Rachel's posts would be so much more useful if she would just say what she meant, instead of twisting everything into knots to find a way to say it backwards so she can be sarcastic and condescending while doing it.
I'm sure there's some useful information in here, but it's not worth digging through the patronization to find it.
Wow, I’m glad I’m not the only one that feels this way. The sheer amount of “everyone is stupid except for people like me” is astounding. I’d love to see an article on the same topic breaking down what is wrong (by showing the code) and then explaining the “right” way to do it, with code.
What are you talking about? Male? Is the author female? I honestly have no idea who the author is. But I don’t care if the author is male or female. Condescending is condescending.
I read this as a dev war story, and as a person venting.
I would have the same condescending sarcastic attitude while doing it if I was venting too.
I also know a lot of people who like my sarcasm when talking about topics like this, so yeah as a guy who very much gets's where the author is coming from I agree this seems like a double standard.
The sarcastic and condescending tone is what makes it entertaining to read. I'm pretty sure you can find plenty of information on performance-tuning Python in IBM whitepapers, if that's what floats your boat.
I'd read it if it was a tutorial, but I'd read it when I hit performance issues in my Python webservice and it was Google's top result for my problem - not when it hit top 10 on HN.
Statistically speaking, maybe that's the same as me not reading it at all in 90% of universes.
It’s an interesting post to read. Have another go if you can, but I very much agree with you on the tone issue. Imagine if these were ones own notes that had to be read through the next time something like this happened. A more succinct operational — dare I say: positive! — way of writing would really be welcome.
There is a lot of literature on the subject if you want more pragmatic notes. You read Rachel’s blog not only for the tech experience, but for her storytelling skills.
I particularly enjoy her blog.
The problem is that a solution for I/O bound workloads has become generalized as the solution for all concurrency needs when in reality, that’s just half the picture.
She mentioned a hell of a lot of googlable terms: epoll_wait, Apache thundering herd, EPOLLONESHOT, EAGAIN, idempotent requests, userspace threads, copy-on-write, queue depth determination, selective LIFO, strongly typed RPC, ...
Presumably “queue depth determination”, another new term for me, means determining how big the queue of pending requests for a service is allowed to get before further requests are refused (another load shedding measure) rather than being enqueued.
I would counter-argue that dry, positive, informational writing is great for Wikipedia but can also be very boring. This blog has a lot of snark and that's what makes digesting the great information so much fun!
There's a middle term, and you can avoid dryness with tones other than condescension. While I always read Rachel's posts whenever they come up because they're jam packed with wisdom, I always find them a bit off-putting.
if i could put a point on it, it would be the implied entitlement and absence of gratitude. Sure, this architecture is not 100% efficient. But step back for a moment, take a breath and consider the number of human-hours spent to get it where it is today. Consider how many people are busting their humps, many volunteers, to keep improving it. We arw not _owed_ any of this. Just the miracle of elastic server config and multicore processors... Buying into the pessimistic viewpoint is dangerous: When these issues get improved, will we feel grateful and adequate? or will we find new flaws and get snarky about them?
Anyway, what i do really like abt this post is it shows the chain of technical details across the call chain. it connects together info on dozens of man pages, etc. I also appreciate how it points out the inefficiency is quite convenient for service providers.
> Consider how many people are busting their humps, many volunteers, to keep improving it.
I think criticism about gratitude is strange when the author is pretty clearly coming from the standpoint that it was a bad idea to use this in the first place (and, to be fair and with regards to Python specifically, I tend towards that standpoint myself) that labor begins to look like it's being set on fire. No Purple Hearts for self-inflicted wounds and all that.
For the downvoters - I also do not like Paul Graham and Sam Altman - they're the same as Rachel in every way. Little substance, lots of unsubstantiated filler material.
To extend this further, I also don't like NewYorker for this reason alone - I don't have time for convoluted novel-like stories that has the important bit buried somewhere in the middle of 6 pages. If I want to read beautiful and creative prose, I need to be in that mindset. Not when discussing Python innards.
Her posts are entertaining. They aren't intended to be technical resources even though the topics are technical. If you aren't entertained by her style, move on.
She recently posted about which of her posts were most referenced by others, which caused all of those posts to be resubmitted despite being years old.
I would say it's a bad post because the conclusion is wrong.
According to the post, "the thing" with Python/Gunicorn/Gevent is it's less performant than one would like in some circumstances, and a lazy developer might tell you you need to 'set your system to "elastically scale up" at some pitiful utilization level, like 25-30% of the entire machine'.
That's probably true! But not that helpful if you don't say what those circumstances are. There are many circumstances where Python is appropriate for a web service, and many circumstances where green threads work just fine. Tell me when I need to consider using the more complicated solution, don't tell me the simpler solution is always useless and doomed from the start.
I'm really glad to see this as the top comment. I came back to comments after reading halfway to see if I was the only one struggling to extract any meaningful point from this.
I didn't find it Patronising it maybe those with ESL English as a second language with more formal usage and more stratified might not be as comfortable with it
It actually alot of background on why it doesn't work. The post could just be:
tl;dr: gunicorn doesn't know how to multiplex listeners and green threads will ruin your request latency.
The thing is, that post isn't very useful nor interesting. The point here is that the "simple" python architecture doesnt scale well at all so you might not want to use it if you're planning on scaling ever.
My feeling is that if you really wanted the author to improve, you would try to connect personally, establish trust and then talk to them privately about ways you feel they could improve their writing. And maybe you aren't comfortable reaching out privately because it's a woman, so that could go sideways (assuming you are male, which I don't actually know). Let me assure you that if you have good intentions, publicly dogging someone because you aren't comfortable reaching out privately is not a good substitute.
Seeing this comment at the top of the page on the highest ranked post on the HN front page for the only woman programmer that I am personally aware of who regularly makes the front page really feels like a kick in the gut and looks like sexist garbage. And I would like to think better of HN than that.
This is the Internet, where you take whatever feedback you get with the appropriate grain of salt and either choose to improve or not. Most people on the public venues on the Internet - forums, blogs, comments, essays - are not looking to build relationships or establish trust. (There are some exceptions - I've made some great friendships with Internet friends - but they're usually more private niche forums than blogs or other publications with a wide readership.) They're looking to get their opinion out there, build a readership, perhaps influence public discourse, and maybe get some feedback on their ideas.
I've seen similar comments leveled at PG [1] and Zed Shaw [2], so I don't think it's just sexism.
b) not the primary conversation around these two authors
Look to Linus Torvalds for a male example where delivery rather than content is often the primary conversation. That is how egregious the delivery must be for a male to get the tone police called on them
You may have something there. I went looking for the HN comments on Dabblers and Blowhards [1] (which, IMHO, is even more egregiously sanctimonious than Rachel's essay), but the top comment there was responding to content rather than tone. Only the 3 bottom-most comments remarked on tone.
I don't consider Linus Torvalds that vitriolic, BTW. Most of the time when he's angry he's trying to make a point. I think of Erik Naggum [2] or Poul Henning-Kemp when it comes to real vitriol on the Internet.
People have valid criticisms of Linus's delivery, but the content is often good. I tend to remember some of the technical arguments in those rants years after the fact, and cite them.
Keep in mind he did create the Linux kernel and git, so even if he delivers them inexpertly, even on a bad day, he has some technical insight.
All that said: I agree there is some gender bias showing up on this thread.
Oh, of course! If Linus wasn't special nobody would tolerate his style. Women have to be special for society to tolerate sarcasm from them. I'm unsure how old I'll be before a woman like Linus will be recognized rather than shoved aside.
Thank you for your many excellent comments in this discussion. You fought the good fight. You basically won in that this thread long ago ceased being at the top of the page.
Take your winnings and go home. Linus is not above social censure. His team reined him in not hugely long ago and the comment you are hissing at agrees with your larger point that there's some gender bias happening here and was uncommonly reasonable and evenhanded. I upvoted it.
I'm trying to be supportive. I'm trying to tell you "You've done enough. Relax. Take a break. Feel okay about how this went down."
I mean if your mom is dying of cancer or something and screaming at internet strangers is good distraction from more serious problems, cool. Don't let me stop you.
But if the point was "Doreen is right: this thread shouldn't be at the top of the page!" well, it's not anymore. Job well done. Have a cold brew or whatever and feel okay about it.
I'm not sure why my comment is interpreted as hissing/criticism. It was intended as elaboration and agreement. Oh well, people seem to have not liked it so I'll reconsider those types of posts in the future
I think it's an excellent point that a woman with equivalent chops as Linus is less likely to be recognized for it. So I am glad you replied. Thank you.
In part because of the larger context. In part because it sounds like sarcasm, not like you are genuinely agreeing that Linus actually deserves special treatment because of his stature.
I've defended Linus once or twice. I'm also glad he chose to take some time off and rethink things.
I can't think of any women we give similar accommodation to. That doesn't mean they don't exist. But the reality is that Linus is in a league all his own. It just sounds catty to make comparisons to him in that fashion.
I imagine if we genuinely had a "female Einstein," she would be pretty unique and would carve out her own unique relationship to the world at large.
Interesting. I suppose it can be read that way and I'll try to be more clear in the future.
My point is that we do have examples of female excellence, but almost invariably they are not uncouth. It seems more likely to me that the uncouth ones are silenced than that only male excellence can come in a brusque box
Janet Reno used to refer to herself as an awkward old maid to acknowledge her lack of smoothness and more or less dismiss such criticisms. Depending on your age, that might be before your time.
I'm short of sleep. I really don't desire to continue this discussion. I only spoke up because you seemed really frustrated and I wanted you to feel okay about how things went and that's apparently not your takeaway at all from my comment.
If you really want to shut me down and make me look like an absolute fool, you could list off the ten other women programmers who routinely hit the front page of HN that silly, pathetic little ole me completely missed.
I'm not getting into this argument about how it's not sexism because (bs example pretending men and women get treated exactly alike when everyone knows that's absolutely not true).
It's not about "wanting the author to improve". People are free to write on their own personal blog with as much snark as they like, in whatever style they prefer.
However, what seems to have happened here is that a bunch of folks are upvoting this link to the top of HN because of who the author is.
Meanwhile, other HN readers find this particular post to be a waste of time because, frankly, the content of the post itself is not particularly interesting or useful for most HN readers. Other posts[1][2] by this author have been much better suited for the top of HN, for example
I think that kinda hits the nail on the head. For a lot of people on HN the information being presented in the posts isn't new or particularly insightful. So to read the information presented in a tone where the author believes they are the only ones with the "true knowledge" can be very off-putting.
But of course there are other people that may get more out of it and not have a negative reaction to it.
I agree that the previous post was not constructive or effective, but there's nothing sexist about what they said. It's just someone broadcasting critical opinion.
Policing tone is far more prevalent when the speaker is a woman. Perhaps (I'm doubtful) this feedback would be given to a very well known male speaker, but it would not have been the top comment here.
Criticism is a staple of any human discussion/forum. It's not even feedback, it's just complaining about TFA. Sometimes the top comment on HN is someone complaining about the font-color of the blog post. Let's not lose our minds here.
Seems weird to get worked up over spotting a complaint on HN just because a woman wrote TFA. And btw, most complaints on HN are leveled at men simply because men populate this forum and tech more than women. Does that mean this forum hate men? Why is it assumed men can handle it but women can't?
I have to wonder how many women are turned off by the idea that they need to be babied like this and can't take generic online criticism. Or the suggestion that criticism was only leveled at them because they are women. It sure reeks, to me.
Having different standards for different speakers is exactly what you're doing.
Criticizing how a message is delivered is standard HN criticism. Especially the sort of "everyone is smart except for me" tone of TFA. I myself criticize commenters here for that as it's something I can't stand, either.
Why would you think it's something we only see leveled at women here? And, according to what? And, yes, you're then infantilizing women when OP does receive that criticism. I think your heart is in the right place, but you're doing exactly what you think you're condemning.
I don't think this type of criticism is only leveled at women. I think it is
a) much more likely to happen for much softer offenses
b) much more likely to become the primary conversation rather than an aside buried three levels deep in the comments
Perhaps in this instance Rachel's rhetoric was so off-putting that it really deserved top billing for conversation/criticism here. But that doesn't ring true for me, and I sincerely doubt the conversation/top post would be the same if instead written by e.g. Carmack
It's a good rant, but it's still a rant. Don't make it to something it's not, plenty of rants get harsher critiques and or don't receive that much up-votes.
There are few blog posts that make it to the front page of hacker news that don't draw sharp criticism in the comments and that criticism is quite often the top comment.
> “When a woman says it, it doesn’t sound as crazy,” said Maria Guadalupe, a professor at France’s INSEAD Business school and a co-creator with Joe Salvatore, clinical associate professor of educational theatre at New York University’s Steinhardt School, of the play.
Hmmm.
Is your conclusion based on actors reading off lines, or real life tone policing?
Maybe if it's a "natural experiment" it could be that women know they'll be held to a more tolerant standard (by most people) so they can get away with being a bit ruder. Or maybe they don't know the standard is more tolerant for women (they might even think they're being oppressed) but know where the line is where a crowd will turn against them (like most people do), and that line happens to allow them to be a little ruder.
Interesting experiment! I wasn't aware of it. I think it's difficult to extrapolate results, but I definitely have different takeaways than you.
1) The smiling aspect is explained (for me) by society pushing women to constantly smile, but not men. The amount we expect men and women to smile is different and when they violate those norms they're either a bitch (women for too little) or fake (men for too much).
I'm not sure how to interpret the tone aspect, and it's super interesting! It definitely flies in the face of multitudes of studies showing the reverse. I'm inclined to believe the studies which are really quite simple e.g. have people grade a short essay where the only difference between groups is the essay author's name.
I'd be interesting to get the sentiment on Torvold's history of blog posts that make hacker news. Willing to bet my paycheck that his sarcastic and ranty tone was loved.
What you're saying with this post and the one below is that criticizing a woman (even in a situation where women are underrepresented) is sexist. This is obviously not true and if you believe the criticism is unwarranted then you should make your own criticism based on those points.
That's not what I'm saying at all and it's dumbfounding to me that I am getting such a pile on to try to shut me up by probably all men trying to claim there's no sexism here.
My framing actually assumes positive intent gone wrong and suggests that if there is positive intent, this is not a best practice.
Entire audience hears "Some whiny bitch reading in sexism where there is none and that needs to be shut down cuz reasons."
And therein lies the problem.
But I promised myself I wasn't going to be dragged into some shitshow. I knew no matter how carefully I worded it, it was likely to get ugly pushback and not get good faith engagement.
DoreenMichele is actually much less ideological than most. Maybe it's not obvious from this thread, but those of us who have read her in that past know that her thoughts on these topics are actually unpredictable (and in particular, not at all anti-men). That's quite unusual. I'd give her the benefit of the doubt.
Much less ideological than most what? Most women who call attention to them being women on the Internet? Or just most people who post interesting technical stuff online?
Than most people who comment about gender issues on the internet. I find that once you have a few bits of information, you can nearly always predict where someone is going to come down on such matters. It's not common to run into someone who's less predictable that way.
Wholeheartedly agree with this. I expected to see the parent comment, but I'm really sad to see it at the top. Of course that's not the commenters fault per se; it's clearly a very common opinion people are happy/eager to communicate rather than be ashamed of (even if so mildly as to prefer not to have it in their upvote collection).
If we're going to assume the Brave user just installed Brave and has 0 BAT, then let's be fair.
You had to spend a certain number of years on Earth to become old enough to have a credit rating and legal standing to get a credit card.
You had to obtain a credit card by filling out paperwork and being accepted by the company issuing the credit card.
You had to wait for the card to arrive in the mail.
You had to activate it the card.
I don't think it's fair to just skip over all those steps just because they're already done. Sure, for you, today, the card is probably easier. But by that token a guy with a horse in 1900 who already had a stable and a bunch of hay could say, "Why would anyone buy a car?"
And he'd be right, on that particular day, for him. But not for everyone, and not forever.
I like the idea of enabling payments to content producers based on the amount of time spent on their site. Curious how much this is actually happening. A quick search for "brave payments to content producers" did not return anything resembling transparency about the aggregate amounts of these payments.
Cloudflare's business lost them over $100 million last year alone. The way they operate right now is not a viable business, and we have no idea what they will change when they need to become one.
Maybe you're new to the tech/security space, but the majority of companies operate at a loss as they grow and pivot their business. If you follow Cloudflare they've only recently begun to start to sell into the enterprise space with new products as in the SASE space and beyond their traditional DDoS/WAF/encryption plays. Even with those "legacy" products - Cloudflare never heavily sold into large enterprise compared to more notable names in the hardware security space that they now are beginning to compete with. Their business is evolving to include field sales that are aligned to selling in this manner, which is relatively new for Cloudflare (comparatively).
But just stating that Cloudflare is operating in the red currently isn't a justification for anything as it doesn't mean anything positive or negative without understanding their operational business model and targets.
I'm guessing your statement is making a leap by assuming that because Cloudflare is operating at a loss currently that they're going to sell your data against what they publicly state in their privacy policy? For a growth company - that would be one of the dumbest things for them to do. Because if they are caught in that lie they will sink themselves.
No, it clearly says that if they haven't figured out a business model yet, the business model they will end up figuring out might just as well be selling your data, so it's maybe not wise to make the internet depend on them not doing so.
The Internet is not dependent on Cloudflare now, or in the future. While FireFox has made a choice (a polarized one), the end user still has the freedom to completely disable DoH and CloudFlare - or choose whatever other service they'd like to use.
Mozilla has an agreement with Cloudflare. Again, it is in Cloudflare's best interest to not break that agreement. If they do, then we can all have that conversation. But just because they could break the agreement does not mean we should jump to any conclusion that they are currently.
It's odd to me that there are a lot of defenders of the status quo that is DNS. Something that is easy to manipulate, easy to profile and scrape passively on the wire (no need to even ask if nobody knows you're doing it), and is generally (with regard to security models) less secure than DoH.
Could Cloudflare nefariously start NXDOMAINing everything? Sure. So could your current ISP (it's likely they already are or already have). Cloudflare hasn't done that. While I have some reservations on the 3 letter agency involvement, that is my only unfounded reservation at this point. Until someone exposes, factually, that Cloudflare has considered selling users data, is selling users data, is planning on monetizing data collected around DNS, etc. I, personally, feel that Cloudflare is offering up a good service. They do allow APNIC to see DNS query data, but not source IP info (go read their privacy policy I linked in this thread).
The Internet has inherent underpinnings of trust. You have to trust your ISP to not MitM your traffic. You have to trust someone to resolve your DNS without manipulation. You have to trust websites to not sell your data back to Facebook, Google, Microsoft, etc. It seems as though DNS data hand waving with regard to Cloudflare is only a fraction of what we should really be concerned about. Do you really want your DNS traffic to continue to be unencrypted? DNS has always been centrally controlled. We have the ease with which we can distribute our DNS queries across multiple providers to not give insight to everything we do all the time. But at the end of the day we have to ask someone where Google is. DNS is the problem, not DoH - at least in my opinion.
You have to trust someone. Cloudflare has done a good job of being a good steward as I see it so far. I'm not saying anyone should trust them blindly or forever by default. But - who do you trust? Who is so free from monetary gain that they should be the single source of truth for all of your DNS queries? Who? I don't see anyone on the playing field that isn't selling something. They're either selling you access to the Internet, or they're selling ads, or they're building up a social graph of you by giving you access to free services.
The Internet is built on trust and that give and take.
Generally arguments are based on facts. You've provided none. Feel free to show me any facts that support your hypothesis. Technically, I know they're valid. However, debates and arguments are only productive with factual data. Because without it it's all subjective in nature.
> Oh, and straw-maning, too? Brilliant!
I'm not refuting something you didn't bring up. Your argument is akin to the following: you should stop using all computing equipment because the NSA could have compromised all of your devices before you purchased them, all networks you connect to might be selling your user data and MitM your traffic with valid root certificates, and all of the services you use are probably collecting and selling all of your user data to the top bidder. This, all, in direct contradiction to their published terms of service and privacy statements with no known deviations or factual allegations against.
Again, what your saying could be true. Do you have proof or facts that back it up? Can you show beyond a reasonable doubt that what your implying even might be true? And are you choosing to attack Cloudflare only in this regard while hypocritically leveraging other services without the same scrutiny? And I get that we need to start somewhere, but in my personal opinion, DoH improves the attack surface for the majority of end users. I do wish Mozilla would have a very big explanation in the browser that this changed and an easy button that was added allowing people to turn it on if they think that what DoH and Cloudflare offers is worthwhile. So there's that.
How is that relevant to your assertion that it is up to you to decide when something needs to be discussed and apparently trying to use that as an argument?
> I'm not refuting something you didn't bring up.
Could you please point to where I said we should conclude that they are currently breaking their agreement, then?
Maybe my SQL's a little rusty, but isn't a left (outer) join between voters+precincts and (that)+party going to create a massive table with a bunch of nulls inserted? (And, how do you know they're primary keys, and that any of it is indexed? That's not evident from the query)
Maybe "worst I've ever seen" is hyperbolic. My main point was, it's a sloppy query, could probably be done with a few WHERE clauses and an inner join instead, and is more evidence of shoddy coding practices.
You really shouldn't act so condescending when you clearly don't even have a solid understanding of the basics yourself. That's a perfectly reasonable query that would run in less than a millisecond on a large database as long as it's been indexed correctly. There's nothing sloppy about it at all.
It's how a naive implementation would work. Nobody actually knows "how" this left join works since we don't know what the query planner will do. Manifesting a whole outer join is not totally unreasonable in all cases.
I think you come off as very aggressive and there's no need for that tone.
But I do agree with the sentiment that the query might not be bad.
Everybody who reads the query knows how it will work. You don't need to see the query plan.
The where clause at the end will filter to the desired rows. The left join will do absolutely nothing bad.
The purpose of the left join is to include voters who might not be assigned to a precinct.
It's a perfectly fine and performant query.
Outputting the query also doesn't really make any difference. Despite what the people on Twitter are saying showing the query does not make SQL injection easier or harder, it's irrelevant.
The big problem with the query is the lack of bound parameters. It's possible to do that safely in theory, but in practice it's not a good idea.
> Everybody who reads the query knows how it will work. You don't need to see the query plan.
No, we don't. Is there an index join between any of the tables? Is there an index on the name in some fashion and/or on the zip code. All we know is that this query can _probably_ not be answered by index only. What's the relative sizes of the tables (even that's not entirely clear)? Are any tables clustered by the filter criteria?
You wouldn't know and if you think you do, you should read up on possible access plans in modern database systems.
Upvoters want to read and or partake in the discussion that will go with it.
I'd wager that for many of the users here, the discussions are routinely far more valuable than the linked content. The linked content and its title are merely the spark to go from. You'll often see people admit in the comment threads that they skip reading the linked content and go right to the comments.
It means the title: the way OSS is funded today is not sustainable - is of high interest, people want to have that conversation.
We'll merge the discussions into https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22165568, which was posted a bit earlier and has the original source. We'll also roll back the clock on it to give it some more front page time, since there's clearly still momentum to discuss it. Thanks!
And now the HN mods have flagged this comment as off-topic, which causes it to be collapsed by default for all viewers of this thread. Everyone needs to specifically click the [+X] on it to even be able to read it.
Regardless of that, it seems like you're upset because of some mistaken expectations of what HN is for. It's not trying to be a "general purpose" site where you should expect to be able to discuss any and all topics. It has a pretty narrow focus, and users tend to aggressively flag posts about anything without a clear connection to the set of subjects that they feel "belong" here.
You shouldn't try to treat HN as a place where you'll be able to find general news about the world or discuss anything in particular, no matter how important you feel it is. It's a good site for its particular niche, but you're going to end up with a myopic view if you aren't also using other sites too.
Point is there is no hard and fast rule and is subjective. There’s plenty of people who died that have nothing to do with technology that have been not been flagged for removal.
Huh. Is there a record of which photos were originally CC0? If you've already downloaded them as CC0, and they were once licensed as such, you can't just take it back. It's like releasing into the wile with GPLv3. You can re-license it if all the authors agree, but the original code at the point of re-license, if you have a copy, can never lose its GPLv3 status.
Yup. The last thing SpaceX wants is to see somebody else make a buck from their footage. We have seen NASA logos in a thousand scifi productions. We will never see the SpaceX logo used in such a manner.
Bias? Im critical of the US government's intellectual property policy in relation to spacex contracts and speak to nothing else. If that constitutes some sort of bias then unbiased criticism is impossible.
Id be critical of any privatization of something that was once public domain, specifically spacelaunch footage.
> Id be critical of any privatization of something that was once public domain, specifically spacelaunch footage.
SpaceX footage was never public domain. It’s completely different camera systems, etc. There is no regression here in rights because they are completely different things.
It sounds like your problem is with the government not putting speculations in the launch contracts to demand footage be released to public domain. That’s the real issue and that’s where it should be fixed.
SpaceX's trademarked name and logo are still limited by the usual trademark stuff even if they're in public domain video or images.
NASA's copyright policy is US government wide, it's just that most of the rest of the government actively dodges it by hiring photographers and letting them own the copyrights.
I meant that the US government policy is the exception compared to US law, not to the rest of the government. Private companies should not be required to make anything public just because their customer is NASA (or the US government, for that matter.)
I'm sure there's some useful information in here, but it's not worth digging through the patronization to find it.