skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: Help! Twilio/Tropo is sentencing our Canadian business number to death?
I’m at wits end, hoping HN knows how this works and how to go about troubleshooting:

8 years ago I signed up with Tropo for our then-start-up's Canadian phone number (area code 403 with a number meaningful to our business).

Around the same time, I also signed-up with Twilio; we have our US number there.

Tropo was acquired by Cisco & on Oct 1 announced a wind-down of all services by Nov 30. Since then I’ve been trying to port our 403 number from Tropo over to Twilio.

Twilio support says the port request is being rejected because the address on file at the losing carrier doesn't match. For weeks now, all they say is: "contact your provider for the CSR on file which contains the needed address."

I've repeatedly told them that the only provider I've ever dealt with for the 403 number is Tropo, who provided a CSR that DOES confirm the address on the port request. Tropo denies even receiving any port request, as does their upstream provider of the 403 number, Voxbone.

I suspect the losing carrier is upstream still from Voxbone & the address they have on file is not even ours (perhaps Voxbone’s?) I suspect the carrier is Iristel (they seem to operate other numbers in the same 403 subrange) but I can’t be sure.

Twilio refuses to say who's rejecting the port request, citing NDAs with their carrier partners. They will not even confirm whether by “my provider” they mean Tropo.

I've asked Twilio and Tropo email support to liaise directly, with no luck. No one from either company will reach out to me via phone to get to the bottom of this. I’ve reached out to Iristel for info, I’ve even tried to communicate to both them and Voxbone that I'm open to taking this number as a SIP trunk until the port can be resolved, but radio silence.

Where do I go from here? Are we seriously going to lose our business phone number with an 8-year collateral history, because telecoms companies are refusing to, erm, communicate?
You seem to be conflating two issues there. If there is a shooting there is no negotiation until they can deem the situation under control.

For riots, obviously using other dispersion tactics is preferable and should be used before physical force is employed.
Hmm.. are you sure? Don't they have to be street legal to drive on the street? You can probably buy one to drive on private land but that's about it.
You're 100% right and I simply wrote it as an ill-considered figure of speech. Too late to edit, but <facepalm>.
Experts condemn Chinese experiment of editing babies' genes
1) Until that announcement: impossible for regular people, and maybe possible for big enough customers agreeing to go through many hoops like dealing with a bank in Uganda (from what I've heard, not sure if even that was possible).

2) Of course not.

3) Which federal government are you thinking about? I think Bitfinex is a Hong Kong entity, and Hong Kong is not a federation (it's a Special Administrative Region of the People's Republic of China), so doesn't have a federal government.
Who should I read to learn more about the state of the art in discrete mathematics applied to physics?
> Surely it can't be that bad

Sure. If you don't mind very bad food. If you don't mind always being a little too cold. If you don't mind never having a moment to yourself. If you don't mind not being able to use the bathroom in private. If you don't mind never showering alone. If you don't never being alone. If you don't mind not seeing much sun.
Martha went to a pretty nice minimum security Federal prison camp. "Club Fed" is a typical nickname for those.

Most US prisoners aren't in anything nice like that. Most state run prisons are dangerous shitholes. Maximum security Federal facilities are clean and safe, but rough in that you're by yourself in a tiny room 23 hours a day.
> The difference is that the 1033 program comes with a use-it-or-lose-it utilization requirement

It's my understanding that the requirement is a stop-gap for a single dept ordering 500 of these vehicles and parking them in a warehouse or selling them off. Basically if they use it for training and have it at the ready for call-outs then they satisfy the requirement.
Another benefit of IH is the dramatically increased HGH production. Not sure if calorie restriction has similar numbers.
Any experience with using Aurora in place of DynamoDB?

A couple years ago there was an interesting tidbit at re:Invent about customers moving from DynamoDB to Aurora to save significant costs.[1] The Aurora team made the point that DynamoDB suffers from hotspots despite your best efforts to evenly distribute keys, so you end up overprovisioning. Whereas with Aurora you just pay for I/O. And the scalability is great. Plus you get other nice stuff with Aurora like, you know, traditional SQL multi-operation transactions.

It was kind of buried in a preso from the Aurora team and the high-level messaging from Amazon was still, NoSQL is the most scalable thing. Aurora was and is still seemingly positioned against other solutions within the SQL realm. I sort of get it in theory that NoSQL is still theoretically infinitely scalable whereas Aurora is bounded by 15 read replicas and one write master.. but in practice these days those limits are huge. I think one write master can handle like 100K transactions a second or something.

So, I'm really curious where this has gone in the past couple years if anywhere. Is NoSQL still the best approach?

[1] https://youtu.be/60QumD2QsF0?t=1021
Looks like AWS announced this capability to beef up their DoD JEDI contract position.

"Give us $10B to build your datacenter, and we'll throw in a ground station for free!"
She's definitively an outlier.
Interesting stuff; also very readable paper.

I wonder how this sort of result might get applied in geology.
OpenStreetMap DWG makes no effort to find consensus
Cafe in Japan Uses Robots to Create Jobs for People with Disabilities
Not the parent commenter, but for what it's worth, I appreciate you taking the time to write your responses in this thread. I am honestly baffled (and a little alarmed) that more people don't understand the points you are making.
Obviously, not all South Koreans are locking themselves up.

This is just an unusual hotel that helps people get away from everyday life and stop being tied to their smartphones for a while. You could remove all references to South Korea, and the business model still looks interesting. I suspect it could work just as well in Japan, or even in the West as a modern alternative to a monastery.
> the same is true for any bank or bank-like entity, all the way up the chain to the Federal Reserve

No, it isn't. For one, ATMs. For another, bank deposits are insured. The banks, themselves, are heavily audited. In fact, "no depositor has ever lost a penny of insured deposits since the FDIC was created in 1933" [1]. (Best treasury practice is to (a) open multiple accounts, to keep deposits insured or (b) hold excess cash as Treasuries.)

[1] https://www.fdic.gov/consumers/banking/facts/
Completely agree. This has always been a fabricated issue anyway. People enhance themselves all sorts of ways, diet exercise, tutoring, etc.

The hysteria over genetic engineering will last just as long as it takes for the first few successful attempts to show their benefits, and then everyone will promptly forget it was ever an issue at all.
All excellent questions. Though it has a bit of an anti-capitalist bent, this is the best article I've ever read on the origins of modern law enforcement: https://worxintheory.wordpress.com/2014/12/07/origins-of-the...

Granted there's room for alternate interpretations, I think history speaks pretty clearly to the fact that the primary function is maintaining control of populations at scale, and that necessarily implies certain things about the outcome of any law enforcement system.
Ask HN: Saving YC Application
Is it ok to save the application while working it out and apply some time later? Do YC partners look for the progress of application changes?
New keypairs are often created, it's not the case that a person has a single keypair that they use for all transactions.

E.g. once you fund key A, immediately send the funds to new keys B, C, and D that are not publicly associated with you.
Because outside the bubble of HN, people generally support their community police and don't feel threatened to call them when a crime is occurring to them / in front of them.
Here's a similar sort of odd business in the US that I read about today: https://www.phoenixnewtimes.com/arts/all-the-rage-tempes-sim...

I don't think stuff like this is very useful to learn about what it's like to live in a country. These are really tiny niches.
It's Not Just America: Climate Policies Are Stumbling Worldwide
You probably should search for Chinese names. While a good portion of them will live in US, the consensus is 1) The career ceiling is significantly higher in China 2) increasingly hostile social environment 3) separation with family and the culture (food) not worth it at some point 4) no underlying racial bias
What if his "mistakes" were intentional?

And his thrill is the nervousness brought about by not wanting to lose after putting himself into a previously un-winnable situation?
When I did research and at grad school a large percentage of my peers were either Asian American or Asian, with a large percentage being immigrants from China. As a researcher in the US you spend too much time writing grants and now equity initiatives introduce extra risk in the tenure system for anyone of the wrong identity. I would not underestimate the lure of easy access to grants and a less politicized tenure track system for anyone of Asian or Asian American heritage.
Would you like it if technology you created was used in disagreement with your personal moral compass? Or are you completely agnostic about this?

Google is free to create a censored and wiretapped search engine app for China. But it should give transparency to everyone contributing to Google (especially those indirectly contributing insights or technology), so they can make an informed decision to work there.

> allowing to give the Chinese access to modern technology

This is not a problem or an issue. Nobody would have a problem with a Chinese Google Search engine. It is about facilitating spying, potentially contributing damage to free speech and human rights, about organizing the world's information vs. a government controlled propaganda machine.

What then is the issue, is that Google is very powerful at search and modern technology. And these systems are thus extra damaging in potential. Slapping Google brand on it carries responsabilities.

I do agree this issue has reached the stage of moral outrage. I think this is largely due to the leaks and surprise revelations. Senior Google AI now silent on this issue, yet vocal against Facebook or changing name of conferences.

I would hope the outrage would be the same or louder when this happened in the US, not China, so I don't think it is very much a thing of priviledged West vs. poor East.
I looked into signing up for a silent retreat, but they are expensive and sold out months in advance.
What is your source for nobody having any withdraw difficulties? I'm seeing heaps of USD withdraw problems on various twitter feeds that track this kind of thing.

BTC withdraw etc. seems to be working fine but not USD.
Maybe western ones are not, but most coming to my mind are non-free police states - Belarus[1], Tajikistan[2], Kazakhstan[3], Azerbaijan[4], Kyrgyzstan[5], Uzbekistan[6] and so on.

[1] - https://freedomhouse.org/report/freedom-world/2018/belarus

[2] - https://freedomhouse.org/country/tajikistan

[3] - https://freedomhouse.org/report/freedom-world/2018/kazakhsta...

[4] - https://freedomhouse.org/report/freedom-world/2018/azerbaija...

[5] - https://freedomhouse.org/report/freedom-world/2018/kyrgyzsta...

[6] - https://freedomhouse.org/country/uzbekistan
I think I agree with you entirely. I'm pointing out that that statement is very different than "the police break the law".
Military prison though, pretty sure the rules are very diffrent.
This paragraph rings hollow:
"Other examples of human variability, such as intelligence, would be even harder to change with current editing techniques. We can’t even produce a consistent definition of intelligence, much less identify its genetic determinants."

Even if we can't tell for sure what effect a particular genetic edit will have, telling customers "Yes this should make your baby smarter" is enough to convince a lot of people.

Also, the risks of off-target editing is massively understated - the FDA is reluctant to allow clinical trials for CRISPR-based therapy in consenting adults, requiring thorough evidence that you've catalogued and proved safe all off-target effects.

Here is a better article from actual scientists: https://www.statnews.com/2015/11/17/gene-editing-embryo-cris...
> most sudents end up paying almost no fees at all thanks to the Governor’s Grant.

That's because California Community colleges right now draw a huge share of students from the low income (sub-150% of federal povertly line) families that are eligible for the Promise Grant (formerly Board of Governor's Fee Waiver.) But that's not the segment of the potential market that is most likely to be weighing Community College against a $100K 2-year accelerated BS program, most likely.

> San Francisco City College is actually completely free for all residents of the city now.

And that is awesome, but again not relevant to most of the potential market at issue here, I think.
I don't see how an MRAP would be any less street legal than one of those large dump trucks. At worst you would need a CDL based on the weight but probably not in most states.
I think that's a fantastic idea. It doesn't even have to be so super adversarial maybe? Like companies sometimes get consultants not just because of their knowledge, but because they have a fresh perspective and might see things where veterans have a blind spot, or might even call a naked emperor out because they're not the subject of said emperor.

I'm dreaming here, but ideally, the incentive wouldn't be "nail cops for things they done wrong", but simply professionality. That department, with the same justification IMO, could also be responsible for praising officers or departments for very good conduct. And ideally, the communities would also be involved in that -- as a partner, rather than just a potential subject of police misconduct and a source of complaints.
Sure, there's an easy clarification. Neither the average nor the median employed American is working 40 hours per week. The average employed American is working around 35 hours per week.
This is a red herring that I see a lot, especially in online discussions. Progressives (like myself) aren't "equalizing the unequal" as you put it. You're conflating our goals with those of socialists and communists from 100 years ago who were coopted by authoritarian dictatorships.

We're working to remove barriers that create inequality, such as discrimination by gender/race/creed etc. And I don't buy crocodile tears for the (generally white/male/older) people currently propped up by the status quo.

I do share your concern, however, that any policy can have ulterior motives. I see that more coming from knee-jerk and nanny state policies crafted by the far right today (that used to supposedly be a province of the far left). See: the military industrial complex growth in response to 9/11, the prison industrial complex growth in response to the war on drugs, etc.
so with the robot guy, you guys really don't need to send too many people to ISS, right?
The textbook answer is typically that there is exponentially more data in unstructured data, but I agree with you. I thought about the unmodified use cases for this tooling for awhile and the major use case that I could come up with was finding unknown interactions or side-effects for medication and treatment combination regimens. That's all tracked very poorly in discrete fields today, especially with the nightmare that is cross-organization problem list management. Most drugs are approved by the FDA with the understanding that there will be post-marketing research (read this: https://undark.org/article/fda-drugs-post-marketing-research...), which this could hypothetically streamline.
And that's often because network hardware understands MPI and is able to optimize flows between nodes at far lower latency than TCP.
You're probably right. I'd guess this will evolve and improve over time as the the AWS team better understands market needs. It's also quite likely that satellite designs will evolve to take be more compatible with AWS Groundstation. In fact, once the service has been around for a few years, I wouldn't be surprised if we see purpose built sats that aim to use this exclusively. The 12 planned stations could also provide much better coverage i.e. save the sat owner having to build stations around the globe.
I happen to be one of those "real engineers", working in an aerospace company. When I have to re-do some calculations done 30 years ago (yeah, we need to have traceability of calculations for that long and more ... ) , I grab the F77 source code, build with gfortran or Intel Fortran, and believe me, it builds and runs. From Windows workstations to Linux clusters. Easy.

Then I get the python code from 6 months ago, and spend hours figuring the right python version, and library compatibilities ...

And when I read the fortran code, made by (physical stuff) engineers, it is ugly but simple - there is one or maybe two ways to do something. Not the 1000000's of ways of doing the same thing in Python. And I don't have to learn 50 new libraries to understand the code.

By the way, Python has been my language of choice for most stuff in the last 15 years ...
Yeah, I think the comparison to a monastery really helps with understanding here.
> No, it doesn't make any sense at all. The only people that care about Carlsen during the tournament are the same people who care about Carlsen not during the tournament - chess fans.

I am not a chess fan, before today I had read about and forgotten Magnus Carlsen's name. Today, I am talking to you about Magnus Carlsen.

Make of this data point what you will.
I think what people should be doing is rethinking "full-time" work. 40-hour weeks don't make sense in today's society. Start negotiating the "standard" 9-5 contracts that are out there today, instead of just blindly agreeing -- ask your employer if you can do 4 days a week for the appropriate amount of pay.

In addition being on-call (thus sacrificing even more freedom and your time) and required to manage operations is cool only if your company pays you extra for that extra time you're losing. Since this is a more contentious issue I'll elaborate - in the past, companies hired night-shift employees and split the work, not giving a ~10k bump in pay to the day employees and expecting them to keep laptops close to them while they were off-premises.

BTW, if you think you're underpaid as a tech employee, you're almost certainly wrong -- don't forget that the big tech firms colluded to keep wages low not too long ago.

Time is the one resource you never get back (well so far at least).

Anyway, nerds/engineers never think of this stuff, it's why CTOs are the least paid of C levels [0].

[0]: https://www.comparably.com/blog/what-the-c-suite-earns-a-loo...
Utopian attempts to build cities almost always fail.

"the real-world urban design and planning of infrastructure and public spaces" from the 19609's brought us empty downtowns, sprawling suburbs, lack of culture and cars everywhere.

The notion of a 'tech first' place is almost repulsive.

Humans are people, who about 'people first'?

How about the fact that we have been 'iterating' already for thousands of years on this one?

'Munich' is a great city precisely because it is old, and it will never be great 'because tech'.

Utopianism is one of the most consistently apparent acts of crude hubris among technologies and ideologues, and it blows me away because there is so much in recent history to show how exemplarily bad it can all be. Basically the entire Soviet Union and satellite Empire speaks to this.

Visit anywhere in Eastern Europe and see the 'revolutionary people's Utopias' built on 'reason, technology and equality' ... my god man.

All of that said - it's good to experiment and if some college town wants to 'go tech' from Google, then that might be a good idea.

As for Google's 'Toronto Harbourfront' initiative ... no.
Did you grab several pieces from several notes? This looks like a garbled mess to me, but if I understood how you had transformed it to get it into this state, it might make more sense.
I don't think they look until you submit. From what I've read, it's good to revise it several times and let other people help you review it before you pull the trigger.
it’s pure ideology. law enforcing bodies have existed in every complex civilization regardless of slavery.
Something tells me the market overlap here isn't quite right.

...They should've made it for Vim.
Experimenting with new tech. Helping activists by building (and supporting) technology that protects them. Sharing information critical of authoritarian regimes. Leaking documents or photos that provide evidence of official corruption.
I'm not sure why I'd want to pay someone else for this when I can do the same thing at home by unplugging my internet for a day.
I hear your point. To avoid getting into trouble I'll keep the framing as better than a full tuition scholarship (rather than full ride). It's already a good deal so no need to take risks with marketing :)

If you're curious, here's the math I'm using (assuming that our average salary will stay around $95k and long term salary trajectory will map to traditional stats). Since our tuition is a percent of earnings, the math is relatively straightforward:

Make School:

- Tuition = 20% of 5 years salary = ~1.1x starting salary = $1.1S (assumes 5% annual salary increase)

- Living expenses = 4 * annual cost of living = $4L

- Earnings = $1.03S * 0.65 * 2 (assumes 35% tax rate, 5% annual salary increase)

- Net worth after 4 years = $0.24S - $4L

Full Tuition Scholarship:

- Tuition = $0

- Living expenses = $4L

- Earnings = $0

- Net worth after 4 years = -$4L

Full Ride Scholarship:

- Tuition = $0

- Living expenses = $0

- Earnings = $0

- Net worth after 4 years = $0

To plug in some numbers, our students' cost of living tends to be ~$1500/mo, while our average starting salary is approximately $95k.

- Make School case net worth after 4 years: -$49k

- Full tuition case net worth: $-72k

- Full ride case net worth: $0

However, this doesn't factor in compounding gains of starting off at a higher salary (http://eagle.gmu.edu/newsroom/843/). The top CS programs in the country (Stanford, MIT) are currently at ~$95k average starting salary, while the overall average is ~$60k. At the point their peers are graduating college, our alums will have a $10k+ higher salary. This difference should compensate for the -$49k difference over a long career.

Since tuition and tax rates are both proportional to income, the numbers won't change substantially if salary is lower.
I won’t. I plan on visiting a church every Sunday, perhaps a couple volunteering days too.
This part is interesting:

>“I hate IoT,” said Hirsch. “I think IoT sucks. You have these stupid tiny chips, that cost a buck or so, going into a smart building [and they] can last 30 years. One of the things [that drives] the semiconductor industry is turnover. Why do I want to sell a chip that lasts 30 years and costs practically nothing? What I want is to sell a disposable chip that goes in the garbage almost as soon as I sell it. We want to make chips that have value along with a turnover rate that lets us keep pushing out silicon.”

This doesn't sound compatible with a future where we're suppose to recycle, reuse and keep using the same things for longer to reduce our ecological footprint, unless we are willing to stop the cycle of constant and fast turnover for products that are faster and/or cheaper with each generation.