throwaway287391

> Kind of weirds people out when … you message them the instant they sit down at their PC.

I miss the AIM days when you’d hear the “door opening” sound when someone signed on. It was totally normal to immediately ping someone then because signing onto AIM was asking to be pinged. And that sound made your heart skip a beat because it might be the girl you like and she might even IM you first :o

"Jeremy From Marketing" (Ep. 36) is another one about a pen tester, and it's really engrossing, like an action thriller in your ears.

I got vaxxed as soon as I reasonably could and I never want to get COVID, but if that's true it really does seem insulting to require vaccination for people who can prove they already had COVID. It's like they did get vaccinated but picked a much more difficult/risky and much more effective way to do so -- if that were their intention (and they avoided spreading it once they got it), one could say it was a heroic choice...

At the same time though, I can imagine it would be really difficult/expensive to verify the proof of previous infection vs. verifying vaccination, and there could be the appearance of incentivizing anti-vaxxers to go infect themselves with COVID.

I doubt Netflix could (easily) make a product that replicates linear network TV (as much as linear TV itself is kind of a shitty product, which I say as a defender of it here). Here's why:

(1) Based on what I've seen from spending many hours scrolling through their available content (or what the algorithm will show me of it, anyway!), I'm not actually sure Netflix could put that content together into a 24/7 program that resembles a linear TV channel, even given how repetitive and often shitty linear TV content is. I could definitely be wrong about this, but I think Netflix lacks both the dynamic breadth and thematic depth of content. On the "dynamic breadth": Linear TV is at least 95% repeats, but if you watch it one day and then watch it again 6 months later, the content in your latter watch will usually be totally disjoint from the first watch. Meanwhile whenever I go on Netflix I swear like 75% of what I'm shown is things they were showing me 2+ years ago. Maybe they could still assemble their content into a 24/7/365 schedule that mimics linear TV programming, but I wouldn't bet on that.

(2) A linear TV channel isn't just a bunch of shows concatenated one right after another. At a minimum it has interstitials between shows/segments telling you what's next and what's on later. These are what gives the channel its personality/brand, and I'd assume it takes at least a few full-time staff per 24/7 channel. Think Discovery Channel's "Shark Week". It was mostly a bunch of repeats of shows they already had that happened to be shark-related, but the interstitials for it marketed it into a national event. And, dare I say it...linear TV often has ads. Ads can be a nice part of TV (especially for shitty/campy TV) -- they're when you go to the bathroom, get a snack, and/or chat about what you just watched. Certainly not a required part of linear TV (HBO and BBC are good linear TV channels and don't have ads), but hard for Netflix in particular to recreate if they were aiming to replicate the full linear TV experience.

> I think linear TV will still be going in 10 years time, but probably not 30

I think you're probably right, but I'm one of the few millennials who will miss it when it's gone. I still like being able to turn on the news or some dumb show as background noise, it's an old habit from my boomer parent upbringing. I'm a bit surprised I haven't really met anyone else around my age with a nostalgic attachment to linear TV.

I stream things that I actually want to watch deliberately, but as a replacement for linear TV it's just not the same. It's a lot more effort (paradox of choice, beyond just the UI itself necessitating a lot more "clicks") and there's something nice about knowing that people around the country/world are watching the same thing at the same time as me. I'd like to say it could be a startup opportunity, but I think I might be the only one who cares.

Not to mention, currently an antenna will get you much better picture quality than many/most streaming services (definitely true for the BBC News stream available on iPlayer -- that looks like crap to me).

It's a good thing they screen applicants to make sure none of them have used alcohol in the last month. Imagine -- hiring someone who drinks alcohol for a driving job. The irresponsibility would be truly unthinkable.

Huh, so $999 is the max -- and here I was all this time thinking the I Am Rich [0] dev had generously chosen an affordable price point.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_Am_Rich

> But since work is per job, when they want to work a few hours a week or take time off, that's also possible without repercussions.

I realize it's rather irrational but I personally don't think I could stomach the non-salaried lifestyle. A day of vacation is a day's wages lost. I'm sure it's something you learn to live with but I appreciate that the cost of taking time off is quite abstract for me.

"Mandates" in the headline refers to mandates imposed by businesses and schools, many of which already require vaccines. Why would this particular vaccine would be any different?

That explains the "birthday paradox" part, what I'm unclear on is the need for a "collision search algorithm" that isn't just "build a hashmap" which should take roughly O(N) time. (I suppose it could just be that, but I'm surprised it's even mentioned in that case. In my uncle(?) comment I wrote an 8 line Python implementation that runs in 3 seconds on my laptop.)

Yeah I'm unclear on why this even requires a clever algorithm. I'd think that given the 1.4 million precomputed hashes, a simple/naive Python function (<10 lines) that builds a dict mapping hash -> (list of images with that hash) could surface all the collisions in a few seconds. (It's a cool article though! I'm glad someone tested this.)

Edit: I'm procrastinating so I tried it. It's 8 lines including IO/parsing and runs in 2.8 seconds on my laptop:

  import collections
  hash_to_filenames = collections.defaultdict(list)
  with open('hashes.txt') as f:
    for line in f.readlines():
      filename, hash = line.strip().split()
      hash_to_filenames[hash].append(filename)
  dupes = {h: fs for h, fs in hash_to_filenames.items() if len(fs) > 1}
  print(f'Done. Found {len(dupes)} dupes.')

(hashes.txt is from the zip in the github repo, and it finds 8865 dupes which looks almost right from the article text (8272 + 595 = 8867).)

And even if you could, once interviewees know you're doing this, they could easily game it by intentionally bombing the first interview.

From what I understand it absolutely does for US teenagers, if not anyone else. You don't want to be the "green bubble".

Is it taxed at (average?) income tax rates or VAT rates or what? Unless it's taxed at the highest marginal income tax rate, it seems like there's still at least some loophole potential.

Right, that makes sense. Thanks for the answer.

> And the answer to your second question is, the payment would be "income" (defined as payment for completing work) and would fall under income tax. There's no exception in income tax for prizes because prizes aren't even income at all, as you don't work for them.

Is it really so clear cut? I'm thinking of things like programming competitions -- in a sense you "work" to win a prize at one of those, don't you? So then what stops my employer calling all of my work as a programmer a programming competition? You could say "the competition organizers can't profit off of the work", but is that always true? Netflix could've legally profited off of the entries in the Netflix competition (even though they didn't), right? Similar for Kaggle contests. Would prizes from those count as taxable income? And even on something like a game show, they're profiting (or hoping to) from your participation/appearance.

> Prizes are tax-free here

Off-topic but: this always seemed like the most bizarre thing to me. What's the rationale? Why do governments want to incentivize people winning "prizes" over "honest work"?

(My HN engineer brain also wants to know what the distinction is that prevents companies from calling any payment for a one-time contract a "prize" for completing the work, but I'm sure there's some unsatisfying "you know it when you see it" or "laws are people not code" type answer.)

> Once a certain number of photos are marked as suspect, Apple will enable all the suspect photos to be decrypted and, if apparently illegal, passed on to the relevant authorities.

Haven't Apple previously claimed that their encryption works such that Apple themselves can't decrypt it no matter what? (IIRC this came up during the San Bernadino attack when the FBI requested that Apple decrypt/unlock a suspect's iPhone and Apple said they couldn't.) Is this not a change? Maybe I'm confusing iCloud encryption vs. iPhone encryption and the former doesn't have any of those guarantees?

I get your point but I like that you describe the name of a character in a fictional TV show as a "thing of the real world", as compared to the name of a coworker you speak with regularly. :p

> The company said Tina did not report the racial slur and it was not detected by the site's moderation system because it was pluralised.

Wow, that's not a very robust moderation system...

What I don't understand is, why are these local US news sites required to comply with GDPR? I wouldn't think they'd have any obligation to follow it (or any possible recourse for not doing so) unless they have business operations in the EU. Are these local news sites in fact all owned by multinationals that do have operations in the EU?

Edit: I'm getting downvoted -- just in case it helps to clarify, I'm not trying to say anything anti-GDPR here... I'm just genuinely surprised these ostensibly US-only companies feel obligated to follow it and genuinely asking why? Is there an actual legal risk to non-compliance for them? Given the already low level of effort just to detect an EU-based IP address and show the patronizing error message, it seems like they must have had some motivation to even do that much and I'm just wondering what that was.

I only see one mention of a year towards the end -- 4 April 2009, the date of the first concert -- and the only other date I see is that construction began the 24th of October (with no year). Am I missing something or should I assume he built an amazing sounding piano, like no other piano in the world, with no prior experience, in <6 months?! Unbelievable.

> The case when one of them is more skilled is actually very good, because then they teach the other one.

Right, I get that that's the theory, it's just that I've never personally seen it work out so well in practice.

I can imagine how it's extremely useful and rewarding for both partners if you have two very motivated people, and the better one is keen to teach and even genuinely open to suggestions from the "worse" one, and the "worse" one is keen to learn. That's the model for a good partnership that most people probably have in mind when they propose doing a project like this. I've just never actually seen a partnership work out like that -- it feels like it requires both members of the parternship have top ~quartile motivation/empathy/communication skills (which as you could imagine might end up being pretty rare among randomly selected CS students...).

In any case thanks for sharing your experience -- good to know that it actually can/does happen!

> in groups of two

I wouldn't doubt there's good research showing pair programming is a great way to learn, but anecdotally/observationally I really have trouble believing it's effective. In my experience, in at least half of pairs there will be one more skilled programmer and one less skilled programmer and the better one does the lion's share (if not all) of the work -- this is doubly true if the partnerships are randomly assigned. Even if the worse one is trying their best to stay engaged and follow along, it's just hard to do if the other person is faster than you, and you might even feel like you're being a bit of a useless nuisance by asking questions when the other person is clearly capable of working on their own. (I've been on both sides of this in different contexts, BTW.)

But I imagine my intuition must be wrong since this is such a popular teaching method -- interested to read any research/counterpoints on the subject.

Isn't it entirely possible that they did exclude GPL licensed code, but somebody somewhere has violated copyright and copy-pasted that snippet into non-GPL-licensed code that they trained on?

They could try to trace every single code snippet they train on to its "true source" and use the license for that, but that's not very well-defined, and is a lot harder, and it's never going to be 100%.

That's incredible. I'm particularly blown away by the memorization from a 200 ms observation, and the fine motor skills -- so effortlessly precise with that finger.

Why am I hearing so much about Pokemon cards in the past few weeks? Are they having a resurgence? What prompted it?

> Releasing your model is as simple as scp’ing to your server; just do it and quit worrying so much.

I guess it is about that simple if you'd be satisfied with the release of a documentation-free binary blob of weights. Somehow I suspect others might complain about usability.

I'm actually quite surprised it's that high -- I've seen one prompt so far, and I was kind of running on autopilot so I accidentally clicked "Accept" before my brain even processed what it was asking me (and then I didn't bother to track down the setting to manually opt-out afterwards). I guess I'm in the top 5% of absent-minded users!

As a scientist who had to use MATLAB up until about 2013 because that's what everyone else used, it was such a relief to move to Python. It's true that you can implement a linear algebra routine in a couple fewer characters in MATLAB, but unless that's literally all you're doing, Python is much nicer to work with. The data structures in MATLAB are just a nightmare for general purpose programming, which makes things like loading and parsing data -- things that scientists often need to do -- just terrible. The fact that the notion of the "matrix" (i.e. a 2D array rather than a general ND array) is so deeply baked into everything is a huge headache (a scalar is a 1x1 matrix in MATLAB!). I'm also surprised anyone is particularly bothered by the @ operator. The asterisk for matrix multiplication seems roughly equally unheard of in nicely typeset / handwritten math (you would just write e.g. Ab for a matrix-vector multiplication with no inset operator).

It's likely from a NYTimes (or maybe LATimes or WaPo) crossword where all 4-10 of the longest answers followed the same punny format. But yes, it's intentionally left up to the person solving to figure out the theme, usually by filling many of the easier/shorter non-theme answers first. This style makes these prestige hand-crafted crosswords (like those in the NYT and a couple other outlets) particularly satisfying/rewarding to solve. The themes can be amazingly creative and original on a daily/weekly basis.