skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Any chance you can explain what the PSTN is and why it is important? I tried reading the wikipedia article[1] but I still feel like I don't have enough telecom domain knowledge to understand it.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_switched_telephone_netw...
That's fine. We have a solution for people who don't have the full amount of a fine.

We take every penny that they do have.

Since the guy hasn't paid a cent, and is not living under a bridge, panhandling with a "Homeless veteran, please give me money for food" sign, I'm pretty sure that this is a problem with enforcement.

> You don’t need a lot of money to spam calls.

No, but you do get a lot of money from the people buying ad time from you.
Already three down-votes, but not a single explanation or repudiation as to why this particular problem isn’t solved more easily by markets.
Just absurd, the damage of having my entire google account being banned is seriously non-trivial and would easily cost thousands of Dollars worth of time and energy to deal with. I remember having the fear of what's happening here when Google originally purchased YouTube but after years of non-issue I forgot about the possibility. For me, this is the last straw with Google, the risk of being banned for such an arbitrary reason is simply too high for me and I'm going to start moving documents and accounts from their services.

It baffles me, they hire some of the worlds more intelligent people but the products/systems they produce are constantly idiotic and daft.
I'd like to think of it as 'big tobacco' - but most of them own vape brands, so would have thought they'd be most happy to carry on selling nicotine products, without being beaten up with them killing people.

Now - I don't think big tobacco is 'clean' here. EU's "Tobacco Products Directive" was pretty much written to hand the market to large suppliers selling small refills.

My guess is that it's just the latest 'think of the children' scare. Juul and teenagers seem to be the main cause/victim here. Seems to gloss over the 'fewer teens are smoking' benefit here.
We had novels, rock music, gansta rap, video-nasties, murder-simulator games... and now we have vaping. Eventually we'll get over it.
I enabled the Silence Unknown Callers feature [0] in iOS and haven’t answered a spam call since. The downside is that it sends every call from unknown numbers to voicemail, including legitimate ones. It’s a worthwhile trade-off.

[0] https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT207099
What do you mean? It's one of the most used algorithm in the history of mankind.
The key limitation is weather. Airships are definitely not "all weather" capable, they must avoid wind shear. So reliability will be lower than ships or trucks.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Crichton#GellMannAmn...

https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/65213-briefly-stated-the-ge...
Live a moral life is what I'm saying!

Not Stealing, cheating and telling lies that causes other harm is how I happily live my life. What I was taught..were u not taught the same?
If that was the case then arguably they wouldn’t fully support web assembly but only have partial support.
You can use hydrogen instead of helium. It's flammable sure, but so are gasoline and jet fuel. Plus it is hard to make it explode unless you inject oxygen.
The marginal price isn't constant. Third party sellers can buy large quantities for cheaper unit prices. It's essentially the manufacturer decentralizing their inventory risk and outsourcing the costs of dealing with a ton of individual consumers.
To me, the central question is whether marathon running is more popular amongst parts of a community with more political clout, and whether this explains the how participants manage to impose inconveniences (and potentially more serious harms, as suggested in this paper) on the rest of the community by staging a marathon.
These are great, but I think the way forward is cellular design. Do an image search for Alexander Bell's cellular kites. Build (relatively) small units that combine to scale, rather than trying to build huge machines right off. (Also makes your craft more resilient: say it breaks in half, both halves are also viable vehicles.)

Also, take advantage of Magnus effect.
One point in favor of the separate fields is that users in general suck at computer input.[0] So we have a user entering her name into our website. And then we need to compare that against some database into which she entered her name five years ago. If we have one freeform field, then we have to deal with small inconsistencies that may or may not be significant.

Say the user has three given names and a family name. For whatever reason, she puts double spaces surrounding the two middle names, but she didn't last time. Or jams them together, maybe with another punctuation. Are those semantically meaningful differences? Do the spaces indicate we have two separate people? Would a shortened form for one of the names be meaningful? Or if she misspells the abbreviation for "Marquise"; is that part of her name now? Etc.

If we're accepting that names can have infinitely varied forms, and that whatever the user enters right now is canonical, then questions like that become very difficult. Normalization for comparison is a real requirement in some cases, and separate name fields give us a leg up on that.

I'm not saying this is insurmountable, or that we should make it the user's problem. Just that the single field doesn't quite solve everything in one fell swoop.

---

[0]:I don't say this to blame the users -- computers overall could almost certainly do more to not leak the details of storage into the front end where users have to deal with it.
> The reason these fresh coins are valuable is that they are untainted by prior transactions and have various uses because of that.

What "various uses" are you talking about? Are you talking about fears of future blacklisting, or something else? If fears of future blacklisting, the only use I can see would be speculative holding. I've written raw Bitcoin transactions, and I don't know of any technical distinctions between coins that would change how they can be used based on prior transactions.
I’m pretty sure it’s solvable, the main problem is that we break up names into first and last to identify the parts and we do bad data quality checks. Let’s say we did just have one field and a service that was trained on each counties’s variations that could return the parts of the name you wanted. So some database and detection system to understand the pattern. It’s definitely possible since we humans do read and understand names just fine in our own locales.
Makes me wonder how long distance rates are charged in the first place. A little OT but did we used to call websites?
People might have names, but they're not always known: you admit an unconscious patient amongst many (e.g. a bus/plane/whatever accident), unclear whose documents are whose (and whether there even are any), now what? USA has the assumed name John/Jane Doe - but that has obvious pitfalls of its own.
Standardization of code via frameworks and scripts also means we're not artisans either. We're somewhere in between.
Any chance you have a link? I’ve had implement solutions to this myself and it’s very tedious. If someone has built a more complete solution I would love to just use that instead
Or get shot down in one of many local wars. Friend of mine flew a homebrew plane across Africa and got shot at multiple times but a plane is quite a bit quicker than an airship. He also got 'arrested' several times after landing because they suspected he was a spy. Typically after they found out he was just a crazy Dutch person on a cross-Africa trip in a device of questionable airworthiness he was let go again.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tWdpgGryELA
It depends on rate center - remember those free conference services - they often used rate centers which were rural so they had a higher termination charge, which meant that the service was profitable.

While I'm having trouble finding hard rates - with the big carriers, I know its not a ton of money now in any case - low enough that I dont think the financial incentive is a relevant course of action, it just subsidizes the trunking infrastructure needed to support the calls.

See Call Pumping: https://www.fcc.gov/general/traffic-pumping
Hot Properties – Eight of History’s Most Fought over Places
>In his teens, Stefansson graduated to drugs: pot, speed, cocaine, ecstasy, LSD. By the time he turned 20, he was growing cannabis. His rap sheet soon included 200 cases of petty crime. He broke into people’s homes to steal TVs and stereos, and somehow managed to extract $10,000 from some slot machines in a Reykjavík bar.

yikes. I'm sure he's hardly the only one. It makes you wonder if Iceland's purported low crime and peacefulness is due to under-reporting of crime and crime being ignored and excessively lenient sentencing guidelines, than because of the absence of actual crime. If all the criminals keep being released over and over, then the prison population will be very low yet there will be crime everywhere anyway. lenient sentences heavily tips the moral calculus in favor of criminals, both petty and major.Time is money. time behind bars means less time for stealing.
The next step is to fine telephone exchanges for allowing robocallers.
Google seems to be constantly playing with any of their algorithms... I totally understand that it’s their business, but especially YouTube gets worse and worse.
I remember asking my high school English teacher if I could use the contraction "shouldn't've" for "should not have." She said no. I still disagree.
If you're still making and receiving phone calls (dialed with numbers, using the dialer on your smart phone, etc), then that's the PSTN you're using.
Apparently, this is happening in Facebook as well.

I wonder how they are accounting for cultural ambiguity when it comes to Likes. In Philippines, most users click like on almost every post they scroll as kind of acknowledgement that they've seen it. Even in other places, many do this for comments when they have nothing to reply.

If removing 'Like' does improve quality of discourse, then it's great; but then again if improving quality of discourse was the motive they would have integrated the 'Dislike' button.
Tell me about it.

I'm Brazilian, a country where the vast majority of people will have at least two last names (typically one maternal, one paternal, but not uncommonly multiple from either or both parents), separated by spaces.

I've immigrated to the US, where the standard is for people to have a single last name, or if they have multiple, they're separated by hyphens.

To make my situation a little worse, legally I have two first names i.e. the second one is not registered as a middle name in any official document I have.

I've dealt with systems that wouldn't accept my last names. I either had to join them together, or separate them by a hyphen.

Some systems don't accept my legal double first name. When I got my driver's license in WA, the system accepted it but later had trouble generating the license identifier, so they had to manually apply the system's logic and enter it by hand.

Some systems just ask you to enter your full legal name, and then try to be smart about figuring out what your first, middle, and last names are. So I end up with the first of my last names being registered as a middle name, and I can't edit it.

Fortunately I'm close to being able to apply for naturalization, and that'll give me the opportunity to change my name. I'll just drop part of my first name and one of my last names and finally make it simple.

Edit: another thing that's funny wrt names in my life is my family situation. My wife has her own two last names (it's not super common in Brazil for women to take their husband's last name), and she has a daughter from her first marriage. So we all have totally different last names, with only my wife and my stepdaughter sharing one of their last names. That caused us a little bit of trouble crossing the border to Canada once.
I have personally encountered a system that used name + birthdate to uniquely identify its "users" (large % of citizens of a country of non negligible size).

That was absolutely insane. Try applying such logic in China or a big Arab state.
There’s No Appeasing Bill Gates
>> Stop allowing spoofed numbers. Period.

> As someone with a heavy background, it would break a fair bit of the PSTN

As it stands, I think quite a few consumers are ready to just walk away from PSTN unless something pretty drastic is done quite soon.
This doesn’t make sense to me. Aren’t all laws then “administrative categories”, of those who commit or don’t commit the corresponding crimes? Breaking the law means, per definition, that someone has committed an illegal action. Calling someone an “illegal immigrant” is appropriate when the crime is immigration related.
You and I would be friends if we met irl
Ditto Lego.
I was literally commenting about your point on “maintenance“.
This has been legal doctrine in Germany for over a century.
If you have fresh coins you can say you mined them which is good for financial reasons. They also have zero prior history so companies like Chainalysis cannot link them anywhere.

I really don’t have more to say on this subject, just think about it for a while.
Has been for a decade now ;)
Wow I'm sure that they are compliant with the EULA is a relief to everyone involved.
Do you mean Christian Slater? Or did I forget a sub-plot in Footloose?
We already have an abstraction for names: a text field. Trying to be more clever than that will break for someones name.
No. I mean the average dollar amount scammed per call.

I assume most calls are not successful, but over a thousand calls how much can a scammer expect to make?
What is an example of a "more democratic institution"? And what are the "obvious self interest motivations"?

I would like to make sure I am answering the question you are asking...

To answer your general question of whether I am in favor of "some kinds of legislation... ...targeted at the current position holder", my general answer is "only for the smallest municipality possible against that entity."

First, I am assuming that harm can be proven to have been done against someone(s) within that municipality by that entity.

Second, I am making the assumption here that the municipality involved (City? County? State?) is enforcing the will of its constituents as obtained by their appropriate mechanism (i.e. voting or other delegation of power). They are authorized to wield this power over their territory, but no other (scope definition).

If an entity spanned multiple territories (Cities, Counties, States) here in the US, or multiple nations, then agreement/consensus must be sought to convince those other municipalities to concur and to mutually enforce the decree at those levels.

If the other territories choose not to support the effort, then the legislation can only have effect within the territory that approved it.

Power should always be determined and enforced at the smallest possible level, requiring consensus all the way up any possible authority-chain of command.

This allows the entity to move its operations to a territory that agrees with the activities, assuming one can be found.

This also allows for the most possible satisfaction of the residents of the respective territories.

I also hold the opinion that current behavior of US States and of the General Government (Federal) have strayed far too much from the original design of individual sovereigns granting limited powers to representative government. And this is likely the reason for so much of the polemic disagreement (unfortunately to the point of virtriol in many cases) that I witness today.

A solution to that (granted, not that you asked for one :) ) would be to reduce the General Government to a tenth of its current size to start, and see if that is enough to have a more satisfied populace. With the understanding that it is immoral to enforce my own ethics upon any other under any measure of coercion; Only through consent between all parties involved.

The power hierarchy below this level (State, County, City, Township, etc.) would choose to incorporate that legislation that was formerly being wielded/enforced at a higher level, that is approved by their constituency. Think local, act local.

Again, if it is not already obvious, my bias is much more anarcho-capitalist, working towards a voluntarist society. Individual people coming to agreements to conduct trade and agreeing to delegate limited power to representative government.

Maybe too much caffeine for me this morning ;)
Ships are ridiculously efficient and much easier to police for safe arrival than having only two containers (effectively a truckload) on a device costing a large multiple to operate compared to a truck. I don't think (pun intended) this will fly unless it is high value goods that are not yet high value enough to be flown with a jet.
Start billing the telecoms, and they'll fix the issue real quick
Clinton outspent Trump nearly 2:1 in the last election ($768m, $398m respectively) and still lost.

Yes she won the popular vote by about 3m votes but that’s hardly a dollar to vote ratio.

People vote their emotions, and emotions are surprisingly difficult to buy.
first, as this is an American prison you will probably want to be using the money on your accounts to buy food that to eat instead of depending on the often inedible, non-nutritious stuff that is available from the prison kitchen.

second, it's quite a well known scandal regarding how systems are set up to rip off inmates for phone services https://www.prisonlegalnews.org/news/2015/jul/31/inside-shad... so if you are a prisoner with money that is nice that you can actually call people when you want as long as you want.

third, depending on where you are at the commissary probably has other things you want, and if you have enough of those things you can trade that for other things inside that you might want.

(of course you do not legally access the money, it is on an account that you can use, you can also - although the process can be convoluted - release money to visitors and those visitors could give it to other people who are related or confederates of other people inside allowing you to buy other things that way [which is of course going to be against the rules])

I could go on, but I find the question somewhat weird - I'm guessing you must be from a country with no knowledge of American pop-culture or anything because this is quite a bit past even 10000 territory https://www.xkcd.com/1053/

on edit: reference article for bad American prison food https://www.vice.com/en_uk/article/ezq59z/what-its-like-to-e...
Twilio, when do they become accountable for enabling robocallers.
I truly mean no offense but you kind of sound like an asshole.

I think these are perfectly acceptable thoughts to have but in the context of interpersonal relationships and society as a whole, these statements just seem confrontational and unnecessary.
Yes. I didn’t outright say “Haskell” because it seems to draw even crazier comments out. That said, I’m aware not all of my points apply to numerous FP languages.
Infrastructure as code in AZURE and the sad state of ARM templates
The technological and legislative infrastructure required to turn this into a market far exceeds what would be required for simpler anti-spam measures. It comes across as unhelpful and detached, like suggesting world peace as the solution to gang violence in your neighborhood.
So we do have a lot of research on how bad just nicotine is for you. And it's close to 5% as harmful.

We also know how bad polyethylene glycol is for you, and it's not that bad(it's used in medical devices).

So most of the unknown risk is concentrated around device and flavorings.
and not a single DS/ML person seems to have ever heard of it.
Would be super interested in the details if you’re willing to share.
Turns out breathing in large quantities of oil droplets is really bad for your lungs...

Is that from the article? (have no access to the article, and none of the other links from another comment here say anything about this, it is all about the findings about Vit E acetate)
It's not about whether it's "legally" yours (and even that would be up for dispute) but how you acquired it. You can't threaten somebody to get things, that's extortion
Does anyone familiar with the law know why these fines couldn't be converted to tax liens or some other legal device that could be used to go after the offenders?

Then the IRS could garnish wages or prevent loans to the businesses until the liens are paid, or do all kinds of things to throw a wrench in their plans and make robocalls too much of a hassle to be lucrative.
JavaScript: Private Fields, Public Worries
You're not wrong, you're (almost) 100% correct, although they've certainly evolved their techniques since.

EDIT: I'm not saying that's everything, but automated signal extraction is a major part of their secret.
Size is a huge concern. The article is exactly about why it wasn't done a long time ago, because it is a very hard problem.
I am recently introduced to golang. I really like the simplicity, expressiveness and standard library. I am also a fan that developer need not to deal with every nitty gritty details about the language, os etc.
Homeland Security will soon have biometric data on nearly 260M people
> High income doesn't really mean upper clasS.

That was the point I was making. 1% is not the same as upper class.
Hydrogen fell out of favor for airships after the Hindenburg disaster. It's much more dangerous than gasoline or jet fuel.
Not to mention the world-class encryption used by torrents is RC4. It would be hard to pick a worse cipher (the encryption protocol was designed in 2006).
I see people here saying that spoofed numbers is the problem. Maybe it's a big part of it, but at the end of the day, the phone companies are complicit with the criminals because there's no good reason that these robocalls can't be treated like a DoS attack.

These crooks make millions, of calls every year. My first employer was apparently making robocalls, though none of us were aware of it(there was a call center with actual human beings), and they were cracked down on by the FTC a few years ago.

https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/press-releases/2017/01/ftc-a...

The way I see it, there's no good technological reason why a system couldn't detect millions of calls coming from one place, compare that with the number of complaints and number-spoofs, and trigger an investigation. The dinosaur phone system needs to either go extinct or be reformed, and the telecom companies don't give a fuck. Every time I've asked either T-mobile or AT&T to block the relentless robocalls, they tell me to install some 3rd party Android app that fails to effectively block calls.
Imagine how quickly those things would become the modern day Wells Fargo stagecoach to be plundered for our masses of under-employed and well-armed poor! Not to mention the conspiracy theories that would quickly pop up around anything like that; it's spying/vaccinating/etc.
My initial reaction is that neither Apple or Microsoft have incentive to get Swift going well on Windows. It will open Windows developers to the language used to build apps on a competing platform, which could steer them towards Apple. And vice versa, it would allow Apple developers to start thinking more about writing Windows app, and possibly steer them away from the Apple platform, or at least dilute their time on it.
I'd go with should not've for better clarity.
Because most folks in DS/ML are working on predicting likelihood to press a button. You don’t need Fourier transforms for that.
I love listening to people speak that are just learning English and don’t have all of the idiosyncrasies/ vernacular down. Little things like saying ‘today morning’ instead of ‘this morning’, gives you a glimpse of a simpler, more logical version of the language.