Hacker News Reader

roseway4on Ford Hires 550 Former Argo.ai Engineers, Creates Latitude.ai

Not mentioned here, but in this Techcrunch article, is Ford’s expensive flip-flopping on AV: https://techcrunch.com/2023/03/02/ford-forms-automated-drivi...

> Argo AI burst on the scene in 2017 stacked with a $1 billion investment from Ford — and Iater an investment from VW. The startup shuttered suddenly in October 2022 after Ford and VW determined they would no longer pursue AV technology, at least not under the Argo umbrella. Ford said, at the time, it was making a strategic decision to shift its resources to developing advanced driver assistance systems, and not autonomous vehicle technology that can be applied to robotaxis. The company said it recorded a $2.7 billion non-cash, pretax impairment on its investment in Argo AI.

roseway4on EVs Coming in 2023

Aside from the Prius, no mention of much needed mass-market, affordable EVs.

Oh, and the Mini Aceman is ugly as sin.

roseway4on Rows 2.0: The easiest way to use data on a spreadsheet

Python’s pandas. Or Apache Arrow (more data structure, but with some calc capabilities). Granted, they’re not spreadsheets per se. Rather, they’re dataframe-centric programming.

roseway4on Ford forms automated driving subsidiary from Argo AI’s remains

Expensive flip-flopping on AV.

roseway4on BetterHelp Barred by FTC from Sharing Data with Facebook

https://archive.is/YlkgC#selection-3665.0-3667.10

Sounds like they might have been sharing hashed emails and other identifiers with advertisers to execute retargeting campaigns:

> BetterHelp said its use of “limited, encrypted information” for targeting ads was an “industry-standard practice” for health-care companies. The company admitted no wrongdoing and it doesn’t share “names or clinical data from therapy sessions” with advertisers, according to a statement.

roseway4on Planned Upcoming Downtime: Coinbase.com Maintenance

8 hours of planned downtime impacting trading, transfers, and access to funds.

The maintenance window strikes me as extraordinarily long for a modern software service, particularly for core functions.

Anybody know what they’re up to?

roseway4on Ongoing Incident in Google Cloud

Downloading the key has been erroring since at least ~5pm PT yesterday, 2/27. It’s likely unrelated. Though I’d be unsurprised if the recent layoffs contributed to the situation.

roseway4on Using GPT3, Supabase and Pinecone to automate a personalized marketing campaign

In this context, it is for semantic matching similar to:

"My daily face cream is BrandX's low-sheen formulation" -> "BrandX Matte Face Moisturizer"

roseway4on Using GPT3, Supabase and Pinecone to automate a personalized marketing campaign

I've seen really good results using BERT and other open-source models for matching symptoms / healthcare service names to CPT/HCPCS code descriptions. Even for specialized domains, some of the freely available models perform well for ANN search. While BERT may not be viewed as state-of-the-art, versions of it have relatively low memory requirements versus newer models which is nice if you're self-hosting and/or care about scalability.

roseway4on Tesla driver killed after plowing into firetruck on freeway

Cheap driver assistance technologies such as collision warning systems and emergency braking are nearly ubiquitous on new cars. It’s puzzling why Tesla hasn’t taken a layered approach to safety, with these supplementing the camera systems they have in place. I can’t imagine it’s a cost thing and the sensor fusion problem is likely tractable.

roseway4on Former Ubiquiti dev pleads guilty to trying to extort his employer

> The ransom note asked for 50 bitcoins (around $1.9 million at the time) in exchange for revealing the vulnerability used to breach the network and for returning the stolen files.

Only $1.9M? If you risk going to jail, make it worth it.

roseway4on Chinese surveillance balloon spotted over U.S., Pentagon says

The WSJ has more detail: https://www.wsj.com/articles/chinese-spy-balloon-seen-over-u...

According to a Pentagon source, the balloon offers "limited additive value" over satellites.

More interesting excerpts:

>The incident, which occurred in the last two days, marked the latest aggressive Chinese intelligence gathering maneuvers in recent years. U.S. defense officials said the balloon loitered over the U.S. longer than in previous similar incidents, which made this “different.”

<snip>

> Mr. Biden was presented with options and proposed that the high-altitude balloon be shot down after it was spotted and reported by civilians in a commercial airliner, U.S. officials said. The Pentagon feared civilian casualties, and opted not to shoot down the balloon, U.S. officials said.

<snip>

> The balloon “was traveling at an altitude well above the commercial air traffic and does not present a military or physical threat to people on the ground,” Gen. Ryder added.

<snip>

> The balloon was observed flying over Montana after flying over Canada and the Aleutian Islands, one U.S. official said. It was large enough for its debris to cause damage, and while the U.S. considered shooting it down over a sparsely populated area of Montana, the U.S. opted to not shoot it down. It also flew over sensitive sites, a senior defense official told reporters Thursday.

roseway4on Show HN: ELI5 Powered by GPT-3

The number 42 is a special number. It is special because it can have many different meanings. One way that it is used is when someone is asking a difficult question and they don't know the answer. If someone says "the answer to life, the universe, and everything is 42", they are saying that they don't know the answer to the question.

roseway4on Software Memory Safety – Cybersecurity Information Sheet (NSA) [pdf]

> Examples of memory safe language include C#, Go, Java®, RubyTM, Rust®, and Swift®.

Python is a surprising server-side omission.

roseway4on Early Access to Chrome OS Flex: The Upgrade PCs and Macs

It would be fun, and possibly quite useful, to run Flex on the Raspberry Pi.

roseway4on DALL-E Mini – Generate images from a text prompt

It’s likely the site is using the smaller “toy” model configured as default with the DALL-E mini code base. The larger “mega” model, used by the official demo, is far superior but requires significant GPU memory.

Unfortunately, despite the model authors adding a significant number of GPUs to the official demo, it has been hugged to death following recent Guardian, NYT, and other coverage.

roseway4on The economics of stadium names

The author mentions randomly sampling companies for the analysis.

roseway4on Lucid recalls all of its 2022 Air EVs

I’m surprised Polestar hasn’t been mentioned. While not mainstream—yet—the PS2 is a great car. We definitely had teething issues (software mostly) with the Launch Edition, but Polestar’s Android Automative implementation has got more solid in the last year.

roseway4on The Contractual Impossibility of Unwinding Disney’s Reedy Creek

> to oppose a Florida bill the majority of people in Florida support.

Please provide a source for this claim.

roseway4on Mozilla warns Chrome, Firefox ‘100’ user agents may break sites

> Some parsing libraries may have hard-coded assumptions or bugs that don’t take into account three-digit major version numbers

22 years after Y2K and we're still not anticipating what happens when we exceed an easily anticipated limit. Yes, I know the cause of the Y2K "bug" wasn't exactly the same as this situation.

roseway4on Levandowski’s moonshot is a peer-to-peer telecom network powered by crypto

Fascinating use of the Citizens Broadband Radio Service frequencies. Supposedly "secure and private", with some interesting engineering on the way[0]:

> To further support anonymity and prevent IMSIs from being tied to a user’s identity, a development priority will be enabling the network to roll IMSIs on a periodic, random basis, such that even if a hostile actor manages to associate an IMSI to a UE, it will be temporary. Additionally, we envision the ability for users to be able to request a new IMSI on demand.

[0] Pollen Mobile Whitepaper: https://assets.website-files.com/61bcdf68fb5dc56d13dd117e/61...

roseway4on Counterfeit KN95 respirators

I have 8210 N95s and yes, they’re welded (as confirmed on the 3M website):

https://www.3m.com/3M/en_US/p/d/v000585997/

roseway4on Hugging Face Acquires Gradio

Possibly an acquihire? Pure conjecture: They may have had difficulty competing with Streamlit[0] and decided to throw in the towel.

[0] https://streamlit.io/

roseway4on U.S. Navy Engineer Charged in Attempt to Sell Nuclear Submarine Secrets

The initial interception is intriguing. Perhaps it suggests the target nation is a US ally?

Terribly risky making overtures to a friendly nation. And for only $100K in crypto.

roseway4on Catholic priest quits after “anonymized” data revealed alleged use of Grindr

There are. Bars, restaurants, coffee shops, and more all offer community to LGBT people , as they do many other minorities (and special interest groups, for that matter).

roseway4on Bitcoin’s reliance on stablecoins harks back to the Wild West of finance

The March attestation was published 5/24 (the day prior to that article) and is available on the Centre website[1]. It doesn’t appear there’s cause for alarm in this case.

[1] https://www.centre.io/hubfs/pdfs/attestation/grant-thorton_c...

roseway4on South Africa suspends rollout of Oxford-AstraZeneca coronavirus vaccine

Is OpenVAERs a legitimate source of information for vaccine injury? The site claims the data is sourced from the HHS. Has this been validated? If so, is this raw data or has it been reviewed and vetted by HHS. Self-reported data from non-medical professionals likely needs significant vetting, analysis and interpretation.

roseway4on South Africa suspends rollout of Oxford-AstraZeneca coronavirus vaccine

> miscarriages, deaths, anaphylactic shock

I've seen coverage of anaphylaxis, but not death and miscarriages. Anaphylaxis is also extremely rare and causality is unproven.

Would you please provide references for the other severe side effects you listed?

roseway4on South Africa suspends rollout of Oxford-AstraZeneca coronavirus vaccine

Healthcare professionals are first in line in the South African vaccine rollout. It's possible that not protecting against moderate to severe illness is an inadequate outcome for this group. Skipping this group in order to vaccinate others may not be politically palatable.

roseway4on Build a Raspberry Pi CM4 4-Bay NAS with Wiretrustee Carrier Board

I went looking for 2.5 inch NAS/ video recorder drives this past weekend and came up empty handed. I’d hoped to install them into a mini-pc NVR. The form-factor doesn’t appear to lend itself to the reliability drive manufacturers target for this class of drive. They’re optimized for high write speeds and very high write loads. You can of course use consumer laptop drives in a NAS, but write speeds will be lower and reliability may suffer.