skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It is nothing more than a counter tax avoidance measure.

Unfortunately, it is something more than a counter tax avoidance measure, because it has caused vast collateral damage. It's a huge administrative burden that literally makes many micro-businesses unviable, and it imposes prohibitive overheads on slightly larger businesses that are just getting going.

To add insult to injury, it's also impossible in practice to comply with the rules fully even if you make a good faith effort, unless you have a specialist VAT accountant's level understanding of each EU member state's tax system. Obviously no business except for large multinationals actually has this level of understanding available to it.

What is particularly appalling in this case is that the authorities who spent all that time working on the new rules didn't even realise all those smaller businesses existed until the very end. A huge campaign against the new measures was started with just weeks to go. Most of the authorities across all levels of government pointed to years of discussions, said they consulted earlier, and asked why the small businesses didn't say anything before. It didn't even occur to them that the microbusinesses didn't know, because no-one had thought to contact them, unlike larger businesses with well-established VAT management, and because someone running a £500/year side business from their kitchen table to fund their kids' christmas presents might not be following the intricate details of EU tax negotiations.

The icing on the cake is the often dysfunctional systems put in place to administer the new systems, which have made it very clear that even the national tax authorities often don't know what they're doing. Case in point: Multiple national tax authorities have already sent waves of wildly incorrect and extremely hostile demands for payment of supposedly unpaid VAT to small businesses in other countries.

Imagine how you'd feel if you spent a year building up a side business, then one morning you woke up to a demand for over a million Euros, far more money than you'd ever made in your year of trading, saying if you didn't pay faster than you could sensibly get legal or tax advice then you'd be taken to court without further notice, inevitably killing your business.

This is the reality when the EU gets to play with legal and tax rules but the people making the rules fail to understand the basic nature of how those rules will affect smaller businesses or individual citizens who aren't over there playing the games with the politicians. It's a scary prospect, and the way forward some of the EU bureaucrats see for the Internet and for intellectual property as we're discussing today seems many times worse than the short-sightedness they showed with the VAT mess a year ago.
I was using Cinderella with the Bill Murrary Caddyshack scene in mind: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zbQTXFJL8lo (implying a non-traditional background experiencing uncommon success, as in the fairy tale).

Until you pointed it out, I hadn't even considered the gender-specificity of Cinderella herself. Thanks and upvoted for pointing that out; it's obvious in retrospect, but wasn't intended.
Sosays: search and run StackOverflow bash tips from the command line
Interesting article. I really like Solarized for the longest time, but these days I prefer Zenburn; it's less harsh on the eyes, although certainly not pretty to look at.
Google Acquires Fly Labs – Video Editing Apps for iPhone
The five shouts of good programmers – O'Reilly Media
They discuss trying to mimic the focus of real human vision, making the foreground in sharper focus than background and peripheral objects. Why is this necessary? My human vision will do that itself.

For example, if I look at the room I'm in, foreground objects are in sharper focus. If I look at the screen of the computer I'm typing on, if I stare at this letter X, maybe 1-4 letters to each side are in sharp enough focus to read.[1] Why would the computer need to blur the non-foreground images further?

The only guess I have is that objects on a screen are in a false perspective, based on the screen size and the typical user distance from it. Cramming the real world onto a screen that is tiny relative to the immersive real world requires some tricks. But that's just a guess - does anyone know?

----

[1] It depends on the font size and probably on resolution too, of course.
Hm I have a book right in front of me that says it is number 2 in the world, right after Taiwan. It's this book:

http://www.xpat.nl/product/holland-handbook-2015-2016/

Perhaps they taking other factors into account by excluding city-states like Singapore, Hong Kong, etc.
PageFair's entire product is circumventing the software I've installed for my security and privacy. I don't think there's any way to do that responsibly. Coming clean with how they infected people with malware while bypassing their security software is the least they could do.
What is the comparable workflow in TeX? Change document, generate pdf, get compile error because the page overflows, repeat?
Though things are tangled now, American English traditionally has thin spaces on the sides of m-dashes.
Given the fact that https://protonmail.com is still offline after several days of attacks, will secure mail ever get a chance?
Water drops that 'trampoline' when freezing could lead to materials that de-ice
It's obviously their choice. OP didn't mean anyone is forced against their will. The question is: why does the vast majority of new tech continue to

A) establish themselves in such an uncomfortable location

B) not embrace distributed teams

It's a terrible cycle at this point.
Unfortunately, my DSL provider can deliver me 6Mb/s. Comcast promises 75Mbit and actually delivers me 90Mbit.

Granted, I live in Chicago which actually has something resembling competition (AT&T is rolling out GigaPower and as far as I know we're a test market for DOCSIS 3.1) so the Internet metering on the Comcast website just straight up doesn't work and throws up an error.
Unlike a lot of other malware out there, crypto lockers don't require privlidge escalation to be effective.

Got to hand it to them, its actually a pretty cool attack vector.
If you're feeling adventurous, it's possible to build and deploy apps using Windows.

Most of the major hurdles are fixed and now it's just a matter of some clean up and documentation.
Haven't the news media hacked into royal family phones, voicemail, etc. multiple times? Maybe that wasn't via BT.
Trampolining droplets raise hopes for ice-shedding surfaces
It's not just sharpness of focus. There's that, because of - I believe - how densely different areas of our retinas are populated with cones and rods. That's not the same thing that's going on when you look at a tree in front of you, and then the mountains miles away.

The screen is flat. If you were playing a game that occupies 3D space, the game could mimic real depth by changing how it looks depending on where you're looking. It would blur things as they'd be blurred in real life. Or maybe they'd double up things close to us when we look far away, like when you hold a finger in front of your face and then stare far away, or vice-versa. I think we probably rarely notice these things in real life. Maybe this would make it feel magically more real.
Building a temperature and humidity logger with an ESP8266
I agree that some terminology could make it easier. I think "key" is an ok choice for the private key, but for the public key I think there could be a better analogy. Calling them the same thing is a bit confusing and people don't understand that one of them you give away, while the other is confidential.

When I explain it to people I tell them that their public key is like an unlocked lockbox that you give people into which they can put a private message. They can close the box to lock it, but once they shut the box only you have the key to open it.

It's not a great analogy but it seems to me that the public key does not make sense as a "key" to the average person.
Defending A16Z
I get around the same numbers, especially streaming full quality TV shows and movies on Plex.
a test / development environment inside the browser where a server is emulated for testing purposes too, accompanied with a code editor.

I d like to describe the vm configuration similar to chef or ansible in js and run some dev/test code.
We'll likely never abandon radio technology because it is an absurdly cheap and universal means of communication that propagates throughout the universe at the speed of light, a hard practical limit for how fast anything can send information. We certainly don't know everything, not by a long shot, and there are theoretical frameworks for FTL communication, but we don't have any hard observational or experimental evidence that this universal speed limit can be broken after a century of research that was more productive than the previous ten thousand years.

It's great to be hopeful and work towards such technology but you can't discard the very, very real possibility that the speed of light can't be exceeded or that doing so to communicate might require a Type II or III civilization, which might also be practically impossible to achieve due to the speed limit for travel.
Interesting that in the PDF preview of the book on the page, which is a slightly newer edition than the one I have, they have changed the discussion of population density to say this:

>The Netherlands is in the world’s top ten in export volume and it
ranks in the world’s top twenty for GNP, even though, in terms of
square kilometers, it is one of the smallest countries of the world.
Though it is true that, in population density, it is on a par with
countries such as India and Japan, nonetheless this only amounts
to a population of almost 16.8 million.
ralliBox Offers Equity Crowdfunding Campaign
> 1. Abstraction. For the non-expert, the only metaphor that works for PKI is that of physical security. The concept of a "key" as a series of characters or a file that must be protected must be replaced by an abstraction that allows users to protect it in the same way they understand how to protect a key or a wallet.

Do you mean something like the Yubikey USB dongle: https://www.yubico.com/products/yubikey-hardware/

[not associated, just referencing a 'physical' item that can be treated as a 'key' by non-experts]
Wasn't there a Microsoft demo using eye tracking, where only the focused area of the screen was rendered at full resolution, and the rest at lower blurred resolution? It saved a lot of GPU power by just needing to draw a tiny fraction of the game, and it looked indistinguishable to the player. What happened to that?
What makes it a design failure if it is so popular?
Half man, half snake
I think you have the idea backwards a bit. The system isn't interested in making the background blurry, it wants to make your exact eye point the section of the image with the highest fidelity. Then the renderer can just sort of half ass the rest of the image. It's a way to make the apparent image better than what the hardware would allow.
You need just the Linux kernel and Busybox in order to run Linux with a working shell. 2-4 MB all together I would say. My first Internet router ran a Linux from a 1.44MB disk 15 years ago.
I'm sorry you had that reaction. It really must suck to be one of those that can't handle opiates (sincerely; my mom can't either).

Due note that the side effects do release over time in some people. For instance one patient I'm familiar with had an adverse reaction to hydrocodone frequently (1:1 to 1:3). But within a year it was closer to 1:50 and years later is around 1:200. There are other options that are more powerful and have less side effect. Combining with an anti nausea med seems to work (dimenhydrinate (Dramamine)).

I've read at least one study that showed improved cognitive due to opiates (from the pain relief). Unfortunately I can't find it right now (but I now get the point of a bookmarking service).

Addiction itself isn't that big of a deal. If the user doesn't want to be addicted, there easy ways to slowly get off. Take time, there's no rush. It's only the legal and financial aspects that make it problematic. If a doctor gives someone half a gram of hydrocodone for pain, they should be legally obligated to provide significantly more over time in case the patient starts to suffer any withdrawal symptoms. But doing so now, even admitting you took an extra one some night, gets you listed as a bad person. That's what needs fixing.
This reminds me of my first mention in a Linux kernel commit message: https://git.kernel.org/cgit/linux/kernel/git/torvalds/linux....
It's the fix for a bug I found in the kernel. This sounds quite boring, but the fun part is the background story:
Antivirus vendor X (actually forgot which one) bragged about a new, dangerous virus that can spread on Windows as well as Linux platforms. Joe Barr reported on that for NewsForge, claiming that the Virus didn't work at all (on Linux). I jumped in and tested too, and found that it wouldn't work (meaning: infect other binaries) on newer kernels since there was an actual bug in the kernel preventing it from doing so.

Why I'm reciting that story is this: It is perfectly fine for a binary to write executable code to other files. Your typical compiler does. The kernel isn't there to prevent that. The kernel is supposed to prevent it if you configure a security policy that forbids it - starting with things as simple as file ownership and permissions. This is pretty much clear for anyone who knows some things about what the computer does. For people who only have some fuzzy ideas, fixing the Linux kernel to make (in this case) a virus work again sounded a bit weird.

Well, ransomware is in the news these days because of the raid in the Netherlands, and here there's another "security specialist" trying to use this for its PR. But again there is nothing that indicates that this is all about standard functionality. Yes, you can encrypt all your own files on a typical machine. Yes, a piece of software can do it for you. Yes, you can run such software. And if you're careless and follow orders easily, someone else might give you the software to do it.
Lambda Architecture with Druid at GumGum
Hmmm, why not take ideas from HTML/CSS and that's all for a next version...
I have an eyeX and the precision is not as high as a mouse. I don't think it can ever be, the eye is just not that controlled itself.

Having low latency from the device seems even more important to me.
Religious children are meaner than their secular counterparts, study finds
The ultimate problem is that SF is not really all that dense. It's ~7,000/km^2. (Amsterdam is ~4,000/km^2).

Seoul is 17,000/km^2. But living spaces are surprisingly reasonable, even by American standards.

It always blows me away that Paris has a density of 21,000/km^2, but the living spaces I've seen are pretty bad.

Like the article says, it just makes very poor use of its space.
We can't see our culture very well, because we see with it
I wonder why it's an issue to allocate 2GB of zeros anyway. With virtual memory, it should all map to the same zeroed page until they get written. And With transparent huge page support, it should only allocate few such pages until they get written.
Arkansas vs. Ole Miss Live Stream
Ask HN: Is Skype safe to use?
In the business I am in literally everyone wants to use Skype instead of PM's etc.

Is Skype currently safe? If not are there any good ideas to secure your work before connecting with someone on Skype?

Thanks!
Socialist millionaire protocol
Pentaceratops dinosaur fossils airlifted out of wilderness
Given the extent to which physicists now rely on computer programming for running experiments, data analysis, simulations and many other things, your skills as an engineer are certainly not useless.
It doesn't give much info.
Fascinating article, and great observation on optimizing density. How do you think in a space like that? I need personal space just to think.
Many did, and many clearly thought it was too chaotic for their tastes and/or didn't actually stop to think where all the people were coming from or going to.

It also gets easier to understand the temptation when you look at the kind of stamps other planners have been able to put on cities.

Central Park?

Arch de Triomphe with it's radiating avenues?

The successful examples puts you in the history books. And even the not-quite-so-successful examples can look amazing and still be fantastic landmarks (e.g. la Défense, with the position of La Grande Arche as one end of the "historical axis" ending at the Louvre).

It's not that surprising that a lot of city planners gets seduced by broad strokes and grand structures when the "prize" is to have your work quite literally stand out even on maps.
I'm really looking forward to eye tracking in VR, because it will make for the scariest games ever. Games could notice that you're looking in one direction, then cause a creature to skitter by in your peripheral vision. By the time your eyes or head have moved, it's gone. Peripheral visual acuity is terrible, so you'd never get a good look at the thing until the game wanted you to.
I don't understand. Help me.
Why do you even PUT content at a linkable url online if you don't want anyone linking to it?

If I wanted to control exactly who views my content and where they come from I can just check headers for internal linking or generate unique single-use URLs for each visitor.

What is the practical scenario that this legislation aims to cover?
For occasional pgp use, a webapp is as easy as it goes. https://ssl.ba.net/util/pgp/

No need to store or remember keys, just create a new key for your conversation.

All encyption / decryption is done client-side with open source code.
Interesting. I'm using https://tinycthread.github.io/ in c99 for now, when I need it.
The grub multiboot specification is short-sighted, x86 specific, and generally useless.
No, we're talking about mental and especially social development, not just single topics like "calculating" or "biology". Look up development psychology. Care-giving is another subject and even small children can to some extent do that to each other.
> Just knowing for certain that there is intelligent life - or any life - on other worlds would have huge ramifications for how humanity views itself and the universe.

I think our species chauvinism is pretty strong. I think the discovery of life on other worlds would have very little practical change to our daily lives.

For example, we seemed to have handled the fact that the dolphins and whales in our oceans are fairly intelligent. Why would finding intelligent whales in Enceladus oceans be any different?
You're confusing a few ideas here. Focus has to do with the fact that the real world can only be projected on to our retina sharply at one distance. The letters in your peripheral vision are hard to make out not because they are out of focus but because they are falling on a part of the retina that has low resolution (also see "visual crowding"). The wikipedia page on optical focus has a good explanation of focus blur. Suffice it to say real scenes have dynamic focus blur and computer screens don't and we can subliminally tell the difference. This tech will make rendered scenes look more like real ones.
I think if it can be made to work, a better framing is in terms of establishing a secure channel and then communicating/sharing something over that channel.

Don't make the user think about the underlying mechanism at all.

The hardest part is probably getting the public key distributed, but that can just be "Check if Bill can receive over a secure channel."
.qcow2 files have two main advantages when building system images compared to a loopback device.

First, when building a system image with make, it works best to have each step result in a separate image file so that make can rebuild your image when a dependency changes without having to completely start over. Using .qcow2 images means that only the diffs are stored in each image file, instead of having a dozen 4GB .bin files.

Second, because the loopback device requires root by default, you end up running "sudo make" as part of your build process. But with .vmdk or .qcow2 files, tools like libguestfs can mount the filesystem for manipulation without root. If you're planning to distribute your work, then "git clone && cd project && make" is more accessible directing your users to modify their user permissions or elevating to root.
interesting, just fyi their webmail is powered by aliyun, which is Alibaba's cloud and dropbox equivalent (or basically the Chinese version of corporate gmail or google apps)
Fastspring already does this, and thank god they do, I really don't want to deal with the vat moss bullshit
> It sounds a bit sexist (as if moms should stay home and their spouse, male of female should be employed)

I never implied that. Preferably society would be rich enough both parents could raise their kids without having to fend for survival while doing so. I would hope we have advanced as a species enough at this point, generated enough wealth at this point, to enable that.

And if that were not possible, I know classical sexism would drive the women to stay home, but preferrably whoever preferred their job would continue working and the other could raise the children, irrespective of sex.

> For example, with basic income

UBI is almost certainly the optimal solution here. I'd argue because it enables that joint parental rearing much more often - if parents have any financial assets they could potentially both drop out of the workforce to optimally raise their child, and depending on their wealth they could both withdraw for variable lengths of time. Even in the worst case scenario one successful careered individual in a family of two with joint UBI should definitely be able to have a stay at home parent and a working one maintain a working class lifestyle.
Yale Students Demand Resignations from Faculty Members Over Halloween Email
The wire cutter did a recent article on best bookshelves speakers in the sub $500 range. There are clearly better (and more expensive) options out there. But the summary managed to find a bunch that punch above their price class.

thewirecutter.com/reviews/best-bookshelf-speakers/
Why aren't SF tech companies hiring more remote workers? They could pay people who work remotely a lot less, save a lot on office space etc.
Tech companies are the ones that should be able to pull that off.

Even if I lived in SF I'd be reluctant to commute an hour to work if I could just as well work from home.
The Pythagorean Theorem doesn't work for any arbitrary value of x, but there are an infinite set of x,y,z triplets that do work.
Another problem is that when the legal system first encounters new technology, and is the most ignorant and unprepared for it, it makes that decision a "precedent" that later cases are expected to follow.
The trouble is, the UK government is demonstrably willing to ignore EU rules it doesn't like, and there is nothing any normal citizen affected by that can do about it. Airport body scanners, all the Internet surveillance stuff... For our recent authoritarian governments, national security paranoia seems to trump privacy concerns every time, and blatantly ignoring European rulings to the contrary appears to be standard procedure at the moment.

I haven't made up my mind yet about whether we're better off in the EU than out. It's obviously a complicated question. But something that is a big factor in favour of leaving is that there is so much one-sided co-operation: the EU seems to be used as a convenient excuse to justify unpopular rules that might cause political problems at home, because we "have to comply with the EU directives" or some such, yet apparently we have no trouble not complying when the EU rules are less convenient.
And here's a new one, on the west bank of the Danube between Croatia and Serbia.

https://liberland.org