skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
To paraphrase Kant:

You shouldn't use the less fortunate (or anybody, really) as a mere mean to an end. Paying the homeless a pittance to behave as moving antennas is about as close as you can get to treating someone as a mere mean. The same goes for paying the disadvantaged $40 for their plasma - we can all intuitively recognize that a minimal "solution" that treats the individual as a mean and not an individual (autonomous, self-legislating, etc) is not a "right" one.

The idea that recognizing this while not giving to charity makes you a hypocrite is puzzling. There's no conflict between the positive right to give to charity and the negative right to not be exploited.
I also have o+ but recentlu found out i will never be allowed to donate in canada because i lived in the middle east off and on as a kid (80s and 90s). The saudis imported beef from the uk. So i have been exposed to mad cow disease. 25 years later and i am symptom free. Lol.

This rule bans so many soldiers, expats and immigrants that i am forced to conclude canada blood services has more than enough blood. The saudis happily took my blood at 15yo. They paid me for it.
Tones is the obvious answer that others have given, because they are often omitted in written pinyin. But even phonetic representation with tone annotation has problems. Take the following characters as examples:

他: he, him; it
她: she, her

These are both pronounced EXACTLY the same in spoken mandarin, and would be indistinguishable in a phonetic transcription. But standard written Chinese is more expressive than spoken mandarin because it allows for gender clarification.

Also take this example:

買: "mǎi" to buy
賣: "mài" to sell

These have exactly opposite meaning, and are differentiated only by tone. Without tone diacritics you would not be able to distinguish the two apart. Even with tone diacritics, reading is slowed because the difference between the two is only a small, semantically meaningless diacritical mark, whereas 賣 has an extra symbolic component that indicates its meaning.
I think you can find them at your competitor, but it won't be easy to convince the loyal ones. Give them more freedom, full trust, a good base salary, vesting and on OTE a LOG multiplier on their base salary. Hunters like freedom and appreciation for the business (intelligence) they gather.
OK, I concede the point.

Let me try to advance a different thesis then: it is possible to write software in such a manner that the source code is amenable to methods of analysis that the object code is not. Accordingly, for software written in such manners, it is possible to provide certain guarantees if the source code is available for analysis, and those guarantees cannot be provided if the source code is not available. Would you agree with that?
There's virtually no other path to get a skilled worker into the US.
H1B visas damage people. But then again, so do the university systems in China and India.
The descent _was_ slower. This was a launch to low earth orbit, as opposed to the geosynchronous launches we've seen recently. Geosynchronous launches require the first stage to be going a lot faster by the time it separates (thus requiring the three-engine landing burn).
Pippin is a extremely competent programmer and has been commited to GIMP and GEGL for a long time. I just signed up for a monthly contribution and I believe it's a great way to support the development of free software for graphics.
It couldn't be worse than being stuck in a FOB in the desert in Iraq.
Makes me want to re-read Excession immediately!
>the (potentially compromised) server would know who has enabled notifications/blocking and who hasn't.

How would that be worse than the current situation, where everyone is vulnerable and we all know it?
It depends. A rich person (multi-million range) in Delhi, a city covered with massive pollution, unbearable traffic might be much better of moving with family to US. A billionaire type might have other things to consider.
Aren't all tech companies now effectively ad agencies?
Ubuntu Mobile may be a work in progress, but it still works far better than the ZeroPhone.

It also look much better :)
> Rather it was new education policy and development of the new Simplified Chinese Characters (Newer Chinese characters with fewer line strokes in them - makes reading and writing much much more simple - it is still used today and is the official character language in China).

Then why do Hong Kong and Taiwan have higher literacy rates?

EDIT: Why the down votes? The parent is making an unsubstantiated claim for which there is conflicting evidence:

1) Reading simplified is not objectively easier in the inside view as some characters with distinct meanings are ambiguously combined, and semantic information stripped from many other characters so if you aren't quite remembering that character you aren't given any hints.

2) Writing simplified is not objectively easier in the inside view as many of the components are changed in form from the characters they derive from, and again some semantic clues are stripped from the character. So there may be slightly fewer characters composed of slightly fewer strokes on average, but those aren't the metrics one should use for measuring difficulty -- a character with more strokes can be easier to write on demand because the strokes are part of components that carry semantic meaning. You don't have to remember each little detail, just the broad gist of a plot for the character and then systematic rules fill in the rest.

3) Finally in the outside view, non-mainland communities like Hong Kong and Taiwan have always used and continue to use the traditional characters. And these communities have higher literacy rates across the board compared with mainland China.

People who have already learned simplified-only find simplified characters easier to read. That shouldn't be surprising, but it is not objective truth. And the PRC likes to toot its own horn and say that simplified characters are cleaner, neater, simpler, more modern, led to higher literacy rates, cure cancer, etc. But that doesn't make it true without further substantiation either.
There's nothing that prevents that. However, Ruby is traditionally thought of as a language written in C, and the gold standard for a Ruby interpreter to be 100% compatible with anything that runs on MRI. So writing JVM specific extensions means losing MRI compatibly, at which point you're deviating from tradition.
It's not that rare. It happens anytime the other user gets a new phone, or re-installs WhatsApp.

> WhatsApp could still give us an option to show a confirmation before automatically re-sending messages to a new device.

Just to clarify: they do optionally notify you (off by default), but after having re-sent the re-keyed messages.

It would be nice if they (optionally) offered you a choice to re-send the message, or discard it. (You could then verify key fingerprints out of band before making that choice.)

Doing that (making it "blocking") would leak information, OpenWhisperSystems argues, correctly.
if invalid(input):
log.warning('UberForm field wrong: ' + input)

(And many subtle variations thereof)
I'm looking at disabling selinux on some of the systems I work on. But I don't think it's for a lack of trying to use and understand it. I don't think it's just a matter of being complicated, to me I find the system cryptic, and information about how to do things correctly very difficult to find information for.

While I agree with your sentiment, I think I have tried to give selinux a fair chance, but I've reached the point where it seems to add more overhead than it benefits us. This is combined with, I'm also likely making mistakes with my configuration, that make it too permissive, because with my limited understanding, I'm putting together modules that make my stuff work, but I don't actually understand the implications of some of the decisions I'm making for permissions.

And my entire team seems to be struggling with selinux, and a little bit fed up with it, because we keep running into it blocking things, simple things, against our intuitions of the way our system and selinux should work.

It might be the perfect access control system, but to me UX is horrible. Or maybe I just hate to admit it, but I've utterly failed at building a mental model for how it works, and how I can effectively interact with it to do what I need to do.

So while you might be right, at least in the case of selinux, I'm not sure I agree that it's simply a matter of developers and admins refusing to learn things that are difficult. In the selinux case, I think it goes deeper, where it creates a cognitive load, that someone needs to invest a significant amount of effort to truly learn it.
Nice term, btw, "in flight message" :-)
But they did ratchet back the prices! Back in college I went with friends to donate plasma(I had a job, didn't 'need' the money). It was interesting and paid $75 for < 2 hours of my time. Wow! I went back once(twice?) a month as allowed. It was a great boost to my income, plus got to watch free movies and free juice and snacks on the way out. Fast forward several years and local labs pay $35 or $25 per seasion and it turned into a 4 hour episode of mostly waiting around to get the 20 min(?) procedure, watching movies. Sure it beats a poke in the eye, but the incentive for anyone but the poor and desperate was gone. Nowadays I'll give blood for free(& snacks!), will not waste half a day to enrich the lab's bottom line.
I get it, but let's stop calling it a backdoor conspiracy theorists. It is really a UX decision. WhatsApp decided they'd rather not have the possibility of losing messages when you switch phones.

I see the fix as being as easy as a new security preference that by default behaves the same way, but you have the option to prevent sending messages that are not reported as delivered to a new device/key. Essentially those messages get lost.
No, really, I know it. It's a pile of bytes until it has an encoding - and I agree with this whole heartedly. I think that getting involved with 'str' is the (my) problem here.
Augh. URL in /opinion/ fails to consider that you're going to donate more money to the people winning because you get more influence per dollar that way, decides to blame "tech has decided the republicans are more in line with their interests".

Well, yes, in so far as "their interests" involve actually getting things done rather than blaming everybody else for not doing.

Can I have a new left wing please? This one appears to be broken :(
I'd hate to work security at a European company...
Unless you're a native american, someone could have made the same claim about your own ancestors, back in the day, no?
The E-2 is a non immigration visa without dual intent. So... just like an F-1 student visa which is a non immigration visa without dual intent.

All this means in reality is that once you've come to the US and established the basis for another visa, your "intent" changes and you apply for an applicable immigration visa. People do every year with both the F-1 and the E-2 visa.

However, some people prefer to reside in the US long term with non immigration status. The E-2 allows people to emigrate to the US and remain there, indefinitely renewing their E-2 visa, whilst (i) protecting their future non-US tax status, and (2) entering and exiting the US for long periods of time (as long as the business is operating successfully). This contrasts with a green card, which (i) subjects green card holders to "citizen-like" tax obligations after a specified period of time and (ii) typically requires continuous residence in the US.

The continuous presence restriction would lift upon receipt of citizenship but not everyone wants (or is able) to hold dual citizenships.

An E-2 is just fine for many rich people.
Vendors (from Samsung to even clothing companies) make agreements with retail stores to have the same price in shops and online. Otherwise online would be cheaper and retail would refuse to list more expensive SKUs. The only ways to bypass the markup of the distribution network are:

- Go "Tesla" mode: Sell directly online or manage your own distribution – Only works if you pull off a unique product, makes the pricesheet much cleaner (examples: Apple and most hardware startups).

- Use Amazon for distribution to bypass retailers and their markup: That would have worked until 2015, but on one hand it seems no seller would rely solely on Amazon for distribution (lack of foothold of Amazon?); on the other hand Amazon decided to massively dispatch counterfeited products together with merchant-originated ones, casting a doubt on the brand and tainting all their providers together.

To date, it seems like retail remains the safest way to order an item...
This was a private launch of commercial satellites (Iridium) whereas GPS is run by the military. In the past, missions with classified satellites do not feature any publicly available footage or telemetry at all.

I guess that's impossible to rule out that this is a sophisticated plan to hide even the existence of the classified microsats, while providing detailed footage and telemetry up until the moment they are deployed, but it's far-fetched.
Right. I had to change my entire diet. Potato without the skins, though, is pretty tolerable.
I think that nuscale approach means there is no cooling system. The reactors are small enough for the pool to passively cool them if so needed.
I didn't get their writing style either.

Fun fact, early GPRS phones usually had the computer 'dial-up' (use a DUN) using:

*99# or *99***n# where n was the stored profile number on the device.

This was a packet, not circuit-switched connection
but the computer didn't see it any differently.
They have https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MIUI, but I don't know if MIUI enables them to sell services or have their own app store.
> I'd like to see a Gig Economy Union myself.

This is called "labor law".

I'm personally looking forward to the IRS reaping its pound of flesh from Uber for contractor misclassification and the hundreds of millions of dollars in employer payroll back taxes and penalties that will be due.
Definitely reads as poor bashing to me. Here's a response from a University of Minnesota professor: https://www.facebook.com/joe.soss/posts/10209924428939404. I think the original article doesn't even link to the real study (https://www.fns.usda.gov/sites/default/files/ops/SNAPFoodsTy...).
It was made public in April last year.

Most knowledgeable advice only recommends Signal, and possibly Threema or Wire, for communication that needs to be secure, see e.g.
https://www.securemessagingapps.com
The Wikipedia article[1] on thorium reactors lists the following disadvantages (quoted from the article):

- Breeding in a thermal neutron spectrum is slow and requires extensive reprocessing. The feasibility of reprocessing is still open.

- Significant and expensive testing, analysis and licensing work is first required, requiring business and government support. According to a 2012 report by the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, about using thorium fuel with existing water-cooled reactors, it would "require too great an investment and provide no clear payoff," noting that "from the utilities’ point of view, the only legitimate driver capable of motivating pursuit of thorium is economics."

- There is a higher cost of fuel fabrication and reprocessing than in plants using traditional solid fuel rods.

- Thorium, when being irradiated for use in reactors, will make uranium-232, which is very dangerous due to the gamma rays it emits. This irradiation process may be altered slightly by removing protactinium-233. The irradiation would then make uranium-233 in lieu of uranium-232, which can be used in nuclear weapons to make thorium into a dual purpose fuel.

/end quote

I do wonder whether some of these issues are significantly different from the problems of uranium fission reactors. The benefits of thorium are huge: can't be used to produce nuclear bomb material; easier to prevent meltdowns; enrichment of fuel not needed.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thorium-based_nuclear_power#Po...
> And if you don't want to do any of the above, that's fine too

Most people have no choice on this. They have to work and it's just to subsist. Typical of hacker news that this would be the most up-voted comment.

Regarding tech, the main change tech has brought is to allow very accurate tracking of debt. Most debt is created through land. Surplus value goes to the landlords and banks.

Before this was not completely efficient, now banks can react to productivity changes much faster. Prices are set by the highest bidder. Tech has enabled "side jobs" which means they can outbid others for rent / mortgage (renting fiat money from a bank). Banks scale up fiat money creation in response. Other workers must respond and they too need a side job.

If we all worked 3 days a week it would be enough to pay the rent. If we all worked 7 days a week it would be enough to pay the rent.

But we cannot coordinate this as workers. Tech is working against workers. Economic rent extraction is now fully efficient.
Very true. Important to note that the 8 plants also allowed for testing different combinations of pumps, steam generators, and other plant equiptment. Rickover got a testbed for future plants integrated into an operating carrier.
Good to see most of the CEOs have come to their senses and are going to put the business before their political beliefs.
I would not give a critique unless I did a thorough review of the current incarnation of re-architecture with some benchmarks on stressful average work flow that could be expected from a computer graphics artist or painter.

I will say that the Gimp 'core rewrite' has been a project in development since the early 2000's. I have never seen a clear design document explaining what this new core is suppose to achieve and for what uses Gimp expects to be used by professional level Artists workflows.

The last development that I was paying attention to was the decision to switch to GEGL for there core compositing and pixel engine. But it looked like it would simply be easier and probably better to start from scratch and build an entirely new software build around a 32bit image architecture rather then try and retrofit there 8bit custom build compositing system.

I will also note that they decided to invest there limited resources into upgrading the gui from GTK2 to GTK3 rather then focus that energy on the core. That shows rather skewed priority focus for a software that has some serious issues.
I think proof of residence means proof of a link to Richmond, otherwise it is some other council district that is responsible.

The proof of homelessness might be an eviction notice? I have no more experience than you in this matter.
For a better take on this, see "Hyper-reality".[1] (If possible, at 1080 line resolution.) This is augmented reality for the job monkey.

It's not that far to this from the apps that tell the drones of Uber, TaskRabbit, and DoorDash where to go and what to do.

Machines should think. People should work.

[1] https://vimeo.com/166807261
> You may be thinking of the rule requiring American citizens to pay taxes over their worldwide income, not only their US income. That rule applies to American citizens as well as permanent residents ("green-card holders"), but generally not to anyone in the US on a temporary visa.

It is indeed what I'm thinking about, but I believe you are wrong about the "temporary visa" thing - As far as I know, only F and J visas (inherently temporary) are exempt; H-1B, L-1, E-1, O and K visas which are temporary in the sense that they expire on job termination / divorce, but they still subject you to taxation of your worldwide income.

> There is no requirement (as far as I'm aware) to report "every single foreign transaction."

There is a requirement to report the details of every transaction that has capital gains and losses associated with it, if that transaction did not happen in the US.

A few years back, I got a call from my foreign bank one day, saying that because I was a US taxpayer (for several years, at that point, well documented with the bank), they could no longer maintain any of my accounts other than checking and saving. At that point, my bank was also my broker keeping some long term bonds, stocks, mutual funds, etc. So, they had me choose whether I want to transfer them to a SEC-regulated bank/broker (impossible - non had the facilities), or liquidate them -- which is what I did.

Had this been done in the US, I would just have to report aggregate capital gains/losses. and that's it. However, as this was outside the US, I had to fill a 2-page form describing every liquidation transaction that the bank did. I ended up filing north of 300 pages that year. "Luckily", now I can't purchase any of these securities so that won't happen again, except ....

> You're right that retirement planning can be complicated for immigrants and temporary visitors.

No, I'm not talking about retirement planning, which is indeed complicated.

Almost every country has a pension saving system independent of the social-security (or equivalent) system. In the US, for example, it is IRAs and 401K. These things get preferential tax treatments, usually "no tax (up to some limit) as long as you only cash it when you retire". However, the US does not recognize any other country's preferred retirement saving. Those savings are in 99% of the cases, a PFIC from the perspective of the US tax system.

Which leaves you with three choices: Either cash it, retroactively forfeiting any tax benefit (possibly 20 years of it), and move it to a US equivalent; Or .. pay a tax each year on the theoretical profit of those pension accounts ... or, pay a lump compounded interest-and-penalty tax the day you actually cash it, which will likely be 50%-100% of that sum.

Now, if you've moved to the US for good, then, by all means, you have to take the hit to switch systems. However, if you can't guarantee that you can stay forever, all your options regarding taxation of your pension saving are awful.
> They have gone on record before that they're not making a profit on their phones

Maybe not (I actually think they do), but they are making money on phone-plus-services.
These are two separate spheres. Rich people love having these, poor people hate having to work all hours to subsist.
Since the software can be updated at almost any time, I don't think either of those are true.
This is also useful for iterating on a throw-away script - something too long to type on one line in the shell, but not significant enough to be worth saving to a file. Put it together in an unnamed buffer, and ":w !" it to the relevant interpreter (eg ":w !perl") whenever you want to run it.
What does "Cutting-edge digital advertising professionals" mean?

The article is very skim about the specifics of what the folks did.

The article mentions that some tech firms tried to recruit employees at this company, but that's no indicator of if this is the class of employee that companies recruit on H1Bs.

There is a wide variance in talent of people on H1Bs too, though this article has a very simplistic view which goes: "we didn't have access to H1Bs, so people were forced to learn and get better" without any understanding of what H1Bs do.

Your "cutting-edge digital advertising professional" is not an engineer.

Fully agree that the path forward to solving a tech talent shortage in the US is for the US to be internally competitive, but just learning on the job doesn't have the same rigor as pursuing 4 year and/or advanced STEM degrees.

Also, this company on LinkedIn has no information. Just 4 employees showing up, i.e. very hard to see if they have people doing engineer caliber work.

https://www.linkedin.com/vsearch/p?f_CC=2467546&trk=rr_conne...

Till as such point there is some evidence about the quality of work being done here being comparable to what a software engineer does as, I'm going to call BS on this article.