skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I was the biggest Google fan ever. I recommended all their products to everyone I know.

Gone are those days. I now trust Microsoft (heh! M!cr0$0ft, anyone?) more than Google which is strange given I grew up rebelling against MS’s technical desktop hegemony.

I wonder when Google decided “doing evil” was okay. I wonder how the SWE’s and other senior people in this thread feel about working for a company that many now consider scum. All their excuses and retorts can honestly take a hike: It is my honest opinion that if you still work for Google you’re selling us all out.

After years of serving malware through ads and doing nothing to stop it, they’re now trying to stop us blocking ads?! That’s just the last of many strikes that set me down this road.
I agree with the articles and have seen these manipulations in my large employer. I wanted to drink the kool aid and be a happy camper but I developed a cognitive dissonance that resulted in my quitting. My salary was good and I was not being exploited in any way, it was just the constant lie that money was not the overarching decision maker that made me sick.

The only alternative I see is paying employees their worth, and admitting the only tool of any worth is money. Of course a company wants to save money wherever possible, because who is the leadership responsible to, the owners, not the customers and not the employees.

As an employee then maybe it is about taking on the values of the leadership, money first, but that is not the employee's job. The employee has a task that needs to be solved and if that task will be done for less money because of values then it is the responsibility of the leadership to exploit those values. Leadership has decided how employees time is to be used effectively and that is why they provided employees with a list of tasks.

For me honesty was more important than the job, but I know I’m in the minority and paying the price for it.
This focused mostly on cancer where the placebo effect doesn’t impact things like tumor size or survival.
An Infinitely Large Napkin
Can we have a roundup of worst-ever computer connectors? I'll open with the stupefyingly bad SCSI VHDCI connector, which was a teensy little thing with a couple of tiny screws usually attached to a gigantic cable that weighed at least a kilogram. These things never worked right without extra mechanical supports.
2FA on SaaS applications is free and easy, while centralising authentication is much harder - you need to manage an authentication platform instead of just using the application's own authentication.

Taken by itself the suggestion is odd, but in concert with the next entry "use password management software" it makes for a low-cost, zero management, higher security stance than not suggesting 2FA by itself. Noone should ever ignore the option to turn on 2FA.
“New question on online US visa application added yesterday.”
That sounds crazy. You mean if I know some guy named Dave and he lives in Europe, to tell somebody about that I need Dave's permission? Moreover, I should give Dave a way to make me forget his name? I'm pretty sure even in Europe things aren't as bad as this. Though who knows...
For anyone looking for the actual PDF page, my best guess is it's referring to page 25 of docket number 261.

Here's the quote I found; it seems to be referring to a particular tort. You may also want to look at the full text to see the citations I omitted in the [...] for brevity:

Intrusion upon seclusion. This tort requires intentional intrusion “upon the solitude or seclusion of another or his private affairs or concerns … if the intrusion would be highly offensive to a reasonable person.” [...] Plaintiffs have not alleged any intrusion into their private affairs; rather, the information at issue is all data they already shared with a broad circle of friends and even strangers (friends of friends). [...] Nor could the disclosure of information such as page likes, which are designed to be communicated to other people, be “highly offensive to a reasonable person.” Disclosure of far more private information, such as private medical records and the identity of undercover police, has been found insufficient. The “highly offensive standard … is reserved for truly exceptional cases of intrusion,” [...] and this is not such as case.
Adding this here as it may be of related interest for those who enjoyed the massive math cheat sheet on the front page recently.

Evan Chen, a math student at MIT, wrote up what would be considered field notes for higher mathematics. The full PDF is here[1], complete with a dependency graph showing what you need to know before reading any particular section.

____________

1. https://usamo.files.wordpress.com/2019/02/napkin-v15-2019022...
Except aren't a lot the jobs you described usually trying to sell products that aren't necessarily good for the planet?
California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA)
Tech people and young people are quitting Facebook or have done so. These are the trendsetter groups. We have likely seen peak of social media
Is there anything like this that doesn't require javascript to work?
Isn't that the point? What you prosecute is not related the first amendment, despite the actions being protected by it.
Thanks for clarifying. I am not sure how important it is to know you are “smart” vs just doing what comes natural in a given situation. It’s just how you will work problems. But I do think there is something there, about being Meta-analytical. I think good leaders have this. The ability to be two feet above a battlefield. I am not convinced it’s completely even a “smart” thing so much as a distinct problem solving methodology that works well (which might just make you smart based on the observables). I am rambling, anyhow. This was a cool thread in general.
about 20 milliseconds gained.
A lot of my old devices have mini connectors, they work, as does micro. I think when the original iphone was released they just wanted something thinner, anticipating future thin smart phones.
Adwords prices are based off the bids submitted - whether this is done through one centralized exchange or many competing ones makes little difference. Each search-based digital advertiser will end up charging the maximum it can while avoiding "vacancies".
Support and staffing costs are not subject to Moore's law.
> Yup, I think state-sponsored editing of Wikipedia is shameful.

You are free to think anything you like, but it makes no sense. Why state-sponsored editing is worse that, say, Taliban-sponsored or Hamas-sponsored or just-random-dudes-hating-jews-sponsored one?

> Can't this be discussed without you invoking antisemitic tropes?

Me invoking tropes? You came to a topic that has nothing to do with Israel and started blaming The Joos and their dirty money, somehow presenting Israel recognizing Wales - who, again, does not have editorial control over Wikipedia - as something shady. I think you've made your bed.

> Possibly other state-sponsored actors have also infiltrated Wikipedia so it is not just about Israel.

You don't say!
Evidence of what? And kissing is “gross”? Try to keep your inane thought-policing to yourself.
Would you want to live forever on a shitty planet though?
Really depends on underlying hardware of the Linode and DO VPS servers as they can vary greatly especially on DO depending on datacenter and region you end up in. Newer DO datacenters getting newer hardware so difference compared to older DO datacenters is huge - benchmarks of same DO droplet plan on different hardware https://community.centminmod.com/threads/digitalocean-us-15-...
Emoji are a terrible insult to the written word. They're also an affront to imagery.

Standard images, at least, are the same image everywhere. A grid of pixels is a grid of pixels.

Emoji, however, vary from platform to platform, so what you pick may well not be what your reader sees. In some cases that may matter, in others it may not.

Furthermore, some people construct new meanings and usages for emoji that do not align with the actual descriptions from the Unicode standard. You'll only realize this if they tell you, of course. I had one of those moments with my wife a few weeks ago.

I'm still (irrationally) upset that emoji are in Unicode. They're ambiguous, ill-defined, and they are certainly not characters in the multilingual support sense of the word.

Do I use them? Yes, grudgingly, and I hate myself a little bit every time I do it.
We're doing it already, in every nuclear power plant. We might as well harvest the results. Many won't be radioactive, with the problematic isotopes disappearing quickly, and anyway we know how to separate isotopes.

Particularly common: yttrium, lanthanum, cerium, neodymium, and samarium.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fission_products_(by_element)

For political reasons, the USA is one of the few nuclear countries that does not reprocess fuel. Besides missing out on rare earths, we're discarding about 95% of the uranium as waste. (discarding about 90% of the energy, with overhead taking a bit) Russia, China, France, India, and Pakistan all have reprocessing plants.
No. But companies should.
I've heard this many times. I have never had a mini USB plug or cable fail. I've had a couple micros fail on me in cheap devices.

The future I fear is far worse, my current phone, OnePlus 5t has the second failed USB-C port, my previous being a Google Pixel. USB-C cables connections in my experience become weak after maybe 50-100 uses.

I never had a single problem with a long line of micro phones.
A modest amount of reasoning will lead a reader to the understanding that this is a metaphor. What defines a prison:

* People are placed there involuntarily.

* Their freedom of movement is confined to the prison at all times (sometimes people serve prison on weekends, so I guess that's an edge case).

* They are put there because they are criminals (or political prisoners, in the case of corrupt countries).

* They are intended as either punitive measure or because we decide society is not safe if certain people are allowed outside of prison.

Schools do not exhibit any of these characteristics. Attendance is not mandatory, as parents can homeschool their children or take them to private schools. They don't live there, they usually only attend from morning to afternoon during weekdays. The purpose is not punitive, it's educational.

Look at the quote in context. This is where prisons are first mentioned:

> Why is the real world more hospitable to nerds? It might seem that the answer is simply that it's populated by adults, who are too mature to pick on one another. But I don't think this is true. Adults in prison certainly pick on one another. And so, apparently, do society wives; in some parts of Manhattan, life for women sounds like a continuation of high school, with all the same petty intrigues.

> I think the important thing about the real world is not that it's populated by adults, but that it's very large, and the things you do have real effects. That's what school, prison, and ladies-who-lunch all lack. The inhabitants of all those worlds are trapped in little bubbles where nothing they do can have more than a local effect. Naturally these societies degenerate into savagery. They have no function for their form to follow.

(skip one paragraph)

> The other thing that's different about the real world is that it's much larger. In a large enough pool, even the smallest minorities can achieve a critical mass if they clump together. Out in the real world, nerds collect in certain places and form their own societies where intelligence is the most important thing. Sometimes the current even starts to flow in the other direction: sometimes, particularly in university math and science departments, nerds deliberately exaggerate their awkwardness in order to seem smarter. John Nash so admired Norbert Wiener that he adopted his habit of touching the wall as he walked down a corridor.

He puts schools, prison, and high-society wives in the same bucket because they are both communities where the members of the community did not choose to be a part of that community and there is very little constructive way to increase social status. The result is that changes in status is mostly destructive: one improves one's standing by pushing others down. It's not that "schools are used as prisons".
>After a reduction in material and energy consumption, which will constrict the economy, there should also be a redistribution of existing wealth, and a transition from a materialistic society to one in which the values are based on simpler lifestyles and unpaid work and activities.

So, this movement is communism by another name? I understand that the new bit is the reduction energy consumption and quality of life, but it seems to me that they first need to get to the communist stage and then they'll shrink the economy. In other words: it's a fantasy.
I'm not, that's why I know PCI DSS requirements off-hand.
> The Spruce Goose is here!?!”

And a 747 on the roof.
"Practically, this would also require an increase in free public services; people won’t have to make as much money if they don’t have to spend on healthcare, housing, education, and transportation. Some degrowthers also call for a universal income to compensate for a shorter work week."

How about we just give every person a billion dollars? Then no one would have to work, and they could invest their excess cash in the environment. Jesus guys, why don't you put me in charge?
Exactly this. Without stuff to sell, those "industries" wouldn't really exist. If your blog relies on ad revenue and you have nothing to advertise you're not making money. Gucci doesn't need to advertise if there's no competition to Gucci.
Is this sort of compliance testing needed in countries with authoritarian leaders?
"Betrayed" sounds exaggerated - after all, the only thing that was revealed is the fact about where she works at, and if somebody "betrayed" her it was her source who entered her identity into a public database, not the database.

I personally rely on TrueCaller daily, and do not pick up any call that doesn't have identification I recognize. Otherwise I'd have to listen to bots telling me my Social Security number has been arrested, screaming at me in Chinese and people trying to get me to give them money for a myriad of reasons that I really don't have time to listen to. I get several such calls daily. Before, I was seriously thinking about just never picking up the phone at all. Now that I found TrueCaller, at least I can get calls from normal people or businesses that aren't shady and want to talk to me.
I think asking for RFC compliance is asking people to pay too high of an up front effort cost for what you are trying to achieve, unless you really are writing standards and not sketches of features.

What is the problem you're actually trying to solve? People not implementing to spec? That's seldom solved by changes to language, and more often solved by an engineer getting asked to fix an incorrect implementation.
at some point having an space company became a billionaire thing to do. I want to add, that's cool though. kinda shows how humanity tend to greater good. hope Allen had lived at least 20 years more
This general line of reason is based on a flawed idea that all of these employers would be willing to offer the same number of full time, full-entitlement positions, if it weren’t for the option of contracting. Everybody who’s in a contracting position is benefiting from having the option to do so, otherwise they wouldn’t be doing it at all. If you restrict people’s ability to freely enter into contracts with one another like this, you are absolutely guaranteed to be taking peoples jobs away from them. This is never discussed here, and it’s not obvious that the benefit to the smaller number of people who are left with employment after the fact is a worthwhile trade off.
Used to work at Linode, let's flip this on it's head:

-When the majority of abuse support dealt with was people angrily calling and asking about the fraudulent charges on their cards for dozens of Lie-nodes you consider putting caps in place to reduce support burden and reduce chargebacks.

At the time at Linode, if it was a known customer, we could easily and quickly raise that limit and life is good.

I've always wondered how Amazon dealt with fraud/abuse at their scale.

I don't think DO was wrong here to have a lock, but the post lock procedure seemed to be the problem.
Like I've been saying, you don't know what you want to q-search next until you've finished the last q-search. So you can't make a q-search queue because you couldn't add anything to the queue until the previous addition was evaluated. I feel like I've said this a few times but for some reason you're not getting it, not really sure what the hangup is?

Alpha-beta in general is so sequential that basically all the algorithms to parallelize it focus on making each thread as independent and sequential as possible. For example, the PV-split algorithm (which generalizes into Young Brothers Wait) splits the tree as low as possible (eventually to the root node) so that all threads can act as independently as possible. There is no local parallelism to be exploited because every branch is radically different from the last branch, and dependent on the result of the last branch. Local parallelism is necessary for a GPU to be effective and conventional game tree search algorithms have none.
My current employer uses Linode, and yeah, they have pretty good support. However, I've been using DO for the last 5 years, and haven't needed to reach out to support once. But I've had to contact Linode support about 5 times in the last year.
"Lost big time" is relative. At most you "didn't gain", and it's easy to get swept up in FOMO when you don't always remind yourself of that.

That said if the market shoots up and you hold on, you didn't gain anything either. No gains or losses until they are realized.
I've been using Foobar2000 with some iPod plugin to sync my iPod classic for as long as I can remember. It's never failed me yet. That could be another option.
I'm not sure ELF makes sense. ELF is all about the representation verbatim in memory, but at least for the executable segments, that's heavily abstracted for WASM. And describing alternate address spaces is always a hack in ELF, just see the craziness in AVR ELFs for an example.
> No one likes ads

It's not a problem with ads. It's a problem with tracking and data collection.

I do not want any company can follow my habits and have a list of my preferences, at least without my consent.

I like general ads (with moderation), not customized based on my past purchases, where I can find out something new and interesting. Like it is on magazines.
yeah, after nanometers we've still got picometers, femtometers, attometers, angstrom, fermi ... lots of room before we hit planck! intel, get your shit together!
What size ‘should’ the global economy be?
Yea, that's kind of what I meant to say, although I wasn't thinking about AMP. Can Google really not use the vast amounts of data it ingests to deduce which sites have bad user experiences and are slow, though? Shouldn't that be their core competency?
I have always been a happy DO customer. So glad to see you step into this lions den and reply to the community.

Looking forward to the write up!
Right in the first sentence the article equates cellphones with smartphones. Manipulation.
> their proxy variable—how many antennas were up—would almost certainly precede cellphone usage by some period of time.

I find this assumption VERY suspect.

Cell tower density is going to increase in the most profitable areas first--and those are not necessarily going to be correlated with high-crime areas (in fact--probably anti-correlated).

Cell phones are useful even if just a small number of drug dealers have them (remember when drug dealers used to have pagers?). You would probably have to correlate cell phones with pagers in some way in order to make a valid correlation.
Still sounds better than being dead.
As does the CLR, TIMI, PNaCL, Apple's bitcode variant of LLVM.

And the long forgotten SWF, P-Code, M-Code, UNCOL, ANDF, Xerox bytecode.
At this point it seems practically impossible to deal with completely.

V8 at least have given up on the concept of trying to protect memory within the same address space.

https://v8.dev/blog/spectre
Ethernet "thicknet" AUI has to be the worst. Aside from being difficult to insert, it had a shit flimsy metal slider to hold it in place. I fixed a countless number of tickets of disconnected AUI connections in my career.

10BASE2/thinnet and coax/BNC was a godsend when it arrived. Mercifully followed by the current RG45 cables.

It's at least encouraging that the powers-that-be improved it over time.

Somewhat off, though, because the more complicated VGA connections, at the time, had almost zero issues. So we knew and understood the problem space, and just ignored the right solution.
Except it wasn't. They standardized on micro-usb.

Edit: from your Wikipedia article - "A common EPS must include a cable with a micro USB-B connector for connecting to a mobile phone."

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2009/06/10-companies-agree-t...
I view 'carbon credits' as a way of manipulating perceptions ... doing something on paper, stalling on concrete action.

The laws of physics don't care what we think or the stupid mind-games we play, tickling the dragon's tail. So long as we refuse the necessary, massive response needed, dozens of coming generations will pay.
What's stopping them? There's tons of empty land in the world. Go find a stream in the forest and live a sustenance-level life. Oh, they want everyone else to be miserable too.
If you want to downsample segmentation produced from convnet output using only numpy, I have this technique to contribute :)

https://towardsdatascience.com/countless-high-performance-2x...
https://github.com/jeeliz/jeelizAR

They seem to be doing a better job.
+1 for Rack support. A previous company I worked for was heavily invested in Rackspace infrastructure and while I often opined not getting the equivalent experience with AWS for the resume, I was regularly floored with the quality of their support. Whenever I had the pleasure of needing to open a ticket they solved my problems and usually taught me something new in the process. The linux guys were very clearly battle hardened admins.

I couldn't imagine getting that level of support from DO, let alone Amazon.
I hope you are right.

I also fear what FB and Zuck are capable of if they realise they're on a dead-end business model, and what abuses of personal data we might see as they attempt to cash out before everything dries up...
"I'm sorry, my responsibilities don't leave me any time to discuss Foo in general terms at the moment. If
you really you need me to, please raise it with $manager, and we will reprioritize my duties."
He gave no facts about the whitehouse advisor.
Conditional Compilation is Dead, Long Live Conditional Compilation!
> Would be great, but human nature is to want more stuff, money and power.

A lot of HN lives in an upper-middle class first world bubble. Median global income is $2900 per year. That's less than $10 a day.

For the vast majority of the world, economic growth isn't about "stuff, money and power". It's about escaping abject poverty. It's about reliable access to running water, electricity, shelter, and food.
NetNewsWire Alpha One
Yes, that sounds exactly right. But I would add that there is a technical reason for the more limited blocklist setup, in that it's much more reasonable to do a simple list check asynchronously than to run JS code.

But to me, that just suggests that firefox might want to consider an additional async API. I can think of many options that are more powerful than what Chrome is moving to. eg use the exact logic uBO needs. Or register a WASM function with no access to anything that would problematic to run async.