skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Non-paywalled version: https://archive.is/GaWcS
The UK only requires you to have a TV licence if you watch BBC iPlayer, or watch any live TV / stream, even if that content is not produced by the BBC. Also, recording something live in order to watch it later requires a TV licence.

So, if you watch something live on Amazon Prime or YouTube, you need a TV licence. I don't know if the BBC define what 'live' actually means, there's always a delay.

I have a TV but don't have a TV licence. I don't own an aerial cable and it's been factory reset to detune all the channels (I used live in a house that had a TV licence). I use it with a Chromecast.

I have one of the 'threatening letters' next to me right now. They're all addressed to 'The Legal Occupier'. That's not my name. They can go **** themselves.

Live TV is awful.

https://www.tvlicensing.co.uk/faqs/FAQ95
It's astonishing this doesn't happen.
I once had a manager that thought he could negotiate estimates. That is like negotiating with the weatherman about the weather. Sure, maybe in the end you can convince them it will be finished sooner. But the fact is that it really doesn't change reality.
Sounds like somewhere for feature requests and discussions to die.

What's wrong with just tagging feature requests?
Isn't the volume so low on that and the latency requirements so undemanding that ML is overkill to get the answer as well as the accuracy issues with false positive for "not deadly" being somewhat asymmetric?

I still think of ML as having a niche of "mostly right is ok" and useful for very, very large volume otherwise one or more people does better for less. That may change in time. Self driving cars are very close now they say, but i suppose we've been hearing that for a few years without getting there.
Sometimes external contributors do not have the correct power to fix the issues they open; mainly that means the maintainer needs to take some decision (and possibly instruct the issue creator to make a PR). That is, the amount of effort the external person needs to spend time to fix it is "become the maintainer".
I don't know much about Perl but am aware of Tau Station, which was launched a few months ago. I recall reading somewhere that it includes a new Perl codebase with approaching a million lines of well written modern code.[0]

Raku is a different language, a very young one that has its adoption-for-serious-applications curve mostly ahead of it. Thus you get articles like the advent one from a few weeks ago that seriously documents a serious Raku application in a notably unserious way.[1] It's apparently only 7K or 13K lines of code, depending how you count, but well written Raku code is typically a fraction of the length of well written Perl code, so there is that.[2]

[0] https://taustation.space/blog/category/technology/
[1] https://raku-advent.blog/2020/12/20/day-20-a-raku-in-the-wil...
[2] https://p6steve.wordpress.com/2020/04/17/raku-vs-perl-save-7...
No because it should be per household or per person, not per device.
Exactly. This was the right path in this case. The value is for the consumer, if he could attract just 100K visitors per month, that's $500,000/year.

Not only that, he would have a highly targeted group of users that he could tailor all kinds of products and services to.
maybe so, but I don't think this particular program does anything like AI. glancing at the code, it looks like it just pastes the full text of a reddit comment into a video template, using a different template for each unique commenter in the thread. it no more "does what a human might otherwise do" than how a sorting algorithm might emulate how I sort my socks.
Not sure if it connected, but this internal monologue is another thing that I fail to understand. I think I do not have internal monologue, but this is especially hard to describe.

Perhaps there is some crossover between people who can't visualize and those who do not experience internal monologue.

Another aspect I've known for a long time is that I have bad "situational" memory. I have good trivia/history memory but very bad memory about personal situations or events. I am not sure about faces, I didn't really notice myself struggling with it but hard to really judge.
Software development which is a repeatable and already defined process is totally possible to predict and estimate. Most tasks of repeatable processes follow normal distribution and is predictable. Deviations from expected mean will be due to predictable factors of the environment such as failed disk or sleepy programmer. You can apply arbitrary six sigma methodology to measure such process with accuracy.

The problem in software though is that such a repeatable process would be immediately automated away by writing a function, library, framework or any such tools that programmers use on a daily basis without much thinking. Unlike in building construction, to which programming discipline is often wrongly likened to, where construction companies simply cannot "write a function" to deploy cookie cutter houses or bridges one after another.

Therefore software engineering is never a repeatable process, unless crappy tools are used, which don't allow for sufficient abstraction of repeatable parts.

Tasks in software disciplines therefore don't follow a normal distribution. They follow exponential distribution most often. Most issues go unnoticed. Majority are just so tiny and ofthen considered business as usual. Every time you get stuck and have to look up a solution in docs or stackoverflow technically is an issue, but never gets reported in an issue tracker for its triviality. There are however issues which are orders of magnitude larger than what management expects when they occassionally sampling issue trackers. Some issues lead to critical design flaws which could need a full blown rewrite for example, or ever lasting and expensive hackery in case the executive decision is to work around the critical design flaw. These issues can take years to accomplish or take massive amount of pain endurance.

Trying to estimate a process with such exponential distribution and making sense of averages or other statistics of such distribution is borderline insanity.

Why not just go to physics department and ask when the next Theory of Relativity will be invented and how much budget and story points those guys need.
Why does every person who pulls out a dictionary use a definition that looks like it came from a century old dictionary? Words change meaning over time. There were computers a century ago.

By the definition you gave, no one can be a chemical, industrial, or electronic engineer. Silly!
With Netflix, Amazon Prime, Disney+, YouTube, etc. the BBC have a hard time justifying the license these days. The only exception would be live sporting events, which is something I don't watch. Given I only watch about 1 hour of "TV" a day I was very glad to stop my license last year. It will not be missed.
In the meantime: https://tosdr.org/
The B.1.1.7 Coronavirus Variant
More specific questions can be readily answered - is software engineering as demanding of perfect execution as other engineering disciplines? are software engineering projects completed on time more/less relative to other disciplines? does software engineering require formal certification to practice? does it have a component of skill in that people who put in more time or have more aptitude do better than others? is it more critical or less critical to

But the "are we really engineers" question, like many others about definitions is destined to go in circles IMHO. Most important quote from the post:

> It’s a standard Wittgenstein game problem: human constructs do not neatly fall into precise definitions.

The actual debate seems to be around social status.. are software engineers as high up the social status ladder as "real" engineers? I don't know/care. Play stupid games, win stupid prizes :D If software engineering stays a sufficiently selective, high-paying, important field for long enough, it will gain the prestige to be considered "real" engineering. Otherwise it will not.

I think it will become both - more bifurcation. The top salaries & status will be reserved for 1/10th of the engineers. A lot of the bottom will become lower paid and more automated, closer to technical support.
Turning the product described in the article into an enterprise product sounds like nonsense to me. The product should arrive to the user that benefits the most. Isn't that people in general?
He quotes Strategic Marketing Management, which is a great book if a bit academic. Another great quote I always remember from that book:

"Marketing is not about selling a product, but about figuring out what product to sell"
If you want to see an index of meta studies, you can check out the Cochrane Collaboration: https://www.cochranelibrary.com/

It’s mentioned in the book Bad Pharma which has a pretty good breakdown of how drug marketing to consumers and medical professionals distorts decision making.
Maybe that's one reason some TV manufactures have started removing OTA tuners. My Visio is not actually labeled as a Television, I believe it's a home theater display, because it has no TV tuner.
I haven't seen a marked TV detector van for for over 25 years. I'd kind of assumed that digitisation of the TV licence records some time before that, as as well as migration away from CRTs, meant that sending reminders/demands was simply more effective.

And I'm really not sure I believe that they correlate room light fluctuations with broadcast programming, or even that this is technically/economically feasible. Sounds more like disinformation to me.
Another interesting uninhabited zone is in Idaho. Summarized by Wikipedia:

The Zone of Death is the name given to the 50 sq mi (129.50 km2) Idaho section of Yellowstone National Park in which, as a result of a purported loophole in the Constitution of the United States, a criminal could theoretically get away with any crime, up to and including murder.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zone_of_Death_(Yellowstone)
Already exists, I heard about it on NPR the other day (perhaps the idea got implanted into your subconscious) https://mushroomai.ml/#mushroomai
You are spot on. We are so self-centered that we think an AI superintelligence will be something like a superintelligent-human-mind/person inside a computer, when most likely, it will be nothing like a human and probably completely unrecognizable to us.

In fact, I'd argue it's already here and already taken over.

Most of us are now enslaved by screens and the Internet, we are addicted to them, even if we don't want to admit it. Some might say these things are run by humans, but are humans really in charge? Can any single person turn off the internet or prevent everyone else from using their phones/screens for hours every day? Is even a group of people capable of doing it? And even if they could, would they?

Maybe if humans went extinct, the Internet and screens would disappear, but that just means there's a symbiotic relationship, not that we are by any means in control.
I like gists and I have used them for years for my (non-medium) blog. I usually break down whatever I am explaining piece by piece and then include a link to a gist with the complete code for the reader.
Note that this was created manually, it's not an example of the bot's output. I was really impressed before I realized that :P
Geniune question: what is on the BBC that you would want to watch that you can't get elsewhere?
“Doppelganger has created value for the customer but not for the company.”

Tell that to “Celebs”, which’s sole app function is the described and makes ~$200K MRR.
Are there any models/research optimised on working on this kind of small, distributed batches that would fit ie. ~10GB of commodity GPU?
We can't answer questions we don't see, and the only reliable way to get a message to us is hn@ycombinator.com. This is in the site guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html. I only saw this one randomly.

Pilfer got it right. I've turned the penalty off now.
Thanks for the really thorough explanation!
Types of innovation: knowing where to pinpoint your efforts
> Grid-locked by what? The purpose of voting in a democracy is to remove gridlocks.

Well I suppose in a "pure" democracy where voting decides everything there is no gridlock, but those types of systems usually suck because there are no checks or balances, and whoever buys up the most votes wins. Most western nations are not governed by pure democracies. USA is a federal republic with 3 systems of government that check and balance each other and they get gridlocked all the time.

> And if they really cared, they could trivially have you killed, with nothing happening

I wouldn't say "with nothing happening". Something would definitely happen. If you're OJ Simson and the prosecution botches your case, then sure "nothing happened" (besides the millions you spent on lawyers and bad PR). But even OJ wasn't untouchable - he spent around a decade in prison later for other felonies. What about Jeffery Epstein? Harvey Weinstein? Yeah, their money buffered them for decades, but justice eventually caught them in its jaws.
There were couple demo sats launched a few months ago. One with the tether, one without. https://www.dragracersat.com/
I believe the comparisons between how engineering is practiced make this more than "silly". The purpose of the writing is not to answer that shallow question, but to better understand both fields.
I am betting that Starlink will have an impact on where people live. We have tons of beautiful empty land in this country but, modern life requires broadband and that's not well distributed yet.
Unfortunately this is common across many countries. I'm an expat in UK and would love to get (paid) access to content from my home country (in UE) but it's simply not possible.

Seems like state TV still has a long way to go.
MechE here so my thoughts can be biased. It’s high because of two reasons. One the pay is typically much better (upward of 20%-100% (yes 100) better) and secondly the “crossover” barrier is much lower compared to other engineer mobility. For instance I would argue, a MechE becoming a SWE is easier than a SWE to become a MechE since companies are opened to SWE not having a specific degree in it.
And to continue your metaphor, most software estimation comes from someone describing a car they like, and based on your mock ups you and others decide on a price, how long is acceptable to build, etc.

So then you goto build the car and everything's going great till you find out that the latest research shows the specific design of engine you're using doesn't work with the eco friendly fuel that is now being mandated by the government. And suddenly killing cows is uncool so you have to change all your chairs to fabric or source fake leather, but half of your company thinks that endorsing fake leather is hide-appropriation and you're now spending a third of your time in HR going through training.

And eventually you get about a week out from delivering the car and the customer calls your PM and says they want the car to have a top speed 30mph over the original specs while maintaining the fuel efficiency rating. And the doors should swing up, instead of out. Like billionaires'.
They think they'll make more money by selling exclusive geographic rights to each show to some local TV station or streaming site in each country.

It makes a bit of sense - a local outfit probably has far more marketing reach, a bigger local audience, can schedule release at the optimal moment not during some local sport match, and can tailor the content locally (translations, censorship).
I'm curious why this pretty comprehensive data collection has not been updated further since May 2020. Does anybody know?
Running AWS Lambda functions with Julia [video]
It's actually a very good sales question, I don't find it demeaning at all.

If you're on a sales call selling a product that increases user retention and someone says "no we don't need that", you would often reply with "So you have perfect user retention then?" to probe them and re-open the conversation.

It could come off as standoffish but when used correctly it's very effective because it gets the person on the other end to open up more and you try to get to the bottom of their objections.
A reason to have a band or orchestra versus recordings played over speakers is that there is a noticeable difference (though this also depends on the space being used) in sound. A recording is not the same as a live performance (whether by humans or robots).
Yeah, this reminded me of the dutch broadcastings association 1969's april fools joke. In which they said to have developed a device that detects "zwartkijkers" (blackwatchers), for use by mailmen [1].

Funny detail, the reporter asked "Can this devise detect all televisions?" to which the fake interviewee answered, "well if you wrap your set in aluminum foil no, but otherwise yes". The next day aluminum foil was sold out nation-wide.

[1] https://www.facebook.com/AndereTijden/videos/1-aprilgrap-jou...
> 3. Every strategy can be viewed as a sort of 'arbitrage'.

No, it can’t. This is a bastardization resulting from the proliferation of “stat arb” to mean mispricing and is truly a misnomer.
Weird, that's the first time I've ever seen it spelled with 2 L's. But it does make more sense than one L.
Your criticism about cherry-picking is relevant if you are trying to distill the secret ingredients of longevity. However, I'm saying just forget about all that. Pick a healthful region of your choosing with proven long-term success, and emulate it as possible/reasonable. The end.
> I hope the Discussions feature becomes generally available soon.

Discussions can already be enabled on any public repository in the repository Settings ("Options" tab, "Features" section, check the "Discussions" checkbox)
BBC has awesome content in areas such as nature, science, history. For example go check out BBC Earth or BBC knowledge series.
Ask HN: Anyway to run pip install directly in a AWS Lambda environment
Basically I need to install a bunch of python packages for my lambda to work. I know you should pack it locally and then upload it, but I was hopping to skip this step
Arguably, the United States, both at home [0] and abroad (e.g., Yemen, where the US has been an active supporter of Saudi policy) as part of it's war with any entity seen as insufficiently hostile to Iran.) Of course, defenders will minimize, excuse, and rationalize each of the acts charged to be part of each of those genocides (and, in the latter case, claim that the US isn't responsible for the actions it actively supports but mostly doesn't carry out directly). But then, that's what people carrying out genocides tend to do (certainly, it's what China does with regard to the Uighur genocide), especially in the post-Nuremberg world, where there is a concrete international rejection of overt genocide.

[0] https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/nov/15/black-...
Indeed. If 40-something me could go back in time and tell 20-something me what I’d learned in my career so far, one of the first lessons would be that simplicity scales and endures like almost nothing else and is probably the most underrated virtue in software development. (Composability would be #2.)

That is not to say that complexity is never necessary. Sometimes we are trying to solve inherently complex problems. But there is a disturbing amount of accidental complexity in modern web development. To make things worse, because web development is such a huge part of the software industry now and how so many people have come into that industry, a whole generation of developers is growing up believing that the accidental complexity is necessary or even desirable.
I'm getting the impression from this article that China is the new boogey man.
Same in Germany, or at least it used to be that way and somewhat recently they just got rid of the requirement to have a TV.

It's just yet another tax. Moving to Germany feels a bit like they pretend to keep "tax rates" low by splitting out various things and making it "not a tax". In the Netherlands I had income tax and that was it, from that the govt just pays development aid and old age money (AOW) as needed. Here, you have church tax (if your parents signed you up for that party), new states support, broadcast fee, pension contribution, and probably more I'm forgetting.
Is it hard living on the wrong side of Popper's paradox?
All the more reason we need some laws defining your data as your property, not the company that collects it. We need strong consumer protection of data.
The Czech is called RSJ, the israeli is called Final. I can’t find the british ones now. Here’s a list for you if you want more names: https://www.planetcompliance.com/2017/03/26/introduction-hft...
But they have huge open spaces with really high ceilings in many cases.. There's lots of air for it to dissipate in. And they're made to handle so many passengers, only a fraction of whom are there now. When I flew around in summer you could hear a pin drop :)

I feel a lot less safe from covid in the metro or bus here even though it's not as busy as it was before, than in an airport, plane or office. Even a taxi.

Still, I'm not going to live in one though :) My house is even better.
You can argue for wearing a bulletproof vest at home if you're an iraqi nuclear scientist. But for most people it doesn't make sense and does more harm than good.

In the same way, HTTPs only, *requiring* a system that "fails open", is bad for the general population. HTTP+HTTPS, yes, definitely. HTTPS only, no, only for sites and contexts where the rigid security is justified.
Honestly, I think I could find meaningful work I love in 6 months or so, faster if I just decided to start my own company again.

I think the key there is I already know what is meaningful to me and what brings me joy overall -- although that took me far longer then I'd like to admit. If you are searching for that still, which is totally reasonable, then I'd say it could take you a year or two if you do some passive activities that bring you opportunities. My suggestion if you are struggling finding something that is meaningful you need to travel and you need to try a bunch of different things to see what matters to you, interact with many different people in areas that you wouldn't normally you'll be surprised what they can teach you. Attempt things you think would bring you meaning, you may find they don't.
Internal estimates are a political tool, not a technical, financial or scientific one: First, decide if you want to do it or not. Then do the estimate, high if you don't want to do it, low if you do want to do it.

Any kind of reality doesn't factor into it.

In the Word example, somebody really thought this project was worthwhile for some reason, so they gave a very low estimate to get things started. As soon as money has been spent on a project, it isn't likely to be cancelled as easily, so you are safe to continue even if you exceed your original estimate. In the worst case, you need a few excuses.

External estimates, i.e. estimates you use for writing up a contract with an external customer, are different. Those actually do matter, depending on the wording of the contract. But a smart contractor will try to get the contract into a shape such that the above for the internal estimate does apply.
In the UK, the fee is £157.50 a year, €160 in Ireland. Any workaround to try and tie it to the point of sale would make buying a TV cost a fortune.
Antiques Roadshow, Gardeners’ World, University Challenge, Mastermind… yes I’m a British grandpa at heart. I would pay for iPlayer to watch these.
The New Mexico / Colorado border is also somewhat visible.
Folks attempting to adopt older kids have a higher 'return' rate than when adopting babies. E.g. If an older kid decides to physically fight you for control, many parents will quickly run out of options, emotional reserves etc. It is undesirable to rush through an adoption in that case, years are warranted. (first hand experience w/ multiple foster/adopted teenagers + failed adoptions).