MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by reactordev | 2025-08-26 02:59:22+00:00
For sure. You downgraded the video to half the size, then blew it back up again, converted the audio, set the apple mov headers, and spit that sucker out as an mp4 with probably half the resolution in pixel density but hey - it played.

I would try it again without the pix_fmt flag, the vf flag (and string). No idea what -level 3.0 is as it’s not in the docs anywhere (hallucination?). The video filter scaling definitely needs to go if you want it to be as close to the original resolution.

Cool part is, it worked. Even with a bad flag or two, ffmpeg said “Hold my beer”
by bilbo0s | 2025-08-26 03:01:11+00:00
???

Genuine question here, not trying to anger anyone.

But we have Heaven only knows how many whites-only groups online. (In fact we have Heaven only knows how many Asian, Black, Native, and Latin groups online as well.) If you don't like them, you're free to ignore them. Or you're free to criticize them. Your choice. All of that is the great thing about the internet.

Why would any of that be a problem for anyone?
by teraflop | 2025-08-26 03:02:33+00:00
> You downgraded the video to half the size, then blew it back up again

No, that's not what that command does. It performs a single rescaling that resizes the video dimensions to the next lower multiple of 2. e.g. it will resize an 801x601 pixel video to 800x600.

If the video size is already an even number of pixels, it's a no-op and doesn't lose any detail.

If the video size isn't already even, then the rescaling is necessary because H.264 doesn't support odd dimensions.

> No idea what -level 3.0 is as it’s not in the docs anywhere (hallucination?).

It's documented here: https://ffmpeg.org/ffmpeg-codecs.html#Options-40
by bee_rider | 2025-08-26 03:02:43+00:00
So, is the problem that you have accounts on both networks. You would be OK with just posting to both accounts, but for people who have the federation toggle on, they’ll get a duplicate view of your posts?

That actually does seem annoying. You probably can’t do anything about it, but it seems like it would be extremely easy to fix on the platforms’ sides. Since you are intentionally trying not to have people get dupes of your posts, they could just add the ability to tag a post with some identifier, then not show posts that have the same identifier, and rely on you tag your posts appropriately (and an obvious feature would be to automate that tagging and include it in the various “share to <other platform>” buttons).
by Izkata | 2025-08-26 03:03:32+00:00
I never started with Vimium (was using an even less known one), also in part because I find smooth scrolling disorienting. Also on Tridactyl now, once someone on here showed me the hintfiltermode, hintchars, and hintnames settings to get the old Vimperator behavior (which I also find so much better than any current defaults):

set hintfiltermode vimperator-reflow set hintchars 1234567890 set hintnames numeric

Lets you type the words in links, and the hints filter down to only matches. If you go all the way to 1 match it automatically picks it, but as the hints filter down the numeric labels also reset - so there are no gaps betweeen the numbers and it's almost always between 1 and 5 to get the link I want.
by OutOfHere | 2025-08-26 03:03:54+00:00
To be fair, LLM can cut through unclear codebases like a hot knife through butter. The LLM may make some mistakes, but it gets the general idea.

There is one exception. It is when the code has no type definitions and obfuscated variable names, or worse yet, has incorrect type definitions and misleading variable names, but such code is not maintainable at all anyway, even for oneself.

In summary, even for the author to understand a codebase over a long period, it has to be well organized because human memory doesn't recall all the little details.
by skydhash | 2025-08-26 03:04:35+00:00
Another on that hill/cemetary. I remember how mush I wish for a computer that was capable of running Win7 (I was on (P2?) with 512mb of memory and 64mb vram). The OS was a delight from turning it on. I have a friend that has Mavericks on his macbook, and that was another amazing experience.

Even today, you look at screenshots of ios 6, and it's still timelessly beautiful. Some apps were atrocious, but you recognize them from a mile away.
by canadaduane | 2025-08-26 03:05:32+00:00
I don't know the bank they are referring to, but I can cite an example for me: RBC Royal Bank of Canada requires the mobile app. There is nothing you can do on their website without first 2FA via their specific mobile app, and even then only in limited transaction sizes. If you want "full access" (e.g. up to $10k daily transfer via e-transfer) then you MUST use biometrics and the mobile app.
by kelnos | 2025-08-26 03:06:43+00:00
Yep. I feel powerless, and I don't know what to do. I don't think there is anything I can do, except for watch all of technology get locked down to the point that you need a monopolist's or a government's permission before you do anything with it.

It's so fundamentally depressing, and completely at odds with how I grew up viewing tech.
by lotsofpulp | 2025-08-26 03:06:56+00:00
Video news is a poor source of information, highlighting outliers when full data distributions are needed to analyze the dynamics at play.

One person’s account of what happened against an entity who is not allowed to discuss their side of the story is useless. And even if the whole account is accurate, it is not sufficient to stand in as proof of a nation’s protocol.
by DrNosferatu | 2025-08-26 03:07:14+00:00
I don’t know about the HN crowd, but my AI sure has things to say about your FFmpeg command:

<< On the ffmpeg command,

• It’s conservative but works. The key bits for web playback are: H.264 video, yuv420p, AAC audio, MP4 container with +faststart. That’s exactly what it ensures.

• Where it’s sub‑optimal in 2025:

• profile/level: baseline, level 3.0 maximizes legacy compatibility but hurts efficiency/quality (no B‑frames, CABAC, etc.). High, level 4.0 (or auto) is widely supported on modern browsers/devices.

• quality control: better to use CRF + preset than implicit defaults. Example: -crf 20 -preset veryfast (or slow if you can wait).

• scaling: forcing even dimensions is fine; you can also just let libx264 pad/scale as needed or do scale=ceil(iw/2)2:ceil(ih/2)2 to avoid rounding down.

• redundancy: -pix_fmt yuv420p is good; adding format=yuv420p in -vf is redundant if -pix_fmt is set.

• Practical “ladder” that minimizes work and preserves quality:

1. If codecs already web‑friendly, just remux: ffmpeg -i in.mkv -c copy -movflags +faststart out.mp4 (Works when video is H.264 yuv420p and audio is AAC.)

2. If video is OK but audio isn’t (e.g., AC3/Opus), transcode audio only: ffmpeg -i in.mkv -c:v copy -c:a aac -b:a 160k -movflags +faststart out.mp4

3. If video needs re-encode, use modern defaults: ffmpeg -i in.mkv -c:v libx264 -profile:v high -level 4.0 -pix_fmt yuv420p -crf 20 -preset veryfast -vf “scale=ceil(iw/2)2:ceil(ih/2)2” -c:a aac -b:a 160k -movflags +faststart out.mp4

4. If you have GPU/QSV and just need “good enough” fast: ffmpeg -hwaccel auto -i in.mkv -c:v h264_nvenc -preset p5 -rc vbr -cq 23 -b:v 5M -maxrate 8M -bufsize 10M -profile:v high -pix_fmt yuv420p -c:a aac -b:a 160k -movflags +faststart out.mp4

• Quick verification after transcoding: ffprobe -v error -select_streams v:0 -show_entries stream=codec_name,profile,level,pix_fmt,width,height -of default=nw=1 out.mp4 >>
by jovial_cavalier | 2025-08-26 03:07:38+00:00
If this goes through, would it be possible to see a consumer class-action lawsuit? I imagine there is a class of people for whom the sideloading of apps is necessary and removing it renders their phone almost useless. I'd also guess that this market is much larger than Google imagines.

Personally, if I'm not allowed to run the software that I want on my phone, it almost makes more sense for me to get some old flip phone or one of those chinese blackberry knockoffs c.a. 2012. Not out of any principled stance, mind you, it's just that's the level of functionality you'd be reducing me to. Why should I pay $500 when I can find something that gives me the same features on a literal junk pile?
by tolerance | 2025-08-26 03:07:39+00:00
Assume that the answer to your question is “Yes”.

No other term has had the cultural staying power with regards to identifying the descendants of African slaves in the US (and the earliest generation of immigrants from elsewhere; namely the Caribbean) as a distinct ethnic/cultural group.

Of course the term “Black” can be applied to other ethnicities in general, but in the context of US history, descendants of African slaves make up the primary demographic.
by MBCook | 2025-08-26 03:09:28+00:00
And, to GP’s point, there is no one to replace them.

As someone who lived Apple stuff were between a rock and a hard place. What we loved is dissolving away into mediocrity or worse. And we don’t like the competition better. If we did we’d already be over there.

Add in that lots of companies like to follow Apple’s design leads, for better or worse, and we’re left with nowhere to go.

So we really want the thing we liked to be good again. Or at least to stop getting worse for no good reason.
by pavelstoev | 2025-08-26 03:10:52+00:00
Here is a link to a video of what it looks like (estimated) in video.

We built this system at the UofT WIRLab back in 2018-19 https://youtu.be/lTOUBUhC0Cg

And link to paper https://arxiv.org/pdf/2001.05842
by teraflop | 2025-08-26 03:11:11+00:00
> forcing even dimensions is fine; you can also just let libx264 pad/scale as needed

This part is wrong, because libx264 will reject an input with odd width or height rather than padding or scaling it automatically.

> redundancy: -pix_fmt yuv420p is good; adding format=yuv420p in -vf is redundant if -pix_fmt is set.

This seems to have hallucinated a redundancy that isn't there.
by clipsy | 2025-08-26 03:12:19+00:00
I genuinely am not clear on how that crosses over to a personal attack? I'm factually describing the outcome of eliminating MAID, nothing more.

Edit: By the way, great job singling my post out for speaking factually about the consequences of someone's beliefs while ignoring a post[0] that explicitly calls MAID eugenics. I wonder: if I'd spoken in abstract terms rather than referencing @giraffe_lady specifically would I be in the clear? What a wonderful policy you have, dang.

[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45021189
by dreamcompiler | 2025-08-26 03:14:14+00:00
That's how it was before about 1980. Every call outside the local area cost money, and every international call cost a lot more. As a result, spam landline calls were rare and international spam calls were nonexistent.

Keep in mind this was the era before CallerID so you never knew what number was calling you in advance. You answered every call on blind faith. And strangely enough most calls were worth taking, because all calls cost money.

Spam happens when it costs the spammer nothing.
by throwaway2037 | 2025-08-26 03:15:55+00:00
> Japan has had a ruling party in power almost continously for 70 years.

On the surface, this is true. When you look deeper, you will realise that LDP (Liberal Democratic Party) is so large, that it acts as a platform, instead of as a single, monolithic political party. Within the LDP are various factions that win or lose elections and premierships. It is also interesting to compare the Singaporean "democratic" system versus the Japanese one. Very quickly, you will realise that "single ruling party" looks different once you understand the details.
by kg | 2025-08-26 03:16:18+00:00
There were a few dust-ups of this sort that I saw on Twitter back before Gamergate started (and during Gamergate) where there were accusations that people were brigading visible black users on Twitter to push them off the site or get them banned with report spam. I don't recall whether it ever got to the point that it was covered in the news - and I can't find any articles about it - but it wouldn't surprise me if things like that have continued to this day.

So at the very least, I recall hearing about it happening. It doesn't surprise me if people are claiming to have experienced it firsthand.
by specialist | 2025-08-26 03:16:21+00:00
IMHO: profiles (personas, aliases, alts) are orthogonal to federation.

I once thought personas were critically important. Something like Platform for Privacy Preferences (P3P). But 1) I wasn't smart enough to figure out how to prevent deanonymonization and 2) USA govt didn't protect our privacy, so there is no market for a privacy preserving stack.
by tptacek | 2025-08-26 03:17:56+00:00
Careful. The reporting in The Atlantic says otherwise:

"Perhaps the now-suspended Veterans Affairs caseworker who, in 2022, was found by the department to have “inappropriately raised” MAID with several service members had meant no harm. But according to testimony, one combat veteran was so shaken by the exchange—he had called seeking support for his ailments and was not suicidal, but was told that MAID was preferable to “blowing your brains out”—that he left the country."

That's followed by an anecdote in which a Vancouver patient in a suicidal crisis claims a hospital clinician said there were no beds available, but that MAID would be a "more peaceful" option than suicide.

No idea how widespread these cases are, not making any claims, just saying there's reporting around this.
by mulmen | 2025-08-26 03:18:13+00:00
> who is doing consumer tech better?

Nobody. It's possible to be the best without being good.

I'm surprised a consumer-focused RedHat hasn't come along to build an offering of just-works-but-still-open devices. There are companies out there that do parts of it but nobody does the full personal device stack thing like Apple. I'm still disappointed they went the cloud route instead of everything lives on your AirPort. If I ever win the lottery ten times this is the startup I'll build.
by tolerance | 2025-08-26 03:18:21+00:00
I hate to drag myself into this kind of stuff. But you can’t really believe that an afrobeats artist isn’t somehow influenced by Black (as in US) culture.

I’d go as far as to say that an artist in that genre will not receive any mainstream popularity (to the extent to the likes of Burna Boy) without in some way appealing to parts of the African diaspora who themselves are influenced largely by Black (US) culture, even if its superficially (i.e., how they dress).

Cursory research about the influence you named of Burna Boy’s yields:

> She grew up listening to Yoruba and Beninese traditional music, Miriam Makeba, Hugh Masekela, James Brown, Manu Dibango, Otis Redding, Jimi Hendrix, Fela Kuti, Stevie Wonder, Osibisa and Santana.

The affect that the American acts had on her music, you’d know better than I. But the degrees between Burna Boy and Chuck Berry apparently are fewer than recognized.
by lolive | 2025-08-26 03:18:26+00:00
Warpd is really cool in that context. (https://github.com/rvaiya/warpd)

First, hint mode: https://github.com/rvaiya/warpd#hint-mode-alt-meta-x

switching to normal mode: https://github.com/rvaiya/warpd#normal-mode-alt-meta-c
by slyall | 2025-08-26 03:18:47+00:00
“There are two novels that can change a bookish fourteen-year old’s life: The Lord of the Rings and Atlas Shrugged.

One is a childish fantasy that often engenders a lifelong obsession with its unbelievable heroes, leading to an emotionally stunted, socially crippled adulthood, unable to deal with the real world. The other, of course, involves orcs." - John Rogers
by DrNosferatu | 2025-08-26 03:19:57+00:00
My AI accepts the padding criticism, but complains of unfairness about the other:

• The earlier suggestion that libx264 might “pad/scale as needed” was wrong; explicit filters are required for odd dimensions, and choosing between pad, crop, or scale depends on whether borders or resampling are acceptable.

• Calling -vf “format=yuv420p” redundant was imprecise; it’s often unnecessary in simple cases where -pix_fmt yuv420p suffices, but it is not “hallucinated” to note that both exist—one governs the filtergraph and the other the encoder output—so redundancy depends on the filter chain.
by zymhan | 2025-08-26 03:20:02+00:00
It's bringing up an entirely unrelated topic as some sort of "gotcha". Cigarette taxes were not part of the GGP's comment. I.e. a red herring

> The communication intent is often to distract from the content of a topic (red herring). The goal may also be to question the justification for criticism and the legitimacy, integrity, and fairness of the critic, which can take on the character of discrediting the criticism, which may or may not be justified.
by protocolture | 2025-08-26 03:20:54+00:00
No this is false. Vegans have a point. UniFi enthusiasts are damaged without any underlying technical or moral reasoning.

UBNT has this weird market slice where their kit falls into being either dogshit with long term support or almost great with terrible support.

Seeing the same people complaining that they have to move to a new portal every few years, deploying customer facing Unifi OLTs gives me this incredible belly laugh.
by alluro2 | 2025-08-26 03:21:19+00:00
This phase from the last couple of years just had to come - and while it's painful to be exposed to it - it seems highly illogical for us to complain and cry about it.

- "Free" search - yay, let's all use it for everything and even make a verb out of it

- Email - such nice guys, Google - free email forever, what could go wrong if I have my 95% of all my info there

- Maps - yeah, let's all depend on these free Google maps with our lives

- Chrome - ofc, heck yes, let's all use their browser, it's the best and free - no need for anything else

- Google account login for EVERYTHING - so convenient! Google Authenticator app, Google Wallet - yes, more!

- Free mobile operating system - nice, take that, Apple!

Google has taken over a large portion of our lives, step by step - good enough services, on global scale, for free, until they became essential.

They are not evil, like they were never good - they are a company, and in the current socio-economic structure, that means having a duty to use their position to enrich their shareholders - and absolutely have no interest in people's wellbeing or morality or opinions or reputation - unless it temporarily serves to do so more / better.

I'm in no way trying to defend them. Just, with all the futility of it, pointing out how hyper-capitalism we've built/allowed to grow, has reached the stage where it's practically impossible for the "free market" to react / provide solutions that people want. Now the big players decide what people get.

In this case, you can no longer have a high quality phone of a good manufacturer and install on it what you want. Small manufacturer catering to that demographic won't get government certification, you can't have your e.g. Samsung and install a ROM anymore, and you can't install your app freely on Android unless Google lets you. That's all just in a tiny sliver of space.

Our Tetris board barely has any room left for choice and actions.
by BrenBarn | 2025-08-26 03:22:29+00:00
The flip side though is that on Windows you can run an installer from 20 years ago, or sometimes even just copy the program directory over, and it will work. You might not have to reinstall Linux, but you'll have to update it and sometimes those updates mean that old stuff starts working. The big win of Windows for a long time was that old stuff would still work no matter what, and you could maintain old workflows on newer computers till kingdom come.

That advantage has been lost with Win10, which jumped on the constant-update bandwagon and took control away from the user. For me that's what tipped the scales to Linux.
by tomhow | 2025-08-26 03:22:51+00:00
You can't comment like this on Hacker News, no matter what you're replying to. If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.

We detached this comment from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45021560 and marked it off topic.
by coolandsmartrr | 2025-08-26 03:23:10+00:00
This comment reminds of me of these such philosophical dualisms:

- Form (Formal Blueprint of Ideas) vs Appearances (Actual Manifestation of Ideas) (Plato)

- Noumenal (how things are in themselves) vs Phenomenal (how things appear) (Immanuel Kant)

Gruber has been an idealistic and longtime Apple observer. This is probably why he seems to invoke the Idea of Apple to compare and critique the current Appearance of Apple.

Fascinated to see a remark on HN that reminds me of this concept in philosophy.
by onionisafruit | 2025-08-26 03:24:34+00:00
I’ve used flag.Value a couple of times. That may be one of the few places I agree with the author, but I don’t really care that flag.Value is a pain. It’s just one of many options for handling flags (I use kong for anything non-trivial). If your complaints about Go boil down to command line parsing and not understanding interfaces, you are probably a future gopher in denial.
by bitwize | 2025-08-26 03:24:37+00:00
Sorry, folks, the good times are over. The future of computing is a signed, attested chain of trust from boot firmware through application code, on all platforms people are likely to use -- and remote attestation with user identification if you wish to connect to the network. End users love it because it prevents or reduces all sorts of malicious activity, from bank fraud down to online game cheating, with little to no effort on their part; platform vendors love it because it provides a moat; service providers (banks and such) love it for the assurance that their clients are uncompromised; and governments love it because it lets them surveil users and developers.

The only ones who hate it are devs. And who really cares about a bunch of nerds?

Remember, general purpose computing really boils down in security terms to "arbitrary code execution" -- a bad thing in the infosec field.
by earthicus | 2025-08-26 03:24:53+00:00
This certainly won't solve the problem, but I would at least like to banish the term "side load", which is a kind of Orwellian word that takes something everyone used to do all the time and makes it sound obscure and a bit nefarious. Maybe we, the tech literate, can start calling sideloading a "free install" or something. When asked, we can clarify that the 'free' stands for both freedom, and not paying middlemen 30%.
by omoikane | 2025-08-26 03:26:34+00:00
One thing I like about Mastodon and Bluesky (and Twitter before 2023) is that most of it can be read without having an account, so users can ignore all federation features and just treat them like old school websites.

The fact that they have different implementation details that is not so important to me, though personally I replicate all my posts for readers who prefer one place over another.
by OneDeuxTriSeiGo | 2025-08-26 03:28:25+00:00
> We took something natively decentralized - TCP/IP internet - and handed it off to handful of companies to run, thus centralizing it. That was a mistake, especially as they use the power they acquired to push back against folks, for example, trying to build independent community ISPs.

This is not and was not ever true. IP was explicitly designed from the start to be difficult to operate without centralisation because the telecoms operators wanted to maintain their "monopoly" on communications infrastructure.

That is why IP insisted on not separating the interface address from device/service identity despite knowing ahead of time this would make multihoming a nightmare (as it did with ARPANET) and despite this problem already having been solved by CYCLADES (it being basically the one feature they explicitly avoided adopting from CYCLADES).

That among other things.

This is in large part why BGP is and always has been such a clusterfuck. There were known issues ahead of time but they were willfully ignored as they made relying on the heavily centralised telecoms operators essentially always the path of least resistance.