Ask HN: How do you deal with high blood pressure? - <AUTHOR> I hadn't gotten my blood pressure checked in at least 3 years. I went to the dentist last week and my blood pressure was really high for my age (28), albeit was a stressful day, it was pretty alarming to see it so high.
I have been actively monitoring my BP this week, with detailed notes on how my work day is going and any caffeine intake. After reviewing, I'm realizing that I need to make some changes to reduce stress, caffeine intake, and start making some life style changes.
Since a lot of us in tech likely have high-stress jobs, what do you personally do to deal with high BP? <comment><USER2> You don't say how much above normal it was and for how long or give details about your current physical state, just in case I'd recommend a general health check-up. My guess is that as most of us you don't do those regularly.

Hypertension is _most of the times but not always_ caused by your life style choices and can be fixed (not dealt with) improving weight, diet, fitness level (chronic stress and caffeine/smoking are a factor too).

For diet recommendations you could look into DASH[1] to get an idea of the direction you should take.

Anyway, this is a good time to start improving your life style as any[2].

[1] [https://www.webmd.com/hypertension-high-blood- pressure/guide...](https://www.webmd.com/hypertension-high-blood- pressure/guide/dash-diet#1)

[2] I did. It worked. A lot.

</comment><comment><USER3> Doing just a few minutes of deep breathing exercises usually makes my blood pressure drop dramatically. It's hard to keep this habit up, though, but I know that there are apps and devices available to help you out here.

This isn't really a "relaxation" exercise or anything, although it helps. Rather, because we all sit on our keisters most of the time we forget to take the kinds of deep breaths that we would ordinarily take while being out and about and active, and the shallow breathing that we end up doing instead stresses our system.

Of course, actually "being out and about and active" would generally help a lot, too, as would pretty much any increase in exercise levels.

</comment><comment><USER4> I'm not a medical professional but do suffer with high blood pressure. My recommendations are 1. reduce your caffeine intake (hopefully to zero) 2. reduce your salt intake 3. eat beetroot/garlic 4. exercise with handgrips.

[https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/articles/4NgZffmPmmR4w9s9BD...](https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/articles/4NgZffmPmmR4w9s9BDGH3lG/the- big-blood-pressure-experiment) [https://www.1mhealthtips.com/easy-handgrip- exercise-to-lower...](https://www.1mhealthtips.com/easy-handgrip-exercise-to- lower-blood-pressure/)

</comment><comment><USER5> Any useful answer would depend on the blood pressure measurements and factors such as stress, weight, exercise regimen and diet.

Lifestyle changes will only get you so far in the short term.

If your systolic pressure (the first value in blood pressure readings) is through the roof (for your age: constantly or predominantly higher than 140) you'll likely need medication to manage that condition in the short term before figuring out the root cause and a healthier lifestyle in the long run.

</comment><comment><USER6> You don't need to "deal" with it. You simply need to fix it, and that's really, really, incredibly simple. It's all about lifestyle changes, especially dietary ones. Look into fasting and then a plant based diet rich mostly in fruits and veggies. High blood pressure is one of the easiest ailments to get rid of, without being on pharmaceuticals or other nasty crap.

</comment><comment><USER7> I'm doing nothing, because I have no healthcare available to me. I know it's bad for me though.

Your blood pressure could simply be high because of your genetics or weight. You should go see a PCP about it and they will refer you further. Hypertension is something that you don't feel affects you but the damage from it builds up over the years. So, go see a doctor about it.

</comment><comment><USER8> Go to a doctor, get a prescription. High BP is something you don't want to screw with.

</comment><comment><USER9> What is you age, weight, blood specs etc, blood pressure, activity level?</comment>


The Swiss leaks and Panama papers open a window on the tax-dodger's world - <AUTHOR> http://www.economist.com/news/finance-and-economics/21722897-swiss-leaks-and-panama-papers-open-window-tax-dodgers-world <comment><USER2> Globalization of wealth is a result of treaties between sovereign nations.

But if so much wealth is hidden and not tied to each nation's fate, those with the most power and influence lose the connection to their compatriots.

This has led to the brittleness of the current international order. Since the fall of the USSR, national treaties no longer bottom out at the self-interest of each countries' residents. We are trusting a legal framework that has had its foundation severely degraded over the past 30 years.

<comment><USER3> > Globalization of wealth is a result of treaties between sovereign nations.

I think this is a questionable causal relationship. Globalization of wealth happened due to improved banking/monetary infrastructure; yes, governments giving permission for this to happen was a practical prerequisite, but I wouldn't say it's a "result" of international politics.

In fact, as we can tell from another article currently on the front page (about Chinese bitcoin miners), globalization of wealth eventually happens whether governments want it or not.

<comment><USER4> Accessibility of global wealth seems more important.

In the age of sail, I'm sure one could have stashed gold in some backwater city, which would have hidden it very effectively from any government. But then you couldn't use it.

The international banking & legal systems now enable those with means to both keep wealth away from governments while still maintaining access to it for practical purposes.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> It is an interesting data point. If it is consistent then increasing tax compliance on the 1% would be sufficent to boost overall tax revenues by close to 4%. (caveat they just decide to become Canadians :-)

<comment><USER6> I'm not even joking when I say: I really hope they do. These are the kinds of people who buy into Koch's philosophy (as opposed to Gates' philosophy). Once this country is rid of Dark money, the political system might finally start serving its citizens, and not just its _wealthy_ citizens.

<comment><USER7> Say "wealth tax" near Buffet and Gates and watch them have quite a different reaction. Income tax rates have little effect on the already-wealthy because most of their money is not distributed in the form of a wage or salary; rather, it is stored in various types of financial vehicles that are already tax privileged. To the extent that this wealth is not held in stock, accountants set up other types of tax-privileged holdings.

Whenever a prominent wealthy person is talking, be aware of the PR necessity to not appear as if they are hoarding their wealth, or as if they are uninterested in sharing. Buffet and Gates are no doubt keenly aware of this necessity.

From the perspective of a Buffet or Gates, it is wise to publicly advocate for a tax increase that has little or no effect on your personal wealth, potentially targets up-and-comers who are currently making good money through their small-to-medium business ventures and may some day pose a threat to your interests (weakening them by confiscating more money from them), and keeps the public on your good side because they can point at you and say "There is $FAMOUS_RICH_GUY, and he knows that being greedy is bad."

<comment><USER8> "Income tax rates have little effect on the already-wealthy because most of their money is not distributed in the form of a wage or salary; rather, it is stored in various types of financial vehicles that are already tax privileged."

The problem with this line of thought _in it 's current implemenation_ is that the top marginal income tax rates are very, very, very low in comparison to the "truly wealthy" people that you are referring to.

You only have to make (roughly) $400k[1] in the US to hit the very top federal bracket of 39%. That's hardly scrooge mcduck swimming in his bank vault. It's more like middle sized contractors, and (lower echelon) doctors and dentists.

So if you are a proponent of substituting income taxes with wealth taxes I would hope you are also a proponent of drastically raising the income brackets for _very, very high_ tax rates to avoid hitting people that aren't "actually wealthy" (your definition).

[1] [https://taxfoundation.org/2017-tax- brackets/](https://taxfoundation.org/2017-tax-brackets/)

<comment><USER9> Income tax is the wrong way to tax the extremely wealthy. They make most of their income from capital gains, which is taxed at a different, low rate.

<comment><USER10> Income tax includes capital gains. At least in the US it's included when you file your "income taxes".

<comment><USER7> Short-term capital gains are taxed as regular income. Long-term capital gains are taxed at a significantly reduced rate (highest income tax bracket (39.6%) pays 20% on long-term capital gains).

See [http://www.investopedia.com/articles/personal- finance/101515...](http://www.investopedia.com/articles/personal- finance/101515/comparing-longterm-vs-shortterm-capital-gain-tax-rates.asp)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> It's worth pointing out that the US model of taxation (US citizens pay taxes on income earned anywhere in the world), as much as people complain about it, completely negates the value in offshore income a la Panama papers.

Sure, until recently you could hide your income in Switzerland, but it was a clear crime -- there wasn't legal grey area.

And yes yes, there are other ways to try to avoid taxation (deductions etc) but this is a really big one that the US doesn't have to worry about.

<comment><USER12> >It's worth pointing out that the US model of taxation (US citizens pay taxes on income earned anywhere in the world), as much as people complain about it, completely negates the value in offshore income a la Panama papers

What's different about the US model is that worldwide income is taxed _while not living in the US_. So if you are an American who permanently lives and works in Germany, for example, the American government entitles itself to tax the money you earn in Germany (*in principle, at least; due to exemptions you've really got to be earning $$$$ to pay taxes twice).

Most countries as far as I'm aware would tax their residents based on income earned abroad, provided they are actually residing in said country. The difference is taxation by citizenship vs. taxation by residence.

<comment><USER13> You will not get taxed twice, rather you will pay part of your taxes in one country and the remaining part, if any, in the other country. You tax rate is the maximum of the two.

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

<comment><USER12> You're right, I wasn't particularly clear. My point was more that you'll (potentially) pay taxes in two countries on money only earned while living and working in one country.

<comment><USER14> If you're living in an EU country like Germany, isn't it academic? - EU taxes are well above US taxes so in effect you will pay nothing more.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Part of the problem is unbalanced incentives between tax inspectors and crooked accountants.

If an accountant helps a billionaire dodge taxes he can earn millions of dollars in fees. If a tax inspector exposes the scam he might get a salary bonus worth a few thousand dollars.

I would like to see tax inspectors get paid by commission. If the tax inspector exposes a scam and the government collects $50 million, the inspector gets $2 million. (And to avoid overzealous inspectors, if a tax audit finds no impropriety the inspector forfeits $20,000)

<comment><USER16> This leads to the moral hazard where you might consider planting evidence for personal gain.

<comment><USER17> Planting $50 million to get $2 million. Not a terribly good deal.

<comment><USER18> Implicating (wrongly) someone else's $50m to get $2m. A tempting deal for some.

<comment><USER19> You can neither make 50 Million appear nor can you plant evidence in Bank data that the victims lawyers couldnt tear to shreds. Accounting isn't dropping a joint in someone's pocket

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Scandinavian countries have one of the most progressive (meaning, increasing with total assets) tax scales in the world.

Astrid Lindgren, who you might now as the author of Karlsson-on-the-Roof and Pippi Longstocking children books, once was unlucky enough that she had to pay 102% of her income in taxes (yes, paying more than she had earned this year). Things got better since then, but I would totally understand the desire to evade arbitrarily-imposed taxes.

<comment><USER21> >arbitrarily-imposed taxes

Isn't a progressive tax system basically the opposite of an arbitrarily defined system? Perhaps you can quibble over where each progressive quantile is delineated, but a system defined by raising taxes on those who make the most is not an arbitrary one. In fact it's a system based on determined reason. Just because you disagree doesn't make it arbitrary.

<comment><USER22> I think 102% in taxes is definitely not reasonable...

<comment><USER23> That would be a marginal tax rate.

Such would establish an income level above which it becomes more desirable to reduce one's taxable income rather than pursue additional income. Every additional euro would go to the state, plus a 2% fee for having the audacity to earn more money when you already earn too much.

Assuming there is a deduction for charitable contributions, that's when you direct your accountant to dump any unexpected windfalls into your favorite charity, so that you save that 2%. Or, more cynically, you might direct your company to reduce its dividend and spend some extra money on an executive retreat.

I can see how a 102% marginal rate might seem reasonable to an insane person. But I think the highest marginal rate you can charge without causing unexpected bizarre avoidance behaviors [that may spill over onto other people] is probably 50%.

<comment><USER24> I'm a sane person, and 50% still seems pretty crazy to me. Make a million, lose half. Then there's 10-20% sales tax on everything you buy. The only thing that can be said in those cases: time to move.

<comment><USER25> But with 50% as the highest _marginal_ rate, you don't lose half if you make a million. You lose half of everything earned above $xxxK, as set by the tax authority.

<comment><USER24> Yes, I am aware how a progressive tax system works. In most countries the threshold for the top rate is ridiculously low however, e.g. between €50-100k.

So to correct my statement: make a million, pay 35% (averaged out over different tax rates) on the first €XX.000, and then lose half of the remaining €XXX,000.

Is that supposed to make it better?

<comment><USER26> Most people who make a few million probably do it as a capital gain rather than income - so different tax rules will apply.

e.g. Higher rate income tax in the UK is 40% for income over £45K (to £150K). However with capital gains tax with things like taper relief you can end up paying 10%.

<comment><USER24> Yes, for people building / buying / selling assets (e.g. entrepreneurs and investors) this generally applies. But your average doctor won't be booking capital gains on his (earned) income any time soon.

Just pointing out that having income taxes that are too high is often counterproductive for society, just because they can easily be avoided by the wealthy. I guess the differentiation (and justification) is mostly a way to make sure the masses who actually use the infrastructure pay more than the one wealthy person who uses it, but don't need it as much.

<comment><USER26> Well, wealthy people have have, by definition, more assets that need protection by state provided legal, police and security services - so I would say it is debatable that rich people need the state less.

<comment><USER24> Probably. Which is why they pay more (in money terms, but not always in percentage points).

<comment><USER23> The idea that rich people don't like to pay excessively high taxes, and will avoid doing so if they are able, is not a particularly compelling argument against progressive taxation.

I am not proposing that any nation institute a 50% marginal tax rate. I am just saying that I believe that any nation that tries to go higher than that is _guaranteed_ to have tax avoidance schemes that ensure no one ever actually pays that much, whether those schemes are visible to the taxing authority or not. Some people will jump through a maze of hoops just to avoid a 0.1% tax.

What I'm saying is that _nobody_ would rationally submit to a scheme wherein they do all the work and someone else reaps the majority of the benefits from it. It goes beyond the limits of the human sense of fairness. A 102% marginal tax rate is so far beyond that, I cannot even imagine circumstances that might lead to anyone actually paying it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> Get tough on crime! Put a few billionaires in prison and compliance will improve sharply.

<comment><USER28> China is willing to do it, as well as capital punishment for fraud. IMO this just transfers more power to politicians. There are more laws than anyone could ever read or count, anyone whose affairs are that complicated can be jailed at any time so it becomes purely political -- would Trump chose to arrest the same billionaires as you?

<comment><USER7> Yes. Selective enforcement of law, especially esoteric or procedural laws that often apply in white-collar crime, is widely used and under-recognized as a potent political weapon.

<comment> rm_-rf_slash Sometimes referred to as "rule __by __law " as opposed to "rule __of __law. "

<comment><USER29> The headshot is my favorite: [http://davidsimon.com/kwame-brown-another- federal-case-anoth...](http://davidsimon.com/kwame-brown-another-federal-case- another-head-shot/)

TL;DR they can get you good for taking money from your parents to buy your first house, which most people in the US do.

<comment><USER30> Most people sounds like overstatement. Personally the idea, "to give your child any money as a loan and then let the child claim those assets as his or her own income or saving [...] in support of a loan application," strikes me as obvious fraud. Without data, I would doubt that most homebuyers follow this practice.

I think the author's argument wasn't that this practice is not or should not be a crime, but that the potential criminal penalty - 30 years! - is far too high.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> In other news, Laffer Cuver still applies: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laffer_curve](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laffer_curve)

</comment><comment><USER32> This is about tax-evasion. While it's often difficult to disentangle the two activities, continually referring to tax dodging (or tax avoidance) is unhelpful and simply wrong. Every single sensible law-abiding taxpayer seeks to avoid and dodges taxes such that they arrange their affairs to minimize their tax bill. Revenue authorities work within the appropriate legal framework to maximize the tax they extract from individuals and organizations.

</comment><comment><USER33> Why can't every payment being sent to someone, simply be digitally taxed?

Why do I get paid and automatically get taxed during this process, but a footballer doesn't?

It is bullshit

<comment><USER34> The problem there is advertising, and jurisdiction for taxing "image rights".

E.g. Cristiano Ronaldo pays taxes in Spain for his salary. His income from advertisers using his mug all over the world is another story - the Spanish state wants dibs on it, his accountants say that is not "work" performed there.

We still do not have a handle on the Mickey Mouse and superstar system.

<comment><USER35> And at least Cristiano Ronaldo is a EU-citizen...

When you're Neymar and you get paid for a toothpaste add in Japan, you get 3 countries possibly arguing about that revenue. Hence Panama, at least until you figure it out.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> Demonetize, tax on consumption, provide rebates to the impoverished. so many problems will be solved. Consumption based economy will go away (destroying the planet, so that's good) and industry will focus on basic necessities that aren't taxed as much - food, shelter, clothing, medicine.

</comment><comment><USER37> > Globalisation has disproportionately benefited the rich in part by rewarding > capital more handsomely than labour

How would one define "Capital" in this case? What does this mean?

<comment><USER38> Roughly, "capital" is the class of people who make most of their money by investing money they already had, and "labor" is people who feed themselves by selling their time working to others. I'm guessing you knew that but want to challenge the categorization?

</comment></comment><comment><USER39> Let's not forget that a lot of the tax fueled gouvernmental spending goes back to the middle and low income classes. And we are voting for it.

</comment><comment><USER40> People need to read this and get it through their head - progressive tax rates don't work because the truly wealthy can afford to hire accountants to avoid tax to a huge degree. It disproportionately effects the middle class.

<comment><USER41> > People need to read this and get it through their head - progressive tax > rates don't work because the truly wealthy can afford to hire accountants to > avoid tax to a huge degree. It disproportionately effects the middle class.

Progressive tax rates on non-capital income, with additional flat taxes on specifically labor income, and lower (but still progressive) rates on capital income hit both low-income workers (because of payroll tax, which bites them hardest due to declining marginal utility) and high-income workers (the part of the middle class that isn't "small business owners") hardest even before considering tax avoidance.

A progressive tax on all income without special tax favor for capital and special tax penalty for labor would go a long way toward making things better, even with the possibility of the rich spending some of their money on less rich accountants to avoid some of their tax burden.

Avoidance is a much smaller problem than the system being designed to favor the way the ultra-rich earn income from square one.

<comment><USER40> Why not scrap income tax altogether and tax land value?

It seems insane to me to punish people getting better jobs. But by owning expensive land you are in effect depriving others of using it. If you want to argue a moral basis for taxation, that is surely one.

Taxing career advancement instead of property investment and absentee land owners sitting on property seems completely backward. But I never considered that tax laws were probably designed from day 1 to benefit the rich, since the wealthy are so much more influential in any government (including democracies).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER42> In the last 20 years or so, I have come across a couple of ideas that are not politically palatable.

The first was a universal transaction tax. Every transaction that passes through the banking system has an associated transaction tax rated at 1 cent per 100 dollars collected by the banks, remitted directly to the government and taken out of the transaction. All monies transferred out of a country would have the originating country collect and retain the tax.

The interesting aspect of this is that all funds that end up in the banking system, irrespective of legality of source would participate in the transaction tax. And based on the figures of over 20 years ago of only 1 in every 1000 dollars passing through the banking system was from legal enterprises, that's a lot of additional taxed wealth.

The other aspect of that discussion was that all other taxes, government charges (duties etc) would be dispensed with. It was unpalatable because it treated all as equal and various interest groups don't like that.

The second one was charging a flat tax (income) on every entity with the only allowable deduction being salaries and wages. This is based on gross income not net income. One aspect would be to force companies to run much more efficiently than they would otherwise do so. Again treating every entity equally would not be politically palatable.

Of course, there will those who would still try to game the system, them you cannot get rid of.

<comment><USER43> > This is based on gross income not net income.

Largely varying margins in different industries makes this seem unfair to me, unless I'm misunderstanding it. Basing it on net income avoids this, but then you get funny bookkeeping to game the system.

<comment><USER42> Precisely, Net income leads to funny bookkeeping to game the system. The goal of gross income forces companies to be efficient and with only wages and salaries as deductions, not at the expense of employees.

Trade tariffs can be applied in a similar manner. In the usual case, tariffs are based on the worst performing internal supplier, not on the best performing (most efficient) internal supplier. As efficiencies are gained by all, the tariffs themselves can come down. If the most efficient internal supplier gets less efficient, the tariffs do not increase to offset this decrease in efficiency. hence, they are forced to maintain or increase efficiency.</comment></comment></comment>


Walk and Code - <AUTHOR> http://blog.8thlight.com/doug-bradbury/2010/02/25/walk-and-code.html

<comment><USER2> I have always wanted to do this, but my group is in open plan space and I think the noise would be a bit much. Maybe one day I can find some more people who'd like this and we can snag an office.</comment>


Ask HN: Machine learning resources for audio processing - <AUTHOR> What are some good learning resources on audio processing, detection and anomaly detection  using machine learning or deep learning? I am interested in machine predictive maintenance using audio anomaly detection <comment><USER2> There's a good class at UIUC regarding signal processing:

[https://courses.engr.illinois.edu/cs598ps/fa2018/material.ht...](https://courses.engr.illinois.edu/cs598ps/fa2018/material.html)

Course is led by Paris Smaragdis, one of top researchers in the field of audio processing.

</comment><comment><USER3> The folks behind audio set have been working on general audio event detection for some years now, I believe.

[https://research.google.com/audioset/](https://research.google.com/audioset/)

There's a huge amount to discuss in the audio domain... But for a starting place, using ResNet on spectrograms to build a binary classifier is a good place to start.

</comment><comment><USER4> I am taking a course called "Speech and Audio Understanding" from Prof. Michael I Mandel, you can check course website[1] , he has a good collection of resources. Also his github stars are good collection of related projects[2]. In class we are using a book called "Human and Machine Hearing: Extracting Meaning from Sound" by Richard F. Lyon, authors shares it for free [3] For example one of the resources you will see on the course website is presentations from interspeech2018, you can check all tutorials from there[4].

[1] [http://mr-pc.org/t/csc83060/](http://mr-pc.org/t/csc83060/)

[2] [https://github.com/mim?tab=stars](https://github.com/mim?tab=stars)

[3] [http://dicklyon.com/hmh/Lyon_Hearing_book_01jan2018.pdf](http://dicklyon.com/hmh/Lyon_Hearing_book_01jan2018.pdf)

[4] [http://interspeech2018.org/program- tutorials.html](http://interspeech2018.org/program-tutorials.html)

</comment><comment><USER5> Just found this thread on the fast.ai forum yesterday that may help: [https://forums.fast.ai/t/deep-learning-with-audio- thread/381...](https://forums.fast.ai/t/deep-learning-with-audio-thread/38123)

<comment><USER6> I just found this too! Great thread for the new Kaggle Freesound competition.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> I don't know if this is off topic but would it be possible to remove the sound of mechanical keyboards with ML in realtime from a VOIP stream? Sell the technology to Discord and profit.

<comment><USER8> Is this a big problem? I thought people loved mechanical keyboard sounds.

<comment><USER9> People love _their own_ , I'm sure. I've never met anybody who puts on a tape of it, though.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> You may reuse some concepts I have described for an audio adblock: [https://www.adblockradio.com/blog/2018/11/15/designing- audio...](https://www.adblockradio.com/blog/2018/11/15/designing-audio-ad- block-radio-podcast/)

More precisely, audio spectral preprocessing then neural network such as LSTM.

</comment><comment><USER11> I think the slides/recording of this excellent Spotify talk will be posted shortly: [https://qcon.ai/qconai2019/presentation/deep-learning- audio-...](https://qcon.ai/qconai2019/presentation/deep-learning-audio- signals-prepare-process-design-expect).

</comment><comment><USER12> aubio and librosa are two excellent MIR (music information retrieval) tools I can recommend from personal use. They can both be implemented for real-time audio using pyaudio or similar.

[https://aubio.org/doc/latest/](https://aubio.org/doc/latest/)

[https://librosa.github.io/librosa/](https://librosa.github.io/librosa/)

<comment><USER12> To append to my own comment, something I haven't tried myself yet but I'm planning to: Urban Sound Classification with Neural Networks in Tensorflow

[https://www.kdnuggets.com/2016/09/urban-sound- classification...](https://www.kdnuggets.com/2016/09/urban-sound- classification-neural-networks-tensorflow.html)

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> I am also curious about this topic! I have picked up a jetson nano and fully intend to put this device to use by projecting comic-book panel-style speech bubbles (plus, who knows... random panels?) on the wall leveraging pytorch + deepspeech.

That's at least the idea kicking around in my head at the moment. [https://github.com/SeanNaren/deepspeech.pytorch](https://github.com/SeanNaren/deepspeech.pytorch)

I'm no expert. Haven't done it. Don't really want to send every convo into the cloud or my tinfoil hat will start burning.

You do not need a jetson to get started investigating. Maybe just nvidia for that particular library. If you find something, maybe you can let me know somehow.

Peace

</comment><comment><USER14> [https://github.com/ybayle/awesome-deep-learning- music](https://github.com/ybayle/awesome-deep-learning-music) a "Non- exhaustive list of scientific articles on deep learning for music"

</comment><comment><USER15> Here's a resource that breaks down the various audio processing tasks and provides case studies: [https://www.analyticsvidhya.com/blog/2018/01/10-audio- proces...](https://www.analyticsvidhya.com/blog/2018/01/10-audio-processing- projects-applications/)

It's slightly academic so here's a more practical resource: [https://towardsdatascience.com/audio-classification-using- fa...](https://towardsdatascience.com/audio-classification-using-fastai-and- on-the-fly-frequency-transforms-4dbe1b540f89)

</comment><comment><USER16> I would get lunch with these guys:

[https://www.audiblemagic.com/](https://www.audiblemagic.com/)

These sketch balls can use your phone's mic to detect what is streaming in a living room.

</comment><comment><USER17> Recently I started looking in to this as a backup method of anomaly detection while performing automated testing of our robotics. I concluded that it's actually pretty easy. Depending upon how simplistic your requirements, you can even achieve this cheaply and effectively on a very tiny microprocessor with an attached surface mount MEMS microphone. Additional features like anomalous audio recording, timestamping and alert transmission are not that hard either. No need for a fully-fledged general purpose operating system, or complex algorithms.

</comment><comment><USER18> See this book and the sources it links to: [https://musicinformationretrieval.com/](https://musicinformationretrieval.com/) Also google for pitch and onset detection. If you want more specific help, you have to ask a more specific question.

<comment><USER19> It sounds as if he's looking for tools that can be used to monitor the sounds coming from machinery to detect or predict impending failures. I found your link interesting since I'm interested in musical applications of machine learning, but I don't think it's what he's looking for.

<comment><USER18> MIR is where the research is at. Not nearly as much work has been done in the general audio IR domain. But most methods are easily transferable. E.g tempo estimation would perhaps serve his anomaly detection needs.

</comment></comment></comment><comment> ml-engineer There are many great resources to reference here:

[https://www.science.wiki/search?keyword=audio+processing](https://www.science.wiki/search?keyword=audio+processing)

</comment><comment><USER20> Contact the founder / maker of Auphonic.com - he's a super nice and clever guy who does this kind of stuff for a living. He'll definitely point you into the right direction.

</comment><comment><USER21> This depends if you're interested in creative applications or analytical (MIR) ones. The two fields share a lot of techniques, but the way they are used is wildly different.

</comment><comment><USER22> thanks for sharing article [https://www.exltech.in/mechanical-design- training.html](https://www.exltech.in/mechanical-design-training.html)

</comment><comment><USER23> piston aircraft?</comment>


Red Hat acquires Gluster for $136M - <AUTHOR> http://venturebeat.com/2011/10/04/red-hat-buys-gluster/

<comment><AUTHOR> Smart move, red hat. Gluster is very cool.</comment>


Ask HN: Free cloud servers for 15 year old high school developers? - <AUTHOR>

Some family friends kids are 15 years old and learning to program.
They need access to a free Linux server so they can learn back end development.
Anyone know of free cloud server access for high school student developers? <comment><USER2> Check out the following:

[http://www.windowsazurepass.com/azureu](http://www.windowsazurepass.com/azureu)

[http://research.google.com/university/relations/appengine/ed...](http://research.google.com/university/relations/appengine/education_awards.html)

</comment><comment><USER3> an alternative is to just hook up an old pc running ubuntu to a home router. Setup dynamic DNS and you have a full running server. I run my personal blog and email server from home and it works fine.</comment>


New Munich city government agrees to use open source software where possible - em-bee https://www.zdnet.com/article/linux-not-windows-why-munich-is-shifting-back-from-microsoft-to-open-source-again/ <comment><AUTHOR> There is another interesting section in the document[1]. The city introduces the "Munich Open Source Sabatical". The city will pay professional programmers for 3 till 6 months to work on open source projects that benefit the community.

> Die Stadt München unterstützt die Entwicklung von Open Source-Projekten mit > einem "Munich Open Source Sabbatical". Professionelle Programmierer*innen, > die sich für drei oder sechs Monate ganz auf die Fortentwicklung eines Open > Source-Projektes kon-zentrieren möchten, können sich dafür auf ein > städtisches bezahltes Stipendium bewerben. Die Projekte müssen einen > kommunalen Nutzen haben.

[1]: [https://www.gruene-muenchen.de/wp- content/uploads/2020/04/Dr...](https://www.gruene-muenchen.de/wp- content/uploads/2020/04/Druckfassung_Koalitionsvertrag-2020_2026.pdf)

<comment><USER2> Interesting. How much will they pay them, though?

<comment><USER3> The document doesn't say how much. I guess, it's just an umbrella document. More detailed regulations will be eventually adopted. That said, my estimate would be 500€ max per month.

<comment> em-bee that would not work. 500€ is not enough to pay rent in most places.

it would have to something that covers your current living expenses, no matter how high they are, because unless you are young and single with a lot of flexibility, you are not going to be able to put a hold on all those expenses.

therefore the two reasonable options are: the government continues to pay your current salary, or it pays what you'd get if they'd hire you. the latter would disadvantage high earners, but that is somewhat reasonable.

anything less would unlikely get any people interested.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Governments should develop and run opensource systems. That way different governments can collaborate to build better systems through open innovation. Not wasting tax payers money on closed source.

I bet tax and pension systems have the same basic requirements cross countries with some local specifics.

<comment><USER5> While I completely agree with you, there is a compelling argument for governments spending tax payer money on goods from local companies rather than competing with them. Of course, I don't think I would class MS as a "local company" for Munich ;-). I'm just saying that there are lots of reasonable points of view on this topic.

<comment><USER6> Same governmemt can spend the same money within the same local economy by paying programmers. There is no _valid_ reason and not that many "reasonable points of view" about paying a private company 5000 times over for the same piece of software, and still not owning it or being able to get full functionality out of it or being able to see into it or your taxpayers (who are subject to it's operation) being able to see into it, vs paying programmers to write the same thing _1_ times over and then you DO own it and can get full functionality out of it and can see into it, and every town in your whole country can use it with no legal burden, no audits, no broken license mangers... And tomorrow, instead of paying for another 100 copies of the same license yet again, you can pay those programmers to make what you have even better or build the next new thing.

There is no valid reason to just pay rent to anyone for nothing, even if they are a local company. That's not a good enough reason.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> > As yet, none of the big players appears to have lost significant business to > the free software movement in Germany. But it seems likely that commercial > vendors will have a tougher time here in the near future.

Free software and open source doesn't mean non-commercial. SUSE in Germany provides commercial support to their distro for example. Such a weird article, zdnet doesn't getting any better...

<comment> blaser-waffle Yeah the US Fed Gov loves linux, and Red Hat is all over the place.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> I think the "Public money => public code" is a stronger (and arguably more interesting) piece of content in the article.

<comment><USER9> Direct link to the petition: [https://publiccode.eu](https://publiccode.eu)

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> The last u-turn was only decided by a bunch of politicians who like Microsoft Windows privately more than Linux.

This is all politics. Nothing more...

</comment><comment><USER11> Just please don't create your own distro this time.

I'm sure Canonical would happily hier some devs from Munich to make this look local.

<comment><USER12> Limux is not its own distro, just a Debian/Ubuntu with additional branding and a few pieces of bundled software in an apt repo.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> I can't imagine any US party echoing the FSF's statement, even if just in a statement of political intent. It's impressive that the movement has enough public interest to make platitudes worthwhile in Germany.

<comment><USER14> The FOSS movement in Germany always seemed to me a tiny bit more mainstream than the one in the US. Tech publications report more on Linux happenings (as opposed to the sometimes intense Apple focus of US tech publications).

Linux also has more market share in Germany than any other western country, I think.

<comment><USER15> According to statcounter, Germany has the highest usage of Firefox and fourth highest usage of Linux (behind Ireland, Greece and Luxembourg) among European and North American countries. Additionally, you have the Chaos Computer Club, which is somewhat prominent and could influence the thinking about FOSS.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Key quote: "So these kinds of decisions must come down to political philosophies about the marketplace as well as increasingly important issues like digital sovereignty. This issue is one reason why this time Munich is unlikely – or any other German city or state – to flip-flop on open-source software decisions again. "

</comment><comment><USER17> Munich made headlines for deciding to switch to linux in 2003 and decided to go back to windows in 2018.

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

I still don't understand why major nations don't create or help create national OSes for their own countries/industries. You would think an OS is national security issue at the very least. A municipality isn't going to cut it. It's going to require a major national effort to stave off a monopoly like microsoft.

<comment><USER18> Bean counters prefer to pay others to "make those problems seem to go away".

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> In case of government spend it is hard for me to comprehend why almost no place in the world has fully open source gov technology. Governments everywhere spend these insane amounts on really bad software :/

<comment><USER20> The sad reality is that there just isn't enough awareness or understanding of technology within Government to make it onto the agenda. The exceptions of this are little pockets of like-minded individuals such as GDS [1] who have done some exemplary work on open sourcing tech.

The downside is that much of the 'trunk' of IT (workstations, Business Software, internal systems) are still contracted out to monolithic, old-school contractors who have no incentive to innovate by non-technical procurement teams. This leads to a culture of proprietary software where the established/expensive solutions are seen as the most trustworthy and there isn't any cost to vendor lock-in or non-interoperability of systems until the next tranche of officials have taken over and all of those issues can be written off as 'legacy' and as a sunk cost.

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

<comment><USER21> As a state government worker, this jives with my experience. The ultimate beneficiaries of any budget savings or improved processes are citizens who have no idea, let alone input, about what we're doing behind the scenes. It's very hard to convince public employees to work with those people in mind. You're right, the people buying the software are even harder to convince. With no good measures of effect, they rely on what's easiest for them. So Microsoft and PDFs everywhere.

Our software licenses are paid through a grant from the federal government. If we replace them with open source software, we don't get to keep the difference. So now I have licensed software like SAS and ArcGIS gathering dust on my machine while I use R and Python.

And sharing software we develop is even harder. I've pushed to release code for my statistical reports. When I said researchers and other states could benefit by reusing parts, my supervisors only saw it as a liability with no benefit to us. I might try to slip it in as part of the technical notes.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> I suspect this time they will be able to make it stick, even if a new government comes into power in following years. The options, particular for desktop linux, have gotten better since the last time they tried it.

</comment><comment><USER23> Wasn't so long since their last U-turn, switching from Linux to Windows 10 around 2018.

[https://www.zdnet.com/article/linux-champion-munich-will- swi...](https://www.zdnet.com/article/linux-champion-munich-will-switch-to- windows-10-in-50m-rollout/) , [https://www.techrepublic.com/article/end-of-an- open-source-e...](https://www.techrepublic.com/article/end-of-an-open-source- era-linux-pioneer-munich-confirms-switch-to-windows-10/)

<comment><USER24> Yes, as discussed in the article.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> > wherever possible

This reminds me of a quote by the character Humphrey Appleby on "Yes, Minister" ("The Office"-like sitcom about government):

"Almost anything can be attacked as a loss of amenity. And almost anything can be defended as not a _significant_ loss of amenity."

</comment><comment><USER26> ...Until they're voted out and replaced with those who are against 'hacker software'.

This is the same ol' carousel we've been going round and round on now for more than 2 decades.

Some people 'get' free and open software, the other people run our world.

</comment><comment><USER27> After one lie they have zero trust. Most likely just trying to negotiate lower prices for Microsoft licenses.

<comment><USER28> I seem to recall hearing the City of Munich considering FOSS for the past 15-20 years or so :)

<comment><USER29> No, they were implementing it at scale for 10+ years. There was an issue with lots of incompatible legacy software so they were still using windows as well but >50% of desks were Linux only.

Then in a very short timespan (1) a new conservative city government came in, (2) Microsoft announced a big local office and (3) the new government killed the open source project without warning and anlunced they'd switch everything to windows 10.

This transition back to windows is now still ongoing and as contracts are signed will not really be feasible to stop. The now new-new Green+social democratic government makes noe a pledge to take open source seriously for all future needs (and I suppose switch back to a Linux asap).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> Beautiful.

</comment><comment><USER31> Except they didn't. It's just a campaign to strongly consider open source software in future contracts. Currently, there is a contract with Microsoft that isn't ending just yet. So they will have a mix of LiMux and Windows for the foreseeable future.

</comment><comment><USER32> This is a bluff that almost every government and municipality with huge contracts with MS does whenever they come up for renewal as part of their negotiations, nobody in MS is impressed.

In other news: 2020 is not the year of the linux desktop.

<comment><USER33> Pessimistically, I agree with you.

But that lends the question; what does it take to end the Microsoft monopoly on our governments?

It can't just be open document standards. I think it goes further than that; into our schools maybe.

I don't have answers, but it's a serious question I have.

<comment><USER32> Easy, just create a software ecosystem that is superior to or at least on-par with the commercial offerings (being open source is not by itself valuable for the users), then grow a generation of non-technical users into that ecosystem

<comment><USER34> > on-par with the commercial offerings

That should be "offering" singular, not "offerings" plural.

And it's totally feasible to produce a superior ecosystem. The hard part is absorbing years of financial loss while building the new ecosystem from the ground up while it isn't compatible with the existing proprietary system.

<comment><USER32> > That should be "offering" singular, not "offerings" plural.

Why ? An ecosystem consists of multiple offerings and there are also multiple commercial ecosystems.

> And it's totally feasible to produce a superior ecosystem. The hard part is > absorbing years of financial loss while building the new ecosystem from the > ground up while it isn't compatible with the existing proprietary system.

Being able to finance something is an inherent part of its feasibility.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


MotoGoogle - <AUTHOR> http://www.cringely.com/2011/08/motogoogle/

<comment><AUTHOR> I haven't heard the Java licensing angle yet. That would make the Motorola acquisition an even bigger legal play than originally thought.</comment>


Gnome's shift to logind leaves behind OS's that don't support systemd - <AUTHOR> http://www.gossamer-threads.com/lists/gentoo/user/274951

<comment><USER2> I'd like to hear more about why depending on systemd without having a fallback mechanism for those who don't support it is a good design decision.</comment>


Bitbucket: On our extended downtime with Amazon - <AUTHOR> http://blog.bitbucket.org/2009/10/04/on-our-extended-downtime-amazon-and-whats-coming/ <comment><USER2> The only thing that kind of bothered me was that Bitbucket focused too much on blaming Amazon. Here's a sports example. Let's say a team loses because the left tackle messes up and the quarterback gets sacked. After the game, during a press conference, does the quarterback say that they lost, but it's the left tackle's fault? No. Even if the quarterback believes he himself performed great, he'll still take part of the blame. That's because it's the professional thing to do, and people respect him more for it.

You could say that Amazon and Bitbucket aren't on the same team, so it's different. But Bitbucket is paying Amazon to perform better just like a football team pays a player to make the team perform better. In other words, based on the concept of a team recruiting players for better team performance, Bitbucket recruits Amazon for better company performance, so they're basically on the same team.

That said, Bitbucket should focus less on singling out Amazon, and focus more on trying to figure out what they could have done better. It's the professional thing to do, and I'll respect them more for it.

<comment><USER3> I certainly can understand why they did, though; for a _very_ long time the only thing they knew was "Amazon's EBS seems to have failed". Once it was known that they were being DoS'd they quickly got that information out.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Downtime like this sucks - I've been there beating my head against a brick wall trying to get someone else to admit it really is something they need to look at :( I'm impressed with the effort they put in in the end.

BitBucket has had quite a lot of down time this year - and I also had a few problems with payments a short time back.

 _but_

It doesn't piss me off like it would with certain other providers.

The status update pages are amusingly maintained when they go down, updates are prompt and contacting support got a sensibly fast (it was a Sunday I emailed :D). At no point have I thought about moving on. So they do deserve a lot of kudos for that.

</comment><comment><USER5> Good to hear you're back on track.

16h resolution time is actually not too bad when you look at your monthly bill - but the initial auto-denial (typical for large service providers of all kinds) is ofcourse annoying. Perhaps you get faster action next time, now that you're paying for the premium plan.

It is indeed strange, though, that it took them so long to discover what must have been a huge traffic spike on your instance. Their administration panel needs work if it doesn't point out such anomalies at a glance. Also your own monitoring needs work if you didn't notice the spike of inbound traffic.

Anyways, good luck for the future and if you decide to switch or extend I'd be curious to read about it.

</comment><comment><USER6> Why weren't they running any monitoring on their instances? A simple graph of incoming traffic should have revealed the massive influx of packets and helped track things down more quickly.

Just because a system is 'in the cloud' is no reason not to setup normal monitoring on the system.

I wrote <http://www.brianlane.com/software/systemhealth/> to try and help with this situation, it is simple to install, doesn't require anything other then rrdtool and a web server to serve up the graphs.

<comment><USER7> They may have been, but I imagine it's difficult to discern the difference between legitimate traffic and a DoS attack if you've got NAS volumes mounted over the same interface. You'd need to do a more thorough network analysis.

<comment><USER8> They claimed in many places that their "pipe" was "maxed out". If the attack was large enough to use up all of their available bandwidth, that should be _easily_ noticeable in any basic bandwidth graphs.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> This is surprising to me. It seems like Amazon should have dedicated ethernet (or at least a separate VLAN + higher QoS) for EBS.

<comment><USER9> Wait! What about Network Neutrality? Using QoS would _de_ prioritize other traffic. In particular it would _unfairly_ advantage EBS over other cloud storage solutions you could be trying to access from EC2.

In all seriousness, I agree that Amazon should probably be using QoS here so outside traffic can't affect your EC2 to EBS link. I just want to point out that it is difficult to be simultaneously in favor of Amazon doing this while being against ISPs prioritizing voice traffic, which provides similar resilience for voice against outside influences [1].

[1] I'm not suggesting that the parent poster suffers this potential cognitive dissidence.

<comment><USER10> QOS and net neutrality are completely unrelated. What net neutrality is trying to prevent isn't prioritization by service, it's prioritization by server. Comcast wants to be able to hold Google's (or ycombinator's, or twitter's) traffic hostage, degrading their bandwidth unless they pay Comcast a fee. They'd also like to be able to ruin skype's voice services and netflix's video services so that their captive audiences can only get phone and video services through Comcast. That's what net neutrality is fighting, not perfectly reasonable QOS.

<comment><USER9> That may be the intention [2], but it isn't the effect.

Prioritizing EBS as was suggested above _is_ prioritizing by _server_. But let's say that there was some reasonable way to priority-queue EBS-like traffic regardless of the provider (there really isn't [1]). The DDOS attacker would then certainly use this priority channel, which would magnify the effect of their attack ten fold.

[1] Let me explain this in greater detail:

The best way to do QoS is to have end-devices tag their own IP traffic with the appropriate DSCP bits. After all, only the end devices can be really certain about the class of some packet. In your network, you then establish policies for how the various classes of packets should be prioritized and limited.

This works great inside a private network (like AWS, or an ISP). For one thing, you can establish clear standards on how different types of packets should be marked, and you can order them appropriately. You can trust the classifications to the same degree you trust your own systems and (potentially) your customers (depending on checks you do at your service edge). Also, your network gear can prioritize efficiently because only one bit field needs to be checked to determine priority.

Once you step outside of a private network, this all breaks down. First off, most carriers strip DSCP bits at the network edge, so these don't propagate end to end on the internet. Even if you receive a DSCP tag from the outside though, why should you trust it, and how could you trust that it is tagged according to your policies? If Youtube sets all their traffic _network control_ priority, and you trust it, your network would grind to a halt under load. More problematically, though, how can you meaningfully (and generically) differentiate Youtube packets from DDOS packets?

I don't expect you to have answers to these questions; they are hard problems that the best internet engineers in the world haven't solved yet. But this is the background on why an enforced government Net Neutrality mandate is going to throw all QoS policies into question.

[2] And trust me, I've very sympathetic to that intention. On net, Net Neutrality would be a win for my business. But it is still bad policy. What makes people so sure we should give politicians like GWB or Pelosi final say about network engineering [3]...

[3] Once the interest groups realize that centralized national network engineering policy is up for grabs in Washington every 2 years, have you thought about all the unpleasant directions this could go?

<comment><USER10> To be honest, I'm not actually sure what QOS even has to do with the initial post in this thread; wouldn't a dedicated private ethernet network between the ECC machines and the EBS machines (assuming it's possible within Amazon's network structure) have worked, assuming that their switches are configured to only allow communication between ECC and EBS (forbid ECC - ECC traffic)? Your commentary about how this would deprioritize other traffic wouldn't then be quite right; it would be a dedicated network, with no cost to any external sites. It would obviously give EBS an "unfair" advantage over anybody who wants to provide an ECC block storage solution to compete with EBS, but honestly, is that a concern? Nobody's demanding that all internet hosts (end- user included) have the same bandwidth to all other hosts. It's just artificial crippling of services that are bad, not some things having advantages over others.

QoS on the general web doesn't seem likely, as you point out. Prioritization based on which services can afford to pay off all the nation's ISPs seems like a really bad idea though. As a service provider, I don't want to have to pay kickbacks to every ISP in the country (world?) to ensure that no unfortunate accidents befall my traffic. Much more personally, though, as a human, I'm sick of being sold as a product. I don't watch commercial TV because I'm not a product to be sold to advertisers. Similarly, I'm not a product for Comcast to sell to google; that's how they see me, but it's not how I see myself. And, I get pissed off when people see me that way :)

<comment><USER9> _wouldn't a dedicated private ethernet network_

With appropriate capacity, a VLAN/QoS configuration is functionally identical to having physically separated networks. On an abstract level, if you object to provider prioritization, you should probably object to them running separate physical networks for their own services.

As to your point about feeling screwed by the (mostly theoretical) possibility of intentional service degradation, I sympathize. I'll point out though that 1) I'm quite certain this isn't terribly prevalent in the US, 2) in most cases where people think this is happening it is the result of simple under-capacity or generally bad network design or management, and 3) the correct answer to this general issue is to enable provider competition, not to impose ham-handed mandates.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> DDOSes are a sucker the first time round.

We went through the symptoms these guys did for about a week(!) before figuring out and putting hardware DDOS protection in place with our dedicated provider.

The lesson was well worth it though. Next time we have these symptoms, we won't be reinstalling the OS, hardware etc.

<comment><USER12> what did you get for hardware protection? Do you have your own data center?

<comment><USER11> I believe we have Cisco Guard DDoS Mitigation Appliance. It was provided to our by our data center for additional $59/month. We certainly don't have our own data center.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I wonder what someone has against BitBucket... but I also understand that BitBucket is unlikely to share all of whatever they suspect.

In such cases, the target of a DDoS often only has hunches and pseudonymous threats from which to reason about attacker motivations. Airing such speculative info risks (1) unfairly implicating innocents who may have been framed; (2) encouraging the guilty with more attention for their grievances or destructive skills.

<comment><USER14> We (GitHub) were DDoS'd the other week when members of an open source project hosted on the site got upset at the other members and wanted to make the entire ecosystem around the project suffer. Not saying that's what happened to BitBucket, but it could be a similar reason.

Talking with Sourceforge, it sounds stuff like this happens fairly regularly. It's one of the disadvantages of running a site that has members capable of doing this stuff.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Yikes, always remember to check interface utilization when troubleshooting performance issues with anything network related!

<comment><USER16> <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=859941>

<comment><USER15> Yeah, I saw that too. Too bad it seems like it was ~15 hours until Amazon checked an interface and saw the high utilization.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> After all, amazon was right to tell them that everything was in order. As it was.

He should fire his sysadmin for not checking the in/out network traffic...

<comment><USER18> Let's not be too hasty to play armchair sysadmin. Someone who claimed to be involved said the traffic never reached their servers.

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=859941>

<comment><USER19> Is that possible? How could they be the only ones affected then?

<comment><USER13> Anything's possible. What if there was enough traffic targeted at just BitBucket that one of the 'last hops' to BitBucket's machines, which may just be a virtual hop in Amazon's own infrastructure, was the only one saturated? I suppose it's even possible that the affected machines could only see high- packet loss (and EBS sluggishness), not the arriving packets themselves.

<comment><USER20> Correct. Our machines don't allow UDP, even. Either the physical machine our VM runs on, or the segment was flooded, which means we couldn't talk outside it.

<comment><USER21> Switch statistics should be able to rule that one out for you.

<comment><USER13> Does Amazon make such network-equipment statistics available?

<comment><USER21> I do not know, but any competent hosting facility will have those stats on call, it's what you base your billing on, so you'd better have them.

For the sites I operate this is my 'general health' indicator, bandwidth says a lot more than my alarms, if there is a problem it usually shows up in the bandwidth graphs before the alarms trigger (unless it is a power failure, but those are extremely rare).

Our providers make them available to us, and this has been the case with any provider that we've had to date (the planet, vxs, leaseweb and a couple of smaller ones), I'd imagine amazon has them too.

According to the Amazon FAQ you have to use 'cloudwatch' to get at this data:

"An Amazon VPC router enables Amazon EC2 instances within subnets to communicate with Amazon EC2 instances in other subnets within the same VPC. They also enable subnets and VPN gateways to communicate with each other. You can create and delete subnets attached to your router. Network usage data is not available from the router; however, you can obtain network usage statistics from your instances using Amazon CloudWatch."

You may have to do some arithmetic to see if a link got overloaded, one telltale on the bandwidth graphs is 'flat caps', where in spite of the machines inbound limit still not being reached you see a fairly flat top on the in or outbound bandwidth graph on several machines at the same time (if they're on the same segment, which on amazons infrastructure could be quite hard to figure out).</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Import fresh HN Comments with jQuery and uiji.js (reverse jQuery) - <AUTHOR> http://aakilfernandes.com/uiji.hnComments.html

<comment><AUTHOR> Lorem ipsum</comment>


Free app (with ads) has over nearly half of the nation's doctors (NYTimes) - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2011/07/29/business/the-epocrates-app-provides-drug-information-and-drug-ads.html?&pagewanted=all

<comment><AUTHOR> Whereas there is a lot of discussion on HN for product/market fit and solving pain points, this article shows what a smart/lucrative idea can do.

From the article:

"You have a drug industry that spends $14 billion a year to influence people who prescribe drugs. There are only 600,000 people who are allowed to prescribe drugs, so there is $14 billion spent against 600,000 people. If you have a channel to reach these physicians, it is a gold mine."</comment>


Banish missing glyphs with Unifont - <AUTHOR> https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2019/04/banish-the-%ef%bf%bd-with-unifont/ <comment><USER2> Indeed, GNU Unifont looks awful to many people, and even we only talk about bitmap fonts, Unifont is not the best-looking one. However, it's a font designed for practicability, not aesthetics. It's one of those few fonts that covers the entire Basic Multilingual Plane, and is actively maintained. It's a perfect choice as a fallback font.

And in fact, the font actually looks pretty good under a CLI console. I once tried a Linux kernel patch that embedded the 10 MiB+ Unifont to the native Linux VT console, and I got a perfect multilingual console (without using a 3rd-party framebuffer-based or KMS-based console), including all the CJK characters. It's also a good choice for a dot-matrix LCD/LED display.

<comment><USER3> > I got a perfect multilingual console

No, you didn't. If it was using Unifont, there are many scripts and languages that it was unable to display correctly because they require "shaping" that Unifont cannot support; it lacks the necessary glyphs, let alone the OpenType (or equivalent) tables to control the rendering.

Displaying one nominal glyph per Unicode character does not result in readable text for many languages. Just because it seems adequate for Western alphabets or for CJK doesn't mean it is sufficient for true multilingual support.

<comment><USER4> > Displaying one nominal glyph per Unicode character does not result in > readable text for many languages

Completely unreadable, even to people with a basic understanding of the inner workings of Unicode and some practice with the font, or just not matching the norms of correctness?

Decipherable but clearly not correct would mark the sweet spot between being just as bad as placeholders and being so good that it undermines efforts for having a proper font for a given language.

<comment><USER5> Unreadable.

Arabic has a strong difference between letters of the same word, and different words. There is no exact equivalent in English...

b&u&t&i&t&m&i&g&h&t&b&e&s&o&m&e&t&h&i&n&g&l&i&k&e&t&h&i&s

<comment><USER4> If that example is representative, I'd definitely put it in the "readable" bin. Leaps and bounds from what you'd _want_ to read, but infinitely more useful than a sequence of identical placeholders. Even just being able to tell wether two strings might be identical or not would be an improvement over blank placeholders.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> I tend to think this is a bad idea. Most of the characters that can't already be displayed using fonts included in modern operating systems are likely to be characters from "obscure" scripts that may need complex shaping for correct/readable display, which won't work with Unifont because of its limited 1:1 character/glyph mapping, and/or they're characters (whether from historic scripts or newly-encoded emoji) in higher Unicode planes, meaning you'll need to provide not just the basic (plane-0) Unifont but also the extra resource for higher planes. It adds up to a lot of bloat, for the sake of inadequate rendering of characters that the user probably can't make sense of anyway.

The one case where there might be a worthwhile benefit would be for recent emoji additions. But that would be better addressed by a more limited effort to provide an up-to-date emoji-only font, not a resource that attempts (in vain!) to cover the whole of Unicode.

<comment><USER6> Not to mention that many emoji are emoji sequences. So again, not a 1:1.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> [https://www.google.com/get/noto/](https://www.google.com/get/noto/)

Google's Noto font family is of far higher quality than Unifont and serves the same purpose. Better, too, since there's a lot of details in various languages and scripts that go far beyond "put a glyph here". I've heard only good things about Noto in that respect.

<comment><AUTHOR> It's also 1.1GB!

And hasn't been updated since 2017 [https://www.google.com/get/noto/updates/](https://www.google.com/get/noto/updates/)

But, other than that...

<comment><USER8> > And hasn't been updated since 2017

This is only a useful data point if there have been significant changes to "writing system" released since then.

<comment><USER9> Unicode 11 was released in 2018 and Unicode 12 in 2019. A "universal" font that doesn't keep up with Unicode isn't very universal.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I am not an http expert, but could we put that file on one location on the web so that I do not download it for every fricking site I open? Or even better, could not the browser bundle it?

<comment><USER11> Why not just have it installed on your system, and disallow websites to dictate which fonts to use?

Edit to make the comment (hopefully) more valuable: I mean, unless certain choice of fonts is somehow intrinsic to the content or purpose a given website serves, the browser, and by extension the user, probably know better which fonts are preferable for them to comfortably read the textual content.

<comment><USER7> Web fonts have their place. For example they're extremely commonly used to efficiently serve icons that seamlessly blend into text across many websites.

In my previous app I used web fonts to be able to render Hearthstone cards using the correct font the game uses. In my previous app I used web fonts to

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> There's also [https://www.google.com/get/noto/](https://www.google.com/get/noto/) which is what Ubuntu uses for emoji and is proportional and colored.

<comment><USER13> I do use noto for this, but absolutely _hate_ the use of color in glyphs such as the emojis.

<comment><USER14> The black and white Noto emoji have not been updated in years sadly, but you can still pretend it before Noto Color Emoji. Alternatively prefer Symbola, which should be more up to date.

<comment><USER15> Couldn't you just strip the tables for the color map and the additional glyphs for the other color layers? Or does Noto use bitmaps or SVGs for the colored glyphs?

<comment><USER14> It's a scalable bitmap glyph as far as my understanding goes. "It's scalable even though it's a bitmap font." is what I remember reading last year, but I cannot find it for you, sorry.

<comment><USER15> From looking at the Github repository, it seems like the source images are SVG and the font might use either SVG or bitmaps, but not COLR/CPAL which would degrade nicely to black and white.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> > If your app or website uses a Unicode character which isn't supported on a > device, the user will usually see � - a replacement character. If you > include Unifont, they'll see the correct character.

Neat idea. I think the transition to UTF-8 is practically done, I'm not seeing � anymore these days (used to be extremely common a while back).

<comment><USER17> This line is largely wrong.

Most systems, when called to display a character which they're unable to render, will render a placeholder. This is most often a dotted box of some sort, roughly the size of a large character. In some systems the dotted box (assuming it's large enough for them to be readable) contains the Unicode codepoint number that the system couldn't render. In a few the box contains some representative symbol that gives you a hint what sort of thing is missing, e.g. maybe it's a Han glyph to suggest that you should look for a Chinese font.

I haven't seen any (they may exist of course) where they render U+FFFD the replacement character �.

The most common reason to see U+FFFD is the reason it was created, something was encoded or decoded in a way that is gibberish and the best option in that case is to replace the minimum chunk of gibberish with U+FFFD and then keep trying. On the Web you'd often see pages which claimed to be UTF-8 but were actually ISO-8859-1 or Windows codepage 1252, neither of which is UTF-8 but they share the most common Latin characters, these days most browsers will auto-detect this goof, and besides most web pages really are UTF-8, but when browsers were less good at guessing and more pages were wrong you'd see it more often.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yup, I screwed up with that title! See the discussion at [https://twitter.com/FakeUnicode/status/1113774985116434433](https://twitter.com/FakeUnicode/status/1113774985116434433)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Question: how do you specify in CSS that you want font X, except if a specific glyph is not present, then you want font Y?

<comment><USER19> when you specify your font-stack, like:

        font-family: Helvetica, Arial, Sans-Serif;

it will fall through. so if a user has Helvetica installed, but Helvetica doesn't provide glyph X, then it will check whether Arial has glyph X.

so if you want all non-ascii glyphs to fall through to an alternative font, you need to serve a version of your primary font that only includes ascii.

<comment><USER18> Ok, I wasn't aware that stacking fonts works at the glyph level.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> See also: [https://github.com/rolandwalker/unicode- fonts](https://github.com/rolandwalker/unicode-fonts) (a different direction, starts from _removing_ Unifont)

</comment><comment><USER20> I can understand the utility of a basic fallback font that just works but if you are already building a large web client, why not just include the fonts you actually want to use? That way you get the look you want at whatever resolution without some horrible bitmap font popping up now and then.

<comment><AUTHOR> Because you don't always know what kind of content you'll be displaying. Especially if you allow user-generated content.

Here's an example I found a few years ago - [https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2015/11/premature-subsetting-of- web...](https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2015/11/premature-subsetting-of-web-fonts/) \- an English language website never expected their authors to use the é (e-acute) character. So they removed it from their webfont.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> I'd love to know how they're apparently fit more glyphs in a font than can fit in a font. The opentype specification only allows up to a USHORT worth of glyph ids, and 65335 ids is nowhere near enough to index even just all 137993 currently assigned code points.

<comment><USER3> They don't. There are multiple truetype fonts involved:

* The Standard Unifont TTF Download: unifont-12.0.01.ttf (12 Mbytes)

* Glyphs above the Unicode Basic Multilingual Plane: unifont_upper-12.0.01.ttf (1 Mbyte)

* Unicode ConScript Unicode Registry (CSUR) PUA Glyphs: unifont_csur-12.0.01.ttf (1 Mbyte)

(from [http://unifoundry.com/unifont/index.html](http://unifoundry.com/unifont/index.html)). And note that unifont_upper only seems to cover plane 1 and plane 14 stuff; they haven't attempted to tackle the plane 2 CJK repertoire.

<comment><USER21> That is really not what this article claims, though. It claims "It contains /every/ Unicode glyph in one single file!".

<comment><USER3> So it does - though later under "Use on the web", it turns out that it's primarily talking about the BMP, and higher-plane characters will require another file. (It doesn't seem to notice the lack of support for plane-2 CJK at all.)

The article title "Banish the � with Unifont" is also misleading, actually. � is U+FFFD, the REPLACEMENT CHARACTER that typically indicates an encoding error or binary garbage; it's not the same thing as the missing-glyph symbol (often a simple box, though it may vary) that generally appears when font support for a valid character is lacking.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> What's the point of rendering characters that can't be understood by the reader? I can't read chinese, cyrillic, native american scripts, etc, so it's not worth the 12MB in apps and definitely websites.

<comment><USER23> If it renders in a facsimile of the correct script, this allows you to:

\- see that it's foreign text, rather than pictographs or weird english text.

\- see when the shapes of other languages are used to make pictures (¯\\_(ツ)_/¯)

\- if it's a foreign language, you can guess which language

\- you can guess at the complexity of what was written, for example by looking for repeated substrings.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> As a resident of a western country, I don't fully understand how to implement or test Unicode compatibility on my browser, website, terminal, etc. Is there a test suite of characters I can use to validate etc?

<comment><USER25> The question doesn't really make sense, because that's not what unicode is.

Unicode encodes what's necessary for printing books since about 1900 (and a bit more, but that's a fair one-sentence summary). What you want to validate isn't that you'd be able to print every kind of book printed since 1900. You're only interested in some of the alphabets, and you may be interested in more functionality than just printing. For example you may need sorting, or character input with the right sort of interactive appearance changes, or equality testing.

If you decide what you want to work, then googling usually finds a suitable test quickly.

<comment><USER26> Right, but if you're making a word processor or a web forum or a registration form what you want might be "Well, I don't speak languages that need complex scripts, but I'd be happy to support other people's scripts if it's easy"

<comment><USER27> The easiest test for "does my software handle Unicode somewhat better than dumbly" is emoji. If your users aren't already deluging you with emoji in their content in 2019, grab the emoji keyboard from your Operating System, often easy to find on most "soft keyboard overlays" such as mobile platforms. (In Windows 10 for the last year or so there are two keyboard shortcuts that work everywhere: Windows Key+. and Windows Key+;)

Many emoji these days are quite complex Unicode sequences with a number of them in the so-called "Astral Plane" meaning they need more than 16-bits to accurately display (proving you aren't treating UTF-8 or UTF-16 as if it was UCS-2), and as sequences include a lot of fun non-visible codepoints ("characters") such as the Zero-Width Joiner, and are very susceptible to breaking if accidentally dropped, reordered, or otherwise spliced (possibly proving you aren't doing back string math or manipulation at the codepoint level rather than the glyph/sequence/combined-character level).

[ETA: Useful sequences to test are any that support the skin-tone and gender modifiers. On Windows, the various "cat occupation" emoji are also interesting sequences such as ninja cat and astro cat. Other platforms have similar unique "fun" sequences that are noticeable at a glance when right/wrong.]

It's not entirely true that if you support emoji well you support any Unicode user's script well, but if you support emoji well you probably don't do anything particularly stupid to make other Unicode users unhappy.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> interesting that the author used images of the font rather than actually embedding the font into this webpage</comment>


How to count digits in a prime number - <AUTHOR> http://www.businessinsider.com/the-ten-most-popular-digits-in-the-new-prime-number-2013-2?op=1

<comment><USER2> The linked article is possibly the worst misuse of a public forum I've ever seen. It pretends to convey useful or interesting information, but it's a shameless attempt to put advertising in front of the reader, over and over again.

They could at least have revealed the statistical breakdown of the digits, or pretended to be interested in the mathematical issues. But no -- there's no usable information at all.

> _[As for methodology, the way we did it is we loaded the number into 10 > different browser tabs, and then Control+F'd each digit to get a count of > how many times it occurred.]_

God, I hope this is a lame attempt at humor.

For the math, here's a quick Python breakdown of the 17,425,170 digits by frequency of occurrence, compared to the expected mean (as a differential percentage):

        dig  total      +-%
        </comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment>
        0:  1739652  -0.164417
        1:  1743497  +0.056240
        2:  1739844  -0.153399
        3:  1745602  +0.177043
        4:  1743528  +0.058020
        5:  1739641  -0.165049
        6:  1742677  +0.009182
        7:  1743436  +0.052740
        8:  1743298  +0.044820
        9:  1743995  +0.084820

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Interns are not just for coffee anymore.

 _Even though the text file came in at a whopping 25 megabytes, we actually counted the number of instances in the newest identified Prime.

Coming in at a mighty 17,425,170 digits, it wasn't an easy task. Still, the most popular number will definitely surprise you.

[As for methodology, the way we did it is we loaded the number into 10 different browser tabs, and then Control+F'd each digit to get a count of how many times it occurred.]_

</comment><comment><USER3> This could be an interesting subject (with more analysis), but the visualization is horrible! There is not even a graph. I _had_ to make one: <http://imgur.com/a/zqhUe></comment>


Property manager application - <AUTHOR> I have created a property manager application, whose aim is to manage the properties for the project for multiple environments / releases.
Complete appliation is deployed on HEROKU at
https://vast-cliffs-8955.herokuapp.com/#/
Project Detail is available at :
https://github.com/panbhatt/propserv er
Clients are available in :
Java NodeJS <comment><USER2> you might get more response as a "Show HN" posting

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks. i m trying that.</comment></comment>


The POWER8 Libre System Looks Set to Fail, Now There's an AMD Libre Effort - <AUTHOR> http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=No-Talos-Now-AMD-Libre-Effort <comment><USER2> As the articles mentions, this "AMD Libre Effort" isn't new--the Libreboot D16 was around before the Talos effort. I believe the D16 coreboot(/libreboot) work was also done by Raptor Engineering, which is the group presently pitching the Talos.

But I'll admit I presently have little faith these will take off. It seems like the folks who should know enough to care about these efforts don't. At least not enough to support them. HN articles like "I returned my 2016 MacBook Pro with Touch Bar" garner hundreds of upvotes and comments within hours of posting even weeks after this horse was beaten to an unrecognizable pulp on HN following the Apple announcement. And don't forget the hunt for a new "development laptop" (translation: a MacBook Pro-like laptop not made by Apple that somehow doesn't sacrifice any of the trendy/cool and usual dog tricks we've all grown accustomed to having in Apple's products) that also keeps coming up. Talos receives ... crickets chirping. What does this say about the state of our industry where even the tech literates of HN are barely distinguishable in their buying behaviour from the general consumer? It's almost like many of the folks here don't even see vendor lock-down as an actual problem, or at least don't give truly libre computing platforms more than a passing thought even when actual opportunities to produce them emerge.

<comment><USER3> > Talos receives ... crickets chirping.

5 grand for a CPU+Mobo no better than a USD400 Intel equivalent in performance with extremely higher energy requirements... unfortunately means dead before arrival. Specially with RISC-V being so promising.

Yes, hardware development is expensive, but most people aren't rich.

<comment><USER2> No, Talos is certainly not a cheap board, but I believe it was clearly intended by its developer to proverbially break ground for a new ecosystem that wasn't vendor-controlled--with increased adoption, these would undoubtedly get cheaper and better down the line.

While most people aren't rich, there is certainly enough wealth among the HN readership, as evidenced by their interest in Apple products, high-end smartphones, DSLRs, Teslas, etc. And even if people couldn't afford to get a workstation, they could have still donated to the cause. That this didn't happen says to me that enough people honestly just didn't give a damn. This comes off as very strange to me, because people are clearly outraged by the conduct of MS, Intel, and others. Buying a Talos means a chance to start stripping some of the usual antagonists in this saga of their hegemony on the computing community at large. Personally, I'd be willing to live with more expensive computers in the short-term if it meant a check on their influence in the long-term.

And performance-wise, Talos with an unclocked 8 core 190 watt POWER8 promised a bit better than the i7-5960X workstation I use at home (not a $400 chip), and consumed only modestly more power than same. So that doesn't strike me as a strong argument against it. But if the only reason this product would appeal to people is that it needed to offer equivalent performance to its x86 counterparts at roughly equiv prices, then we're in dire straits--that misses the entire point of having a computer that guarantees your access right down to the hardware and firmware. Until now, we've only enjoyed this luxury on small embedded boards (e.g., BeagleBone), which are toys in comparison.

Finally, RISC-V may be promising, but it's not here--POWER8 is, and POWER9 is already in the works. Why hold your breath for what may prove to be vaporware apart from prototypes in an academic or company R&D setting?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> I will never understand non-Intel chip makers. Is it so friggin hard to build and ITX / ATX motherboard that people can build a PC with? How do these folks expect to get mind share with no entrance ramp?</comment>