skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: Where can we find experts to help with App Store communication issues?
We are a startup that has reached a total of 2 billion downloads with our mobile applications. Our company is based in Europe and all our employees live in Europe. Over the past three years, policy teams have become central to our business operations. The effort to break through the walls of Silicon Valley has significantly overshadowed our efforts to improve our products. Especially Apple, and occasionally Facebook, have for entirely arbitrary reasons reached the point of destroying products into which we have invested millions of dollars and years of hard work. The appeal and review processes generally do not function correctly, and we struggle to communicate our issues to the policy teams, who seem to operate in 'god mode'. We are starting to believe that being geographically distant from Silicon Valley is costing us dearly.

At this point, we have decided to consult with you to solve this communication issue. Are there any service providers or individuals who specialize in facilitating communication with tech giants? If there are companies or consultants who provide this service, your guidance would be greatly appreciated. We are looking to initiate a process where we can continuously compensate the company or individuals that make our lives easier. I would be very grateful for your direction.
A better idea would obviously be to enhance the compressed data.
You could also go the ‘autistic’ route -

Frown, and walk away while they’re talking.

Or

Deeply analyze why they’re wrong and they know it. In front of them, where they can hear you do it.

You’ll get hate, but what else is new?

You could also just lie, say ‘oh that’s good advice’ and then ignore it like most normal people.

Or, figure out what painful personal failure they are trying to warn you about from their side, with no real solution they’ve been able to figure out. And see if there is some lesson you can learn from it.

Wait, am I giving unsolicited advice now?
Ask HN: I have so many 'bots' signing up to my site. Why?
Hello HN,

Was wondering if anyone else has seen this type of activity on any of the projects they have worked on, and/or know what is going on.

My friends and I have a small community site for content creators to discuss news (think of it like hn but for content creators specifically)[0].

Recently, I have seen a ton of accounts being registered with our email and pw option (the only option). This was very strange considering we are a really small community, and most of our registrations are high quality people at a slow rate through word of mouth. After looking into it, I noticed that all the accounts had usernames like "jDwJeVTQEaP" with a variety of @gmail and @yahoo email's associated to them. There have been 100s of them registered over the course of a week.

These accounts have no activity, mostly because they cannot log in due to needing to be verified via email first. So these accounts are pretty much just shells.

So I am trying to understand what the point of all this is for the account creation spammer? What would you do in my situation to mitigate this?

[0] https://www.cbx.gg/
Satellite data would benefit from that.
The most developed idea like this is

https://csl.noaa.gov/news/2024/400_0320.html

There is definitely research on how vegetation cover affects albedo

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7641169/

It is also widely known you can reduce the urban heat island effect by using whiter colored roofs. I haven't seen any paper that makes a conclusive effort that things like spreading out light colored sand or tarps isn't worth it.
It seems to me that the most likely outcome is that some money will opaquely change hands and that TikTok will remain available, either because of a shell game divestiture or because of a policy change. There's just too much money at stake.

But even if that doesn't happen, and the US state starts to regard TikTok as banned, what makes anyone think people will stop using it?

Many western resources are banned in China, and it seems that the primary effect of this is simply the proliferation of tools to subvert the ban.

One thing I don't understand, at a high level: how, despite the overwhelming evidence to the contrary, can anyone believe that the internet will shape itself around the whims of legacy states on anything but very short timescales?

There is no case of successful censorship of this nature, let alone with such a large and popular resource. Conversely, there are many, many cases of failed attempts at censorship, even by the largest and most powerful states and corporations in the world.

Is there some reason to believe that this trend will very suddenly reverse?
You could also assemble the assembly using an assembler into a separate object file and export a symbol from there, and let the linker do the job, right?
I would argue that most don't.

If you ask most senior citizens or simply most users of computing devices to explain what they think about "background services", most won't know what you are talking about. Just because a functionality has been present in a system for a while does not mean that everyone will know about it. Ask people about dual booting, most won't know about it. Ask most people about "SSL", most won't know about it. Ask users about the command line, most won't know about it. And so on. Even the abstract concept of a search engine (separate from the concept of Google Search) is likely to fly over the head of many people. You vastly overestimate your audience. Let's put it this way: most computing devices nowadays are mobile phones and for many people this is their first and main interaction with computation. The modern ubiquity of phones is bigger than that of personal computers by an order of magnitude imo. Personal computers were huge but mobile phones have a level of penetration PCs could never reach.

When you buy a device, you agree to the terms of service. Most manufacturers like Apple have something along the lines of "don't interfere with the proper working of the system". Freezing apps sound like it breaks the ToS.

Buying a device is less like buying a toothbrush and more like buying a tractor. You don't own it inconditially. You own it under certain terms. Those terms give the manufacturers lots of power.
I was wondering if Zoho paid to have this article written. And then all these positive comments make me paranoid they’re paying for that too. Maybe I’m too much of a skeptic but companies definitely pay agencies to astroturf like this.
Oh man, be very careful with that. I don't know about AWS specifically, but many of those big tech companies have powerful ways to get you, and they often use them. You may be silently blacklisting yourself from being an AWS customer in the future. As they are fond of saying, cancelling the card is not cancelling the service. You still owe the money!
GPS tracking app iSharing data leak vulnerability
Funny how in the US places with 500k people are 'nowhere'.
Just get a plate with 'AAAAA4' and blame everything on 'AAAAAA'
yes, we’re okay with that - or its not a statement on that, the goal is for TikTok to be sold to Americans

with a ban being the fall back outcome
That's smart, I switch between powershell & git-bash so this helps since they don't the same way of defining aliases
US bans TikTok owner ByteDance, will prohibit app in US unless it is sold
> graphics department (PowerPoint)

You started the paragraph with the word "workload," but here the load is about as close to zero for the average employee as one could get without being pedantic about it.

People aren't using virtual brushes and learning color theory to digitally paint their PowerPoints, or even composing their slides effectively in the visual space provided as a graphic designer would in Photoshop. They are writing and revising their drafts in PowerPoint, often using the default templates or perhaps 2-3 minutes of trying out different themes.

That ends up smearing all the costs and benefits of default PowerPoint look-and-feel across the audience for all these boring presentations.

But I claim the cost to the employee's time and education due to them technically having taken on the responsibilities of a graphic designer are, on average, effectively zero.
Linking urbanism to hitler was a strange point of discussion.
The specification for the Podlite markup language is written using Podlite markup itself.

https://github.com/podlite/podlite-specs/blob/main/Specifica...

Also online playground is available here:
https://pod6.in/

Thanks for your interest in Podlite!
with best,
Alex
It's impressive, but still looks kinda bad?

I think the video of the camera operator on the ladder shows the artifacts the best. The main camera equipment is no longer grounded in reality, with the fiddly bits disconnected from the whole and moving around. The smaller camera is barely recognizable. The plant in the background looks blurry and weird, the mountains have extra detail. Finally, the lens flare shifts!

Check out the spider too, the way the details on the leg shift is distinctly artificial.

I think the 4x/8x expansion (16x/64x the pixels!) is pushing the tech too far. I bet it would look great at <2x.
*logit
Larry Sanger Speaks Out
So you were able to get your Perplexity Rabbit gift to work? I'm also already a subscriber, and tried several times to get the Rabbit offer to work, and it never seems to have worked.
When whacking moles, you cannot whack all moles at once. Pick the one closest/easiest, and keep whacking.
No public model available yet?
Would love to test and train it on some of my datasets.
Yes you're talking about hybrids of socialism with capitalism, which are absolutely the way to go. History has shown that nation-scale "pure" socialism (which in practice nearly always results in a flavor of Marxism/Communism) is even more brutish and tragic than "pure" capitalism.
> They announced a plan to bring Model 2 out

Have a link? The stories I read said they specifically declined to comment on Model 2
If I read the bill correctly, any entity with an at least 20% chinese ownership stake (by a person or company) falls under this law...

What are the other 2nd and 3rd order effects of this?
A few minor nitpicks. Pagerank is not just link counting, who is linking to the page matters. Among the linking pages those that are ranked higher matter more -- and how does one figure out their rank ? its by Pagerank. It may sound a bit like chicken and egg but its fine, its the fixed point of the self-referential. definition.

Pagerank based ranking will not return the same set of pages. Its true that the ranking is global in vanilla version of Pagerank, but what gets returned in rank order is the set of qualifying pages. The set of qualifying pages are very much query sensitive. Pagerank also depends on a seed set of initial pages, these may also be set on a query dependent way.

All this is a little moot now, because Pagerank even defined in this way stopped being useful a long time ago.
10 seconds is what, about a dozen cuts in a modern movie? Much longer has people pulling out their phones.
Youtube channel "bigclivedotcom" does teardowns of consumer electronic crap from AliBaba, Amazon etc. with a soothing British accent and wit.
Is USB a trust worth busting?

Or DDR?

Or M2?

I'd argue those are trusts worth boosting.
Representing, manipulating and discussing data in a more detailed way
I fear the US government will be whacking just the one mole and then putting down their novelty mallet.
Understanding Apache Hudi's Consistency Model Part 1
You claim that this bill "violates free speech". Can you expand on that? That's... quite the claim to just throw out there without any references.
This goes back to the oppressors and the oppressed. In the case of Punching Nazis, the way I read it is the meme of the anti-fascist that punched Richard Spencer during an ABC interview in 2017[1][2]. The post-modernis in me also like to point out that before then Punching Nazis was endorsed by Steven Spielberg when he directed Harrison Ford to do that as Indiana Jones[3]. And—of course—the supreme glorifies of violence against Nazis Quentin Tarantino who doesn’t let a movie go by unless a Nazi, a rapist, KKK members, etc. get severely tortured, bombed, burned with flamethrowers, etc.

Back to 2017, Richard Spencer is an actually nazi. He is a white supremacist that routinely spouts hate speech against Jewish people. In the case of the ABC interview the oppressed were Jewish people, and the oppressor was Richard Spencer. The Anti-facist very much cared about the Jewish people when he punched Richard Spencer. If Richard Spencer weren’t an oppressor of Jewish People, he wouldn’t have gotten punched.

1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aFh08JEKDYk

2: https://www.theguardian.com/science/brain-flapping/2017/jan/...

3: https://gizmodo.com/indiana-jones-punching-nazis-harrison-fo...
That's known as multi-frame super-resolution.

https://paperswithcode.com/task/multi-frame-super-resolution
The state can pass whatever legislation it wants; we've seen convincingly that constitutional restraints are not substantially motivating (although the strongest evidence for this in the current week is not this bill, but the legislation surrounding the ongoing surveillance regime(s)).

But the bigger question is the literal one you've asked: how the federal government can just ban TikTok?

What makes the government think that they can stop packets at some arbitrary line in the sand, when every indication in the history of the internet shows the opposite?
Yes, the American government is comfortable with American companies having deeper access to American data than foreign adversaries.

It's not about what's being done, it's about who's doing it.
Why Niches Matter
Show HN: I made a free competition/giveaway aggregator
I made this a bit ago, but just recently revamped it all, if you like entering free competitions I think it could help you enter hundreds more.

My next job is to add pagination to the site, as currently, it doesn't have any!

thanks for looking.

for techies: The back end is nodejs for gathering the giveaways, and I am storing on mongo atlas. Then I used hono/bun (for the first time) to build my api out for the front end to consume, which is Nuxt3/tailwind!
I gave it 1 sentence of instructions and it took beyond the 5 minutes to finish the response. It seems like a neat concept though!
Remote work is like juggling scarves -- especially if there are more than a few time zones in between. Things can stay in the air a bit longer which also can mean juggling more.. and moving your hands twice as fast.
Congress has extremely sweeping authority to dictate interstate and international commerce. Article 1 Section 8 of the Constitution:

"The Congress shall have power to lay and collect taxes, duties, imposts and excises, to pay the debts and provide for the common defense and general welfare of the United States; but all duties, imposts and excises shall be uniform throughout the United States;
To borrow money on the credit of the United States;
To regulate commerce with foreign nations, and among the several states, and with the Indian tribes;
"
So are you saying no apps can ever be banned?

Whether right or wrong, whether politically motivated or not, it has gone through the house, senate and president which is not a small thing.
I still need to use Teams...
The crisis of higher education is worse than you think
The lead years of XML as the hammer to every nail and the subsequent adoption of json as the data format to be used have led many to feel that XML is the data format equivalent of COBOL and just as pretty.
Stepped tax thresholds are always a problem when they incentivise low-earners to keep their income below a certain, arbitrary level. However, it would be inappropriate to deny employees a raise based on the existence of tax levels - after all, wouldn't the employees pay exactly no tax at all if they weren't paid? The tax is also guaranteed in most cases to improve the economy of the local area. I don't know the specifics of how it works in the USA, but I am aware of 'buy American' policies for federal public spending and equivalent rules for local government.

Say an employee effectively gets $10 less money, but the company effectively now pays the government $1000 in the same period. That might mean new bus subsidies, legal aid, development grants... things which make everyone slightly better off in the long-term. I think that's a good trade-off.
Best TTS available from 2020-2021 was done by a single unemployed guy
looks interesting! thanks for sharing
If you want to use your image for anything that needs to be factual (i.e. surveillance, science, automation) the up-scaling adds nothing---it's just guessing on what is probably there.

If you just want the picture to be pretty, this is probably cheaper than a bigger sensor.
> for some reason

Fixed rail is the only reasonable way to get large numbers of people in and out of cities.

- walking and cycling takes too long

- cars lead to congestion and you need to store them somewhere

- flying has security overhead and is terrible for the environment
The schlep never ends, it just ebbs and flows, always in constant tension. Stay engaged and involved in the political process.
Haven’t looked into it. What is the discoverability and does it come close to TikTok’s algorithm?
I hope some Intel PHB reads this and purely stochastically makes the right decision for the first time in his/her life. It seems pretty existential to be competitive at selling shovels during a gold rush.
> The findings lend support to the aims of the ESO to begin the “groundbreaking and world-leading” step of running a zero-carbon electricity grid for Great Britain for short periods from next year.

Running a „zero-carbon“ electricity grid also means to switch off nuclear since nuclear isn’t zero-carbon (even the ICCC estimates are disputed) nor renewable.

When you take into account that nuclear reactors are not particularly fond of being ramped up and down (load-following operation), because this is neither economically nor technically desirable, these 15% must also come from renewable energy sources in order to truly speak of zero CO2 emissions.
Fun fact: according to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_websites_blocked_in_ma..., tiktok.com has been blocked in mainland China since 2020.
Last time this was discussed during the Trump admin it was going to be Oracle that TikTok would be divested to, I wonder if that will still be the case now
> due to corporate greed inflation

The inflation is the inevitable result of flooding the economy with trillions of dollars in freshly printed money. It happens every time the printing press is run like that, in every country, throughout history.

> we'll actually reclaim the economic liberty that we used to enjoy

Having the government run the economy is not economic liberty.
My girlfriend not zombifying herself for 3 hours a day noticeably improves her life and my life
Lately I've started using a barebones SQLite DB for this and a GUI DB editor program (TablePlus, which happens to have an iOS app as well).

I'd always relied on ORMs in whatever web application I used to interact with DBs for the most part, but I've recently been learning more about views, triggers, and more complex relations. It's been insightful and I've found that much of what I want from a program like BeeBase is covered by knowing more SQL.

----

That being said, I'd love to see what you described too. I don't mean for this to be like the infamous "why do you need dropbox when you have rsync" comment. I just wanted to give an anecdotal alternative to use until someone creates what you described!
Do you seriously think down sampling is superior to JPEG?
Why would you not enhance the compressed data?
Many Israelis in tech worked shifted hours to line up with the USA better, because either their customers or coworkers are in the USA.
Show HN: Chaterra – An alternative ChatGPT front end
Nextcloud launches a SaaS plan with Nextcloud One
Hey everyone! I'm Kamil and I just released the first version of my personal project Chaterra.

Chaterra is a web-based frontend for OpenAI's GPT and DALL-E models. It is designed to be a simple and easy-to-use user interface that allows you to take advantage of the usage-based pricing model of OpenAI's API.

I am an early adopter of generative AI and have been using ChatGPT since it was first released. I am also not very fond of paying monthly subscriptions. That's why I created Chaterra - to have a similar experience to ChatGPT but with usage-based billing.

I also used this opportunity to improve my frontend skills (most of my experience is in backend development) and so everything is stored locally on the frontend.

Chaterra is also open-source on Github: https://github.com/exler/chaterra

Let me know if you find it useful! All feedback is appreciated.
Walmart getting that rep is so odd to me.

I read the Sam Walton autobiography and providing low cost goods with lots of options was one of the key benefits they provided smaller towns in Arkansas. The other chains couldn't operate at a profit due to the smaller customer base.

He was constantly trying to optimize his stores and dropping in on his locations daily. Because they were oroginally so far apart, in order to save driving time he learned to fly a plane and would just land in the field behind the store.

Constantly shopping competitors to see what they are doing better and how he could improve.

Originally store staff and towns welcomed the stores and him with open arms.

How times change.
Calling it a "TikTok ban" is sort of inaccurate, but unfortunately that's how the media and politicians have referred to it. The act doesn't ban TikTok; it bans TikTok from having China-based owners (in this case the Chinese company ByteDance). The act requires the China-based owners to sell TikTok to non-China-based owners or cease operations in the US.

I'm guessing Congress justifies its authority here based on national security. The bill refers to "foreign adversary controlled applications".
Unfortunately I have no desire to talk to computers, particularly near other people
I noticed on difference between franken-ui.dev and ui.shadcn.com

The navigation between the different exmaples on https://www.franken-ui.dev/examples/mail refreshed the website and did not restore the scroll position.

While on https://ui.shadcn.com/examples/mail, switching between the different examples keeps the scroll position and does not refresh the page.
In the Unbox therapy video it did say what breed the dog is. That is useful!
This is great for entertainment (and hopefully the main application), but we need clear marking of such type of videos before hallucinated details are used as "proofs" of any kind by people not knowing how this works. Software video/photography on smartphones is already using proprietary algorithms that "infer" non-existent or fake details, and this would be at an even bigger scale.
Play it for yourself against the current stockfish.
I think it's kind of interesting to watch the dynamics between Clear, PreCheck, and regular security. I flew out from SFO last month, and the PreCheck line was actually longer than normal security. Clear was a ghost-town.

I've always opposed PreCheck, because I think it's antithetical to the ideals our country claims to hold. It's essentially a government-sponsored "pay money for better treatment" program, combined with a little bit of "pay money to avoid the poors" and a dash of big-brother for flavor. Clear is no better.

People say that in New York, the subways are a great equalizer because everybody rides them - whether rich or poor. Airports should work the same way, in my opinion.
This is my first real project. Still trying to learn. Any feedback is acceptable.

I made RevRate to bring the car community closer. You can share images of your favorite car and let other car enthusiasts vote for the best car.

It's a simple website, but with awesome meaning.
The Billionaire Keeping TikTok on Phones in the U.S. (2023)
In my experience you have to be very successful to get anyone to pay attention at all.