skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
>Email accounts practically at the whim of big corporations

As are mail boxes unless you own house outright or have a mom and pop landlord (which is really not much better).

>The private sector may be more efficient than the government, but that's because of bureaucracy imposed by the politicians themselves.

Wait what? No it's the opposite. There are ridiculous laws that attempt to protect the USPS monopoly. For example, only they can deliver to your mailbox.

Only USPS is allowed to deliver letters. USPS does not pay state or federal taxes, etc. There is all kinda of bureaucracy in place to protect USPS and still the private carriers are better.

>Tell me, how long does it take UPS or FedEx to ship a package across the US? At least 5 business days for the cheapest. USPS gets it there in 3.

Yes it's easy to be cheaper when you don't pay any taxes. Except they're not actually cheaper except for most packages between 2 and 5 pounds.

>* The USPS, unlike UPS and FedEx, have a legal mandate to attempt to deliver every letter and parcel if it's in the US.

And yet they fail stunningly at delivering things.

>* Your mail sent through USPS is protected from searches without a warrant by law. You can't say the same about UPS and FedEx.

I agree it's absurd that the law grants these special powers to USPS. All carriers' customers should get this protection.

>* I can send a small letter through USPS for $.55. How much does a private courier charge?

Wait what? It's illegal for anyone else to deliver letters. You're making my case for me.

Anyway, we need to stop sending letters. It's almost 2020.
We changed the URL from https://www.axios.com/bill-to-crack-down-on-robocalls-passes... to one that has a bit more information.

(via https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21838912)
It's not so much that the Founders didn't grasp partisanship as it was that they thought it incompatible with republican government. Their conception of "good government" was a society governed by an aristocratic class of landed gentry, whose wealth would (in theory) make them immune to temptations like bribery and self-dealing. Ordinary people couldn't be trusted with their own government, because they would too easily succumb to those same temptations.

In practice, of course, that theory broke down almost immediately. Political parties started coalescing around Hamilton and Jefferson practically before the ink on the Constitution had dried, and the gentry whose disinterestedness the Founders had placed so much trust in turned out to be just as flawed and venal as everybody else.

If you're interested in why the Founders thought the way they did and the process of how reality broke their worldview in half, I can't recommend Gordon Wood's book The Radicalism of the American Revolution (https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/6956.The_Radicalism_of_t...) highly enough. It's a great read that will change the way you look at the Revolution and the early republic.
If that were the only way of eliminating robocalls you might have a point, but I think this situation is a good example of a case where relatively targeted regulation coupled with technical progress (develop+mandate SHAKEN/STIR and allow for an ecosystem of filtering solutions based on accurate caller origin info) is preferable to draconian regulation (enormous fines are totally ignored, revoking common-carrier status/other liability changes have a fractal of side-effects).
There will be a lot of less secure accounts then. Even tho I don't like SMS for 2FA, it is the only thing that many consumers will use. If you want to destroy the ability to send any SMS programmatically, the loss of security will be only one unintended consequence.

We also use a robocall for the devops team when the site goes down. We can't afford to hire a human to do it, and that would be stupid anyway. That's a pretty useful feature that would suck to lose.
The Future of Wearables in Heart Failure Patients
Introduction to Web Scraping with Node.js
Link building ways that'll increase your keywords rankings
What do you mean formal. It's exceedingly easy to fake snail mail. What can you fake in email that you can't fake in snail mail?
My point is that S3 is significantly more durable than the "OVH" type object storage in the posters comparison.
Answer to all 3: FCC is to decide this in the next 12-18 months. Read the actual bill if you're interested in details. https://www.congress.gov/bill/116th-congress/senate-bill/151...
And also the ideology that has lifted half of the world's poor out of extreme poverty just since 2010 (not to mention the changes over the last century) so maybe we could give it a little credit.
1a/1b and 2 is where all our work is going currently. We're trying to get E2E on by default in Jan, and likewise exit beta for RiotX/Android around the same time. We're going as fast as we can.

3: Matrix.org homeserver performance should be absolutely fine now. Delays when doing things like joining big rooms are unrelated to the hardware, but perf optimisations we need to do to synapse in general. They're on the radar.

4: This is literally the first time i've heard an ask for 'copy entire message'. The other features exist in labs, and yes, we need to fix notifs and add custom emoji. "Many people asking" doesn't magically produce features unfortunately, especially when we are battling points 1 & 2. Contributions help though. Thanks for testing though.
This has some paths I did not expect, such as having an unauthorized request to an unimplemented method return 501 Not Implemented rather than 401 Unauthorized. Does HTTP really specify that, or does it allow either and does the flowchart just pick one of the valid ways?
Simple - $500 fine payable by your carrier.

They have a right to collect from whomever originated the call AND have the responsibility to track who originated. If they don't know who originated they still pay and can't recover the payment.

Interconnection is still guaranteed.

Anyone interconnecting is required to post a $500K bond.

If that bond is exhausted no one is required to interconnect anymore with you, but can if they want (bearing risk of being unable to recover the fees paid out from responsibility party).

Call recordings from one party consent states may be used as support for robocall claims - and your phone may auto record and keep calls for 12 hours as evidence - to be discarded if not marked as a robocall.

Just an idea
How about make it so voter registration, vehicle registration, and property purchases are not public records?
There is no legitimate reason why everyone on the planet needs to have open access to all of that information AND be free to use it for commercial purposes
How about adding your judgement, based on the specific evidence, of the likely cause? One of:

1. Ignorance/Incompetence -- wasn't paying attention?

2. Gross negligence -- doing it wrong was somehow quicker and cheaper.

3. Fraud -- calculated to fail.

p.s. Dealing with similar case of malfeasance myself just now (electrical). Looks to be about #1 20%, #2 80%.
Your unit comp is not micro, controlling them is
>It's time you encourage users to write code. It's not that hard.

It is. Try teaching coding to someone non technical, especially someone that doesn't want to learn, and by the time you get them to understand what a variable is, you will fully understand that coding is not for everyone.
That's not the technology failing, that's the users failing. Technological failure would imply that manually turning your lights on and off somehow breaks them or renders them otherwise nonfunctional, or the lever/switch itself breaks.

If someone got in a car and tried to put it in drive without starting it, would that be a technological failure of ignition switches?
Instagram expands fact-checking globally
Larger companies need meta-roles. That is never going away. If that "PMO" person isn't using JIRA, they are using something else, or there are even more people wasting time dealing with all this via email and shared Excel sheets.
We don’t assume we are saving money. We are a smallish B2B company. We are far more concerned with being able to scale up when a new client can increase our load (and revenue) noticeably.

The money we save by not having someone babysitting infrastructure and the speed we can move at is well worth it. One client contract basically pays our entire infrastructure bill and then some and we have 30 clients. If we had to hire one Devops person it would be about the same as our yearly bill if not slightly more.
This is the underlying study: https://www.nist.gov/news-events/news/2019/12/nist-study-eva...

I linked the news article about it both as a simple summary and because I think readers (especially anyone working in this space) should look at the comments on the article to see how carefully curated data is received by a biased audience, and reflect on the idea that reproducibility or technical merit are not self-executing or self-perpetuating.
The idea that Gary Larson made any decision about context menus or tracking on this site is hilarious. He was definitely not involved in that way.
One is a useless anecdote that doesn't really tell us anything about anything except one random person's mailing proclivities.

The other is a policy position that apparently a lot of people want to discuss.
The author separates knowledge work, which I think would include programming, from “working with your hands”. Although I agree there’s a difference between building a house and building a program, the feeling I get from really coding is closer to the sense I get when I play the guitar than I get when I “brainstorm” a solution to a problem. One of the reasons I’ve stayed away from a management track is because of the sense of “making something” with my keyboard.
They almost certainly used their sense of smell to detect unknown people as well.
A thread from 2018: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16387222

Discussed at the time (a little but quite well): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3854262
I love this game! I love the UX, the use of haptics, the visual design, and the gameplay. And I especially love that it’s ad-free.

I would love to see other puzzle games done in this style as well.
I’m not an expert, but: Can’t common carriers discriminate if there’s compelling reason? Like, a railway can refuse to carry a passenger if they’re disruptive to others. My ISP can cut me off if I’m running DDOS attacks. Is there any reason a (common) phone carrier shouldn’t be able to refuse service to a call that they believe is illegal in nature?
It'll correct just like BYND.

Profit taking will take place soon.
These days however you can do password resets manually with Apple. It is no longer as stringent as before where previously if you lost your password without recovery methods enabled your account is as good as gone. The current Apple account system is a lot weaker.
Around here they mostly spoof local numbers.

E.g. My number is ABC-DEF-1234, I'll get calls from ABC-DEF-7899.
Now resolved
Note that sandstorm.io (and Cap'n Proto) was written 100% after I left Google, so I'm not sure if that's a great example.

I would not recommend working on a future startup while still at Google, unless the work is 100% open source and approved. If it's open source, you'll have an easier time getting it approved if you let Google keep copyright. This should be fine because they cannot retroactively revoke the license, so your startup will be able to use it under the terms of the open source license.

If you're writing proprietary code, you are putting your future startup at risk. It's not just that Google might come after you (this is actually unlikely, since it's bad PR for Google), but you may have a hard time getting investors if your IP rights aren't in order. Investors do care about this stuff.

California law does not work well as a defense since Google essentially claims that all code relates to its business in some way.
Amen. I always set my mirrors very carefully and having someone behind me with their brights on makes it next to impossible to see ahead of me.
This law basically says: FCC has a year to figure out the answers. I'd hold off criticising it until anything is known about implementation.
Wanted: €1B for troubled German nuclear physics facility
My mailbox is 95% spam. If you really need to get in touch with me, you need to use email.
> Easier said than done. To implement that I will probably need to hire a DevOps guy, and now we have all this cloud formation (or whatever your infra as code choice is) code to manage now. So in reality it probably costs more (devops and more code to manage) than if I just went with a couple cheaper bare metal servers.

This does not make any sense. You don't need cloudformation or anything, you can just use a wizard and provision as many VMs (baremetal or otherwise) as you need. It's literally a form and next -> next -> next.

Now that you have systems you can login to, their complexity is the same – except you won't have to care, or manage any hardware.

You still have to manage those systems yourself. Keep them patched, secure, and the workloads up. It's your choice whether or not to delve deeper into the AWS ecosystem.

Note that even though I said you don't need cloudformation (actually just use Terraform instead), you have a lot of power at your disposal if you do. You can't automate racking and stacking of physical servers, but you can fully automate the lifecycle of a cluster of VMs. At my job I can bring up a 40+ cluster containing many kinds of workloads, with a single butotn press. And destroy it just as easily (for non-prod). That's invaluable.
If you want to run within a container so that you don't have to install dependencies, that's no problem. Just specify it as `jobs.<job-id>.container`. GitHub Actions will download and start that container, and any `run` commands that you specify within that job will run within that container.

Without that, they'll run directly on the virtual machine that you specify.
PDF version: https://manuals.info.apple.com/MANUALS/1000/MA1902/en_US/app...
Phrenology in the Cyberpunk Age
On Starting Out as a Hacker
Sure, but data that doesn't flow back isn't much use to anyone, nor much of a danger to the consumer, and no amount of compression is going to make 25GB of raw data per hour per car for 100M cars anything other than very, very expensive. They probably send very little data.
just b urself ;)
That's a lot of data though, especially since it's usefulness goes down with time.
My father owned a Phillips AM/FM/SW/LW radio from the 60's that had one for tuning. It was the most magical part of the whole item.
6 months for fraud doesn't seem unreasonable.
501 Not Implemented is what's returned when you try something crazy like:

FOOBAR /my/path HTTP 1.1
However, Linus would object to hiding the true type of list (it's actually a pointer) --- as do I, since I was a little confused by that fragment at first, wondering what exactly was doubly indirected about it. It looks very different from the usual implementation of a "virtual head", which uses a single-indirect pointer only.
You’re always locked into your infrastructure at a certain scale. All the time you waste trying to avoid lock in, you could be using to actually deliver value to customers.

Even if you are just running a bunch of EC2 instances the pain of transitioning your workload and data usually isn’t worth it.
Simpler solution: At the end of a call, the recipient can dial some number, like * SPAM, and the phone company who routed the call to your number is charged 25 cents. Presumably the routing phone company will pass this charge back down the chain until it reaches the caller. You must dial * SPAM within 2 minutes from the end of the call for the charge to take effect.

There is no appeal. If you don't like a call for any reason, you can dial * SPAM, and the caller is charged 25 cents. Since the report must be immediate, VOIP providers only need to require a deposit for two minutes of calling volume, and they can throttle their customers to make sure that the reserve is always present. Callers don't need to be verified or have good credit, they just need to have 25 cents.
Yeah, I was ready to be pissed at Space X but after reading the flavor text on the page it's clear that the title was very clickbaity.
Signal: Make Privacy Stick
Google is in the directory business. Ultimately they don't want us to make the most informed decision, they want us to "feel lucky" and trust The Algorithm. Because the more we "feel lucky", the bigger the fear of businesses to get punished by The Algorithm for insufficient ad spending.

That's why desktop web search is less valuable to Google than mobile web search, mobile web search is less valuable to them than map search, map search is less valuable than voice search and voice search while driving is their holy grail because there the ranking game is completely winner takes all. A second page hit on desktop has a better chance at getting traffic than the second place overall in voice while driving. (And those sweet "while driving" hits will almost always be followed by actual business transactions, whereas the old desktop is just a mostly worthless page view)

Afaik Google is far from allowing businesses to directly bid for that coveted number slot (it would ruin their ability to keep the balance between attracting advertisers and attracting eyeballs), but the result is even better for them: when businesses "bid by proxy", via buying other ad products in hope/fear that it might be a factor in the ranking they don't just get the winner's money. I'd absolutely say that drivers are very high on Google's audience priority list, it's just that nobody on that list is a customer.
For starters what you’re suggesting is logically equivalent to completely removing all net neutrality principles. Allowing service providers complete discretion over service discrimination.

Just think about what you’re suggesting for more than a second. Do you want your base contract to only allow you to send and receive calls within the service providers network? Do you want to have people trying to call you get caught up in an endless web of spam filters? Do want to have to pay extra for the ability to receive calls from over seas? How do you think developing economies would fare if they could essentially never make a phone call to the US again?

Because all that and worse would be an inevitable outcome of the rules you’re suggesting.

The phone system is an open and distributed system, just like email is. It’s everything HN should love. But then you get comments like this which at the first sign of a system showing its natural distributed-system-related short comings, are all of a sudden asking for centralised walled gardens.
I've just got back from the Lake District in the UK where I've been driving a 2019 Range Rover Sport. I hired this vehicle just in case the weather conditions demanded it and for driving roads like this: https://www.visitcumbria.com/amb/wrynose-pass/

What I discovered though, was "Intelligent High Beam"... which was an automatic head light mode that looked (from the driver perspective) like it used an LCD matrix over the high beam. It would fade up from the normal beam, flood the road, and then if a car was in front or approaching it would block out the parts of the scene in which those vehicles were present.

It turns out it is this: https://www.osram-continental.com/en/products/smartrix.html

It's something else to have full visibility of the sides of the road (where sheep wandered freely) and still not be blinding anyone in front or oncoming, and to not have to think about it at all. More than that, road signs were singled out and side obstacles made visible... whilst not blinding anyone.

Within a couple of days I took this fully for granted, and not a single vehicle we passed flashed their lights at us (which I'd expect if we'd blinded anyone).

Now if I buy a car I'd like lights like this.
Collaborative filtering is better than law IMO.

My phone company shipped a phone app in the app-stores that you're supposed to use in replacement of the default phone app. It comes equipped with collaborative filtering to weed out robocalls: when one rings your phone, the phone app displays it as such as well as the number of people who have reported it.

I used to have one robocall a day, but not anymore. It looks like this simple technology has made robocallers give up.
> Maybe give people free HVAC upgrades to filter more particles.

HVAC and indoor air quality (IAQ) is a fascinating topic and it takes good design to get it right. In most HVAC systems you can't just stick a higher MERV filter in and expect good results because they are designed for specific amounts of air flow. Thicker filters cause more air resistance which reduces air flow and fan efficiency which means less comfort and greater energy use.

Often a better strategy in a retrofit is to increase air sealing (a good energy recommendation anyway) and install an E/HRV to exchange indoor for outdoor air with a good filter in it. PM2.5 comes from outside so this should take care of it.

https://www.energyvanguard.com/blog/unintended-consequences-...

https://www.energyvanguard.com/blog/7-reasons-your-filter-is...
I shared the experience described by the grand parent. In particular I remember I had some argument on HN with a few people and the sheer amount of bad faith and technical inaccuracy thrown at me was jaw dropping. At this point I consider SW more a cult than a technology.

On the research side there are two kinds of research papers: the one that proposes an ontology for a domain, and the one that describes the conversion of an existing resource to RDF. I've never seen a paper where SW was used for something new and interesting and that would have been impossible without SW.

That being said, they are also both technical and conceptual pain points that are plaguing RDF. Basically the tech is trying to address too many things: both metadata and data, and every kind of data. "IRIs that can be URLs than can be sometimes dereferenced and sometimes not, but it's better if they are and then it's Linked Data" kind of thing makes it hard to assume (and thus build) anything.

So, RDF have been success in a few domains (biology) but in most case it doesn't offer a real competitive advantage over simpler and more expressive technologies such as graph databases.

PS: @zcw100 if you where to really write a book about semantic web, drop me a line please.
We offer escrow of our source as an option for our customers who have concerns or policies about mission-critical software. The escrow includes instructions about tooling needed & versions (Visual Studio and others), any third-party (Telerik) or open-source things we use, database creation scripts, etc. A couple have run DR drills where they pulled the escrow, went through the instructions, and produced executables.
Indeed, GitHub Actions only has ubuntu virtual machines, but you can run a custom container with the `jobs.<job-id>.container` specifier.
As more time passes you just have to put your phone on do-not-disturb and only allow star'ed contacts. It might be useful to make a call forwarding service where they have to enter some number code to get transferred to you, kind of like a captcha, maybe something like plivo or twilio can do this. After putting my resume with my work number I also get a crazy amount of recruiters in India call centers using fuzzy keyword matches to recommend poorly fitting jobs.
It also looks like the spammers are picking up in sophistication. Like a prerecorded voice asks me if I want an extended warranty and a few questions to do automated voice recognition screening of the call before transferring it to the India call center for sales. You can say potatos to every question and they will still transfer you, but the call will drop if you say "no". Once the India call center collects information from you they pass you to some guys that sound like they're in the US for the final sale.
Let me guess, this won't include politicians robocalling before elections
Amazon's response seems quite defensive. They are typically a bit black box when it comes to security issues.