skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
On a meta level, this is a little biased and click-baity: the Trump references, the "abuses of power" mission statement, the emphasis on "the Disabled, the Unemployed and Students".

In short, Intuit moved from previously-free features to their paid tiers. This move may have disproportionately affected low-income taxpayers, though—if true—that impact was unintentional, not targeted.[1]

The article cites several different features that were monetized and affect lower-earning taxpayers[2] as well as those affecting higher-end earners[3], but doesn't state that this list is comprehensive, and doesn't prove that impact was disproportionate.

ALL THAT SAID, there's still some crappy dark patterns here, as well as broader tax-ecosystem improvements that would benefit taxpayers that Intuit has fought tooth and nail to block. So I'm certainly not defending Intuit here, but I'd find more objective reporting to be more compelling.

[1] "The income levels of the groups that were being driven to paid products 'was never really considered.'"

[2] "One of these forms was for a tax credit that goes exclusively to poor taxpayers who are elderly or get disability benefits. Another is used by low- to middle-income households that receive a credit for putting money in a retirement account." (Which, if it's what I'm thinking of, applies to above-average earners, too.) "A third is used by taxpayers who collected unemployment benefits." "And then there are people with student loans, who also have to use Deluxe." (Unclear if this is a change.)

[3] "The company’s changes also affected parents who get a credit for child care expenses, as well as people filing the schedule for interest and dividends."
> The way a network works, is that besides upkeep which is a small percentage of TCO, upfront cost scales with total bandwidth, not total number of packets one needs to move across a set of links.

This isn't really true for wired networks, and it's extremely untrue for wireless networks. There is only so much total aggregate bandwidth available in a given area's spectrum allocation. If every device at a given base station was downloading as fast as it could, performance for all users would collapse. Wireless ISPs need to get users to limit their usage. In the past they did this by charging the byte. This confused users, and got them angry, so now they've migrated to "unlimited" plans where you effectively pre-pay for (say) 30GB per month and then get slower downloads beyond that. They've also added tricks on top of that to make it harder to use a lot of bandwidth. This includes making it harder to tether, and throttling music/video streaming services.
Well that's food for thought isn't it? I don't really listen to music anyways, but one of those people who seems to need constant music in their life should try it and report the results.
Ai Weiwei: Can Hong Kong’s Resistance Win?
yah, businesses making money via legitimately adding value is awesome; making it via rent seeking and regulatory capture sucks.

turbotax could still have a lucrative business by building on top of free filing with value added services, but no, they want government-protected profits. it's dishonorable.

and it's a symptom of money controlling politics. we need to figure out how to allow politicians to be productive and contributive without money being the measuring stick proxying power.
Ask HN: Biggest Alternatives to Pingdom?
Hi HN. We've used Pingdom for over a decade but in the past year the alerts have become increasingly unreliable. I never get alerts on my phone anymore despite triple checking every setting and interacting several times with their support people (who kinda just stop responding).

We added Slack webhook integration and started using a Slack channel as the alerting piece, which is OK, but Pingdom doesn't seem to honor their "Alert only after down for more than 10 minutes" setting when sending webhooks to Slack. So we get bombarded with tiny up/down up/down alerts when any minor glitch happens (even network connectivity glitches), which is why we set the "Alert only after down for more than 10 minutes" in the first place. We opened a support ticket, but given past support responses from them, we are not hopeful for a solution.

Long winded intro to the question - what would you recommend as an alternative to Pingdom? Looking for someone who's stable, established and not going anywhere obviously.

Thanks in advance.
Exchanging data and money offline, in a very compact format :-)
I'd personally support the US pressuring the EU on its lack of free speech, but it still isn't comparable to the need for pressure on China as EU laws still allow for much freer speech in practice.
Cannabis Company Wurk #1 on Denver's 100 Fastest Growing Companies
In a world with global monopolies that drive out local farmers in developing countries through their hyper efficiency, importing GMO food aid from the USA is obviously required.

If countries were able to produce their own food then GMO food isn't necessary.
> Even my home security system calls the fire department by default and my condo isn’t an 850 year old landmark.

Non-residential buildings are often charged for false alarms, so standard procedure is to have a human confirm things first:

* https://gps-securitygroup.com/the-role-of-security-guard-reg...

If confirmation is not done in x minutes, there is an automatic call though (with the requisite charge back for false alarms).
Doing nothing is also a choice, and also comes with risk.

Accepting the built-in device software is also an "experiment."

Being conservative does not always mean accepting the status quo.
IntelliJ?

But I agree: HTML/CSS/JS is far easier (eg: threading) and generally results in a more polished experience.
> Monitoring systems have this sort of "meta" issue of needing to be more reliable than the things they monitor.

Only slightly; they just need to have an extremely low likelihood of going down at the same time.

It’s okay if your monitoring is down sporadically, just as long as it doesn’t overlap with the device under test also going down unexpectedly.
>It is difficult for an average user to set up a proxy

I'm sure that if there's enough demand for it, someone would make an app. A simple SOCKS5/stunnel server with a few buttons shouldn't be hard to make.

>and there is still a possibility to detect PC by analyzing unencrypted DNS queries to MS domains for telemetry servers.

This would really only be an issue if you don't have VPN killswitch set up on the tethered devices. Even if this can't be prevented, disconnecting phones because they made a connection to MSFT telemetry servers can be easily turned into a DoS vector. Want to mess with someone's internet? Put a bunch of img/script tags to MSFT telemetry servers on your site.
> The best result would probably be something like Mozilla buying it and/or paying Troy to just keep doing what he's doing.

Mozilla could very well be one of the potential candidates for HIBP ownership.
It would work for most people, wouldn't it? And the people putting their raspis into unusual scenarios for which the case was poorly suited could simply choose to not use that particular case. Encouraging thermal convection (ideally flowing over a proper finned passive heatsink) with a chimney design seems like a pretty good idea to me.
WASI provides a cross platform definition of "system calls" ( https://github.com/WebAssembly/WASI/blob/master/design/WASI-... ), so that you could write a program, compile it for wasm+wasi, and run the program on any implementation that provides those system calls, like cranelift on Linux, something on Windows, Browsix in the browser.

Browsix and Browsix-Wasm were developed before Wasm and WASI respectively were available, so they have their own definition of syscalls that are conceptually similar but not exactly binary compatible. We hope to modify Browsix to support running programs targeting WASI in the browser, which would free us from having to maintain our own fork of Emscripten.

Do you have specific decentalized apps or usecases in mind? We would love to hear more about the use cases of running things like that in the browser (and have done some work to make socket connections between programs in different browser tabs work over WebRTC)
See also: the Power Mac G4 Cube
Ah nice! This kind of reminds of an app Yahoo had about 4 or 5 years ago that summarized the entire article into a few paragraphs, just on a more micro scale (by design).
The 51% rule does apply for certain industries (here is the PDF: https://www.set-up-company.com/uploads/file/negative-list-fo... an informative guide is here: https://www.set-up-company.com/the-ultimate-guide-for-china-... and I would start there.

A WFOE = Wholly Foreign-Owned Enterprise is allowed for manufacturing (which I assume Tesla regulates under), but not for Telecom companies where 51% still applies. Internet services seem even worse based on a cursory reading:

(42) No foreign investor is allowed to invest in Internet news services, Internet publishing services, Internet audio-visual program services, Internet culture operation (except music), Internet access service establishments, and services of information release to the public through Internet (except those under China's commitment to opening up to the outside world in its entry into the WTO).
For software engineers we ask to bring a piece of code with them that they wrote. It can be anything. At the interview they first show what it does, and then we go through the code together. We ask some questions about why they implemented it a certain way. When doing that you can already see how people think and if they wrote it theirselves. It’s pretty interesting also to see what keeps other people busy. It removes a part of anxiety because they have written it themselves.
This is a time-honored practice. You would need to chase every big retailer for this.
I cannot talk for other places, but in the context of the EU the big point is presenting yourself as a marketplace / a third party that merely stores shelf placement (or the equivalent on your platform), instead of selling others' items yourself.

Retail stores are not in the business of offering a marketplace for companies to buy shelf placement. When I go to a retail store and buy something, the seller is always the store. In terms of the laws, insurance, etc ... It changes a lot.

Marketplaces have protections, but those protection come from their independance from one vendor or another. Same principle that made us force all of our national ISP to separate their fiber/network business from their actual ISP business, or why the national train companies were cut and separated from the rail lines companies ...
My wife bought a used 2012 Fiesta a couple years ago that had these transmission problems about a month ago.

I have an OBD II device to pull the error codes and it took me days to narrow down the problem and a few more to nail down if her car qualified for a repair under warranty.

It was a job worthy of Sherlock Holmes to track it all down but when I did call the dealer I had my ducks in a row and they did step up and make the repair at no cost to us. But the truth is the repair doesn't really fix the problem and Ford only has to repair it once.

The story about how Ford has tried to hide and dodge fixing the problem for years is just outrageous. They pissed off a lot of new car buyers something awful. People that will probably never buy another new Ford again now.
I hear you since I have a similar background (born and grew up in HK). I really wish that the Chinese people can benefit from better services (search, social media) and also the people in the west can benefit from some the the innovation in China.

Though I find that as a company, this is a slippery slope that it's better not to get on in the first place.

Can Google enter China and slowly affect change? Possibly

But from the track record of China and especially what's happening in Hong Kong, cooperating seems to be just feeding the beast. There needs to be genuine interest in opening up and making a change. So far, I do not see that but perhaps one day we can get there.
Yes when.

What changed was gsuit. They want to move away from the “we are harvesting your emails” image, in order to better sell paid accounts

“Consumer Gmail content will not be used or scanned for any ads personalization after this change.”

https://blog.google/products/gmail/g-suite-gains-traction-in...
The alternative to a pacemaker is death from an irregular heartbeat. The alternative to closed loop insulin is a lower quality of life.

The FDA is setup to optimize survival not quality of life. The standards will be much higher for these pumps.
Block it, then.
Cisco's been accused of have assisted China in identifing members of Falun Gong.

The first news story I came a across searching (it seems fairly unbiased): https://m.sfgate.com/technology/dotcommentary/article/Cisco-...
Antitrust isn't actually about monopolies. It's about anti-comptitive business practices. While market share usually matters, there are a number of antitrust violations where market share is irrelevant.
2 big reasons:
1) There are a lot of solutions to climate change that we could enact today if they had funding. Project Drawdown (https://www.drawdown.org/) may be of interest—it lists all the solutions to climate change we can enact today. It's quite surprising—we don't need CRT, we just need action today. With electing officials, we think that would be the best solution but it's relatively high risk—if we fail to do it, climate change gets worse. (that said electing officials is still super important, more on why we didn't choose that route in (2))

2) We thought this is something we'd be good at relative to our other options.

It would be really cool to work on CRT or clean energy breakthroughs, but we have no science background and it would be years before we ramped up to start making an impact on those technologies.

For policy, we think we can be good active members of our communities and vote etc, but we could not see ourselves spending all of our time lobbying or campaigning or otherwise pulling levers in the political space.

But what we do love doing is building products. We are content doing this all day, and hope that will allow us to make more and more useful products to reverse climate change.
EU commission press release: https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/en/ip_19_...

EU commission press release [PDF]: https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/api/files/docume...
Thanks! That's a helpful description.
Was it? I remember trying to watch flash stuff on Linux at the turn of the century and it wasn't so consistent at all.
Oh my, you don't know how laws get "designed." Congress ostensibly writes the laws, but they're now often allowing outside special interests and lawyers to pass along laws for introduction nearly verbatim. Furthermore, Intuit was caught lobbying to keep the tax submission process complicated and not free.
I truly felt this way after sinking a month into a company with multiple phone interviews, a HackerRank challenge, full on-site day with more interviews (all an in-person repeat of the phone ones) and a case study. All for a no after the in-person day.
Currently the stuff is hosted in AWS Frankfurt, maybe that? Normally it should load pretty fast, the lazy loading is just an optimisation for the users.
Yes, I have to admit, that loads pretty slow and the performance is not good. The problem is - I can try to make the performance as good as possible, designers still tend to want super high res textures / high fidelity 3d objects as they tend to put visual quality over performance. They have beefy machines and so don't really notice.
Yes, the post includes remarkably little detail. TechCrunch has marginally more: https://techcrunch.com/2019/07/17/googles-area-120-launches-...
> own infrastructure and take one's own destiny into one's own hands, along with the responsibility.

Amazon did this. It went pretty well. So well they decided to sell the results of the expertise.
Also check out PageProbe - https://nodetics.com/pageprobe
It seems there is a solution for your problem already: Busses.

Although not strictly automated, they are externalized. That is you are not the one doing the driving, and therefor you are free to sleep, read, work, etc, while you wait to get to your destination.

The beauty about busses is that they exists. There is no unsolved technology problems with busses. And they can be (and most likely already are) implemented without any or minimal additional infrastructure in your area.

If busses are overcrowded your local government can simply buy more, so they scale really well. If they become congested, we also have a solution called trains. Trains also solves your problems with driving and as a bonus get you to your destination far quicker then driving.
Ask HN: Are there any uptime monitors for SPAs that have string matching?
Need something that can execute js and search for a string on my page for a react app, needs to run JavaScript as part of the health check. Anyone knows anything?
In order to have a positive effect, a technology only needs to be less discriminatory than the technology it replaces. I chose the example of education because it is very expensive and discriminatory today; a technology which replaces the need for tuition could still be expensive and improve social mobility.

> If hypothetically, a brain-computer interface were to exist, it would likely reach individuals that are well-off first.

While often true for technology generally, medical technology has special considerations. Rather than simply reaching the well-off first, performance enhancing neurological implants are likely to reach the disabled first, where it is deemed ethically more acceptable, as has been the case so far. Due to public healthcare, health insurance, and research contribution, patients' wealth is not always crucial here. It may be the case that costs reduce greatly before non-medical uses become acceptable. In the case of BCIs, the acceptability of their non-medically necessary use cases would likely depend of the technology's maturity.

The extent to which market differentiation is possible is not yet clear for such technology, particularly if the market is competitive. Tiering is typically based on either having a unique product (e.g. nobody else can make an equivalent) which can be artificially crippled, or natural differences in production quality (e.g. only some cores of this processor work).
Feels good that since I use LineageOS, I can disallow cell providers from blocking me if I tether.
Yes: https://github.com/virtualagc/virtualagc
That was a great write-up. Thanks for sharing.

You could probably run an async loop which slices up painted frames and compares hashes of the slices to find identical slices to anchor and stitch similar frames together, still maintaining separate layers in case a better match is found later on. Something like that should solve for games like SMB.
If I think about how omnipresent computers and data are in my life now, I wonder how much we can use that as a starting point for what some of that evolution might look like.

For example...

- I find myself trying to memorize fewer things if I can easily reference them digitally later

- My expectations for having answers at my fingertips has grown such that not having internet or cell service causes anxiety

- My communication is increasingly in a pure visual format, condensing complex ideas, concepts, emotions etc. to a pic or gif. Further, my concept of a photo has bifurcated into more permanent photos I care about, and more ephemeral "pics" that get forgotten about. TBD whether I'd say my overall communication throughout speed has increased

- Phantom phone vibrations when I don't have my device on me

- Shortened attention span due to the wealth of data immediately available, but also many notifications vying for my attention

- A tendency to avoid situations where I'd be without electricity long term

- The ability to enjoy virtual experiences in a way that delivers some of the enjoyment of in-person experiences (think socializing in online games)
> Not a good long term strategy.

That's exactly the point. When you're poor, you don't have the luxury of considering a long term strategy.
In addition to what plorkyeran said: While volatile alone doesn't synchronize accesses between threads, it is enough to ensure that the variable is read separately in each iteration of the loop&mdash;though it might just be read from the L1 cache and not take into account writes from other cores.
That story feels like scrolljacking because there is a mismatch from the scrolling and the background animation, it's a pretty free tool, so the designer decided to have easings like that. But you're still scrolling normally, the background is just animating. Normally we have html text boxes, where you feel that you're scrolling normally. Not in this story though.
Copyright and patent enforcement does not suppress information, they suppress specific actions on information. You are required to publish information before it can be patented or copyrighted, the information must be available for the public to view. You cannot compare copyright to censorship, it is practically the opposite of censorship as it's designed to encourage creators to publish information.

Even when copyrights are abused to attempt censorship, US copyright law specifically defines Fair Use as an exemption to protect valuable speech.
Why would you assume that they are different boards?
The purpose of a search engine is to give results wanted for the user query - showing a dead website probably isn't want the user wants.

Google already handles this with DMCA takedowns in the US. If you search a website that has been removed by DMCA, Google will notify you at the bottom of the screen. Telling the user that N number results are hidden because of censorship is probably a better approach.
"Party cadres across the country are now required to use the app every day and accumulate their scores, according to recent state media reports."