skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Trek's premise is that a just few hundred years in human evolution will be enough to make the human brain socially mature so that after solving the scarcity problem there won't be any crime, save for just a few villains here and there. Sadly it's pure scifi because should such a thing happen it would require no less than ten thousand years minimum, probably a lot more just to get to a significative point.
Having more doesn't make a human less likely to commit a crime: a homeless who didn't eat for days could kill a passer by to steal his sandwich, a lower class citizen could do the same to steal an iPhone, a smarter one could organize bank robberies/kidnaps/drug traffic then launder the money by building a legit business etc. If being wealthy made people less likely to commit crimes we would solve all humankind problems just by putting billionaires in power seats. Having more just moves the target; that's a byproduct of the human desire to get more, which is perfectly fine if one keeps the stance of not harming others to get there.
every piece of software rises to its own level of incompetence.

Which, from a simple review of the contemporary software landscape, is obviously false.
Saying “NO” to the Non-Essential
> There are kids enlisting in the army now that were born after XP was released.

Does the army accept 16-year-olds?

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

"It was released to manufacturing on August 24, 2001, and broadly released for retail sale on October 25, 2001."
The crackdown on free speech / Section 230 legislative changes is all part of this reining in of the 'information merchants'.
https://www.eff.org/issues/cda230

Expect the launch of a shiny new 'social network' foundationed in 'safe' cryptocurrency commerce and led by an unknown fresh faced kid who 'invented it in his dorm room' and took no money from Russian offshore mob oligarchs...
They are accused of being unregistered agents for the Russian government, violating foreign influence laws, and Manafort bank fraud by lying on a loan application.

The money laundering charges were used as leverage to get Gates to turn, which makes one wonder if the government should be allowed such a powerful tool that can be misused against the innocent. Shouldn’t the prosecution be focused on proving their real crimes and not a victimless reporting statute?
Also the CCC and European hacker culture. I think in the US hacker culture is different and less political, because of the FBI suffocating its roots early on, and a general fear of leftist politics. In europe, and Germany in particular, the CCC and close structures have been really important correctives since before the internet. And they are like reeeally left wing anticapitalist idealists and antiauthoritarians, which plays part to their motivation.
This is their tactic. Find edge case. Break the system massively in favor of themselves and donors while claiming to help said edge case, while most of the time not actually helping at all.

Edge case can be anything that gets people worked up. Child molestation, mass shootings, overt racism, sex trafficking, transgender, etc etc. It doesn't matter what your response is, the fact is people all have strong ones and are being manipulated because of it.

It's an adversarial attack vector on the entire nation.
Are the Political Parties Dying?
Show HN: Add audio forwarding to scrcpy (a tool to display Android devices)
People might be more understanding if he wasn't at the same time threatening tariffs on everyone else too.
Hi,

We recently published an open source application to display and control Android devices: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16544977

Since then, I investigated how to forward audio, and implemented something experimental, but which works for me.

I would appreciate some feedbacks on several devices, and I hope having some help to fix the "Access denied (insufficient permissions)" error on Windows (yes, this feature does not work on Windows yet): https://github.com/Genymobile/scrcpy/issues/14#issuecomment-...

Thank you for your time :)
> "The change in loudness would have to be proven to make a difference first"

What do you specifically mean by "proven to make a difference"? Suppressors are known for being used by intelligence services -- presumably they're not using them to protect their agents' hearing.
Fortnite effect on Pornhub searches
At least in the US, there are legal prohibitions on government propaganda programs targeting Americans, whereas that's more or less entirely what Facebook is for. If the govt is caught running influence campaigns inside the US, there will be hell to pay- Congressional hearings, new legislation, etc.
I wish I could get the downvote button soon.
>Not to mention the unimaginable wealth of natural resources that Russia has, which, under proper political and economic policies, could make it into a Norway-like paradise.

Norway wasn't "made into a paradise" by its natural resources, it was just lucky to be the sole exception unafflicted by the resource curse:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Resource_curse
I have read it, and remains one of my favorite biographies -- Highly recommended. Never thought it would get a mention on HN!
That’s clearly not a problem for the US justice system. I’d kind of like it focused on the all of the crimes with US victims that are currently too low priority to investigate, including millions of untested rape kits.
Parent is talking about the time it takes to integrate multiple ways to login, and I agree with him. When you implement only one way (be it social login with Google/Facebook/etc or an email/password combination depending on your target audience) it's usually easy. When you have multiples ways to login, you end up having to (1) maintain more code, but also (2) need a way to reconcile users who end up signing in with multiple methods.
Computus is a calculation that determines the calendar date of Easter
What other word would you use if a chunk of the population intentionally goes out of their way to walk to a store further away, just to not enter Target?
> Tangentially related, I quite like Medium’s workflow where you don’t need to enter passwords anymore. You just enter your address, they send a login email, you click the link in your email, and it redirects you to Medium, logged in.

That's absolutely crazy, I've always thought it didn't make any sense.

Browsers have autofill, and even if you don't want to use it it takes a lot less time to type your password than to click on a button, open your email client, wait for the email to arrive, click on a link, be taken back to the browser, yack!

It only make _kind_ of sense on mobile where typing is harder, but then again it's also a pain to switch to email and back.
Well no surprises there.

First, of course all the big co. are saying yes now even Zuckerberg now pretends he "isn't opposed to the idea", the growing outcry is getting too big to push away and if they say no they won't be invited to the table where the deal is made, so if you can't stop it at least make sure it's kept under control.

Second, Apple the company faces major competition from companies who will directly be hurt by this, while they won't be too much. I'm not talking about the cost to adhere to the regulation, but the ability to sell a product that has just been truncated. So I fully expect the CEO of Apple to push for it, because he really wouldn't be doing his job otherwise.

Third, of course, Tim Cook is probably as a human being for it too, although I'm not sure if that matters too much for when he speaks as the Apple's CEO.

I really don't think we need to talk about all the big corp and CEO who will one after another say "oh yeah I'm totally for it", "this is a good idea, we can find a solution together", ... Let's keep focused and make sure the end result is fitting. They all saw what happened here in the EU and I doubt they want to see that spread to such an extent to the US.
I followed the standard definition: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intellectual_giftedness#Char...
Philae didn't have the mass to spare for an RTG. And Rosetta was just fine with solar power.
And this is the climate while tremendously powerful corporations consider personal data collection to be a lynchpin of their moneymaking strategy (i.e., advertising.) Once internet advertising becomes broadly recognized as being not worth the cost, the demand for this data could fall off a cliff- what will policy look like then?

I consider it a reason to be optimistic.
Under no circumstance do you ever need to use the acronym IANAL on the internet.
Apple, Amazon, Netflix and Google will need to work hard to distance themselves from Facebook in the public imagination. They’re presently all “big tech” FAANGs. Until that happens, Silicon Valley’s political priorities will suffer in D.C.
I mean it's the best of any GUI on any platform. It's Android-only, yes.
"I realized I could never really make the watch my own creation unless I developed and manufactured the movement myself"

Aren't you equally disappointed that you didn't mine the metal from the earth, and raise the cows from which the leather was taken? ;)
The Mac gaming console time has forgot
Suppose that we decided that we shouldn't have abnormal tariffs. We decide to do what is typical for large and/or advanced economies.

We'd have to raise tariffs.
How come? AFAIK there is no big problem in Denmark (which has the flexicurity approach) to collect social security payments. All employees have a person number registered at the civil registration system. Companies pay the social contributions and tax withdrawals with the PAYE system.

The only exception is perhaps "shadow economy" of immigrant-dominated areas in some cities where rule of law is weaker and restaurants and other local businesses may use undocumented employees. But these cannot be very big business.
Any encryption scheme with a backdoor is insecure, by definition.
Famine would be the other problem the prepped would have an advantage in. One would expect the deaths of many farm animals, and it would take a few years to recover production.
"Fair" is a bullshit notion when it comes to trade. What Americans say is that China can produce <insert commodity> cheaper than the USA only because "it's subsidized", and that's unfair.

What exactly does it mean to say that is "unfair"? The USA for example subsidizes their soybean exports, is that "unfair" to the rest of the world?

Their society spotted a strategic opportunity in collectively working together to lower the prices of some exports. Now, it might make sense for the USA to apply strategic tariffs. But calling their decision "unfair" is just filler word nonsense, as we're all playing by the same rules.
How to solve 2D equations using color
One might say that Facebook is bound by Metcalfe's law
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metcalfe's_law
Mozilla Persona tried this. It was a good user experience, but it never gained enough traction and eventually they shut it down.
You ultimately have to want the skill. The gp would have noticed his skill gradually waning, not suddenly when it had gone, yet as a kid he didn't care for it.
Perhaps on the first subthread that is the case, but reading through the entire thing paints an entirely different picture. Especially if you focus on comments from more frequent HN participants.
Wow, that's totally fucked up. Apparently it is now illegal to structure even if you are not evading any law:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-watch/wp/2014/03/24/...
They added "sex" to the title of the bill. I knew this would pass the first time I heard of it when they were discussing it as a separate bill. Stopping people from having sex is clearly high on the agenda for both parties as is getting information without a warrant.
Of course tariffs won't improve the welfare of Americans. Removing those tariffs after China has changed its illegal and unfair trade practices is what is suggested to improve the welfare of Americans.
Trump did nothing wrong.
Is my no-dogs-allowed CatTube unethical, then?

Or do the ethics have to do with YouTube's utility like status?

I personally am happy that YouTube can and does censor/ban porn, obscene videos, and videos depicting humans dying.
I like the idea of focusing on the device problem rather than the transport problem.

I'm personally completely ok with the special devices specific unlock code suggested. It's not universal, and requires the government to go through the company first who at some level at least have a stake in me believing my device is secure.

The insentives seem to work and I still have reasonable security.
Are you saying that as soon as I signed up to IG with an email address and started posting pictures, IG then knew who I was to the extent that they can prevent impersonation after I delete my account? I'm skeptical.

They do not need to keep a record that I previously existed in their system. There is literally nothing other than marketing/bizdev that derives value from this.
Zimride predated Uber. Lyft predated UberX.
Of course, but the author didn't talk to them at all, and doesn't know anything about their situation except that they got out of the Uber at a van.

Since they were Ubering around town instead of driving the van, I would assume they're probably not poor.

But we'll never know because the "journalist" was too busy listening to music to find out the facts.
Love Earth Day Art Artistic Tee Shirts
No one on HN wants to hear it but this is part of the Feminist agenda.
I don't think you're responding to the point. The point is that speech--methods of communication--are being restricted here, which hurts legitimate users and does not prevent anyone from performing these heinous acts.

The whole point of speech protections is that you have to allow people to say things you don't want them to say in order to protect the things you do want to be said.

Going after the speech here is a pandering waste of time that infringes on fundamental rights. The actual crimes here are what need to be chased after.

And the parent's point is a strong one -- why would you discourage criminals from using an open communication medium?? If we can't stop these people when they communicate openly how on earth are we going to do so if we drive them underground? Enforcement, police resources, whatever you want to call it is the issue here. Pushing the communication out of sight and pretending something has been done about the problem is the complete opposite of a solution, it makes people feel like something has been done while making the problem less visible and no more solved.
Android, at least the parts that would be required to be modified to implement this misfeature, is already open source. That won't help. The DoJ isn't asking for proprietary code secrecy, fundamentally they're asking for key escrow. Storing data in different places isn't something source visibility can address.
That would depend on Prox Cen b's atmosphere and magnetic field, and we don't know much about either.

At the top of its atmosphere (if it has one at all; otherwise, at the surface) Prox Cen b would get about 500x more EUV/X-Ray radiation in an average day than we get at the top of Earth's atmosphere, so putting Earth into an orbit whose periastron is similar to Prox Cen B's average orbital distance would not be good news for many of Earth's near-surface organisms.

The planet is in such a tight orbit around Prox Cen that it may not have any atmosphere thanks to erosion by the stellar wind. However, it might have a sufficiently strong magnetic field that erosive loss is checked. It also might not be a rocky planet rather than something like a small Neptune, with a deep atmosphere. Finally, Venus's magnetic field is negligible, and Venus is rocky, yet it has a thick atmosphere; Prox Cen b could be like a big Venus, for all we know so far.

Venus is pretty interesting: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11214-017-0362-8

Maybe someday we'll have similar (well, almost certainly strictly superior) probes around Prox Cen b.
I think a lot of responses here are forgetting that OP is an undergraduate student in an _Applied_ Mathematics course. "A Concise Introduction to Pure Mathematics" by Martin Liebeck would be my suggestion.
I think some type of "lawful access" was inevitable. Law enforcement all over the world weren't going to just let the status quo fly.

If it's going to happen hopefully Apple can do some jujutsu and get GDPR in the US out of it as part of an omnibus bill [1].

[1] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-03-24/apple-s-t...
In France we always had strong laws too (we basically adapted our super old laws for "files and info on paper" to "files and info on paper on a computer"), in decent part because Vichy.

Technically I could already ten years ago ask any company to show me every file they had on me, allow me to edit, and ask them to delete, and they had to comply. But the era on gigantic worldwide corp made this much harder to enforce, and thus much harder for user to enjoy their rights. I'm glad the EU moved forward on standardisation and enforcement at EU level.

No more "the data you refer to is in Ireland and owned by an Irish company that doesn't operate in France !" and crap like that.
> I still have reasonable security.

Backdoored “security” is in no way reasonable. It’s essentially not security at all.
If you run two schedulers they don't have a correct view of available capacity. You can use Mesos as a meta-scheduler but that introduces more complexity.
A 600hp ls3
If you view an IP lawsuit as masculine posturing, you should check your blind spots.
they are like reeeally left wing

The historical record of the extreme left is extremely pro-state, pro surveillance. Indeed, the Marxist corrective to freewheeling capitalism was a strong socialist state (to cover the period before communism emerges and the state withers away) [1]. Many modern surveillance techniques were pioneered or refined by the likes of the OGPU [2], the NKVD [3] and their equivalents in satellite states like the Stasi [4] in the GDR, or the secret police in China (sorry I have no good reference).
Note that both Wilhelm Zaisser [5](founder of the Stasi) and Kang Sheng [6] (founder of China's secret police) had worked in Moscow under Stalin in the security services.

This is historically very well documented, but seems to be somehow unpalatable ...

[1] https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1848/communist-m...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joint_State_Political_Director...

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NKVD

[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stasi

[5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wilhelm_Zaisser

[6] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kang_Sheng

Edit: replaced "left" by "extreme left" for additional clarity.
Why can't it just be "manipulation?" There doesn't need to be a technical or academic term for it just because it uses technology.
>gifted kids do benefit from suitable gifted education

If you show me that other students don't benefit from suitable gifted education, then you'll have an argument. Claiming that treating children with gifted education increases their chance of success is obvious, but misses the point, does it not?

I can specifically remember back to when the TAG Math students (Talented and Gifted) were learning what negative numbers were. I kept hearing about them. I imagined what they might mean, how you use them. When I was finally introduced one year later, I was disappointed, you mean it's literally just subtraction? I could have done that one year ago. And same with all the other students in the normal math course, if they had the same level of attention and care.

The worst part was this: the students in TAG math had a student:teacher ratio of 10:1, while the normal math students had a ratio of 20:1. The remedial students had a ratio of 10:1, but the remedial teacher was from the special ed department, not a specialized math teacher that the TAG and normal students got. The TAG program at my school was praised, and the teacher acted as if she was doing God's work. Of course, she had children who were students at the school, and of course, they were in all of her classes.

Now, looking back on it, I realize how broken this frame of thinking is. Yes, students will benefit if you put them in an elite math course with more resources than other children. Other students will bare the cost. I think a better allocation of our time and money would be to spread resources evenly. If you really want to get ahead by one or two years, take summer classes in middle or high school. That way, the students bares the cost of the additional time and effort, and we can still evenly allocate resources so every eight year old gets the same opportunity.

EDITS: spelling bear -> bare
In a previous job I had, I was responsible for the authentication service of the organization (big B2C company). Even if it wasn't available from the get go, over time about half of the logins were done with social media, Facebook and Google in our case.
It'd be incredibly stupid for CA to have destroyed any evidence[0].

Privacy protections are, as far as I know, completely a matter of civil law. The worst that one would expect from the facts known so far is a high fine, bankrupting the company.

Buy CA is toast anyway: no politician or reputable brand will ever want to be associated with them.

Destroying evidence, however, can rather quickly result in criminal prosecution.

So this doesn't make much sense even for the owners of CA. It's even worse for employees: their risk was mostly limited to losing their job when the inevitable happens. Participating in obstruction of justice for the sake of job security is borderline insane. That's actually the #1 reason why I mostly doubt conspiracy theories in the private sector.

The only way to possibly way to square destruction of evidence with rational thinking is the possibility of CA having engaged in things worse than currently known. Maybe they actually engaged in honeytraps or killing Kennedy.

[0]: Which doesn't mean it's not possible. They don't have the best track record as far as not-being-stupid goes.
It's the critical part of the novel, that he does! That was understood, but it's like watching a movie yelling at the screen, don't go in there!
I generally agree with you, but you picked sort of an exceptional example. As far as I know, Finance/Accounting is one of the explicitly defined use cases for Excel. For finance people, it's actually the best-in-breed tool for what they're doing.

GP is talking about people outside Finance who use Excel as a database. Though he's being a bit facetious, he's actually not far off. For the store data/retrieve data/share data workflows that most of these folks have, there actually is a good SaaS business in putting Excel on a server, wrapping it with a database, putting a nice UI on it and adding a few industry specific features.
Security is pretty binary in this sense. It is either secure or it isn´t.
That isn’t very hard to understand.
How would this be different from &? It is also a unary operator and && is a different binary operator.

'||' and '&&' are distinct tokens in C as far as i know, i.e. not handled as two consecutive '|'s or '&'s.

So your example would unambiguously be parsed as "a to the b:th power". Whereas the other case would need explicit parens:

int c = a * (*b);

Similar example for &:

int a = 1;
int b = 1 && a; /* 1 LOGICAL_AND a */
int c = 1 & (&a); /* 1 AND address of a */
Some would - but not you, as you give no argument, or point to any. Gainsaying is not a contribution.