skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Always looks worse when you keep denying, denying just to turn around and admit it later.

Why is this such a common way to handle these situations?
is there a rebuttal to this?

would be interested in reading something that addresses the authors points directly.
> It is 2019 and we need to make a decision about GIFs

I thought "everyone" already agreed on this. Video files are smaller and if you choose the right set of codecs for which clients have hardware acceleration then playback consumes less energy, meaning your visitors don't drain the batteries of their devices as fast.

> replacing GIFs with video has now been common for a few years

Indeed. Which kind of leaves me wondering why author seems to be introducing their article as though it wasn't.

Of course, the article does go on to argue for a specific codec. Still, to me it seems to talk in a way as if not using GIF is "controversial".
What exactly is ‘hackernoon’?

A few days ago they posted a critique of Apple that bordered on libelous: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19853263

Now they post a piece heavily promoting a Google language.

There are good points in both articles, but it’s interesting to wonder what “hackernoon”’s interest is.
If Oracle goes through with the Java licensing threats, Go will have its day for sure.

Also, environments like Kubernetes and Openshift make Java kind of heavy--the portability comes via the container and thus there is no need for a portable runtime. A Go program running in a Kubernetes pod is plenty portable already.
Download Firefox Focus from the AppStore and enable it as an ad blocker for Safari. Works perfectly for me
You'd basically have to get a new number

Utter ruin.
What did you need to do to make Mojave compatible? I've seen a few installer patches around[0] but wasn't sure if you rolled your own solution. Thanks.

Edit: added link

[0] https://github.com/rmc-team/macos-patcher
What is the best saxophone for beginners?
This is a nice overview of Go, but I don't see why Go having enterprise features means that its poised to replace java.
Those same minimum wage workers also couldn't really afford to lose that $25 in the first place
You can make the same art with other formats. I'm not sure exactly what your point is here.
Except it takes 30 seconds and it’s free to open a facebook account. You can even use messenger without having a facebook profile.
True! And ARC in Rust suffers from the same problem (note that while ARC in Rust and ARC in Swift are the same thing, the "A" happens to stand for different words in each case).
Don't delete it. That only makes you look super guilty. And can get you in legal trouble if you start deleting after the trial begins.

The evidence shows that you cancel projects that Mike tells you are unsafe. And the record shows that Ken and Joe have a history of saving the day. "I had no idea that Ken and Joe were cutting corners. I'm not a software person, so I rely on my experts to tell me when things are unsafe. It's all Ken and Joe's fault."
Disclaimer: I'm the founder/maintainer for AppGet (appget.net)

Issues like this were one of the main reasons I started working on appget.
I died a little bit inside every time I saw a friend google an app and click on the first link (usually an ad) or click through the installation wizard as fast as they possibly could and not unchecking the toolbar, bundle, bonus, whatever else.

AppGet solves these issues from a couple of different angles,

1. we only allow packages hosted on the official vendor, maintainer websites.

2. All package manifests are simple YAML files on GitHub where they go through a PR/Review before getting merged.

3. For your _tech normal_ friends or family, they can search for apps in https://appget.net/packages/ and click the install button, and we do the rest. No command line needed.
4. We disable all bundled app installations by default.

For example here is the page for Keepass
https://appget.net/packages/i/keepass
Any social media can be fear-based if you're scared enough.

"Fear of crime" has rarely had much connection to actual crime levels, far more to do with perceptions of cleanliness and social class.
Set `media.av1.enabled` to true in about:config.
You should try and write a fearmongering article and see if it makes it in!

Seriously though, it's not like they ran the story solely because of a screenshot. Other things they likely considered (being a reputable news source [1]) would include the source of the information and historical accuracy of that source, additional source material that was not fit for publication (confidentiality, irrelevent beyond proving accuracy of information, etc.), and other independent verification (reaching out to potential affected companies, communication with the sellers, viewing the advertisement for the material, etc.).

On top of that, writing the article in this way allows for expansion and updates as more information is confirmed or comes to light.

Welcome to how reputable news companies work. They generally don't make stuff up on the spot based on a screenshot.

[1]https://mediabiasfactcheck.com/ars-technica/
So we've redefined "Linux laptop" to mean a system that returns to the base Debian install any time I log out or reboot?

On the other hand, Chromebooks are cheap. So it might be a fun exercise to post a script on github that installs my development environment packages.
As a Canada-US transplant that's been my experience as well. If you have good coverage through work, you'll get better care in the US than in the public Canadian system.

Of course, not everyone in the US has good coverage through work...
Single Writer Principle
New Era: Movie Shot on iPhone and Released on YouTube
Likely because it’s not worse. Facebook does this and I’m betting the know what they’re doing beter than your impression that it “always looks worse”
AV1 will never work on Safari, so it's dead in the water.
Can we start blocking regular http yet?
Traditionally, many Indian classics were transmitted orally. This supposedly led to a lower error rate over time because if I mistranscribe a letter in a written text, all descendants of my text will have the same error, but a single misspeaking in oral transmission is unlikely to persist. On the flipside, the classics tend to be shorter and gnomic and rely on commentary to make them intelligible. They also needed to create a system to preserve old Sanskrit pronunciation even after the spoken language changed.
Yep. I would like to see an article that implements everything without using matrices first, then creates the matrices library with you, and refactors everything over.

So much learning that we're missing by not going through this step.
It's a "compliance car" intended to meet California EV sales minimums. So yes, you see more of them on 280 than you might expect from the total US sales.
Perhaps audio-free videos should be allowed in <img> tags
It should be noted that AMD designed the 64-bit extensions not Intel. One of the rare cases Intel had to accept third party instructions.
I have tried to express my joy at this news to my less SQL literate co-workers... that failed so I wanted to let it out here. This is the best news, I am overjoyed!
Curious where you got 'poorer' out of that. I'm a city boy all my life, but I've driven the country quite a few times - I could picture the Grizzly dip guy with guns and snowmobiles being in Wyoming .. https://www.deptofnumbers.com/income/wyoming/
That does make sense; strong deterrence, and deterministic rather than probabilistic guarantees, are both better for legitimacy, probably.

I don't think there's any need to legislate random audit sample sizes; in practice, independent groups will do so. (And it's crucial to legitimacy that it's possible for independent groups to do so in the first place, of course.)
Facebook Is Not a Monopoly, but It Should Be Broken Up
Sometimes, that's due to blights. We're losing a lot of beautiful, mature ash trees to emerald ash borers. So any tree with even a hint of them leads to immediate destruction.

I have a big, beautiful ash tree, and live a few blocks from a large park (a couple of square miles) with hundreds of ash trees, so I worry just how long I'll get to keep my tree.
A city can't delete a federal law. A city can tell its police department(s) to ignore a federal law (in the sense that it's physically and logically possible, not in the sense of it actually being legal; I'm not sure if the federal government has the power to compel local police forces to enforce federal laws).
I interpreted the statement as "the process of thoughtful reflection, learning, and decision is no different in the scientific domain as any other".

The problem is so few people do engage in critical thinking. I think that's a human universal though.
Please elaborate on the means to prevent unauthorized withdrawals.
> If we'd spent that time developing smarter languages and compilers (Rust is a start, but not an end) we'd be better off as developers and as people.

What about Swift? Automatic Reference Counting avoids the typical problems of mark and sweep garbage collection. Has its own trade offs of course but the benefits include more consistent latency, efficient memory usage and cache friendliness. Like Rust it uses a smarter compiler (LLVM).

Really interesting stuff happing on the server side of Swift right now. It’s early days but I’d keep a close eye on it. Long tail latency is a big big server problem.
Isn’t Vox itself ‘fear based social media’?
This is a guess, but maybe because CEOs are just trying to stall until they can secure a previously agreed upon exit package? Since prosecuting CEOs is so rare these days (here is a great book on that subject https://www.amazon.com/Chickenshit-Club-Department-Prosecute...) it is in their best interest to just deny to avoid culpability.
related: https://www.politico.com/story/2019/04/09/democrats-corporat...

just “voting democrat” is not enough, they have to be held accountable for taking any corporate money, not just from PACs

getting democrats (or any politician) off of corporate funding is like getting a crack addict to stop, but i would argue it’s the most important issue of our time
I'm surprised there is no mention of the Raptor Talos II, which is designed to be auditable in exactly this fashion.
Why are 2D vector graphics so much harder than 3D?
The most important part of GIFs for me is that they behave like images in browsers. They are always auto-playing with no concept of play and pause. You can drag and drop them from a browser to your desktop to save them. You can save an entire page and have all the image files save with it. I've never had this work for webm or other video formats.

You could even argue that GIFs not being a video with no video decoding required is a feature. It may take longer to load, but I can have 100+ GIFs playing at once with no impact to my CPU.

I don't care about video compression or hardware decoding or whatever until they function the same way as GIFs do.
A lot of focus is on the bribers (TurboTax, H&R Block) rather than the bribees (politicians).

But that's curious because the bribers are acting in their own interests whereas the bribees are meant to protect the general public and are failing in their duties. The misplaced focus might actually be why this continues seemingly unabated.

Two other examples of this phenomenon: College textbooks and ticket fees (TicketMaster, et al). In both cases the company acts as a lightning rod deflecting blame away from the only parties able to actually change things (college professors and performers respectively) and who are failing in their duty to protect others (students and fans).

I'm surprised this doesn't have a name, seems super common (and quite effective).

PS - No doubt someone will intentionally or unintentionally misread my post as defending this behavior rather than pointing out that politicians are really the ones that allow this to continue. I'm critical that the focus is not on the MOST guilty, not that TurboTax et al aren't guilty.
Has anyone tried this? Any feedback?
I guess one could view urban tree dynamics as extreme selection for certain traits. They have to be pretty, and in a location that won't inconvenience humans, and they can't do anything to inconvenience humans, like cause allergies, and they have to be extremely resilient.
I'm not sure -- I haven't messed with a Pixelbook. On Chromebooks, the trust root lives in the bootloader's flash with no security beyond the write protect screw.

A quick googling led to a reddit post that indicates it's possible with the Pixelbook, but likely a PITA:

https://www.reddit.com/r/PixelBook/comments/7kv944/does_anyo...
1. One of the reasons a kinda secondary feature of GIFs (animations) became so popular is because it's so easy to generate them. 2. A big feature is that they are not lossy compressed so you can do animations of all the kinds. 3. They allow to set very slow FPS settings in a trivial way.

Animated GIFs are not really a video format, they are just a set of non-lossy compressed images shown at a timer interval. Such small details are hugely important when some media is used in a creative way.
I think that's a very disingenuous reading of what I wrote. I was comparing my personal experience to the hysterics I read on forums like NextDoor and local Reddit. I did not say that the problem was not a problem, but that some responses to and perceptions of it are overblown. (Oftentimes, these positions are used to justify espousing a preference for simply throwing homeless people in jail for "vagrancy" or involuntarily removing people from the state. So, yes, in a way, I do find the response to be worse than the actual problem.)
You're right, but I think the purpose of the article is to spread word about AV1 as a comparison with h264 and vp9 through the fun example of GIFs. Most people know that at least h264 should be used for looping movie clips if your service cares about filesize.

I believe that autoplaying videos are allowed in all browsers if no sound channel is included in the video container.
> Someone should come up with a credit card that has a dynamic hard limit connected to a checking account balance.

You mean a regular bank transaction card? Is that not something that exists in the US?

I always find the American reliance on credit cards somewhat bizarre. Not having an alternative would explain it, I guess.
Good public relations (PR) is not intuitive. The best practice when it comes to bad news is Robert Dilenschneider's advice to "tell it all and tell it fast", but companies are often hesitant to do so for legal and political reasons.

EDIT: To elaborate, getting ahead of an unfolding story is difficult even for experienced PR people. One misplaced word may be taken out of context or even used as admission of guilt in an ongoing investigation. This is generally why PR folks default to true generalities, e.g. "we care about our customers' safety" or "what happened is terrible and should be prevented from happening again".

My knowledge of PR is limited to the book "When the Headline Is You" which I highly recommend. It gives a great perspective on how companies manage themselves in the public light.
Not to mention the hassle and expense of defending yourself.
D'oh! I'll let the record stand as lesson on rash comments.
This kind of infinite regress of A being the pre-requisite of B can be pretty off-putting. It's essentially analogous to mandated "yak shaving", but in a more structured form. Pretty quickly once loses sight of the original inspiration and it's associated joys.

As someone who enjoys multi-disciplinary learning and holistic understanding, what works for me is a kind of spiralling spaced repetition. I keep alternating my attention over a bunch of topics, each time going a little deeper and making more connections. In the later stages, this manifests as a comprehensive and integrative understanding, but it is very difficult to measure partial progress or feel confident in the earlier stages. It is also challenging to communicate with people who have learned the topic in a linear manner and prefer to think that way, especially if they aren't patient or open-minded.

Getting bogged down with gatekeeping "requirements" (as if to cross off prerequisites on a checklist... What does it even mean to check off a topic?) is an easy way to get bogged down. Experience gives me a measure of confidence to push on with my flitting between topics with the faith that enough pieces will eventually come together.

I also like some things Edward Kmett says in his talk "Stop treading water".
The Norquist anti-tax block wants people to have pain filing taxes so they can militate against it, or at least complain about how much they're being taxed.

That said, my sense is that most people don't know what their total yearly tax is, nor their tax rate is, only their refund/tax payment that's due in April 15. As the Republicans found out recently, a lot of people complain about their "tax increase" when they don't don't get a refund, even if their actual tax rate went down.
> If Google owns Search, Gmail, Android, Analytics, Chat, Google Fi, Google Fiber, Chrome, GPay, etc... then they are able leverage one monopoly to establish monopolies elsewhere.

You're right that Google leverages its portfolio of services to get a foothold in other ventures, but not one of those listed above is a monopoly. There are solid and well-performing alternatives/competitors to nearly all of Google's services. Their (and Facebook's) online advertising business is another story.
You could have googled "AdvIntel" in less time than it took you to write this comment. Seriously though, the results will surprise you.
HackerNoon has been an editorial related to tech for quite some years. They don't have any secret conspiracy like interest, but like any editorial, they are made up of many different voices and opinions (which each have their own interests).
All browsers except IE/Edge support it, so it "caught on", but I don't see it in the wild, so it hasn't caught on with web publishers.
At the risk of ousting myself as an idiot: I never ask why.

I honestly have little to no idea how the software I work on works, outside of my narrow scope of responsibility. I just do what the work as defined in the story, then go home.
It isn't a

> (poorly) made up excuse to ban undesirable users.

I suppose I'm not interested in debating the definition of malice as it relates to actions by a large corporation...
People need to be in jail.
I'm with you on this one.
In short they got bad legal advice about a contract from someone at the company on the other end of the contract. It is not even clear if this person is a lawyer, who would have understood the details of the contract, but they very clearlly are not the lawyer for the city.
Not sure why this is getting downvoted. We see again and again that in spite of these kinds of disasters and callous disregard and fraud, CEOs don't actually get punished, instead are rewarded with massive exit packages.
ARC optimizations do let it retain/release less often. For example, instead of a callee adding the return value to an autorelease pool then having the caller immediately retain the returned value, the autorelease+retain pair can be elided entirely.
Cool. Looks really useful!
Our Shared Ongoing Battle to Not Buy a Tesla
Seems like limiting their payment processing was a pretty effective step.
That's a different issue. Aircraft systems are classified as to degree of risk. This is from MIL-STD-882C.

- I Catastrophic - Death, and/or system loss, and/or severe environmental damage.

- II Critical - Severe injury, severe occupational illness, major system and/or environmental damage.

- III Marginal - Minor injury, and/or minor system damage, and/or environmental damage.

- IV Negligible - Less then minor injury, or less then minor system or environmental damage.

Now, face it, most webcrap and phone apps are at level IV. Few people in computing outside aerospace regularly work on Level I systems. (Except the self-driving car people, who are working at Level I and need to act like it.)

MCAS started as just an automatic trim system. Those have been around for decades, and they're usually level III systems. They usually have limited control authority, and they usually act rather slowly, on purpose.
So auto trim systems don't have the heavy redundancy required of level I and II systems. Then the trim system got additional functionality, control authority, and speed to provide the MCAS capability. Now it could cause real trouble.

At that point, the auto trim system had become a level I system. A level I system requires redundancy in sensors, actuators, electronics, power, and data paths. Plus much more failure analysis. A full fly-by-wire system or a full authority engine control system will have all that.

So either MCAS needed to have more limited authority over trim, so it couldn't cause trim runaway, or it needed the safety features of a Level I system. Boeing did neither. Parts of the company seem to have thought the system didn't have as much authority as it did. ("Authority", in this context, means "how much can you change the setting".)

Management failure.
Red Hat doesn't necessarily care about adoption unless it leads to subscription revenue. It's easy enough to switch between CentOS and Red Hat. At some point I care enough about enterprise support and Red Hat's add-ons to make that switch and pay for it. And if I don't, Red Hat doesn't care. I really don't understand this pressure for companies to just literally give stuff away. It's hard enough convincing corporate leadership that free-as-in-libre software is a good thing. If people just complain when it's also not free-as-in-gratis, the community is shooting itself in the foot.
> AV1 is an open and free format, but if people really wanted to replace GIFs they could've done it with H.264 or VP9 or VP8.

They have. The "gifs" on reddit or imgur are generally h.264, even if you upload gifs they'll get converted to video files.

TFA's just saying those should be switched to AV1, or an AV1 source should be provided.

I'm not sure they're right though. h.264 will be larger and of lower quality especially at low bitrates, but clients can offload the decoding to hardware whereas with AV1 most or all will be decoding in software.
Enes Kanter: What It’s Like to Fast for Ramadan While in the NBA Playoffs
It's telling that the author doesn't list all of the file sizes. The GIFs are gigantic but the AV1 files are LARGER than either the H.264 or VP9 versions in every example. If we wanted to replace GIFs you'd want to go with something closer to a comparable level of support and at this scale there's no reason to use a format with no hardware support and limited client support in general:

https://caniuse.com/#feat=mpeg4 97.16%

https://caniuse.com/#feat=webm 86.39%

https://caniuse.com/#feat=hevc 16.57%

https://caniuse.com/#feat=av1 35%

Note also that this is _any_ support at all, including the slow software implementations which boost the VP9 and AV1 numbers but have significant drawbacks if you care about quality, battery life, or the impact on other things running on the same device.
For whatever reason my browser is crashing when trying to read this article, so I guess I'll keep my GIFs.
Software markets and businesses are 10x bigger due to the internet
I think that's what p1mrx is saying as well. You can install Debian and Ubuntu in the containers, reaping the benefits of secure boot. However, after 6.5 years the devices are EOLd and stop receiving updates making secure boot useless since you're securely booting into out of date software. p1mrx wants secure boot to be disabled once the device is EOL so that they can install a distro without dealing with dev mode.
Wow neat! Thanks for the tip, hero
I have no problem being fed the fad of the month codec, as long as a reliable fallback is available.
Anonymous public feedback. You need whistle lowers because things are happening in the dark without a way for the truth to bubble up.