MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: How do free (illegitimate) streaming apps cover running costs?
by BuildTheRobots | 2025-07-12 10:55:04+00:00
I've recently been exposed to some of the technical and financial minutia involved in hosting a legal video on demand and live streaming service, and it's left me wondering how some of these illegitimate free apps work.

Playing with friends TV boxes, they seem to have installed multiple apps which offer live-streamed worldwide TV (including commercial and premium channels, not just free to air). They also have apps that give access to seemingly massive video on demand libraries, streaming a wide range of TV and films. Most content seems to have multiple sources available as well.

It seems to be free to install the apps, free to use and I can't see any advertising. How are they making money?

If they're not making money, how the heck do they afford to host the service?

I can see it being relatively easy to make & host an Android app that lets you pick from a database of streams/playlists, but someone, somewhere has to be hosting the media content. The live-streaming alone would (I assume) require a vast amount of tuners or capture cards to get the content, an amount of processing to re-encode it all, some level of CDN or proxies to support large numbers of simultaneous viewers and a large amount of bandwidth as well. The video on demand doesn't have the capture problem, but it swaps it for massive storage requirements.

The ongoing costs must be massive. Even self-hosted, you're burning large amounts of electric and bandwidth, and no doubt ongoing engineering time.

I'm very naive, but I don't understand the motivation or the finances that cause these apps to exist in the first place. I (and others on HN) have certainly been guilty of building silly things and keeping them running only for the heck of it, but the ongoing costs make me think it must be something bigger than a few people doing it "for the lols".

Can someone please tell me what I'm missing?
by seabombs | 2025-07-12 10:57:55+00:00
There's a term I read about a long time ago, I think it was "aesthetic completeness" or something like that. It was used in the context of video games whose art direction was fully realized in the game, i.e. increases in graphics hardware or capabilities wouldn't add anything to the game in an artistic sense. The original Homeworld games were held up as examples.

Anyway, this reminded me of that. Making these pictures in anything but the tools of the time wouldn't just change them, they'd be totally different artworks. The medium is part of the artwork itself.
by muzani | 2025-07-12 10:58:02+00:00
Writing.

I've tried for years to build writing tools with AI. I think for the most part, it doesn't work well and they have become worse (more unnatural) since GPT-3, with the exception of GPT-4.5 and Gemini 1.5 Flash.

There are bits you can delegate to AI: Writing punchy intro paragraphs. Brainstorming titles. Starting off dialogue in a certain style, but it can't sustain it for very long. Or dialogue as another person - you often don't want two characters with similar language.

Writing is thinking. You can rubber duck it for ideas. And it does bounce back some good ones. But you can't expect it to do the heavy work.

Lately, I've been reversing the dynamic - getting AI to generate the bullet points while I write the document. The last straw was when I got it to summarize a doc, and then got it to do work based off the doc it wrote. It would get half the work wrong.
by mnahkies | 2025-07-12 10:59:28+00:00
It's probably improved the past 8 years or so, but I remember Safari was particularly bad for bugs around DST and just dates in general back then, even when using valid input.

We ended up with a bunch of Safari specific workarounds that weren't necessary on Chrome (it was mostly a webview use case so Safari and Chrome were the two we cared about at the time)

Assumingly to me this was around the same time that Apple seemed to have DST problems more generally, such as their iOS alarm clock mishap https://www.theguardian.com/technology/blog/2010/nov/01/ipho...
by Tuna-Fish | 2025-07-12 10:59:51+00:00
This is not a vague technicality, though? The FTC has to obey the law, and the law says that if they make a new rule that has more than $100M of direct monetary impact, they have to use a more involved process. They originally tried to waive this by saying that the rule doesn't have more than $100M impact, but that's just clearly false.

It's not a good thing to cheer rules being broken when you like the reason.
by thibaut_barrere | 2025-07-12 10:59:57+00:00
Overall, it's not widely used nor pushed (blue green deployments are now very common), but it still has interesting uses.

For instance, very high availability without blue-green (using a front-end that can be hot-patched), or... musical endeavors (such as live reloading code that generates music, on the go) https://youtu.be/_VgcUatTilU?si=DDfe4FN3Nw9OzRhF&t=122
by stuaxo | 2025-07-12 11:00:12+00:00
This seems decent, I hope they get the virtual keyboard sorted and its good for use with remotes.

Apps not adapted to TV really seem to suffer on Android with basics like focus not working well (the order, and visibility), hopefully this will work better as desktop apps tend to have OK focus handling with tab, it would be good if moving up and down could also work, by finding the right widget to focus on, or if there are none visible by scrolling.
by Sharlin | 2025-07-12 11:00:47+00:00
Yes, and the exoplanets we found first were highly unusual and not at all what we expected to find, which triggered tons of new research to amend our models of planetary system formation and dynamics. I’m not even sure what you’re trying to argue here – we found an object that did not fit our model of what things should look like, which is very curious and calls for an explanation. That’s how science works. Doesn’t mean it’s aliens. But “oh well maybe it’s just how things are back where it’s from” does not satisfy anyone.
by Applejinx | 2025-07-12 11:02:37+00:00
The brazenness is part of the point. From a game theory standpoint, it's interesting to watch the tactics out there (in here) in the wild.

An earlier comment mentioned how hard it is to get down to objective truth. Sometimes there are cases, like 'accelerate climate change in the belief that it'll help Siberia and hurt the West and Europe and open up the Arctic for shipping' where it's not at all hard to get down to objective truth: objective truth comes for ya like a tiger and will not be avoided.
by pydry | 2025-07-12 11:02:49+00:00
Ive noticed that some of these types tend to be well meaning young people (often girls) who are super excited to have scored a job doing developer outreach for $BIGTECH.

It's a clever political tactic coz a 50 year old white male middle manager at Microsoft trying to become a board member on an open source foundation would face a lot more hostility than a 20-something girl who pushes all of the diversity buttons.

It mirrors the rather successful marketing strategies for a string of movies including Ghostbusters movie and Barbie, among others. i.e. "There's a certain kind of person who doesnt like our latest corporate offering...". Who wants to be that person?
by blargthorwars | 2025-07-12 11:03:36+00:00
Reasons:

20 million illegal immigrants can't be ignored. Radical Islamification of the West has to stop. Deficit spending is hurting the next generation. Men should not be involved in women's sports unless women agree. Education sucks. Endless wars fought way too late.

Rating:

Major failure on most levels to treat these problems seriously.
by encom | 2025-07-12 11:05:31+00:00
The PNG files seem to be very poorly compressed.

$ oxipng -o max --strip all -avZ --fast acius.png Processing: acius.png 2304x2880 pixels, PNG format 8-bit Indexed (2 colors), non-interlaced IDAT size = 84251 bytes File size = 84326 bytes Transformed image to 1-bit Indexed (2 colors), non-interlaced Trying filter None with zopfli, zi = 15 Found better result: zopfli, zi = 15, f = None IDAT size = 24466 bytes (59785 bytes decrease) file size = 24541 bytes (59785 bytes = 70.90% decrease) 24541 bytes (70.90% smaller): acius.png
by IsaacGichuru | 2025-07-12 11:05:59+00:00
Location: EMEA, CET Timezones Remote: Yes

Willing to relocate: Yes

Technologies: TypeScript, Angular, ReactJS, Next.js, Django, Flask, Node.js, Express.js, Python, MySQL, PostgreSQL, SQLite, MongoDB, CouchDB, Firebase, REST APIs, GraphQL, Docker, AWS (EC2, S3, Lambda), Azure Cloud Services, Git, GitHub, GitLab, CI/CD, Nginx, WebSockets, JWT, OAuth, PyTest, Jest, Cypress, Agile, Scrum, Figma, Adobe XD, Tailwind CSS, Bootstrap, Linux, Bash scripting, Trello, JIRA

Résumé/CV: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1EBQpTT0m9SCfGxg4BKc7ZBxF3nM...

Email: isaacgwamugi@gmail.com

I have over 5 years of professional experience building, deploying, and maintaining scalable fullstack applications. My recent focus has been on frontend engineering and UX design, where I bring a user-first mindset and strong technical execution.

One of my most impactful accomplishments was designing, building, and maintaining a full-scale healthcare platform from scratch that now serves tens of thousands of users across Kenya with 99.9% uptime. My work included: Building a powerful admin dashboard, Implementing features like advanced search, invoice generation, billing, live location matching, and secure health data management compliant with international standards.

I’m available to start immediately, and ready to collaborate with teams or solo on impactful digital solutions.
by concinds | 2025-07-12 11:06:05+00:00
Why is slowness synonymous with rule of law?

Apple's implementation is overtly malicious. This malice is a publicly-known, conscious effort on the part of some of their trashier employees to make it as malicious as possible to please their execs ("Ohh, keep going").

All you need for "rule of law" is an independent judicial entity to notice this. Why give them months and months "to comply", when everyone on Earth knows they have no intention to? Why turn up the fines slowly, when we all know we're headed all the way to the seizure of 10% of global turnover in 4 years? Why are we all pretending not to know the end-state?
by alpha-c | 2025-07-12 11:09:06+00:00
I’ve tested a variety of CR2032 batteries in my AirTags, including both name brands and several Amazon “no name” options like LiCB, AmVolt, and CELEWELL. There’s actually a big difference in battery life and reliability depending on the brand you choose.

If you’re interested, I put together a detailed comparison of popular CR2032 brands (including Amazon Basics, Energizer, Panasonic, and more) with real-world test results and tips for getting the best value. You can check it out here: https://airtagbattery.org/best-batteries

Hope this helps you pick the right battery for your AirTag!
by justacrow | 2025-07-12 11:09:26+00:00
It's not just young people. My boss (originally a programmer) agreed with me that there's lots of problems using ChatGPT for our products and programs as it gives the wrong answers too often, but tgen 30 seconds later told me that it was apparently great at giving medical advice.

...later someone higher-up decided that it's actually great at programming as well, and so now we all believe it's incredibly useful and necessary for us to be able to do our daily work
by disposition2 | 2025-07-12 11:09:59+00:00
Maybe it’ll help the folks that are probably at higher risk of cancer due to the natural gas turbines powering the AI facility in Memphis.

- https://apnews.com/article/memphis-xai-elon-musk-pollution-n...

- https://tennesseelookout.com/2025/07/07/a-billionaire-an-ai-... (this is an opinion article but also has some useful context)
by jorvi | 2025-07-12 11:10:21+00:00
Look at this Kioxia Excera drive[0]. It plummets from 6800Mb/s (850MB/s) all the way to 1600Mb/s (200MB/s).

Its not really a well ackshually comment, there's real pitfalls. Especially when doing 4K. RAW 4K is 12Gb/s and would fill 450GB within 5 minutes. ProRes 4444XQ within 10 minutes. ProRes4444 in 40 minutes.

Martinald his comment is right too. By being very inefficient and treating TLC (or even QLC) as single level and only writing one bit to a cell, much higher performance can be extracted. But once you hit the 80% full threshold, the drive starts to repack the last/least used data into multiple bits per cell.

A RAM cache and SLC cache can both speed access times up, act as a write buffer and mask the shuffling of bits, but there is a limit.

Lastly, its kind of ironic to see me portrayed as jaded when someone else is the one pouring out vitriol all over the thread. Ah well.

[0]https://tweakers.net/reviews/12310/wd-sn5000-4tb-ssd-hoe-sne...
by ChrisMarshallNY | 2025-07-12 11:11:36+00:00
Sounds good, but unless it advocates for HR practices that retain talent, and corporate practices that incentivize Quality, it probably won't result in any changes.

Personal Quality Coding practices have been around for as long as software has been a thing. Way back when, Watts Humphrey, Steve McConnell, and Steve Maguire wrote books on how to maximize personal Quality. Many of their techniques still hold true, today.

But as long as there are bad people managers and short-sighted execs, you'll have shit quality; regardless of who does the work.
by zer00eyz | 2025-07-12 11:12:35+00:00
> The browser’s access to a user’s web activity would make it the ideal platform for AI “agents” that can take actions on their behalf, like booking reservations or filling out forms, directly within the websites they use.

How about agents canceling services I no longer want? Or agents figuring out what choices I have to make to get my return picked up rather than have to take it to a drop off or pay?

There was the open web, with lots of rich api's... All of that got killed for the sake of profit and market consolidation. Are those same players going to be tolerant of agents cutting into their bottom line, of agents that cant be upsold, that dont misclick?

IF we ever get a solid agenic tooling I suspect that it will be murdered in its crib by industry.
by redhale | 2025-07-12 11:13:03+00:00
Cursor's multi-file tab completion and multi-file diff experience are worth $20 easily IMO.

I truly do not understand people's affinity for a CLI interface for coding agents. Scriptability I understand, but surely we could agree that CC with Cursor's UX would be superior to CC's terminal alone, right? That's why CC is pushing IDE integration -- they're just not there yet.
by tialaramex | 2025-07-12 11:13:23+00:00
In a language which doesn't understand that "false" isn't true? I would be entirely unsurprised to discover it's secretly calling a browser vendor web API to search for similarly named dates, or that it's now AI powered and might decide "Last Christmas" means the release date (December 3 1984) of the single not like, Christmas Day in 2024...

I think after the 1970s "Worse is better" languages vanish from the Earth the last shadow of that thinking left might be Javascript, hopefully by then humans aren't writing it but of course for "compatibility" it'll still be implemented by web browsers.
by BuildTheRobots | 2025-07-12 11:13:57+00:00
To be fair, I've not actually played much with the VoD ones other than flick through the libraries and see if a couple of streams play. There's every chance they do break playback to throw adverts at you, I honestly don't know.

The live-tv streaming apps I've seen didn't seem to break for adverts, but I could be wrong. I don't have a box at home to play with or test so it's all passive observation.

Even so, does advertising revenue actually work out profitable after running costs?
by idle_zealot | 2025-07-12 11:15:10+00:00
I struggle with the ethics of this. On one hand, social media seems to be socially deleterious. On the other, outright banning mass communication sounds horrifically draconian, and probably harmful in its own right. The idea I end up leaning toward is banning the way social media platforms monetize their users; targeted advertising. That's probably socially harmful on its own, or at the very least isn't too great a loss in terms of efficiency or individual rights. Of course, it's possible that social media platforms find another way to successfully monetize, and such a ban fails to eliminate social media in its current form, but if that happens we could always try again with another policy until the desired outcome is achieved.
by Applejinx | 2025-07-12 11:15:32+00:00
Leaving aside the Israeli propaganda (certainly the US government shows strong alliance with that), you can't make such a statement without taking into account the nature of what America traditionally is.

A liberal multicultural postmodern democracy continually acting as if immigration (both legal and illegal) and diversity are its strengths, particularly when that turns out to be factual (see: large American cities becoming influential cultural exporters and hotbeds of innovation, like New York and Silicon Valley etc) means American propaganda is only more effective when it's backed by economic might.

It also means the American propaganda is WILDLY contradictory. There's a million sources and it's a noisy burst of neon glamour. It is simply not as controlled by authority, however they may try.

You cannot liken authoritarian propaganda to postmodern multicultural propaganda. The whole reason it's postmodern is that it eschews direct control of the message, and it's a giant scrum of information. Turns out this is fertile ground, and this is also why attacks by alien propaganda have been so effective. If you can grab big chunks of the American propaganda and turn it to your enemy weapon of war and destruction of America quite directly, well then the American propaganda is not on the same destructive level as your rigidly state-controlled propaganda.
by giantg2 | 2025-07-12 11:16:48+00:00
A search for those exact words didn't being up studies for me. One of the articles on the first page even talks about the potential dangers. At this point I assume you're teolling swine multiple attempts at asking for studies on real-world data hasn't yielded nothing of value from you. Goodbye.

https://www.aarp.org/auto/driver-safety/dangerous-reliance-c...
by Disposal8433 | 2025-07-12 11:17:45+00:00
We don't remember the same internet. For the first time in our lives we could communicate by email with people from all over the world. Anyone could have a page to show what they were doing with pictures and text. We had access to photos and videos of art, museum, cities, lifestyles that we could not get anywhere else. And as a non-English guy I got access to millions of lines of written text and audio to actually improve my English.

It was a whole new world that may have changed my life forever. ChatGPT is a shitty Google replacement in comparison, and it's a bad alternative due to being censored in its main instructions.
by WJW | 2025-07-12 11:17:51+00:00
Sure but even at 32 km up it's still ~300 m/s, only about 15% less than the speed of sound at sea level. Let's say that by the time our hypothetical paper airplane start noticing drag the speed of sound is all the way down to 100 m/s. Hypersonic is mach 5+, so this implies speeds of at least 500 m/s.

Most paper airplanes I ever built would not stand up to 500 m/s airspeeds, I can tell you.
by fuzzfactor | 2025-07-12 11:18:00+00:00
Don't hold back. Tell people how you really feel :)

Few seem to have put it so succinctly. Although your text recovers completely after being fully compressed to "from day one" ;)

Magic Leap gave Nova a bad name and Ft. Lauderdale a worse name but visitors should know better than to be sold their own dream.

Exactly the thing I was advising yachtsmen against when I was a teenager.

Back in the Everglades there never were that many legitimate sources of income so different cultures had long developed different ways to survive in that type of climate :\

Small-town resort coup on SV that one.
by carlosjobim | 2025-07-12 11:18:42+00:00
Stockholm syndrome in everyday speech means that victims many times take the side of their abusers and defend them and their actions when a third party wants to help them. And this is extremely prevalent, most people have seen this behaviour many times in real life.

In the case of the Stockholm hostage situation, it's not just a situation where a hostage is doing what she's told to in order to survive. Anybody who is interested can find tons of footage, documentaries, interviews.
by gavinray | 2025-07-12 11:19:16+00:00
For reference, 20-25mg of oral 4-Aco-DMT feels identical to 3.5g of standard potency cubensis.

But 4-AcO has much less body load and no nausea from the organic matter that'd usually be sitting in your stomach, I think it's better than "organic" shrooms.

5-MeO is a lot stronger mg-for-mg, you're quite brave at those doses IMO!

Truth be told, I was more of a fan of the lighter headspace phenethylamines, like 2C-B or even 25i/25b-NBOMe.
by tootie | 2025-07-12 11:19:39+00:00
> hypersensitivity to ideas leftists find offensive”

Nobody was fleeing Twitter because people were calling for lower taxes. It was for the rise in unrestrained hate speech culminating in the unleashing of MechaHitler by the guy who cancelled the world's biggest AIDS prevention program after buying an election. That should be an intolerable state for any rational person.
by Applejinx | 2025-07-12 11:19:52+00:00
People were already willing to do that with Eliza. When you combine LLMs with a bit of persistent storage, WOOF. It's gonna be extremely nasty.

Gaslight reality, coming right up, at scale. Only costs like ten degrees of global warming and the death of the world as we know it. But WOW, the opportunities for massed social control!
by zozbot234 | 2025-07-12 11:20:29+00:00
Even today these pictures have an almost perfect resolution for showing on a compact e-paper display. The viewing area on the original Mac models was not that much bigger, either. They only look "horribly pixelated" when artificially upscaled for a modern big screen.

(A pixel-art specific upscaling filter would mitigate that issue, of course.)
by detaro | 2025-07-12 11:20:43+00:00
It's always funny (and a bit sad) how media people don't grasp that people don't use social media the same way they do, and there is value outside their expectations. I'm not on social media to provide "engagement" to media companies or journalists, nor am I for general politics.

While there is some utility to platforms where "everyone" is, that a) never was actually true of any of them, as much as journalists loved to pretend Twitter reflected "everyone" and b) just not what most people need.
by MSFT_Edging | 2025-07-12 11:21:10+00:00
A core aspect of fascism is finding as scapegoat to blame societal ills on in order to avoid introspection of said society. The scapegoat is in danger in this regard.

Combined with a strong nationalistic and militaristic tendencies, this combination doesn't end in a way other than violence against the scapegoat.

Because fascism is incoherent, there's little to be gained from arguing with their adherents.