Being an Intern at Our Startup Would Be Just Awful - <AUTHOR> https://www.whttl.com/content/2015/02/07/being-an-intern-at-our-startup-would-be-just-awful/

<comment><USER2> Satire aside, the really awful part is that these jobs are being advertised as unpaid.[1] Since it looks like this is a for-profit corporation and the interns will be providing useful services to the company (e.g., "finding, cataloging and uploading new products to add to to Whttl"[1]), this arrangement is probably illegal under U.S.[2] (and state) minimum wage laws.

Also, if you're not a Y Combinator company, posting job ads on HN (except in the monthly "Who's Hiring" postings) violates HN guidelines.[3]

[1] [https://www.whttl.com/jobs](https://www.whttl.com/jobs)

[2] [http://www.dol.gov/whd/regs/compliance/whdfs71.pdf](http://www.dol.gov/whd/regs/compliance/whdfs71.pdf) \- see item #4: "The employer that provides the training derives no immediate advantage from the activities of the intern...".

[3] [https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html)</comment>


Gravitational pull 'has role in quakes' - <AUTHOR> http://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-37350839 <comment><USER3> Quote: "When the tug of gravity is strongest, they added, "the probability of a tiny rock failure expanding to a gigantic rupture increases"."

The article's author clearly didn't understand the original paper. It's not gravitational force that was being examined, but its first derivative -- changes in gravitational force from one location to another and/or one time to another, i.e. tidal stresses.

In fact, any change in gravitational force -- either an increase or a decrease -- could produce the effects being examined. So it's not the strength of the gravitational force, but the fact that it changes over time, and from one location to another.

Consider Jupiter's moon Io as a classic example. If Io were in a circular orbit, it would be a cold, dead world. But Io's orbit is elliptical, which causes perpetual changes in tidal force (the first derivative of gravitational force) across Io's diameter. The result is a very highly seismically and volcanically active body.

</comment><comment><USER4> Without gravity, there would not be very many earthquakes.

<comment><USER5> Or planets lol.

<comment><USER6> Plus no stars and any large scale formation, totally diffuse dark matter, and only the heavy elements from very early nucleosynthesis, assuming you could have a BB without gravity. Practically though, it's hard to imagine spacetime that has no curvature at all beyond a local IF.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> This is kind of old news, I found references in late 1990's to tides influencing earthquakes around volcanos while doing a high school science project. The problem is the effect size is tiny. I thought it was a cool project, but someone else at that science fair did the same thing. I suspect a lot of people have looked into it over the years.

PS: USGS has a great database if earthquake data going back decades, it was downloadable as a ~100 meg txt file. Just remember there is a lot of different kinds of faults, and volcanos cause a lot of earthquakes. Modern version looks rate limited to 20,000 events though.

</comment><comment><USER8> There's some research out there that correlates certain types of marine quakes with tidal levels: [http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1365-246X.2009....](http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1365-246X.2009.04319.x/abstract)

</comment><comment><USER9> For those reading the article (it was free to read for me at home), it looks like their central point is shown in Figure 2a. Mind the vertical axis as you look across Figure 2.

The statistics are thankfully low for strong earthquakes, but another century or so will provide an ample test of their hypothesis.

</comment><comment><USER10> I looked up the San Francisco 1989 earthquake and it was 2 days past a full moon. I tried to look up tide data, which is out there, but I'm on my phone and didn't want to bother with ftp or CSV stuff, heh. Probably just a coincidence but was interesting to me at least.

<comment><USER11> Roughly half of all earthquakes are within one week of a full moon.

<comment><USER12> I dont believe the phase of the moon as anything to do with the earthquakes, more the orbital position...

<comment><USER13> Psst. The moon takes about four weeks to go from full moon to full moon, so "within a week of full moon" is roughly 50% of all days - earthquakes or otherwise.

<comment><USER14> I'm pretty sure OP was joking. Except what if the quakes are not evenly distributed? Then the joke is wrong :-)

<comment><USER15> It is a joke - but intuitively you'd expect some correlation between tides and earthquakes. It would be somewhat surprising if such correlation did not exist, and then I'd wonder what does that mean for the mechanisms that produce EQs.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Tidal forces cause a lot of stress on celestial bodies.

The Moon is tidally locked to Earth. Its rotational energy was spent by rotating it while being tidally pulled.

A good analogy is: get a rubber ball, squeeze it on a flat surface and roll it (while squeezing it). That's what happened to the Moon.

<comment><USER17> That can't be strictly true, otherwise we wouldn't be able to extract energy from the tides. What am I missing?

<comment><USER18> > That can't be strictly true,

That The Moon is tidally locked to Earth? It's a one way relationship - <USER2> Moon is tidally locked to Earth, but Earth isn't tidally locked to The Moon.

I assume you'd have trouble extracting as much energy from any tides that might exist on The Moon, if it had liquid oceans.

<comment><USER17> No. I was referring to

      "Its rotational energy was spent"

or rephrased

      "Tidal forces cause a lot of stress on celestial bodies",
      but not with the Earth-Moon system because the Moon's
      "rotational energy was spent".

raverbashing's point as I read it was that while tidal forces matter on celestial bodies (i.e. not in the Earth-Moon system) they no longer matter in the Earth-Moon system because the Moon is tidally locked.

I'm not disputing that the Moon is tidally locked, just the consequences in terms of tidal forces. But perhaps the issue (and maybe err) is in confusing rotational energy with orbital energy and the relationship to tidal forces.

<comment><USER16> You misunderstood me

> "Tidal forces cause a lot of stress on celestial bodies",

Correct

> but not with the Earth-Moon system because the Moon's "rotational energy was > spent".

Not _now_. But the Moon is still stretched tidally (and permanently in that position)

It causes a lot of stress when the tidal pull happens while the body rotates (w.r.t their main "puller" \- the Moon rotates, but not relative to the Earth)

And this pulling/stretching is what caused the Moon to stop rotating

Maybe Wikipedia explains it better [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tidal_locking](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tidal_locking)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> I can confirm, we didn't have gravity here in Oklahoma until the 2000s.

</comment><comment><USER20> Queue the fracking-causes-quakes deniers! I can hear the floor speeches already.</comment>


VMware to acquire startup CloudHealth in push to grow cloud offerings - <AUTHOR> https://www.reuters.com/article/us-vmware-cloud/vmware-to-acquire-startup-cloudhealth-in-push-to-grow-cloud-offerings-idUSKCN1LC1T7 <comment><USER2> Congrats; good for Cloudhealth tech to get a great offer. Hope this will bring increased budgets for them to continue to improve their solution.</comment>


This 512-Year-Old GreenLand Shark Is the Oldest Living Vertebrate on the Planet - <AUTHOR> https://www.thescinewsreporter.com/2018/10/this-512-year-old-greenland-shark-is.html <comment><USER2> As mujoco noticed in another thread, the 512 number is misleading. From the article:

> _This particular shark, one of 28 Greenland sharks to be analysed by the > scientists, was measured at 18 feet in length and weighed over a tonne, > meaning it could be anywhere between 272 and 512 years old._</comment>


Ask HN: Unexpected Seed Investment Offer (Angels/VCs/Entrepreneurs) - <AUTHOR>

My partner and I have been quietly working on our (lean) startup for a about 7 months, bootstrapping and not looking for investments unless absolutely necessary. We are pre-launch though we already have the interest of a handful of clients and are quite assured of our ability to generate revenue. If anything, we would only consider looking for capital investment once we have some real numbers to put on the table for negotiation, and only if needed.
On the downside, as of late we've been slowed in our progress due to professional commitments and a lack of cash flow to invest in contractors.  As a result, our timelines are delayed, and that is obviously a painful issue for us.
We have found ourselves facing a seed investment offer when we didn't seek one, and we are only considering it because it would quicken the pace of the project and get the idea off the ground.  The downside, of course, is that we don't want to give away too much if we do enter into an investment agreement.
Any advice for us? <comment><USER2> You don't exactly have a plan for the money yet. Your plan so far is to bootstrap and fund via revenue. If your idea is good, and you have clients, you will continue to have a future in clients and revenue. You have not made a case here that you need to launch by a certain time.

<comment><AUTHOR> We do, again, this is a seed investment rather than a major capital investment. The immediate plan is to fund the rest of the development to get the platform to beta. The initial cost is fairly small (<$10,000) since a good portion of the work is done by me on the tools, and our launch deadline is "the sooner, the better."</comment></comment>


When Bad Patents Hurt Good People: Patent Threat Shuts Down Flight Planning Site - <AUTHOR> https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2011/01/when-bad-patents-hurt-good-people-patent-threat

<comment><USER2> RunwayFinder replaced tens of thousands of dollars of hard-to-use maps and charts with a great free google maps interface. FlightPrep deserves to burn in hell as far as I'm concerned

</comment><comment><USER3> On a related note, the guys from Hipmunk[0] also patented something ridiculous which is basically a simple jquery plugin.

[0]: <http://www.hipmunk.com/>

<comment><USER4> Getting a patent for something isn't necessarily a bad thing in and of itself. Doing harm with those patents is. Many companies get patents to protect themselves from situations just like this one.

<comment><USER5> When companies must have patents to defend themselves against patent trolls, the only possible winners are lawyers.

Software patents are completely wrong. As a side note, pg said that if software patents are wrong, then all patents are wrong. BTW I'm confident that most of current IP environment (both patents and copyright) hurts people and the economy.

<comment><USER6> I don't think patents are wrong in all fields. They seem to work when you're required to claim a specific, high-effort solution that the industry wouldn't have found without you. They fail when you're allowed to claim an entire problem by being the first to write down the features all solutions have in common. With software, USPTO is enabling a land rush into a new discipline that doesn't yet have enough written prior art to make any useful work safe, and their bar for "novel and non-obvious" is absurdly low.

<comment><USER7> Patents _can_ help innovation but only in the rare cases where it's actually worth to license the patent in order to still make serious money _now_. But even specific patented solutions often seem to be a hindrance in overall development.

As an example, when reading the history of steam engines, I recall several occasions where development simply halted until some patent expired. Nobody got any wealthier either but when the thing fell into public domain, innovation rushed forward. And this was in the 1800's, and pretty much a prime example of what the patent system was cooked up for: a mechanical, specified engineering invention...

Yet it failed, already then.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Why is nobody talking about the real issue here: the slashed budget of the USPTO that has made them unable to properly vet patent applications for a decade? The problem isn't the trolls, it's the fact that these bullshit patent requests are being granted in the first place. The USPTO can't afford to have experts review patent applications, and this is the result.

<comment><USER9> I'd argue that:

1.) There are bad feedback loops between speed / quality / price of patent examination and the amount of ridiculous patents issued.

2.) Increasing the budget to improve screening and throughput will lead to an increase in patents submitted - will this increase at a higher / lower rate than their budget? I.e. will new patent submissions bloat the office even more than now?

3.) We could try to increase patent fees to cover costs, but then you'll "hurt the little guy" and fully benefit the IBMs who can afford to blow money like this.

4.) The boundary is quite gray between trolls (IV and others) and institutions with near-troll behavior (IBM's if-it-sticks patent submission methods).

5.) There are higher ratios of bad patents in certain categories: process patents, software, etc.

Conclusion: I bet that reducing the scope of what categories are patentable scales very well in reducing bad patents than any method of trying to make a better filter, because better filters will just lead to more patents to fill the void.

<comment><USER8> I think you really need to re-examine 1 & 2\. Increasing the speed and quality of patent review may lead to more patent applications, but would reduce the number of baseless patents granted. As for price, the USPTO was never supposed to be self-sufficient. Doing it properly means the taxpayer picks up the tab. That's just something you have to accept in exchange for living in a highly developed economy.

IBM's patents, as well as those of Google and others, are generally defensive. They're meant to provide ammo to protect themselves from patent trolls.

<comment><USER10> Probably due to the fact that IANAL, I never understood why you need an actual patent to defend yourself. Why doesn't just having prior art suffice? Seems like if it's publicly reachable you should be safe. <sigh>

<comment><USER11> > _I never understood why you need an actual patent to defend yourself. Why > doesn't just having prior art suffice?_

Only having an actual patent gives you a weapon for a counterclaim. And it's a weapon only if the company suing you for infringement is itself infringing your patent.

<comment><USER10> OK- so you don't need one to protect yourself, only if you want to sue in retaliation. Am I understanding that right? Seems if you can invalidate a patent by showing prior art that would be a powerful deterrent to someone wanting to sue you.

<comment><USER11> > _Seems if you can invalidate a patent by showing prior art that would be a > powerful deterrent to someone wanting to sue you._

Sometimes, yes, but not always. It once worked out that way for one of my clients. The client got a letter from another company's lawyer, saying, "you may be interested in this patent." That's code for a threat to sue. The other company was a legitimate company that actually made stuff; it wasn't a troll, er, _non-practicing entity_.

My client had solid evidence that _it_ had come up with the invention several years before, and that it had not abandoned, suppressed, or concealed the invention. This put the client in a position to make a powerful invalidity argument, one that can be especially persuasive to a jury -- _even assuming this invention was patentable, we'd have been the ones entitled to the patent, not them_.

I sent a letter to the patent owner's lawyer (whom I knew), saying, almost in so many words: _I've reviewed some prior art not cited by the patent examiner, and my client is not the least bit interested in discussing your client's patent._ The lawyer asked if I'd send him a copy of the prior art. I said, _if you file a lawsuit, you'll get the prior art in the ordinary course of discovery._ The lawyer evidently got the message - we never heard from them again, at least not on that subject.

(As usual, YMMV, and don't rely on this anecdote as a substitute for legal advice. Knowingly infringing a patent without clear and convincing evidence of invalidity could result in being held liable for _willful_ infringement. That in turn could mean having to pay treble damages and the patent owner's attorneys' fees, which will almost always be considerable.)

<comment><USER10> Thank you; I sure appreciate the insight. It's heartening to know that if you try to do the right thing and mind your own business (as long as you _document_ ) then you stand a reasonable chance of being safe (so the system's not completely broken).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Three weeks ago they were going to fight it: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2018272>

<comment><USER13> And since then, he seems to be getting quite a bit of support in his fight: [http://blog.runwayfinder.com/2011/01/07/the-lawyers-are- talk...](http://blog.runwayfinder.com/2011/01/07/the-lawyers-are-talking/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> reminds me of the crap Blackboard pull so they don't have to compete on merit

</comment><comment><USER15> Another piece of evidence that software patents are harmful.</comment>


TV News is Ridiculous Compared with Internet News - <AUTHOR> http://www.experimentgarden.com/2012/02/tv-news-is-ridiculous-compared-to.html

<comment><USER2> This article highlights a real generational gap I never considered until earlier this year.

I started Googling when I was about nine years old, at the latest. My brother, who is five years old, has used Google since he was three or four.

My entire life, I have been able to investigate my interests and other bits of information, with individual independence. If a news story interests me, I have been wired, by habit and what-have-you, to seek out the info when and from whom I want it.

A local news program once teased a fluff piece about some record-breaking octopus. They were hoping it would entice viewers enough to sit through the commercials and watch it when the program returned. In the past, this would have been the case.

But instead, because that subject piqued my interest, I went ahead and looked it up very quickly online. Immediately, through Google News, I had access to dozens of articles to whet my appetite. I got the jist of the subject, and then I moved on. All of this before the commercials on TV were over.

When the program returned, they dedicated seconds to the subject, and moved on. There was a huge difference between what I knew about the subject from what I learned online, and the very little I would have known if I had only relied upon the TV news segment. Entire generations are wired to rely on the latter, the youngest ones are wired to Google.

My parents, who are still rather young--they are both 41--are more likely to just wait for the news program to return.

These cultural differences blow my mind. They remind me how dynamic culture is, and how much it has changed even throughout the course of my short life.

I told my five-year-old brother a couple weeks ago, that the internet is not very old, and there was a long time when people did not have it. It was hard for him to grasp a time when people did not have Google. I have to admit, I ask myself that very same question all of the time.

(Head Explodes)

<comment><AUTHOR> Exactly. I can foresee that soon television news programs will find it harder and harder to attract viewers as the newer generation with its use of the Internet for news turns away from the television networks.

It'll be interesting to see what they do to stay alive, and if they try to fight back against the internet like the movie industry is doing.</comment></comment>


Board: only remote developer jobs - <AUTHOR> http://www.eastvox.com <comment><USER2> Look, we've all got to start somewhere, so at least you shipped.

Here are my thoughts:

* None of the footer links work. I cared because I wanted to know what made this site different than the 40 other remote job boards.

* There appear to have been 6 jobs posted ever. This hurts credibility on both ends of the market - I would expect you to scrape other job boards to stuff your content.

* The site kind of seems over-engineered for the number of jobs (e.g. search functionality for the 6 jobs)

* The name doesn't make sense to me - I'll never remember this

* "Momentarily free, enjoy" -> This doesn't seem humble to me. It still costs time to post a job here, and you need to defend that investment.

My advice would be to __do things that don 't scale __. Focus on talking to companies looking for remote developers to get a deeper understanding of their needs and the market.

<comment><USER3> I second this, plus the design made me think that I reached a parking page. I was 100% sure it was a parking page. I closed it, went back at it and after reading carefully I realized that the content matched the description

<comment><AUTHOR> Well, this is not the initial idea. And your feedback, is valuable to me. Tanks!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Looks like a good start. Personally I need to see a salary range before applying for a remote job. With in-office jobs you at least have any idea of what the going rate for the area is, but for remote it is going to depend on a huge number of factors.

<comment><AUTHOR> This is a really good tip! I make this too when i go apply for a new job. And, unfortunately, the market works as your describe it: "depend on a huge number of factors".

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> There are so many job boards out there now that it's way too saturated and every job board has something wrong with it (or a lot of things wrong with it). I just can't keep up with all of them and it takes some time (sometimes a lot of time) to learn and utilize them efficiently.

Good start but I think there's a huge space for something way more compelling.

<comment><AUTHOR> Tank you so much!

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Just tried to post a job. Remarks:

1\. Unclear why there are both "Company e-mail" and "Apply Email"

2\. Unclear what I'm supposed to put in "Based" if I really do't care. I've put my TZ instead.

3\. Main Technology: That's a list of... programming language? Why? I don't care about that, I care about candidates experiences with various business domains (networking, monitoring) and technological environment (TCP/IP, distributed sytems, unix system programming, web technologies...), and that the candidate is already somewhat familiar, or is willing to become familiar, with all of the many languages that are used around here.

4\. Is the price going to change? When? How?

<comment><AUTHOR> Tanks for the questions and doubts. I understood the point 1 and 2, but for the point 3: although we are programmers and be part of our mindset to always be learning new technologies, when you will apply for a new job, generally you will looking for the language that has more proficiency, so, remove the main technology, does not make sense for me. For the point 4: If this site earns traction, I will certainly charge for the ads.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> I've seen that Clevertech job opening around for a long time on many job boards. What's going on there?

<comment><AUTHOR> I dont know.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Not Turbolinks! Turbolinks appears to make building a SPA without javascript easy, but what it really does is expose you to some of the hardest to debug javascript bugs.

You will be fighting it every step of the way.

Stay away!

<comment><AUTHOR> Guys, please: Turbolinks® makes navigating your web application faster. Get the performance benefits of a single-page application without the added complexity of a client-side JavaScript framework. Use HTML to render your views on the server side and link to pages as usual. When you follow a link, Turbolinks automatically fetches the page, swaps in its <body>, and merges its <head>, all without incurring the cost of a full page load.

[https://www.npmjs.com/package/turbolinks](https://www.npmjs.com/package/turbolinks)

<comment><USER8> "all without incurring the cost of a full page load." Except that it just downloaded the whole page. Forget about any javascript that runs on doc ready in that fetched page, it wont run. It also caches a bunch of pages in memory, leaks event listeners etc! Let the fun begin!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Good start. Stay with it!

There is always more that can be done, but get it out there and keep shipping code.

A couple more tweeks and you should have a MVP.

<comment><AUTHOR> Tank you so much!</comment></comment>


One man's quest to create a bespoke suit from scratch - <AUTHOR> http://suitingmyself.com/ <comment><USER2> There are many costumers who do that kind of work routinely. I know people in the steampunk community who've done it.

</comment><comment><USER3> We need a comment section</comment>


New York state lawmakers have agreed to pass a sweeping climate plan - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/18/nyregion/greenhouse-gases-ny.html <comment><USER2> It would be nice for "subway cost control" to be part of that plan: [http://nymag.com/intelligencer/2019/05/new-york- infrastructu...](http://nymag.com/intelligencer/2019/05/new-york- infrastructure-costs.html). Subways are among the greenest possible transport modes and yet NYC hasn't built substantial new lines since 1940.

This is also the same city that provides copious free and heavily subsidized parking while banning or severely limited 30-pound, highly efficient electric vehicles: [https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/17/opinion/electric- scooters...](https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/17/opinion/electric-scooters- nashville.html).

I wonder how we should interpret the city's stated desires versus its actual policies.

<comment><USER3> I'm surprised to hear someone say that New York City has "copious free and heavily subsidized parking"; how does that manifest itself, exactly? Living in Manhattan, that's not really my experience.

<comment><USER4> Does your car parking cost as much as renting a flat/sqm? I bet it does not.

Where I live, parking space costs you about 15€/sqm/month on a single floor/no floor since it's 'public space'. A flat is avg. 22€/sqm/month and buildings in general come with 6 floors: we're closer to 6*22€/sqm/month for living space...

<comment><USER5> I don't want to argue for cars, but a square of something you can park on should definitely be cheaper per unit area than something you live in. I don't think I've ever parked anywhere I'd happily live.

<comment><USER6> In expensive real estate areas land costs should dwarf construction costs.

<comment><USER5> This isn't the issue though, the actual comparison is car park versus living space, and which can be built cheaper.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Marvellous. Is the ball actually starting to roll?

Oh, wait, it's a plan to form a committee that issues recommendations of how to do it in two years. Erm. So more aspiration than plan then.

Still, the broad aim is roughly in line with what the nations who've committed recently have signed up to, with actual plans. Different dates for net zero: Finland(2035), Ireland(2050), Norway(2030).

Oh and the UK(2050) who did so comically badly via soundbite only from Theresa but then immediately disagreed with what the committee on climate change plan had recommended, and the Chancellor who essentially said was too expensive to bother fixing anyway.

Where's the follow up to the UN Paris Climate Summit? London, 2020. Bloody typical.

<comment><USER8> > it's a plan to form a committee that issues recommendations of how to do it

Yup.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> > There are also numerous questions about whether the energy, real estate and > business communities can adapt by 2050, and how much it would cost to do so. > Business groups in the state had derided the bill as impractical and > potentially disastrous for companies forced to move to green energy sources.

If you are old enough to remember what the economy looked like 30 years ago, in 1989, think about how much it has transformed since then. Quite impressive, isn't it. If "business communities" and "business groups" think they can't adapt by 2050 (30 years from now) they show the complete lack of imagination. Sigh.

</comment><comment><USER10> You can see the realtime mix of power in NY at:

[https://www.nyiso.com/real-time-dashboard](https://www.nyiso.com/real-time- dashboard)

Right now, we're over 50% nuclear + hydro, though I suspect this goal will be harder to achieve when Indian Point shuts down.

<comment><USER11> Also remember all of the nuclear plants bleed cash and now require direct subsidy to operate. New York has lots of challenges ahead as the environmentalists hate gas and the NIMBY types and farmers hate solar/wind.

<comment><USER12> The atmosphere doesn't care about our green paper rectangles. If our rectangles don't care about the atmosphere, then that's an implementation bug.

<comment><USER13> Money isn't green paper rectangles, it is a store of value. It represents tradeoffs. It represents man-hours, other investments into our future that we could make, etc.

Pretending money isn't that important is just an ignorant thing to do.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> If the article is correct, that's a 10% move (60% to 70%) from fossil to green over a 10-year period. That's hardly a breakneck speed (though NY managed only 8% between 1990 and 2015).

Nonetheless, demanding that _all_ carbon producers get serious is a no-BS approach. Too bad that the cost of doing nothing had to become so obvious.

<comment><USER15> The cost of doing nothing is nothing.

<comment><USER16> The cost of doing nothing is climate change and all that comes with it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> 2050 is more than 30 years from now. The politicians that voted for this will be long gone many years before this fantasy needs to be completed, at which time perhaps we'll be out of fossil fuels and it will be moot.

</comment><comment><USER17> Do we have until 2050 for cities to go net neutral?

<comment><USER18> It's a political stunt. They put the deadline far enough in the future that they don't actually have to do anything.

<comment><USER19> Would you believe it if they said they were going to completely eliminate net CO2 emissions in 5-10 years?

<comment><USER20> No, but you could say that in order to hit 0 by 2050, you need to be at X by 2025 and Y by 2030...then commit to those.

And of course, the article states: "New York will be required to get 70 percent of its electricity from renewable sources by 2030, and shift entirely to carbon-free power a decade later."

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> dfeojm-zlib Virtual-signaling, small-scale nonsense to claim they're "helping."

CCS (and SRM) at scale (tens of trillion$, on the order of the pointless MIC cash-grabs in the Middle East) need to be expended to reduce CO2 to pre- industrial levels (280-300 ppm). Cities and states cannot and shouldn't handle this.. international- and national-level collaboration to standardize, strategize and deploy solutions are the most appropriate avenues.</comment>


Jon Hicks's Design Iterations for the Silverback Mascot  - <AUTHOR> http://www.hicksdesign.co.uk/journal/recent-work-silverback <comment><USER2> God I wish I had that much design talent. Love the logo.</comment>


France Is Making Space-Based Anti-Satellite Laser Weapons - <AUTHOR> https://www.popularmechanics.com/military/weapons/a28509615/france-anti-satellite-weapon/ <comment><USER2> > Additionally France plans to set up its own space force, the "Air and Space > Army," as part of the French Air Force. The new organization will be based > in Toulouse, but it's not clear if the Air and Space Army will remain part > of the French Air Force or become its own service branch.

They've announced that the Air Force is to become the Air and Space Force, which is quite different than what this paragraph from the article suggests.</comment>


Show HN: Mongoku, a Web-Scale GUI for MongoDB - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/huggingface/Mongoku <comment><AUTHOR> It scales with your data (at Hugging Face we use it on a 1TB+ cluster) and is blazing fast for all operations, including sort/skip/limit. Built on TypeScript/Node.js/Angular.

[disclaimer: made it]

</comment><comment><USER2> This is awesome, will definitely try it out. I actually wrote a project like this with a java backend but I ran into a json serialization issue on the server that put too many /// into nested json and I abandoned the project. Very cool project you made here, lots of use for it making mongo administration easy.

</comment><comment><USER3> Cool! Looks like a really nice interface.</comment>


Startup hustle: Why two men decided to sleep together in a van for months on end - <AUTHOR> http://pandodaily.com/2013/05/13/startup-hustle-why-two-men-decided-to-sleep-together-in-a-van-for-months-on-end/ <comment><USER2> Unfortunate headline wording.

</comment><comment><USER3> I lived out of my VW Vanagon while starting my business.. good time.

</comment><comment><USER4> Blatant PR spam.

</comment><comment><USER5> ... down by the river?</comment>


Long Exposures – Creating Average Frames from Movies - <AUTHOR> https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2017/05/long-exposures-creating-average-frames-from-movies/ <comment><USER2> I did something similar by piping ffmpeg into a numpy array, with each frame updating the average RGB value of each pixel in the array.

Here's a three-second clip from 'Logan' of a scene where Hugh Jackman's character is leaping through the air from right to left: [http://i.imgur.com/EIp56LX.jpg](http://i.imgur.com/EIp56LX.jpg)

I like the results better for short sequences, but here's the entirety of 'Logan' (not sure what's causing the dark line down the middle): [http://i.imgur.com/3QW6zPj.jpg](http://i.imgur.com/3QW6zPj.jpg)

<comment><USER3> Would you mind sharing the code? I find the second example oddly satisfying to look at and would like to experiment with other movies at different resolutions.

<comment><USER2> Here's my code: [https://gist.github.com/timbennett/9c1614281797ce620c6069476...](https://gist.github.com/timbennett/9c1614281797ce620c6069476d39c7b8)

You'll need to experiment to find the right value for the variable 'alpha' in the script. This controls each frame's opacity: too high and it will be overexposed, too low and it will be dark. It's roughly in the range 5/n to 40/n where n is the number of frames in the video, but depends on the film's overall moodiness too.

If you're going to run it on a feature film length video, I suggest making a low-resolution version (e.g. 144p) and fine-tuning alpha on that, since it will be significantly less frustrating.

<comment><USER3> Thanks!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Different but related. Color of movies by frame: Corrected:

[http://thecolorsofmotion.com/films](http://thecolorsofmotion.com/films)

<comment><USER2> If you're interested in creating your own: [http://timbennett.github.io/movie- barcodes/](http://timbennett.github.io/movie-barcodes/) (I wrote this, it's not fantastic but it's functional)

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> I wonder how a moving average of a movie would look? I think the trick would be in choosing the right length for the moving average window, so that the viewer could still see the "chapter" transitions.

</comment><comment><USER6> Related work: The artist Jason Salavon is well-known for making work using a software-driven frame averaging technique. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jason_Salavon](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jason_Salavon)

Using analog techniques there is a famous set of photographs of films playing in movie theaters by Japanese artist Hiroshi Sugimoto. In this work a long duration time-lapse photo of the film renders the screen glowing white with a pale outline of the theatre around it. [https://www.sugimotohiroshi.com/new- page-7](https://www.sugimotohiroshi.com/new-page-7)

</comment><comment><USER7> Also different but related: slit scan photography.

wikipedia: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slit- scan_photography](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slit-scan_photography)

with video: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NSesvu_uqLo](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NSesvu_uqLo)

</comment><comment><USER8> Awesome! Here's a similar project in the audio domain:

[http://rlukedubois.bandcamp.com/album/timelapse](http://rlukedubois.bandcamp.com/album/timelapse)

</comment><comment><USER9> Cool! I tried something similar using Go + ffmpeg. Eventually wanted to find a way to select the most "continuous" pixel from all available data and spider out, but never got that far. Instead I played around with gifs and space.

[1] [https://goo.gl/photos/se5pBWh399JJ945T6](https://goo.gl/photos/se5pBWh399JJ945T6) [2] [https://theblackbox.ca/blog/vector- video/](https://theblackbox.ca/blog/vector-video/)

</comment><comment><USER10> With VLC you can add motion blur to your videos in "Video Effects(⌘+E) > Color > Motion Blur", if you push the factor high you get some nice effects.

</comment><comment><USER11> I have one of Brendan Dawes' CinemaRedux prints on my wall at home. [http://www.brendandawes.com/projects/cinemaredux](http://www.brendandawes.com/projects/cinemaredux)

</comment><comment><USER12> you can also do some fun stuff with image averaging in ImageJ. here is a python script for ImageJ I wrote a while back that takes the standard deviation of several frames at a time and averages them onto a background ([https://pastebin.com/09wPkwhN](https://pastebin.com/09wPkwhN) nb: I am a terrible programmer and this was when I was just starting to learn) that produced this: [http://imgur.com/a/eaLEO](http://imgur.com/a/eaLEO)

</comment><comment><USER13> At the beginning of the article, there is a set of a 2 rows x 3 column set of images by Jason Schulman. The last imahlge on the first row, looks kind of like a blurry Albert Einstein.</comment>


Slip of the finger, deleted 4 years and  4,000 SMS messages. Thanks Apple. - <AUTHOR> http://fourlightyears.blogspot.com/2015/04/slip-of-finger-deleted-4-years-and.html

<comment><USER2> So you managed to botch a two step process that requires a slide gesture that has the singular purpose of deleting messages, and then instinctively pressed the large, red button that said "Delete" without thinking about it? I believe that instead of being critical of Apple you should be critical of yourself for being impulsive and lacking care for what you do.

<comment><USER3> I'm with you. This is user error, plain and simple. At least you had a backup. "Thanks, Apple" indeed.</comment></comment>


Boxing Legend Mary Kom's Journey from Rural India to the Olympics - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/the-mission/mary-kom-5249e06d751c <comment><USER2> These stories should be shown to corrupt officials in India in style of Stanley Kubrick director of A Clockwork Orange.</comment>


Should Patients Be Allowed to Choose – Or Refuse – Doctors by Race or Gender? - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/06/magazine/should-patients-be-allowed-to-choose-or-refuse-doctors-by-race-or-gender.html <comment><USER2> If you are the patient, and you refuse to be served by a doctor of a particular race or gender, then I think you're primarily hurting yourself.

But if you choose to do that, then I think you should lose all rights to any kind of complaint regarding the service you do receive.

Am I missing something?

<comment><USER3> I think most patients are ultimately making the best choices for them in good faith and we should assume so unless provided evidence otherwise. I have a Vietnamese friend with an older, non-English speaking parent who can only be helped by a Vietnamese doctor. Sure you can have interpreters, but that's not always the most convenient. There is also another element to this that has to do with race/genetics, which I will argue for only as a devil's advocate. People from different cultures/races are well, different. An Indian doctor will have the most intuitive sense for diagnosing an Indian patient. And even if that isn't factually true, if the patient believes it, is it wrong for them to pursue the option they think is best for them? If we outlaw or punish people for making the choice they believe is best for them in good faith, would we not then be liable for any negative outcome that should result from that?</comment></comment>


Last week's news - <AUTHOR> http://www.marco.org/502016907 <comment><USER2> What he's talking about is not news, but analysis. The Economist _really_ shines here as a model.

News isn't dead, only our consumption patterns have changed and it is definitely still more mainstream than being limited to news junkies, I don't know why everyone keeps saying that. Like, ask anyone if they watch the news, and the answer is no, but we're all on Hacker News or digg or insert_community_of_choice here and consuming "news" in other ways.

I think that twitter will probably be the platform that the next generation "news" app is built on. What it will do, and who it will appeal to are open questions...

<comment><USER3> Two stand-out features of The Economist I'd like to see emulated more:

1\. No separation of op-ed from news reporting. Just-the-facts-Ma'am reporting isn't objective, it just plays coy games with selective quotes and straw-men. It's dishonest and, worse, it's wordy.

2\. No signatures on articles, whether written by one person or the entire staff. The text is boldly honest, without worrying the author might never work again for saying the wrong thing. The paper itself holds the opinions, which lean different directions in different decades. This is okay.

Most blogs and have the first item down pat. But the second is rare, despite the easy collaborative editing that modern blogware offers, and the benefit of pseudo-anonymity for amateurs who can't keep a perpetually diplomatic tongue. A platform that nudges its community in this direction might be all that's needed.

(Just another company I'm too lazy to start.)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Last Week's Tech News:

Ars Technica -- "Week in __________"

\- Tech: [http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2010/04/week-in- tech...](http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2010/04/week-in-tech-decide- your-own-hot-stories-edition.ars)

\- Apple: [http://arstechnica.com/apple/news/2010/04/week-in-apple- veri...](http://arstechnica.com/apple/news/2010/04/week-in-apple-verizon- iphone-rumors-mac-os-x-update.ars)

\- Microsoft: [http://arstechnica.com/microsoft/news/2010/04/week-in- micros...](http://arstechnica.com/microsoft/news/2010/04/week-in-microsoft- windows-7-windows-live-chrome-attacks.ars)

\- Gaming: [http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/news/2010/04/week-in- gaming-e...](http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/news/2010/04/week-in-gaming-evony- water-balloons-pax-east.ars)

</comment><comment><USER5> I sent this to marco's email address, but Harpers.org has a "Weekly Review" every Tuesday. Example: <http://harpers.org/archive/2010/04/WeeklyReview2010-04-06>

<comment><USER6> I used to read this quite often, but it was so short that each sentence-length "story" was too short to contemplate, and there were no links to in-depth stories.

Clicking on your example though, I was very happily surprised to see that they have corrected all of these shortcomings! I'm not sure when it happened, but Harpers is definitely going back on my radar.

[edit] On second thought, it is still as myopically US and frivolous news oriented as ever, nevermind. I'll stick to the economist.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Relevant project "Long News" - <http://longnow.org/> \- "How many of today's headlines will matter in 100 years? 1000? Kirk Citron's "Long News" project collects stories that not only matter today, but will resonate for decades -- even centuries -- to come." via TED Talks - [http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/eng/kirk_citron_and_now_the_re...](http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/eng/kirk_citron_and_now_the_real_news.html)

</comment><comment><USER8> Interesting perspective. That seems like the niche held by magazines and "the Sunday paper". It's ironic that they provide a solution to information overload and yet are slowly being killed by the firehose itself.

Do they have the better content model? Is it just the cost of providing that type of service that makes the delivery model impossible in today's world, where we expect news to be free?

<comment><USER9> Such analysis would be perfect as the paid part of freemium.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> <http://news.ycombinator.com/best>

Not exhaustive enough - I also would wish for a HN with only the best links...

<comment><USER11> You want this perhaps: <http://hnweekly.chibidesign.com/>

<comment><USER10> Thanks for the link. The articles there all seem to be from January. Maybe the site stopped working?

<comment><USER11> Good point. I got it from this link: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1059465>

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Merrian Webster definition of "News" 1 a : a report of recent events

<http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/news>

In the information age "a week old is not recent". This is contextual. (Some living in Indonesia would find a week old report on US politics to be "recent").

</comment><comment><USER13> In the UK, there's The Week

<http://www.theweek.co.uk/>

<comment><USER14> There's a US edition as well:

<http://theweek.com/home>

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> I think the traditional magazines do this really well.

<comment><USER9> The mainstream ones sometimes get Science or Tech details glaringly wrong.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> What he wants is _The Week_ (<http://theweek.com>) and I must say it's a very good publication; quite subscription-worthy.

</comment><comment><USER17> Some have taken to calling this perspective "slow news". See:

[http://mediactive.com/2009/11/08/toward-a-slow-news- movement...](http://mediactive.com/2009/11/08/toward-a-slow-news-movement/)

</comment><comment><USER18> ACM TechNews is really good source of well-reviewed technology news.

</comment><comment><USER19> Sounds like a request for... ah... a magazine (eek!)

</comment><comment><USER20> like hnsummary but for everything else?</comment>


Why Python is Better than Matlab for Scientific Software - <AUTHOR> https://metarabbit.wordpress.com/2013/10/18/why-python-is-better-than-matlab-for-scientific-software/comment-page-1/

<comment><USER2> The argument that Python is "second best in more things" seems like a poor one to me, because it doesn't account for the size of the gap between first and second in some cases.

For one anecdote - during my PhD studies, I knew Python very well, and spent a week or two working with and around SciPy's not-quite-complete stats libraries. Eventually I threw in the towel, used Python as a preprocessor to create CSV files and got it all done in R in a couple of hours of REPL time, _with no prior exposure to R_.

I'm sure there are thousands of counter examples in which Python stomps all over R for stats analysis, but for my particular use case and set of data, the difference between the best tool and the second best was astonishing.

<comment><USER3> With Rpy, you could have done it even from Python, calling R seamlessly and without data copy.</comment></comment>


Maloney Introduces Legislation to Block FCC Rollback of Net Neutrality - <AUTHOR> https://seanmaloney.house.gov/media-center/press-releases/maloney-introduces-legislation-to-save-the-open-internet-block-fcc <comment><USER2> Is there any reason to believe that this will ever even make it out of committee and come up for a vote?

He's a Democrat. Democrats are a minority in the House of Representatives (193 Democrats vs. 239 Republicans), and Republicans have been very united in opposition to net neutrality. Getting rid of the 2015 rule is even part of the party platform adopted at the 2016 convention. It seems very unlikely that enough Republicans can be convinced to go against their party position and flip on this.

They would also draw the ire of President Trump, who is on the record as strongly opposing net neutrality. Not that he actually knows what net neutrality is [1]...

At best, Republicans might let this go to a vote, and allow up to about 20 Republicans from moderate states where Democrats might use net neutrality to flip seats vote in favor of it to help keep those seats Republican.

[1] Trump: ""Obama's attack on the internet is another top down power grab. Net neutrality is the Fairness Doctrine. Will target conservative media." [https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/53260835850816716...](https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/532608358508167168)

<comment><USER3> _> Republicans have been very united in opposition to net neutrality_

Does it indicate all of them are corrupt? Because only corrupt shills oppose it willingly.

<comment><USER4> It's self-evidently not the case that only "corrupt shills" oppose FCC- mandated net neutrality.

<comment><USER3> The core of the opposition to it comes from monopolists who don't want their abusive monopolistic practices to be held in check. Who else, besides those who are paid off by said monopolists, would willingly side with them?

<comment><USER5> People who do not understand tech. It's quite easy to sell the repeal of net neutrality as "pro competition" to someone who doesn't understand the issues. Unfortunately this includes a lot of people.

<comment><USER4> Robert Graham understands tech. I'm a software developer who ran an ISP with default-free BGP peering. It's not just people who "don't understand the tech'.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Apart from being doomed to failure, this seems like a stupid thing to legislate for. The one thing everybody in this debate should be able to agree upon is that Title II is not an especially good regulatory mechanism for enforcing net neutrality, just the only one that the FCC is legally entitled to use. If Congress wanted to do something useful they could legislate to allow (or require) the FCC to enforce net neutrality under a lighter-touch regulatory system like the pre-2015 Open Internet regime that failed to stand up in court.

Of course if Congress does pass anything it all it's most likely to be a law to shield ISP from liability for not delivering the services their customers have paid for when they don't receive the kickbacks they want...

<comment><USER7> If congress REALLY wanted to be useful, they could declare Internet access to be a first amendment right and providers of last mile access to be natural monopolies (to be regulated as such).

<comment><USER4> Congress can't "declare" something to be a First Amendment right. A thing is either guaranteed under 1A or it isn't; if it is, it's guaranteed regardless of the laws passed by Congress. That's a question for Article III tribunals.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I'm unable to confirm, but based on Maloney's committee memberships, this appears to be introduced in the Transportation and Infrastructure Committee. Here is the membership list for those who would like to to lobby the appropriate representatives:

[https://transportation.house.gov/about/membership.htm](https://transportation.house.gov/about/membership.htm)

<comment><USER9> Extra note, it's not worth contacting members who do not represent your district. The interns are instructed to take any contacts from other districts and ship them to your own member's office.

An exception could exist for people who live on a gerrymandered district border or who are in the same state as a member seeking a state-wide office.

It's always better to call too.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Bring it on. At least something is being attempted.

The American body politic has been beyond repair for at least six years. The whole damned superstructure at the national level deserves to come tumbling down.

Whether or not Maloney's proposal makes it anywhere is beside the point, and concerning itself with that is a pedantic waste of time in smugness. I applaud Maloney for doing this precisely because how abundantly clear it makes the dysfunction, regulatory capture, and public interest disconnect.

</comment><comment><USER11> Great news! Could someone also introduce some legislation to neutralise FCC's requirement for WiFi router manufacturers to block custom firmwares plese?

</comment><comment><USER12> What's the point of applauding legislative initiatives like this that are obviously doomed to failure?

It's a waste of time that could be better spent elsewhere. The only point of this is to make Maloney more marketable in the next election.

<comment><USER13> It's a signal. Signals are important even if futile. Without such signals, we can only make assumptions concerning where the minority party stands on whichever issue.

<comment><USER14> It also forces Congresspeople to publicly take a stand and not just sit idly by and let Ajit Pai do the dirty work. Getting people on the record is important anytime something is being done at the behest of a limited number of corporations and contrary to the interests of their constituents.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> This is just stupid. Or maybe smart posturing at best.

This won't happen. But maybe it will look like it could've. Good move for Maloney. Meaningless for all of us.</comment>


Robots didn't take our jobs - <AUTHOR> https://www.chrisstucchio.com/blog/2016/robots_didnt_take_our_jobs.html <comment><USER2> Insightful post. Occupational licensing is regressive because it hurts lower income families the most. Single mother wants to run a salon from her apartment in the projects? Illegal. Guy wants to hustle cigarettes on the street? Death sentence.

Makes things more expensive for consumers, and totally chokes out small startups.

Licensing should be voluntary, and paid for by premium prices. Instead we have all these artificial monopolies crushing competition and distorting prices.

<comment><USER3> Americans like safety more than they like free markets. You might feel otherwise, but US citizens have made their collective decision.

<comment><USER4> That's not true at all. As an American, I was never given the option to purchase an "unsafe" cigarette from Eric Garner - he was killed in order to prevent me from having that option.

<comment><USER5> According to wikipedia, Garner was not primarily a cigarette salesman:

1\. He had been a horticulturist at the New York City Department of Parks and Recreation, but quit for health reasons.

2\. Garner had been arrested by the NYPD thirty times since 1980 on charges such as assault, resisting arrest, and grand larceny.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_of_Eric_Garner](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_of_Eric_Garner)

With thirty arrests, he is best described as a criminal who used to work as horticulturist. Although:

"An official said he had been arrested multiple times for allegedly selling unlicensed cigarettes"

<comment><USER4> At least as indicated in the video of his death, none of this is relevant. He didn't assault any police officers when he was killed and he didn't appear to be resisting or committing larceny.

Also, you do know that "resisting arrest" just means "the cops don't like this guy", right? (I suppose it's easy for folks who don't interact with the police not to know this.)

<comment><USER5> We must have seen different videos, then, as it's very clear from it that he was resisting arrest.

Is this the one you were talking about? [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JpGxagKOkv8](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JpGxagKOkv8)

PS: Can you tell just how biased you are? I'm curious as to how oblivious you are of your own professional shortcomings.

<comment><USER4> I just rewatched the video, module the actual killing part. He's having a conversation and pretty animated, waving his arms Italian style, when the police grab him. Almost immediately he's put into a chokehold.

Clearly the personal attacks bolster your case.

<comment><USER5> "And if all others accepted the lie which the Party imposed – if all records told the same tale – then the lie passed into history and became truth. "Who controls the past," ran the Party slogan, "controls the future: who controls the present controls the past." And yet the past, though of its nature alterable, never had been altered. Whatever was true now was true from everlasting to everlasting. It was quite simple. All that was needed was an unending series of victories over your own memory. "Reality control," they called it: in Newspeak, "doublethink." (1.3.18)"

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> > In the "poverty" regime of approximately $0-$15k/year (I put "poverty" in > scare quotes because in India this would be considered "rich")

Cost of living is what makes $0-15k/year poverty in the US. It's disingenuous to suggest that one can equate the US dollar amount poverty level designation with that of India.

<comment><USER4> Nope. Here are numbers which are adjusted to cost of living, and which show that the bottom 5% of America is about as rich as the top 5% of India.

[http://economix.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/01/31/the-haves- and-t...](http://economix.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/01/31/the-haves-and-the-have- nots/)

THESE NUMBERS ARE ADJUSTED FOR COST OF LIVING.

(Since this keeps coming up, I added a link to that article to the post.)

<comment><USER7> I am not so sure about the validity of that graph. Even a quick google search search provides [http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/calculator.cms](http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/calculator.cms) which is also from 2011. 8500 dollars (the cutoff for the bottom 5% of the US according to [http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2012/01/15/business/one-p...](http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2012/01/15/business/one- percent-map.html)) a year gives a person in the top 16% of India. But this is without any adjustment whatsoever. And I checked, the calculator is in terms of USD not INR according to the survey it comes from. The other argument to consider is how much India's top ventile has increased by compared to the bottom ventile of the US since 2011. Just by economic growth numbers it would have relatively increased. If you can provide what your article's base income numbers were and how they adjusted them to get the graph, it would be much more convincing.

<comment><USER4> This is probably a good primer:

[http://siteresources.worldbank.org/INTPOVRES/Resources/47722...](http://siteresources.worldbank.org/INTPOVRES/Resources/477227-1142020443961/Module5_chap9_10.pdf)

Yearly statistics on India are not very good. Realistically if you have accurate info on what happened in the past 5 years (form what I've seen, they've been great!), you should keep quiet about it and just rake in crores in the shares markets.

<comment><USER7> The paper you have cited not only uses data from 1998, it also splits India into rural and urban India. The passage in the paper that I can find to support you claim is as follows:

"Now, consider mean income of the people belonging to the top decile or ventile, in countries ranging from rural India to Cameroon. Their income puts them between the 51th and 69th percentile of world distribution. Therefore, these two distributions, e.g. Japan's and rural India's, practically do not overlap. Or to give another example: a Frenchman on welfare or unemployment benefits (who would presumably belong to the bottom decile of income distribution in France) would still be better off than a top decile person in Madagascar."

Note that it only talks about rural India. In fact all the charts in the paper, including the chart on top decile/ventile of poor vs bottom decile/ventile of rich on page 47 do not even include Urban India. I would be curious to see this study repeated with current numbers and without splitting India into urban and rural. Especially because of the amount of urbanization and economic growth that India has seen since 1998.

<comment><USER4> The actual source is Milanovic's book (which you'd know if you read the NYT article), but that's $12 on kindle: [http://amzn.to/1VSdMU5](http://amzn.to/1VSdMU5)

I spent a few minutes googling hoping to find something academic by the same author, but didn't look as carefully as I should have.

But since you've called me out, I dug up my copy of the book. Apparently this paper is the original source and it uses 2005 data: [https://www.gc.cuny.edu/CUNY_GC/media/CUNY-Graduate- Center/P...](https://www.gc.cuny.edu/CUNY_GC/media/CUNY-Graduate- Center/PDF/Centers/LIS/Milanovic/papers/2012/gpol_170.pdf)

No idea where to get the most current data.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> So when Uber and the other transportation companies will be introducing automated cars and truck and one of the only industries that isn't possible to outsource and doesn't require education, become replaced by robots then what?

The Taxi Medallions where obviously out of touch with reality because technology allow anyone to be able to drive a car and find the right address, but it does so by lowering the money you can actually make and so removing restrictions creates more jobs but at lower salaries (especially in ubers case where they dont allow drivers to hire other drivers).

It's ironic how many people who normally claim to be free market proponents simply ignore the consequences of the free market when it works against their argument.

Nothing in that post changes the fact that there are less and less jobs and that there will continue to be so as long as technology progresses.

We can hope that prices comes down so we don't need a lot of money to get by, but unless something fundamentally change not just robots, technology is going to take over all functions on what we today consider jobs humans can do.

</comment><comment><USER9> In the linked article op misses the critical variation of occupational licensing and regulation over time. Never, ever, ever constant over time and thats the real problem.

Nobody, and I mean nobody, wants to go back to Upton Sinclair's "The Jungle" wrt the linked article's discussion of street food providers. The current establishment system sucks about as bad as "The Jungle" yet in a totally different way. A pre-FDA, pre-OSHA, pre-FCC, pre-FAA world? No thanks!

The solution is that historically the establishment changes as little as possible with the exception of riots, revolutions, and guillotines. Status quo till the collapse. A new cultural solution such as all laws and regulations having a sunset date might help us smooth over the human nature boom bust cycle of laws and regulation.

All laws and regulations stink after they sit around too long and start rotting. You can use tech and muscle and money to try to prevent change, or you can try something totally new and flow with change.

My bright idea won't help with entrenched interests such as property owners. Nobody who paid $5M for the land for a restaurant is EVER going to make nice with food trucks. In a limited way bureaucracy can help.. crack the path of money... "I'm so sorry mr restaurant real estate landlord, but you don't pay prop taxes that fund the state DMV and we're in charge of the road regulations WRT selling food from a truck, so if you don't like progress you can pound sand or rent to a different type of business other than restaurant."

</comment><comment><USER10> I for one intend to wait and see how these Universal Basic Income experiments play out. Maybe the decrease in overhead for over 9000 social programs will combine with the increased tax revenue generated by additional low income persons entering the workforce (now that doing so works to their financial advantage) and produce enough revenue to offset the cost of the programs. Maybe not.

<comment> saiya-jin considering the projected expenses for Swiss proposal - something around 220 billions of CHF per year (~=USD), and if I recall correctly only about 1/3 of it could be saved by reducing social programs and other savings, rest is a necessary steep taxes hike - not likely. It's ridiculously high amount for this tiny, albeit wealthy country. And it goes in exact opposite of what made this country consistently great over last 800 years - belief that you should be successful only if you put in hard and quality work. citizens are given more rights than elsewhere, but also more responsibility over their own destiny.

it's ridiculously expensive social experiment. vast majority of people around me is very skeptical since we all know plenty of people (ie from childhood) that live whole life on social help, and they don't contribute anything back. their full time job is slacking, drinking and finding a way to screw system and others more and more.

but boy would I wish to see it work! I just don't consider it possible in this century. not even in this great country

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Have these jobs existed in the US in the first place? Was it commonplace for people to have cooks for example? Not to nitpick but is it really a matter of jobs disappearing or a cultural/societal difference?

<comment><USER12> On the street I grew up in, the houses all had maid quarters. These were suburban houses built in the 20's and are smaller than the typical McMansion from the 80's. Also there was that one episode of Baywatch where Mitch hired a cook...

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Interesting take, but I think SS is still better. Since a person can get some money for basics, he can try to learn something he/she is interested in and get a better job than that pay $20K. In India, though lot of maids would prefer to do something else, they don't have the luxury to take some time off and get skilled to earn more.

<comment><USER14> But the article makes the case that just acquiring the skill set isn't enough. There are prohibitive costs involved if you want to legally use those skills professionally.

Obviously there is a case of the grass being greener on the other side here, though.

Consumers in India want the quality assurance and standardization of services, that American regulation ensures to a certain extent.

<comment><USER4> Consumers in India want that _option_. They want the option of spending 60rs on guaranteed clean pani puri. (I love Elco and I have it every time I pass through Bandra.)

That doesn't mean they want encounter killings of the guys who are selling regular pani puri.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I think one of the difficulties of preserving freedom is that it's easy to get stuck in distortion bubbles where we become unaware of what we're actually missing. We can maintain we have a free market in the US, and it does not appear to be otherwise. Only the few who see outside of the bubble actually have a wider gamut in which to compare.

\---

A part I think is missing from this analysis is relative wealth inequality. Prashant's driver and cook can only ever have a fraction of his income. This seems untenable in the US where those servants would be priced out of any wider economy. For example, there is no market for the $1 prepared meal in the US, likely due to those barriers to entry. But this creates a self-sustaining cycle which compounds the low-income trap. In effect, the poor are discouraged from even _having_ an economy.

</comment><comment><USER16> Yet another article that completely ignores cost of living and cost of working to the worker.

> In short, if a person could earn $15k-20k/year as a maid, they have no > incentive whatsoever to actually take this job; they can also have > $15-20k/year of consumption by taking advantage of the safety net and they > don't even have to work.

There's absolutely nothing wrong with this. Based on the cost of living in a certain area, I wouldn't be surprised if the person decides not to work even if the job offered was in the $25k-30k/year range, since the marginal benefits of earning an extra $10,000 do not outweigh the marginal cost of having to work as a maid for a year.

It is not up to an individual person to ensure that their personal utility function aligns with the supply side economics prerogative that work is somehow inherently beneficial to the worker aside from the net benefit that it provides.

If you want such a worker to work - create a higher wage job or create a policy that allows them to receive education to acquire such a job somewhere else. Or provide such worker a means to relocate to an area with lower cost of living, where taking a job with $10,000 marginal benefit will be sufficient to enter the workforce.

<comment><USER17> Provide, provide, provide. Create a higher-wage job. Provide an education. Provide a means to relocate. Is any part of the "running of one's own life" the responsibility of the individual? Is it not the job of one to take advantage of the opportunities that exist? (e.g. schooling, self-education, moving to areas with higher opportunity, etc.)?

This is a part of the learned helplessness of poverty - waiting for others to provide.

<comment><USER18> So tell me, where does one get the money to pay for such an education? Where does one get the money to move to places with jobs? Further, where does one get the time to study if they're working two jobs? How does one afford the computer equipment and the internet connection? If you say "use a library", how does one ensure that their two jobs don't take all of the time that the library is open? What if one has children?

You can drone on and on about "personal responsibility" all you want if it makes you feel better, but at the end of the day, that isn't going to do jack shit. We need actual answers to these issues, not some haughty, Captain Hindsight, "well, you should have..." crap designed only to make yourself feel better.

It all comes down to, do you actually care about fixing these problems, or not? If you drone on about "personal responsibility", then it's clear you're only interested in assigning blame, and not interested in actually trying to fix things. Go feel superior somewhere else, and get out of the way of people actually trying to fix things.

<comment><USER15> > _you 're only interested in assigning blame, and not interested in actually > trying to fix things_

This succinctly sums up your comment. Perhaps if you gave OP the benefit of the doubt, you'd understand he's trying to fix things in a _distributed_ manner, rather than thinking everybody can be rescued with top-down omniscience.

<comment><USER19> OP is not trying to fix things in a distributed manner. They're saying that the status quo is fine - the solutions are already here and that people aren't taking advantage of them. This is is not a constructive position because, the current status quo clearly doesn't work for many people, so there is scope for making changes and improvements.

Like any complex problem, there probably isn't a simple solution. Its not a binary issue of 'personal responsibility' vs 'central government', theres room for central, state & local governments as well as charities, communities, and companies to work together on this.

<comment><USER15> I don't see any assertions of the status quo being fine. The issue is with the passivation of individuals, both by themselves and well-meaning others.

<comment><USER8> When it's claimed that the jobs are there it's just a matter of taking them then yes it's a claim tha the status quo is being fine.

<comment><USER15> Would you please point me to exactly where the original blog post, or the above comment by 'jackhack, assert that these jobs are currently available in the US?

There's really two independent facets to this subject. One is about the immediate state of things, which in the US is regulation artificially lowering the amount of jobs available (even minimum wage does this). The blog post does a good job exploring this.

The second, which you seem more concerned about, is the trends of whether these types of jobs will continue to exist at all in the future. Which I will agree is questionable.

The US basically has an accelerated view of the effects of automation, as outsourcing to cheaper countries has identical effects. Furthermore, our poor lack the table stakes for participation in our highly-regulated economy, as explored in the original post.

I would point to broken employment and monetary policy that are actively further screwing up the economy and fostering the current go-big-or-stay-home environment. If we really have gotten much more productive, why is the standard "full time" workweek 40+ hours and not 15?

<comment><USER8> The post have a comment by the author saying basically this:

"I'm just pointing out that the jobs are here and those folks simply refuse to do them."

Problem is that this is a phenomena you see everywhere regardless of system but in all liberal markets.

The only thing thats consistent is the technology.

The problem when you remove regulation (uber) you end up with lots of jobs that pay less until as with Uber they will all be automated away.

This is the problem and ignoring it by trying to use the typical "there are plenty of jobs" as the Author does is simply refusing to deal with the reality as it is IMO.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> "I put "poverty" in scare quotes because in India this would be considered "rich""

Yeah, this guy doesn't know what he's talking about. Yes, in India, that might be considered "rich". But he's not talking about India. He's talking about the US. And in the US, that amount of money would make you desperately poor. Further, if you could make that amount of money either doing hard, laborious work, or not doing anything, any rational person would do nothing, as it doesn't have the costs that labor have on the body.

If you really wanted to see that the person took the job as a maid, then what should happen is that they would get the safety net money as well. That way, there's an incentive to take the maid job. (One could also just raise the wages of the maid job, but nobody wants to do that).

<comment><USER4> If you don't like my informal description, look at the main graph in this article:

[http://economix.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/01/31/the-haves- and-t...](http://economix.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/01/31/the-haves-and-the-have- nots/)

Branco Milanovic's numbers support the exact claim I made - 95'th percentile in India is approximately the bottom 5'th percentile in the US.

THOSE NUMBERS ARE ADJUSTED FOR PURCHASING POWER. (I feel the need to heavily emphasize this since whenever I post that graph, people ignore this fact.)

<comment><USER7> I think it is worth noting that the graph you provide is based on data from 1998, and only includes data for rural india, since Milanovic's study split rural and urban india into two separate countries (with good statistical reason). But your claim only holds for a rural india to US comparison in 1998.</comment></comment></comment>


Blade Runner is set in November 2019: What predictions did the movie get right? - <AUTHOR> https://www.express.co.uk/entertainment/films/1198613/Blade-Runner-setting-predictions-November-2019-Los-Angeles-Harrison-Ford-Rick-Deckard <comment><USER2> This article reads like a click-through from a Taboola/Outbrain chum box: designed purely to maximize ad viewability.

</comment><comment><USER3> Daily Express is a cancer on the British press, please don't click...

<comment><USER4> Quite right, this is Buzzfeed level of "journalism".</comment></comment>


Not-quite-so-broken TLS - <AUTHOR> https://nqsb.io

<comment><AUTHOR> One of the really useful things is that there is now a (peer-reviewed) paper on the work, which covers much more detail about the motivation, as well as performance results ("same handshake performance as OpenSSL and 73% – 84% for bulk throughput").

[https://nqsb.io/nqsbtls-usenix-security15.pdf](https://nqsb.io/nqsbtls- usenix-security15.pdf)

<comment><USER2> 404 at the moment, and not in Wayback. Google Cache finds it at:

[http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:https%3...](http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:https%3A%2F%2Fnqsb.io%2Fnqsbtls- usenix-security15.pdf)

in turn listing the source as:

[http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~pes20/nqsbtls-usenix- security15.pdf](http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~pes20/nqsbtls-usenix-security15.pdf)

<comment><USER3> You're getting a 404 from nqsb.io? This: [https://nqsb.io/nqsbtls-usenix- security15.pdf](https://nqsb.io/nqsbtls-usenix-security15.pdf) works fine for me. What browser/cache setup do you have? Does a `curl` work?

I left another copy of the paper on my homepage at [http://anil.recoil.org/papers/2015-usenixsec- nqsb.pdf](http://anil.recoil.org/papers/2015-usenixsec-nqsb.pdf), but Peter's version or the USENIX site should be fine as well.

<comment><USER2> Sorry for my delay responding; HN Notify just, very belatedly (10 days later), spit out a notification of your reply.

In case the information is of any value, this much later, the first link (at nqsb.io) works for me, now. (So does the second link.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> some might have heard of this TLS stack as OCaml-TLS, but we rebranded it for our Usenix security paper. The paper includes an evaluation of common vulnerabilities in widely used TLS stacks in 2014.

<comment><USER5> Is the rebranding just for the paper or you plan on keeping it? Or is it because you plan on making this available to non-OCaml applications as well (I think it was mentioned previously on HN that ctypes/cstubs could be used in reverse mode for this)?

<comment><USER3> Definitely working on making it available to non-OCaml applications as well. The most obvious way is by using 'tlstunnel' to act as a TLS terminator to TCP, but also via inverted Ctypes to ship a shared library and C header files. More on that when it's working...</comment></comment></comment>


Time Seems to Pass More Slowly for the Depressed - <AUTHOR> http://nymag.com/scienceofus/2015/03/time-seems-to-pass-more-slowly-for-the-depressed.html <comment><USER2> It makes sense to me that depressed people are just as accurate at judging time as non-depressed people. In cases where depression has a sudden onset, that "slower" rate of time passing might take some getting used to. But eventually you WOULD get used to it, and start to judge the passage of time from that frame of reference.

There's no reason that couldn't be just as accurate as a non-depressed person's judgment. It's just a matter of relearning the skill. Or learning it in the first place, to those of us whose sense of time wasn't so acute to begin with.</comment>


Apple May Finally Ditch Problematic Butterfly Keyboard with MacBook Air Refresh - <AUTHOR> https://hothardware.com/news/apple-may-ditch-butterfly-keyboard-macbook-air-refresh <comment><USER2> See this discussion [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20353148](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20353148)

<comment><AUTHOR> Sadly, I can't delete my entry. :-(</comment></comment>


Mozilla Common Voice Dataset: More data, more languages - <AUTHOR> https://discourse.mozilla.org/t/common-voice-dataset-release-mid-year-2020/62938 <comment><USER2> Data in ML is critical, and this release from Mozilla is absolute gold for voice research.

This dataset and will help the many independent deep learning practitioners such as myself that aren't working at FAANG and have only had access to datasets such as LJS [1] or self-constructed datasets that have been cobbled together and manually transcribed.

Despite the limited materials available, there's already some truly amazing stuff being created. We've seen a lot of visually creative work being produced in the past few years, but the artistic community is only getting started with voice and sound.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3qR8I5zlMHs](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3qR8I5zlMHs)

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L69gMxdvpUM](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L69gMxdvpUM)

Another really cool thing popping up are TTS systems trained from non-English speakers reading English corpuses. I've heard Angela Merkel reciting copypastas, and it's quite amazing.

I've personally been dabbling in TTS as one of my "pandemic side projects" and found it to be quite fun and rewarding:

[https://trumped.com](https://trumped.com)

[https://vo.codes](https://vo.codes)

Besides TTS, one of the areas I think this data set will really help with is the domain of Voice Conversion (VC). It'll be awesome to join Discord or TeamSpeak and talk in the voice of Gollum or Rick Sanchez. The VC field needs more data to perfect non-aligned training (where source and target speakers aren't reciting the same training text that is temporally aligned), and this will be extremely helpful.

I think the future possibilities for ML techniques in art and media are nearly limitless. It's truly an exciting frontier to watch rapidly evolve and to participate in.

[1] [https://keithito.com/LJ-Speech-Dataset/](https://keithito.com/LJ-Speech- Dataset/)

<comment><USER3> Curious to know why don't researchers use Audiobooks/Videos and transcript when data is not available? Is it because these do not capture different dialects/accents?

<comment><USER4> I suppose there might some copyright issues with such content (?)

<comment><USER5> Well there is Librivox...

<comment><USER6> Indeed, that's what one of the famous established datasets, LibriSpeech, bases on.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> This is great! I'm always excited to see new common voice releases.

As someone actively using the data I wish I could more easily see (and download lists for?) the older releases as there have been 3-4 dataset updates for English now. If we don't have access to versioned datasets, there's no way to reproduce old whitepapers or models that use common voice. And at this point I don't remember the statistics (hours, accent/gender breakdown) for each release. It would be neat to see that over time on the website.

I'm glad they're working on single word recognition! This is something I've put significant effort into. It's the biggest gap I've found in the existing public datasets - listening to someone read an audiobook or recite a sentence doesn't seem to prepare the model very well for recognizing single words in isolation.

My model and training process have adapted for that, though I'm still not sure of the best way to balance training of that sort of thing. I have maybe 5 examples of each English word in isolation but 5000 examples of each number (Speech Commands), and it seems like the model will prefer e.g. "eight" over "ace", I guess due to training balance.

Maybe I should be randomly sampling 50/5000 of the imbalanced words each epoch so the model still has a chance to learn from them without overtraining?

<comment><USER8> What if you first trained a classifier that told you if the uttereance is a single word vs. multiple words? Then, based on that prediction, you would use one of two separate models.

The technique you're thinking of is called oversampling and there are many other general techniques for dealing with imbalanced datasets, as it's a very common situation.

<comment><USER7> Thanks, the oversampling mention gives me a good reference to start.

The model itself has generalized pretty well to handle both single and multi word utterances I think, without a separate classifier, but I'm definitely not going to rule out multi-model recognition in the long run.

My main issues with single words right now are:

\- The model sometimes plays favorites with numbers (ace vs eight)

\- Collecting enough word-granularity training data for words-that-are-not- numbers (I've done a decent job of this so far, but it's a slow and painful process. I've considered building a frontend to turn sentence datasets into word datasets with careful alignment)

<comment><USER9> For that last point, forced alignment tools may be useful.

An issue to watch for though is elision: a word in a sentence can often be said differently to the individual words, eg saying "last" and "time" separately one typically includes the final t in last and yet said together, commonly it's more like "las time".

<comment><USER7> Yeah, I'm familiar with forced alignment. This is slightly nicer than the generic forced alignment, because my model has trained on the alignment of all of my training data already. My character based models already have pretty good guesses for the word alignment.

I think I'd be very cautious about it and use a model with a different architecture than the aligner to validate extracted words, and probably play with training on the data a bit to see if the resulting model makes sense or not. I do have examples of most english words to compare extracted words.

<comment><USER9> Sounds like a great approach

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Does this dataset include people with voice or speech disorders (or other disabilities)? I don't see any mention of it in this announcement or the forums, though I haven't looked thoroughly (yet).

Examples: dysphonias of various kinds, dysarthria (e.g. from ALS / cerebral palsy), vocal fold atrophy, stuttering, people with laryngectomies / voice prosthesis, and many more.

Altogether, this represents millions of people for whom current speech recognition systems do not work well. This is an especially tragic situation, since people with disabilities depend more heavily on assistive technologies like ASR. Data/ML bias is rightfully a hot topic lately, so I feel that the voices of people w/ disabilities need to be amplified as well (npi).

<comment><USER11> There's g.co/euphonia for those projects

<comment><USER12> Google is certainly doing some great work with this, both Project Euphonia and other research [0]. However, as far as I know, the Euphonia dataset is closed and only usable by Google. A Common Voice disordered speech dataset would (presumably) be open to all, allowing independent projects and research. (I would love to have access to such a dataset.)

[0] [https://ai.googleblog.com/2019/08/project-euphonias- personal...](https://ai.googleblog.com/2019/08/project-euphonias-personalized- speech.html)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I would love to work for Mozilla on this effort full time. I have experience in voice data collection / annotation / processing at 2 FAANG companies. Anyone have an in? Thinking of reaching out to the person on who wrote this post directly.

<comment><USER9> The people on those related projects seem like a great bunch of people to work with.

I don't have "an in" but it's probably worth having a look over the Common Voice and Deep Speech forums on Discourse to see who the main people are. They also hang out in their Matrix Chat groups, so might be able to get in touch that way. Links are below.

[https://discourse.mozilla.org/c/deep- speech/247](https://discourse.mozilla.org/c/deep-speech/247)

[https://discourse.mozilla.org/c/voice/239](https://discourse.mozilla.org/c/voice/239) [https://chat.mozilla.org/](https://chat.mozilla.org/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Why on earth are they using mp3 for the dataset? Its absolutely ancient and probably the worst choice possible. Opus is widely used for voice because it gets flawless results at minuscule bitrates. And don't tell me its because users find mp3 simpler because if you are doing machine learning I expect you know how to use an audio file.

<comment><USER7> Probably because they're uploading (and playing back) from a webpage and Web Audio is weird and inconsistent, so sticking to a builtin codec is probably more reliable. As someone who trains on their data, it seems usable anyway. Training on 1000 hours of Common Voice makes my model better in very clear ways.

[https://caniuse.com/#search=mp3](https://caniuse.com/#search=mp3)

[https://caniuse.com/#search=opus](https://caniuse.com/#search=opus)

I got flac working for speech.talonvoice.com with an asm codec so they could do whatever in theory, but I do get some audio artifacts sometimes.

<comment><USER6> Yeah especially compatibility with Apple browsers was very important for them. I'd added functionality to normalize audio for verification but they removed it multiple times because it didn't work on Safari for various reasons.

I ended up building an extension for Firefox that normalizes the audio on the website if installed: [https://github.com/est31/vmo-audio- normalizer](https://github.com/est31/vmo-audio-normalizer) [https://addons.mozilla.org/de/firefox/addon/vmo-audio- normal...](https://addons.mozilla.org/de/firefox/addon/vmo-audio-normalizer/)

In general I don't think normalization should happen at the backend. It's useful for training data to have multiple loudness levels, so that the network can understand them all.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> If curious see also

2019 [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19270646](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19270646)

</comment><comment><USER16> To contribute [https://voice.mozilla.org/en/speak](https://voice.mozilla.org/en/speak)

<comment><USER17> They make it really easy to contribute! You don't need to make an account (you can though) and you read/review short sentences. I just added 75 recordings and it only took ~30 minutes. Also if you speak other languages you can contribute in them. It would really be great if there was a comprehensive public voice dataset for people to do all sorts of interesting things with.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> This is really encouraging to see. So nice to see languages that have more speakers than the most commonly translated languages.

</comment><comment><USER19> The complete project is very exciting, I hope that this is really a game changer, that enables private persons and startups to create new neural networks without a big investment for the data collection.

I worked for the Esperanto dataset of common voice in the last year, and we now have collected over 80 hours in Esperanto. I hope that in a year or two we'll have collected enough data to create the first usable neural network for a constructed language and maybe the first voice assistant in Esperanto too. I will train a first experimental model with this release soon.

</comment><comment><USER20> This is interesting. As someone who has always tons of interview data to transcribe for academic research, what TTS systems should I be looking into to help me save some time? Is Deep Speech adapted for this use?

</comment><comment><USER21> Nice, now we need the CTC based models to run offline on low-powered devices & then pretty much all speech-to-text APIs are done for.

<comment><USER7> I've been working on this. I think I can reliably hit the quality ballpark of STT APIs at the acoustic model level, but not at the language model level (word probabilities) in a low-powered-way yet.

Also, non-English models are _way_ behind still.

<comment><USER21> The way google & now Apple manage to run these on device is pretty neat. Google has a blog post for the same too.

The recently updated Mozilla Voice dataset still lacks non-EN languages sadly.</comment></comment></comment>


Botanists are using graffiti to name forgotten flora - <AUTHOR> https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2020/may/01/not-just-weeds-how-rebel-botanists-are-using-graffiti-to-name-forgotten-flora-aoe <comment><USER2> "Rebel botanists". Two words that put together make you wonder...

This is like "controversial paleontologist" (Robert Bakker, perhaps?) or "favorite mathematician" or "famous historian". Adjectives that just don't seem to belong with their object.

<comment><USER3> > In the UK it is illegal to chalk anything – hopscotch, art or botanical > names – on paths or highways without permission, even if it educates, > celebrates and fosters interest and knowledge in nature.

> One anonymous London tree name chalker said: "I'll keep labelling as I go on > my daily walks. I think it's really tapped into where people are right now.

Looks like a pretty clear act of rebellion to me.

<comment><USER4> A legal alternative could be using a projector from a window to paint the name with light. Emit a shadow over the street is allowed (currently).</comment></comment></comment>


Trump issues Memorandum to stop "critical race theory" training in government [pdf] - bra-ket https://www.whitehouse.gov/wp-content/uploads/2020/09/M-20-34.pdf <comment><AUTHOR> The PDF is a quick read, just a page and a quarter.

This should help to cut down on the hostile divisive rhetoric that is getting in the way of unity and effective teamwork.</comment>


Arm Announces Neoverse Infrastructure IP Branding and Future Roadmap - <AUTHOR> https://www.anandtech.com/show/13475/arm-announces-neoverse-infrastructure-ip-branding-future-roadmap <comment><USER2> Any word about when they'll be catching up to Apple?

Crickets about AMD K12 successor (TBA?). Qualcomm's given up custom design. Nvidia's Transmeta-based project Denver was a bit of a bust (no recent work?).

That leaves Samsung, Apple, and ARM with ARM making up the vast majority of designs. They really need a design that's way faster than A76.

<comment><USER3> _Any word about when they 'll be catching up to Apple?_

I guess never is a word.

 _Crickets about AMD K12 successor (TBA?)._

Has been dead for years. AMD is being very careful about not spreading themselves too thin.

 _Nvidia 's Transmeta-based project Denver was a bit of a bust (no recent work?)._

Xavier just came out in June with updated Carmel cores.

You might also be forgetting ThunderX2 and Ampere eMAG.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Whole lot of marketing-ese and nothing about what distinguishes Neoverse from Cortex. Well done ARM.

</comment><comment><USER5> One thing arm has which I find interesting is mbedssl, which used to be called polarssl. I feel like we could use a nice slim and efficient ssl alternative.</comment>


Announcing the RethinkDB 2.0 release candidate - <AUTHOR> http://rethinkdb.com/blog/2.0-release-candidate

<comment><USER2> Yesterday: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9238983](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9238983)

</comment><comment><USER3> RethinkDB: do you plan on releasing any official benchmarks or projections, especially with regards to how much better at realtime RethinkDB is or could be compared to other realtime database systems built on top of non-realtime databases?

<comment><USER4> Would you trust those benchmarks if they did? Much better that a third party creates them

<comment><USER3> That's why I mentioned projections too. I'd just love to hear a RethinkDB person tell us how they see themselves in relation to it's alternatives. I don't particularly care about their current performance because it's a young project. I don't even know if they see real-time performance as their core value proposition.

Tho of course, a third party analysis of RethinkDB's architecture would be amaizing (-; Benchmarks not so much.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I'm quite interested in the upcoming official Java driver; I tried to use RethinkDB for Clojure, but by then the DB was several versions ahead of what the Clojure driver supported (the tests would randomly fail, in a different place each time they were run).

Eventually, I swapped my project over to Redis, which was reasonably well suited to the task (a scraper with independent values, the whole db is held in memory and shipped to the client and queried locally).

Still, RethinkDB would have been nice for future proofing, once it is time to implement user accounts etc, so I'd like to switch back in the future.

<comment><USER6> There's also a new third-party Clojure driver under development: [https://github.com/apa512/clj-rethinkdb](https://github.com/apa512/clj- rethinkdb) It's not complete yet, but it's starting to look pretty good.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> What is RethinkDB's business model? I can't find anything about this. It seems they currently live off VC funding but how will they sustain this?

<comment><USER6> As the blog post says, commercial support options and other services will debut alongside the 2.0 release. You can expect more details when 2.0 officially launches.</comment></comment>


Our brains are designed to respond to each new interruption - <AUTHOR> http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/conquering-cyber-overload/201006/the-fault-dear-brutus-is-not-in-our-gadgets-in-ourselves

<comment><USER2> > It's been estimated that unnecessary interruptions, mainly facilitated by > technology, cost U.S. businesses $650,000,000,000 year in lost employee > time.

Lost me right there...the report it links to is even worse. The entire concept of linking the productivity of a "knowledge-worker" to dollars and hours is wrong-headed and incredibly prevalent in the IT field. You as an employer may be paying someone X dollars an hour but that's not what you are paying them _for_. The insights critical to writing great software, developing new analysis techniques, simplifying the network structure, what have you, cannot be codified in these terms. And just because your hands are at the keyboard doesn't mean you are doing anything, and sometimes being off work focused on something else brings a breakthrough.

<comment><USER3> "the report it links to is even worse"

It's Psychology Today. It's not exactly the Journal of Neuroscience. It's a half step up from Cosmo's "Ten Tricks That Will Drive Him Crazy!"</comment></comment>