skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I wouldn't say I am "addicted" to tech more than most people my age (26) but I was using my phone a lot more than I liked so I have taken some steps lately. The early results are encouraging that you can in fact use software to control yourself (no particular order).

Here are some things I did and the results.

1. Hacker News "noprocrast" setting. This is something underrated in HN, but I have set it so I can only visit every 6 hours and that my session can only be 20m long. That basically means one visit per day. I find myself not going on as much because I am "saving" my one visit for later.

2. Android "Digital Wellbeing" timers. I set a timer on my phone to limit me to 1hr of Google Chrome per day. This is my #1 most-used app. The first few days I was always hitting my limit. After a week or two my brain subconsciously started knowing about the limit and now my natural usage is < 1hr.

3. Work Profile + Do Not Disturb + Grayscale. At night my phone goes full grayscale and turns off all non-urgent notifications. My work profile also turns off. The combination of these three things makes me much less likely to engage after 9pm and get ready to wind down for bed.

4. I made an app (https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.habosa.not...) that helps me take control of notifications. Instead of blocking them, the app puts them in an inbox-like format. I can check them all at the end of the day without missing them entirely or letting them bother me at work. I do this for apps like NYTimes that surface interesting things but that I don't need to know about urgently.

Overall I am seeing a lot of progress! I find myself more able to, for instance, wait for the bus without playing on my phone. Hopefully over time I'll get better and better.
Yes! It's a mad world where a design compromise suddenly becomes something to be emulated all by itself.

"It's not a bug, it's a feature".

I hate the look of the notch, but at least the rest of the iPhone looks super slick. The Pixel Notch instead just made an unattractive design far far worse. Bravo!
I tried Azure lately – it felt like I booted into Windows 98. I couldn't stand it. A lot of the CLI UX was buggy for me too.

AWS works. A lot of the UI is dated but the new designs are nice.

GCP is the best. Google has done a great job on Dev UX both CLI and Web Console.
NetLogo – A multi-agent programmable modeling environment
honest question: was there anything in particular that you liked about the new gmail that brought you back?
> a tablet that you can't take with you

What do you mean?
One of my friends is an archaeologist. My view of an archaeologist was always one where they are leisurely researching history, finding locations for finds, cautiously digging in the fields, sorting shards of pottery, etc. She described instead a potentially stressful job performing surveys on urban sites to determine the historical significance of a location to give a go/no-go to developers looking to build a multi-million dollar apartment complex on top of what once might have been the governors home, which was once on top of an officer's quarters, which was once an indigenous settlement.
The Momentum Wireless with ANC is still being sold under that name at least over here: https://en-de.sennheiser.com/momentum-wireless-headphones-wi...

But there's half a dozen other Momentum headphones, some with, some without ANC. Sennheiser's naming schemes are aggressively unhelpful. Just look at this small subset of their overall headphone selection (hit Show all): https://en-de.sennheiser.com/music-headphones-portable

Naturally, they don't call it ANC, it's NoiseGard™ [sic].
A lot of games are download only, not to mention DLC (Downloadable Content, aka expansions).
I dont see the point of
This website if i am installing an application for example gparted it can format my drives??
Ah okay, that makes a bit more sense. Thanks!
Are you one of the developers/speaking for them? That warning is pretty old.
YMMV. I have NEVER seen a company call the bluff. At worst it just means you wait while the request goes to someone’s boss or boss’ boss and they say just give them what they want.

Also I don’t tell the company I’m suing them. They could care less about me. I am however telling them THE STATE will be looking into their practices, which to them is much scarier and expensive than a disgruntled customer.
Only if you run with no isolation / user namespace. And even without that, you need to run with `--privileged` to get access to interesting capabilities. It's not as simple as container root == host root.
> Forget learning new frameworks we were still talking about Java at the end of the second year.

Personally I don't think people should be learning frameworks in school except for elective classes. CS is so vast that there is more than enough foundational knowledge to learn without going into specific tooling.

Learning Java in your second year seems like a problem though unless you mean the class used Java but was focused on teaching other topics like data structures/algorithms/garbage collection.
I don't see any real benefits to using flatpak in its current form. You get worse integration with the rest of the system, poor tools that are inferior to your system's package manager, and no real security benefits currently. What's the point of launching all these rubbish proprietary apps on the store with no real sandboxing ? It creates a false sense of security, which is worse. All the proprietary apps will do what they used to. They've just been ported to flatpak as thin wrappers. If you get the dropbox flatpak, it will continue to litter your home directory with hidden files.
See today's Android Police artice on the Moshi adapter that just got re-released today.

https://www.androidpolice.com/2018/10/09/moshi-type-c-audio-...

Comments on that page point to this one on Amazon, looking very similar but a lot cheaper, with positive reviews: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07FCZY1ZB/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_apa_T2qV....
the fact that this one test is news suggests, no.

I seem to remember a story about "how good is the SAS" because they were asked, after years of development, to try and destroy an armoured train that carried nuclear material from power plant to disposal (it ran through populated areas so was proof against head on collisions at a gazillion miles per hour and so on)

The guy took a calor gas canister, filled the train half full of gas and lit it. The armoured million dollar train of course ruptured with the internal explosion.

kudos to the well trained SAS demolitions expert, but i suspect a lot of the army could have done that, at various earlier stages.

not sure where that is going, except, yeah blow things up, early on.
It's mostly about the library. Many long-term Playstation users have large libraries of expensive games tied to it, so people buy stolen accounts so they can play all the games on them without buying all the games themselves.

Game-hackers also buy the accounts so they can get around being banned from online games, but considering the price mentioned this sounds more like a big game library account.
Again: some airlines do.
> it's illegal to report an attack by US intelligence agencies

Is this true? I mean outside a specific gag order or working under a clearance, you could find an issue with a piece of equipment, publicly talk about it and then be arrested because it turned out it was the US government who caused the issue?
I THINK the commenter was referring to the Computational Theory or Complexity Theory of which they do indeed have no recommendation (Sipser is the common one).
Those living in Portland can check out: http://www.kailashecovillage.org/ in SE Portland (near Reed College). I lived there a few years ago, definitely not the biggest and greatest, but if you want a taste of it I'd check it out and get in touch.
What is with this trend of super niche, esoteric startups?
> Yes, outside of a sandbox it's expected. But you don't sell something as secure and sandboxed when it's not.

It is isn't being sold as "secure". It's sandboxed in the same way that Python virtual environment is sandboxed, i.e. you're not messing with the system software installation. Real security sandboxing is a completely orthogonal feature that package managers do not deliver either.
There's not even much engineering brilliance anymore. It's been replaced by engineering orthodoxy.

Which is it's own kind of rot.
appreciate the clarification!
BBB is it's own pay to play scam. People who join magicly have poor scores removed.
Just the reminder - Soviet Union entered WW2 on _Hitler's_ side.

So, they were preparing for war - but for the offensive one.
> The assumption that MBAs do not have domain experience is often incorrect. Stereotyping is supposedly frowned on in the comments here.

Obviously not. I think the critique is about MBAs who don't have domain experience and don't think they need it, because they have a generically-applicable "management skill." That ponderous specification is typically shortened to "MBAs" for brevity, since it apparently has some root in ideology that's common in business schools.
Google under Eric Schmidt (from 2001 to 2015) was the one people learnt to love.
>" It was still a work hard, play hard culture and (outside of AdWords and classism that was starting to arise out of red badge ism)."

What does this mean? Could you elaborate? Do the color of badges indicate a class?
I don't think the answer is to just give up. Sure they have shadow accounts. But that data gets stale after you delete your account. And you can hasten that by blocking Facebook domains so that they can't track your movements around the web.
> Prompting or not it would still be an issue.

Yes, but in one case the issue would result in a mail because the cron job failed, and in the other case the issue would just cause the the process to hang indefinitely without notice
What is the most valuable company in history? What company in the world has a higher market value than Apple?
I recently lost access to my two factor authenticator. I had saved most but not all of my recovery codes. I was surprised that a couple of websites I didn't have recovery codes for allowed me to disable 2FA after login but before authentication. It saved me from having to contact support, but it seemed to defeat the purpose of 2FA.
And Apple?
What ? No it's exactly the opposite ! I think you're confusing with AppImage maybe which is indeed download from the browser & run.

The (long) goal of flatpak is that the user would never download and execute from the browser, everything is updated through the flatpak repos (like the PPAs for .deb) but with the addition that the apps are sandboxed and follow a runtime model for dependency instead of packaging everything or depending on other packages.

Basically the goal is to have something like on Android or IOS , so exactly the opposite of the "download from the browser and run an untrusted executable"
You can set that up with Tasker pretty easily. I hadn't considered it before now but I just set mine up to go to vibrate when I flip it over.
This person is from VMWare? Why was this culturally important?
The Art of Unix Programming by Eric Raymond is a good in-depth look at (not just) Unix CLI programs, covering both pros and cons, some:

http://www.catb.org/esr/writings/taoup/html/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Art_of_Unix_Programming
Industry was the pathway for doctorates in chemistry & the life sciences until 2008, when the jobs went away. With a physics degree you have a decent grounding in mathematics and programming, so you can go to work on Wall Street, in the life sciences, not so much.
There’s no way the HD280s are blocking 30db.

Here’s a source that says 12db.

https://www.rtings.com/headphones/reviews/sennheiser/hd-280-...
...and it’s Open Access, i.e. free download.
Well Android does have a "face-id" kind of system built in that works with the camera alone. It's not as advanced, but Google's thing is using software to really make it a nice product, and the face unlock works really well for me on my pixel 1 XL.
It was widely praised, because it breathed new life into old (and not so old) devices that were utterly hamstrung by iOS 11 running them into the ground.

"Apple completely ignored performance on older devices for several generations until the complaints got too loud. Now let's act like that never happened, because they have put some effort in now."

> And even in the cases where there is a performance tradeoff, updating isn't mandatory, but it's still an option for those who want it.

Yeah. Except that many of the new Xcode updates to support iOS 12 involve builds that remove older compatibility. So sure, "you can still use your older iOS! Just ignore the fact that if your favorite apps are actively being maintained the chance they'll retain old iOS compatibility will be a rapidly shrinking one".
How was iOS 11?
> The Debian security team being responsible may help you figure out who to blame, but it doesn't magically help the update actually happen.

Actually they do. Debian does carry local patches when necessary. It will also backport patches to release in older versions which may not be updated upstream. They literally make the updates happen.

In this case, it's valid to ask - where/when did you see the issue with this working.
From Google, "we determined that there were portions of the contract that were out of scope with our current government certifications."
> The FAQ page states "We are explicitly using many features of the linux kernel (bind mounts, namespaces, seccomp, etc) to create the sandbox that Flatpak apps are running in." ... and then it turns out that they aren't, or at least they aren't enforcing it

They are using those features. flatpak has network namespaces for applications that don't need access to the network and bindmounts for applications that use very limited parts of the filesystem.

Sure, in reality many desktop apps have more far-reaching permissions, but all they're saying is that flatpak can make use of those features in some cases.

> This is flat out lying to try and get mindshare

Usually that's just called marketing. I don't think any of the above statements are actually lies in any way though. Can you point to what's actually a lie, or what lie is implied in your mind?
sure, but there were plenty of well-to-do jews whose wealth was expropriated and were murdered.
Could he sue Sony in small claims court for the value of all the games he had in his account? Seems like they are unlikely to show up.
I agree. When Verizon sold off large portions of their FIOS network to Frontier, they took away several movies I had purchased. No refund, no apologies, they just took them away and refused to do anything. It wasn't enough money to motivate me enough to do more than call and complain 3 or 4 times. So they won. I did switch to another provider, but that meant I lost the rest of the movies. Sigh.
Silver lining: when the DOD find good ways to harden their systems, we can all copy them.

Cloud: it's probably unplug the aerial / network cable
Definitely not safe:

https://events.linuxfoundation.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/1...

Far as backdoors, the most common way professionals do it is disguise them as normal bugs/vulnerabilities. They werent saboteurs: just slipped like everyone does. ;)
Secrets of successful NDAs
Explain to me how an analog 1/8th inch jack doesn't "just work."
I think they already tried commercial off the shelf OCR software (which they didn't name but I would assume it's ABBYY) before they decided to build their own solution:

https://blogs.dropbox.com/tech/2017/04/creating-a-modern-ocr...
I'm in love with Netlify. The product is spot on. The support team is fast and knowledgeable. Things are simple and they just work, and it doesn't feel like it's holding you back.
I’ve never used them but I would never recommend the Sony MDR7506 to anyone, they sound awful to me.
Point being it started with the CEO.. At what point do you suspect the publicist of all people was clued in? Absolutely never.
I'd agree with a lot of this experience. There's a huge amount of music that I can just zone out while I'm programming. Though I'd add that new music will typically pull me out of it, much as a conversation would. Maybe it's something about new stimuli that triggers the brain to get out of the zone, and conversations always count as new stimuli, while listening to Led Zepplin IV for the thousandth time isn't doing anything new for my brain.

Additionally, I have a really hard time focusing without _any_ music. Typically I need some beat to be able to get in the zone at all. It doesn't matter what the beat is - EDM, ska, soundtracks, lo-fi beats to study to, but there needs to be something.
These workplace issues significantly up your odds of divorce – Science – AAAS
I have a small set of Nexus 5x phones that I manage, and 50% of them have bootlooped.
It'd be lovely to see a return of the first sale doctrine, as well. We gave up the right to own a movie when we went to streaming. I want to be able to sell my stuff again. More importantly, I want Netflix to be able to offer streaming of everything they have the DVDs for.
I'm going to piggy back off of your comment to say that I have no problems working "in the zone" in an open office. I can just ignore what is going around me. And I had HR sitting right behind me (as in 1.5m away) for a while. The sales guys were also quite close. Lots of loud phone calls.

Just to bring a counterweight to the usual "I'm a virtuoso that needs absolute silence to work" stuff that gets posted every time open offices get mentioned.
FWIW apps for doing those things work really well.

I've lost weight with a phone app. I never could have done Weightwatchers or something like that before.

Also fitness apps are great in gamifying exercise a bit. Again another app has really helped me.

Actually gamifying good habits might help more than trying to remove bad habits with an app which might be the issue with apps to try and reduce digital addiction.
Diet in this sense might be different.

If you want to gain weight, you'd have to change your diet to eating more for a specific period. Vice versa for losing it.

If you want to change the way you eat, that's not to diet - that requires a lifestyle change in the way you see food. Meaning, you have to discipline yourself to eat well for life (generally).
Some of it is interest in the spectrum and the need for long range bidirectional radio for modern "hacking" interests isn't there, and what you said, that everything is so closed source and locked up by the hardware vendors, that open, cross platform development isn't intuitive.

I haven't looked at SDR, though, so I could be off base.
That's your chance for a cheap hire? They're probably not going to get hired anywhere else and you can see in-interview if they are able to understand quickly!
There's not much value for junior positions to "know concept X", so what you want to know is the derivative...
But specifying the zone won't help since zones are not consistent across different accounts, so while you can ensure your in the same region, you may still end up talking across different data centers. Do they have anyway to handle this?
The fact that many desktop applications need access to $HOME and that $HOME also conveniently provides arbitrary code execution via .bashrc/.profile/etc is kinda fundamentally at odds with doing filesystem sandboxing of desktop apps.

Sure, flatpak isn't making things worse by not being able to fix the fact that desktop users expect to open $HOME/screenshot.png in gimp, but it's also not going to easily fix that.

This is fixable on android / chromeos by specifically having applications request access to data which is isolated from arbitrary code execution (e.g. "user files" which don't include .bashrc). I think flatpak may need to ultimately have a custom file-browser where the user can "share" subsets of files into a sandbox and then patch applications to use that file browser... or to otherwise build a new filesystem abstraction.

Until then, this issue will be tricky to fix. I, of course, agree with your main point that things like updating packages more is fixable and the post is overly harsh and critical of what's effectively "things aren't perfect" with no empathy for how complicated stuff can be.
4 big takeaways from the UN’s alarming climate change report
Atlas has a free tier with about the same storage limit.
Why switching an account to Japanese make it harder for the owner to get it back?
What’s interesting in your Facebook history today is your daily route, when you use your phone, the people you’re connected to through two degrees of separation or by inhabiting the same locations at the same time, and also the provability to swing your vote on a few very particular issues.
I think that point was reached about 4-5 years ago which is why I don't understand the prices of these phones. They offer literally nothing over a $200-$300 phone. Nothing. Diminishing returns? More like no returns and just a waste of money. Apple is a fashion brand nowadays and Google is trying to become one too. No thanks.
That's sad because overfitting predates ML by a long shot, and most experimental physicists of my generation (PhD 1990) knew what it was, even if we didn't use that term.

In my view it's not so much that "everything else must be easy," but that physicists are expected to take a multidisciplinary approach to our work. In the process of getting my thesis project to work, I had to teach myself electronics and programming, not to mention a variety of mechanical skills such as machining and vacuum plumbing.

Naturally, the job market situation encourages physicists to spread our wings beyond physics research, and to claim that we can do things. ;-)

Most physicists are pretty good at math. This actually gives us a head start in quantitative branches of other disciplines such as engineering. Today, when the engineers at my workplace run into a hard quantitative problem, they go looking for a physicist. If math is what makes a subject seem hard to most people, you might discover a few physicists trying to sneak in.
The problem isn't raw noise volume or surprising sounds, it's background chatter that drowns out the internal monologue needed to carry out the work at hand.

Crude analogy: Picture you're working on some annoying electrical gremlin under the hood and you've got the shop manual open trying to troubleshoot. The manual's telling you to find the blue wire and set the jumper to position 23, then turn the smallest hex bolt adjacent clockwise two and a half turns. You've got the flashlight out and there are about 20 different blue wires and several dip switch panels.

Now imagine three people stood around you talking at an un-ignorable audible volume 'nimbius blue green 24 41 brown nimbius twelve yellow forty three hedgehog..' on and on, indefinitely. More people come and go all the time and they never stop.

You're gonna keep re-reading that shop manual and it's gonna keep getting pushed out of your head by the chatter. You will get frustrated. That's what it's like, all the time, coding in an open office.
No. Flathub has nothing to do with flatpak technology itself. Flathub is just one server hosting some flatpack repos.

It's like saying .deb is Ubuntu Store. Well no, it is just one PPA among many other you could add to get your apps
They are a disgusting gutter company who cares naught for their reputation. I haven't knowingly purchased any Sony products (music, movies, games, hardware) since their behavior around 2005.
Just deserts: Can we be held morally responsible for our actions?
One of the things I love about Netlify is that I have never asked my clients to flush their cache after updating their sites... everything is invalidated and refreshed almost by magic. I suddenly realised this after months of using it, sometimes multiple pushes to live each day and it never skipped a beat, no issues with clients getting edgy because their site hasn’t been updated or because something doesn’t look right (css not refreshed but html has) etc.

It just works. Every time.