omnimike

Necessity is the mother of invention (not laziness). The internet was invented for surviving nuclear war with Russia.

We say laziness motivates us to become more efficient, but I can’t agree. It’s people who want or need to get things done faster that find innovative and creative ways of doing so.

Sorry, you misunderstand. I’m not defending billionaires, I’m condemning politicians.

Politicians and policy should not be for sale in the first place. The fact that they are means, yes, rich people have more power to control policy, but the solution isn’t to ban rich people from getting rich. We need to ban money from influencing policy. Instead, the Supreme Court decided that money is speech and political corruption is protected by the first amendment. We need to undo that.

The brain dead part are the people (apparently common on hacker news) who think that stopping people getting rich is a better solution than, for eg., campaign spending limits.

Money only gets you things when you spend it. Real power is how much money you have to spend, not the market cap of the companies you own. There’s a tired meme that billionaires are somehow more powerful than the politicians in charge of all the money.

I can’t give specifics, I know someone who had to deal with “delete me” requests from these “privacy” companies. The privacy company would literally take your personal info (name, email), and _email it to every company they could think of_ asking the company to delete your account _even if you didn’t have one_.

> It's because it ensures everyone can use the same web and gives the user agent as much power as possible to act on the user's behalf.

Those aren't the principles underlying HTML, and I doubt Tim Berners-Lee was thinking about that at all when he designed HTML. Instead, he was trying to design a format which could be read by both machines and humans, which is why "semantic" HTML elements were introduced. In the end, LLMs were what allowed machines to understand web pages, not semantic HTML elements.

If we do want to make this about accessibility, anyone who has worked with screen readers knows that semantic HTML has failed on that front too. Screen readers rarely understand fancy elements. Instead we often have to create obscene DOM structures to get the reader to say something reasonable, which is at complete odds with the ideals of the semantic web.

I interpreted this post completely differently. I think it is talking specifically about design principles for code/systems. The core thesis appears to be "principles should be based on what works in practice, not what sounds good in theory."

The reason for the focus on CPU time is that it has the larger impact on battery life.

This is likely very deliberate. Publishing error rates of vendor equipment could violate NDAs or just damage vendor relations. The number of units purchased can be used by stock market analysts to predict FB growth or vendor sales, so the PR/legal team might prevent the publishing of details which could be used to that effect. Those are my guesses as to why actual numbers would be left out.

> the article doesn’t actually do is give a good answer as to why you should be allowed to make false statements in the knowledge it will cause harm to others

While it's not explicitly called out in the article, it has given me the best answer to that question I've ever come across in this paragraph:

> The court said that anti-war speech in wartime is like “falsely shouting fire in a theatre and causing a panic,” and it justified the ban with a dubious analogy to the longstanding principle that the First Amendment doesn’t protect speech that incites people to physical violence.

In the case in question the judge ruled that anti-war speech is illegal during wartime because of the harm it causes others. The fundamental problem is that the judge believes that more harm would come from not participating in war, and so opposition to the war causes (more) harm. The imprisoned anti-war activists probably didn't share the judge's opinion. That's why their speech should be protected, because it's not up to others to determine whether or not their speech is "falsely" and "knowingly" causing harm.

I looked at Annoy at the time but from memory it required rebuilding the index every time a new vector is inserted, which was an issue for the project I was working on.

I assume that Vlad takes care of the reindexing in the background, which would save a lot of the work.

I’m really glad this exists and is open source. Two years ago I was working on a project that really could have benefitted from a strong ANN search engine but couldn’t find one. In the end I brute forced it (we only had 100k vectors to search, so with a few optimizations it was fine), but I always wished I could have solved it using something like this.

Give that the data leak is 2+ years old I’m wondering why it’s getting so much attention in the media right now, just as FB hits record highs. The cynic inside me suspects that this is actually a ploy to manipulate the stock price, though I can’t tell who would benefit from it.

> Gee, that sounds a lot like someone abused your contact importer tool to do something you didn't intend for it to do.

From the article it appears that the contact importer is an API endpoint which returns a set of Facebook profiles given a set of phone numbers. In that sense, it did exactly what the developer intended.

If I write a script to query google.com and get a response back you could say I'm not using google search as intended, but most software engineers would laugh at me if I claimed to have "hacked" Google in this way.