Hacker News Reader

_pukon Rebuilding Netflix's video processing pipeline with microservices

I've found actively pausing a video before exiting seems to improve the accuracy of the resume point.

I'm presuming this is because it fires a beacon on pause, but only every X (10?, 30?) seconds on playback.

Not had many issues with it completely forgetting where I am though (it does sometimes get confused as to which episode I watched last though).

_pukon Bard is now Gemini, and we’re rolling out a mobile app and Gemini Advanced

Was worth a shot!

_pukon Bard is now Gemini, and we’re rolling out a mobile app and Gemini Advanced

edit Sadly not!

Sounds like you can theoretically do the old Xbox game pass trick of loading up Gold and then upgrading.

£25 for an annual standard plan, and then upgrade to Ultra. First 2 months free, so potentially 14 months for £25 (then £18.99 a month after). No idea if this works in practice!

"If you upgrade, your plan will be active immediately, and the remaining time on your current plan will be credited towards your new plan."

_pukon The worst users come from referral programs, free trials, coupons

That coupled with the crazy cashback deals that were on offer from referral sites..

I cleared double that, but doubt it would work these days.

_pukon GitHub Spam

I've had similar on Amazon..

Next day delivery.. you pay, it ships, then delivery estimate gets an "oops you're delivery had a problem and has been rescheduled for 6 weeks in the future".

Can't refund as it has been shipped, and the original listing disappears after a couple of days "listing not found", so no feedback possible either.

_pukon General purpose MCUs built in to LEDs emulate candle flicker

I thought a Tesla smoked them all..

I'll show myself out!

_pukon Spotting LLMs with Binoculars: Zero-Shot Detection of Machine-Generated Text

Agreed, we shouldn't trust the system, but using it as a bloom filter to flag those that should be reviewed manually seems warranted.

If all we're getting is false positives then it can be used to reduce the workload.

If we also get false negatives then we'd be better off using existing techniques (manual or otherwise).

_pukon Higher vehicle hoods significantly increase pedestrian deaths, study finds

They (The RAC[0]) are actually pushing for regulation here in the UK along those lines.

There seems to be quite a push from the public to do something, so maybe it'll change one day..

"According to the Royal Society for the Prevention of Accidents, between the ages of 15 and 65, the time it takes to recover from glare increases from one to nine seconds.

At 60 miles an hour, that’s 250 yards in nine seconds.

Baroness Hayter said: "The Group’s first interaction with Ministers led them to say: No problem here, no evidence of deaths or serious injuries. Since then, the public have reached out to tell us they disagree, and that many are stopping driving at night, with eight out of 10 drivers surveyed wanting action to reduce glare.

"We know other countries share our concern, with drivers demanding action. The Government needs to heed our call for action and be on the side of road safety."

0: https://www.rac.co.uk/drive/news/motoring-news/drivers-deman...

_pukon Kayak's new flight filter allows you to exclude aircraft models

Especially in Europe, where any delay over 3 hours results in a right to compensation [0]. It's quite usual to swap a technical fault out so then have time to fix it.

Last few flights the poor staff have come from one airport and returned to another country..

0: https://europa.eu/youreurope/citizens/travel/passenger-right...

_pukon FedEx launches new e-commerce platform

Whilst Amazon has nailed logistics (especially last mile), it's real value is in reduced cognitive load.

You know when you shop there that what you order will arrive quickly, no convoluted delivery charges, and a returns policy that shook the industry up completely

_pukon Fake It 'Til You Fake It

"The gun is the tool, the mind is the weapon" [0]

0: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guns_Don%27t_Kill_People,_Ra...

_pukon User read the manual, followed instructions, still couldn't make 'Excel' work

One favourite is to simply spin the magic mouse 180 degrees on the desk..

Takes a few seconds to work out what is going on, every time:)

_pukon In the gut's 'second brain,' key agents of health emerge

A generally recommended elimination diet is the FODMAP diet (originally out of studies by the Australian Monash University).

It's primarily for IBS and identification of trigger foods, but the elimination and reintroduction steps may well help you with identifying your triggers.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/FODMAP

https://www.monashfodmap.com/

They've also got a basic, but handy app.

It's done me well over the years.

_pukon One sleepless night can rapidly reverse depression for several days in mice

Having to quarantine in a small sauna house after travelling introduced me to the delights of crappy internet, multiple daily cold river swims, and no real lighting outside of a few candles.

Needless to say I went from awful sleep to going to bed as the sun went down (in summer), and not waking up until sunrise, all in the matter of days.

Thinking back on it, I really should get back into that.

_pukon Return to Office Is Bullshit and Everyone Knows It

Granted. If you want something set in stone, add it to your contract.

If it's a general policy that "we are remote", but your contract wasn't updated to reflect that, then don't be surprised if it changes.

_pukon Return to Office Is Bullshit and Everyone Knows It

Generally[0] your contract references a living policy document covering the softer areas.

I see changes to these documents as similar to the change in T's & C's for any service I use; your continued use of the service denotes acceptance of the new terms. You're welcome to leave at any time.

Not sure what you can litigate against.

0: anecdotal from the past 15 years

_pukon Teens inundated with phone prompts day and night, research finds

I use Uber irregularly (when I travel). Every one of those notifications has resulted in me uninstalling the app as it reminds me I still have it on my phone since the last time I travelled.

It may juice their stats, but I've definitely installed competitors apps when I need a taxi in a new place as opposed to just using the app I already have installed.

_pukon Outperforming larger language models with less training data and smaller models

Define winning - I'd take "Android maintained its position as the leading mobile operating system worldwide in the second quarter of 2023 with a market share of 70.8 percent. Android's closest rival, Apple's iOS, had a market share of 28.4 percent during the same period." [0]

0: https://www.statista.com/statistics/272698/global-market-sha...

_pukon UK’s largest steelworks given £500M to decarbonise

Given the impact on the surrounding areas (including a speed limit to "improve air quality" because that'll make a huge difference..), and the general film of black dust on everything in the locality, it really is worth £3500 per person in port Talbot (140,000 population as per Wikipedia) to improve their lives for years to come.

_pukon The “Do Something About It” Club

"I don’t want the mere discussion of ideas to give me satisfaction".

I'm struggling to find a reference, but I very much subscribe to the concept I read somewhere that discussing an idea releases a similar dopamine hit to actual execution.

There's room for validation of an idea etc., but (over)imagining what completion looks / feels like prior to execution can rob that drive to execute.

_pukon TikTok fined €345M for breaking EU data law on children’s accounts

https://www.enforcementtracker.com/

Ironically, currently 2023 entries.

_pukon Servant leadership

This [0] was posted recently and (IMO) really captures the reality of ownership.

Without all 3 of responsibility, mandate, and knowledge there can be no ownership.

0: https://blog.alexewerlof.com/p/broken-ownership

_pukon UK drops 'spy clause' for scanning encrypted messages, admits not 'feasible'

In a country that doesn't have a written constitution [0] (per se), and is continually trying to renege on what human rights have been agreed [1], what would there be to punish against?

0: https://www.bl.uk/magna-carta/articles/britains-unwritten-co...

1: https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2023/feb/05/tory-mps-to...

_pukon Silicon Valley elites revealed as investors behind $800M Bay Area land grab

It looks like "private residential club communities" are still a thing: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-tayside-central-66536...

_pukon Astro: All-in-one web framework designed for speed

A big thing is support for island architecture [0].

Essentially it only pulls in the JavaScript it needs to make an element interactive; you can mix frameworks on the same page, and it's very fast.

https://docs.astro.build/en/concepts/islands/

_pukon Show HN: ChainForge, a visual tool for prompt engineering and LLM evaluation

Awesome, thank you!

If I called it truly open source I half expected to get shot down.

I know where we stand now :)

_pukon Show HN: ChainForge, a visual tool for prompt engineering and LLM evaluation

I didn't want to open that can of worms: "If you use ChainForge for research purposes, or build upon the source code, we ask that you cite this project in any related publications. The BibTeX you can use for now is.."

That's outside of the MIT licence as far as I'm concerned

_pukon Show HN: ChainForge, a visual tool for prompt engineering and LLM evaluation

I think you should probably mention that its source is available! [0]

I don't personally have a need for this right now, but I can really see the use for the parameterised queries, as well as comparisons across models.

Thanks for your efforts!

0: https://github.com/ianarawjo/ChainForge

_pukon The underground world of credit card network exploitation

Define "We".

With a UK card pretty much any transaction I do online requires me to Auth it in app.

I even found I had to do it recently for things like car hire, and those websites are generally just wrappers around local company searches (though higher sums overall).

_pukon Ask HN: Who is hiring? (August 2023)

One for the Europeans!

Staff and Senior Engineers (5+ years of experience) GoLang, Typescript, React, Scylla

Madrid, Sofia or Vienna; other GoStudent hubs are an option

I'm Senior Director of Engineering at GoStudent, and we're on a mission to build the #1 global school. We've successfully navigated our way from startup to scale-up, and, having found product market fit, are proud to be one of the largest online schools in Europe.

We've still got a lot to do, and are now focusing on building out long term scalable systems. To that end we're looking for a number of positions (Back-End, Front-End, DevOps), ideally at a level that can provide insight and experience to the team as we build out our platform.

We've been a fully remote tech team to this point with Engineers all over Europe, but we get the value of face to face interactions; We are looking to build our teams out in the above areas to make it easier for us to meet in person from time to time.

I'm really proud to be working with a fantastic team building a platform with real world impact. Come join us.

Email me directly (joe.mathews@gostudent.org) for more info. No recruiters please.