skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I agree with you 100%! This is where I am wondering:

> If they use any generative model in their codec, they had to train it first, offline, on some dataset.

One thing I'm wondering if they have a model that can be "retrained" on the fly.

Let's assume for this discussion that you've got a model with 1024 weights in it. You train it on spoken text, all languages, just throw anything at it that is speech. That gets a you a generalized model that isn't specialized for any particular kind of speech and the results will be predictably mixed when you generate random speech from it. But if you take it, and ran a "mini" training system on just the sample of interest, so you have this general model, you digitize the speech, you run it through your trainer, now the generalized model is better at generating exactly this kind of speech agreed? So now you take the weights and generate a set of changes from the previous "generic" set, you bundle those changes in the header of the data you are sending and label them appropriately. Now you send only the data bits from the training set that were needed to activate those parts of the model that are updated. Your data product becomes (<model deltas>, <sound deltas>).

What I'm wondering is this, if every digitization is used to train the model, and you can send the model deltas in a way that the receiver can incorporate those changes in a predictable way to its local model. Can you then send just the essential features of the digitized sound and get it to re-generate by the model on the other end (which has incorporated the model deltas you sent).

Here is an analogy for how I'm thinking about this, and it can be completely wrong, just speculating. If you wanted to "transport" a human with the least number of bits you could simply take their DNA and their mental state and transmit THAT to a cloning facility. No need to digitize every scar, every bit of tissue, instead a model is used to regenerate the person and their 'state' is sent as state of mind.

That is clearly science fiction, but some of the GAN models I've played with have this "feel" where they will produce reliably consistent results from the same seed. Not exact results necessarily, but very consistent.

From that, and this article, I'm wondering if they figured out how to compute the 'seed' + 'initial conditions', given the model that will reproduce what was just digitized. If they have, then its a pretty amazing result.
Nothing to see here.

Speed always has been not only the most important thing, but virtually the only important thing. Back before most of you were born, there was a review (in PC Magazine, IIRC) of the category of spreadsheet programs. MBA Analyst dominated the others (visicalc and lotus 123, IIRC) in every category except speed, in which it was OK, but not great. That's why you never heard of it.

The speed requirement is closely related to the self-importance fallacy. If a computer needs time to think, maybe we could make good use of a few moments pause, too.
They have a newer version that's actually watch sized but neither have an eink display like the Watchy.
It is exactly the same right now, with the difference that the crumbles of the pie are enough to feed the people. (Housing, health and education is another story)
I’m not sure about publisher’s actions after they won the appeal in late 2020. Deluxe release certainly seems a bit aggressive, but without knowing the details of the ruling it’s hard for me to have a [layman’s] opinion on whether it was acceptable for them to do it.

My [non-lawyer’s] impression based on the older post is that, if true, the publisher acted maliciously enough in early 2020, and the fact that the court decided the appeal in publisher’s favour in the first place weirds me out a bit. It looks like emergency COVID regulations against contract termination came into play? They were designed to protect struggling small businesses, but in this case ended up favoring publisher’s booming enterprise (game sales appear to have done very, very well during the pandemic).
UK failed to inform EU countries about almost 200 killers and rapists
I love the idea of smartwatches and owned several ones starting wit Pebble. But since I need reading glasses to read small print I have to give up on them and go back to old-school watch with hands. It is just not practical to stop in the middle of the street and put on my spectacles to read a notification.
You need to have an army and weapons to enforce that threat, which costs a lot of energy to maintain.
Hey friend, I just wanted to let you know that I love your writing. I’ve got nothing of substance to add but you’ve got a great voice. Do you blog? If so, I’d love a link.
It's also clearly not intended as a password (why would you password protect a public zip archive?), but instead a "yeah you got us, but f** off" kind of message.

It may seem juvenile, but it is the kind of thing people do in an adversarial situation when they have no better hand to play, AKA they "got nothin'".
Fibre isn't a nutrient though. It's waste. We have a very low capability to ferment it verses other apes.
I support the idea of Bitcoin and blockchain despite flaws in both but you beat me to pointing this obviously bad argument against stock markets in defense of Bitcoin. BTC constantly has insane movements over absurd things like Musk tweets and etc.. It's much worse than the stock market at being volatile.
I don't think it's too far a leap to suggest that knowledge like that could get you killed. Lets ask some Iranian nuclear scientists to see what they think...
I took my first university course in Ada in 1981. I also worked for a company that provided an Ada runtime in the mid 80's.

Ada was sabotaged early on because it was 'mandated' by the DOD for new programs. That meant that all the usual suspects, like Lockheed, GD , TI (I don't remember exactly which ones) came up with Ada compilers and runtimes that cost on the order of $10K per seat. The typical military contractor ripoff. So it was impossible for individuals or small companies to use Ada on their own dime. It was only feasible if the cost was rolled into a larger (bloated) defense contract. So it couldn't get a following. Of course much later on free versions became available but it was too late.

That said, Ada was absolutely no fun to program with. It was awkward and verbose. I hated it from the get go, compared to the alternatives. If it is so super why is rarely used.
https://openbehavioralscience.org/manifesto/
I tried using typescritp with vim, the setup was painful; flow in the other hand was pretty straight forward; I'm considering moving to flow because of this and also because we can have contributors not familiar with typescript helping the code base grow.
US should be roughly done with Covid in 2021
Doesn't change a thing. KFC,McD don't give a rats-arse about anything other than money.

They will still murder and inhumanely treat animals.
I struggled with this too, and it actually got even worse when I started managing people. I also started writing people off as "amazing folks can take feedback, and not great folks who can't."

What changed my perspective was the talks and books around Radical Candor.

The basic idea is this, you need to get people into the right state of mind through genuine empathy and shared trust before they will be ready to hear feedback. Otherwise, it's human nature to become defensive and not hear it.

If it comes from someone you know and trust, then you'll hear the feedback as constructive. If it's from a stranger, or someone who you see as a rival, then you'll see it as a threat.

It can take a long time to build enough trust with people to get them into a place where you can provide constructive feedback. But it's crucial to actually getting the feedback to achieve the outcome you wan.
I would really like to get email, calendar, and slack working in emacs but I have very little spare time to tinker and figure it out, and have yet to find walkthroughs for dummies dumb enough for me. I, too, was a vimmer fist, with a desire for org mode, and Doom Emacs came along and made it very easy for me to get up and running with emacs.
Is this really an AI victory? I mean, the ice isn’t changing that much.

It’s mostly just an aim-bot
Yikes. I'm working on an internal web app which can only be accessed on our network and even I am using parametrized queries to prevent injection.

What a joke, and then blaming the documentation...just wow.
You're supposed to generate your own key pair. Keep the private one and publish the public one.
You can't spell Elsevier without E-V-I-L.
Chinese vaccines sweep much of the world, despite concerns
I want a coffeescript that lets me define types when I want to, but doesn't require it. Thanks.
Yes, but do you think we would have reached the innovations and supply chain capabilities required to make modern electric cars if not for the supply chain build-out of trucks, the commutes of folks researching these technologies, etc.

And even if my specifics are wrong, my point is that some technology may be impossible to leapfrog because we build on the innovations and rollout of past technology in order to innovate further.

And again, you can debate that modern electric cars could have been more capable earlier if we had distributed more towards innovation than to rollout of old tech (e.g. would a carbon tax on gas cars 20 years ago that went towards battery research have accelerated us towards our current position more quickly?). But my uber-point is that gas cars were probably required for some period of the last century. Maybe even to make, like, internet, smartphones, and all kinds of stuff
And if other side hears these arguments and considers it to be an equal justification to the similar behavior but to your side?
There's an entire company to solve that problem: Pantone.
In my later years, I tend to be more skeptical of brilliant/magical solutions. I genuinely hope "Beyond Meat" doesn't turn out to be more trouble than good in the long run. Then again fast food meat isn't that great anyway so the bar is pretty low to begin with.
I mean you could have asked "what operating system that starts with an L out there are you comparing Linux to," so you picked those specific features for a reason. I would like to know why.
yeah backlog issue or TODO in code. i personally dont mind the TODOs in code because they remain in context. also, you often get benefits from accumulating some todos of a similar nature, then solving them in one go in a tech debt cleanup sweep.

in my time there (i've since left the company) we didn't get a lot of pebbles. boulders and sand were more common. perhaps i shouldve communicated that distribution more clearly.
Confirmation bias, survivorship bias, etc. Make that index if you aren’t just bullshitting.
Show HN: My country blocked internet, so I created new VPN protocol
In 2020 my country temporarily blocked nearly all popular websites (Facebook, Youtube, Instagram etc.) for 45 days. I tried other VPN apps and protocols but they failed. And I started crafting my own VPN protocol and app.

Android client app has features below:
Quick Tile,
Multi-profiles,
Split tunneling,
Offline region,
Custom DNS, MTU config

I found Offline region feature unique, for example if you want to watch videos on Youtube but don't want people to send you message from social medias. You can block internet access of these social media apps, so your friends will see you as offline, but Youtube will work. Or you can use this feature to block games' internet access, so they can't show you ads.

-What is NOT VanillaVPN for?
+It is not for privacy or security. People already have TLS/SSL (HTTPS).

-What is VanillaVPN for?
+It is for changing your apps' location (IP address) or making some apps offline.

-How big is it?
+It is only 800KB in size.

-Where can I get VanillaVPN?
+From vanillavpn.io or https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=io.vanillavpn

Currently Android client is available. I'm working on the MacOS and iOS versions right now, and planning to release them in the next weeks. I will be glad to hear your thoughts about VanillaVPN.

Thanks.
So you need a smart watch with a bigger screen and font that you can't get at present. Others are almost certainly in the same boat. People who like tech of this nature are a generation who are aging so the demographic is growing. Everyone needs reading glasses if they live long enough.

There's an opportunity there! I have no doubt it will happen. Who, how etc? We'll see.
> their philosophy is to "move slowly and not break things"

The world needs more of this. I'm tired of seeing tooltips that don't disappear and thus get in the way and long GC pauses on Firefox, because nobody bothered to test their bloated React app in Firefox.
Is RSA Dead?
I Productized My Design Service and Created a Logo Maker Tool for Startups
> You build cities around transit, walking and biking instead of giant chasms between buildings. This is not a problem that exists in Europe.

Ahem, European reality begs to differ.
> (Ada also commits to using many English language words where languages like C use symbols. SQL does this too. I'm not sold on the idea that this improves readability. Of course, there's far more to Ada than the skin-deep matter of its wordy syntax.)

Wasn't the hypothesis behind COBOL that this would allow managers to gain a certain level of understanding of the code?

I find that it made COBOL code notoriously unreadable.
> one reason I worry about jQuery is that it's losing some steam and the development is not very active

It’s super mature which I like. Compare to Vue 3 which is now GA yet lots of related components like Vuetify are quarters behind in supporting v3. Lots of exciting features for sure but also lots of churn.
i like your system too!
Yes. Apart from being non-flexible, non-transparent compared to OLED. AFAIK It is possibly the current known best technology for Display. Which is why I did the submission. But may be HN crowd isn't so interested.

Current Trade off is price and size. Previous MicroLED are all 100"+. So sub 100" is new.

While QLED is LCD with Quantum Dot with or without Mini LED Backlight.
Isn’t this a bit like saying the phalanx system on a ship is better at hitting inbound missiles than a human? Oh wait, it’s AI!!
A mechanical system having better consistency than a human is hardly much of an achievement in this day and age? And you don't need deep reinforcement learning to adapt to changing ice conditions. You could just apply a basic Kentucky windage style control algorithm instead.
You're just (whether you're conscious of it or not) expecting that because it would vindicate your political beliefs.
Isn’t brushing mostly just to help correct slightly imperfect throws though? This thing can just put whatever speed/spin on it needs to achieve the same effect. I don’t think that’s great AI though, just very accurate lobbing.
The protein you get from meat is a different collection of amino acids than the protein you can get from plants or soy.
I much prefer VHDL to Verilog. Mostly because you can define your own types in VHDL but can't in standard verilog (SystemVerilog is closer to VHDL in capability). Also because the whole reg thing in Verilog just doesn't seem very ergonomic to me - I have to stop and look things up when coding state machines or similar stateful things in Verilog. In VHDL you've got signals and variables. Signals can have state. Variables are only used inside of processes - much easier to remember for me, anyway (maybe my block has to do with learning VHDL first).

And finally VHDL is strongly typed. Verilog is pretty much C-typed meaning it's pretty weak. About a dozen years ago I worked at an EDA company and one of my tasks was to run our generated HDL code through a popular industry linting tool. There were hundreds linting problems with the Verilog code that needed to be fixed. In the VHDL code there were only a couple of things that needed to be addressed - this was mostly due to VHDL's strong type system preventing many of the problems that showed up on the Verilog side.
This is the only issue where this sort of silly hyperbole is common and tolerated.
Ah man I forgot about Computer Music Journal, thanks! I got a copy of one issue from a colleague some years ago and it had lots of interesting stuff. Guess now I can get a digital copy (among the rest of the back-catalogue), haha :)
For some reason I did think of a "Garbage Watch" after reading the article. https://gizmodo.com/the-garbage-watch-is-a-piece-of-haute-ec...
A couple of coloured wires would make Watchy a much cooler accessory.
That's a fallacy into which they're falling. Not a logical one, just a mental fault in their thinking.

You and everyone else around you are always missing out on life-changing money.

I missed out on GameStop when it was $4. Roaring Kitty was posting on YouTube then... but I didn't know about him. I didn't hear anything about GameStop until it was already in the hundreds of dollars. I missed out on Tesla. I missed out on Microsoft, Apple, Apple's resurgence in the 90s, etc.

There's always going to be some thing that everyone misses out on.

I'm biased, because I've been mining Bitcoin since 2010, starting with an old Asus Core2Duo laptop, then I got a Butterfly Labs Jalapeno miner, and then the Chinese miners took over the scene and I got out because I didn't see the point trying to compete with them.

But I'm still missing out of all kinds of life-changing money scenarios even today. And so is everyone else.
Need a Linux version too.
Is there a ublock list for these?
Technically, for many owners their carrying costs do increase year over year. Property taxes, HOA, maintenance, etc all tend to increase over time. Depending on where you live, these non-mortgage costs can be thousands of dollars per month and they don't go away when the mortgage is paid off.

If you look at it in terms of portfolio construction, you would never want more than 10-20% of your net worth in your home, much less the 50+% many people have in practice. Owning your home is a pretty mixed bag, financially, and made worse in practice because people have far too much of their net worth in it. They'd benefit from renting much longer and buying much less home if it was a financial argument.

I've owned my current home for several years, and go back and forth between renting and owning. Even though I live in a "hot" property market and benefited from appreciation, I actually lost money versus renting the equivalent and investing the difference, and I do keep track.
I've been programming JS for 13 years (professionally, and some more as a hobby) and I'm pretty aware of its warts. And as a firm believer of TDD, most of my code is pretty well tested.

Unit tests have similar advantages to types: they catch errors early and let you refactor your code with confidence.

But unit tests go even further, because they test the _correctness_ of the returned value, not just its type.

And a massive turnoff for me is that the types are compile-time only.

So you see, if your code is tested, and the types are just partial static checks; I feel like it's just not worth it.

I enjoy using types in other languages, for example it feels nice to add type hinting to old PHP codebases. But in PHP, types are much simpler (less work) and more effective.

If they added optional run-time instrumentation like "spec" in Clojure, I would definitely use TS. But for now, I'm out.
It shouldn't be a far mental leap, though. There are people who work in suicide prevention (hotlines, counseling, awareness + outreach, etc) and their employment and operations requires funding. Unless one believes that all efforts to prevent suicide are entirely futile...?
Points 2 and 3 don't seem to be things we can modify. Are they barriers to an effective implementation, or will the increased size + diversity be more friction but not a blocker?

For points 1 and 4, those sound like symptoms to a more rudimentary problem. I don't know what that problem is, but my guess is its something systemic and structural.
To be honest if it wasn't so good, we wouldn't have evolved to consume so much of it.
People dying is not a political belief
Rent control only exists for one reason: to keep tenants in their apartments. It's not a tool that is solving a shortage of housing but lots of politicians will insist that new housing isn't needed. You just need to manipulate the useful fiction that is the market and fake everything. At least that's what the politicians think. Even if it means that the market is no longer useful.
Researchers read sealed 17th-century letter without opening it
It only leads to negative outcomes if that's the only step you take though. Most societal problems need to be tackled from multiple angles to actually see any positive effect.

Rent control is a good tool for keeping existing tenants in their homes. That has a lot of value in itself but it must to be coupled with the construction of good quality, affordable public housing at or below the average rent controlled property in order to maintain the desired goals of keeping rents/property prices down for new entrants and increasing mobility.

The only issue with rent control is that it's applied as a band aid without also addressing the root causes.
Hacker culture
My two last position were in team where all members have a technical background. Like, we just assume you can code or query whatever. Devs are not magical creature. Coding happen to be their main focus.

- A bunch of devs.
- A BA exactly like you described. Usually 50% on one team.
- QA lead, able to pull from the set of devs at will. Must have deep automation and QA skills.
- A scrum person ( 20% on the team )
- a tech lead.
Java is fast, unlike JS. Perhaps one day JS will be fast, too.
Meat has high calories per pound. But a cow must eat 10,000 calories of plants to produce 1,000 calories of beef.

Chickens need as few as 2,000 calories of plant to produce 1,000 calories of chicken.

If they are eating roughage humans can't eat, it's useful. But if we are farming corn to feed cows, we could have been farming something humans (or chickens) can eat instead with less land, fertilizer, etc.
It seems slightly weird to me that university presses and learned society journals aren’t generally open access. I thought the point was to aid the university’s research. Surely it helps the name of the university to have important widely accessible journals with the university’s name on them. Maybe the presses tend to have been spun off as commercial enterprises, or maybe the university really loves the income. Or maybe they are really expensive to run for some reason. I know the press at my university has a pretty large building but I’d figured a lot of it was a warehouse. Maybe it’s full of salespeople negotiating with librarians.

I don’t think there’s much hope of the commercial journals owned by Elsevier or Springer opening up, but I do hope that the trend of journals flipping (where the entire editorial board resigns and forms a similarly named open access journal) will increase.

Perhaps another problem is that in those fields that are already closest to open access (say because they use the arxiv), there is less incentive for people to jot publish in commercial journals as everyone who matters will have already read the preprint in the arxiv.
How much is that reduced if you cook the vegetables? Or do you eat raw meat? The time spent eating is a function of nutritional density and difficulty to digest. We have plenty of nutritional vegetarian food that doesn't require hours of chewing to extract the nutrition from.

It's an interesting counterpoint but not actually proving the point made. There are large herbivores.
I agree that people have gone too far. Art is a protected field, right?

There’s going to be a huge backlash against cancel culture, I don’t think it’s going to last very long. That kinda trend always breeds rebellion.