skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I think the problem is exactly that the average consumer can't start their own instance. What if there was a front-end service that made creating a fediverse instance as easy as creating a discord or Slack, and handled all the messy technical stuff with setting up an instance for the average user, while at the same time allowing said user to have full control of the cloud files? The front end would be incredibly light weight (just API calls, no data storage), so even if it shut down, as long as it is open source someone else could run their own instance of it on a different URL and the user could keep admin of their instance through that.
For that matter how can you have any assurance of security on a device with an opaque binary blob running underneath the OS? If you are paranoid enough nothing is secure.
All of this poignant reminiscing reminds me of action buttons, aka Tim Rogers, latest review on YouTube. If you like games he puts out some of the best content around. If you aren't, skip to part five of the review to hear the part that this reminded me of.

Part five is a wonderful video essay on memory, nostalgia and regret. Tim is also in a unique position to talk about this as he has a condition where he never forgets anything. It's really a fascinating video.

Also general shout out to action button, all the videos are fantastic.

Link to the video: https://youtu.be/779coR-XPTw
Sound reveals giant blue whales dance with the wind to find food
In what way does a Play Services dependency make them insecure?
A deep dive into a Zotero workflow
You can't prove that something is secure by "hackers". You can only prove it's not secure.
From what I've noticed in our setup latency these days is in the encoder. Everyone is pretty good at pumping out segments and stuffing them into disk.

Of course, I'm on AWS using SSDs, MediaStore, and CloudFront (as a testbed; we use medialive for production). If you're on a spinning disk you'll have contention and throughput issues (ie: you can't expect to write and read to that guy effectively).

I'd suggest dropping to 24fps, since you're not doing fast action sports. Also, use the Apple HLS authoring guidelines as a baseline for your bandwidth settings. Overall they seem to be pretty good.

As with any compression, high quality in is better, because it gives the encoders more data to work with.

360p is pretty worthless.

What you can try and do, if you want to ride the edge of legality, is start an unlisted youtube livestream then extract the m3u8 out of it and send it to your clients.
Probably somewhat similar to how Trino/Presto/Bigtable/Spanner works but targeted at search, decompose the query into a set of highly parallelizable steps and execute them simultaneously over the set of data using some type of specialized storage format for rapidly indexing into the file, some really nice heuristics, and then drop all the ones without a potential for a hit, aggregate the rest and then do maybe a more classical search over the vastly reduced set of potential files in memory.

I know Presto isn't focused on search, but Athena (AWS branded Presto) can do some really fast queries over S3, the issue is coldstart time on the compute, for a similar solution focused on search maybe you keep the compute always warm and work from there.
Sudoku variants, and even more importantly human-designed puzzles, are where all the fun is.

I grew bored with classic machine-generated sudoku ages ago because it began to feel very mechanical. Adding variant rules like thermometers lets puzzle setters use more bits of logic that are satisfying to reason about.

Puzzle creators are still finding new theorems about how sudoku works, even within the standard rules, and creating puzzles that teach them to solvers. The Phistomephel Ring, an extension of set theory, applies to every single sudoku grid in existence.

As a middling solver, many recently-featured puzzles are too difficult for me, but it’s still fascinating to watch CTC solve them.
what exactly happens to all the URLs that were linking to mastodon addresses? surely those are now going to die?
The most beautiful and unusual tuning I came across is alternating major and minor thirds, something like ACEGBD. Then you can tune A,E,B down 15 cents and each group of three consecutive strings (open or mini-barred at any fret) becomes a _just intonation_ major or minor chord. You pluck three strings and it's like plucking one static string, a sound hanging in space without movement. Major and minor just intonation scales are also playable, though require some jumps.
The problem is the investors, they don't like companies that has zero growth rate even if it is profitable. Profitable companies that has zero growth rate are used as collateral for loans to buy growing companies with negative profits and this bankrupts the profitable company because of debt burden. It seems greed is too much in the capital markets.
Maybe not, but Signal would be vulnerable to a much bigger problem: its server would, like other secure messengers, end up keeping an effectively plaintext database of every pair of users that communicates.
Heh, I wonder if they're running their website on OS/2? I forgot to check the response headers from when it was up
Pardon makes it possible/easier to have your record expunged.
These pardons also effectively decriminalize possession at the federal level.

It's far from an empty gesture. But at the same time it is also a token, bare minimum gesture.
Funny you say that, the chance of nuclear war is the highest since the Cuban missile crisis.
Are there any hard skills a manager should have that are not included in common sense?
> I rarely see the same type of rigour or skepticism being applied to the natural-origin hypothesis

Isn't the natural-origin the default assumption? There are no lab-leak theories for polio or smallpox as far as I know.
> Wikipedia should not be used as a source for academic purposes

It's not a primary source, or a secondary source, but it's a great tertiary source for getting an overview of an area, and as a tertiary source (like other encyclopedias historically) it has a major role in academic work.
Bypassing Hotspot Limits on iOS (2021)
I created an account just to recommend shooting ProRaw with the Pro Camera app on an iPhone. There's even a setting to turn down some of the computational photography features (under 'Capture Quality'). Makes a world of difference!

https://www.procamera-app.com/en/

https://apps.apple.com/us/app/procamera/id694647259
Making it easy to create and publish digital forms on GOV.UK
Yes I agree that it's accurate to say "the new FDA boosters weren't tested on humans"!

My point is that if you leave out "the new FDA boosters" then you're being misleading. It's important context.
Early days of the internet, people were afraid to put their credit card into a website.

The main reason we are not afraid to do this today is because we usually get a refund if there is an issue. This is subsidized with the profits the credit card companies make from that 16%+ APY they charge people with revolving debt.

Credit card companies do all sorts of silly advertisements and cards get hacked all the time...

We can go in circles on these comparisons all day long. We have a choice... either keep the status quo, or try to work towards a future where we don't have to give up our privacy and information in order to just buy something on the internet so that we can have ads follow us around.

Whether cryptocurrencies are that solution, is irrelevant... the part where people are working on these sorts of things at all, is what I care about. I personally, would rather be able to provide liquidity and take out a loan without having to ask permission first.
yeah, idk if you could count this as a success when by his own admission there's so much user data essentially sited on one single point of failure/compromise.
Good times. MK2 was still in the very early days of the internet and people were still in Compusa and AOL. Some enterprising kids would download and print the move sheets for all the characters and sell them for a few bucks.
And I would take it one step further... What do you want to do with music? The people I know who studied theory were interested in becoming better musicians.

I'm a jazz musician. The people I know who can create their own compositions and arrangements in that genre all studied theory in college.
Maybe this is a stupid question, but why is it unrentable?

Could you AirBnB it?
in the last 20 years I have had more attacks on my email account and $whatever_current_social_network account then I had on my irc account.
Things like nickserv and ip cloaks (which have been part of nearly all networks I used to connect to and those I connect to) do the job just fine.
Is it easy to flood down a server, sure is, but if there's more then 1 hub on the network, things will settle pretty quickly normally.

In my opinion, the main reason why it was never adopted as a mainstream platform, is because it was never picked up by a big corp that saw a way to earn money off of it.
Prioritizing work over family and loved ones.

You don’t get back that time. Ever.
I took Fundies 1 at NEU last year, but I came in with a good amount of programming experience. I appreciated it because it forced me to think in a new programming paradigm (functional) but for a lot of my classmates who were beginners it was tough because of the much more puzzle-like nature of the problems. I also didn't think it was very fair to these students for the curriculum to immediately abandon Racket after the first semester and go right into Java for the second. The Fundies classes can at times be very discouraging because of the intensity.
I'm getting my information from the book written by Andrew Leatherbarrow "Chernobyl 01:23:40" -- not a TV series. Yes, according to him they are still alive. It was indeed a probable suicide mission because all of them went in there knowing full well there was a significant chance that they would die from it.
> it's hard to get everyone to run a distributed database, identity server, etc without it being some single binary.

Then it's a real problem that people keep doing these projects in Ruby and PHP. It was a problem that was ultimately laughed off when Diaspora chose it, and it's a problem that continues to linger and continues to be laughed off.

Make it a single-binary that uses a couple sqlite files in a ~/.directory, and people won't mind running their own server. They could opt to proxy their traffic through a caching intermediary, and we could still federate those caching intermediaries. Being a mule for social traffic could be a commodity service if social were standardized properly. Ideally, one would be able to flip a switch and adjust a few dials on one's own instance to become a caching intermediary for others.
great extension, right up there with vanced for android
If someone mailed me their key along with a letter saying "I want you to go into my house and take my DVD of season 1 of the Sopranos and you can watch it at your home for the next week, but then you have to throw it in the garbage", is it illegal for me to do what they say but then not throw it in the garbage?
And how to we know they don't collect other data but don't advertise it?

If they have a special deal with government, the court wouldn't even know about those, or might be instructed not to ask them and not disclose anything.
They aren't normal BD-Rs nor are they gold plate. They use a different technology for the reflective and recording layers. These discs weren't included in the linked research.
"Go somewhere else" isn't a solution when a plurality of servers agree to tolerate racist, sexist, or just plain obscene conduct.

I'm also amazed that giving users control over what they see isn't an option. That solves the problem completely by making it the user's problem. That, however, somehow never seems to be an option.
If Signal is secure really depends on your threat model.

While they never classified them as data breaches, they had all the numbers in their system extracted number of times.

If someone was using a real phone number, even if Signal was secure — just knowing the number alone would give an attacker addition information. When Moxie was in charge, he repeatedly refused to allow new users to signup without phone, even though in there numerous ways this could have been done and are being done by their competition.

Lastly, all three Signal board members have held the top leadership role in past year, which is highly unusual, in fact, never heard of anything like it.
I’ve recently been hearing “human capital” thrown around by MBAs
Thanks for the link, but even this study, which claims to have not found large differences between vegans and omnivores, still reports that e.g. the prevalence of osteoporosis in the femoral neck (which increases the risk of hip fracture) was 1/7 among omnivores, but more than 1/6 among vegans.

A vegan does not need a large amount per day of calcium supplementation, but all the studies, including this one, demonstrate that a small amount of additional calcium is necessary to reduce the risk of bone fractures to the same level as for omnivores.
I need to understand this obsession with "getting discovered via the application itself".

I mean, what's the problem of using other means of communication to publish/promote your identity?

I am far from being internet famous, and I get at least one follower every week on Mastodon simply because I put it on my Twitter bio.
yes there are different castes of homeless, some do quite well, and are not problematic. others are of disorganized psyche, and cause much of thier own problems, resulting in no one wanting them around.
Until very recently (weeks not months), Matrix servers controlled group membership, and could add arbitrary accounts to your group without permission, thus allowing them to decrypt messages to the group. Matrix servers could also silently add "devices" to your account.

https://nebuchadnezzar-megolm.github.io/
I'm back on Usenet, and hey my 5 digit uid on /. Still works! Meta-moderation!
> I'd rather get my accounts hacked because of password reuse than lose access to my email, forever.

When your account is stolen the attacker changes your password. You lose access to your email forever and lose access to all of the services that use your email as a recovery platform.
Mind that RaTG13 isn't the closest known relative, BANAL-236 and BANAL-52 are much closer, and they are not known to have been present in China, nor is there evidence for these being studied at WIV. (Also mind that these are also just "cousins" and not directly related. We actually do not know of any direct lineage.) And where is any evidence (via social network analysis or whatever) to link the outbreak to any member of the WIV, be it socially or geographically? Or even a hint? All we have is evidence for the wet market as the center of origin of the outbreak and no link between this and the WIV, and no, these are not in the same vicinity, and (from genetic evidence) that the virus must have been around for some time.

If we happen to ignore all the counter-evidence and insist on, "but it could have happened", without providing any evidence for this, I've a hard time finding a crucial difference between this argument and "Ancient Aliens". And, to return to the subject of the thread, it seems to be all about the thrills of the "game".
To quote my old trainer, "the weight's not gonna lift itself."
Thanks for your hard work Ash, and sorry to hear about your loved one.

As much as I love the Fediverse, I think the culture leans toward instances that are too big. I think the number of people on each instance should be much closer to 1 than 1000.

The problem is self-hosting is too difficult for the average person. But that doesn't have to be the case. Self-hosting shouldn't be any more complicated or less secure than installing an app on your phone. You shouldn't need to understand DNS, TLS, NAT, HTTP, TCP, UDP, etc, etc. Domain names shouldn't be any more difficult to buy or use than phone numbers. Apps should be sandboxed in KVM/WHPX/HVP-accelerated virtual machines that run on Windows, Mac, and Linux and are secure-by-default. Tunneling out to the public internet should be a quick OAuth flow that lets you connect a given app to a specific subdomain, with TLS certs automatically obtained from Let's Encrypt and stored locally for end-to-end encryption.
If Satoshi is cryptohacker turned drug lord Paul LeRoux, you can wait a while for that.
What OS? I've used the Signal desktop app on Windows paired to iOS for more than a year and have never once had to re-link.
> Church givings - not sure how it's called, but in Christianity while being in Church a person goes around and asks for the money from people, so people give a dollar or few cents. So some kind of app that does that on global scale for the Church

My first startup turned into this!
Wow. AFAIK, that's as strong a paper as you will get on the social sciences. With also as strong claims as you will get.

The title is not the same as the paper's (for obvious reasons), and it's also wrong. The paper finds that the business people increase profits. More precisely, they are able to turn about half of the salary cuts into profits in a 5 years window. (There is no analysis of anything long term, except that employee turnover skyrockets.)

Of course, the always present disclaimer applies, that this is a single work, and any kind of certainty requires replication. But well, the claims aren't any extraordinary.
Weakness of running a decentralized service: no money made, which means you have to give and keep on giving. The solution is to decentralize the hosting itself instead of leeching off the work of a few individuals. Mastodon credentials should use something like a bittorrent/blockchain db. It s ok to lose the posts

Maintaining oss-related services can be entirely frustrating
https://blog.pinboard.in/2011/12/don_t_be_a_free_user/
Thanks for the direct link. I tried looking again and again in the page, but I still can't find it there.
Any new media has this problem. I know we think of digital media as being old and well understood at this point, but that's far from the truth.

Media moves too quickly for most people to understand it. By the time you understand it, it changes again. That was true for newspapers, radio, television, digital media, and now ubiquitous computing.

As people who build these media platforms (hackers) we need to do a better job designing the technology for humans and educating people to approach it with a more sophisticated mindset.

Ex; social media has been a disaster.

Remember, it was not that long ago that everyone got their information from the same places. This is going to be a long road.
That’s a fascinating idea but no I don’t think so. I think crypto is just liquidity for the future internet. The idea it has any purpose as a currency seems to me like a relic of the failed Bitcoin principles.

Crypto is a bit like the early internet. People thought the liberation of information would make people smarter and democracies. Instead we built giant skinner boxes where people ignore valuable information in favor of random stimuli.

It’s likely the most dystopian outcome for crypto is the most likely - something like Central Bank Digital Currencies where every transaction is logged and financial privacy is erased. At the edge you might have something like flexible pricing where anyone who doesn’t own a business will be charged more money for transactions if they have more money, thus making sure that capital owns everything and can’t be threatened in the future.
Only if you assume that reducing wages has no secondary effects. But that's never the case. You might get a momentary bump in your balance sheet, but then you have to deal with employee morale issue, deadline slippages, &c., which eat away at that bump and then some.
Let me break this down so you can understand. When you write questions in your posts, they ought to end in question marks. That is standard english. Clear enough for you yet, sweetie?
> - Accounts should not be tied a single server and their continued maintenance.

you can move your account to another instance in about 2 Minutes of work

> - Private data and DMs should be end-to-end encrypted rather than entrusted with a single administrator.

There is no "private data" on mastodon, I think it gets communicated enough that admins will have access to direct massages. it even says to you "Posts on Mastodon are not end-to-end encrypted. Do not share any sensitive information over Mastodon."

if you want more, use the IM of your trust ;)

> - People don't want to self-host.

True MOST ppl don't want to host, but they are a few that like it and even get money for providing a public service.
So I don't have to host smth, I just have to find someone hosting it.
That's interesting because on the contrary, I've done very well with HN-sentiment on Cloudflare, Datadog, AMD, Nvidia, even crypto because the opinion didn't mostly sour until 2021.
It's just the GUI wrapper, relax.
Not all jobs require hiring smart people, in fact for some jobs, hiring a smart person is a liability, law enforcement for instance.
My guess is they didn't deploy a new version but rather they used a CDN... for a mobile app... I can't even.

Not pinning and not testing is egregious enough but to use a CDN for a web-based cross-platform app? Absurd.
The 10K hour rule came from the research by Erics Anderson and you can learn more by reading his book "Peak: Secrets from the New Science of Expertise".

It contests the generalized statement from Malcom Gladwell's writings and then the book makes sure to say that it it needs to be 10K of deliberate AND perfect practice (not just practicing incorrectly for 10k hours).

This book will prove that you can learn anything at any age, and it doesn't need to be 10K hours to learn a shit ton.

This is the first book I have my software student mentees read when they start. Why? Because it does one thing. Gives them hope.
I love that version, just really wish you could use that beautiful HD art from ST HD remix.
Yeah, "dynamic range compression" on a score vote does feel a bit dishonest—kind of independently of whether it's actually "strategic", actually.

Personally, this is a major factor in preferring approval over score vote, which requires someone who intuitively "feels", say, a 0.3/0.6/0.7 about candidates to either vote 0/0.75/1 to maximize their vote spread, or give more influence to people who do. Notice that this is not strategic in Gibbon's sense—it is always better to vote 0/0.75/1 than it is to vote 0.3/0.6/0.7—but it's probably more counterintuitive!
Why reply to yourself? You can edit your comment on HN.
Signal's non-phone-number-keeping competition keeps a plaintext database of every pair of users that has ever communicated. The reason Signal uses phone numbers is the same as it has always been: to avoid having that database at all, or features that depend on it.
This is possible. I like that idea.