skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Don't know if it's a personal site or not, it sounds like it is. But at least my case is that a VPS provider provides a hard stop to spend. Sure, your service will go down if you get too much traffic, but that's a risk I'm happier with than a potentially unbounded AWS bill.

That said, I've topped HN before and nginx happily handled that load on a 2 vCPU / 2 GB RAM host with a static site. A lot of these personal site meltdowns are Wordpress with no caching plugins.
A few thoughts on this from someone who happens to work with graphics programming.

Mega textures: I always thought their insistence on this technique was weird and was never quite convinced by it. I used to have a colleague who praised it to the skies and swore everyone would be doing it in a few years. It's interesting that they've moved away from it now.

Forward rendering: It's fascinating that they're going this way. I feel like everyone is all in on deferred rendering nowadays, except when targeting mobile. I wonder if this is because they want to target older systems and Nintendo Switch. I have heard that Doom Eternal renders surprisingly well on older systems and my own experience optimizing for Switch is that it's not worth it trying to deferred rendering to work efficiently on Switch.

Shadow mapping: the use of simple 3x3 PCF makes me feel a bit sad that variance shadow mapping never really took off. I remember reading about it and implementing my own version in 2010 and it seemed like the future.

Uber shaders and draw call merging: I really like this from a technical standpoint, but I wonder how it affects artist workflow. I know a number of artists who love using special crafted shader graphs for everything.

Reflections: I wonder if this was just an optimization for memory bandwidth, as suggested, or a compromise to allow to go fully forward rendering.
Yes fair enough. I'm not trying to offer a legal opinion, just noting that there is some precedent for journalistic privilege in releasing such information (e.g. the Pentagon papers).
"LinkedIn says 11, our server logs show 10, our actual reporting software's only showing 8 people. The only reason that we would not see them pop up in this logging tool is that they were on the site and bounced so quickly that the logging tool was unable to load and capture anything of their session [We've went back and forth will the session recording company multiple times to confirm that]"

Seems awareness of ad/trackblocking and disabling JavaScript is low in this space.

Still, he could absolutely be right some portion of them are misclicks.
Did you read the second paragraph of my post at all? I agree with you.
IE was also absurdly dominant back then. I appreciate the fact that we now live in a world where everything is integrated, so the costs of switching are higher, but it's not impossible
Great link! I have a cassette of HoS I recorded off public radio in the 1990s and still listen to (perhaps an alien signal for someone down the road who can still get ahold of the alien technology required to play it). Glad to know they still have a presence online... (the announcer on my cassette suggests you look up HoS on The Well or on Gopherspace -- more obsolete(?) alien technologies...).
I don't know anything about LinkedIn ads, but I watched some of the video that this post is based on: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jKuyxgWuiRM

It sounds like they are moaning that their client side rendered React-based landing page had a lot of bounces which they don't believe because client side rendered react pages are known to be "very very fast" and "some of the very fastest available technology". (This is around the 15:30 mark)

That's baloney, client side rendered JavaScript landing pages are much slower than server-side rendered.
I think (personal opinion, not a lawyer, biased, etc) that it is very much appropriate to consider the allegations before extradition; the US is pissed off at him and it's probable he won't be getting a fair treatment, or he may even "disappear" entirely.

Wouldn't be the first time, plenty of people branded "terrorist" have vanished off the face of the earth, or been incarcerated and tortured without fair trial in Guantanamo Bay.
Japanese names are written in kanji (Chinese logographic characters with semantic meaning), and pronunciation of kanji is a matter of context. Kanji in names have a variety of possible common pronunciations, meaning that when given the kanji alone the pronunciation can be ambiguous. The extra two fields are presumably for the kana (syllabary characters that are unambiguously pronounced) spelling of the names.

Even then, there are two accepted standards for sorting kana. Japanese is full of these kinds of fun exercises in writing system complexity.
> My system will never have to deal with names from China

I work in a small French town where Chinese people were quite rare until a few years ago. Their passports have a translation of their names in Latin alphabet, same for Russians.

However one day one of my user told me "hey I can't find some customers in your app, but I'm 100% sure I recorded them previously. Funnily they're all Chinese".

It turns out that to avoid querying the database too much I was starting to look for customers name once the user had entered at least 3 chars. Most of the Chinese names were only 2 chars like "Xi", "Wu" etc.

I clearly remember thinking at the time of writing the original code that nobody had only a 2 letter name :)
Show HN: An app for reading tech news (e.g. TechCrunch) and VC blogs (e.g. A16Z)
Hi everyone,

I would like to introduce "TechTea", an iOS app for reading tech news (e.g. TechCrunch) and VC blogs (e.g. A16z), with audio.

I like to keep myself updated about the latest news/discussion in tech and venture capital. Most of these good information sources either have terrible iOS apps or have no native apps at all. For venture capital blogs, there is also a discovery problem. TechTea is intended is to tackle these problems.

Besides, the app uses ML to generate audio for these articles so users can listen to them just like listening to a podcast.

App Store link: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/id1529509067
Landing Page: https://www.techtea.app/

Suggestions and feedback are more than welcome!
You mean like SemVer vs the default whose name I can't remember?
> Some, however have given "I didn't know" or "the situation changed" half-apologies since.

I hope some people will take this as their "Iraq" moment, where the mechanisms of consensus-building by propaganda are laid bare. This is how powerful interests work: they push people to take sides with selected (or no) information, and by the time the full picture emerges, it's too late.
https://www.theverge.com/2018/8/6/17655168/alex-jones-infowa...
That is actually a very valid argument/question: Is Assange (through WikiLeaks) “press”? I feel that he is, but the US is claiming he aided Manning in hacking; In that case, he (Assange) isn’t innocent (whether it’s true or not is a different question).
Turpan [1] has striking landscape with a very 'frontier' feel, and has a history to match. It's a pretty good location for filming such a movie.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turpan
Tesla Shares Fall as It Fails to Make It into S&P 500 Index
My blog is about field stories on product and engineering : https://amols.blog

I started recently. So just once a week, I publish. Writing happens whenever I find a topic worth organising or sharing

Netlify. It’s free. I use gatsby theme borrowed from Victor Zhou
LOL. Spin spin spin, and downvote dissenting opinions. You guys are transparent.
LinkedIn is the weirdest product ever. Everybody is there, nobody is using it for anything. Except shady recruiters.
I am guessing this is one of the situations where you might need to make that niche for yourself.

Take on contracts to do something that is traditionally done with hand -> write scripts to automate it -> take on more contracts.

At that point you would probably be paid for 20 people's worth for 20 people's work....but automating it will allow you to pocket all of it due to zero (low) costs.

Our startup tried doing this with automated 3D map creation for drone use surveying. It is incredibly easy to undercut traditional competition at a technical level. Convincing corporate to trust in your experiment tho, kinda hard. It is the classic: 'No one has been fired for hiring IBM' conundrum.
This is one of those ideas that is good in theory until you look at how it will actually be used, as well as the actual problems it solves and doesn’t solve.

For better or worse, Apple has been the defacto podcast directory for almost every podcasting app for over 15 years. In the aughts, a number of startups tried to take on that space (notably Odeo, which incubated and then pivoted into Twitter) and all of them failed. Apple has been largely an absentee steward, which has worked out well for podcasting. It wasn’t until Google decided to take podcasts seriously about five years ago and launched its own podcast directory. Spotify’s podcast directory started about five years ago too, though took longer to build momentum.

All three are largely copies of one another — although Spotify has exclusives in its directory that can only be played in its app — and most major podcasts choose to submit their RSS feed to those directories, with some also choosing to share with other services (Stitcher, Luminary, etc.) that can do some fucked up stuff with the audio. It’s all a game of reach for a podcast publisher, unless you choose you don’t want Luminary or Stitcher to insert their own ads into your content — or you have an exclusive with some service or another.

So now there is ostensibly yet another podcast directory, except it can’t offer a good value prop for existing except that it is “open” — which sounds good if you’re Alex Jones or you make content that has been kicked out of the other directories — but will realistically impact only a small number of podcasters.

The target audience, I assume is podcatching apps. Right now, most of them scrape the Apple or Google podcasts directory to save the insanity of trying to maintain their own directory.

So what value is there for this “open” directory to someone who has a podcatching app? Well, nothing unless there is a critical mass of podcasts submitted. Moreover, the service says it’s free, but is also asking for donations, which makes me worry about the viability of the index longterm. Given how difficult the market is for creating a third-party podcasting client when Google, Apple, and Spotify exist with their own apps and established indies (Overcast), I would strongly discourage anyone from building their own podcatcher as anything more than a hobby project.

So what’s the point? Podcasters will still have to submit to the major indexes anyway and podcatchers or client apps already have enough problems without having to worry about a little-used alternative that doesn’t have a business plan associated with it.

I’m all for open and I’m not mad this exists — but I certainly wouldn’t build my app off its API.
That is objectively a lot.
I can understand that Tesla can strip features when you sell the car back to Tesla, but are they doing it as part of private party transfers?
Australia Opens Antitrust Inquiry into Apple's App Store
I was going to say - it's a lot easier to not let them take your money (even retroactively) - then it is to get it back through small claims court.
No, not really in America. There are a few freeform music stations that still have actual DJs in the booth selecting records that they like, but mostly al the FM broadcast stations here are owned by 1 or 2 advertising companies who play preselected songs, have canned DJ banter, and a very low music-to-ad ratio.
Exploring the Internet: A Technical Travelogue (Carl Malamud, 1993)
What a baseless accusation. Did you even bother listening to the podcast linked in the article or consider that a centralized directory hosted by a major company might be cause for concern?
Last I checked he does a current podcast with an ADOS member discussing everything from reparations to current events...
Throwing this sort of stuff out there is irresponsible.
CPC estimation is not an exact science anywhere - most places are comparing it based on other ads with similar targeting to yours, they have no idea how much your ad content makes people want to click or not which is a big factor.
Yes, I don't know how reliable I find his theories, but they are interesting. I can't see who else would have done the poisonings if not Russia (and he is surprisingly pro-Russia) but he does raise other interesting questions, such as how the Head Nurse of the British Army seemed to be just in the right place to administer aid to the first two victims:

https://www.craigmurray.org.uk/archives/2019/03/pure-ten-poi...

His coverage of when "diplomat" Ann Sacoolas ran over and killed Harry Dunn has been interesting as well (I put diplomat in parentheses because he makes a case that she is not entitled to diplomatic immunity)

https://www.craigmurray.org.uk/?s=sacoolas

Like I say, I read his stuff and I can't believe he ever became a UK ambassador, and I'm not with him politically but there is always a place for people poking their noses into the actions of states.
Yes, indeed. It will be an interesting case for sure.
I don't really use LinkedIn that much, so this confuses me:

> And the membership fees for being invisible are ridiculously high now.

Do you mean simply having an account? Or are there now fees for, e.g. avoiding recruiters? I thought that the business model of LinkedIn had only companies/recruiters pay to reach (free) users.
"If they wanted to" being the key here; handing over Assange would give them a lot of goodwill and political credit, and with Brexit about to end badly when it comes to UK / Europe relationships, they're looking towards the US for trade deals.

They're already pretty far along in selling / privatizing the NHS [1] and getting rid of European food standards so they can import the US' bleached chicken and eggs [2], etc.

note: did not check if The Guardian is an unbiased source in this case. It's not owned by News Corp / Murdoch at least.

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/dec/11/nhs-us...
[2] https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2020/feb/25/why-chlorin...
Tech Firms Offer the Highest Average H-1B Salaries
Show HN: WebRender – Edge Deployed SSR as a Service
With your case where the government requires the title being the notable exception:

> In Austria some people are VERY insistent that you use the proper title.

So let those people put their titles in the freeform input if they care.
What even? Has there been an apology from dang for this? Is this sort of thing still happening?

I have a rule not to read forums which do shady stuff to the content.
Maybe it's time to adblock the HN homepage.
I'd really like to be able to disconnect my car from the internet.
You have the choice of not buying a car with that type of subscription features for quite some time yet, factoring in base models, non-premium brands, the used market and so on.

Like with a lot of features, this will be introduced on so-called premium brands first. Unless you insist on having one of those (which you would probably lease anyway), you can easily avoid dodgy subscription features.
I'm working with a startup that's using React for a site where SEO is really important, which means we need to do Server Side Rendering well.

We tried various traditional SSR solutions, but it always required front end engineers to set up and maintain servers. It was often quite slow in spinning up and generating responses, we'd lose flexibility in how we wrote our code, and it hampered our ability to ship features quickly. We'd need to deal with separate code paths for different user agents, and roll our own analytics to make sure we were sending the right thing to the right crawler. It was... non-trivial.

We tried some pre-rendering solutions, but they don't always come with built in caches, and if they do the first responses are always painfully slow. For a site that updates dynamically this is a deal breaker. In addition to that, users don't actually need to receive a server side rendered response most of the time. Only crawlers do. Making the experience slower for users.

So we decided to build something new. We combined really fast pre-rendering with a crawler and analytics service that pre caches the pages that search engines visit (with different user agents and devices), and shows you which user agents are utilizing your pages in different ways. It integrates easily with analytics services like honeycomb and can be deployed as an API on the edge (just send an API request on crawler requests), or you can CNAME a whole domain to it (we'll handle serving only to crawlers). It gave us the control we needed to not slow down our engineering teams, let frontend developers write frontend code without worrying about deploying servers, and give us the SEO insights and performance gains we needed to start utilizing React for a site where SEO is important. We also extended it for people who don't use react, as it'll work in front of any SPA.

It's finally polished up to the point where we can start letting people in off the street to kick the tires. Check out the demo on your own site and let us know what you think!
> Honestly couldn't believe how tacky it looked when I walked past the main Apple store in London

Such a nice store, super convenient location and fast service.
How could religion that died +-with him 400 years ago and nobody worships anymore could have any effect on tensions these days? People even today are often primitive when it comes to handling their emotions, generally easy to manipulate and so on. Those are more sources of issues
it's pretty easy to click on competitors ads with bots to run out competitors credit and then run your ads for the rest of the day for cheap prices. But the same happens with Google adwords. I guess they don't have any way to prevent it
> Sure, your service will go down if you get too much traffic, but that's a risk I'm happier with than a potentially unbounded AWS bill.

The last time an article on my site reached the top of HN, my AWS bill was a couple of dollars for the month, across S3, Cloudfront, Athena and SNS.

I get the concern that you'll spend more than you intended with AWS, but it's honestly hard to blow a budget on a static site hosted in S3 and served by Cloudfront. Those two services have heavy guard rails on what you can accidentally commit to doing, unlike the myriad compute services.
I think this is hat parent is talking about as my imagination was insufficient in imagining it.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KRarn9st2bg
This concept allowed Nickelback to make it into arenas and stadia. Their music is the dry toast of rock, no one loves it but it is the lowest common denominator for "rock".
Ask HN: What life changing thing have you bought for less than $100?
If we eventually get to more automated features that put more liability on the manufacturer, it's hard to imagine not having a system where the manufacturer owns the car and enforces a mandatory maintenance schedule. It's not even unreasonable if you assume the manufacturer is on the hook for an accident caused by an unpatched piece of software.
Part two: https://youtu.be/z85myMjRvrI
Well, it's not quite as straightforward as that.

It's being heard at Westminster Magistrate's Court because that is where all extradition cases from England and Wales are heard.

Criminal matters in the Magistrate's Court are heard before Justices of the Peace, and you are correct that most JPs are lay-people who have taken some basic legal training, and are assisted by a clerk who is legally trained at a professional level.

However, there are also District Judges that sit in the Magistrate's Court and are by virtue of their appointment also Justices of the Peace. These are judges employed by the Government to deal with specific types of more serious cases, e.g. terrorism, or specific subject matter like extradition.

I looked this up previously, but it's hard to find useful references due to the preponderance of Assange-related stories, but if I recall correctly: Vanessa Baraitser is a District Judge, and has something like 15+ years of professional experience as a solicitor before appointment.
Yes I didn't get a popup either time so I'm assuming that LinkedIn, in their infinite benevolence, automatically created an account for me.
No vaccine will work as if by magic, returning us to 'normal'
People who read it and are aware that screens aren't great for reading comprehension.
>massive fines

With GDPR that can be a maximum 4% of global turnover, so "massive" is a bit of an understatement.
No, having an account is free. But many features are behind a paywall now, like seeing who is visiting your profile.

It used to be it was only not shown if you were browsing privately youself, but recently it changed and you can only see the first two.

Also, as you say as a free user you can be reached by more people more easily and I hate that. Some of the high-level contacts I know are not findable at all by using the public search and I don't have this option.

Especially lately I get a lot of spam from SAP related businesses even though I don't work with ERP systems nor have I ever done so. It's super annoying. If it was even remotely related to my work it would be much less so.
I have the impression that the UK government genuinely (and incorrectly) believes itself to be in a position of strength, at least for now.

To the extent that it is now sycophantic towards the USA, it already was — the “special relationship” meme in UK
politics has been around for a long time.
Joe Rogan's interviews with Tim Pool have covered corporate censorship in detail. Adam Curry and his co-host John C. Dvorak have also covered in detail on their podcast, the No Agenda Show, how a lot of this "censorship" on the part of corporations is a reaction to advertisers to demand brand-safety for their advertisements (eg: I don't want my ads showing up next to alt-right, pro-Trump content!) which is why Reddit banned The Donald and YouTube de-monitises videos that get even a little preachy or political. It's a real pickle for the companies because they are caught between bowing to their advertisers (which shareholder interest demands) and being free to the spirit of free speech in which they all believe.

Separating the definitive index of podcasts from a corporate entity allows corporations to save face with their shareholders without removing discoverability for content creators who are considered not to be brand-safe.
Honestly, I majored in compsci. Between the required first and second semester calculus and two math electives I took, I was one class from a math minor. Knot theory looked interesting, had no prerequisites, and seemed like I could pass it.

It has had zero applicability to anything I’ve done since, except for coiling bandsaw blades and climbing rope.

I hope that wasn’t a terribly disappointing answer to your question.
From Wikipedia:

> Once initialized, both processes produce net energy. For typical inputs, the energy required to run a "fast" pyrolyzer is approximately 15% of the energy that it outputs. Modern pyrolysis plants can use the syngas created by the pyrolysis process and output 3–9 times the amount of energy required to run.

Wow, that's impressive. I had not heard about this before, and I'm impressed that this is a sustainable process that may produce durable carbon sequestration. Thanks for the tip!