skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Awesome to see pen plotter stuff posted here with more frequency. This project is pretty amazing in its frugality, kudos to the author. I have another pen plotter and I'd highly recommend pen plotting to anyone who's into generative art or anything similar, it's really fun to write a few lines of code to generate some visuals and then watch the plotter as your design is made into something tangible.

I'm working on a (free) app around making drawings on your computer, putting some effects on them, and sending them directly to a pen plotter. So far it only works with axidraw because that's the only one I have, but ultimately it's just sets of coordinates so it could be adapted for other plotters pretty easily. I'll post it here once it's in a decent state :)
I just got one of the cheapest phones that Samsung makes, the A50. There is an aftermarket screen protector on the screen.

I was able to register my nose to unlock the phone via the "fingerprint" sensor. Interestingly enough, it will reliably unlock with my nose, but not with either of my daughters' noses.
> Everyone likes to say they don't use Facebook, but they do. Or at least 10 people they know do.

I can confirm there are certainly people who don't use Facebook. I'm one of them and don't have any regrets dropping the platform years ago. It's just a boomer-meme-filled wasteland now.
if I may do a bit of self-promotion, even though zig is not ready for prod (yet) I'm writing a nif system for zig that will make that whole process dead-easy.

https://github.com/ityonemo/zigler
It does, but the protagonists are part of the utopian society; in that context, technology actually works to benefit people.
Could 'Carpenter vs. Murphy' Reopen 2k Oklahoma Trials?
I do not believe that this is accurate, in my opinion this assertion requires some documentation. I looked up the survival rate of premature babies and the neonatal mortality rate (28 days after birth) is higher in the US than in Canada.[0] I'm having trouble finding numbers on other procedures, in my opinion it may be because because the US is falling behind on them as well.

[0]: https://www.healthsystemtracker.org/chart-collection/infant-...
Unity 5 came out in 2017 and it's not supported on Catalina.[1]

So devs of two year old games will need an old macOS install that can export their game to 64-bit, but also a new enough macOS install that can notarize their app (maybe these can both be Mojave -- but many indies don't own their own macs).

Also, Unity 5 is no longer available for purchase. If they're already using their license on another machine, they'll have to migrate it to these macOS installs.

Devs could upgrade to a more recent Unity and fix all the bugs, but to what benefit and at what cost?

[1]: https://forum.unity.com/threads/installing-unity-on-macos-ca...
> Writing the simulation in Python was probably a bad idea in retrospect: it turns out to be incredibly slow to run Dijkstra’s shortest path algorithm on a large grid.

Dijkstra's algorithm is the completely wrong approach for this problem. First of all, the cost to enter any grid square is the same, so Dijkstra's priority queue is needless overhead. When all edges have the same weight Dijkstra's behaves identically to breadth-first search.

BFS is obviously a poor approach for a mostly open grid like you have here. It will explore every single open vertex whose distance is less than the distance to the goal. Imagine the person standing in the center of a circular room with the food at the edge. With DFS, the pathfinder will look at every single vertex in that room.

What you want is A-star, which is no harder to implement than Dijkstra's. Even better would be something like jump-point search that handles open spaces better. But just A-star alone will yield a massive improvement for problems like this.
Blackbaud – 1Mby1M Social Good Startup Challenge Launches
No I know what those are. But the industry has generally separated a "5G without mmWave" and a "5G with mmWave" as two stages of evolution. Massive MIMO, directional/beamforming, various ML techniques, improved coding, etc. generally fall into the former category
How do you know if you can trust someone that way without dating them in the first place? Only date people you've been friends with for several years?
We aren’t going to get anywhere in this thread, my friend. TurboTax is evil. Ignore the fact that there are a dozen other companies offering the same service and that prices have actually fallen because of that competition.

Also no mention of filling out the free 1040 form... that’s too difficult. As if the companies charging you to do that for you just existed because they were forcing people to pay them...
Ah right, let's cancel everything then... This is buzzfeed level of argumentation. What do you care about ? The official GDPR website developers being too lazy to update their own website or Facebook, Google & co. willingly juicing every single drop of your privacy ?
a) You must not have read the piece: "the bills are high because of who is paying them"; "insurance companies spend some eighteen cents for every dollar they collect in premiums on administration costs: 'marketing, determining eligibility, utilization controls (e.g., prior authorization of particular procedures), claims processing, and negotiating fees with each and every physician, hospital, and other health care workers and facilities.'"
Games were small back then, so there was less often an ongoing relationship between a publisher and a developer, and more often just a one-time exchange: software, already finished, for a lump sum. As if the publisher had contracted out work on the game and didn't know it until the contractor showed up at their door. Basically, games as "piece work."

At that point, the developer walked off with money, and the publisher walked off with a game binary they could resell and market however they liked (including taking the IP rights and licensing them to a porter.) But the publisher didn't retain any right to the developer's time; and often, the "developer" was just some college kid who developed just the one game, moved on to other pursuits, and now can't be found.
I've switched from Chromium to Firefox on Ubuntu. Performance has been a bit worse with regards to rendering, tab switching etc. The scrolling isn't as smooth in Firefox. Otoh, Firefox stays responsive even if one page runs a lot of scripts; it freezes the tab, not the browser (as Chromium does).

It's not necessarily an issue for me, I won't switch back because of it, and I like Firefox for development, though the Chromium dev tools are still a bit better in some regards, but yeah, lower performance has been noticeable for me.

I don't remember what made me switch on Desktop, but I had switched on android before, simply because the internet was unusable on Chrome with ads.
I see... so we're resorting to calling gay people mentally damaged now.
I was initially sceptical, because lying is generally not illegal. CEOs are people, and people have first amendment rights. However, it seems it's narrowly classifying the act of hiding what you do with personal data as criminal fraud, and I'm on board with that idea.
Hm that's been a big issue for maybe 200 years. Should the government start its own companies? What happened to the free market? How does a 'free' government company respond to competition (since they have no pressure to be profitable)?
Fredriks design looks really interesting!

Vertical plotters are usually hard to install and calibrate but his looks like one you could slap on coworkers whiteboard and print something while he is on lunch break ;)
Wow. Incentivizing people who need money to sell their organs has "zero negative effects"? Really?
That would expose the level of identity theft that the IRS does nothing about and actively tries to hide by refusing to provide identity theft victims with documentation.

https://web.archive.org/web/20161209003500/http://www.ayotte...
> If I don't want cookies then I can turn cookies off in my browser settings and turn it on for the sites I like.

Most people have no idea about these settings and shouldn't have to worry about them.
Don't feed the trolls?
Generally yes (there are a lot of SSH implementations out there), but that isn't the only thing you want to protect against:

1. If there is a critically broken cipher an attacker that can perform a MiTM attack and claim it only supports the broken cipher between both ends which can force an association using that and thus break your crypto transparently.

This type of attack would be high effort and targeted. Most threat models don't really need to address this issue, but disabling ciphers is so easy you mind as well spend a couple of keystrokes doing it.

2. If the cipher implementation is broken (think OpenSSL's heartbleed) then leaving the cipher available opens you up to being directly attacked by botnets.

This type of attack has a high initial cost for the attacker (developing the exploit) but can be sprayed across the entire internet. This is the type of attack that would affect most people and should be protected against by patching and disabling known bad ciphers.
Machines Beat Humans on a Reading Test. But Do They Understand?
Samsung says will soon patch Galaxy S10 fingerprint recognition problem
Side channel attacks sure have the tendency to introduce security vs performance tradeoffs. But it looks like they've made a pretty reasonable decision by turning it on for only capable devices, and by starting with highly-sensitive sites.

I definitely prefer this to the original Spectre fix of simple disabling highly sensitive timers. As far as I know, other browsers are still using that solution.
It seems to be working fine in every other country mentioned in this thread where government is free to provide free tax filing services. We do not need bullshit jobs at rent seeking companies that are glorified PDF generators. This is a government feature, not a product.
Obama knew well in advance that the statements they were making were not true.
Brexit – What Next?
I'm assuming that by rental property you mean AirBNB or some other short term rentals.

I would never be okay with my landlord controlling or monitoring my thermostat.
Thank you for this information 'JCBarry. I was legitimately alarmed and confused. I searched for the word “thermostat” in the article, and I didn’t find it, but I could easily be out of date with respect to Google’s Nest and IoT branding.

Thanks again,
Really. Done all over the world.
Hah, interesting to see an analogy I've made before to explain different situations.

This is accurate. The US is huge. A lot of European nations could quite literally fit inside of one of our states, with room left over. Hell some could fit inside of Los Angeles county. We're also not ethnically or culturally homogeneous, which are the reasons why we have so many issues that Europeans consider 'solved'.
Some more images of and by the plotter: https://www.dropbox.com/s/fuifujd70jvn7lw/brachiograph-image...
How can we fight this, when so much money is on the line, to make sure that this golden goose keeps fleecing the middle class?
In a PoW network (read Bitcoin), those that have the currency (satoshis/'sats') don't gain any more sats by just possessing them. The only way to gain more is from either those that have some or to mine more (until 2140).

In a PoS network, those that have the currency can "stake" their possessions to gain more. They don't need to spend in hardware/electricity to mine more. There is a built in function to extract currency.
Most Japanese restaurants have menus illustrated with photographs of their photogenic dishes. Foreigners who can't read the menu items can simply point to what they want. Japan's beautiful cuisine is not just aesthetic, it's functional as well. A lot of Japanese craftsman culture is like this, both beautiful and profoundly functional. A broken ceramic vessel repaired with kintsugi not only has an extended lifetime, it's arguably more beautiful than when it was brand new.
A Facebook Scam Siphoned Millions of Dollars from Unsuspecting Boomers
It's also possible for any software to have a keylogger. We don't really worry about that, because if it unexpectedly sends data, someone is likely to notice and tell everyone.

Voice interfaces today work like keyloggers by design, and we're just trusting them not to abuse all the data they're getting. It'd be a lot better if we didn't have to.

(I'm on board with legal protections too, of course.)
If you have a predictable schedule, there are plenty of offline thermostats that let you set target temperatures for different times of day. If you don't, I can see how being able to control it remotely would be nice. (But an embedded microphone is still creepy and unnecessary.)
I had the same question. In that case, the root of the issue was that the crash broke the key assumption that the CEO was operating on: that the company's growth in revenue and headcount would continue at current rates. Delegating the to someone else to quickly find a new office doesn't fix the problem that history broke the CEO's own preconditions.

I think the CEO's overall point is still valid, but in a different way. If you are a leader with substantive responsibilities, you'll get tons of "bad feelings", and some subset of them will turn out to be real problems. One sign of a good leader is how accurate they are at predicting which ones are real problems. This is one place where experience matters a lot, because experience (applied well) helps a lot to translate the bad gut feeling into targeted investigation.
18% is surely not the whole issue with inflated medical bills. If medicine in the US were only 18% higher than elsewhere, we'd all call the problem 'solved'.
Then what about digital assistants, and cellphones, and connected car computers, and...?
[Prior reply got detached in some cleanup, so adding again here.]

An update on the WireGuard situation: they have reinstated the app _without_ the donation link. From what I can tell from talking to Google insiders, there has been no change in policy. Officially, Google has not communicated at all with us about it, so we're not sure what's up. But at least our app is available again to users, which is great.
Let's go over the circularity issue in more detail. It starts with Swebs' statement that "[The big bang as a uniform expansion in spacetime] wouldn't work out because it wouldn't match what our telescopes are observing." Here we have a claim that the 'uniform expansion in spacetime' hypothesis (UEIS for short), which we all agree is wrong, has already been ruled out by astronomical observation.

Next, Swebs offers a specific argument for that claim, in the form of a diagram which shows that, in a uniformly expanding universe, each point appears to be that from which the expansion is ocurrring. One problem with that argument, which we both apparently agree on, is that this would be true for UEIS (for one thing, the image can be taken as a diagram of a demonstration using marbles on a table, which would literally be a UEIS.)

There is a second problem with it, however: none of our telescopes have observed the universe from the perspective of a distant galaxy, so we cannot say that our telescopes have shown that everywhere seems to be at the center of the expansion. We can deduce what it looks like from distant galaxies, if and only if we make some assumptions about the dynamics of the universe (there may be other observations from Earth that have already ruled out UEIS empirically, in which case the rest of this comment is moot. You have claimed that there are, but so far, you have have not presented any details.)

There are two possibilities: either it looks the same as from Earth (putting aside details local to the specific point of observation) or there is some difference. In the former case, which would hold if the expansion we observe is a uniform expansion of spacetime (UEOS), and which therefore is what we all, and cosmology in general, assumes to be so, I do not think these observations would rule out the possibility of UEIS. Therefore, for observations made in a distant galaxy to empirically settle the UEIS/UEOS issue, they must differ from those from Earth, in a way that is diagnostic of, and therefore causally dependent on, what form the expansion takes. Furthermore, because the local and remote results would differ in this case, UEOS would be ruled out.

So, when we try to deduce what can be observed from a distant galaxy, we must either assume that it is the same as from Earth (subject to local corrections), which will fail to resolve the issue, or we must deduce that there is some difference - but what difference? As shown in the previous paragraph, the relevant differences must be causally dependent on what form the expansion takes, so you have to make assumptions about the latter in order to deduce the former. There's the circularity, and it is general - i.e. not dependent on what specific measurements are being considered.
Yet another data point: Hungary.

For most people the National Tax Bureau (NAV) prepares the filing based on the data they receive from employers, banks, etc. You can check the content on a web page, and approve, if you agree.

For those who have income that must be self-reported, there is the free Java app provided by NAV. I have used the latter for several years and it has been working reasonably well for me.
so BSDs wrote their own libc implementations, then historically (pre-clang) compiled them with `gcc` without any GNU extensions?
I remember someone mentioning that one of the dark secrets of the SaaS world is reliance on people procrastinating on cancelling the subscription, forgetting to cancel it, etc.

I think if I had a SaaS company, I'd try to avoid doing that, and encourage people who are clearly not using the product to unsubscribe.
Joined with a rise in suicides
https://www.nbcnews.com/health/mental-health/suicides-homici...

and mass killings
https://news.wttw.com/2019/08/13/northwestern-research-shows...

and violent crime
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/25/us/violent-crime-murder-c...

and homelessness
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/homelessness-on-the-rise-in-som...

What do Christian churches do? (quick Google search random).

https://www.uchristianchurch.org/mission-and-outreach/
https://www.diamondcanyon.org/missions
https://www.newhopechristianchurch.com/missions
http://northridge.online/about/missions
What is it that you use these popups for?
It is exactly this.

You look at donations to people from corporations or through lobbyists and they don't look that large, $15-20k and they are getting big bills passed.

That $15-20k isn't buying the politician or their vote. The threat to give millions of dollars to the opposing politician that will support them is.
I wonder how the IT director was hired and who monitored what the department was doing. I worked at a place that hired a MS system support person but no on one knew anything about it and he seemed to know more than they did. He was fired a couple months later as he actually knew nothing and spent all his time making support calls trying to get someone to tell him what to do. He was on the phone for hours every day. Then when he was fired no one changed passwords so he logged into the DNS server and randomized all the IPs, leaving the whole company without networking. Hopefully not the same person...
Unfortunately, I don't have the ability to silently downvote them
You're stating an assumption as if it's a fact, and this requires everything we've been told about security enclave/Titan M/Trust Zone/etc to be a lie.

If you're going to believe that, there's no reason to believe that HN isn't uploading all user activity to the NSA for sentiment analysis and tracking.
Since I'm teaching Kubernetes I'll definitely take a deeper look into it. Recently I tried RedHat Labs, but unfortunately these resources were not lasting (only available for 2 months, which is not good if your students start the lab over the course of 6 months...)
Except last time I tried using that feature it required something crazy... I think like either a Java applet or a Flash something or a Windows download... so I didn't get far with that.
If I didn't know how much I had to pay for gas until two months after I left the pump, my gas would cost $25/gallon, and I would count myself lucky that I'm buying it from a station that has a reputation for not swindling me.

That is, of course, after my 'gas insurer' comped the station anywhere between $0 and $25, that number being determined by the astrological position, and retrograde state of the planets.
Ok, that would be a clear conflict.

There seems to be an exception for when "the transfer is necessary for the establishment, exercise or defence of legal claims". I'm not qualified to say whether that would cover law enforcement requests, or whether some other considerations would make it illegal under GDPR to comply with 3rd country legal requirements. It would seem like a serious oversight if the legislators haven't given thought to this, though.
Wouldn't it be extremely difficult to build a sustainable business on random one-off payments from casual users?
This is a topic I've personally given a lot of thought.

I worked for a Silicon Valley company that became quite successful. I made enough money to quit and live off the investment income. I got to the level of wealth I needed and it was enough for me and retired. I enjoyed my work and my job, but I also wanted to do other things in my life, and having a full-time job in Silicon Valley precluded that.

I was at my employer early enough that I had quite a bit of personal contact with the CEO at this company, and he did not think like me at all. Money wasn't the main thing for him. He wants to chase down his competitor, watch it struggle in death, chew on the meat, bury the corpse, dig it up again, make sure it's dead, and then bury it again. This guy lives for the hunt, and the hunt is all there is.

When I figured this out, I realized I could never be him. I couldn't summon that level of motivation on a constant basis even if I used every bit of my willpower.

And I'm glad that I was on this guy's side and not his competitor.
Sure, non-transparent pricing is a problem too. My point is just that inelastic demand is not on its own an explanation for the problem.
Nobel Prize winner admits BS artistry regarding neutron stars and gravity waves
>> Go is probably the best in class here

Sorry no offence but I do not want to write Go at all. If I want to use such a language I will use Rust with nicer features and better out of the box performance (see TechEmpower results), no GC and more safety (no memory corruption bugs or data races).

I am not sure if I am the one who paints himself into a corner.
PayPal used to have this feature too. It was very useful.
Mark Zuckerberg Live from Georgetown
So maybe this one should be allowed.

Other government competition with private enterprise is not so clear. Paving roads? Providing medicine? Delivering packages? Its been a rocky road.
What were the painful parts of SharePoint development?
The trope of telling a suspected undercover "If you're a cop you have to tell me"

There's also some choice scenes in The Wire, like when they put some youths in a "lie detector" that is really a copy machine.
Enjoyable story. Please add to HBO's Silicon Valley script =)
Yes, spying on users is a cheap way to get results.

The fact that incentives exist to violate user privacy is not an excuse to violate user privacy.
Ask HN: Getting Started with Hardware Programming
I am writing higher level software but hve always wanted to able to write a program for a chip or another piece 8f hardware.

I want to learn about hardware programming on a higher level and not just "buy a raspi' and get cracking".

Any recommendations for understanding the tooling, debugging and testing is much appreciated.