skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It is based on the beta release channel and has some configuration tweaks. See https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Mozilla/Firefox/Dev...
Digital Sheriff Helps Cities Wrangle Airbnb Rules
GPT-2 has been already known by many people for months right now and is capable of generating realistic text since it was introduced. It's just that for 'ethical reasons' OpenAI refused to release the full dataset but instead released a smaller and limited version, but others have recreated a larger one to closely-replicate the original.

> I'm terrified of GPT-2 because it represents the kind of technology that evil humans are going to use to manipulate the population.

GPT-2 only is actually nothing compared to what is really going on. I won't say it is 'terrifying' but I would say that what would be more interesting is that if you combine thispersondoesnotexist.com, FaceApp, GPT-2, fakena.me, Lyrebird, DeepFake, Chatbots and few-shot talking heads [0] you can create realistic fake profiles. Although it is easy to generate, it will be harder to maintain over time as you have to do your due-diligence or several checks to find at least one anomaly and it can be declared as fake. Thus, it is easy to generate but hard to maintain over time.

So, this sort of doom-saying attitude around GPT-2 is actually just nonsense, unless you get your news from Facebook/Twitter/Online/etc. Just don't believe everything you see on the internet.

Time to get out the good old newspaper.
There is an XKCD for that: https://www.xkcd.com/2030/
Show HN: A Pure Android Launcher Based on AOSP Pie Launcher3
I'll definitely be trying this one out <3 Thanks for this work
Azimo appoints new CEO as money transfer service reaches profitability
Note that this is just a disorganized collection of graphs made by third parties, not an article or indeed an attempt to make any sort of a point beyond "hey check this out". There's no commentary of any kind, beyond that which the original graph authors put in themselves.
You manage to neatly encapsulate why I find him so frustrating.

"feels uncharitable and too reductive"

I'm old enough to remember when the law suits, a flagged throwaway comment briefly mentions, were going - my recollection is of a lengthy effort to deprive the other developers of the fruits of Mathematica labours. That colours later impressions. Charitable isn't necessarily always the right take...

Still, that's an aside here, and perhaps I was too sweeping. It's difficult as there are rare times, like this one, where the topic is fascinating and well explored, and the self-promotion is, for Stephen, light touch. It's well known he was a child prodigy, so I'm sure many people and events had part in boosting his ego and innate sense of exceptionalism, resulting in the personality we know. So I don't entirely blame him for it...

"arrogant self-promotion of the highest order, by one of the most productive and insightful thinkers of our time."

You're not wrong. He'd probably be well served employing someone to bring a lighter touch, via an editing pass to all output. I end up not finishing articles he writes on topics I might otherwise find hugely interesting. Solely because too much prose is spent telling me he's brilliant, rather than simply showing it. For me at least, the style of delivery has cost the message - as I stopped regularly reading him as far too frustrating, ages ago. :)
'The new norm': High school designed to protect students in mass shooting
I regularly watch commits from webkit, chromium, gecko-dev and servo.

Webkit is developed almost exclusively by Apple (or more maintained because development is very slow, btw I suspect that Apple will drop webkit as it become too far behind)
There are also a few igalia devs and one Sony dev + one Gmail dev.

Chromium is developed by so many people, Google, Microsoft, opera, QT, hardware makers (ARM, Intel, nvidia), some enterprises, and many contributors (I wonder if chromium has more opensource non paid contributor than gecko)

Servo is mostly developed by paid mozilla devs, but had major improvements made by contributors.
Proportionally far more non paid contributor than the gecko of today, I expect mostly because they work on github which is more friendly than bugzilla and mailing lists...

Gecko dev today non paid developers are a few minority.

If Firefox does not die by himself, expect Google to slowly stop paying them
Thus mozilla will die which would be a great loss.

Mozilla could save it's future, mozilla could become sustainable:
I made a proposal here:
https://github.com/servo/servo/issues/24026
> The C/C++ standards do not require formatting to round correctly or even be portable.

The linked-to method uses PyOS_snprintf(). Its documentation at https://docs.python.org/3/c-api/conversion.html says:

"""PyOS_snprintf() and PyOS_vsnprintf() wrap the Standard C library functions snprintf() and vsnprintf(). Their purpose is to guarantee consistent behavior in corner cases, which the Standard C functions do not."""
You may end up unable to remove features that are now only used because they provide a workaround to the damage you did earlier.
I think Uber/Lyft provides much broader service compared to Apple/Google's 30% percent cut for App store purchase and subscriptions , What they charge for just hosting your app and providing payment gateway is outrageous.
While motorcycles and cars aren't the same; I've found tires for them are really expensive. I can get about 3000-10000 miles on a set, and the sets are $450 installed. There's cheaper tires out there, but good tires are a safety feature on them really and make a huge difference.

I always bought really cheap tires on my really cheap clunker cars and never knew the difference. I wonder if it's just volume of cheaper tires, or if expensive rubber is just more expensive?
> all it takes is their expert saying that "we can prove beyond resonable doubt that the file is encrypted" and you are screwed.

I'm pretty sure this wouldn't fly in the UK, wouldn't the expert need to demonstrate to a Jury and the defence council how he "proved beyond reasonable doubt" so the proof could be refuted?

In fact it might not work in the US. I remember a pedo trial collapsing because the feds were unwilling to explain in open court how they tracked people via the dark web.
Are you perhaps blocking third party cookies?
Nearly 100%. Welcome to German enterprise intranets.

The only good thing is that when the new Edge enters general availability, we can likely get rid of 100% of our IE11 users for good.
You Give Up on Everything You Try. IT’S Not Your Fault – IT’S This Neuron
Rclone 1.49 Adds Google Photos Back End, New Web UI
Wow. 18k is nuts. 50 miles a day? We lowered our last lease to 10k and wont even be close at end of the year.
They already do that too, but it can't solve the racial distribution problem which colleges care a lot about: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/c6/1995-SAT...
OP says he bought the car privately.
GoAccess is awesome. The one problem I had with it was that it often had problems determining which requests were from bots instead of real users, skewing the statistics. Maybe if I had more real readers it would make less of a difference.
Sure. I think that's still done -- I mean, look at top-tier racers.

But fasting and cutting weight are different ideas.
2% of CO2 emissions and growing. The impact is higher though. It's too difficult to trawl through the original literature on mobile; Wikipedia: The IPCC has estimated that aviation is responsible for around 3.5 percent of anthropogenic climate change, a figure which includes both CO2 and non-CO2 induced effects.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Environmental_impact_of_avia...
Adding to the praise, I adore Paw and the developer is amazingly responsive. Highly recommended on my end.
I own a Fairphone 2 and was very proud to buy it and support the company that is behind it. Honestly I have to say that specs are not (and were not at the time) impressive, and that the phone has had quite a few hardware issues (which I mostly attribute to the fact that the Fairphone company is still rather young, and building a high quality smartphone likely requires a lot of experience). As an object, the value/cost ratio is not stellar, but if you factor in the added value given by the work for a better and fairer world, my personal balance is strongly positive. Given that Fairphone 2 was already a great improvement over the first edition, I really hope that 3 is finally a great smartphone, with a great social value. All the best to people developing it! :-)
There doesn't seem to be any inflection point in that graph, so I'm not sure why you consider it relevant:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Labor_force_in_the_United_Stat...
And the logomark is almost identical to Apple News.
Money does not necessarily mean happiness.
I'm sure there's lots of fair and creative ideas could be dreamed up that can solve this, without destroying commerce, or leaving gaping loopholes. Do we want sustainable, or just the pretence of it?

How about requiring some large percent of turnover or profit to be held in escrow until decommissioning? Set it at whatever level necessary such that all companies will eventually get a refund from it, only if they still exist, otherwise it goes to state coffers, or distributed to the population. Added bonus of encouraging some long-termism.

Beats socialising all losses and cleanups via the state. Might not be quite so popular with the extremely wealthy. :)
US traffic agency plans to test rearview camera systems for vehicles
The title should be “Cost of owning a bad electric car (that is actually a hybrid car)”
Minus the 11 grand for selling it after, no?
Firefox has tracking protection enabled by default. Given the current state of the ad ecosystem, this has the side effect of blocking most ads.

https://blog.mozilla.org/blog/2019/06/04/firefox-now-availab...
> MS wasn't really into the sort of feature-racing that's happening today;

I agree with your post except for the bit quoted above. At that time Microsoft had already won the browser war and was then using that to lock people into Windows via ActiveX controls and such like. So there was feature-racing -- of sorts. It's just those features all lived outside of the web browser engine
Does anyone know if fitness benefit reimbursement would apply to these?
Buying fair products gives one POWER. RAW POWER
Their i3 isn't even an electric car, it's a hybrid with a petrol engine (range extender).

The title claims the content is somehow about electric cars in general, but it's just one datapoint about one model and one owner. FWIW, my maintenance costs for almost 3 years with a Tesla S90D were so far: €290 for changing and storing winter tires. No repairs, no breakdowns so far, despite some abuse on italian country roads. Yearly cost for insurance and (0) tax was half as much as the 530xd I owned previously.
Microsoft Azure’s cloud regions in Switzerland are now open for business
Original Skype for Web developer here. I was part of the launch team who built the first version for this product in 2014[1]. Back then we supported Chrome, IE 9+, Safari and Firefox. Already we had internal debates to support Opera, but the decision was to focus on the largest browsers.

For each browser, we had to add support in our standalone plugin, that was (and still is) required to install for audio/video calls. There was a small maintenance cost per browser, which was a bigger one whenever changes to the plug-in were made.

I left Skype/Microsoft a long time ago and Microsoft announced in March they will drop support for Firefox[2]. I can only speculate, but it’s likely due to not wanting to pay the maintenance cost of this product on an ongoing basis.

Not directly related story from building Skype for Web: a big internal battle those days was us vs the Edge team. We wanted Edge to ship the Skype plugin as default, making calls seamless for Edge users, not needing to install a plugin (we saw large drops in adoption due to this plugin). Chrome already did exactly this with Hangouts back in the day and we saw it as them eating our lunch.

This was at the time of Steve Balmer’s Microsoft, where collaboration between different orgs was difficult and facing strong political headwind. We got nowhere with the Edge team, who wanted no dependencies and prioritised performance above anything like this - and also wanted to hit their own KPIs, which had nothing to do with Skype users preferring to use Edge.

We reasoned, pleaded, argued, steamed, shouted names and even used the "C" argument ("but... but... but... even Chrome does it!"). No avail. So a separate plugin install it was, giving people zero incentive to use a Microsoft browser for a Microsoft product. The Edge team were pleased they did not have to cater for another dependency and their roadmap remained unchanged. We were frustrated and had little doubt which brodwser will keep gaining market share - being certain it will not be IE/Edge.

Other not directly related story: a few years ago I wrote in detail my take on why Skype failed, here on HN. Read it on this thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10927600

[1] https://www.google.co.uk/amp/s/www.theverge.com/platform/amp...
[2] https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2019/03/microsofts-new-skype...
In this particular case it was "politics" in the smallest sense of the word. The head of the storage team did not get along with the head of the infra team, so the infra guys would solve the problems they could solve, ignoring any storage subsystem problems because that was a "dead end".

This is exactly like the boy looking for the coin under the light. It feels like it could be productive, versus definitely not being productive. It doesn't matter that logically it won't work, it's the feeling that matters.
This may still be a win if the removed feature was one that made future changes difficult. The code bade I spend a lot of time working on has some old/weird features that it seems exist only to be tested but nobody is using them.

But when asking the users you rarely get told to go ahead with removal.
Also keep in mind that BMWs are notoriously expensive on maintenance compared to many other cars.[0] Around where I live, it's easy to find some relatively inexpensive used BMWs when people want to unload them due to high maintenance costs.

[0] https://www.consumerreports.org/car-maintenance/the-cost-of-...
> Asian Americans have the highest income of all groups of Americans.

Amazing how people in the United States nowadays are sensitive to stereotyping and racism ... except when it comes to Asians.
It's not to save space, they could download it opt-in..
It's because they don't have the resources and have many P1 features to catch up.
> the 30% guys ... control the market.

Why is that? Is it because they were providing a superior service? If they were providing an inferior service, how did they control the market?
If we're talking anecdotes, I've always been most creative when I have tight constraints to work within (technical, time, aesthetic etc). For example, some of my most imaginative code was when trying to fit some code into a teeny tiny microcontroller. Some of the most fun too (provided that time wasn't also a constraint, I find that mixing a time constraint with other constraints often turns it from a fun puzzle to a stressful task).
Quite some years ago I think that symbol was used among youngsters so that if you looked at the hand making the OK symbol people would make laugh of you. Not because of some white supremacism ideology, but because of young people's stupid jokes. Politics were not involved as far as I know.

Basically, a symbol for you to look at and the other person saying "Hah, you're an idiot!".
I did a brand new Windows install recently and it had all sorts of icons for apps in the Start Menu that aren't made by Microsoft. Candy Crush, some racing game, some other game, Spotify. In fact, some of these "pre-installed" apps weren't even installed (like crapware is) at all. They were icons that install the apps (or take you to the store) once you click them.

You honestly don't think those are ads? It's Microsoft pushing "install this!" icons for third-party apps from the store in your face in a non-related UI place in the OS, that you have not chosen to install. There is no other proper name for that than an ad. The apps are not even remotely related to Windows as a product and you don't have to even go to the store to see them- they are in a standard OS menu.

To be fair- I don't (as much) mind some Microsoft products being treated this way (OneDrive, Skype), because I would expect the creator of the OS to push their own stuff.

There is zero comparison to the MacOS App Store (where obviously there would be ads for apps... because it's a store... for apps.) If Apple started putting Candy Crush, Racing Games, and Spotify in my Dock on a new install- I would have just as much a problem with that.
Packet Radio (Post Apocalyptic Internet?) – Computerphile [video]
According to Google, there are about 10600 entries on "government shutdown" on HN: https://www.google.com/search?q=government+shutdown+site:new... When I submitted this article, I thought about the similarity and the direct effect of the tech companies in the UK and Europe.
new improved icons on mobile, thanks to window.devicePixelRation workaround
Renders just fine for me in Firefox on Ubuntu.
Random question:
Do you use safari?
Do you see significant performance differences with chrome?
Do you see broken/partially broken websites on safari vs chrome ?
Zapperment Smooth background music for coding, mixed with machine learning
I have no idea how money works.

I have a 401k, it's got more in it than the median 60 year old in the united states, and I'm 20 years from that.

And I am terrified of how little I know about how it exists or survives.

I read these articles and get a sense of overwhelming urgency that, without any explicit indication, I should do something with my nest egg to make it safer to survive a crash.

And then I keep reading, "don't touch it" when I go to read about what I should do.

So I sit here, not doing anything at all about it, crippled with dread.

What's the best strategy for someone like me, who has absolutely no idea how their retirement account exists?
Yeah, anything I've ever encountered that had certifications didn't say "military grade" or whatever, instead they always listed the certifications relatively prominently.
Ring has given 400+ police departments access to doorbell cameras
not in the context of giving millions of rides a day. They don't have an HR department to handle the vast majority of their employees(the drivers) is the point.
I think so. A solution to this might be to croudsource an extension which changes the User Agent on known good apps (where changing it just works but they've decided not to let you use it).
One, I didn't know this was an issue but two, who puts their MacBook Pro in checked luggage? I keep mine in my backpack which I then carry on.
TV manufacturers unite to tackle the scourge of motion smoothing
I see, you want to (poorly and incompletely) reduce my points to a syllogism, and point out that I'm not formally proving the physical nature of the mind (which is more appropriately addressed by the last few hundred years of science than a toy logic problem).

Meanwhile, you have not presented any evidence or argument (or even actual definition) of your magical antenna hypothesis.

"You can't falsify my unfalsifyable hypothesis, therefore it must be true" is not reason, especially when your hypothesis is in no way needed to explain the oberved phenomena (and is, in fact, inconsistent with all empirical observation).

You don't get to play stupid word games and declare that therefore magic is real.

Or rather, you do, but rational people will feel free to ignore you, as I am about to do.
Global Climate Strike: shutdown your website on the 20th Sep
The $4 Billion figure was the cost to Palo Alto, that they thought they could make up with increased "property values" and taxes. They expected the People of California to pay another $20 Billion or so to complete the work. All for their precious snowflakes and property values.
Starhopper aces test, sets up full-scale prototype flights this year
I think it's just volume. But yeah it's a pain - they go relatively quick and they cost a ton.
It's hard to skimp on safety though, especially if you don't only ride on dry and warm days.
The 2% number is from the IPCC, and carbon emissions from planes have the same climate impact as carbon emissions from any other source (according to the IPCC). But just for the sake of argument, let’s say the number is much higher than that. Let’s say it was 10%, 5x higher than the IPCC claims it is. It still poses a negligible impact to the climate, and has the least ROI or any of the major contributors to carbon emissions. Electricity consumption is by far the biggest contributor, and is by far the easiest to solve. If we were to solve those problems, there’d be no need to even worry about aviation at all. This idea that all carbon emissions are terrible and must be eliminated is entirely counter productive, and entirely impossible.
Since I have moved to LA 20000 per year is nothing. It’s nuts and costs a lot of money.
I agree the uniqueness is a big draw. Never sure what might show up.
Absolutely! I was just there a few weeks ago and I had the best time. There's displays of equipment from the 60's - today, but also several rooms with wartime electromechanical and electrical machines used by Bletchley Park to break Enigma and Lorenz. Incredible!
In addition to the economy of mass production on car tires, motorcycle tires are engineered differently. For example, they are generally higher performance tires with a different contact footprint because the handling dynamics of a motorcycle mean a tire 'leans' into a turn.

Similarly, heavy duty truck tires are more expensive as they have more engineering requirements.
I don't think that's a useful measure. You really don't know what, if anything at all, you will get back after 3 years.

If you total your car and you have good insurance, you might get reimbursed its remaining value, which might be about market, or nothing. If you have a loan out on the car, better hope it didn't depreciate faster than the loan payment takes, or you take a loss. Or maybe you don't total it, sell it privately, and get more than on a trade-in. You don't know what the market will bear, you don't even know if you'll have ended up with a lemon. But even if you do get money back at the end, how old it is, whether its insurance or maintenance costs more, etc will all affect sales later.

I think purchasing a car with an expectation to regain value is gambling. I'd prefer to buy something I'll drive into the dirt, whether used or new, for a more certain financial outcome.
Utopia, Abandoned
Could you ELI5 for this?
FileKit – Build an end-to-end encrypted file transfer in 15 minutes
That is awful and fundamentally flawed. If it's on my device, I can save it.

Edit: Come to think of it, if it's on my device, it's already saved in some way, shape and form. Clearly nobody technical at that company made that decision to sue Google.

What Google should of done is offered to advertise that an image is available to purchase...
Maybe they wouldn’t be expressed as annualized volatility and only expressed as long tail risk: blight, climate change, etc.
they got rid of affirmative action in california. the asians were the only minorities to see growth in the number of acceptances to uc. however, it was no where near the rate of growth of their population demographic. most of the new spots went to foreign students. once again the faculty went back to being exclusively white male. also all state government jobs hiring practices were no longer scrutinized for discrimination. minority elected officials in california clearly have difficulties dealing with their own state government.

nobody bothered to check whether eliminating affirmative action actually helped.