skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> I think consumers would prefer subscriptions if they understood how it aligned incentives.

Funny how consumers tend to despise them though.

The term "subscription" itself a typically a euphemism for "rental". There are a small number of companies who offer a year of updates that you get to keep forever (which makes consumers play the game of when exactly to buy to maximize the new features in that year), but most so-called subscriptions disable the software entirely if you stop paying. In other words, rental.

Long-term rental is almost always a bad deal for consumers. One of the few exceptions is housing, because many consumers can't afford to buy a house, and also houses are one of the least liquid assets you can own, if you have to move it (and yourself). Otherwise, rental is going to cost you a lot more in the long run.

Financially, rental can work well for the seller, of course, but we end up with "subscription fatigue", where the market can't sustain as many sellers, and the few rich companies get richer (which is exactly why they were "pioneered" by BigCos such as Adobe, Microsoft, and Apple).
Layout is actually difficult and offers a great many interesting problems when you try to parallelize it or efficiently use GPU acceleration. There are a lot of constraints and text is difficult to size and render.
Usually because it costs more to do so. Many times the local governments are corrupt, and U.S. money gets funneled to terrorist organizations or just pocketed, never actually helping the populace have better lives..
Thank you, that was a very inspiring response.

I completely agree with you about the unrealized potential, but my greatest regret over the past 50 years is not about the technology, but our ability to harness it. I remember helping to setup a computer show at our local high school when I was still very young. The local vendors had agreed to donate an Apple //+ to the school in return for having space to show off all of their wares. We were thrilled and I can vividly remember my father saying that my generation would be the last one to learn programming as an add-on elective skill. He imagined a world where everyone could harness the power of digital technologies and that programming, building, tinkering, would be second nature to all of us.

We spend our time thinking about UI glitter because we gave up on that dream of having every student learn to program. We took the exercises out of math and science books where we asked students to write programs to use the Pythagorean theorem or convert Celsius to Fahrenheit. It became "enough" to learn how to enter a few numbers in a spreadsheet and perhaps add a trend line.

A few hard working people in a garage can still turn out wonderful things, but if we really want to see the promise of technology then we need to fix the bigger problem of building an educational system that empowers many more people.
That fits into my definition of "significantly". It may not be a total game-changer, but if up to 15% isn't significant, where do we draw that line?
Technically the US has already, over two subsequent administrations intentionally and with a handful of discrete attacks, gone after and killed a father, his US citizen son (a minor), and US citizen daughter (a minor) in a series of targeted missile and commando strikes. It was done outside US soil but it was at least one targeted killings of US citizen kid. The daughter may have been accidental since her assassination was a commando raid and not two seperate drone strikes like they used to get the son.

1. https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2012/10/how-tea...

2. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/feb/01/yemen-strike-e...
The board is made up of about 25 experts, among them Shoshana Zuboff, author of "The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power"; Maria Ressa, a co-founder of the Filipino independent news site Rappler; Rashad Robinson, president of the civil rights nonprofit Color of Change; Derrick Johnson, president of the NAACP; Reed Galen, a co-founder of the conservative anti-Trump super PAC The Lincoln Project; Ruha Benjamin, an associate professor of African American studies at Princeton University; Marietje Schaake, a Dutch politician who is international policy director at Stanford University's Cyber Policy Center; Toomas Hendrik Ilves, the former president of Estonia; Safiya Noble, an associate professor of information studies and African American studies at UCLA; Damian Collins, a member of the British Parliament; tech investor Roger McNamee, a frequent Facebook critic; and ex-CIA officer Yael Eisenstat, former head of election integrity operations for political ads at Facebook.
This kind of case puts the lie to "premature optimization is the root of all evil".
How far do you take that line of thinking? Should the US have entered the second world war in Europe?
Firstly there's the vengeance aspect. Al Qaeda did 9/11, along with many other terror attacks against the US.

Hurras al-din has also given support to ISIS, who destabilized a good chunk of the middle east. It's a bad look since a lot of Americans died to effect regime change in Iraq. If Iraq ends up turning into a full-blown theocracy, it makes our efforts there seem even more wasteful.

According to the Russians, he was trying to gather supplies to make illegal chemical weapons but definitely take that with a grain of salt.

Supposedly this helps US goals in Syria, but TBH I'm not really sure what the US goals are. I suspect that both our current and previous president would have a hard time articulating goals that are consistent with their actions in Syria
Capitalism doesn't promote that kind of change. See, e.g, China...
No, both start at 0. Also, [0, infinity] and [0, infinity+1] are the same thing.
They'd have to overcome both very short lifespans and adversarial behavior.
Go ahead, build a hospital in Assad's backyard, no biggie.

Or just build a hospital somewhere and watch as it gets captured/used by the regional dictator.

Yes, wars are bad. Yes, if it were that easy to export peace and prosperity we wouldn't be talking about it, but the reality is that there are power structures that consider their selfish short term goals more important than the lives of many-many of their fellow humans. (Eg. Putin, Xi, Assad, etc.)
I have actually the opposite reaction. It is easy to be cynical and say "everything sucks". But if you look around, you'll actually see that many things work and do so surprisingly well. You can literally rent 1000 computers for an hour for a few bucks. It works! It's amazing. You can use a little device you carry around as a phone, for email, to look up information on machines running anywhere! There is a lot to marvel at. Sure, things could be better - so work on them and make them so. But don't pretend everything is terrible. It's not!
hi HN!

I've been working in the browser audio domain recently and noticed to my surprise that WebAudio has no way to decode audio files efficiently. WebAudio has no support for partial decoding and can only decode entire audio files upfront which results in huge CPU and memory usage.

For example, decoding a typical stereo 44.1 KHz 1-hour long audio file (e.g a podcast) into uncompressed floating point
samples would consume (3600s * 44100Hz * 4 bytes * 2 channels) = ~1.27 GB of memory. Nice

Obviously this isn't acceptable so I ended up creating this library to work around this issue. I ported FFmpeg over to WASM using Emscripten (a painful process) and then implemented an audio decoder with support for partial decoding. I hope this library can help anyone else with the same issue or at least serve as an additional reference for those looking to roll their own WASM-based workarounds.

Thanks for taking a look!

P.S: extra info/ranting about WebAudio below for those interested

Others have already pointed out this glaring issue in the WebAudio API:
https://github.com/WebAudio/web-audio-api/issues/1305

But it's sad to see that so many libraries/applications out there still rely on it such as:
https://github.com/bbc/waveform-data.js
https://github.com/katspaugh/wavesurfer.js

Thankfully this issue should hopefully be addressed whenever WebCodecs is standardized and implemented:
https://github.com/WICG/web-codecs/issues/28

But until then it's quite disappointing that developers have to go as far as rolling their own WASM-based solution just to work around the WebAudio API. I've heard unpleasant things about WebAudio and came in with zero expectations and yet was still disappointed. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Can take compressed monochrome pictures, or low FPS video. 80 kilobytes a second plus tailor-made compression, plus 1 channel instead of 3 like RGB, can do a lot, actually.
About the app itself, I would love for it to be available also as a widget so that I can see the next few upcoming tasks in the pull-down menu.

To be most useful the widget should allow you to select what to show. E.g. can choose just next upcoming thing, or next n number of things or whole day etc
I believe that the 2.25x estimate comes from a time where a mortgage rate of 4% would not be considered shitty but rather impossibly low. Lower interest rates have increased the home value that people can afford for the same monthly payment, and thus has been also a factor in driving up home prices.
Paul Offit had some ideas about this in a recent interview: https://www.medscape.com/viewarticle/936937

> [Eric Topol]: Moreover, there are a lot of things that we still don't understand. Like, for example, "long COVID." What is your sense about long COVID?

> Offit: You're referring to people reporting long-lasting symptoms, such as depression, joint pain, low-grade fever?

> Topol: Right. Joint pain, brain fog, chest discomfort, difficulty breathing, very poor exercise tolerance, some that has been continuing since acute infections in March. For some people, it is still going on and very disabling. But it seems to affect an unknown percent of people.

> Offit: I think it's probably a reflection of a couple of things. In part it is probably because of the vasculitis which is causing damage in a variety of organs, and that can be chronic. Scarring of the lung can be somewhat disabling. I think we'll learn about that over time.

> Then there may be an ICU psychosis associated with this; for patients who are in the ICU for a long time, when they come out of it, there's a sort of brain fog, or depression, which may be part of this. So I think there may be overlapping things going on.

> I think it's real. I don't think it's just something people are making up. I think this is a real problem. We'll learn about it as we gather more information on this virus.

(Offit's expertise is of course in vaccines and not management of COVID-19 - this was just an aside in an interview that was mostly about the timeline and success criteria for SARS-CoV-2 vaccines.)
TSMC 2nm MBCFET process node in 2024
My first lesson in "capacitors store electricity" when I was a kid was when I took the battery out of a disposable camera... and then managed to shock myself with the flash discharge anyways.
In a follow up tweet, he mentions a post mortem is coming. Where would that get posted?
you say this, but given a choice between a "finished" product and a competitor with more bugs and more wanted/needed features, users will almost always pick the latter unless it catastrophically affects their workflow. engineers care about quality; customers care about the fastest way of solving their problem.
Proportional? You think a proportionate response would be a bigger deterrent?
I go one step further and simply ignore any n=1 report about matters like these that I read through internet. The insight that "false news travels faster than true stories" applies more broadly and sometimes more subtly: extraordinary but statistically insignificant truths travel faster than statistically significant truths.
What’s everyone’s hot take on allowing eero routers within your network?
In general its tough to learn from videos, BUT its really enlightening to see demos of people's workflows, how often they test, how long it takes to compile run. Demos where people have problems, make mistakes, can't figure out why obvious things are going wrong, skippping a bunch of unit testing, hard code credentials etc. Hearing other people gave up on XYZ is reaffirming.
Very long thread about How Darpa Works that was on HN a couple months ago, for those interested - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23670246
A lot of these schools are using foreign students to subsidize their operations. Government funding to state universities has been falling, so if they can get thousands of foreign students to pay $50k/year that can help minimize tuition increases or spending cuts which impact the state's citizens.
It seems like dismissing their symptoms without specifically identifying why they feel the way they do is as much as a mistake as insisting that there is a specific disease when the tests say otherwise. There must be a more scientific study of large scale public health - what field is that, Epidemiology? Is there also some form of medical Anthropology?

On a population scale, one rarely has "adequate control groups" it would seem to me. What is the process of going from anecdotes to identifying a distinct population with problem to work on in epidemiology? We can't just shrug and say, it must be mistaken because there's no control group.
People fail to notice that many who are killed are innocent, and this actually creates more people willing to fight back.

It's a vicious cycle, and the murdering of innocent people only makes it worse.
The biggest reason why they do not control the territory is the US and Turkey military presence in the region (with some active interventions from time to time), effectively it's a military occupation, but with extra steps.

After Trump declared that US troops will be withdrawn and they will not defend Kurds against Turkish forces, the government has easily reclaimed control over the large area with a very limited fighting.
Amazon Employee Warns Internal Groups Being Monitored for Labor Organizing
The particular missiles discussed in the article are killing high-value leaders, etc. So not so much about stopping radicalization as wearing an existing organization.

But yeah, I’m sympathetic to your overall point, for sure.
You can pour in millions into an economy, but they will only make a difference if there is peace (not even the rule of law yet). To achieve peace, you first have to win the war — if you care about peace on your terms. In a war you unfortunately have to fight — it's quite unpleasant and bloody, but else your foes will kill you and those who you are trying to protect.
I only leaned this a few days ago in another HN thread, but no, the USA has not declared war since 1942: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24567355
At least Linux and Windows shortcuts are easier to remember as they start with basically words, not a combination of weird symbols you never learn cause you never look at them (cause who looks at the keyboard when they type).
Any possibility of porting this to Android? I love the execution of the app. Clean. Works for me too.
tl;dr this is a gruesome but targeted missile that doesn't explode and thus reducing collateral damage.

Overall a good thing.

Overall wars are terrible and so are "police actions" that we often do.

So my opinion is still that we need to figure out how to combat misinformation, propaganda, and radicalism rather than figuring out better/more efficient ways to kill each other. But that requires going after both social media companies, and stabilizing governments by providing spreading of wealth in poor countries, and relief to natural disasters.
1 person committing arson and 10,000 other people protesting peacefully nearby is entirely possible.

That's of course an over-simplification of the dynamics at play in many US cities this summer, but it's not reasonable to attribute responsibility for the actions of a few to large groups that just happen to be nearby.
What are some things non-programmers say that frustrate programmers?
Covid-19 mutation may be evolving to bypass mask-wearing, hand-washing
And likewise, it probably does not value a gold medal.

gold/silver/bronze in the rat world is probably more like: peanut butter/cheese/grain
Ask HN: What Are the Laws of Software?
I was reading the article "A Few Rules" that was posted yesterday and Housel brings up the idea that most fields only have a few laws. This idea in the context of another recently posted article titled "People expect technology to suck because it actually sucks" have me wondering whether some core laws might be beneficial to software engineering. Sorry if the question is naive. I am only an undergraduate and I study more math than cs.
So if A says something incorrect, B can't set the record straight because that's unfortunate and shuts down any respectful discussion?

I'm thinking that reactions to this maintainer's answers probably align to which side of the discussion one often find themselves.
> I'd like to hear from the other side of this - I'd like to hear the stories of the people who pushed the redesign away from the systems.

I'm certainly not one of those people, but they'll tell you things like how they standardized the new acquisition onto "best practices" and eliminated the "cowboy deployment" culture that was previously running rampant. I was part of an acquired Erlang team that went through this, although I mostly didn't deploy into the acquirer's systems, I managed the legacy systems, until they were mostly retired, then I retired.

They won't tell you that deploy times grew massively, requiring a larger team to manage (and that increasing the team size requires increasing the team size, because of increased time spent in coordination).

They won't tell you that because they've built their system to handle unreliable environments, they've neglected to make their environments reliable, and the system redundancy factor had to be increased to 3x instead of 2x because the churn rate on systems is too high to expect at least one out of two systems in a pair to be running. Of course, increasing the number of systems, increases deployment complexity, too.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dKsDjpKr2Mk

The world is grey, Jack. - Clear and Present Danger

Was WWII a more acceptable war because one side was clearly more morally reprehensible? Even then, it seems to often be a difference in degree, not in kind. Please do not take this as an excuse or lessening of severity for any group.
Bringing the Mona Lisa Effect to Life with Tensorflow.js
fwiw: my household’s being hyper-vigilant regarding covid, rarely doing anything beyond social distancing. i'm looking for a study that validates the conventional wisdom about masking so that we know we aren’t contributing to the spread. at no point am i suggesting any behavior that isn’t backed by scientific data.
That'd be great if Apple hadn't been sabotaging the web on iOS for years.
Yep, just work on all those advanced JVM garbage collectors with various performance characteristics and trade offs is unmatched elsewhere in the industry.
>This is not usual.

I agree. Due to specialized compute taking over mining and economies of scale most cryptocurrencies don't do what they say and are manipulated by their big pools (like this) consistently.
All of the features that you point out do make it quite clean and easy to load.

I visited on a desktop and in that visitor mode the reader sees a wide bar of rock on each side of a compressed text field amounting to ~60% of the screen width. The story is told in the remaining ~40% of the screen between the two grey bars on the rock border. Inside that ~40%, the actual text field uses ~2/3 of the width to tell the story and deliver the photos, etc.

Only ~25% of the screen width is used to tell the story and as a result the user spends a lot of time scrolling through the story unnecessarily. Making effective use of screen real estate wasn't one of the things the site is optimized for.

All that noted, it is still quite worth reading the story. The author has included a long bibliography of sources at the end and the story, though repetitious in spots, ends up being believable as he has related it.
The driver is liable. You wouldn't use cruise control on city streets with pedestrians around. You shouldn't use the self-driving features either.

If we're really talking about automated driving where humans are only passengers, that's an entirely different kettle of fish.
We had it in the 80s using a BBC Micro tuned into the Ceefax broadcast. Here's some more information about the expansion unit: https://www.wikiwand.com/en/BBC_Micro_expansion_unit#/Telete...

Here's a video showing it: https://youtu.be/ctxZWEVJ1S0?t=147

This is a great nostalgia trip!
Unfortunately what is the alternative? Does every social network or forum after X users need to consider getting a disinformation center?

The only other way to scale this is to make it illegal to spread disinformation, this way citizens can potentially police one another by suing one another.

It happens in France for specific things, for example if you deny that the holocaust existed.
Thank you. That's much more informative than the Wikimedia Foundation's own version of events. The textual account is incomplete, as there were statements by Iran, Russia, Canada, and Pakistan, and it was China that had the closing remarks, not the United States. It's also not quite an accurate transcript.

So:

It turns out that China looked up the Wikimedia Foundation on Wikipedia.

It compared what Wikipedia said with what was in the Wikimedia Foundation's application documents.

The Wikimedia Foundation put 124 user groups, 39 geographic chapters and 2 thematic organizations on its application form.

The Chinese delegation to WIPO, deciding to trust Wikipedia in this instance, found that Wikipedia stated that the Wikimedia Foundation had 47 user groups, 41 chapters, and 1 thematic organization.

* https://zh.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=维基媒体基金会&oldid=617...

So the first prong of the objection was a formal way of saying "Did this organization lie on its application form?".

The second prong was a vague complaint against unspecified content violating the One China Policy on "the affiliated Web site of the Foundation". This could be the Foundation wiki; Wikimedia Taiwan's own WWW site (http://wikimedia.tw/); the Chinese-language Wikipedia; the English-language Wikipedia; Meta; or even something else entirely. China didn't actually say.

There's some clever chess here. For starters, the Wikimedia Foundation now has to officially state for the record that the Chinese Wikipedia does not provide up-to-date accurate information.
I assumed this was a common feature, but I just use Google Assistant to do this. "Remind me to change my filters every 6 months at 10 AM."

I think my longest term reminder is for renewing my secondary citizenship passport (~10 years I think), though I do have this backed up with a Google Calendar event just in case.
Assange literally said he's shilling for the red team

“We believe it would be much better for GOP to win,” he typed into a private Twitter direct message group to an assortment of WikiLeaks’ Twittard humunculus retard supporters and probably a few millions bots because most of social media is bots
Chrome uses Skia which - on Windows - uses DirectWrite which is basically native however...

DirectWrite has a whole bunch of flags that configure sub-pixel and anti-aliasing as well as natural widths etc. So it might not look the same. To make matters worse it changes what settings it uses depending on the size of the type IIRC and even had a few font-specific tweaks there as well.

Windows apps in general might not look the same depending on whether they are using GDI, GDI+, DirectWrite (all considered native) and any combination of those flags... and of course it depends on whether the user has ClearType turned on and if they have used the Tuner to calibrate the rendering further for their preference...