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All streaming services should have a pay per minute system as an alternative to the fixed monthly subscription.

That way, I'd happily use any service to watch whatever cause it would be convenient, instead of piracy.

And it would be a reason for them to really improve their recommendation systems.


What these companies would "sell" would be DRM crusty shit that wouldn't work on my devices. And the 'Authorization servers' would be decommissioned at some unstated future date. Hell, even Microsoft couldn't manage to maintain these DRM servers.

If MS cant, why would I expect any company to properly maintain them?

https://community.spiceworks.com/t/how-to-play-content-prote...

So, unless these are MP4's or MKV's with correct subtitling and appropriate audio, I'm not going to pay a cent here.


Lets go back to old good CD/DVD era.


> pay per minute system

And/or pay-per-episode, pay-per-season or pay-per-show. So I don't have to start thinking ahead too much about the _length_ of something and can just enjoy the thing itself based on some pre-determined price.


Isn't this just renting, which is already offered by Amazon, Apple, Google ...


Sort of, but:

- the price to rent is comically overpriced, to the point it makes no sense to rent, especially at HD or UHD.

- you still require an online connection.

- the quality is shit unless your playing it on the holy Privacy Violator 9000.

- they give you an absurdly small amount of time to view the movie or show. 2 days? Really? Family video did a week!


Pay per episode could be an ok granularity. Anything above that I'm not ok, there is too much garbage


Perhaps pay-per-episode with a discounted price for an entire series (and an option to buy the remainders taking that into account). It seems fair to be able to dip your toe into a series and try a few episodes before committing. On the other hand, that seems just a bit too consumer-friendly...


Isn't this precisely what Amazon already does?


For the subset of Amazon-available content that isn't counted as Prime Video I think yes, but not for the rest of it. Apple TV+ possibly too, though they also have what feels like their own confusing model that shows some things as being available with the caveat that it's actually available through either a) a proxy with a subscription to a third party or b) a one-time purchase from them. I'd hate to be in the meetings where the details of these licensing agreements get hashed out.


Would be fine with that. I want a demo before committing, essentially


Some Disney series are already 20mins about the show and 10mins credits/something else. Don’t give them new ideas to reduce the actual content…


I was thinking along the lines of how much I actually watch, if I only watched 10 minutes of your show, I only pay for 10 minutes, not the entire thing.

You're also saving on bandwidth.

Paradoxically, I'd still want to pay per minute of viewing time, if I'm watching the show on 2x the speed.


Yes but then it must be in the form of a subscription (e.g. 300 mins/month), because recurring revenue is critical for the valuation of most companies.


Maybe the incentives would be better, but i also dont really want to keep track of budgeting when watching TV. I'm here to relax. I dont want to stress about how much i watched this month and if im going to blow my entertainment budget.


That would incentivize services to make their shows longer. Maybe they play them back at 95% speed, maybe they add their own intro or credits to the end. maybe if they make their own shows like Netfliz does, they stretch them out.


Movie shows will optimize for that by making half of the episode filler.


Idea for a service.

The service effectively rebroadcasts all the streaming services to provide exactly what you suggest. It’s still paying the streaming services, and users pay it.

Better not set it up in the US .


This is like cable with extra steps ;)

I think we are already seeing some packaged stream services and we will probably see more. It’s a lot of overhead to maintain a separate service to do the exact same thing (with only a different library and branding).

I think the NHL uses the streaming backend developed by MLB Advanced Media (they adapted it in 2015, not sure if still the case).

https://www.sportsnet.ca/hockey/nhl/a-closer-look-at-nhls-pa...


Na, not like cable. It’s all on demand so you can watch what you want when you want. You don’t pay a cent for stuff you don’t watch.

You can pay by minute, or episode, or season or whatever.

Like Netflix but with the catalog of every streaming service in existence, better per-use pricing, no ads.


That would only suit a portion of their user base and completely ream people who use Netflix to entertain/occupy their kids, who use TV shows to fall asleep, etc. Not to mention throwing away valuable subscriber dollars from idle users like me who maintain a subscription but rarely watch anything (mostly because there's nothing good on the entire platform).


Sling TV now has a "day pass" option for $5. (A weekend for $10.) https://www.cnet.com/tech/services-and-software/sling-tv-off...


A bundle of streaming services. That you can surf and choose one from and just watch. And a TV guide that tells you what's running where.

Gee...sounds a lot like Cable TV.

Sarcasm aside, the one problem folks had with Cable was the inability to upgrade without getting locked into another 2 year contract. Streaming solves that one problem while enshittifying all the other good things.


I thought the main complaint was "I'm paying for channels I don't watch!" while not realizing the channels they were watching were actually what they were paying for, and the rest of the stuff was just lumped in for nearly free to make the lineups look bigger and more appealing.


For some reason I always saw it in reverse, that I had to pay to subsidise a set of channels I'm _not_ interested in for the one I am.


Chances are that's not what was happening unless you were watching the channels nobody else watches.

I haven't looked into cable pricing for a while but i remember a few of the contract disputes that caused some big channels to drop off big cable providers in the 2010s. The price-per-customer those channels were asking the cable companies were significant chunks of what a package would cost the customer (eg upwards for $1).

Meanwhile some of the less common ones were a few cents per customer.

That means that unless you weren't watching any of the $1+ ones, you were mostly actually "paying for what you're watching".


I assure you that there are many people who do not need nor want ESPN and knew damn well they were directly paying it.


And those people were having part of their package subsidized by the people who were watching ESPN but not the other channels.


> Gee...sounds a lot like Cable TV.

Honestly, Cable companies could make a comeback by using their relationships with producers to actually be a "one stop shop" streaming services. There's definitely a pain point to having to be subscribed to so many different services just to cover the gamut of shows and movies


> .. the one problem folks had with Cable was the i...

and hardware rental fees

ads on top of your service

bundling a bunch of channels you didnt ask for and increase price

outages

the list goes on


For movies at least it's usually no problem to find them for "rent", i.e. 48h for an absurd amount of money.


I think they know how many dead / inactive subscriptions they have.


From the article -

> this paper was not a retrospective study of electronic health records, it was a randomized clinical trial, which is the gold standard. This means that we’ll be forced to immediately throw away our list of other obvious complaints against this paper. Yes, healthier patients may come in the morning more often, but randomization fixes that. Yes, patients with better support systems may come in the morning more often, but randomization fixes that. Yes, maybe morning nurses are fresher and more alert, but, again, randomization fixes that.


> Yes, maybe morning nurses are fresher and more alert, but, again, randomization fixes that

How does randomization fix that?


exactly. that one clause casts doubt on all the other reasoning; randomization controls for patient selection bias but not diurnal clinic performance


It would if the clinic is a controlled setting and they can control when the nursing shift begins.


"Forced to throw away" biases is strong. If run well, RCTs surely help manage potential biases, but it does not eliminate them. The slides saw available on X-itter didn't show a Consort diagram (accounting of patient count between screening and endpoint) or the balance of patent characteristics between the arms. This seems to be a single site study, which is significant caveat IMO. The lack of substantial mechanistic explanation, and alleged study redesign mid-stream are also caveats. All that said the reported effect is very large, and I'd like to see a more detailed reporting and analysis. If the effect that size is real, it should be able to be found in some relatively quickly retrospective studies (yes, many caveats there, but that could probably provide very large numbers rapidly in support of the RCT).


What does randomization mean in this context, and why does it fix those problems?


https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Randomized_controlled_trial

The same thing it means in every context: that (with enough samples) you can control for confounders.


Supposing that patients did better in the morning because, say, the nurses were more alert, no matter how many samples you take you'll find the patients do better in the morning. How does "more samples" help control for confounders rather than just confirm a bias?


> How does "more samples" help control for confounders rather than just confirm a bias?

I think you're correct that randomising patient assignments doesn't control for provider-side confounders. Curious if the study also randomised nursing assignments.


"more samples" is not what controls for confounders. Controlling for confounders is what controls for confounders, which you can only do with enough samples that you can randomize out the effect of the confounder.

Whether or not they controlled for nurse-alertness is something you'd have to read the paper (or assume the researchers are intelligent) for.


I guess I'm asking, how do you randomize out the confounder in this case.


I imagine that that particular confounder is not possible to eliminate via randomization. Perhaps you collect a bunch of data on nurse awakeness--day shift vs night-shift, measuring alertness somehow, or measuring them on other activities known to be influenced by alertness--and then ensure your results don't correlate with that.

There is also the mechanistic side: if you have lots of plausible mechanism for what's going on, and you can detect indicators for it that don't seem to correlate with nurse alertness, that's a vote against it mattering. Same if you have of lots of expertise on the ground and they can attest that nurse alertness doesn't seem to have an affect. There are lots of ways, basically, to reach pretty good confidence about that, but they might not be as rigorous as randomized assignments can be.


Have every dose be observed by another doctor?


Patients in the study are randomly assigned to the early group or the late group. They don't get to schedule their own appointments for whatever time of day they want.


How does this control for the "alert nurses" variable? In that case, patients would do better in the morning, regardless of the patient.


Based on these graphs and the differences in outcomes they show, you are not talking about "alert vs less alert" nurses but about "nurses doing their job vs nurses basically slowly killing dozens of patients".


Why would you assume nurses are scheduled on a 9-5 basis?


Why do you think you're going to poke holes in a research article when you've clearly only just heard of the concept and havent even read the article


If I thought I could poke holes in the research, I wouldn't be posting on HN. I'm asking questions to learn because obviously I don't understand :)


Patients are assigned the time for their visits. The time itself is randomized


How many dose this treatment has? How many between them?

How many patients dropped out? (Or requested a schedule change) Do they count like live or dead?


Not who you're asking.

I really don't see why we're still using A/C inside our houses / apartments. I understand that the transmission loss is lower when sending A/C, so it makes sense, but then nearly every device in my house has their own AC to DC converter. Just have one AC-DC converter per building.

I'd like the future to just be USB-C sockets in my house. We have USB-C PD 3.1 which supports up to 48v, I imagine that would be good for all devices.

There are probably safety reasons why this future might be difficult.


That would have been a good argument to make a decade or two ago but these days switch-mode power supplies are very efficient, and GaN ones even more so.

I have a small mess of 12-ish volt computer/network equipment in the corner of my office and looked into running it all off of one $40 high-amp power supply to eliminate all the wall warts and bricks. By the time I figured out power distribution and termination, buck/boost converters for the things that aren't 12V, it all seemed like a lot of work compared to just spending a couple hours tidying up the cabling and hiding the wall warts.

You can live in the future now and install power outlets with USB-PD built right in, although a quick glance suggests they top out at 65W. Fine for phones and tablets, might not keep a gaming laptop charged while in use.


A lot of appliances need >1kw.

This requires higher voltage and robust connectors.

That level of DC is quite dangerous compared to AC for many reasons.

Also, unless you want to have 60lb extension cords the size of bratwurst, you need to go high voltage. High voltage DC is its own kind of devil, and is something I would not want in my household except in very isolated, self contained places.

High voltage, high current DC is on yet another level of mortal threat, able to do cool tricks like making extensions cords burn from one end to the other like cartoon dynamite fuses. Also, absolutely the best for accidental electrocution, severe burns and flash blindness, and setting otherwise fire resistant structures thoroughly aflame.


At USB voltages, one or two volts of drop is significant. You need very heavy cables, and for every voltage USB-PD allows you'd need another set of cables.

Also, some devices run directly on AC, or need more than USB can do, even with EPR. Since we already need AC for that, why add more wires when USB chargers are cheap and efficient and reliable these days?


I think what they meant is that if it's hosted online / home-network, only allow access to all services through a VPN. Wireguard is relatively easy to setup, and you can configure all your services to only be available through wireguard.

Ever since ssh almost got backdoor-ed, the only thing "exposed" on my servers is Wireguard, which is UDP based and therefore harder to know if it's running. SSH also goes over wireguard.


> ... Wireguard, which is UDP based and therefore harder to know if it's running.

Isn't it basically impossible to know if it's running unless you have an authorize key? I thought it didn't respond at all unless you ping a valid entry key off it.


Well, there is packet inspection. My ISP / Government will know.


Wouldn't the share holders care more about the profits of the company which are then being given as dividends instead of the price they can trade the share price at?

Isn't the amount of profit the company is making (and how that will change) what matters and not what its share price is?


Most companies don't pay out dividends. Google paid out its first dividend in 25 years and it's only 20 cents a share. Your wealth increases faster from the share price going up vs a dividend and it's not even close. Couple that with the fact that you don't have to sell - you can just borrow against your shares to get liquidity, most are far more incentivized to care about the stock price.


I bought some cheap Chromebooks (100-150 euros, second hand), and removed nearly every app on them, apart for one for writing.

Having a separate device for separate tasks, can often be quite useful.


> Having a separate device for separate tasks, can often be quite useful.

This is what I have done ever since I could afford to own more than 1 laptop and I phased out Windows (XP). I have a device that I use for a daily driver, and 3-4 other Linux distros on other laptops (various X series thinkpads), 1 Windows machine and a Mac. Each does one to two specific tasks and nothing else.

It's actually rather formidable solution and while I've tried running virtual machines its just not the same. Intuitively typing on an external keyboard on my daily driver X1 means I'm going into code mode and occasionally will look (but almost never post) at StackOverflow or HN. When I'm on the native keyboard I just respond to emails and browse/post here.

I have many devices, I will admit, but the truth is that its older stuff so the cost relative to one new machine is about the same for all I have excluding peripherals; a new X1 Carbon is like 2k these days with little to no changes to previous generations.


you can even add a script to let custom noise play on key strokes :D


If I may ask - why?

Why is increasing your code coverage to 100% matter? Would that reduce bugs or speed up development in any way?

Wouldn't it just add lots more code to maintain and make refactors more time consuming?


I said 100% more or less as a figure of speech. I meant to say adding tests in some modules that I deem relevant. As a matter of fact, it would speed up development. Because I'm always feeling uneasy of the changes I introduce, all while learning the underlying Object-Relational Mapper. This has been the case for the past year or more in a new job position. The past developer of this code moved to new position long ago...


100% code coverage doesn't guarantee there are no bugs, but less than 100% code coverage does mean that there is code that you definitely aren't testing.

To put it another way, code coverage isn't a direct measure of how good your testing is, but it is still a useful metric to try and improve.

In most cases 100% is too hardcore a target, but you should probably aim for at least 80%.


Tom from Codecov here. This is so true, 80% is usually a much more reasonable approach. It’s better to write good tests than all the tests.

(Shameless plug) I wrote a short post about this here: https://about.codecov.io/blog/the-case-against-100-code-cove...


I really liked the blogpost! We're hoping to change point 2 (Engineering Time is Finite) with Sweep, so hopefully we don't have to make a tradeoff between a high quantity/quality of tests.


I think they meant that now that an AI can write the tests they can bring themselves to write enough to hit the 100% coverage. And I think importance of coverage just depends on if you want to build fast or have better maintenance, but I could be wrong since I usually only write e2e tests at most.


"In addition to not offering the longevity loophole, Opsomer also points out that the battery regulation covers all products with a portable battery; it’s far wider-reaching than the phone and tablet-focused ecodesign regulation."


> then their billion dollar app distribution monopoly money hose will be in jeopardy

It only comes under jeopardy, if there are reasonable alternatives the Apple app store (not move to Android).

Otherwise, it's easy for Apple to say - we are now taking step x, y and z, and "trust us".


The aggregate is the number of attempts at "Entrepreneurship" across class boundaries. The thesis is that Middle class kids get far fewer attempts vs richer kids.

In that context, counting where the number of attempts is 0 doesn't add anything to the thesis.


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