MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by AnotherGoodName | 2025-04-12 01:45:45+00:00
MP4 allows the header at the start or the end.

It’s usually written to the end since it’s its not a fixed size and it’s a pain for recording and processing tools to rewrite the whole file on completion just to move the header to the start. You should always re-encode to move the header to the start for web though.

It’s something you see too much of online once you know about it but mp4 can absolutely have the header at the start.
by seba_dos1 | 2025-04-12 01:45:53+00:00
Getting Android up on the hardware is easy - you just grab the unmaintainable kernel fork provided by the vendor and you're 90% there.

I'm not interested in Android though, so I just wouldn't buy such phone no matter how cheap would it be. I'm not interested in upgrading every year either. Librem 5 is great, but unfortunately I'll need something to upgrade to in a few years anyway, as the Web has a tendency to only get heavier with time.
by pseudalopex | 2025-04-12 01:47:26+00:00
The relevance of search is obvious. Replies are used to work around length limits, clarify, correct, and update. Replies and parents are invisible if not logged in. This is not hypothetical.[1][2]

[1] https://x.com/SocialSecurity/status/1909710597324964065

[2] https://xcancel.com/SocialSecurity/status/190971059732496406...
by abetusk | 2025-04-12 01:47:59+00:00
> Software also has a (unique?) "win more" mechanic where a popular tool tends to get more popular.

I don't think this is unique at all to software tools and is a general principle.

Rosen had a paper in 1981 talking about "The Economics of Superstars" [0]. I don't claim to have deep knowledge but the idea is that if an individual has limited resources (money, attention, etc.) and wants to ensure the maximum gain from their expenditure, then allocating resources to the superstar is a safer bet. This means that superstars get proportionally larger resources than what they might be valued at.

For example, if 120 consumer has $5 to spend on a song ($600 total), each consumer on an individual level might allocate their $5 on the known good superstar song. The superstar song might only be 2x better than the next best thing, so one might expect that the superstar song might, at most, get $400 of the total, but because of the superstar effect, the superstar song gets all $600.

I just watched an interview with Torvalds about Git. There were a lot of reasons why Git was so quickly adopted, not the least of which was functionality and how it leveraged a changing technology landscape, but a major factor was almost surely Torvalds celebrity status and blessing.

[0] https://pdodds.w3.uvm.edu/files/papers/others/1981/rosen1981...
by sam_bristow | 2025-04-12 01:48:17+00:00
I've had a reasonable amount of luck with a combination of Buildroot and Bazel. I use Buildroot to assemble a minimal Base OS with just the kernel, bootloader and a few system services. Then the application layer is built with Bazel and assembled into a set of squashfs images which are mounted as overlay filesystems at boot time. The whole thing is shipped as a SWUpdate file built with the Bazel layer.

Because most of the iteration is happening in the Bazel layers I can generate a full system update in about 15 seconds with everything being fully reproducible.
by timewizard | 2025-04-12 01:48:32+00:00
> Understandable, it’s where the file pointer was and mp4 allows this so your recording device writes it at the end.

Yet formats like WAVE which use a similar "chunked" encoding they just use a fixed length header and use a single seek() to get back to it when finalizing the file. Quicktime and WAVE were released around nearly the same time in the early 90s.

MP2 was so much better I cringe every time I have to deal with MP4 in some context.
by Fade_Dance | 2025-04-12 01:49:14+00:00
>It seems there's a liquidity problem in the markets, which is also weird because stocks are being sold, so there should be liquidity.

This is a normal relationship. The financial system has leverage. When liquidity dries up and sellers dominate, volatility rises which feeds back into valuable risk metrics and realize portfolio volatility. That causes participants to downsize their exposure to keep the same risk. In these cases the participants don't necessarily have extra liquidity to deploy until after volatility and uncertainty settles.

>For a while, even gold went down, which is also highly unusual during a market crisis.

During a true crisis this is actually not that uncommon. In the trading space, you saw what you can during these events. In extreme circumstances where correlations all go to one even the safe havens get sold off to raise cash. The gold liquidation was a sign of pressured margin metrics and very high stress. You can see how quickly gold recovered after the peak stress, confirming that situation.

>One reason that is frequently cited now and also in this article is because some hedge funds have specialized on the so called "basis trade", which I never heard of before. It basically means buying large amount of treasuries and speculating on their futures.

The basis trade is more of an arbitrage than a speculation. The global eurodollar system (not currency, global offshore dollars) is about 20 trillion dollars in size. The basis trade is essentially a method in which regulated US financial markets are exported to The world at large to be used in the global, emergent financial system. Instead of buying a treasury directly, one can use the futures/eurodollar market, and the basis traders will arbitrage the difference and keep everything in line.

>At some point, the FED would normally intervene and buy treasuries.

The issue that the FED is facing isn't so much their balance sheet capacity but the tariff-driven inflation outlook and how it interacts with their mandate. That said, they did clearly communicate today that they would be willing to step in if there were severe signs of systemic instability. The reality is... if tariffs really do cause an inflation wave, yields at 5% may be relatively low...
by Brian_K_White | 2025-04-12 01:49:45+00:00
The fact that you are a paying user who does not hate some thing that other users do, does not change the fact that they do, and that they are the final authority on what they hate and why they hate it.

It has nothing to do with you. You are free not to have the same priorities as them, but that's all that difference indicates, is that your priorities are different.

The "what is art?" stuff is saying why I think that "get as good as a human artist" is a fundamentally invalid concept.

Not that humans are the mostest bestest blessed by god chosen whatever. Just that it's a fundamentally meaningless sequence of words.
by thelittleone | 2025-04-12 01:49:50+00:00
As a youngster in the 70s (before lead sas a known carcinogen) I had a piece of lead in my lego bag (no idea how it came to be there). I thought that soft metal was neat and bit it more than once. Fortunately I still have all my hair though I know a woman who would say 'that explains a lot.
by teruakohatu | 2025-04-12 01:50:42+00:00
According to Wikipedia the wall was reported to be 15% complete in 2019, but found to be actually just 4% complete in 2020, then reportedly 18% in 2022 and 30% last year.

Given that is started over 15 years ago and there seems to be significant differences between what countries report and what was actually done when the UN commissioned a report in 2020, it’s anyone guess what progress has actually been made.

In my opinion it’s probably around 10% or low teens now and would be lucky to double that by the end of the project in 2030.

The project will probably report a much higher number when it actually finishes.

Hopefully it will be funded to continue. It’s probably one of the most important global events environmental projects of the 21st century.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Green_Wall_(Africa)
by kmeisthax | 2025-04-12 01:51:00+00:00
Artists do not want to get paid micropennies for use-of-training-data licenses for something that destroys the market for new art. And that's the only claim Adobe Firefly makes for being ethical. Adobe used a EULA Roofie to make all their Adobe Stock contributors consent to getting monthly payments for images trained on in Firefly.
by inetknght | 2025-04-12 01:51:06+00:00
> Big bold projects by African dictators to leapfrog the economy has a truly atrocious track record.

Perhaps, yes. But the Sahara is expanding and reducing the livable area of land in those countries. That can only add to economic strife. On the other hand, building a green wall reduces or eliminates the expansion of the desert and also increases the amount of food available to those countries. I believe that would help reduce the strife between those countries. Yes there's risk of abuse but I think everyone wants to be self-sufficient and anything towards that is laudable.

> UN involvement makes it even worse.

Can you explain that further? The U.N. is terrible at directly preventing conflict (just look at Ukraine) but I think it has a decent track record of helping countries build their infrastructure.

> I'm glad that it's still possible to destroy an ecosystem

What? You think building green savannahs is destroying an ecosystem?

> That would never fly in the US.

I don't know about never but I do think it'd certainly be difficult.

> We also have no need to produce more food

I disagree. I think we have no appetite to produce more food right now, but the way we're currently growing food is rather asinine.

> and our deserts are mostly beloved natural wonders.

Mostly, yes. But I think there's plenty of deserts that aren't quite natural wonders.
by hosh | 2025-04-12 01:51:19+00:00
This has to do with how async works without preemption and resource limits.

There's a counter-intuitive thing when trying to balance load across resources: applying resource limits helps the system run better overall.

One example: when scaling a web app, there comes a point when scaling up the database doesn't seem to help. So we're tempted to increase the connection pool because that looks like a bottleneck. Increasing the pool can make the overall system perform worse, because often times, it is slow queries and poorly performing queries that is stopping up the system.

Another example: one of the systems I worked on has over 250 node runtimes running on a single, large server. It used pm2 and did not apply cgroups to limit CPU resources. The whole system was a hog, and I temporarily fixed it by consolidating things to run on about 50 node runtimes.

When I moved them over to Kubernetes, I also applied CPU resource limit, each in its own pod. I set the limits based on what I measured when they were all running on PM2 ... but the same code running on Kubernetes ran with 10x less CPU overall. Why? Because the async code were not allowed to just run grabbing as much CPU as it can for as long as it can, and the kernel scheduler was able to fairly run. That allowed the entire system to run with less resources overall.

There's probably some math that folks who know Operations Research can prove all this.
by maxerickson | 2025-04-12 01:55:05+00:00
The Constitution doesn't actually say that the party with a majority share of seats in the house or senate gets all the power. It's a practical matter of the rules that the members choose to implement.

So for instance, groups that were nominally from 2 different parties could elect leadership that planned to work with the groups, rather than whichever party had the nominal majority.

This is kind of an abstract point, but it's useful for reasoning about things. The so called "centrist" members of a given party are actually aligning themselves with the most extreme members, not some 'center'.
by Mawr | 2025-04-12 01:55:32+00:00
I just expect better from professional language designers. To me, the blindingly obvious follow up to the thought "We understand that people familiar with other languages would like to see string interpolation in Go." [1] is to research how said other languages have gone about implementing this and to present a brief summary of their findings. This is table stakes stuff.

Then there's "You can [get] a similar effect using fmt.Sprint, with custom functions for non-default formatting." [2]:

- Just the fact that "you can already do this" needs to be said should give the designers pause. Clearly you can't already do this if people are requesting a new feature. Indeed, this situation exactly mimics the story of Go's generics - after all, they do not let you do anything you couldn't do before, and yet they got added to Go. It's as if ergonomics matter, huh.

Another way to look at this: if fmt.Sprint is so good it should be used way more than fmt.Sprintf right? Should be easy to prove :)

- The argument crumbles under the load-bearing "similar effect". I already scratched the surface of why this is wrong in a sibling post: [3].

I suspect the reason for this shallow dismissal is the designers didn't go as far as to A/B test their proposal themselves, so their arguments are based on their gut feel instead of experience. That's the only way I can see someone would come up with the idea that fmt.Sprint and f-strings are similar enough. They actually are if all you do is imagine yourself writing the simplest case possible:

fmt.Sprint("This house is ", measurements(2.5), " tall") f"This house is {measurements(2.5)} tall"

Similar enough, so long as you're willing to handwave away the need to match quotation marks and insert commas and don't spend time coding using both approaches. If you did, you'd find that writing brand new string formatting statements is much rarer than modifying existing ones. And that's where the meat of the differences is buried. Modifying f-strings is trivial, but making any changes to existing fmt.Sprint calls is painful.

P.S. Proposing syntax as noisy as:

fmt.Println("This house is \(measurements(2.5)) tall")

is just another sign the designers don't get it. The entire point is to reduce the amount of typing and visual noise.

[1]: https://github.com/golang/go/issues/57616#issuecomment-14509...

[2]: https://github.com/golang/go/issues/34174#issuecomment-14509...

[3]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43651419
by smcin | 2025-04-12 01:57:50+00:00
Similar to if you engaged a realtor on a monthly subscription instead of a (roughly) fixed commission based on % of sales price - incentivizes them to spin things out.

Having legislators outlaw bad business practices is in general very slow; if competition works then it seems there should be a niche for a lump-sum/fixed commission-based dating service where they match you with the people in their database most likely to actually be compatible with you. But now that creates a new problem of measuring "successful" outcomes in matchmaking, which will be near-impossible to measure and easy for all parties to game, if it's mostly transacted by app. But it sounds in principle like the business model for traditional introduction-based matchmaking (the matchmaker only gets a good reputation if they have some successes, and most prospective customers will only be willing to pay $ for say 3-12 months).

EDIT: makes me wonder: eHarmony never opened matchmaking offices.
by timewizard | 2025-04-12 01:59:49+00:00
It was during an era where there was actual competition over Operating Systems. OS/2 definitely pushed Microsoft hard. BeOS woke everyone up even if it wasn't on popular hardware. Bell labs was still experimenting with plan9. There were several commercial Unix vendors.

Monopolies. They ruin markets. Destroy products. Reduce wages. Induce nostalgia.
by GuB-42 | 2025-04-12 02:00:39+00:00
It turns out it is not a reliable approach. How a LLM works and how a LLM says it works can be completely different.

Think about it, a LLM is an autocompleter. It will give you the most probable next word each time. It doesn't mean it doesn't understand high level concepts, but in the end, it just writes stuff that is similar to its training dataset.

For example, ask it to multiply two numbers. If the number are small enough, you will get the right answer. Now ask it to explain how it did it, it will probably tell you the process as commonly taught in school, but it not actually how it did it. What it did is much weirder for us humans, and the only way to see how it actually works is to look at the internals of the neural network. The LLM can't describe it, it doesn't see inside itself, however, it has many textbooks in its training dataset, so it will grab an answer from these textbooks because that's how people answer.

Seeing how it correctly describes the multiplication process and how it can multiply small number correctly, you would assume it can also multiply large numbers (as we do), but nope, it can't, unless it has access to a separate math module, traditionally made (i.e. not a neural net).
by koakuma-chan | 2025-04-12 02:02:48+00:00
> Why would the browser send byte range requests for video tags if it expects to play the file back linearly from beginning to end anyway?

Probably because byte range is required for seeking, and playing from the beginning is equivalent to seeking at 0.

> Wouldn't that be additional overhead/round-trips?

No because the range of the initial byte range request is the whole file (`bytes=0-`).
by genocidicbunny | 2025-04-12 02:05:27+00:00
I think this can be generalized a bit to not just software but real-world things. I was recently dealing with tearing up an old deck that was rotting. I could have done it myself -- I started doing just that in fact, but after a half day of work I did some math and realized that while it would not be cheap to hire someone with machinery that could do the job, it would end up being cheaper once I factored in externalities like being tired and sore, the risk of injury, and even just the discomfort of having to finish the job despite the weather du jour. Add in the significantly lower amount of stress, and the fact that I could use that same time for other projects, it made sense to shell out the $$$ to just have someone come in and do it for me.

And to that person, because they've already invested the money and time to get the equipment and learn how to properly use it and be proficient with it, the cost was much lower. In the end, between the two of us, we saved a lot of unnecessary labour by sticking to what we were both good at.
by benward2301 | 2025-04-12 02:05:48+00:00
I wanted a tool that can execute one-shot queries of arbitrary complexity against a DynamoDB table, without the need for scripting or propagation. I couldn't find one so have written my own.

You can find example queries here: https://github.com/benward2301/dynq?tab=readme-ov-file#examp....

I hope some of you find it useful. If you discover a bug, open an issue on GitHub and I'll take a look!
by rchaud | 2025-04-12 02:06:19+00:00
Those places aren't worth their while, and blessed be they for that!

All a business cares about is maximum reach, so they will ignore the small sites in favour of the biggest aggregator for the lowest cost.

If somebody on a smaller site behaved in the disingenuous and spammy way brands do on social, they'd be banned. Bluesky is not doing that, so this should be an opportunity to genuinely engage with the audience instead of copy/pasting the cynical tactics they apply everywhere else.
by magicalhippo | 2025-04-12 02:07:32+00:00
I read this[1] review on Steam which also raises the same point as you.

The thing that made The Talos Principle, The Witness[2] and similar games so great was that they spent a lot of time on designing the puzzles.

I'm not opposed to a Groundhog Day sort of scenario, but in that case it really needs to be done well, like The Stanley Parable, not just rely on pure RNG. If you want to use RNG you really should have some constraint system involved to ensure at least some progress could have been made by the player.

[1]: https://steamcommunity.com/id/ADHunter/recommended/1569580/

[2]: If you've played The Witness but haven't played The Looker, you've been missing out IMHO.
by treetalker | 2025-04-12 02:08:47+00:00
It's actually a pretty-well documented phenomenon. (My familiarity with it stems from having served as editor in chief of one of the primary administrative law journals.) I will try to dig up some articles to provide as sources, but many are behind hard paywalls (e.g., on Westlaw subscriptions, etc.). If it's not already there, put your email in your HN profile and I'll do my best to send some to you.
by JadeNB | 2025-04-12 02:09:38+00:00
> To be fair...the other side was just as ferocious when someone postulated that the election was rigged, or that COVID couldn't be stopped by masks. You're essentially asking for conservatives to be the bigger person and stop the blood feud.

Did anyone have their, and their coworkers', security clearance revoked just for saying either of those? (There are other activities that could have been taken by people saying the election was rigged that could have led to a loss of security clearance, but I don't think that just the statement did it.)
by vunderba | 2025-04-12 02:09:42+00:00
I have a hypothetical. Let's say you attend a rally and give a hate speech and the entire event is live-streamed / recorded for posterity. Can you use "right to forget" laws to impel all sites hosting that video record to blur out your face in the original videos?

What's the functional difference to writing a bunch of hate speech with your username and wanting it scrubbed from the "public record" (which I would argue a popular forum such as HN would be classified) using RTBF?

Same thing if you wrote a "Letter to the Editor" to the New York Times expressing something distasteful. I don't see how anyone should be allowed to wield RTBF as a tool for suppressing information.
by alganet | 2025-04-12 02:09:55+00:00
Isn't that too traditional of a list?

Sometimes I feel that this list is just a syncretic body of knowledge built on top of previous anti-fascistic thinkers.

A numbered list of items? Jeez, that is a very simple way of pushing an idea forward to a lot of people, isn't it?

You know, nevermind. I won't think too much about it. Let the women do it this time.
by rqtwteye | 2025-04-12 02:09:57+00:00
My main gripe for work laptop is that Windows 11 is dog slow. I think they have rewritten Explorer but not for the better. Word is also driving me nuts. The formatting does a ton of weird stuff that's totally unpredictable. Outlook has this weird flat UI where it's hard to tell what is a button and what isn't. Search has been broken for a long time.
by ipv6ipv4 | 2025-04-12 02:10:42+00:00
To explain further. I can't imagine why anyone would post about Jews on my local NextDoor or FB group. It's just not a topic that comes up outside of Jewish community events, like holidays. There are certainly no Jewish community events in Bangladesh. If they are writing posts about Jews like were posted about Rohingya, then maybe it's not just "posts on Facebook".

You are the one who seems to be uptight, bringing up the topic of bombs (?!), and scolding me to relax. Maybe you should relax.

P.S. for those wondering, my flagged comment simply asked why Jews would come up as a topic at all on a local Bangladeshi group. The irony of it being flagged in a post about censorship is piquant.
by bigstrat2003 | 2025-04-12 02:11:52+00:00
That's not true at all. You should read The Canceling of the American Mind (though get it from the library, because it's not really good enough to own imo). The authors very clearly lay out the evidence that there has in fact been an increase in the sort of online lynch mobs we call "cancel culture". It comes from both the left and the right, and the increase has been noticeable if you look at the data.

People have always tried to use social pressure to strike at people they didn't like. But there really has been a marked increase in occurrences in the last ten or so years.