron Another AI company wrote us and here’s our response

"[Artists] would much rather be properly compensated for their work..."

'Properly compensated'... determined by the market, right? That's being driven close to $0, just like with software (and was headed that direction before the recent AI craze).

"Artists would much rather... focus more on fulfilling creative tasks."

Like the two penis jokes shown on that site? Incredible.

bjornlouseron The Right Kind of Stubborn

"The persistent are attached to the goal. The obstinate are attached to their ideas about how to reach it. Worse still, that means they'll tend to be attached to their first ideas..."

So obstinate people expect the desired outcome to depend on their expertise at some point(s) in the past. Is the difference between the two just humility?

bjornlouseron Tracing the hidden hand of magnetism in the galaxy

I was struck by the number of oddly posed photos as well. The choice seems consistent across all their Q&A interviews. https://www.quantamagazine.org/tag/qa/

A clue about the styling can be found on their 'About' page: "Our work often resembles journalistic alchemy — we mash together the complexities of science with the malleable art of storytelling in an attempt to forge a precious new alloy. It can be a mind-bending enterprise, but we relish the challenge."

bjornlouseron Apple won't roll out AI tech in EU market over regulatory concerns

"In a longer time frame, pushback is healthy for stability"

Yes, thank god for the adults in the room giving us our cookie prompts... such foresight!

bjornlouseron Napoleon's Traveling Libraries

"... Louis Sarkozy is a Franco-American writer. After having been raised in France, he moved to the United States and graduated from Valley Forge Military Academy and College... " [1]

and

"... He is currently applying to the United States Army's Officer Candidate School, where he hopes to start a career as an Army officer..." [2]

Makes it seem like he is preparing to be the next Lafayette in case China invades the USA.

[1] https://www.louissarkozy.org/about-1 [2] https://www.thefrenchhistorypodcast.com/napoleons-library-wi...

bjornlouseron McDonald's Loses 'Big Mac' Trademark in European Union

Got curious about their 'Mighty Mac':

https://api.supermacs.ie//uploads/628d16681e300/medium-628d1...

Two 'Irish Beef' patties with 'Burger Sauce'. Plus you can get curry fries, nice.

bjornlouseron Book people think they know why 9-year-olds stop reading for fun

You've probably already seen these, but just in case:

https://www.mangaclassics.com

bjornlouseron Ask HN: Good sources of math exercises for ~10-17 y/o?

> You only get involved if they are really slow

Was a reasonable approach in the previous century. Not clear that it will be enough these days...

bjornlouseron What's Going on with ‘Nonplussed’? (2017)

what about 'moot'. Do Brits screw that up like Americans? 'moot point'

bjornlouseron GPT-4 Vision Can Estimate Building Age Epoch

"In this study, a training-free classifier based on GPT-4 Vision has been developed to estimate building age epochs from facade images... Based on the analysis of MAE of only 0.85 decade and special confusion matrices, we found that most of the age epochs can be predicted successfully but only approximately, which means they are predicted to be in adjacent but not far off age epochs."

bjornlouseron Your LLM Is a Capable Regressor When Given In-Context Examples

‘We provide a total of 50 tuples… and then ask the model to generate y51, corresponding to x51…’

I wonder if testing a single point is masking a larger llm error.

bjornlouseron How Arnold Schoenberg changed Hollywood

https://youtu.be/N8mI6MvsWZA?si=vf6L1AC_Y4vRZBXg&t=1080

Also, Hanson's 2nd Symphony, 3rd Movement: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=abKXHeG0u6I&t=1267s

bjornlouseron Apple terminates Epic Games developer account, calling it a 'threat' to iOS

Je suis Sweeney!

-- sent from my iPhone

bjornlouseron Apple hit with over 1.8B euro EU antitrust fine in Spotify case

"That should not be too difficult to understand."

Also not difficult to understand Brexit.

bjornlouseron The 'Atlanta Magnet Man' is saving our car tires, one bike ride at a time

"Nearly every day, Benigno bikes about 10 miles and picks up around six pounds of debris — about the max the magnets can carry. Over the course of eight weeks, he collected over 410 pounds of metal..."

bjornlouseron Rebuilding Netflix's video processing pipeline with microservices

'Long release cycles: The joint deployment meant that there was increased fear of unintended production outages as debugging and rollback can be difficult for a deployment of this size. This drove the approach of the “release train”. Every two weeks, a “snapshot” of all modules was taken, and promoted to be a “release candidate”. This release candidate then went through exhaustive testing which attempted to cover as large a surface area as possible. This testing stage took about two weeks. Thus, depending on when the code change was merged, it could take anywhere between two and four weeks to reach production.'

I guess I'm just old, but I prefer the delay with a couple of weeks of testing versus pushing to prod and having the customer test the code.

bjornlouseron A Single Small Map Is Enough for a Lifetime

Unless... it's the Powerline trail in Kauai. Then my friends and family will think I'm special for having visited there.

https://www.alltrails.com/trail/hawaii/kaua-i--2/powerline-t...

bjornlouseron Snowcraft – Building a Lego Snowfort from giant Lego snow-bricks

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4qlBC45jk3I

bjornlouseron Ask HN: Questions for two 40 year IBM Mainframe repair and programmers

Did either ever come close to leaving the field? If so, what made them want to quit tech?

bjornlouseron How to learn chess as an adult (2021)

TFA mentions that their openings preparation didn't help much, and mentions next steps as learning "Basic Endgames".

The minute you stop blundering pieces you find yourself in a nearly even endgame.

bjornlouseron Schoenberg: Why He Matters

"But most of all Schoenberg was trying too hard to be remembered. Bach, Mozart, Debussy and his predecessors saw themselves as jobbing composers. They knew they had to keep at least one ear moored in audience expectations."

But weren't audience expectations tainted by the musical establishment? Debussy (born 1862) won the Prix de Rome, but somehow Ravel (born 1875, one year after Schoenberg) was snubbed for five consecutive years.

Something terrible seems to have happened in music schools around the turn of the century. It's hard to blame Schoenberg for wanting to watch it all burn.

bjornlouseron How to Work Effectively with Someone You Don't Like

Add a hook in the first sentence of your email that allows them to shine, even if it’s a false lie.

“I’m having trouble figuring out this piece of the critical path”

bjornlouseron OpenAI Is Nothing Without Its

people or silicon slaves?

bjornlouseron Walking has plummeted across America

"There's a chubby one with a cane... American! tee hee. There's another one!"

bjornlouseron Walking has plummeted across America

"noticing people around you and thinking about them"

Your description of people watching sounds innocent, considerate even, but I think you're leaving out the display of open contempt that is so common these days.

bjornlouseron Melatonin use soars among children, with unknown risks

"During 2017–18, only about 1.3% of U.S. parents reported that their children used melatonin. To get a sense of the current prevalence of use, Hartstein and colleagues surveyed about 1,000 parents in the first half of 2023.

Among children ages 5 to 9, 18.5% had been given melatonin in the previous 30 days. For preteens ages 10 to 13, that number rose to 19.4%. Nearly 6% of preschoolers ages 1 to 4 had used melatonin in the previous month."