skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I agree that direct connection to a database might not be the best idea, but I dont see anything particularly wrong with sending SQL over the wire.

I'm suggesting something like a hassura that isn't based on graphql, but works directly on SQL.

And ofcourse for specific logic, you can always run a traditional server in tandem.
There is a yak, and it is furry.
I think my point is more that people who actually change their behavior based on whether or not a company explicitly supports BLM is not a majority. It is probably a small minority. If that 57% actually boycotted businesses not supporting BLM, Home Depot would change their tune quickly.
If you’re in a store and see someone acting odd with gift cards, it’s ok to say something and try to help out.

I recently encountered an elderly woman fiddling with some purchased gift cards (at CVS) while talking to someone on her cell phone. They threatened to disconnect her power immediately if she didn’t pay for a new meter immediately. Luckily I convinced her to not share the numbers and hang up on the scammer. It took her a while to even trust me. Poor woman had no idea who to trust. I had her call the local utility who was super patient explaining the situation and consoling her.
Model Based Machine Learning
I look up directions before-hand and draw maps. It works most of the time as long as you plan to be a little late "snoopin" around.
The article states the flywheel will not be used to provide electricity to the grid.
I've said this before on similar posts, but I think most clipboard "snooping" is not nefarious, it's boneheaded. Developers get a requirement like "if the user has a URL in their clip board, give them an option to share it with a single click". Then they do a poor job actually implementing this code by sticking it in some delegate the fires way more often than they think and all of a sudden they're "snooping". Not saying there aren't bad actors, just saying we're maybe blowing it out of proportion.

And kudos to Apple for making this stuff more obvious in iOS 14.
In a somewhat-related topic, you might be interested in DLSS [0], where machine learning is being used in graphics rendering in games to draw the games at a lower resolution, then upscale the image to the monitor's resolution using a neural network to fill in the missing data. I imagine a similar thing could be done with video rendering, though you'd need some crazy computing power to train the neural network for each video, just like DLSS requires training for each game.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deep_learning_super_sampling
Prevalence of SARS-CoV-2 in Spain: a nationwide seroepidemiological study
> Many companies switching to remote work have noticed no drop in productivity, but there's two possible explanations for that. Either people are just as productive at home or most workers were never producing much in the first place.

It's neither of those. The drop in demand for the fruits of that productivity has more than balanced out any drop in supply of productivity. Some products and services have a more elastic and/or variable demand than others.
At a large Seattle-based technology company ~10 years ago, the only way to submit an expense report was via fax "for security", but there were no fax machines in the office, only multifunction printers that could send virtual faxes (not via a phone line)
Can you or they explain to me what was meant then, because I’ve read the two comments over and over and the only conclusion I can reach is exactly what I replied with.
Dask vs. Vaex for Big Data
I'm already aware of popper and his falsification, but I'll spend a bit more time on the article, thanks.

My problem is I can easily and happily change my mind if the evidence is concrete but where it is more a matter of common sense I tend to fail; "This is interesting and fun and may be useful - is it worth investing the time in?" And because it is all these, I seduce myself into spending the time on it whereas I suspect it may not be the best use of my time. Deffo not my strong point, that...

Going back to the original issue of evidence swaying (or not) people, I really feel lost looking at how to some people, reality is just a hindrance to what they know to be true.
I promise you, this exact thing happened to me.

I had never used my number with an Apple device, I only registered my email and FaceTimed someone.

Maybe I gave Apple my phone number at some point.

One day, I looked at my Apple device after not using it for a while, and discovered a handful of text messages which had been forwarded there -- you're right, to iMessage, not FaceTime -- on the Apple device.

I never received them on my actual number.
TrueAccord | Remote-fist and San Francisco | Full Time | 13 engineering jobs

____________________

Product and Mission

We have pioneered a new way of helping consumers deal with debt while safeguarding their credit scores. Using ML models to understand our consumers better, we remove the need for aggressive debt collectors completely, and work with consumers to cure their late debts with customized payment plans. TrueAccord has already helped over 11M consumers deal with late debt!

____________________

Team

40 full-time engineers, mostly in the SF Bay Area with a few scattered around the country.

____________________

Tech Stack

TypeScript | Java | AngularJS | Node.js | ReactJS | Scala | Tensorflow | Spark | Jupyter | Kotlin | React Native

____________________

More about the TrueAccord engineering team, CTO, culture, and jobs:

https://bit.ly/trueaccordengineeringjobs
You are infinitely better off competing with them directly instead of useless personal choice.
> 3) If I buy gift cards in New York, there's zero reason someone in Bangalore, India should immediately be able to redeem those gift cards. Perhaps Target could should spend some of their data collection techniques on this instead of trying to figure out if your daughter is pregnant so they can send you maternity coupons.

I don't see why data collection is necessary here, if gift cards are such a fraud vector, why not put a 24hr delay in activation on gift card purchases over a $100 to give scammees a chance to understand what happaned and prevent the scammers from profiting.
This doesn't seem to hold true as a rule for the creator economy if they are reliant on platforms that control pricing and can change it at a whim (or via algorithm).
But by having multiple small reactors you loose thermal efficiency and generate more waste/killowathour. Whatever the technical issues involved nuclear waste is such a political hot potato that all reasonable attempts to deal with it have been dead in the water for the past half century. Increasing that problem substantially is going to make a politically toxic problem worse.
> do the high-fees still give you a better risk-adjusted return?

Yes. With your standard 2 and 20 fee structure, you don't pay performance fees on anything below 8% returns. Performance fees are where bonuses come from, so anyone coming up short sees capital and employees disappear overnight.

RenTech has a 40+% performance fee on their Medallion fund because it consistently generates 60% returns YoY.
If you are creating a portfolio for the primary purpose of showcasing it to get a job, I don't think it's worth the effort. Maybe there is an exception if you are a high profile contributor to high profile projects.

Otherwise the number of companies that care about a candidate's portfolio is small. Just studying leetcode problems is still the most scalable way to a job, unfortunately.

A shame, because there are so many things I want to build, work on, or contribute to, but all of that is put on hold until I can land the job first via leetcode.
I have only been in my current role for a handful of months, and frankly, I need to put out more work to get the kind of creds I need to command legitimacy in a design role. Before, I spent years as a SME on a different set of technologies - in a non-pandemic world, I may drop back to that world and do consulting. Right now, though, I have a great team, a great manager, and decent pay, so given all the volatility in the world I am taking what I can get until I feel a bit safer moving around.
I wonder why all of the MPEG1 encoders of the day enforced a maximum of 320x240?
I personally think the value of a Harvard education is not necessarily what you learn, but who you meet. That's why it's critical for majority of the student body to be in close proximity to one another. I wonder if they could crack the challenges of building rapport between students remotely.
> I find it equally plausible that the computer determined that there was a difference in personal grooming habits or facial expressions between groups.

Right, so then the question is if this is valuable.

Consider three people: a closeted, married-to-a-woman, gay man who has hidden his sexuality. An openly gay man who looks "stereotypically gay" (this statement should start triggering warning bells, btw), and a well groomed heterosexual man who might be described as "stereotypically-gay looking".

Does your model identify men 2 and 3, the stereotypically "gay"-looking men? If so you've just built a model that detects cultural signifiers for homosexuality, which, congrats I guess. This isn't a useful tool, is it? It is a model that encodes stereotypes. But we know the stereotypes already, because we use them as intentional cultural signals. So nothing of value was added, and the model may serve to perpetuate those stereotypes in the future if people wish to change them.

Does your model identify men 1 and 2? Well now you've built something interesting, it's found a deeper relationship than just overt social signifiers, perhaps it's noticing some minute bone structure thing. Is it ethical? Hell no.

In essence the stronger statement is that you are either simply encoding cultural biases into a model, which will serve to perpetuate those biases (and is therefore harmful), or you are building something terrifying and dystopian and harmful.
I would love to hear the specific script they use to convince people to buy gift cards. Everything leading up to that I can understand someone being suckered into - but how the hell do they convince people that a government agent wants them to buy gift cards?!
I seriously doubt it. The PS4 has a custom graphics API which directly creates command buffers in the GPUs native format. There's not really much of a graphics driver at all other than what's necessary to isolate the game from the OS.
to be more blunt, the bullshit jobs are those chasing returns for capital disconnected from commensurate return to the public good, leaving little to tackle meaningful issues.

corrupting forces work relentlessly against economic systems to break the tie between capital returns and returns to public good (a key tenet of capitalism, incidentally), to serve the former at the expense of the latter.

we keep failing to directly face this most critical distortion to incentives in economic systems. fixing that would lead to a better world for us all, not just the selfish and greedy.
An alternate interpretation: It makes it so that the school board doesn't get to decide what "true" is.
The rest of the Lenna story (the standard imaging photo)
Notwithstanding the relatively small amount purchased, the question remains still: is this something the federal reserve should be engaged in in the first place? And what are the long term consequences of even the perception of such behavior?
Reminds me of Black Mirror's take on this in the episode 'Nosedive'. I don't believe we're far from it, especially as some of us mesh our real identities with our online ones.
The legendary debate that laid US political lines on race, justice and history
InVision makes the case for going all-in on remote work
Why digital transformation is the competitive advantage most companies are too stuck in their ways to see
Not calling GP out specifically, but generally asking someone hell-bent on re-opening to check their sources or facts is pointless. They will just go out and find another rationalization. This isn't just about this school--it's happening all across (at least) the USA. We should be coming up with objective, measurable milestones that support re-opening, tracking towards them, reviewing periodically and then making a decision to re-open based on whether the criteria were met.

Instead, people are simply starting with a foregone conclusion of "We must re-open!" and fishing for any nugget that might justify this pre-ordained decision. So far in this thread we've already seen:

1. The cases are not uniformly distributed, therefore it's OK to re-open in areas that currently seem good! [many variants of this one]

2. Cases are spiking but deaths are not up, we should ignore the non-fatal consequences of the disease and re-open!

3. Cases only look like they are up because testing is up, therefore the numbers are in question, so re-open!

4. Governments are conspiring to inflate case numbers, therefore the numbers are in question, so re-open!

We are already starting to see the disastrous effects of prematurely re-opening, but the public just won't accept any story that doesn't end with "...and we re-opened everything as soon as we could!"
> You can learn all of this by yourself.

No, and I know this for a fact because I'm me, and you're not. But thanks for telling me I'm wrong that I can't learn something without a tutor. That's a new twist on mansplaining. I guess I'm happy for you that you are so smart.
Super fun podcast talking about Spectro Cloud and Kubernetes Day 2 issues
Thanks for sharing that, I'll read it!

I do agree that comments, documentation, and other artifacts aren't sufficient to solve this problem. The closest I've come is with formal specification, where the intent of the program can be communicated very clearly. Multiple approaches are needed. One of those approaches is continuity: Keeping people around who are familiar with the code base and can pass on this knowledge to others.
According to the article, the laundering is done in the US:

> Once the scammers obtain gift card numbers from a victim, they transfer them to a group of US-based “runners,” who liquidate and launder the funds — either by buying resellable goods at the store or selling them via gift card resale sites. Some even have their own gift card resale apps.
I avoid the GP products. I can't change the plastics in my computer. My house is older than dirt, and the windows are so old you can see the glass warping. The lumber's proper sized, not scaled by 0.5inches (eg, rafters are true 2"x8"), but I get your point. It's hard to PROVE what the state is.

Let's just say, I try my hardest.
It looks wild, but the pronunciation is very regular:

https://wikitravel.org/en/Welsh_phrasebook

Or rather, the orthography is - spoken Welsh is ancient, but the way of writing it with Latin letters is relatively new, so it was worked out fairly sensibly.

The actual grammar is headache-inducing, though.
That would be good for first contact only... And believe me, non technical people are unable to properly explain what they want. Going by what they ask without giving constant feedback means you'll end up with something that has little to do with what they originally wanted
I knew a bunch of Indy car drivers and they could visualize a road course lap in their head down to 0.3 repeatably.
Commit messages are much harder to get to for a given line of code than a comment would be.
Interesting project from a research standpoint, for Covid however I don't see the use case. Still it is interesting to see what can be done.

A family member does this for a living and they have been working on a lot of Covid cases lately, also in emergency situations. Even if you rush it, you have the patient on the bench for at least 10 minutes. Out of the 10 minutes, it only takes takes 1 minute to review the result. In the case of Covid it is something that is very, very easy to analyze visually - even with little experience.

We can still improve the process a lot, there is a huuuge difference depending on equipment. Image quality, image development, the time it takes to get the image developed (yes, sometimes that is done in a different room) vary a lot depending on platform. The software could be improved a lot but vendors don't seem to be developing old platforms a lot - which is sad because equipment doesn't get replaced every couple of years.

Here we don't do CT for Covid (would be even slower), just plain old X-ray.
I use pandas with multiple sources and try to keep as much as possible in the db.

But many sources are outside the db, or run on multiple, disconnected dbs.

Loading data into a db is impractical and I only do it if necessary.

Also, different people run and manage dbs so it’s frequently easier to run in pandas.
Right, then there's indeed quite little you can do directly.
It's a long shot because it's a bad idea. It's fundamentally no different than pumped hydro, but much more complicated. I don't think there's any chance such ideas can work out.
Surely "spear (ph|f)ishing" is the most appropriate fishing analogy here because it targets an individual?
When the govt and FED is asked to print money for healthcare -> What are we socialists?

When the govt and FED is asked to print money to supplement income -> People will become lazy

When the govt and FED is asked to print money to save the wealth of capitalist class -> Brrrrrrrrrrrr
Ten-year software video compression engineer here:

TL;DR: it's partly because we're using higher video resolutions. A non-negligible part of the improvement stems from adapting existing algorithms to the now-doubled-resolution.

Almost all video compression standards split the input frame into fixed-size square blocks, aka "macroblocks". To put it simply, the macroblock is the coarsest granularity level at which compression happens.

- H.264 and MPEG-2 Video use 16x16 macroblocks (ignoring MBAFF).

- H.265 use configurable quad-tree-like macroblocks, with a frame-level configurable size up to 64x64.

- AV1 makes this block-size configurable up to 128x128.

Which means:

Compression to H.264 a SD video (720x576, used by DVDs) results in 1620 macroblocks/frame.

Compressing to H.265 a HD video (1920x1080) results in at least 506 macroblocks/frame.

Compressing to AV1 a 4K video (3840x2160) results in at least 506 macroblocks/frame.

But compressing to H.264 a 4K video (3840x2160) will result in 32400 macroblocks/frame.

The problem is, there are constant bitcosts per-macroblock ((mostly) regardless of the input picture). So using H.264 to compress 4K video will be inefficient.

When you take an old compression standard to encode recent-resolution content, you're using the compression standard outside of the resolution domain for which it was optimized.

> Is this continued improvement related to the improvement of technology? Or just coincidental?

Of course, there also "real" improvements (in the sense "qualitative improvements that would have benefited to compression old video resolutions, if only we had invented them sooner").

For example:

- the context-adaptive arithmetic coding from H.264, which is a net improvement over classic variable-length huffman coding used by MPEG-2 (and H.264 baseline profile).

- the entropy coding used by AV1, which is a net improvement over H.264's CABAC.

- integer DCT (introduced by H.264), which allow bit-accuracy checking and way lot easier and smaller hardware implementations (compared to floating point DCT that is used by MPEG2).

- loop filters: H.264 pioneered the idea of a normative post-processing step, whose output could be used to predict next frames. H.264 had 1 loop filter ("deblocking"). HEVC had 2 loop filters: "deblocking" and "SAO". AV1 has 4 loop filters.

All of these a real improvements, brought to us by time, and extremely clever and dedicated people. However, the compression gains of these improvements are nowhere near the "50% less bitrate" that is used to sell each new advanced-high-efficiency-versatile-nextgen video codec. Without increasing - a lot - the frame resolution, selling a new video compression standard will be a lot harder.

Besides, now that the resolutions seems to have settled up around 4K/8K (and that "high definition" has become the lowest resolution we might have to deal with :D), things are going to get interesting ... provided that we don't start playing the same game with framerates!
Ask HN: How did you build your social network at your current employer?
I'm in a junior role and during the first year or so, I should network heavily which is expected of me, most likely going to help me advance in my job and unfortunately not at all what I'm good at. Any advice or stories are welcome!
If you don't exclude socially toxic people from your company, talented people who don't want to work with that type of person will leave. I know multiple people who have left or transferred because of difficult coworkers, and more who have left because of difficult managers. If one toxic person can't outperform all the talented people who will leave, it is in the company's best interests not to hire that person.

Yes, you can technically call this social darwinism. If you are an irritating person that no one wants to be around, you will be socially excluded. I don't know of any movement that is going to champion your cause. There is a difference between preventing profiling / prejudice and avoiding manipulative, mean people.
The mention of Onlyfans makes me sigh. Because they are in the beginning of the payment-enabler cycle, where they are delighted to let porn on their site. Once they grow past a certain point, they will inevitably come into conflict with anti-porn policies at the larger financial institutions they have to interface, and there will be a day when they start banning more and more kinds of porn, until it’s all gone.

I’m an artist on Patreon, so are a lot of my friends. Patreon’s somewhere in the middle of this cycle. You can still put some kinds of horny stuff up, and that’s still some of their top earners IIRC even though they don’t like to admit it. But other stuff is banned - if you’re an adult performer who wants to post clips of you Doing Horny Things, Patreon doesn’t want you any more. All my friends who draw horny art have a little twitch of fear every time Patreon announces a policy change, is this gonna be the one that means Patreon kicks them off?
ICE changes exemptions for foreign students taking online courses in Fall 2020
Why is there this laser focus on Fatality rate as a talking point for anti-mask anti-lockdown types? Is death the only undesirable outcome? Polio had historic mortality rates around 5% in children, would you want your children to catch polio? Would you push for herd immunity for polio and have >60% of the children in the country catch it? It's simply absurd! There are other health risks besides death to consider. How does no one see that?

Half of the US seems to think this is just a GLOBAL conspiracy to hurt Donald Trump, like are you dense? You think the entire world would torpedo their economies just for the chance to hurt Trump? These people need help.

I am consistently disappointed by the lack of critical thinking in HN comments.
H.265 was always better from a technical perspective but that's not everything which factors into a video codec decision. H.264 was supported everywhere, including hardware support on most platforms. You could generate one file and have it work with great experience everywhere, whereas switching to anything else likely required adding additional tools to your workflow and trying to balance bandwidth savings against both client compatibility and performance — if you guess wrong on the latter case, users notice their fans coming on / battery draining in the best case and frames dropping in the worst cases.

Encoder maturity is also a big factor: when H.265 first came out, people were comparing the very mature tools like x264 to the first software encoders which might have had bugs which could affect quality and were definitely less polished. It especially takes time for people to polish those tools and develop good settings for various content types.