skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> don't you think you'd enjoy more if you had worked on lots of different projects, tech, companies, etc... instead of "just" VLC?

Well, to be honest, I'd love to extend what we're doing in VLC to other end-user applications like PDF reader, or the basic apps you have on Android and iOS.
First I want to say thank you for taking the harder road and providing such great software to the community.

What are your thoughts about software crowdfunding approaches like patreon “$1 donation per donor, per version release” and similar?
Who Needs Autonomous Vehicles?
Rural land values will remain low until there is significant economic activity and particular demand for land IN THAT PLACE. To the extent that land, say, 10 or 20 miles away is just as suited for the user's purposes, the next piece of land that comes on the market is quite adequate, and the rural business can locate wherever, not pay a premium.

I am reminded of a famous passage from Henry George's book "Progress and Poverty" (whose subtitle is "An inquiry into the cause of industrial depressions and of increase of want with increase of wealth ... The Remedy") known as The Savannah. http://progressandpoverty.org/files/george.henry/pp042.html, starting at the 10th paragraph (the paragraphs are numbered in this particular file).

Incidentally, George dedicated P&P as follows:

"To those who, seeing the vice and misery that spring from the unequal distribution of wealth and privilege, feel the possibility of a higher social state and would strive for its attainment."
Everything You Know About John Paul II's Early Lectures on CST Is Wrong
Cash Spending != Costs, and that is the point. Cash accounting is hiding the massive maintenance and depreciation costs that are accumulating.
Not even being able to talk to somebody is a negative feature if you have dietary restrictions. A friend is vegan, and she often skips over items which could be vegan with a slight substitution which is not offered via the app, but which would be easy to ask for if she could just talk to a human.
A well executed Excel model is much easier to explain to a non-technical person.

To be frank, for all the snobbery towards Excel, it has done a marvelous job at getting millions of people to think in more quantitative ways instead of "business acumen".
Exactly right. A modern website is one that knows that the browser's configured language is the best way to determine the user's language. A website that uses location to determine language is hopelessly outdated.

I never completely agreed with the rationale for using location, but 15-20 years ago I at least found it understandable...Internet Cafes and borrowing your host's desktop computer were more common scenarios then. Today they're rare enough that I can't understand why anyone would accommodate those scenarios over the scenario of someone traveling with their own device.
Airflow: How and When to Use It
Do you have any page describing it?
There have been alot of stories about stuff like this. One of the public ones I remember was if you were looking for US forces in unusual places, you'd find their running paths on Strava.
Part of the reasoning behind this is, I think, that there are severe criminal penalties for private persons and organizations snooping on phone lines and exchanges. For similar reasons, USPS is considered secure (there is a high grade federal police service for the postal service, and tampering with mail is a felony).
And those names can't be faked (or belong to true people but not relevant to what they supposedly did) because?

I'd be sceptical of any "revelation" from such agencies...
Awesome! Will try this today!!
Airflow: How and when to use it (Advanced)
Your point is noted, but Trump is popular with less than 44% [0] of people currently and has done nothing to improve their lives. Comparing the current admin with Caesar is giving a huge compliment to them, that they do not deserve.

[0] https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/trump-approval-ratings/
I'm somewhat skeptical. Firstly, I don't think the language is the problem with scientific code. You can write messy code in any language. So the warning then has to be about writing software in general. In that case, I think a warning like "don't try to write software unless you have years of training" is a bit much. Many people with no training learn to write nice code. Many projects made by amateurs might have ugly code but still add something to the world (eg. many games).

The problem here is the project is influencing decisions in healthcare.

Having worked in HPC and academia, I've seen code like this a lot. There are two archetypes I've noticed: (1) the well-meaning older academic maintaining legacy code, who have often done a lot of convergence testing, but still have code that isn't up to modern engineering practices, and (2) the domain experts with the attitude that "programming is much easier than my area of domain expertise". These are problems that require attitude changes within academia, not better warnings on online tutorials. The second group are going to ignore the warnings anyway.

Remember many of the people writing this academic code also teach programming courses in their departments! They view themselves as programming experts.
It's not exactly what you wanted but they do have a "strong town test" [1] that looks to have at least some semblance of a quantitative aspect to it.

[1] https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2017/11/1/take-the-stron...
If you are an end user who would like to avoid getting caught in this situation, you might want to switch to using F-Droid [0] as your primary source of Android software. The selection is more limited, but because everything is open source and distributed outside of Google's walled garden, you can be sure that it won't be arbitrarily removed because of the whims of corporate bureaucracy.

I write this not as a dogmatic free software proponent, either; I have bought apps on the Play Store in the past and would consider doing so if the experience weren't so poor. Dealing with the Play Store has gotten so frustrating (not just due to this issue, but also due to the difficulty of filtering out shovelware and spyware) that I only reach for it as a last resort now.

[0] https://f-droid.org/
One small example: Microsoft financially supported the developer who added C# support to the Godot game engine. Can hardly call that "small" and "up and coming" though.
No hard data to share but there are 2~3B people coming online still, so I doubt the S-curve is leveling off yet.
See termux app's addons and some simple mobile tools apps for Android. They have paid versions on play store which are actually open source. But you are paying for the privilege of getting them on play store instead of compiling them and loading through adb.

Another way is providing an SaaS version, but having an open core product is better for this. If memory serves right, wallabag does something like this.

Enterprise support etc: There are quite a few companies that provide support for software. Red Hat for example.

Bounties: see bountysource
It's better, but it's still not as good as just using the browser default font.
That may all be true, but it doesn't change the fact that the code is written in a style that has proven to be almost totally immune to proper verification of any kind. That being the case, and regardless of the soundness or utility of the underlying science or mathematical modelling, you don't know if it works. You can't. Neither can I. Neither can the people who wrote it, or the people relying on their advice.

Any arguments that the developers of this code are somehow above needing to mechanically test, or formally verify, or independently peer review the code to ensure quality are trivially debunked by the history of bug fixes and changes in behaviour that we do know about, even before making any judgements based on the apparent attempts to hide that history and to conceal the original code from before they brought in programming experts to help tidy it up.

If you have indeed been an expert witness doing code reviews, are you seriously contending that you would not annihilate any case made in a court that hinged on the results of code like this?
I wonder if the lies were informed by empirical social psychology, or if they were based on our leaders’ level of selfishness projected onto the general population...
No, most of the landlords were of British descent. The rest were under control of the crown and the crown got their taxes. The upper classes, mainly British and some Irish systematically bled the vast majority of the people.

>As they would have seen it, stopping the export of food stuffs would have caused economic collapse.

They knew very well that it would have caused economic collapse only for the people in power who were at no risk of dying. And they knew very well what they could do to save the lives of people they saw starving all around them. To say they could do nothing because 'it's the system' is ridiculous. The people with power were the system. The people who starved had no real representation and that's they way it was designed by the people in power, namely the landlords and the government.

Even before the famine the reason a lot of the tenant farmers emigrated was because if they managed to be in any way extra productive and make some profit for themselves it was immediately taken from them in the form of some tax (see for example the 'window' tax). This was systematic and the people in power were responsible.
Which is just baffling
Vlcam – Extra Money (Official Music Video)
> While obviously Podcast Addict does not deserve a ban, the sheer number of people in this thread advocating unrestricted speech around COVID-19 is thoroughly disturbing.

Are you sure that advocating a "stamp down" won't throw away the baby with the bathwater? In my country, a lot of now very legitimate theories (thrombosis and treatment with heparin, convalescent plasma therapy) were slammed by certain very prominent experts at first ("baloney", "colossal idiocy"). What would've happened if Twitter or Google decided to remove the "controversial" theories?

Also, Twitter now is blocking an URL of a legitimate university promoting a trial with hydroxychloroquine. As you can see, to remove the "batshit conspiracy theories" we are also removing good science.
Feedback on implementing the W3C Payment Handler API to optimize web checkout
Hey guys,
We want to use the W3C Payment Handler API to optimize our web checkout.
I could not find data online about the expected web checkout benefits.
Anyone can share his or her experience?
Thanks!
WeWork and Uber are two of the best “products” on the market. Thanks to SoftBank for their contribution I guess!
Sorry, what is not super common? With my customers I rarely see incidents due to CPU starvation of a pod in their K8S clusters.
It's funny to me how wrong all of the answers of this thread are: These programs are too broad. / The talent is abroad. / This is a ticket for a Visa.

Those may all be more or less true, but the broader issue of why these programs are mostly populated by foreigners is that they're too expensive (for master degrees) and vastly underpaid compared to market rates for PhD degrees. (Consider the strike at UC Santa Cruz by PhD students for a wage that would allow them to cover their living expenses without having to commute hours to campus.)

US students, which most likely have already contracted debt to finance their undergraduate degree will simply go get a job that both pays better and may boost their carreers more, and may come with more social status, given the current wave of anti-academic sentiment.
Oh not not the heckin scientists. They are always right! Dang it guys it's our fault, not Science. I just wish it was 1801 again so we could parade around streets once more in worship of the god of Rationality!
Their other big bet, Oyo, was already struggling with an ill-conceived expansion strategy and poor brand image in its local market.
When they are maintained by resurfacing on a 15-20 year lifecycle, and regrading on a 50 year lifecycle, as is common with residential roads, that leaves plenty of time for ponzi-like growth to occur.
I figured as much with regards to civil suit, was just curious about public enforcement of private regulations when the lines appear blurred. Further, I wonder by what authority they can even set monetary fines? Like, why stop at $X for a fine? I ask because their site lists specific penalties which seem somewhat arbitrary [0]. I can't arbitrarily "fine" someone $1000 for stepping on my lawn. I can certainly take them to court for trespassing and possibly collect some damages, but those damages are not a fixed value in a fee schedule. So I wonder how this corporation has the authority to impose fines.

[0]: https://dcdbc.com/ratesandrestr.php
All large flask implementations eventually turn into a crappy version of Django.
If you are referring to the Fed repo market operations, then these are short-term collateralised loans, so not really the same thing as pumping trillions in to the real economy.

A fiscal stimulus of that size would almost certainly drive demand (during a pandemic that has caused a negative supply shock) and therefore increase inflation.
Agree.

I am using the German email provider mailbox.org
They even report how often the government forces them to release info with a search warrant.

However, I have yet to find an email provider that mimics Gmail's tagging system (=> you can give n many tags to a single email and that email is only kept once on the server).

I often think that Google's "Don't do evil" motto is stretched way too often these days.
>At the same time they colonized Crimea, fought a war with Georgia. Who is starting wars here?

Well, one could say those who befriended and armed their neighbourhood states like Georgia to use them against them, or helped install Nazi sympathisers toppling the legitimate government in Ukraine?
Figures like that are not how much cities need to spend to maintain everything they have, but how much they choose to spend on maintenance in a single year. The problem is almost every city engages in deferred maintenance - ie. they don’t spend enough to maintain everything they had and somewhere between many to most roads are allowed to deteriorate.

At the state and federal level the ASCE reports on this every four years: https://www.infrastructurereportcard.org/

They claim that actual funding, just for roads, is 981 Billion while the need is 2 trillion.

Again that’s just for roads.

Usually there’s one comment like this on each Strong Towns thing that gets on hacker news, and I get it, this crowd wants to dig into the numbers. The challenge is that StrongTowns is a blog which posts bite sized bits of content every day, And their audience is a very broad national readership of “regular folks” whose eyes tend to glaze over when you show them a spreadsheet. So a lot of the Strong Towns daily posts are narrative centric like this without being focused on the data.

EDIT: I had to dig a bit, but this series is more spreadsheet-y, and probably of more interest to the HN crowd: https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2019/12/17/best-of-2019-...

Also these articles are pretty good intro pieces:

- https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2017/1/29/the-cost-of-au...

- https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2015/9/14/lafayette-pipe...
Covid is about control not health. Every aspect of it.
Science is inherently a low stakes game. Most scientists are competing for budgets of no more than a few million a year, if they are really successful. There is little reward for producing excellent code, but a lot of reward for producing atrocious code to publish in prestigious journals.

If you want to be truly horrified look into the practices surrounding NEURON, a simulation tool that has been used to publish simulations since the 80s. You have to write code in a domain specific language called Hoc, that code is typically littered with hard coded constants. Code is copied over from one paper to the next, etc. Code is a means to an end, not something that is held in high regard. Moreover improving someone else's code style or quality won't earn you a degree or praise. Starting a competing "higher quality" project is bound to annoy or anger the establish players. It will be hard to get funding for it, because those players will likely review your proposal. In any case there is typically a 10-20 year gap between the people doing any decisions and the people actually doing any practical work.

Finally in some cases code is a competitive advantage, I'm sure that Neil Ferguson has churned out quite a few papers with the same framework by simply tweaking some things here and there. In that case you are ill advised to share the code with anyone.
Brain gain down the drain, would force a longer recovery
I don't really understand why higher income taxes is such a big deal in the US. Instead of income taxes you seem to be fine with inflated rents to landlords, massive mortgages, unaffordable child care and education and so on. So regular payments are fine as long as it's not to the government?
Look at the difference between things and todoist on macos. Things is much snappier and better looking while simultaneously using fewer resources. Todoist is an electron app whereas things is native. It really does make a difference and I wish there were more truly native apps out there.
> This is absurd. There is plenty of money, we could tax something like...

We could spend less money.

In Education we spend far more than the 80's and have less to show for it.

In healthcare we have astronomical costs that have not bought us more vitality, but an extended morbidity. Gone are the days of grandmothers with sinewy arms maintaining huge gardens. Obesity in the early 2000's was at "crisis" levels and it's gotten so much worse that we just stopped talking about it. But we can keep the numbers up a bit here and there.

In infrastructure we let car-first build-out destroy everything Jane Jacobs said we were going to lose. Valuable things that cost no money at all, but are too intangible for top-down planning to notice.

The failure of imagination isn't finding new people to juice. It's finding ways to be effective. I agree they are very bad at their jobs, but I don't think finding a new way to tax the rich is any more creative or sustainable. I think it's the same failure of imagination that you fear.
The opening description resonates with me. I would say I'm pretty experienced in what I do, but do I know the detail of being accurate with everything? No. This is why I don't blog nearly enough because it takes a lot more time explaining details that I filter out in my day-to-day work.

Experience can come from knowing enough concepts to make stuff work, but also knowing where to look to fill in the gaps should you need to do. It's also knowing when to fill in those gaps, and when to leave them because it's not important right now.

I would say imposter syndrome is the anxious feel not knowing all the gaps and questioning yourself. Some people are impacted by this, others are not.

If you adopt a growth mindset, you see these gaps as advances in your craft, and not a measurement of your inexperience.

The real question to ask is what about that trigger is causing your to feel uneasy and become anxious. This is usually a more complex question to answer. If you can get to a point of exploring that question objectively and without judgment of yourself, you can path the way to overcoming imposter syndrome.
I find it very difficult to see where ARM fits, it really should be an independent company. Since everyone who sees the most value in buying it shouldn't be allowed to. Can you imagine if Apple snapped it up? Or Qualcomm? Or even Intel?
I would be worried about Alibaba as well given how the world has been building up momentum for a China-USA decoupling.
I don't care what it's written in.

Native UIs seem to matter more for small to medium size apps. Huge all-encompassing things like Blender, IDEs, etc. seem benefit from a unified, attractive, easy to use UI but it doesn't seem to matter quite as much that it's native. These things are intrinsically huge too so bloat matters less.
>"He resisted questioning about his private life, but he allowed that he missed small things from home. Milkshakes, for one. Why not make your own? Snowden refused to confirm or deny possession of a blender. Like all appliances, blenders have an electrical signature when switched on. He believed that the U.S. government was trying to discover where he lived. He did not wish to offer clues, electromagnetic or otherwise. U.S. intelligence agencies had closely studied electrical emissions when scouting Osama bin Laden’s hideout in Pakistan."

This reminds me of one of the discussion threads that was happening here last week [0] where people were speculating about the next generation of spy satellites.

[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23151301
But these are the extreme outliers. Here is a list of schools in Tennessee as an example [0]. How many of them have a big time football program? Maybe 4 or 5 out of the 53 schools?

[0] - https://www.universityreview.org/tennessee-colleges/
Bridges do, however.
The problem is that we don't have access to the original source code or input parameters.

There is no way to independently verify the claims that were made on March 16th. Indeed, the claims originally made were not peer reviewed.

Code was finally put into github, but that is not the code that existed originally.

Important policy decisions require transparency and accountability. Not making source code and data available when it is so easy to do so defeats those goals.
We're in the middle of a rapidly-evolving epidemic that is killing thousands of people per day. Leaders need information, even imperfect information right now. There is no time to hire a team of production engineers so they can release a slightly more stable multi-core version 1.0 in 2023.

If there is ever an asteroid heading towards the earth, I swear that some segment of HN will write angry articles about how the hastily built nuclear-powered spaceship we sent to intercept it doesn't have proper unit tests. They'll demand that we delay the launch until 300 days after impact.
The Rise of Privacy Tech
For innovators, investors, experts, and evangelists of privacy tech.
Trump is a symptom of a deeper cultural problem for which we are all participants. Take him out too viciously and the entire country would implode forever. Our chance is to address the problem directly by economic relief for rural poor (among others) so that the symptom resolves.
You may want to check out We Are All Completely Ourselves by Karen Jay Fowler - a similar theme. Thanks for the recs.
That article reads like propaganda for Google Store.

> That's because Fortnite isn't available through Google's Play Store. Epic instead chose an unorthodox -- and more dangerous -- route for the game's fans. Rather than download it through the official Google app store, players need to download the game and "sideload" the app on their Android devices instead. That Epic is allowed to do this underscores why Google's Android often gets knocked for its security chops.

No wonder they ultimately folded and came back into the “protection” [racket] offered by Google Play with PR like this coming to bear.
I am confused, why is it called a framework? From what I read it's just a default theme for HTML. Did I miss anything?