skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
You know that feeling you get when you see, say, CSI "building a GUI interface in Visual Basic to track the killers?" That's how I feel whenever a post about music hits the front page of HN.

Save for a few genuinely educated and empathetic comments (thankfully towards the top for once), these comments (such is tradition) are a sea of Dunning-Kruger effects in full swing.

I'd like to respond to a few confident-and-wrong assertions I'm seeing rear their heads again:

No, "most musicians" don't make most of their money from gigs. That one band you know is not indicative of an entire diverse industry, nor is it a proper sample size. Those are amateur musicians, not pros. A pro musician who makes the bulk of their cash from gigs is doing it wrong. And not all musicians are instrumentalists: some are primarily writers, some are producers, or audio engineers, or synthesists, or whatever. There's so much diversity in this world that you're not aware of. If your idea of a "musician" is "someone carrying an instrument," that's a good sign that you know as much about this world as your family member who says "you're a software developer, why can't you fix my TV" as if knowing about computers means you know about hardware and electronics -- it just betrays a huge amount of ignorance on your part.

No, streaming does not pay people better than album sales. This is just...I don't even know where to start with how wrong this is, so if you believe this just know that you're dead wrong and I'll leave it at that. Look into my previous comments for more info if you'd like.

No, streaming is not supposed to be "exposure." It is a replacement of both album sales and radio plays. Artists and musicians constantly have to defend against the moving of goalposts -- first it was album sales nearly going away, then gigs becoming "exposure" for their albums, then their album sales becoming "exposure" for their gigs, then album sales became totally replaced by streaming and still being seen as "exposure" for their gigs/merch. It's a constant chipping away of previously-decent-income-streams that we're then told to be grateful for because they can apparently "expose" us for better payment. Which takes the form of...what? The only truly reliable thing left is licensing/royalties, which is also very heavily under attack.

Just -- people, please understand that you just probably don't understand very much about the complexities of a market with which you have zero experience. Your armchair analysis that makes sense only within the context of near-total ignorance isn't helping. HN tends to be full of smarter-than-usual people, so at least be smart enough to know when you don't know what you're talking about, and try approaching these topics with more empathy and humility.
Is TikTok really state-sponsored? Do you have any source?
Data, Data, Data and Data
Better than a capital gains tax would be a wealth tax.

Tax, say, 1% for every million in net worth.

This would be cumulative, so $2 million would be taxed at 2%, $50 million would be taxed at 50%, etc...
Alleged Salas Family Assailant Worked for US/Israeli Intelligence-Linked Firm
Going for a walk around the block

In the shower

Sitting around quietly at night

Try to keep a notepad around
Right, but botanically speaking, we have not found a “true blue” plant.
I would add that if you add a traceId to #1 and use something like https://www.jaegertracing.io/. You get even more.
Trump is a "protected" account in twitters internal system.
Even Twitter employees cant access such protected accounts.
They don't pay (as much?) above and beyond taxes for them.
Wouldn't a better coder get it right the first time, with less churn and bug fixes, resulting in less GitHub activity? ;)
If this turns out to be true, then we can conclude two things:

1. It's incredible that the security of Twitter allows for a solitary 17-year old to gain full access to (any) account.

2. This also explains why the profit of the hack was 'only' ~$100k. Many speculated about how incredibly valuable such a hack could be and how much more a group could have profited from this hack. Using it for two hours of bitcoin scamming seemed very amateurish. I suppose this explains it.
Yes. That use case would be enabled... at a commensurate price.
My take:

- It's basically Ergodox EZ for the main part, from the same company.

- The thumb block is more comfortable now, but 2 keys smaller.

- The position of wrist pad is adjustable.

- Backlight, legs, and wrist pads are included in the base set.

- The price of the whole thing is about the same as of Ergodox EZ in a minimal set, without backlight and wrist pads.

Still not barrel-shaped as e.g. Kinesis Advantage; you can put the parts quite far aside, though.

Looks like a buy if you were planning to buy a mechanical ergonomic keyboard.
coverage in remote areas too expensive/difficult to deploy fiber/towers
Wait, if you're 55 now, you grew up in basically the golden age of US growth and the easy value of a college degree at relatively cheap tuition. And you had friends back then who were saddled with college debt that led to dead end jobs?

The situation, is way, way worse now. Orders of magnitude worse.
Thanks for sharing. Lyn Alden is one of the better independent voices out there.
I want a more ergonomic keyboard since I may be developing wrist problems, but I don't understand why none of them seem to have function keys. I use the function keys all the time and when I switch to a 40% layout I get seriously annoyed by the lack of them and end up going back to a full layout keyboard because of it. I spent twenty minutes searching for a split keyboard with function keys and found only one thread where someone made a "theoretical" split layout with function keys and discussed it for a long time, and then gave up in the end by going back to a function-keyless keyboard and saying that he simply learned to live without them and even argued that having no function keys is healthier as it reduces finger movement, so there's no real point in having them.

Is this some kind of cultural thing, where nobody in the DIY keyboard space is interested in making such a keyboard, even though there are keyboards marketed as ergonomic with cheap dome switches I don't prefer but still have function keys? Are "split keyboard" and "function keys" mutually exclusive properties? I don't understand.

EDIT: Okay, I did not look hard enough at all.

https://www.zergotech.com/

This looks like the kind of keyboard I would be interested in using.
Personally, I find predictability to be the most important attribute of good software. I want to know that if I do an action, I can expect a specific, repeatable result. I find that any time AI technologies are involved, predictability decreases (for example any voice controlled system, or Google's increasingly fuzzy search suggestions). Therefore I don't understand how AI can add "polish" to a product. New features? Sure. But polish?
You could easily add in a widowed grandma on social security clause in a replacement piece of legislation - where it only applies to a single property per family/household/whatever-definition.

That said - America is full of temporarily embarrassed millionaires... So, even though the masses will never own a second home - they will vote against it because they think it will screw them over later.
But it still killed Kaby Lake G. What could have been... sigh
Exactly! There is a reason why personalized ads are a thing. You are not shown stuff that you have no interest in! Removing targeting is basically asking for watching ads that don't align with your interests at all! I rather give my mind space to ads that are relevant to me than watch an ad that I have absolutely no interest in! Not only is it a waste of my time, is exhausting but also a big waste of money.
Title: Superluminal Motion-Assisted 4-Dimensional Light-in-Flight Imaging

The video is also listed as Supplementary_Video_2.avi[1] on arXiv.org

[1] https://arxiv.org/src/2007.09308v1/anc/Supplementary_Video_2...
Social engineering is well within the capabilities of many 18 year olds, and plenty of them will have experience with corporate-style processes at school.
Tesla Gigafactory Texas shows its crazy potential with other Tesla factories
How to make sure your references are reliable when writing
One-Room Schoolhouses Make a Covid-19 Comeback–In Backyards and Garages
Surely Iridium NEXT must be making tons of money to justify these ventures.
It's both. Just like gold.
Some software products. There are loads of artistic pieces of software.
Speaking personally, here's why TikTok concerns me: TikTok is a Chinese business, and China has shown no limit to how much it will meddle in the affairs of and even take control of Chinese businesses for the furthering of the Chinese state's agenda.

Simultaneously, TikTok has captured the daily attention spans of millions of Americans, many of them especially young and impressionable. They've captured their attention in the form of a black box algorithm that promotes content in whichever way TikTok deems most appropriate.

These two facts mean that the Chinese government now has direct access to the brains of millions of young Americans, with zero oversight. Imagine China subtly promoting videos to create outrage and civil unrest in the US, or to feed anti-US propaganda to germinate terrorist groups in the US. These might sound like far flung possibilities, but I think it's hard to say what a country that views the US as its enemy (politically, economically, philosophically) might do with that kind of power, and I don't think we can wait to find out.
> I guess you don't belong in the new future landscape

There's really nothing unusual in bands losing fans and appeal. If you don't want to change and loose fans - that's your choice. This isn't even new. Many artists had to recreate themselves to stay relevant or just retire.

Now - you have much cheaper and much more direct means of engaging with your audience. If you decide to ignore this - then you probably will not make a splash, but there's always a need for wedding singers and backup vocals...
The apps that fail to track me?
Florida Man Seeks Publicity, Charges Teen Locally

- Uses Words Like "Mastermind" and "Massive Fraud"
Thank you for posting this! (author here)

In case the main link gets pay walled, this will get you around it:

https://medium.com/@FreedomBen/what-is-mtls-and-how-does-it-...
That's not the issue that satellites are solving.

Huge portions of the world are simply so sparsely populated that running wires is cost prohibitive.
A Buddhist monk I met used a similar analogy: Harboring resentment is like holding onto a hot coal with the intent of throwing it at another; you are the one who gets burned.

Forgiveness is setting down the coal.
Doubtful they'd be able to compete with any terrestrial provider on price. Perhaps on performance.
I wonder how effective it would move data using spark? Have anyone considered that!
This is far better than having facial recognition data in the hands of CCP. I am not a fan of US gov, but if I had the choice, I wouldn't side with CCP. The genie is already out and we've failed to put laws in place to stop all this data collection way back in 2004. Surprisingly, I feel comfortable with Microsoft having this data. What a world we've created.

For those who are skeptical, just watch the Vice doc on how China tracks people, it's on a whole another level: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CLo3e1Pak-Y
Music is a winner-take-all markets. It makes it really hard for new musicians to break in. It also tend to be a sticky market, so those that have several hits remain relevant for a long time. Winner-take-all markets are reinforced by feedback loops.
There's a big difference between "starvation" and "hunger"/"food insecurity".

You can make all the excuses you want, but nobody is dying of starvation in the USA. The number of annual starvation deaths in the US is so small we don't even track it, and the people that do die of starvation aren't starving because they are poor, but sick (i.e. cancer makes them stop eating).

I'm not advocating a plain rice diet 24/7. I'm just saying calories are so cheap in America that obesity is a bigger problem for the poor than starvation.

Furthermore, even the poorest in the US have access to the things in your list if they want them.
You'd fix it by banning non-dischargeable loans (and potentially making Universities guarantee the loans so they're actually responsible for the candidates they shit out without prospects).

It's incredibly predatory to lure people who by definition don't know that much about the world yet (let alone finance) to take on six figures of debt for something that the investors know in a lot of cases won't pay for itself. It's usury. As an outsider, the fact the US allows it reeks of political corruption.
Know what?
aka ban people who annoy the jewish lobby
There is considerable difference between "uncontrolled" and the status of digital books lent by the "national emergency library". For one thing, all of those copies have expired and are unusable to either the person who checked them out or anyone else without illegal actions by those people. To argue that these digital copies are, or were, "uncontrolled" is ridiculous and quite inverts the meaning of "uncontrolled".
So it'd be a reallocation of the budget? Like the same dollar funds space based internet and also space based satellites. That sounds pretty efficient.
I always thought this was for precisely the oppposite - i.e. that news headlines (edit: I mean whole articles) were more often "A Florida Man has been arrested" because they were not allowed/didn't have the names.
Indeed. Nvidia shouldn't be allowed to buy it, given their status (not just a reputation) of an anti-competitive bully.

But anti-trust is so diluted and toothless these days, that the deal will probably be simply rubber stamped. If they aren't stopping existing anti-competitive behavior, why wouldn't they allow such bullies to gain even more power?
It's doubtful that he actually did it. Probably just a teen groomed by a cracking group; the group gets away with the deed by leaving a paper trail pointing to the teen (that will get a reduced prison sentence) and the teen gets PR which will inevitably lead to a well-paying job.
When studying flora, things like color or inflorescence, for example, are examined with excessive concern with minor details, though.
I wonder if this is an adjacent phenomenon to the financialization of everything- the "moativation" of everything? To survive as a business, you need to be everything to everyone, or at least explore as many tenuously-connected paths to monetization.
Lol I guess that's one way to cover all 50 states? I guess he doesn't owe us anything. It would just be so great to get like, an Alaska album.
Doing IPO would mean they will use the money raised meaningfully. Shareholders probably see more upside with Nvidia integration. I’m not really sure what ARM need a bunch of money for in an IPO, they are pretty established.
What makes Paul Graham a great writer?
I don't think this subthread is any use when you're just speaking of "musicians" at large being able to pay their rent.

You can't put Rammstein in the same league as my friend who would like to make a living in music but realizes that it's unlikely he'll ever make pay-the-rent kind of money from that, simply due to the sheer volume of competition and luck involved (while their music is as good as any song I've heard in the genre, it's a combination of reaching the right people and stumbling upon better ideas than your competition, which both have a significant luck factor). The former can do what they want and still get that private jet, the latter has to "spend their time riding a perpetual wave that they have to continually feed" and likely still couldn't pay the rent. That spectrum is way too broad to generalize into "musicians".
Launching Capital-as-a-Service on ProductHunt
Given enough time ecosystems can adapt to new invaders.

The problem is that we’ve dramatically accelerated the movement of flora and fauna around the world, and ecosystems can’t keep up with those changes (among many others we’ve caused).
There actually are very few legal restrictions on naming minors. There is substantially more scrutiny applied to false reporting when it involves accusing a minor of a crime. Most of the time when publications refuse to name a minor it’s because they promised not to while obtaining the minor’s name.
> I see GPT as being ~13-14 years ahead of its time.

What do you think is missing from GPT that will take more than ten years to add?
If that CEO was in charge of Redhat, sure. Or maybe one of those open source SaaS companies, but many of them are realizing that maybe giving away the software was also a product decision that is now harming the bottom line.
Counterpoint is record companies are creating pop music or using audiotune without the artist quality a classic painting has.
Microsoft is definitely a good candidate here for TikTok. With them missing Mobile-rise and Social media-rise, this acquisition seems to be a desperate attempt to cement their position in a hyper growth consumer product that's both Mobile and Social Media. Question is, Would it impact Microsoft's image? I mean, Tik Tok is known for their addictive design and Privacy controversy, so not sure how it goes well with the recent Good-guy image Microsoft's trying to portray itself.
Does debit vs credit really matter? I have a pin for both my MC debit and credit cards (same with Visa earlier) and any online purchase requires 2FA (MasterCard SecureCode and VerifiedByVisa respectively).

I wouldn’t make a transaction online without those 2FA measures and I wouldn’t make an in person transaction without pin. I haven’t checked actually but I assume the cards can’t be used without pin/2FA e.g if the details were leaked.
Imagine we collected the best material in written, bound volumes. And nearly every city had a large collection you could borrow from for free.

We did. The professors of history, psychology, art, biology, math, - everything - at the world's greatest universities very often write down what they know in books. We achieved this already.

You can read Feynman's course on physics tonight. Your city library probably has it.
Some media groups have done this but only for content under their umbrella like Rooster Teeth FIRST. If you follow a few RT groups, ten it likely pays for itself vs youtube premium as you get live and locked shows on the RT site.

I bet Patreon could take on a similar model, but I'm not sure how it would be curated. Who would bundle creators? Patreon, the creator(s), or the user(s)? I don't think Patreon would want to show bias by grouping anything. To support creators working together it might be really cool to see them create alliances and tag team projects. But I'd probably want to bundle them myself to hand pick who I support.

I only follow 1 Patreon user, a good (very talented) high school friend with a knack for explanation of musical concepts. He's brilliant on a guitar and I want others to see that.
> It is trivial to track that an app has never been opened on a device and automatically uninstall it in that case

Why would you want Apple to have access to everyones online/offline usage habits for apps, and scans every time you restore a backup?
Why This Restaurant Critic Isn’t Dining Out
Author here. I think about it this way - some tools are more like programming languages, and some are like can openers. Programming languages have a high skill ceiling and a big variation in performance - a great programmer is 10x more effective than a mediocre programmer.

In contrast, can openers have a low skill ceiling and low variation in performance.

iPhone apps I'd argue were more like a programming language. The App Store was more of a platform everyone had to be on to play, rather than the core technology that drove every app's value prop. The best app developers still had a big advantage over the median app developer - their products were more performant, easier to use. e.g. Candy Crush was 5x more fun and addictive than the next match-3 game.

The question I ask is, can a great GPT-3 developer have a 10x advantage over the median GPT-3 developer? Or does everyone's performance taper off quickly because of how powerful it already is, and how little any user can tweak under the hood?

--

I agree it's still early and there's room for exceptions:

-there will be brand new markets with applications that no one has thought of yet. My applications listed here are 'obvious' in the same way 1995 observers for the Internet had 'obvious' ideas - namely, wrong and not imaginative enough.

-even if you have to compete with incumbents, there will still be big winners. Even among all the meal kit companies, there was still one big winner - Hello Fresh. I just think it's going to be hyper-competitive, and founders will find it's less about technology and product (what they set out to focus on) and more about marketing/distribution.
> It's orders of magnitude easier to make working software than it is to make a hit record.

It is order of magnitudes more difficult being in the top 0.1% in Y industry. Then, being in the bottom 99.9% in Z industry. Giving that roughly the same number of people work in each industry.
Perhaps you could evolve another mobile OS out of TikTok that is not Android or iOS. MicroSoft failed to get traction with its two previous mobile OSes (perhaps because they were basically offering reworked Windows).
I never worked in the music industry, but hasn't it always been this way?

I have a lot of my grandparents old records, and when I first went through the collection I was surprised at the output of some artists both big and small. The obvious example would be Elvis. Just counting his studio albums, the guy put out over 20 albums over his career 24 year career, and that isn't counting singles, soundtracks, or whatever else he put out. If you factored in all of that, it's easily in the range of 150-200+ releases.
While Nvidia has a vastly superior product to AMD and Intel, they have less than 20% of the GPU market. Intel has held greater than 50% market share since 2010.

It is very hard to make an anti-competition case against someone who is consistently 2nd and 3rd in the market.
Speaking as a Linux graphics developer, I can confirm that NVidia indeed is a pretty terrible actor. There could be a viable Open Source driver for most of their GPUs tomorrow if they changed some licensing, NVidia knows this.

A NVidia purchase of ARM would also create a lot of conflicts of interest.
None of that convinces me that the KKK is anything but an abhorrent terrorist hate group who should be banned from Twitter like ISIS.
It is an ASIC.

> A gate array is an approach to the design and manufacture of application-specific integrated circuits (ASICs) using a prefabricated chip with components that are later interconnected into logic devices (e.g. NAND gates, flip-flops, etc.) according to a custom order by adding metal interconnect layers in the factory.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gate_array

PLA's job is simple: it basically contains a lot of combinational logic, transforming some inputs to some outputs. It generates a CS output based on a memory address and bus signals, it's just an address decoder, you can build the decoder using a large number of logic gates, but it gets messy and expensive. You can build a full-custom ASIC for it, but it's expensive and unnecessary. The point of PLA is allowing one to create a custom logic circuit to replace combinational logic by burning the logic on a general template, it was the right tool for the job.

Even today, modern equivalents of PLAs are still used. Some companies provide FPGA-to-ASIC conversion service using mask-programmable array, it allows you to burn your FPGA design to the silicon for a moderate performance boost, without the complication of ASIC redesign.
https://sciences.adelaide.edu.au/news/list/2019/08/20/why-is...