skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: Why No Smart Phone Esque IoT Device?
I've been playing around with hardware, IOT, and microcontrollers for the past year, and always wondered why there isn't the equivalent of a smart phone IOT device or microcontroller in the space. Even the cheapest phone has a host of sensors already integrated which would make getting up and started with projects so much easier. (I still haven't managed to get a consistent working GSM connection.)

What am I missing?
French doctors say they found a Covid 19 patient from December
I just wanted to mention that I didn't fault the original author for the proposed solution. It was 2011, they seemed to use some commercial load-balancer, and the customer didn't seem to want to actually solve the solution.

I actually found the original solution interesting, and I also proposed an alternative achievable with HAProxy as an load-balancer.
You should check Hetzner AX series. Even their cheap (39 euro with ecc) ryzen 5 3600 give us 4 times the performance than our E3 1245 cpu.
Then you probably don't consider Rust datarace free as well.
Did you read the code? It’s not formatting or minor anal things like that. There are 10s of variables defined, functions, all without comment, cryptic names updating other cryptic names, stateful global vars updated promiscuously by everyone...

This I take issue with.
I think the real killer is going to be the constant improvements to the video editing and mixed 2D animation facilities. I recently used Blender for some casual video editing, and there were a couple things about the experience that really stunk (like not having proper control over framerates, while editing a 15fps video, needing to render to 30fps), but there is also a lot of promise with its tight integration with the Blender renderers and animation system.

I think it's time for a mixed-content VFX BOMP with all the sequences composited and edited in Blender, end to end.
I think you're right. It does make more sense.

I think the pull-down-to-scroll-up action came from the scroll bars at the side of the page.
> Instead, if part of the frame is constantly being updated you'll still recover from loss in finite time

Modern video codecs tend not to be self-stabilising. For example, most codecs use some kind of huffman tables or arithmetic coding. If the probabilities for those tables depend on previous frames, and you don't know the probabilities, the resulting decode will be entirely junk, and won't get you any closer to being able to decode the next frame either.
Yeah

At the same time it misses the point of the natural sciences.

Hypergraphs as described are more like Calculus than Physics. Of course, describing gravity with calculus was a brilliant discovery but you can't just have calculus and say "that's gravity". You need the connection between the two.
CSS Text Glitch Effect – Gscode
Wow... really a first world perspective here.
Yes, Django takes care of the complexity so the developer does not have to. Flask is bare bones, so the complexity is left to the developer. I have done similar applications and websites with both and I know which one I'm more productive with. But of course YMMV and we are all lucky to have the choice.
Indeed if I were to configure the load-balancer I would limit both the number of concurrent requests and the number of queued requests. (In fact this is what I do in my HAProxy deployments.)

However I assume that the customer (the original author was referring to) didn't want to apply any limitations. (Why is beyond my reasoning...)
Yep. In US the interchange fee is more than 2% of the transaction. In the EU, interchange fees are capped to 0.3% of the transaction for credit cards and to 0.2% for debit cards. That's why in US they have those cash back options on credit cards, that are just not possible in Europe.
Seriously? Works fine for me. Most systems are distributed and outages can be limited to certain users or areas. There is absolutely no point in posting here about a suspected outage.
Supporting embedding well is a lot of work, both to create the APIs and then deal with their constraints as the browser evolves. Mozilla has always been under-resourced compared to the competition (IE, then Chrome) and taking people off improving Firefox/Gecko to work on embedding never made the cut. I don't really regret those decisions.

What made it extra unappealing for Mozilla was that we knew the Firefox/Gecko architecture needed lots of work that would destabilize an embedding API. Not much point in supporting an API that assumes single-process while you're moving to multi-process, or that exposes XUL which you know is a dead end, or that isn't compatible with off-main-thread rendering or GPU rendering, etc. Things are much better now that a lot of that debt has been paid off.
In the article, swap is mentioned. Apparently either processing each request requires some amount of memory, or new processes are fired up for concurrent requests (the Apache model). So, what I've seen happen in similar circumstances is that once swapping starts, some of the processes run 10x slower, while new load keeps coming in and piling up, running the server even deeper into the swap. Soon you have a thousand processes, load-average >100, and you can't run anything in the terminal.

As mentioned in other comments, a proper defense against this would be to have a front-line system that anticipates such a situation and actively manages it: puts outstanding requests in a queue (throttling the load) and then errors out on new requests if there's still too many of them coming in.
The Noob Friendly Guide To: What Is Usability Testing
Cloudfare should run captcha service and not sell the data acquired as such.

Data can be used by their ddos protection scheme but that's all about it, not to be sold to advertisers or other firms.
>> The smarter the tech in store — less training required per employee on site

We know that the larger the attack surface the more likely is to get hacked so if Starbucks really cares about everything you said (i.e food safety issues) it should hire more people and less machines.
This is remarkable.

The "YouTube algorithm" is responsible for Donald Trump's ascension, Pizzagate, the belief that 5G towers cause Coronavirus, anti-vaccers, and on and on. It has been the most destructive force in the modern era.

Personally I find it unbelievably stupid -- the videos it presents to me are just a terrible collection of trash, and if I happen to watch one video about someone shooting arrows, suddenly YouTube thinks I am an extreme bow and arrow aficionado.

This post will be auto-flagged given that dang prefers to run an AGW-denial website that spends far too much time apologizing and appeasing the US president.
Just out of curiosity, what downtime is in acceptable range for that single server?
>ever more complex configurations of CA until we find the one that somehow works

Just gotta keep adding more epicycles, eventually geocentrism will be vindicated! /s
Here [1] is a comment on Wolfram's 2002 book which includes a section about his choice of style (go to `Why everybody doesn't get it`), talking about the culturally expected extreme humbleness of scientists, and the impact of that humbleness on clarity of communication.

A plausible explanation for his being viewed as megalomaniac is a disapproval of a perceived lack of humbleness ("A good scientist ought to downplay their discoveries, make them seem like no big deal. He claims his discoveries are super important, so he's a baaaad guy").

Having been in your (supposed) position of coming across discussions about Wolfram, where the first things I read where judgments about Wolfram the person instead of his ideas, I arrived at the following conclusion after a while:

I don't know and don't have the expertise to evaluate the correctness or value of his ideas to physics or science in general. I'm also not interested in "drama", I just want to learn cool stuff. So what I can do is actually read his work, keep an open mind with respect to his writing style, and see what, if anything, I get out of it.

The result of that is that I occasionally read a blog post by him, or a random paragraph from NKS (which is available online), or watch one of his Q&A streams. [2] And from those, I get tremendous value. The ideas are often beautiful, clearly explained and visualized, and some have had a large impact of my thinking about both the universe and the mind.

Not reading someone's work because of other peoples' judgment of that person just robs you of potential opportunities to learn something.

[1] https://people.well.com/user/abs/Cyb/archive/c3m_0201.html

[2] https://www.twitch.tv/stephen_wolfram/videos?filter=archives...
So there are two ways a server can be engineered to handle overload:

1. A throttling scheme of some sort

2. Ignore the possibility, and just crash disastrously if/when it occurs

Is that right? If so, surely that's what we should be talking about here, no? (I see ninkendo mentioned it in their comment too.)

Am I right in thinking the whole problem that the blog-post discusses - avoiding a small pool of servers getting overloaded and blowing up - follows from poorly engineered servers that go with Option 2?

Edit This is what I get for reading the article too quickly. She addresses this quite explicitly:

> they could have rewritten their web site code so it didn't send the machines into a many-GB-deep swap fest. They could have done that without getting any hosting people involved. They didn't
Yes. Electricity is cheap and it's housed in an existing office(s).

The real cost is IT talent and time. I happen to have homelab experience with HP servers, so (for us) those costs are extremely low.

It's honestly not as complex or costly as cloud providers make it sound.

Replication offsite is easy via s2s vpn and veeam - as is spinning up new VMs for dev or testing. Building already has good a/c and backup power, and hardware/drive failures are rare.
It's likely colocation, getting to the physically building data-centers size is another size up.
Kraftwerk were great. But their greatness wasn't primarily in
making novel sounds. Where they really stomped on the terra was in making good music using ideas that various useless and unlistenable academic electronic music "composers" had been screwing up for at least a couple of decades.

Relatively few people celebrate forerunners like Morton Subotnik, Karlheinz Stockhausen, or Iannis Xenakis as innovators, and that is because those guys sucked. Kraftwerk rocked, and we can hear the difference.

IMO, IMO.
Show HN: An Illustrated Guide to Graph Neural Networks
Yes, three finger drag is a huge friction-saver. Any time I see someone working without one or the other I cringe.
There are a limited number of hours in the day. I guarantee you that >99.99% of all nonexpert blogs on the internet are pure garbage—should they spend 50-100 hours a week reviewing crazy?

My field was an uninteresting sub-field of programming language theory, and every conference, at least 1/2 the papers submitted were borderline batshit insane. The stuff on the internet is gibberish.

Screaming into the night & railing that physicists are ignoring you is just sociopathy. Instead, go to them, give presentations, prove your ideas have merit. Make it short to get their attention, build up credit & lead them to what’s new.
Wink Smart Home – Hub API Outage
Chromium Fugu API Tracker
Which dedicated infra host did you use?
Yeah, I saw them in NYC many years ago and was supprised how openly people were smoking weed. :-)

Anyway, the show was great!
As most have mentioned already: cost

We started out with Emvi [1] on Kubernetes at Google Cloud as it was the "fancy thing to use". I like Kubernetes, but we paid about 250€/month just to run some web servers and two REST APIs. Which is way too much considering that we're still working on the product and pivoting right now, so we don't have a lot of traffic.

We then moved on to use a different cloud provider (Hetzner) and host Kubernetes on VMs. Our costs went down to about 50€ just because of that. And after I got tired managing Kubernetes and all the complexity that comes along with it, we now just use a docker-compose on a single (more powerful) VM, which reduced our cost even futher to about 20€/month and _increased_ performance, as we have less networking overhead.

My recommendation is to start out as simple as possible. Probably just a single server, but keep scaling in mind while developing the system. We can still easily scale Emvi on different hardware and move it around as we like. We still use Google Cloud for backups (together with Hetzners own backup system).

[1] https://emvi.com/
I don't disagree with you that paradigm shifts are rare, but to dismiss then out of hand as simply not being the way we do science is indeed naive.

We need both sorts of thinkers in science: those who want to make the important incremental improvements and those who seek entirely new ways of looking at problems.
Advantage is that most of the time, you have a fairly new browser engine available for your app, that is not tied to the OS version (especially important on Android). Also doesn't require embedding an 50MB engine (Crosswalk) in your app.

Disadvantage is that as an app developer you're not guaranteed to have any specific version available. Some devices never upgrade the pre-installed version automatically. The user is also able to switch between the Chrome webview and an OS webview on some devices (in developer settings, so it's not common). You can add checks in your app and direct the user to the update links, but requires quite a bit of work to do well.
Show HN: Customised Jitsi Meet as a Service
We have hosted Jitsi Meet and plan to customise it to have real-time speech to speech audio translation and multilingual speech to text transcription.
Yeah, truly impressive.
XULRunner was working great.

Unfortunately, there were strategic decisions to basically never maintain it :(
Unfortunately the load-balancer is not a magic-bullet curing every issue a system has. A load-balancer can be configured to do lots of things, like for example:

* limit the number of concurrent requests, and drop the others;

* limit the number of concurrent requests, but queue the others (with a timeout);

* distribute all requests uniformly (randomly or in round-robin fashion) to all backends;

* (any combination of the above);

However if the "customer" asks you to not drop or queue requests, then there is nothing the load-balancer can actually do...
They were a necessity in some places like NYC and parts of Europe, but in many other places, lockdown began before the virus spread there and the hospitals have been gaping empty while lockdown continues. The original tactic was "flatten the curve" to keep cases where the healthcare system could handle them, but that tactic has been changed to "get cases down to the level where we can test & trace down to zero". Sweden appears to be the only country sticking to the original flatten the curve plan, they've been keeping their R hovering around 1, staying about 20% under ICU capacity.
I would say the installation experience might be a bit more involved, but once it's installed it's much more worry-free for me. On every other distribution I've used (including Ubuntu and co), it's very easy to break the system completely. On Nix, it's almost impossible because you can always boot directly into the state before your update. Once you've set up your configuration, you can install it instantly on other machines by copying one file. On other distributions, you would have to re-install and configure everything by hand. Many of the tweaks for which you usually have to read Arch Wiki are also built into Nix, so you just have to write services.myService.myOption = foo; and you're done.

For the second point, if you've got a package that just builds with the usual ./configure, make, make install, here is all you need to get a nix package for it:

{ stdenv }:
stdenv.mkDerivation {
name = "my-package";
src = ./.;
buildInputs = [ ... whatever dependencies you need ...];
}

And the standard build commands will be run automatically. The only thing that's kind of annoying is installing binary distributions of packages since they need to be patched to work on Nix, but it's not the end of the world. Also, nixpkgs is so universal that I very rarely find myself having to add a package that's not in it.
Apologies if my earlier comment came off as insinuating that code used for research paper was buggy. That was not my intent.
China’s Military Is Tied to Debilitating New Cyberattack Tool
But that's not always possible when you don't have a good enough job to save which is the reality for a majority of Americans since they live pacheck to paycheck.
Maybe, but if they were screwing around with the inside of the equipment, that kinda is circuit bending tho.
That makes perfect sense, and it appears that you always have the option to handrol something if you discover it as a bottle neck worth fixing.
Do you use any external dedicated host?
Twitter Tackles 5G Covid-19 Conspiracy in the UK with Warning Prompt
Emacs is my text editor, I love it to bits but I don't have much interest in whether it implements tail call recursion or if lambdas are implemented as a macro. So while the article is a great bit of work, quite praiseworthy and possibly an instant classic of Emacs lore I'm going to be critical of it because I was hoping for something different.

Emacs the system is a programming environment that is used to create a model of what a text editor should look like (in Elisp), then an implementation of that model with windows and suchlike (in Elisp, C and with a bit more thrown in for good measure). Extensions build on that model to accomplish magic of various forms. I was anticipating an interesting read on competing ideas of what that model should look like, and how extensions customarily interacted with it, and how the culture has changed over time. 1985 was not the high point for string manipulation and I expect there has been a lot of change through the 90s and 00s, let alone the 10s.

This document is a record of the mechanisms behind the Emacs model. Important to record, a great service for the archivists who really will care, but if I'm going to invest an evening learning about mechanism I'd rather read up on the JVM which is frankly more powerful and interesting than the Elisp interpretor. Elisp is a historical curiosity to be sure and probably interesting diversion to anyone implementing a lisp (who really should be looking to Common Lisps or Clojures of the world for most of the inspiration), but it this document isn't selling the interesting points of the story which is how it was being used. If I'm reading about Emacs generators the only reason I can think of that they are relevant to an Emacs user in in 2020 is in context of what the implications of that are for how Emacs models documents and a text editor.
Part of the problem is that you usually need a lot more Apache workers to process static file requests. But limit the number of expensive PHP invocations

This was pretty much not easily possible (with suphp, mod_php) until FPM which has a per site worker pool.

Solved a lot of problems for us as a shared hosting provider.
I'm pretty sure it was. It was at number four and rising then suddenly dropped to the bottom of the front page before vanishing.
Gone in 60 Quibis
Having a single source of documentation and components perfectly integrated out of the box make a huge difference.
It makes a difference though. The fact that Chromium is Electron’s backend is why MS picked Chromium to base Edge off. It’s likely they would have chosen something else if that wasn’t the case (or maybe continued with their own web tech).
Still, using a modular synth well, which seems to be an extremely demanding art in its own right, is really not the same art as designing a synthesizer.
Considering the potential performance issues of Electron apps, I am still hopeful that someone can come up with an Electron alternative with the right engine, but I don't know if that engine is Gecko or not.
Well if your companies entire raison d'être is to serve coffee, then you’re gonna spend the cash to make sure your coffee machines are in tip-top shape.

It would be weird if Starbucks wasn’t investing in their coffee machines. Make me wonder what they were spending their money on.
>> This is pretty impressive, they were able to factor a 17 bit number (103459 = 337 * 307) using 1635 physical qubits (arranged as 73 logical qubits) using QUBO

What? I was implementing CFRAC on my Atari 800 trying to factor a 100 bit number on its 6502. I had found enough congruences saved to disk but never wrote the matrix reduction code to spit out the answer.

17 bits. Pffft

P.s. not kidding about cfrac on atari.
I like a lot of the paid tools, but I just feel like open databases deserve open tools. DBeaver is great for DBAs.
Show HN: VR video conferencing with AFrame and Mediasoup
What about support for CSS list-style-type: '-'?
Happy to discover that it is finally supported since Chrome 79, released on the December 10, 2019. Supported on Firefox since version 39, released on July 2, 2015.

And what about Flex-box's safe value for the justify-content property, allowing to justify (center) an element, but still be sure that the left side of the content will not be hidden if the parent container is too small? Right, supported on Firefox since version 63 released on October 23, 2018 and still not supported on Chrome (and to add insult to injury, safe is recognized, it just does nothing, which is worse than really not supporting the feature).

I didn't look for these missing features on purpose, I have been annoyed by them recently or less recently. So as for Chrome's excellent support for modern Web standard, I guess it depends on one's definition of "excellent".

Or more accurately, you can find lacking support for some features of the Web standard in any browser engine. :-)
Have you met people? They’re really unreliable and inconsistent, especially on minimum wage.
I upvoted because is a bit of history I did not known about, I like reading or watching videos about old computers or consoles.
I'm sure it does, but, as you say, not a bad thing.
Why would someone want to play music but try and dodge the foundations of music theory?

Why would someone want to paint but try and dodge the foundations of art theory?

Why would someone want to learn a new language but try and dodge learning language theory?

Why would someone want to learn to program but try and dodge learning category theory?
Win win. Flag not captured: MSFT is secure! Flag captured: Linux is insecure.
Hi HN, in the past weeks I spent a lot of time videoconferencing. However, something was missing. Classical videoconferencing works fine with a small number of people, but when the group gets larger it becomes very static. I built this in my spare time to improve things. The positional audio (use headphones!) makes it easy to pick out voices, and moving around makes splitting off into smaller groups very natural.

This is built using the AFrame library, but I haven't enabled real VR device support. Mainly because hardly anyone I know has one. Also, the webcam images will become a lot less useful when everyone is wearing a headset.

Please give it a try and tell me what you think! Works great for informal gatherings, but if you really miss office meetings EveryoneVR has got you covered.
The Federal reserve pumped, I believe, about 1 trillion dollars into the economy in March. That would pay every unemployed worker somewhere around 80k.

Yes, that’s somewhat apples to oranges due to the way the reserve operates, but the money is available if the will is.