skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I don't understand how this is meant to lower the latency. Currently:

ground <--> satellite <--> ground

With satellite links:

ground <--> satellite <--> satellite <--> ground

How can the latter possibly be faster?

Edit: Thanks for all the responses. I'd been assuming it was a test of Starlink latency only, but if it's Starlink -> ground station -> open internet -> ISP then it would make sense how that would be slower than a pure Starlink connection.
Tbh I’ve never heard those words before.
Too lazy to watch it -- does it take into account the multiple criss-crossing satellite hops?

I watched it -- no it doesn't :)
It is comparing fiberoptics latency with straight line light propagation.
So the worst case scenario of non-existing inter-satellite communication could easily be worse than fiberoptics.

But I guess if the hedgefunds knew exactly which packet travels in a straight line, they could send one packet via Starlink and others via fiberoptics.
Seeing as she keeps mentioning how she thinks they're Asian men while apparently linking some of them to their real identities through GitHub, well, I don't think it's that hard to put 1 and 1 together in this case.
The revolutionary part is to use V12 turbo-diesel piston engine for high cruise altitude instead of turboprop or jet engine.

Aerospace experts are skeptical https://www.thedailybeast.com/this-weird-plane-could-be-the-...

>Juan Alonso, a professor in the Department of Aeronautics at Stanford University, has his doubts. A 30 percent improvement in fuel-efficiency is possible in an airplane with a new, more aerodynamic wing design, an ultra-light airframe made from high-tech composite materials and a super-efficient engine.

>But an 800 percent improvement? “Unlikely,” Alonso told The Daily Beast. The Celera 500L’s rear-mounted propeller is a good choice for a more fuel-efficient plane, Alonso said. But the egg-like fuselage probably is less fuel-efficient than the narrower fuselages on planes such as the PC-12, he pointed out.

>Mark Drela, an MIT aeronautical engineer, is equally skeptical. “The 500L looks fairly well-designed,” Drela told The Daily Beast, “but I cannot say whether it’s close to optimum, or whether the diesel engine makes sense.”

> To say for sure, Drela said he’d need to know how much the Celera 500L weighs and how efficient its engine is. Since Otto isn’t talking, Drela can only guess. And he’s guessing that the Celera 500L isn’t nearly as efficient as Otto hopes it will be.
Yeah it sucks, but I think it is kind of inevitable that someone was going to do this, and even Iridium had similar problems. Now that we have at least 3 companies pouring in serious money, it seems likely that the economics will keep pushing for it.

My hope is that this will lower the cost of access to space with another magnitude, which should allow a serious scale up of the amount of astronomy done from space.
The World Trade Organization allows for asymmetrical relations like that for developing countries.

Same reason why we don't demand a level playing field between sheep and wolves...

China is a poor, third-world country.
I worked for an advertiser a while ago - they were totally respecting DNT header, _except_ on the browsers that had it on by default. The business argument was that "it's bogus/meaningless if the user didn't set it explicitly" - industry wanted that to be "opt-out-of-tracking" not "opt-in-to-tracking".
> That is clearly a bug and not an expected behaviour.

No, it’s just a reflection that the pace of updates exceeded my pace of attempting to use Windows. These all applied successfully, and an immediate reboot was fine.

> But consider that you don’t use any other household tool for 8+ hours a day

I don’t use my household computer nearly that much, either. At a guess, it sees a comparable amount of use as my dishwasher which demands significantly less attention. (My office computer is a different story).

> Other household tools are not designed to serve a rapidly moving target of constantly changing application needs.

Regardless of its design intent, my application needs aren’t rapidly changing: I use a computer for roughly the same things as I did 1 or 2 or 3 years ago. Why should I pay the time cost of upgrades to enable features I have no intention of using?
Note that the process of reforming equity fundraising began at least ten years ago as the JOBS Act was drafted. Powerful financial lobbying watered down provisions, such as the designation of accredited investor and anything else that would enable a viable crowdfunding marketplace to exist. After TEN YEARS, across several political administrations controlled by both political parties, this change finally takes a baby step forward. It's still not democratizing access to private investment. The reasons for this remain the same: those who control the flow of capital demand it.
I'm actually ok with corporate self-interest if it benefits the consumers and their privacy.

I mean Google (the ad company) spent a lot of R&D money into making browsers and the internet faster. For me it means the internet is faster, for them they get more ad impressions and goodwill. Win-win, although they ballsed up the goodwill part.
Ask HN: How does onlyfans.com work around the “no porn” Stripe rule?
For reasons beyond this ask, I'm needing to use a payment processor that is fine with high-risk transactions (which the porn industry certainly fits in) so started looking around what adult websites are using.

Many are using probiller, vendo and similar, since Stripe and others have rules against porn/adult industry, citing high risk transactions for this.

But then I came across onlyfans.com, which is using Stripe for its payments, although Stripe has a strict "no porn" rule in their terms of service.

How does this work? Onlyfans is by now a huge website, with lots of transactions, so it's surely not flying under the radar. It's the only adult website I could find that is using Stripe.

Is it as simple as they have an agreement with Stripe to bypass the rule? Or am I missing something else obvious here?
The latter is pretty well handled by existing devices such as SPOT:

https://www.findmespot.com/en-gb/

Edit: Starlink looks fantastic but maybe not for that particular scenario, at least not any time soon.
> fret not, a second computer program can assure us of its validity

Formal methods are rigorous enough and mature enough to be helpful in avionics software development, why not in research mathematics?

> I hope they are not building the foundations of future math on this house of cards.

Mathematics is always a house of cards, and human mathematicians will always be fallible. It's already possible for a published result to later turn out to be invalid, in turn invalidating papers that relied on it.
How long are digital exposures? It seems like most of the interference could be removed with a bit of signal processing.
The satellite itself is way more expensive then a ground based telescope. Maintenance of a space telescope is much more expensive then a ground based telescope. All in all launching a satellite is just a fraction of the total costs of a space telescope.

On top of that SpaceX has also not proven to be real friendly towards space telescopes, so that just "moves" the problem. See for example: https://www.forbes.com/sites/jonathanocallaghan/2019/09/02/s...
Actually, banks risk management is easy.

Most in-bank or between banks transfers are reversible and usually a non-issue. That why the risk management probably says something like this:

Risk: Incorrect transfer of funds to customer in another bank
Mitigation: Manual review of all funds transfer above 5 million dollars
Mitigation: Besides litigation issues, lost funds are easily recovered by asking the receiving bank
Status: Risk accepted

Edit: Clarified "Mitigation: Besides litigation issues bank transfers are reversible" into "Mitigation: Besides litigation issues, lost funds are easily recovered by asking the receiving bank"
To be fair, I would have thought that Vyacheslav and Slava were also different people.
> It’s not about interest.

How do you know?

Example: I flag, on every opportunity, posts related to US politics. It's not because I'm "hurt" or annoyed by US politics, it's because I have close to zero interest in them and don't want that to be a content category that takes up space in HN from the actual interesting stuff.

I bet many feel the same for posts about social issues like this, whether it's morally right or wrong.
Just a friendly reminder of the facts on the ground that the change that great folks at El Reg are reporting on and the folks at Facebook in their blog post are posting about is a toggle in iOS 14, which while there in previous operating system releases as an opt-out toggle, will be an opt-in sort of toggle. iOS will now ask for explicit permission on behalf of Apps to let them track you using an identifier Apple made available to developers like Facebook (“IDFA” aka “Identifier for Advertisers”) rather than relying on the implicit permission of an opt-out toggle.

This does not kill all forms of tracking, nor does it eliminate IDFA as an an option, but it does make it more obvious to iPhone/iPad users what exactly is going on behind the curtains with this tracking tool and let them make an informed and explicit choice about whether they want any part of that.
That's an unfair comparison though. Everyone used to play with high latency. There's a clear advantage to you if your ping is 20 ms and mine is 300 ms.

Whether there's a clear advantage to having 50 vs 20 ms ping I can't answer. I'm quite certain that's an advantage I personally can't make any use of, but a Quake pro might be able to.

Also, today's pro gamers are likely at a higher skill ceiling than the best players were 10 years ago.
Just because it might be self-interested on one party’s behalf (Apple) doesn’t automatically invalidate the positive externalities.
There is something to be said about that tbh, the do-not-track option should be an option on first launch.

Then again, I'm sure very few people are like "Sure do track me pls". I know Microsoft tries to package and word it nicely in their Windows setup (then ignores it at a next update).
Current satellites are in a much higher orbit
They look something like this - https://explainingscience.org/2020/01/29/spacex-starlink-sat...

If you google starlink satellites you can see more images
The strange thing is that they split the setting in two and happily left the "let Apple keep tracking you" as ON by default while leaving third party apps OFF by default.

A principled stance would just flip the default to OFF for both Apple and everyone else. With the strange treatment of developers on AppStore, I'm afraid they'll start abusing this to give edge to their own advertising on AppStore and elsewhere.
Yes, especially if they are just after dusk or before dawn. Spotting satellites is a common thing.
Single engine aircraft with a range of around 800 miles are regularly ferried across the Atlantic. Now, I'm not for a minute suggesting that this is an everyday pleasure flight, it's something which takes planning, preparation and additional equipment. However, all I'm pointing out is that range would be the least of your problems if any of the claims prove true.

If you are interested this site gives a good overview of the routes and the legs involved http://220kts.com/ferry-flights/atlantic-ferry-routes.html
From what I've seen this is mostly already the state of the cosplay industry, except the AI part:

* Some big Chinese manufacturers start drafting the easiest way to get a passable-enough version of an outfit to sell on aliexpress for <$50 in time for Halloween /convention season.

* Fans come up with sewing patterns and jewelry sources on their own (a manual process).
Names are hard. Sitting with a Polish colleague with a very biblical name he commented "Your name, in Poland.. you would be instantly labelled a psycho. You just can't have a name like yours." Was named from the traditional family book in Scotland. Korva.
It’s not racist. It’s phonetics. Foreign kids who grow up Japanese have the same issue.
Didn't know that. That is just sick.
> Fortunately I can count on one hand the applications that don't work with +100ms latency (not counting gaming).

Pardon my ignorance, but what are some exampes of applications that wouldn’t work with +100 latency?
Sourcehut is indeed well engineered and well run, and also very opinionated - which is actually great for most people.

However, if the opinions disagree with you -- e.g., if you need your builds to run on Windows, you ARE disadvantaged. Which is not a bad thing - I wholly support Drew's machine and opinions - but that's one of the reason I can't promote it at $MY_DAY_JOB, where I can't drop the Windows requirement.
Sattelites appear way faster then what you expect from a moving star or a plane.
I'm not saying it isn't a problem, but aside for Covid there are usually 10,000 flights in the air at any given time on average, with several hundred thousand flights in 24hrs. A lot of those are concentrated during the day over the continental US, which is the most congested region in the world. So on that basis, an evenly distributed web of LEO satellites should be manageable, especially as they will also be much more vertically distributed than planes.
Non-surveyability was introduced precisely as a criticism of the 1976 proof. I believe that the four color theorem was proven with the help of an automated proof checker only in 2005.
>The regulatory situation might get quite complicated I think

I think it'll be OK. Cellphone roaming works just fine for example
I'm not familiar with these remote plantations, where can I read about them?
They split the setting in two and the 3rd party tracking setting is off by default, Apple's tracking setting is on by default.

So it won't affect all networks equally - it continues tracking users for Apple's own network and other uses.
If countries require permission to use slices of radio spectrum over their territory (I don't know to what extent), then they can control whether a radio service operates there.

Does this usually apply to space-based operations? I would guess there must be minimal coordination, or otherwise anyone space-based could degrade the infrastructure of countries in line of sight.

If such regulation exists, then satellite internet either needs to make sure they have all the permission to use their band (bands?) in particular countries, or... I guess they can just ignore the local laws, blast away, and claim no jurisdiction?
The Hypervisor framework has been in macOS since at least Mojave (if not longer, this is just what I began using it), it's not new to macOS 11.
LEO sat constellations that are low enough to beat existing solutions need to be almost global to provide reliable communication anywhere.
Maybe I should have been more clear. I don't support the TikTok case specifically. This should be applied to all Chinese companies, investments etc
> So you say this idea was born by the company and not some human ambition?

Not a thing I said.

> How did Amazon the company, or SpaceX the company come up with this?

Companies have employees, employees are humans with brains, they come up with ideas.

> Nothing to do with Bezos and Musk for sure?

I'm sure the normal company structures were involved in approving strategy. I doubt the idea originated with either Bezos or Musk, and not sure why their net worth has much to do with it.

If you have a problem with ambition, ambition is something many people who are not millionaires have.
That would be a more principled stand. I didn’t know they had bifurcated it in that manner in the next OS release. Thank you for the heads up.
Apple made the choice to monetize via cuts of in-app purchases rather than selling ads on its platforms as e.g. Windows does. This was a principled choice.
yup. what a lovely and hugely thought provoking book. specifically on the nature of cognition, and our need to impose order / structure on unknown. which ultimately, is a reflection on ourselves...
Painting was already tried and doesn't work.

> But the black paint made the satellite thermally ‘hot’, harming its internet operations, said Patricia Cooper, SpaceX’s vice-president of satellite government affairs, at a recent webinar.
You won't be alone on that hill.

This issue is yet another reminder that capitalism only appears to work because you assume infinite resources on a finite planet.
Funny. I have a full 42U rack at home but because I am moving to another city I had to dismantle everything to get it packed. All the critical VM's and services are now running on an old NUC and a HP low-spec laptop. Made me rethink if I really need all the hardware I have or I should downsize.
Apple is one of the few coMpanies you should trust for this.
Could a country (or a continent) in theory remove satellites hanging above their area? What if countries decide to extend the airspace to the aerospace?
All of those harassments and trolling mainly happens as a back and forth between two streams of culture within the USA. And typically revolves around the topics of: "Black lives matter", "Racism", "Sexism in tech", "Transphobia" - all these things are internal US politics stuff.

From the perspective of where I live (Eastern Europe):

"Black lives matter" - We have very few black people living here. And very few problems with police in general. When something bad happens it typically happens to the police, not by the police.

"Racism" - we have no history of slavery nor racism, except being subjected to it. Even more - originally the word "slave" was derived from the word "slav".

"Sexism in tech" - there is no sexism in tech here. Tech is not even a prestigious field. People want to work in law, medicine and finance. Some can even be quite ashamed to admit they work in a technical field.

"Transphobia" - even such things as thinking about "sex" and "gender" as different concepts are quite US specific. i.e. where I live we typically refer to people by their sex, and don't even have a term for a separate concept like gender.

Yet these things are so pervasive on the internet. People even post their pronouns on twitter and (in this case) fill their GitHub profiles with that stuff. They can do it of course, it might even be a good thing to do. But I do not think this deserves a front page of HN. Hence why I am glad it was flagged.
That's not really our problem though. They've shown they have no intention of opening up regardless of how rich they get.
This feels like something that I used before or it was influenced by something that I know, but for the life of me I can't point the source/reference.

Maybe the familiarity is what makes this so good.

Amazing.
The data does show getting a parcel from California to most points in the east will have up to a 40% chance of delay. It seems their internal routes are getting backed up and causing a ripple effect.
> Ads are very much a necessary evil

Apple isn't blocking ads per se. They're reducing effectiveness of ads that don't respect user's privacy. The other kind of ads (e.g. sponsored videos, privacy friendly ads, etc) could still work.

I don't think ads that don't respect user's privacy are a necessary evil.
With the (text) sources in Git so they can be easily archived, distributed and indexed for the future.

I've fired up and taken down multiple attempts at blogging, I don't know if anything I've written was worth keeping but still, the information is lost.
Too lazy to answer
I was just providing explanation, not that I agree that there can't be US-centric discussions in Reddit.
Don't forget the kicker: the original computer-powered proof turned out to to have several serious flaws, brought to light after work done by several researchers unconnected to the original effort. ctrl-f for Schmidt.
The other day I was looking at an old BBC micro demo (cold tea) and thought about porting it to python for fun. In BBC basic there is a sound command which has 4 parameters, allowing you to play a sound straight away -not play back a wav file (a la pygame etc), but generate musical pitches easily with a single command. Other older era systems had similar commands, and that immediacy (both literally in terms of command leads directly to an audio output, as well as the command being a single line and easy to understand even for 11 year old me) is what I'm looking for.
Handwriting Recognition with Deep Learning
Related: SpaceX tests black satellite to reduce ‘megaconstellation’ threat to astronomy

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-00041-4
You can say from the language in those screenshots that at least some of the bullies are not from the US. I don't really know how the US racial 'dynamics' work and feel, as I don't live there, so I'm not taking sides here.

There's just one thing I would like to bring your attention to.

I'm a white guy, born and raised in Europe, in an almost all-white country (+ Vietnamese and Gypsy minorities, but basically no big racial tensions). In my 20-thousand-people hometown there was a black guy and everyone knew him by name, because he was THE black guy.
My country had been through fourty years of communism, then had a revolution and then went through a slow, uphill struggle to become a modern country where people vote in free elections every few years, have MacBooks and drive BMWs too fast. The living standard isn't exactly like Germany or the Great Britain, but we manage.

And yet, every time I go online, there are people talking about "white supremacy". About "white privilege". People blaming the whites for slavery and wars, people saying whites are responsible for everything bad that has ever happened to the blacks. There are people who get so offended about everything they slightly disagree with, who are so sensitive and self-righteous, they wouldn't even be taken seriously in my country.

To a white person whose ancestors never took part in any colonialism or slavery, the internet feels pretty hostile and just as judgemental as those 4chan weirdos.
I don't like feeling guilty and being judged just because I don't support BLM, don't condemn Trump or don't care for "diversity" in companies whose products I use.

I don't vote in your elections, I'm not the one who doesn't greet your black neighbor, I didn't install an obscure bipartisan system in your country.

I don't feel guilty, yet every time I try to express any of those opinions online I get downvoted into oblivion by a US-centric virtue signalling mob.

I understand the world is a complicated place and I kind of let it fly, but there are people getting slowly pushed over the edge by the hostility and shaming.

Here's a link [0] to a news site discussion under a BLM related article. The opinions expressed there are pretty much in unison with what I hear from people around me.

[0] https://translate.google.com/translate?sl=cs&tl=en&u=https%3...
I feel like this could be solved with a simple requirement that anyone launching anything shiny into LEO has to help fund space based telescopes. They're better anyway and we can have the best of all worlds that way...
I just goaded my Italian partner with a link to the page containing our toddler's name - we agreed on the name itself, which is known in both countries, but not the exact spelling.

I was pleased this page preferred my interpretation, so as an asshole Scot, I was quick to share it.

Her response was less than enthused...
an impressive feat in itself
This must be the weirdest gatekeeping comment I've seen in a while. Also, who is claiming what now? Words and conventions are a thing, so it seems awfully unproductive to say something that is, isn't.
Install a script blocker.
Great if you're an extroverted narcissist, but that only represents (a small) part of the software development world.