skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Middleware doesn't and can't solve the distribution problem. The aggregation of content is a non-problem.

Video distribution is expensive and technically complicated.

Say I've got a video channel and most of my content is "talking head" style. Encoding 1080p using in a widely compatible h.264 configuration (Main profile level 3) I could easily get good quality output at a data rate between 1-2Mb/s, let's say 1.5Mb/s. That's about 11MB per minute of video for storage purposes (for that single config).

In order to serve those videos to streaming clients I'll need 1.5Mb/s of bandwidth for each client. Any lower of a transfer rate and the playback will stall. Faster data rates can allow for a larger buffer but the file's data rate is your transfer minimum to actually play the content as it downloads.

So back to our video channel. Self hosting on my residential connection means I'm limited by my shitty upstream bandwidth and throttling from my ISP if not outright T&C violations. My home connection I could serve maybe a half dozen clients simultaneously. So long as my content is unpopular that might be ok. Bubbling up on an aggregator or just making an interesting video would DDoS me and no one would get to see it. It I want to spend ~$60 a year on cloud hosting I could serve a lot more connections. Then I'm out $60 a year or more if I want to make a longer history of my content available, remember 11MB a minute.

If I want to have better compatibility and broader reach I would need to encode a couple more versions of my videos at the cost of storage and my time.

So self hosting either costs me money or severely limits the availability of my content. P2P distribution can help a little but it has its own issues. Even an aggregator offering paid hosting doesn't really solve the issue because I'm still out some money. Were I to make any money from advertising or patronage that hosting cost would come right off the top.

The situation is even more difficult if you consider mobile access which is a huge portion of online video access. For a lot of reasons self hosting from mobile devices isn't practical. P2P from a mobile device is likewise impractical. So for anyone with a mobile device as their primary computing device, a non-trivial number of people, they would have to pay for some third party hosting without a meaningful self hosting option.

Demand from mobile devices also significantly increases your need for multiple encodings of a video. Mobile streaming needs to respond to much more drastic traffic conditions than your laptop on your home WiFi. This increases storage requirements meaning less historic content or increased storage costs.
Control Panel Will Be the Next Windows 10 Feature to Get Axed
According to wikipedia you are more than an order of magnitude off:
"In 2018-19, the EU and its member states contributed 11% of the WHO's $5.6 billion budget, the US contributed 15%, while China contributed 0.2%"
Here’s an article which further explains the situation between China, Taiwan, and the WHO.

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-52088167
But isn't the obvious domestic institution for public health crises/epidemics the CDC, not the NIH? And hasn't the current administration interfered with the CDC's response (including e.g. stopping them from doing their own regular press briefings, removing a leading researcher after he expressed skepticism in response to the president's comments on hydrochloroquine, etc)?

If your complaint is the crisis being made worse by confusion, misinformation and incompetence, I hardly see how removing resources and trying to favor hamstrung American institutions is an improvement.
Statistically, the American immigrant population from Africa (around 2 million people) seems to have a very different background from most American born African Americans (around 40 million people).

Overall, African immigrants (like many other immigrant groups) tend to have very high education/economic mobility, due to the selection effect - if you don't have those characteristics, it's hard to immigrate to the US.

But if you lump both groups together as "black", the likely result is that tech companies trying to make up for lack of representation in American born African Americans, will end up filling most of the gap with African immigrants, because immigrants are more likely to have the background tech companies are looking for.

Which is great for immigrants, but does it end up helping African Americans?
The difference between "dies suddenly" and "died after falling from one of the company's buildings" is left to the reader.

Very sad.
You have to go with the evidence you have at the time. That’s the way it works.
Since this is just an event announcement, we should probably wait until the actual event.

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...
> The CO2 from methane breakdown was sourced from the atmosphere in the first place. And it goes back into the atmosphere. It's part of the permanent surface-atmosphere CO2 cycle.

intersting, i didnt know that

> But it seems silly to me to focus on these minor hacks to surface cycles for temporary gains when the clear long-term problem is fossil fuel. We need to keep focusing on fossil fuel.

definitely, agree 100%
I empathise with people who go to college to study computer science, mainly with the intent of eventually landing a well-paid programming job, who are then frustrated when they have to learn actual computer science topics instead of just learning to program.

But their anger is usually directed at the wrong institution. The problem doesn't lie with academia teaching the wrong things, it lies with companies requiring CS degrees for simple programming jobs. They treat the theoretical computer science material as nothing more than a raw intelligence/perseverance filter.
When unemployment shoots to 25% it’s a sign of a lot of sever stress for businesses. Left uncheck the drop in demand will create further contraction. What more evidence do you want that urgent action system wide is needed? By the time the bankruptcy filings start its too late.
Self Driving Bicycle [video]
I don't know, but everybody panicked about the same time and came to the conclusion it was a crisis right about on Friday the 13th. I personally was worrying about why a lot of authorities were dragging their feet that week, but none of them were the WHO.

Maybe take an inventory of where you were and what you were doing and thinking that week?
"So then say you're short. Why do I need to know at what strike price you bought at? This isn't r/WallStreetBets."

I guess asshole that can't spell runs strong in Colorado.
> did you read it?

Yes, I disagreed with most of it. But I also think that the response is disproportionate.
I'll shoot you an email, and we can talk more if you do end up working on this.

I'm not a big fan of pre-registered clients in the first place. Ideally any client should be able to talk to any OAuth2 server that speaks the same profile, ie endpoints and scopes. Aaron Parecki describes a way to allow "anonymous" clients here[0]. As I understand that's how IndieAuth is implemented. But I'm still relatively new to OAuth, and I don't doubt there could be subtle security issues. Do you have any thoughts on that?

[0]: https://aaronparecki.com/2018/07/07/7/oauth-for-the-open-web
You can only act on the evidence and information you have, and they were wrong in early January. Being wrong isn't necessarily a sign of uselesness, even the most useful are sometimes wrong.

But on January 30th, WHO said there was human to human transmission, and it was dangerous, officially declared a public health emergency.

At what point would you say CDC started taking it seriously?
A different source [1] describes certain product categories. Initially products like swabs, forks, plates, cups, stick for balloons that have non-plastic alternatives.

[1] German: https://www.spiegel.de/wirtschaft/umweltschutz-verbot-von-ei...
I created a few open source Opera (presto) extensions. Didn't even put it in my online profile as I considered it a work in progress and wanted to improve the code more. One got prominent because Opera featured it on their extension site (something like "Editors' Pick", don't remember). Another became popular with users. Somebody looked up the code, found my email ID, invited me to eLance and paid me well to create a few Firefox extensions. It was unexpected as I hated javascript, and was in love with Python. (Still do.)

Another one, I remember was a blog I started to experiment with Google Adsense. It didn't make much money, but once or twice a day made a few cents. There were some book reviews, and links to "read more" on a few article (for readers who wanted to research more on the subject). I added Amazon referral links to it. Was shocked a week later to see that I had made around $50 or so with one click because somebody who had clicked the link bought some expensive item on Amazon! While the blog was alive, Amazon ads / links made me more money than Google Adsense. That was some fun experiment, while it lasted.
"and you will be sitting all day at a computer like a drone"

Um, this one is kind of true of many programming jobs. Also true of many non-programming jobs today, too.
This is great, but I am frustrated to see the effects of Google's 10 minute "minimum". The video did not need to be 13 minutes long and the filler parts were obvious. At scale, this is uncountable thousands of hours of human time. I dont know if that's important, but it makes the experience less genuine.
> That's the whole point.

Until something falls over and you haven't deployed any new code and all the vendor's systems are green. Part of the reason you went with a PaaS in the first place is that you didn't want to manage the infra yourself, you just want to ship application code.

This has worked great so far and so you've stopped thinking about the infrastructure at all. Disk and network I/O still exist though, you've just been incentivized to stop thinking about them and so all you know is that the vendor sucks, when in reality it's the application's fault.

Somebody's gotta roll up their sleeves and see what's going on in there though, so hopefully your PaaS vendor is as cool as we are :)
wow that is really bad, I am increasingly loosing fate in Firefox and I have been using it since v1.0
In the UK, they put a mandatory 5p charge on bags (reusable or not) instead of banning them outright. Remarkably this has led to a 90% reduction in plastic bag use.

The thicker reusable bags also now available here (usually costing 10p), and in practice they do actually see a lot of reuse.
And ksh.
Standards support is a big one.

Early Google took pride in following other people's standards and avoiding walled gardens: XMPP, RSS, semantic web/micro-formats.

Today's Google avoids traditional standards and many standards that don't originate from Google, doesn't mind walled gardens in their favor, or "standards" that they (almost) solely control (AMP as an obvious one, HTML nearly with the Chromium monopoly), and doesn't even use standards in many areas where early Google thought it important (communications apps that might use something like XMPP or Matrix to federate, for instance).
Show HN: Generate Deep Fake Video with an Image
Thanks, trying to reconcile it. I will check the Wikipedia source when I get some time and tally up the numbers.

All - please help verify the source I linked above if you can. Take it with a grain of salt for now.
It's not as true and there's actually been studies on the particular voter behaviour in 2016, and belief in 'fake news' (as in literally made up stuff) was a strong predictor of defection from the Democratic to the Republican ticket, and there's solid psychological evidence why this affects conservatives in particular[1]

It's also very trivial to see if you eyeball the size of the market for misinformation. While there are some highly partisan left-wing media in the US, and there were some facebook pages targetting say, Bernie voters it paled in the market for the Trump base, literally by a magnitude or so in revenue. Which I think is very obvious too if one looks at the size of the audiences of youtube channels attracting those audiences or people like Alex Jones.

NPR in 2016 actually did an interview with one such 'entrepreneur', who actually tried to sell fake news to virtually everyone, but had very little success with liberal audiences.[2]

[1]https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2017/02/why-fake...

[2]https://www.npr.org/sections/alltechconsidered/2016/11/23/50...
Learning Input Tokens for Effective Fuzzing
recent discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23337759
No, I think the readability of the help documentation itself is largely the same whether it is placed in the header or in a dedicated function. When I'm viewing the shell script code though, often I want to jump right in and see the actual code, not look at the help documentation.

By having the help documentation in a function in the middle or towards the end of the file, I don't have to page down through the help documentation to get to the code that is actually doing things. If I'm really interested in the help documentation, then I'd prefer to look at the nicely formatted version output by the script (<script> --help or whatever) rather than looking in the actual script code anyway.

Admittedly, this may be more of a subjective personal preference item.
For larger shops - supermarkets etc - the UK government has both banned single-use plastic bags and also made them charge for thicker plastic bags (10p in my local supermarket), which has noticeably decreased their use. Of course it hasn't eliminated them entirely.
You’re just asking for a long drawn out fight over which cultures emphasize education more.
Come to Switzerland, it's like that on Sundays. Only kiosks at train stations and a small fraction of restaurants are open.
Damn, I was expecting sqrt(2pi) which is 2.5066.
My wife plays video games with a group of players and though they all know each other’s real names by now, they still call each other by their game names. They call me “Mr. YYYY” where YYYY is my wife’s nick name.
Show HN: Create Happiness with Serendipitous Messages
Hey HN!

This is a project I built with a small design team. Our product thesis is that happiness is a byproduct of positive thinking. By changing thought patterns, you can create happiness.

The app serendipitously delivers curated affirmations and coaching messages to encourage that positive thinking. You can opt for messages to be delivered via email (SendGrid), SMS (Twilio), or Slack (webhook calls). The stack is Ruby/Rails with Vue/webpacker backed by Airtable and Postgres hosted on Heroku.

We just launched a library of new content, and appreciate your feedback (plus any tech questions!). I sincerely hope you'll give it a shot!
See also: https://github.com/nhoffman/argparse-bash

A great option when you're stuck with an old crusty script that you don't want to completely rewrite in python, but do want to clean up enough so that you can call it with `-h` and remember how to use it a few months in the future.

Unfortunately, this won't help you if you're on embedded where python isn't in the base system.
150Gb ML model file? That's cool!

Yes, DVC can help with that. Where the data lives? S3/GCS or just a server with SSH?

Disclaimer: I'm a creator of DVC.
I'm sorry, but how is it OK to ban stuff people find useful for purely symbolic reasons? And you say this so nonchalantly!
The Burr vs Jefferson part or the Jefferson vs Adams part? Most of my eighteenth-century US history knowledge is from Hamilton and some Burr memoirs.
I personally don't believe Goodhart's Law overpowers the benefit of the metric, ever.

It's a quaint factoid, but just as the soviets would just execute a factory manage gaming the system for producing pins or spikes, people will see you at some level gaming the system and call you on it. (and make a TV show like The Wire)

Just like other factoids (ie Risk compensation), the effects will be real, but the factoid is so misused at extreme interpretations the factoids do more harm the good.
Actually, I believe they are vilified for being moderates.
Same here, the work laptop is for work, otherwise it is lava.

And that's ok with me, it's work's laptop, not mine.
StopHateForProfit Sees No Commitment to Action from Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg
> Modern fuzzing tools like AFL operate at a lexical level: They explore the input space of tested programs one byte after another. For inputs with complex syntactical properties, this is very inefficient, as keywords and other tokens have to be composed one character at a time. Fuzzers thus allow to specify dictionaries listing possible tokens the input can be composed from; such dictionaries speed up fuzzers dramatically. Also, fuzzers make use of dynamic tainting to track input tokens and infer values that are expected in the input validation phase. Unfortunately, such tokens are usually implicitly converted to program specific values which causes a loss of the taints attached to the input data in the lexical phase. In this paper we present a technique to extend dynamic tainting to not only track explicit data flows but also taint implicitly converted data without suffering from taint explosion. This extension makes it possible to augment existing techniques and automatically infer a set of tokens and seed inputs for the input language of a program given nothing but the source code. Specifically targeting the lexical analysis of an input processor, our lFuzzer test generator systematically explores branches of the lexical analysis, producing a set of tokens that fully cover all decisions seen. The resulting set of tokens can be directly used as a dictionary for fuzzing. Along with the token extraction seed inputs are generated which give further fuzzing processes a head start. In our experiments, the lFuzzer-AFL combination achieves up to 17% more coverage on complex input formats like JSON, LISP, tinyC, and JavaScript compared to AFL.
Why China Wants Trump to Win
Yeah, that's a really handy resource. Shows what i'd expect, with a heavy grainy look to caffenol, but I can see it being useful if that's your thing
I guess I'm not clear how you're even reading the table. The US paid $115M out of $488M total for 2020. 23% is obviously a large chunk, but the contributions appear to be based on GDP. We have ~23% of the worldwide GDP and pay in ~23% to the WHO.
I think the ban of plastic bags happened across Europe years ago. Still you can see them in many smaller supermarkets and other markets (not in Aldi, Netto, EDEKA, etc...)

1) What I find it funny is banning plastic bags but at the same time many of the "bio" veggies and fruits come in plastic packaging to prevent contamination and hijacking (sometimes between the producer and consumer non bio stuff is introduced and sold like so)

2) And the funniest thing is that single plastic use is banned in a first world country where most of the food products come from the other side of the world. The CO2 footprint here in Germany is one of the biggest in Europe... Sometimes it feels a bit of green-washing all this news
There are no “powers that be” if you don’t like the system then change it. Start a company, pay people higher wages, build a competitive advantage. Or run for office. If you think there is some coordinated effort to oppress then build a counter effort.

I suspect what you would find is not some grand conspiracy but emergent properties from competitive forces.
Hey, me too! It's true that there is nothing much to do around the area, it's mostly offices. There is however a Tower Records, which is kind of a rarity nowadays.
> I guess it depends on the culture, some dont like getting direct cash.

East Asian cultures tend to stick to the "red envelope of cash".

I'm curious how much businesses have had inroads into swaying cultures to believe that gifts and gift cards are more desirable than cash. Economists historically have talked about how gifts are frequently inefficient uses of money because there is value loss when it isn't the most desired item at the time.
Anyone have a sense of how easy it is to audit/verify devices made with this process? I would love to see some properly trustworthy chips for end-to-end encryption come out of this.
> Most of what you describe is the result of having waited ages before implementing it

Except we already had godep. It worked. It was in widespread use.

> exacerbated by the relatively decent (but not perfect) backward compatibility with pre-modules code.

My experience has been that the backwards compatibility has been a nightmare. It forces itself on any downstream repository, whether or not that repository wishes to participate. Plus it does very poorly on diamond dependencies, giving error messages about as scrutable as the I Ching. If your answer is "they're doing it wrong", take it up with the Kubernetes and go-client maintainers, because I can't change what they are doing.

> There is already a global system to get hold to unique names: the domain name system. For better or worse, that's a solved problem, let's not create new naming arbiters

Versions are not addresses. Addresses are not versions. You may find a version at an address, but addresses are not versions. Docker did the same thing with image references and they too created a pig's breakfast. The difference was that they didn't have prior art to compare to and it was an oversight obvious largely in hindsight. I do not extend the same credit to Russ Cox.
i see... i would really like to beleive it, personally

just about everyone i know under 50 is sick of trump and people like him, but i wonder sometimes if im just in a bubble... which is why i was curious, thanks

i guess we shall see in november
Covid-19 New Deaths
That’s more the general case of the word “black” being used both to denote bad/negative/disallowed and to denote people of African ancestry. But there isn’t a specifically racial meaning to either “blackballed” or “blacklist”.
"Pesticides"? Herbicides, anyway. Robots to pick off insect eggs or larvae are harder to make.

Edit: "Editor’s note: While it’s generally true that pesticides are used to kill pests and herbicides are used to kill weeds, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency defines both agents for killing pests and weeds as “pesticides.” By the government’s definition, pests can be both bugs and weeds." Still. The EPA does not get to redefine English, outside their own publications.
Ask HN: How do I get my own Google account back?
I'm a digital nomad, and therefore I move countries here and there, and change phone numbers.

My gmail account still forwards to another gmail account to which I do have access.

So my (failed) process has been:

1. Enter my correct password

2. Enter my correct security question answer

3. Enter my correct backup email

4. Receive the verification code in my backup email and enter it correctly

5. Get told that since I'm using an unrecognized device, I'm not allowed to access my Google account

Well yes, it's an unrecognized device only in that I upgraded to Catalina within the last year.

Is there any way to retrieve my own Google account?

Thanks!
> Both have an understanding on how things work and/or an intuition, either by studying theoretical concepts or via practical, hands on experience.

hands on experience with regular expressions manages to fail a lot of people with practical problems.

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/1732348/regex-match-open...
Thank you! I hope all is well with you and your project!
I'm really excited for the movie and the casting looks incredible so far. I wonder how the 2 movie split is going to work narratively. The book itself has kind of a perfect 3 act setup but I'm not sure breaking the story at the end of the book's part 1 (or halfway through part 2) is going to feel very satisfying.
Why is “./script.sh -h” better than “less script.sh”?
How to Use Acceptance Criteria to Ensure Software Delivery