skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
So, there's a mistake the author is making here: since film budgets have gone up, the increased cost has to be for more VFX, and thus the reason why CGI ruins movies isn't so much that CGI is cheap but that directors are unconstrained by it. There is definitely a kernel of truth in there, but I want to point out that VFX is actually still comparably cheap.

VFX artists are unusual in that they are one of the few parts of Hollywood that isn't unionized in any meaningful way. This is because of outsourcing. On paper, this is all above-board because the artists being hired live in lower-cost-of-living cities. However, in practice, this also means the artists do not have the option of unionizing. So the studios can browbeat their artists into churning out uninspired work quickly[0].

The article brings up a few more technical problems; such as CGI characters not fitting into practical sets all that well, or not having all that much visual weight to them when interacting with practical actors. However, that's something that can be worked around and planned for with creative set or prop design. This doesn't happen because the people involved don't care, or don't have the time to care, if their bad guy looks like a hologram.

That's really the core problem. Bad CGI work in an otherwise good movie can be excused, and it is possible to make good CGI that will hold up over time. But uninspired movies are bad whether or not they use special or practical effects. The problem is not so much that CGI is a cheap filler material for movies or that directors don't want to work under constraints; but that studios are running the show and asking for safe, uninspired work. Everything else is just a symptom.

The traditional Hollywood business model was that creatives would option off novel projects to the suits. This has now changed to a model in which the suits ask creatives to create derivatives of works they already own. It's why every studio was jumping over themselves to create a "cinematic universe" about a decade ago. Why go picking through a bunch of projects that might succeed or fail on their own merits when you can bring out a franchise with a built-in audience[1][2]?

[0] This is also a problem in 2d animation, specifically Japanese animation studios that churn out lots of light novel adaptations.

[1] Yes, your minds turned to Marvel at this point; but I don't think we should blame the MCU for this. The trend towards franchise film started long before we started making true-to-the-comics superhero movies.

[2] China is also a big factor here. If you can please the PRC censors, big-budget Hollywood blockbusters do very well there even if they get panned for being too derivative in the states.
Yesterday, I spent several hours figuring out if the business requirement for "within the next 3 days" meant 3 calendar days or 72 hours from now. Then about 10 minutes actually writing the code. Everyone thought my efforts were very valuable.
I try to keep such coupling to a minimum, though.
Only when the alternative to a `heroku add ..` is really hard, I prefer to have a much more flexible SOME_SAAS_KEY env var and use that in my app/adapters rather than having heroku shoehorn it in. Because the latter only ever ties me further into Heroku.

Which, following YAGNI, may not be an issue today, but does make your agility and ability to react to market changes (such as alternatives being a better option) much less. I try to keep my software platform agnostic because any tight coupling will haunt me in future.
That was a fun article, but this stood out:

> I cannot start any document — a novel, a letter, an invoice — without first clicking on the drop-down menu labeled “Font” and considering my options.

This is why I do most of my writing in Markdown using something like iA Writer. The temptation to make my words look pretty before I’ve even written them is too strong, and I’m happy to see those decisions go away altogether. I can style things after I’m finished, but until then, I want to think about the words on the screen.
Haha, agreed 100%. My go to for years had been https://www.regexplanet.com/. It let's you test what regex escapes work where without spinning up one-off `void main()s`.
They're not recalling them in the traditional sense. Tesla is not taking your car. They're just sending an OTA update that disables the behavior.
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We're now looking for multiple Ruby developers to join our team of over sixty people. No prior work experience required. For more info and to apply go to http://tbyte.co/hn
Written in font-family: nyt-imperial,georgia,'times new roman',times,serif - no Garamond.
...you beat me to it! RipGrep[0] is among my favorite semi-recently discovered CLI tools.

[0] - https://github.com/BurntSushi/ripgrep#why-should-i-use-ripgr...
What about typing instead of voice?
My favourite point of comparison is car chase scenes.

To this day, it's just so blatantly obvious when they're CGI cars that don't actually exist. Though action is pumped up to 11 (not to mention occasional Michael Bay syndrome of fast zooms,a whole separate gripe), it's not as believable and impactful than physical cars at their actual limit.

That being said, that's me, and a few fellow car chase geeks and possibly film nerds.
The median rating is not descriptive of median ability, because a large number of Codeforces competitors only do one or a few competitions. A very small number of competitors hone their skills over multiple competitions. If we were to restrict our sample to competitors with more than 20 competitions, the median rating would be much higher than 1300. It's amazing that Alphacode achieved a 1300 rating, but compared to humans who actually practice competitive coding, this is a low rating.

To clarify, this is a HUGE leap in AI and computing in general. I don't mean to play it down.
The models aren't subject to GDPR, but which data went to which model is: every data treatment must be documented.
Impossible to distinguish if this is satire or reality.
Does anyone have a simple to read & concise resource to educate myself on this topic.

I understand what an ASN is at a super high level, but have to admit that the vast majority of the acromyns in this article were new to me.

Any good resources to read on this subject?
Ask HN: Are there any user owned platforms outside of the crypto space?
user owned platform where the users own like 51% or more of the platform some how. I get that crypto is not really owned by the users, but some crypto projects I think make user ownership/voting a possibility. But, it seems like you shouldn't need crypto to pull off a user owned platform.
> PHP code is not sandboxable

People said the same about JavaScript, and yet smart people figured out ways to do it. For example: https://github.com/googlearchive/caja

PHP may be particularly challenging to sandbox, but it's not too much for talented engineers to figure out.

As a near-last resort, a secure PHP subset language could be developed.
There's all kinds of competition in that market, Deere is just the worst offender and is the reason they are at the very center of the issue.
I know the video you're talking about (I also watched multiple rebuttals of the video which pointed out the issues you mentioned among others). It's been a while since I watched it though, I may be misremembering. I found it very useful as a steel-man of the pro-meat side and even after watching the rebuttals I came out with a more complexed, nuanced, and less certain opinion than I went in with.

You have a statement, like "meat agriculture uses more water than plant agriculture." Then you have a fact checker that says "yup, if you look at the amount of water to raise a cow vs to water a grain field with equivalent weight, calories, or whatever other metric you're using, it takes far more water to raise a cow". This truth gets copied around the internet and used to support claims and policies -- "meat uses more water. We have a water shortage in California. Therefore we should ban cows in California because of the water shortage." The logic makes perfect sense, and all the underlying facts are true.

The video then gave the context, which is that cows are often raised on otherwise unproductive grasslands that aren't used for crops anyways, and those that aren't being raised on unproductive land are usually eating corn from places that don't have as much of a water problem (e.g. the Midwest). This doesn't debunk the fact that a calorie of cow uses more water than a calorie of potato, or corn, or soybean -- you can still find those facts on any fact checker on the internet and they're still just as true -- but it does weaken the claim of "we should ban cows in California to help with the water shortage".

In the context of the linked article, this is both "Decontextualizing and recontextualizing" and "Reinterpreting and pre-framing meaning". The claim "meat uses more water than plants" is decontextualized from the world where corn is grown in places without water problems and meat is often raised in situations where water use is minimal, and reinterpreted and reframed in the context of local environmental problems to support a predetermined conclusion. Of course there are probably examples in the video where it makes the same mistake the other way around -- but by watching both that video, the rebuttals, and the discussion, you can come to a better, more complex understanding of the issue, which can't be a bad thing.
“ In Theory There Is No Difference Between Theory and Practice, While In Practice There Is”

https://quoteinvestigator.com/2018/04/14/theory/
They only made 150k in all of 2021, so we're seeing the result of that right now. Good news is they're expecting to make 250k in Q1 2022 with 500k planned for Q2.
This article made me curious how independent the NSA inspector general is. According to https://oig.nsa.gov/About-Us/A-Brief-History/, since 2018 they are appointed by the president/confirmed by the senate. Prior to this the NSA director had power over the IG.
Depends who you ask: if you ask sales people they'd tell you the reason is because the sales strategy wasn't good enough /s
You can run LiveBeats on the smallest instances. You end up needing 2 small VMs and 2 10GB disks per region. So it costs about $6.80 per region to get started. ~$150/mo to run in all our regions with the small VMs. Most apps only need 3-6 regions to get really great performance.

The interesting thing about adding regions is that it also scales capacity horizontally. The way we route traffic means we can max out a region then spillover to the next one. And the way LiveBeats uses disks, each new region adds 10GB of song storage too.

Chris gets this stuff for free so he put way bigger CPUs and disks on the databases than they really need.

---Edit---

I did that wrong. It's ~$6.80 per region. Not ~$13.60 per region.
I've been running homeassistant installed by pip3 for years now (before they even had a os) and that has always worked fine.
I haven’t seen 2017 justice league, but I have seen enough modern day superhero films to be sceptical that’s why his strength is unthreatening.

Of course he’s going to be defeated, he’s the villain. Heroes don’t get injured. Every strength based character is infinite strong.

Superman could leap tall buildings in a single bound, then fly, then fly in space, then lift a continent made of kryptonite which is “Superman’s Kryptonite”, if you will.

Tobey MacGuire Spider-Man hurt his knee trying to slow down a train, Tom Holland held a flying aircraft carrier together with his hands. Yesterday’s Doctor Octopus would be no match for today’s Spider-Man and his small scale plots no interest. Even so, Alfred Molina’s Doc Oc was a good and threatening character despite having CGI assisted arms.

Hulk used to throw tanks about, now he punches alien spaceships into the ground.

Iron man was a guy in a cyborg suite, with hulk buster he’s hulk strong.

Magneto was a strategist who could push away wolverine, now he can lift sunken battleships and stadiums.

Wolverine was an eternal soldier now he can survive a hit from a nuclear bomb(!)

Batman was a strategist who worked out, now he’s strong enough to fight superman hand to hand.

Nobody gets injured unless they can walk it off, nobody dies unless they’re about to come back to life[mostly]. Nothing is damaged unless it’s background scenery buildings and cars.

Of course people aren’t thinking it’s hush stakes, it isn’t. That’s not CGI fault, it’s poor story telling papered over with CGI, bad character writing with CGI energy beam weapons instead of personality.
The assumption embedded in that line of thought is that the failure modes (and times) of peak and baseline power will never significantly overlap. Essentially, by injecting more variance and different types of uncertainty, frailty and the chance of systemic failure are increased (as shown in Europe), especially regarding second and third order effects.
This is an excellent point.
There are films where the CGI was intentionally kept limited - the film equivalent to someone sticking to a healthy diet and not overeating.

I'm struggling to think of really recent examples but one I recall when CGI was starting to have this problem, that was pretty subtle (to the point that it's easy to watch it and not realise how many small CGI effects are used, along with some physical ones) is What Lies Beneath. It's mainly to cover up the impossible camera angles and you'd hardly know.
Copy-pasting the identical comment certainly isn't, dang told me so when I was once re-using a comment I made earlier for another thread.

I think it's cool what doctoboggan has done with Blender, I feel it's okay to mention it in every Blender thread, but he should actually post a fresh comment.

And then it's up to us users if we feel it's become a bit stale. Downvoting exists.
I agree on a social behavior point of view. However, there is nuance. Very strong recommendations don't close public and private schools, day care, public parks and beaches, nor significantly curtail economic activity in restaurants and other non-essential businesses.
I do the same for the automation part (mosquitto+zigbee2mqtt+custom scripts), but I do have Home Assistant for GUI and logging. For example I have a card in Home Assistant that shows whether any system at home doesn't ping.

Here is an example of an automation script, turning a zigbee plug on/off depending on solar roof output: https://gist.githubusercontent.com/bonzini/c705bdd47fd5cd16a...
I don't want to discount your experience, but this does seem like an unpopular opinion considering Dune won a lot of prizes for the special effects[1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dune_(2021_film)
How do they adjust for the reasons for lockdowns? Surely a lockdown is introduced because things are bad. Is the analysis separating that out adequately?
I thought about that, but many people use HN via RSS, via other sites that scrap it, etc.. And of course people might want to use it from the address bar.
Yes, thats needed when you have counters in global memory. In that case, instead of just having vector<double> you would put each double into a stricture aligned to 64 byte addresses. Here all the counters are on local stack, so that trick unfortunately wont help
There's so much CGI nowadays that even things you don't think are CGI, are actually CGI. Like buildings, glasses, doors, the most mundane things are done with CGI in many TV shows and movies.

Jon Favreau was a person who was very much against CGI, until he was reviewing some of the first iron man work and couldn't actually differentiate CGI from non CGI shots, he gave up on that.

There's bad cgi and good cgi, but 99% of the movies nowadays have a lot of cgi that you don't even notice, because it's good cgi :)
This is cool! This is an extension version of the federalist [1] project I was working on earlier! This makes using federalist so much easier!

Way to go! Also, this is really cool that you did this!

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29513547
22 year veteran of CGI here. It's not less work. It's certainly different work. In fact it probably takes more time because directors think (and studios let them) do do-over after do-over. But once a giant set is blown up, that's it. Once you've flooded the set and soaked your actors it's prohibitive to do it again.
Hey, OP here. It's not that unusual actually. Check bgp.services (I mentioned it in https://chown.me/blog/getting-my-own-asn#findinghosters).

A few years ago someone gave a talk "anycast on a shoestring": https://ripe69.ripe.net/wp-content/uploads/presentations/36-...

The author explained how they found hosting services.
Interesting!

But say if my wife and I have location sharing enabled, and it updates every several minutes, is there any difference in using SSIDs vs GPS?
As predicted!

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29746236#29767679
Lol came here to just say that. The microphone auth prompt results in stress going waaay up.
The thing with trends is that they all end eventually. At the start of the automobile era, cars were quite slow, and they got faster over time. If we just draw out the dotted-line trend, we'd all be driving around at supersonic speeds.

It's true that computing has become more and more ubiquitous in recent decades. Will that continue? We'll see. Will it continue with VR and AR? Maybe, maybe not. Your approach to this is fine for asking "Is this SF short story plausible?" But it's not at all sufficient to justify billions of dollars in spending.
The point was that you don't need stereopsis to do that.

Basically, could you do it with one eye closed? Without stereopsis, tasks involving close-up things are harder, but farther away things are not.
Israel is very concerned with the guided stuff that Hezbollah backed by Iran has been amassing the last decade.
I'm worried that if we don't let the free market handle this, the government is going to make it worse. Someone should steal deere customers on merit, and deere should have the right to ruin their brand equity with stupid predatory marketing and service restrictions. If you don't like it, spend your money with another vendor.
Who will fix bugs in code generated by AI?
> if you eliminate half the transmission of a highly contagious disease, everyone may well still get it, and while you have flattened the curve, you haven’t actually saved many lives.

Assuming all other things are equal in both cases, sure.

In reality though, by flattening the curve we have avoided greater collapse of health systems, we got more time to understand better what works and what doesn't when fighting the disease, we got more vaccinated people, etc. These things combined might have saved a lot of lives.

I'm not sure why delaying chicken pox may have been a bad thing, what do you mean by that?
> My RPi sits next to my router now

Some brave souls have installed Home Assistant on their routers: https://www.snbforums.com/threads/home-assistant-entware-gt-...
How many shares need to be DRS'd?
> and can be easily manufactured in large quantities

That seems promising.

I have a couple of concerns
- Can it be recycled?
- How are new materials like this tested for toxicity?
I feel like people on HN are really detached from reality sometimes. For 99% of people, typing "chicken" into Google search means they want chicken, or don't know what a chicken is. Does anyone here actually expect the average person to be looking for in-depth guides on how to raise a chicken? That's like saying the "hotel" query should return compelling information about the supply chain and inner workings of the hotel industry.

Google's "problem" is that they need to cater to the most common intents per query (see: lowest common denominator), and believe it or not, those intents are usually not biased toward in-depth educational content - isn't this why HN is such a nice niche?

Google could think about adding a different search result sorting option that attempts to prioritize high quality, thought provoking, or otherwise educational content above all else, but it makes sense to me why their primary search ranking algorithm works the way it does.
Ya it's possible to build a fanless system, but Apple or any OEM with those parts is not going to sell you that system <$100. Not with out of the box compatibility with every x86 software out there.

The fan ramps based on usage, as I said, Ubuntu server with HASS OS, VS Code Server, Netdata monitoring, NodeRed, Sonos Airplay, InfluxDB and few other containers, it's barely gets to 2% CPU usage and CPU temp at 25C.

Look at Pi, they have been at it for SO many years and that shit is slow with no real storage interface, they are only faster compared to their own previous generation.
Postman founder here. Thank you HN community for highlighting this feature. We have been seeing gRPC usage exploding especially in microservices driven architectures and we are looking forward to the feedback we get on the feature.

A few other observations on comments that I read through:

1. Postman leans towards adding UI affordances instead of hiding them. This can irritate experienced developers at times who already know the complexities of HTTP or other protocols but that is really how new developers find their way around. So while it is attractive to have 1000 options hidden behind a command line interface, nobody uses 995 of those features. We are getting better at building experiences for both experienced and new developers. Also, I don’t believe reading man pages of git or curl is a better experience.

2. Performance is a huge area for improvement. More to come in subsequent releases this year.

3. Our roadmap is community driven: https://github.com/postmanlabs/postman-app-support/issues. Raising more investment helps us do more. We have built a business model around doing the maximum for every developer on the planet while also providing value to companies so we can charge for it and continue development. I find it fair that companies spend hundreds of millions of dollars on salaries can pay some money for improving their productivity by spending in developer tools.

4. API Development is a huge and growing area and developers are spending more and more time working with APIs rather than their IDEs. API Design, documentation, and testing are areas that a large number of developers tell us they wish they had better tooling for. Most of their time is spend pointlessly in trying to figure out how an API works (in some cases whether an API even exists). We decided to take Postman in those areas even though paradoxically it might lead to “less” Postman usage. (The faster people figure out an API the fewer number of calls they have to send)

5. Finally, it is good to see here a call for fewer features which we insist internally as well. Unfortunately at some point some part of the community is upset that we are NOT adding features (just see the gRPC thread on our issue tracker!). We don’t see issues to remove features as much as we have requests to fulfill. We do remove features consciously but it is a hard problem, so we default to adding them slowly.
Libre office and gimp to me both crash too often to be reliable for professional work.

At some point in your life a crash is worth hundreds of thousands of dollars, so you might as well pay Microsoft and Adobe for the peace of mind.
Fun. Profit. Boredom. Curiosity.

I know many people that go through Omegle when bored and meet new folks. Seems like the same concept.
Sorry but no this is not what I call “very much”, nor “very well” as GP said. If you look at all the fossil bars (don’t forget the gas that would be too easy) it further prove my point that Germany really failed this decade and the trajectory is not looking good.

Also for a reality check have a look at electricitymap.org when there is no wind and when it’s the night, I don’t see how ones could keep a straight face thinking they are doing good, this is the mix of the future for our cities.