skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Questions for y'all. (Rather, I'm soliciting broad technical and business advice.)

I have built a very fast and efficient CPU-only neural TTS engine in Rust/Torch JIT that is the synthesis of three different models. I've got a bunch of celebrity and cartoon voices I've trained. The selling point is that this runs on cheap, commodity hardware and doesn't require GPUs. I can easily horizontally scale it as a service.

I've currently got it running in a Kubernetes autoscaling group on DigitalOcean, but I'm worried about the bandwidth costs of serving up potentially thousands of hours of generated audio. I haven't thrown any real traffic at it beyond load testing, but I think it can survive heavy traffic. The thing that worries me is the bandwidth bill.

Does anyone have experience with other hosts that are cheap for bandwidth intensive apps? Are there hosts that provide egress bandwidth on the cheap for dynamically generated (non-CDN) content?

Subsequent to this, I would really like to sell or monetize this app so I can fund the R&D / CapEx intensive startup I really want to undertake.

Who might be the market to buy a TTS system like this?

I was thinking Cartoon Network might want "Rick and Morty" TTS, but despite my engineering to scale this and make it sound really good, I doubt they'd pay me much for the product. I suppose $2M would give me runway to hire a few engineers and buy a lot of the equipment I need, but I have no idea who would pay for this.

Glass for optics is surprisingly expensive, and beyond that I have other extremely high R&D costs.

Alternatively, I also have a "real time" (~800ms delay) neural voice conversion system. I thought about running a Kickstarter campaign and selling it to gamers / the discord demographic. It's relatively high fidelity with no spectral distortion, and I have a bunch of hypothetical mechanisms to make it an even better fit.

I've also thought about slapping a cute animation system on top of my TTS service let people animate characters interacting. (Value add?) An earlier non-neural TTS system I built before the last presidential election cycle had something like this, but more primitive: http://trumped.com (The audio quality of this concatenative system is absolute garbage. The new thing I've built is unrelated.)
Sign that they are overstaffed. Imagine the resources spent to go after these guys.
The best way to reduce usage is to not build and run what people do not want.
>> When they hire you, they’re convinced at first that they’ve made a great choice. This honeymoon period lasts about six months at which point their attitude flips and they become convinced that they hired a bozo

True of almost every job!!! There could be many reasons to why this happens, I can only speculate given all the hiring strategies, the interviewing jujitsu and what not, it might be an NP category problem.
Without looking, let's take a guess as to where this happened.

Florida?
Okay then. We have arrived at something like the terminal state I earlier called "identifying subjective factors and agreeing to disagree", and there's nothing more to talk about. But I'll answer one of your earlier questions, since I think it's an interesting one:

> So you think they'd agree with your statement that - is a fair characterisation of their own tactics???

Frankly, yes. in a lot of cases, if they were really being truthful, I think they would. I say that because I have myself followed these impulses in the past, seeking to tear someone down and make them look like a fool (and myself reciprocally stronger) rather than attack whatever argument they were peddling. In my defense, I tend only to do this when my opponent has already stopped saying meaningful things (if they ever started in the first place) and started throwing slurs, but probably not always, especially in the past.

I'm not afraid of being honest, and I have the benefit of being old enough to be able to look back on past versions of myself and somewhat clearly see all the different ways I've been a total asshole to people, many of them total strangers. So I guess my theoretical jerk-revealing machine would have a threefold approach:

1. Add ten years to the subject's age. (filled with life experience and growth; not sure how that works, but this is a thought experiment so)

2. Induce an intense reflective/introspective episode in them.

3. Force them to be honest.

Some people probably just don't have it in 'em to grapple with this aspect of themselves even with the above help, but I expect more do than one might think.
These experience degradation pushes people gradually towards a cliff.

Another competing thing comes up in people's life (it need not be even in the same category), the previous one would be dropped if there are unpleasant association with it - conscious or subconscious.

OR, ..need to cut back (finance, digital wellbeing, etc.), again the first thing would go out is the one which is associated with less value i.e., of lesser quality, not living upto expectation, and so on..
It's for anti-spam. Preventing people from generating millions of free accounts is valuable.
Grab Acquires SG Wealth Tech Startup Bento to Expand Financial Offering
They have reasonably good support in mainline Linux/etc, so you don't have to use the vendor BSPs. In addition, for Allwinner you can even run open source firmware on the power management processor (AR100, OpenRISC based).

http://linux-rockchip.org/
https://linux-sunxi.org/
https://linux-sunxi.org/AR100
So people don't generate thousands of accounts then sit on them until they want to spam with legit-looking seven year old accounts.
Because you don’t have to.

The few hours you used on infrastructure can be better used fixing a bug, polishing/adding a feature or even giving yourself a break so you can be better focused the next day.

A Heroku-like platform will literally do the scaling for you. The non-financial cost is that you need to develop your application in-line with their framework/platform. If you make this decision at the start, this cost in practically nil.
I’m not sure if I’m misunderstanding, but you will need a Real ID to board domestic flights as well.
Yeah, there are those who argue that conservation programs benefit from the money generated by zoos, but I still don't feel great about them. Ideally it would be nice if we could work out better ways to distribute our resources so that conservation could be funded without them.
I work on one of the systems called out in the article. It's a fabulous disaster. I don't think it'll keel over and die anytime soon, but it absolutely should be phased out.

The problem is these big projects, like modernizing core social service systems, are given big budgets and big expectations. Then they start a big team to work on it, with short deadlines and not enough direction. At some point it is discovered that the legacy systems business logic is mostly undocumented/baked into a mainframe/functioning through sheer luck/nothing but PL/SQL and DB triggers. Then the several contacting companies are brought in to try and sort out the mess, solutions are purchased from billion dollar private companies (all of which have screwed over the Government of Canada one way or another), and project management is shuffled around as fast as HR can fill out the forms. After three years the money runs out, the project dies, and then we try again in two years.

The solution is never a slow and steady modernization. It's never small, focused teams working on improving or rebuilding individual components. It's never upgrading infrastructure, or moving to modern best practices.

It's always all or nothing. Solve the problems, without fixing them.
Be careful about going down this rabbit hole, or you might end up being called a cOnSpiRacY ThEOriSt.
It's simpler than that: Stripe does the things that banks weren't even good at (APIs for programmatic payments).
No, it wouldn't work. It only works if people can discover you with the "find people you know from your address book" feature. A deleted number won't match. Or you can just turn it off in your discoverability settings.
If you want the truly bizarre (read protectionist), check out lawmakers reasons for licensed interior designers.
OSS Robot development platform supports 3 environments: AWS, Azure, and on-prem
Most Beautifully Illustrated Math Books for Kids
Because you don't have one year to update and release your software. You have to have it ready and begin testing at least by the time betas of the next version of OS ships.

And to do that, you have to start much earlier.
Interestingly I’ve gotten much better results with workers than I have with lambda
The takeaway from the first story is simple: don't be a jerk.

It's harder to find a takeaway from the second story. How do you in general avoid making whatever mistakes Bill supposedly made with his seminar?
Maybe they understand that there's very little empty land to build housing on.
Surely youtube will be high up on the list.
They don't have to. USB is four wires.
Kirk Douglas, longtime influential movie star, dies at 103
> if they were really being truthful, I think they would.

What makes you so good at telling when people are masking some underlying truth?
We do both SMEs, and large corporate, with 5.5M users in total.

I would say we sign a 1000+ employee corporationn every month. Example, in Portugal we replaced 150 legacy proprietary software in 3 years: https://joinup.ec.europa.eu/collection/open-source-observato...

More case studies here:
In no way saying they don't matter. I'm saying it's overblown and ridiculous how scared people are, most media outlets have running 24 hour coverage of any snippet they can scrounge up.

The authorities are taking care of it incredibly well, my main point was keep calm and carry on. Of course it will spread elsewhere in greater numbers, may even rival some rare ailments for deaths. Catching pneumonia is bad for everyone. A marginally higher risk of catching it isn't anything to stress about.

Would you like to talk about the 5000 people who died on the roads in China last week alone? Because I would. Do their lives matter as much here? It's far more tragic given that nearly all of them weren't suffering pre-existing conditions.

This is giant global experiment in human ability to logically discern risk and we seemed to have failed dramatically.
Hiding counts makes it hard to identify imposter accounts and bots. Users need to be able to see account age and counts at a minimum.
My wife subscribes to their service. I can say, you pay a lot for what you get.
Neat! So simple.
> Don’t want surveillance? Don’t use the products the employ it

That’s as simple as saying “don’t like crime? Don’t be near criminals.”

Data’s being stolen and we’re being watched whether we like it or not. Only sometimes can we easily opt out and have those decisions respected.
This is how I see it as well. Start making cookies with the kitchen oven before planning to start a bakery. Heroku lets you do both.
Do you sit for long periods and hate wearing a belt?
I mean we realize this thread of argument has nothing to do with the point right?

A cell phone number does not equal your kitchen phone in terms of access to information. The whole this is moot. The issue now is that this is my personal phone number, me, personally, and is being used as a piece of validating information in a variety of compromises databases.
Simple react hook-based global state library
The criticism is that it is made by and caters to low status people.
Are you criticising Bill Wadge in particular? His Ph. D thesis led to one of the widely studied notions in descriptive set theory [1]. He switched to computer science and made a lot of contributions to CS and AI [2]

If you are talking about disrupting academia in general, I am partly with you. There are academic have-beens, but the "disruption" might be tantamount to throwing the baby out with the bath water. I don't know of any decent way of distinguishing an academic who is currently stuck while trying to make progress, from an academic who is truly academically dead.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wadge_hierarchy

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lucid_(programming_language)
Cool! It seems to work well, and respects with no hassle my IP-based location.
So many well informed comments here I have to ask... and please forgive the spam... If you're interested in this area and might be be interested in working at YouTube then please email me using the address in my profile. I work in this area at YouTube.
Those numbers were faked. See the screenshots from the original website here:

http://archive.ph/https://news.qq.com/zt2020/page/feiyan.htm

I've seen this pattern before (Epstein, Douma, the principle of net neutrality etc.). Fake data is released to muddy the water hoping that someone seeking for the truth is accidentally going to pick it up to then discredit / censor this person. If someone will then leak the actual truth that is similar to the faked one people are then less likely to look at it even if proof is provided.
That's actually pretty awesome!
Our critique of Behringer's proposed TD-3 variant with Devil Fish functions
big whoop
I think the lesson is "Read the room". Different types of seminars have different purposes.

For some, it is indeed desirable to dazzle and confuse. In others, to be approachable.
He’s been a known sex trafficker with close ties to US politicians for decades. You think the CIA would not look into him?
You shouldn’t be installing third party antivirus on macOS (or BSD/Linux for that matter), they are little more than another path the kernel and root user space. MacOS has its own built in malware / virus protection.
because you are a non-partisan software? I agree with the 'getting into trouble piece' I think. I don't see how being non-partisan gets you into more trouble or would increase those chances.
creating good will costs little but pays off a lot when you eventually F something up and can draw from it for forgiveness

apart from that, not being an asshole is its own reward
Auto-scaling doesn’t take 3-5 hours to set up. Or come work for us!
Oh of course, though would say insects are far more prepared evolutionary-wise to deal with those products rather than Monsantos new monthly bioweapon straight out of the lab.
Ask HN: Why does census API have columns like B01001_009 and not readable names?
And why hasn't anyone created a service that humanizes the naming?
When I hit play on the audio near the top I get no sound, progress indicator progresses as expected.

Mobile Safari on iPhone 7 running iOS 13.1.2
The employer will be fine with 30% reduced output.
I don't think it counts if it can't actually edit text, i.e. open and save at minimum.
It's super hard for me to not respond too strongly to this, as I'm currently having trouble with a particularly junior dev who just cannot wrap his mind around maintainability issues...

But really, I feel if "you" are spending the majority of time setting up new projects and familiarizing yourself with new technologies, that doesn't leave much time to get really GOOD at anything. Sure, we live in an amazing time where the simple act of adding a new technology to a problem can grant huge business benefits in a lot of places. But that's almost never the end-all, be-all of it. You don't just get to hook up GraphQL and ring your hands of it; as the company grows and begins to rely more and more on the new technology you set up, issues like whether or not you're getting source data efficiently start to really matter. How you set it up, and the design patterns you instituted for that technology, could very well make for the success or failure of a company. And it'll definitely effect the mental well-being of the the devs you leave behind.
I think kickstart is quite well documented, both upstream and in RHEL:

https://pykickstart.readthedocs.io/en/latest/https://access....

Any concrete examples of stuff the existing docs do not cover ?
My freakish psychic powers.

Seriously, though, if you don't think the distinction between attacks on arguments and attacks on people is at all meaningful or useful, we're 100% done here. That last bit is a bonus; feel free to read it and take what you want from it, or not.

Til next time.
Meh. I'd wish Microsoft and Google would start separating their actual cloud platform (Azure, GCP) revenues from their "cloud" SaaS revenue (Office 365, G Suite). It'd make comparisons to AWS a lot more meaningful.

Edit: Apparently Microsoft is already doing this.
Can I ask any legal expert to explain the difference between this and entrapment?
Sadly, these tiles haven't been updated for several years. They are beautiful though. Probably best used for zoomed out maps.
Let me wonder aloud here. The story goes that Epstein was a Mossad puppet in an operation that served to control the richest, most powerful and influential, most well-connected people alive, to extent to significantly affect things on global political stage. That operation was successfully going on for decades. (That's impressive, but wouldn't really surprise me, as we know for a fact that some even more impressive success stories of several government intelligence agencies dismissed as "conspiracy stories" for decades turned out to be true.)

Then, this very valuable asset (virtually untouchable for some very high-profile people) gets compromised because some nobody accused him of "sexual abuse". There is an investigation, arrest, conviction, yet nothing really leaks, he gets off relatively easy, his masters don't think it is necessary to get rid of him and the whole (pretty public by now, with multiple very famous people low-key-affected) goes on in this messy way for 15 years.

After 15 years he suddenly gets arrested again, this time for good, the whole story gets incredibly public, his bosses suddenly (again, 15 years) realise that he is a liability and decide to get rid of him. He gets killed in a cell by Mossad agents, this is staged as a suicide, which is another "conspiracy theory" for a short while, but in the end we all know that Epstein didn't kill himself. Key evidence disappears and the case is covered on multiple levels, leading up to some very high ranks.

Ok, there are plenty of really really suspicious inconsistencies in that story already, but here's what really baffles me: how come this very well-organized, lead by world-class professionals and covered up by incredibly influential people (both on the "offending" and "blackmailed" sides) operation gets "cleaned up" in a way such that every fucking couch potato in the internet (HN included) sees that this is obviously staged? Mossad cannot silently get rid of people?

I mean, of course everybody (again, HN community members especially included) loves to think they are wa-ay smarter than some Mossad goons and dirty politicians covering this up. But seriously. How can this possibly be so obvious (yet still so mysterious! — we really know nothing in paricluar) unless somebody really wants it to be obvious?
New VMware and VirtualBox versions can rely on hyper v platform so you can use them with vbs enabled
This burns me up:

> These 118 con men and women were posing as contractors & preying on innocent homeowners in Hillsborough County, who were just looking to repair or improve their home," said Hillsborough County Sheriff Chad Chronister

I am almost certain that's not what happened. Unless they each lied about having a contractors' license when asked, they didn't "pose" as anything, and aren't conning anyone.

Based on the examples in this article, is there anything that doesn't require a license to do? Unhooking a toilet is apparently an advanced skill in Florida.

I guess this is my reminder to give some more to www.ij.org
It's not the bureaucrats that want this legislature, it's licensed tradespeople who want it, so that unlicensed tradespeople don't take work from them.

You should be turning your ire at the hammer-swingers, wrench-turners, and saw-operators.
That would be a problem.

I've typically gone a different route and used an ATMega32U2 (or U4) with Dean Camera's LUFA code to create a CDC to custom hardware bridge. Then the baud rate is irrelevant (or you can use it to set modes). I did this because OpenOCD was taking many, many minutes to program a tiny XC95144 CPLD using an FTDI JTAG cable. Yeah, sorry, trying to do it the "cheap way". When I got it working, the ATMega32U2 "serial" solution could do it in 2.3 seconds. Admittedly this was a few years ago, so things have likely improved.

One funny thing I did find doing this; I have not checked recent macOS releases - I should, was that if "Camera" was in the USB Device Descriptor the device would get claimed as a "serially attached camera" and the "serial" port would not show up - doh.
I would really love to know what the quarterly revenue is for just compute and storage, for each of the major cloud providers. Including things like G Suite and Office 365 just muddies the waters.
They did have a kill switch. What they did not have was someone with the authority and guts to throw it in time.

This may have something to do with the fact that killing a HFT bot without some kind of orderly wind-down might leave you with some very expensive open positions.
I am the author and I am aware that the number of hook based global state libraries are like increasing per week.
But it only means that all the authors combined are onto something.

The simplicity of these hook based libraries are much much more appealing than say redux, mobx or even context api.
Minimal setup time, simple to use.. not having to worry about potentially future performance issues (as with context api.. for those not aware, there is a sentence in react docs saying context forces re-render whenever the content changes regardless of shouldComponentUpdate rules)

The TypeScript part is simple too. Don't have to create classes or annotations. Create a type for your store data structure and start hacking away.

What do you all think?
That's like saying Toyota sells more cars than the Italian supercar industry.
Somehow I have an impression that I tried something and could not repeat it in SML/NJ. I can recall it was about streams and lazy evaluations, but now I think that I just misused Lazy lib since I haven't used SML for a while. So this is getting easier, great, thanks! :)
I stated that rather than explainability, for most use cases, people just want calibrated and robust uncertainty estimates NOT low quality and uncalibrated uncertainties estimates.

Your example points to models that provide low quality uncertainty estimates, but that's not true for all deep learning models.

I believe it's these low quality uncertainty estimates that lead people to look toward "explainability" as a solution, but for the majority of use cases, I think people just want better uncertainty estimates so that they can "know when they're model doesn't know".

There are techniques now to get higher quality, calibrated, uncertainty estimates that don't suffer from the problems you mentioned and I've outlined these solutions in my posted link above.

Additionally if you're interested, there is some nice recent research from google on the subject:

https://ai.googleblog.com/2020/01/can-you-trust-your-models-...

and from oxford:

https://arxiv.org/abs/1912.10481v1
This exchange reads to me like one commenter saying "not a true communist!" and one commenter saying "not a true capitalist."

I won't call it either way, because I've seen this argument play out many many times and it never seems to be satisfactorily settled.
YouTube revenue disclosure could pressure Instagram to share money with creators
That's not really relevant, though. The point is not "Video produces significant emissions, therefore it is bad." The point is "Video produces significant emissions, therefore making it more efficient would be good." The fact that video is not as bad as something else has no bearing on whether video could be made even better. It's worth bringing up because in a decision between x% better image quality or x% lower emissions, the total amount of those emissions is the key piece of information.