1. Show HN: If YouTube had actual channels
Total comment counts : 154
Summary
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Top 1 Comment Summary
The article discusses various suggestions and feedback regarding a TV guide application. The author expresses excitement about the app and suggests adding channel names to enhance the user experience. They also request the ability to share permalinks for channels, allowing others to view the same content. Additionally, the author mentions a Firefox extension they use to adjust audio settings and wonders if a similar feature could be implemented in the app. The author concludes by mentioning the absence of a volume control feature.
Top 2 Comment Summary
This article discusses a channel that continues to run even when you switch away from it. This design creates a fear of missing out (FOMO), forcing users to make a subconscious decision about which channel they want to watch, as they cannot catch everything.
2. ARPA-H announces awards to develop novel technologies for precise tumor removal
Total comment counts : 6
Summary
The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services’ Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health (ARPA-H) has announced the recipients of its Precision Surgical Interventions (PSI) program awards. The program aims to develop new technologies that will enable surgeons to remove tumors with greater accuracy, potentially reducing the need for repeat surgeries and minimizing damage to critical structures. The selected teams will focus on improving cancer detection and enhancing the visibility of anatomical structures during surgery. The program emphasizes the development of solutions that are accessible, affordable, and compatible with different users. ARPA-H’s total investment in the program is expected to be around $150 million.
Top 1 Comment Summary
The article asks about the differences between the mandates of ARPA-H and NIH. It notes that NIH already allocates $30 billion a year for research and wonders if the research structure of ARPA-H is significantly different.
Top 2 Comment Summary
The article highlights the potential of precision medicine and suggests the need for parallel research tracks with backing and support from NIH. It also mentions the Obama Precision Medicine Initiative from 2015 and wonders about its progress.
3. Ex-Kansas police chief who raided local newspaper criminally charged
Total comment counts : 10
Summary
Former Marion police chief, Gideon Cody, has been charged with felony obstruction of justice for allegedly persuading a potential witness to withhold information during the investigation of his conduct. The charge accuses Cody of knowingly or intentionally influencing the witness to withhold information on the day of a raid on a weekly newspaper and the home of its publisher, or within the following six days. The raid, which sparked a national debate about press freedom, took place in Marion, Kansas. The publisher of the newspaper, Eric Meyer, believes that Cody is being made the “fall guy” for the raid and expects the case to be resolved through a plea bargain. The charge against Cody does not provide specific details about his alleged conduct. A report from two special prosecutors revealed text messages between Cody and a local business owner, with Cody allegedly asking her to delete the messages. Cody had justified the raid by claiming that Meyer, the newspaper, and one of its reporters had committed identity theft or other computer crimes. However, the prosecutors’ report concluded that no crime was committed by Meyer, the reporter, or the newspaper, and that Cody had reached an erroneous conclusion due to a poor investigation.
Top 1 Comment Summary
The author believes that law enforcement officials who break the law should receive double the punishment because they are aware of the law and should not have any excuse. The author considers it unjust that only one person is being charged despite several others participating in the wrongdoing.
Top 2 Comment Summary
The article discusses a series of events related to the raid on the Marion County Record by the Kansas police chief. The police chief, who led the raid, has resigned, and prior to that, he had been suspended. The Marion County attorney has also withdrawn the search warrant against the Kansas paper and returned the items. The raid raised concerns about violations of press freedom, and unfortunately, the co-owner of the newspaper collapsed and died after the police raid. These events have led to discussions and comments on various news platforms.
4. MVSplat: Efficient 3D Gaussian Splatting from Sparse Multi-View Images
Total comment counts : 5
Summary
The author of the article presents qualitative comparisons between their model, MVSplat, and the state-of-the-art model, pixelSplat. They claim that MVSplat produces higher-quality 3D Gaussian primitives. They provide “.ply” files for the 3D Gaussians produced by both models for readers to compare. They recommend using online viewers like 3D Gaussian Splatting with Three.js to view the files. The article also states that MVSplat is superior in generalizing to out-of-distribution novel scenes because the cost volume captures the relative similarity between features. They demonstrate this by training models on RealEstate10K (indoor scenes) and testing them directly on DTU (object-centric scenes) and ACID (outdoor scenes). The article mentions that the template used was borrowed from Nerfies, which is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License. The author encourages readers to provide feedback and ask questions to Yuedong Chen.
Top 1 Comment Summary
The author discusses the current state of the tech stack in the “splat world,” a reference to a specific technology or field. They mention MVSplat, a tool that generates splats for renderings, and their desire to use it to create renderings of a field near their house. However, they note that they need camera pose data to use MVSplat effectively. They discuss the challenges of obtaining accurate camera pose data from outdoor photos and mention a tool called FAR that claims to provide up to 80% pose accuracy. The author expresses uncertainty about how MVSplat will handle 80% accurate camera pose data and whether they should use a pre-trained model or train their own. They also mention the availability of iPhone apps and commercial projects like Skydio that offer similar functionality but at a higher cost. The author anticipates that in the future, there will be more user-friendly and affordable tools based on open models, but acknowledges that there is still progress to be made in this area.
Top 2 Comment Summary
The article discusses the difficulty of finding information about the hardware used for inference in a paper. Although the training was done on a single A100 GPU, the platform for inference is unclear. The article emphasizes the importance of this information for understanding the significance of the 22fps result. It also mentions the potential for synthesizing new views in real-time from a small set of images, which could be useful in augmented reality applications. The author expresses interest in being able to navigate through their photo library as if they were physically present.
5. Disney seeks dismissal of wrongful death lawsuit citing waiver in Disney+ terms
Total comment counts : 47
Summary
Disney has asked a Florida court to dismiss a wrongful death lawsuit filed against them due to anaphylaxis, citing an arbitration waiver in the terms and conditions of Disney+. The lawsuit was filed by Jeffrey Piccolo, husband of Kanokporn Tangsuan, a doctor who passed away after eating a meal at a Disney Springs restaurant. Disney claims Piccolo agreed to arbitration when signing up for a free trial of Disney+ and purchasing tickets through the My Disney Experience app. Piccolo’s attorneys argue that it is unreasonable for Disney to enforce an agreement that he never signed.
Top 1 Comment Summary
The article discusses a bug in the legal system that allows companies like Disney to win by filing a motion or claim. Even if the motion is denied, they can wear down their opponent who has limited resources and is personally affected by the case dragging out. This makes the opponent more likely to accept a lower settlement. The only downside for Disney is minimal legal costs. The article suggests that courts should be able to issue sanctions or extra damages for using such tactics to deter companies from playing this game. This way, the potential consequences could double the award and make companies less eager to use these sleazy tricks.
Top 2 Comment Summary
The article emphasizes the potential consequences of implied contract acceptance and the importance of specificity in contracts. It suggests that certain transactions, when accompanied by an implied contract acceptance, could result in a loophole that allows parent companies and associated entities to evade responsibility indefinitely. The author expresses hope that the justice system will address this legal theory and emphasizes the need for precise and detailed contractual terms to avoid potential complications.
6. Rust Atomics and Locks (2023)
Total comment counts : 13
Summary
The article discusses the book “Low-Level Concurrency in Practice” written by Mara Bos. The book focuses on the Rust programming language and its suitability for concurrency. It explains the challenges of implementing concurrent data structures correctly and addresses memory ordering bugs commonly found in libraries. The book covers topics such as atomics, memory ordering, and the combination of these with operating system APIs to build primitives like mutexes and condition variables. By the end of the book, readers will have a deep understanding of Rust’s memory model, processors, and the role of the operating system in concurrent programming. The article also provides links to where the book can be purchased.
Top 1 Comment Summary
The article discusses changes that have occurred since the writing of a book about Rust’s Mutex and RwLock implementation on Windows. The author mentions that Rust moved to WaitOnAddress on Windows 8 and beyond, and highlights a bug found in SRWLocks that has not been fixed in released Windows versions. The bug causes SRWLocks to occasionally give a Write Lock instead of a Read Lock, potentially causing issues with concurrency. The author suggests that this bug arises from the authors of SRWLocks assuming they do not know whether a read or write lock is requested in certain edge cases, leading them to always provide a write lock.
Top 2 Comment Summary
This article recommends a book for individuals interested in low-level and/or embedded programming, even if they are not specifically interested in Rust. The book provides a well-written introduction to important topics in this field, and around 80% of the content is applicable to other programming languages as well.
7. Entangled Photons Maintained Under New York Streets
Total comment counts : 5
Summary
Researchers have successfully sent 20,000 entangled photons per second down a 34-km-long section of a fiber-optic network in New York with a fidelity of 99%. This achievement is a major step toward the commercialization of quantum networks. The researchers used polarization entanglement and developed a method to compensate for the stresses and disturbances that optical fibers experience, which could disrupt the entanglement. The demonstration ran continuously for 15 days with an uptime of 99.84%. The results of this study impressed experts and suggest the possibility of deploying quantum networks in the real world.
Top 1 Comment Summary
The article discusses a concept called “quantum eruv,” which is similar to the Jewish religious concept of an eruv. The eruv is an enclosed area that allows observant Jews to carry objects on the Sabbath, which would normally be prohibited. In the context of quantum computing, the quantum eruv refers to the ability to entangle distant qubits, or quantum bits, in a large-scale quantum system. The article mentions that the eruv has a certain number of photons per second and fidelity percentages, but it does not provide information on the actual bandwidth needed for practical usage or computation.
Top 2 Comment Summary
The author is expressing frustration about not having access to fiber internet in their apartment in Brooklyn. They are currently using a coaxial connection from Spectrum, which is providing less than satisfactory speeds. They mention that there are no other options available on their block.
8. Sort, sweep, and prune: Collision detection algorithms (2023)
Total comment counts : 16
Summary
The article discusses collision detection algorithms in video game programming, specifically focusing on the sweep-and-prune algorithm. The author explains the problem of collision detection and the need for efficient algorithms. They start by demonstrating a simple solution of testing every potential pair of objects for collision. However, this approach has performance issues and has a time complexity of O(n^2). The author then explores ways to improve this solution, starting with optimizing the intersects() function. They explain how the short-circuit evaluation of the && operator can be used to optimize the collision detection process. The author highlights the importance of focusing on individual axis checks and suggests using the separating axis theorem to determine if two objects are colliding. They conclude by stating that optimizing in one axis can make a significant difference in the overall performance of the collision detection algorithm.
Top 1 Comment Summary
The author suggests using a “fast” sorting algorithm like mergesort/quicksort for best performance in collision detection systems. However, in practice, insertion sort may provide better performance because objects in these systems tend to move relatively small steps between frames. This means that lists from the previous frame are already mostly sorted, and insertion sort performs well on such lists, approaching O(n) complexity, while quicksort approaches O(n^2) complexity.
Top 2 Comment Summary
The article discusses continuous collision detection and provides a link to a document that explains it. The author praises the performance of a physics library called BepuPhysics2, but mentions that integrating it can be challenging due to the level of optimization required.
9. An approach to optimizing TypeScript type checking performance
Total comment counts : 6
Summary
The article discusses the challenge of optimizing TypeScript’s type checking performance in order to improve IDE responsiveness and reduce compile times. The author shares their experience of facing performance issues after TypeScript 5.3 introduced changes to the type inference algorithm. The article explains the approach they used to measure and improve type inference performance, including the tools they utilized and workflow tips. The article also provides a simplified example of the problem they faced related to the EdgeDB query builder and how they approached solving it. Overall, the article aims to provide guidance on improving TypeScript type checking performance.
Top 1 Comment Summary
The author of the article is interested in discussing and addressing issues related to the performance of a type checker. They are open to answering questions and engaging in a discussion about this topic.
Top 2 Comment Summary
The article discusses the author’s desire for a JavaScript-based language similar to Dart or TypeScript that would break some features to incorporate types, but still run on the same virtual machine. The author suggests that WebAssembly (WASM) enables languages like AssemblyScript, but feels it is too disconnected from the primary use case of webpages.
10. SponsorBlock – skip sponsor segments on YouTube
Total comment counts : 33
Summary
SponsorBlock is an open-source browser extension and API designed to skip sponsor segments in YouTube videos. The extension allows users to submit sponsor timestamps, which are then used to automatically skip sponsors using a privacy-preserving query system. The extension can also skip intros, outros, reminders to subscribe, and highlight specific points in videos. The project is open to the public, with the source code and database available for download. There is a leaderboard showcasing the number of users and skip segments, which have collectively saved a significant amount of time for viewers. SponsorBlock works best with YouTube Premium and uBlock Origin, and it is developed and maintained by Ajay Ramachandran with assistance from contributors such as Jeremy Plsek, NDev, Joe Dowd, and Michael Chang. Users can find more information on the SponsorBlock website, including the public API documentation and the option to host a mirror. Communication with the SponsorBlock team can be done through Discord or Matrix.
Top 1 Comment Summary
The author is expressing confusion and skepticism about YouTube advertising. They mention that they don’t trust ads because it seems like they are paid promotions rather than genuine recommendations from users. They also criticize sponsorships from companies like BetterHelp, which have been considered scams, and a mobile game called Raid Shadow Legends, which they consider to be low-quality. The author states that the only reason they use a tool called Onshape is because it was recommended by a friend, and they were initially skeptical about it.
Top 2 Comment Summary
The article discusses a tool called Sponsorblock, which allows users to block specific types of ads and whitelist certain channels. The author mentions that they use a version of the app called Tubular, which integrates Sponsorblock and another feature called ReturnYoutube Dislike. The author also suggests a possible additional feature of being able to download videos after removing sponsor block sections.