skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
That's useful info on the Android experience... but if it works for anyone, it's still better than Signal's crappy answer to iOS users: "wait until someday when you can trust our new crypto & Intel SGX to upload all your data to a cloud".

And yes, WhatsApp has a seamless experience – even if you never share your contact lists, or back-up your message history, to WhatsApp. It "just works" even if you only use encrypted local iOS phone backup/restores – no "unencrypted database in the remote cloud" required. That's why I find Signal's rationale, that "unencrypted remote cloud" is either the "normal approach" or "necessary for recovering the social graph", to be a hand-wavy & borderline dishonest oversimplification. There's a simple approach that works pretty well, including in their major competitor, without the flaws they allege!

Debugging an "export to a single file whose format is completely under our control", then "import from that single file" cycle isn't exactly rocket science.

But Signal clearly sees their desire to do rocket science as a sufficient excuse for why iOS users (& perhaps per your report, many Android users) can't have any working backup/device-migration solution for 5 years, and counting.
Brainstorming Process Is Broken: How to Generate Ideas More Effectively
Not sure "working fine in PRC" is really something you can say about anything web related.

I do occasional web dev from within China and had to eliminate external references to get manageable page load times. At least from where I work pulling in practically anything from outside the Great Firewall will have a high probability of killing page load time. Anything hosted by Google in particular will often have you staring at your screen for 30 seconds.
Consumer Card Issuing Company
Anyone know of any Consumer Card Issuing Company other than marqeta?
I am looking for a card issuing company that the issued card can be added to Apple Pay and Google Pay. Any information is appreciated.
has it got any better?
Actually they currently just put a retimer chip on the backplane, attach the NVMe drives to the otherwise passive (as far as high-speed data goes) backplane, and use QSFP+ twinax cabling between the backplane and a sometimes passive "HBA" card that adapts from PCIe slot to this QSFP+ cage. Afaik they can run PCIe3 x4 per cable.
If you look for open compute hardware, you'll find various modular blade-like designs.
A few problems with the reasoning in this article.

It assumes that either "cryptography works" (and you only need to seed the CSRNG once) or "cryptography does not work" (and the entropy pool is necessary). In actuality, "cryptography" covers a wide range of algorithms, some of which seem to work, and some of which (like RC4) are known not to work. It's possible that (say) ECDSA works but Linux's CSRNG isn't as good as we think it is.

The article also makes fun of the kernel for not trusting RDRAND. Well, here's a sequence of random numbers from RDRAND on the AMD Ryzen 3000: 0xffffffff, 0xffffffff, 0xffffffff, 0xffffffff, 0xffffffff. Do you see a pattern? Was it indeed a foolish choice not to trust RDRAND?
This is fake right?
It wasn't Mark's original philosophy - it was a stolen mechanism that the twins who hired him to develop ConnectU had come up with, so unsurprising that it wouldn't be kept as a cornerstone.
I'd like to remind everyone that as we are fast approaching the prospect of hundreds of thousands of AIs and bots graduating from their Turing Tests, we must take the internet's own proverb very seriously.

Do not believe everything you see on the internet.
Ask HN: Independent Consultants, how do you find work?
I’ve been in my field for a while and feel comfortable enough that I want to try and branch out and consult as a side gig.

How do you go about finding clients for work?

Beyond reaching out to colleagues who might need some help, are there any specific tools, sites, or strategies you used to start off?
Plug for the “universal radio hacker” open source tool. It made it absolutely childs play to reverse engineer a wireless thermometer signal which i now feed into a dynamo db table and present as a graph via alexa. My kamado joe is at the bottom of the garden and when i’m smoking or bbq’ing i can bring up the meat and the grill temps on any screen in the house. Fantastic.
Definitely.

I mean I think e.g. you could have incredible art projects and experiences created out e.g. of giant undetectable fake crowds. There are real tradeoffs in terms of what we value or need in a society.
Yes the friendly neighbour idea was last seen in home improvement, the TV show. There is too much fear of placing a foot wrong and ghosting as the norm for mistakes.
Alert to Smartphones Tracking Us
Competent cinematography is about artistry and emotion, and whatever technical standards are necessary to achieve that. And everything with technical issues about tradeoffs. Movies are chock-full of tradeoffs.

Oval bokeh is... hardly noticeable to anyone except professional photographers, and also isn't inherently "bad", it's just different, and has its own personality.

If your standards are so perfectionist, I have a hard time believing you find any of Hollywood's cinematographers -- whether blockbuster or indie -- up to your competent standards. ;)
With a spoon straight out of the jar.
UDP requires some physical layer, which 802.11 provides. There are others, but in any case, you can't just "broadcast UDP" over the radio by itself.
Which is why I mentioned it.
Winston Churchill – We Shall Never Surrender
Ask HN: Why there are no good services to send money abroad?
Why it's so hard to send money abroad? It's either takes long or costs a lot. IS it laws or is it just no one has taken this an issue?
Unions aren't libertarian enough - can one get a freelancer's license? Asking for a friend.....

Edit: /sarcasm. PLEASE don't do this.
BugJail doesn't do currently line/statement level debugging, but it already captures all the information required for full "time travel" debugging. So, coming someday.

Also, BugJail is designed so that in normal use (webapps etc) it writes fast enough to database and never runs out of memory. Though, hardcode programs like databases and compilers exceed that, and currently don't buffer to disk, but crash it hard..

If you configure BugJail to capture only your own code/packages (--primary option) the disk usage is not that bad either. If you don't, you'll burn in the magnitude of ~10MB per second.

Give it a try, and let me know how it goes?
> even a single person being offended is one too many

This is absurd.
That is a catch-22, isn't it? The common definition of "winning the social media war" is to get a lot of users. That is inherently contradictory to "cultivating" a "selective group". Just as water flows downhill, there will inevitably be a few most popular social networks, which will inevitably be driven by clickbait and moral panic and targeted by all bad actors.

I already saw that happen with atheism. When I was young you had to be pretty far from normal to be really into it, and there was some fantasy that once everybody was an athiest, society would be cool and rational. Now about a hundred million Americans are effectively athiests and we're no more rational than before. The problems stayed the same, because people stayed the same.
Making double sided chips, and TSVs on them are nothing new. Been tried in the past and didn't take off.

Even without costs of TSVs, a double sided wafer costs twice the normal one, while you can at most squeeze like 20-30% more things onto it, given that the backside will only be usable for lower tier logic or analogue process.
Show HN: Filmshape – The social network for filmmakers and actors
It's probably the thinking in your antepenultimate paragraph reinforcing itself. Instead, abstract skills can offer a gateway to the application of more rigid rules, so to speak, because it shows that they are strong, but the applicability is flexible.
>CIA's only KNOWN listening post in Africa
Filmshape will be a social network for everyone involved in film and TV once the app is released. Our current focus is to facilitate the connection, collaboration and project management between filmmakers anywhere in the world. The community that could be anywhere at any given time with the pressures of crew organisation, budgets and ultimately creative exploration can use the upcoming app to network and promote their work.

You can follow us on twitter too @filmshape
Same thing happens when mexico sends its tens of millions of illegal colonizers except in that case its even more direct and on an even larger scale. Then again, being against foreign collusion would make me WACIST.
The NYT has referred to presidents as Mr. X for hundreds of years
> it is not generally (ever?) in the job description.

You're wrong! Just one counter-example I could find in seconds - 'participation on program committees, advisory panels, and editorial boards'. And that's not even an academic position - it's industry.

https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/careers/

In fact I'm literally reviewing a paper myself... right now... while being paid.
I sometimes use Google for searching (although not always; I use more than one in order to find more) but that's all. I have no Google account and use no other Google services (although I do use some of Google's open source software, such as the V8 JavaScript engine). I have about:blank set as my home page and not Google. I use self-hosted email, with Heirloom-mailx as the mail user agent and Exim4 as the server (both running on the same computer).
I didn’t say that, but thanks for putting words in my mouth that make this somehow about nationality. I said that achieving a target PPP before expecting some restraint on the environment is a ludicrous goal in the face of the impending environmental cliff. You basically aren’t arguing, but telling me I’m just wrong and then making me out to really be on about keeping China down. Maybe try some intellectual honesty.

My point has everything to do with what the global ecosystem can take, and how much of an impact any nation has on it. As a species we need to figure out how to develop societies and countries without poisoning the planet.

The concept that because a country hasn’t reached PPP with the US it’s developing and can do what it pleases is patently insane. The Earth just doesn’t have the environmental resources for that, it’s already painfully apparent if you aren’t covering your eyes and ears. The human race can’t wait for countries to completely develop to play by the rules. Sucks.

Meanwhile China has demonstrably better infrastructure and more development in terms of cities than the US. I think by a lot of measures the US is still “developing”, we certainly lack the rail infrastructure of other “developed” countries for example, and our cities lack the dense, efficient urban cores of highly developed old world.

To boil my argument down, if China can build an extensive high speed rail network and capture the global electronics and PV markets they’ve moved beyond a “developing” economy, regardless of how well off or not the majority of their populace is.
The point is not that tradeoffs are inherently unethical, it's that in practice, deceiving the customer about those tradeoffs affects how they are made. You go to the supermarket and they have to post unit prices so you can compare, although this is gamed as much as possible. But you go and look at shoes, and you can only guess whether the $100 pair is going to last proportionally longer than the $80 pair. Some things, like tires and cars, you can get information from others experience and testing about lifespan, but even so, there is still a segment of the market that buys the poor quality products which is being deceived in the sense that they might well choose differently if it was thrown in their face how they are being screwed.
The video is amazing if you're a coder and might need to use excel at some point (access columns by name?! sign me up!).

However, what I love about excel is to see what it enables people without formal programming training to do with data, and using functional programming on top of that!

Is there any tool that comes even close in terms of power, accessibility and ubiquity? What would such a tool even look like?
Winding the Body’s Clock
you can actually can get near them, but you have to book well in advance:
https://www.english-heritage.org.uk/visit/places/stonehenge/...
ICLR 2020 Accepted Papers Announced
There is little more disappointing to see a position you embrace argued with weak or misleading arguments.

The entropy estimation used in Linux is indeed essentially pointless, but a number of the arguments used in this page are not great.

The main reasons I'd give is that the applications we use randomness for have only computational security at best so the effort to provide information theoretic security is overkill. The actual mechanisms that have been used in linux both for estimating random inputs and maintaining the pool are entirely adhoc and there is no particular reason to believe they'd actually provide information theoretic randomness even if you did have some fringe usage where it could be a theoretical benefit. And finally, the weird behavior like blocking RNGs added for purely conjectural benefits results in real vulnerabilities.

Not much more is needed to be said: It's a common story, security theater resulting in insecurity.

> so the entropy pool estimator is based on a fair amount of trust in physicists such as Feynman or Bohr (but not Einstein, for that matter). But the entropy depletion is an assertion that cryptographers such as Shamir cannot be equally trusted

Our expectations about the security of cryptographic constructs are largely unlike our expectations of physical systems.

Thomas is making a cheap and misleading argument here, and I very much expect that Shamir would disagree with it... (heck, one of the famous 'Shamir' named things is shamir secret sharing which comes straight from the realm of information theoretic security.)

A case can be made for cryptography with information theoretic security... but what the kernel provided in the past was at best a cargo-cult imitation of it, taking many of its costs without providing its assurances.

> The Linux kernel uses rdrand. It does not trust rdrand, because NSA (I’m not exaggerating! The kernel source code explicitly calls out the NSA),

Imagine this in a world where the kernel always blindly trusted rdrand: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2019/10/how-a-months-old-amd...

CPU makers can't manage to achieve really strong reliability against obvious _accidental_ fault in rdrand. Gonsidering this, some caution against backdoors in a totally black box magic source of random numbers seems eminently prudent. NSA is just an existence proof of intelligence operations with the intellectual and financial capabilities that would make backdooring a CPU possible, if not likely.
Of course it should. So what? We know that won’t make it unassailable, so they still need the other tools.
The Spectrum Monitor – DRM-free radio listening magazine
While I am fine with the social conventions that hold spoiling recent works as anathema, or even older works within limited contexts (for instance, /r/WoT tries to allow readers to talk about the early books without instantly being spoiled for the later ones), the absurd demands people make to not "spoil" any book or movie people still read or watch recreationally -- and not just as a homework assignment -- is harmful.

The metaphors, the concepts, the philosophies expressed in books, even trashy 1960's SF, are important. They are tools we can use to explain, to convince, to argue, to communicate.

Demanding that we never speak aloud in any public place the words from any work of art more recent than Black Beauty (is that too recent? Is it OK to at least reference the end of Romeo and Juliet?) is demanding that we weaken ourselves, like Harrison Bergeron in Kurt Vonnegut's short story of the same name, and only communicate at the level of the least well-read individual in any society. If books are not going to contribute to discourse, if we cannot tell other people of what we read, we might as well burn them all, as in Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451.

And at the end of the day, the only thing being protected by fervent cries of "spoilers!" "spoilers!" are the barest, sparsest facts of the story: if finding out the ending of a story is the only reason to read it, you were probably done a favor by having it "spoiled". Journey before destination.
You definitely can broadcast packets via wifi. I mean, that's essentially what you're doing when talking to an AP. All the other wifi antennas/chips in the area can see the data you're sending. You'd have to do some hacking on the receive side to get the data out, but that should be pretty straightforward.
[I'm not an employee, just a radio buff]

If you've ever listened to shortwave radio via the stations at websdr.org, The Spectrum Monitor covers topics like ham radio, pirate radio, scanners, numbers stations, and the like. Not too expensive, and each issue is a plain-PDF file--no DRM.

The current December 2019 issue has a piece on the history of broadcast radio in the U.S. before 1921, when the first broadcast licenses were first issued. Another article examines the U.S. Air Force HFGCS global shortwave communications network, formalized after 9/11 when U.S. military comms satellites were swamped with traffic.
> That's what all your personal information and your identity is worth. $6.

That's not how much it's worth, that's just how much Equifax was able to corruptly negotiate to pay for losing it.

If you really want to know how much it's worth, you could probably compute a reasonable estimate by taking all the money the credit bureaus from your credit file, and divide that by the number of credit files.
"Essentially, the scientists took some lithium and shot protons at it."

How does this actually work? Presumably it's a very small amount of lithium. What is it held in? How are the protons so accurately steered towards it? The accelerator ring is comparatively very wide, right?
Can you write fluently on a deeply technical subject in a foreign language?

Are you judging them in their English because you dont have the skills to actually judge them on the merits of scientific work?

Why should all of society lose on scientific progress just to appease your linguistic sensitivities?
To bolster the claim, "Mr. Obama, Your Move" (2014): https://www.nytimes.com/2014/08/10/opinion/sunday/mr-obama-y...

And more historical, "Another Interview with Mr. Lincoln; His Opinion of Compromises" (1861) https://www.nytimes.com/1861/01/14/archives/anotherinterview...
The worst thing about widespread fake information is the ease with which you can convince yourself that everything you don't like is fake. We don't really have a defense against it that allows for people with opposing perspectives to coexist.

I wonder if it's possible to somehow create a "consistency checker" that can check to see what claims are compatible with what other claims. Not a truth checker; that's far too dangerous and easily abused. But a system that just checks for consistency, combined with a "web of trust" where you can see the connections to people with different perspectives who you know are NOT liars/can connect to events you KNOW are true. That might help people trust information from outside of their comfort zone and identify problems with their own outlook.

There's precedent for that kind of a thing in the math world. MetaMath is an example of a system that verifies proofs based on substitution rules alone, plus whatever axioms you add to the system. Natural language news stories that need to correspond to reality are obviously a much different beast, and maybe it's impossible to do something equivalent with knowledge that isn't as rigid/formal as math, but it's tempting to try.

Could easily backfire and make the problem worse if done improperly, though. The risk is that such a system could be taken over/hijacked my ideologically motivated individuals to reinforce their own ideas and hide inconsistencies rather than shine a light on them.
The fact that you were already downvoted after zero minutes supports your thesis. That could have been your employment being downvoted instead of HN points. In China, critics of the political enforcement systems are also more likely to try to remain anonymous or completely silent, while those who proclaim their support (and their lack of tolerance for dissidents) usually want their identities known. And the Chinese media use that to claim the former group are crackpots, criminals, and fakes, while the latter are respectable, mainstream Solid Citizens.
and a single digit isn't really prohibitive for making fake accounts either. I'd gladly pay $250 for 50 fake fbook accounts spewing the commercial and propaganda crap that makes me profit.. or just feel good about skewering another side I don't care for.
I didn't know that! Cool!
That's nothing new. Journalists have always needed to identify fake source material. Dan Rather wrecked his career by reporting a story about George W. Bush based on fake documents.
John Nagel asylum Netherlands persecution clandestine U.S. agencies CIA NSA
Hi Pete, It’s not really intended as an overall strategy – but as a ‘how to do content marketing’. Whether or not to attach the word ‘strategy’ is perhaps debatable; I think it works with the word ‘content’ – I wouldn’t have called it ‘marketing strategy’; but I did call it ‘content strategy’.

Three of the principles within it are:

1. Getting the most out of pillar content (e.g. 20–50 pieces relating to each pillar)

2. Getting the most out of social networks (e.g. tailoring pieces across different social networks with paths to the pillar)

3. Listening to reactions and accounting for those reactions in further content that is produced
More than that, Sicily was a Muslim emirate for hundreds of years! The darker skin prevalent in Southern Italy is the result of that history, with the Moors conquering and occupying it for centuries.

When 23andme makes a guess about ancestry it is guessing where a set of people were at some arbitrary point in the past, otherwise everyone would simply be "Africa - 100%". This is clearly very inexact and is a novelty more than anything. And in this case enough of those Moors lived in the Middle East so it got categorized so. If anything this should be illuminating to her about notions of race and groupism (e.g. "No, I'm Italian!")

The ads play into this, of course, with the people in the ads suddenly embracing a different self-identity based upon the results. Which is just sad.
Randy Suess, Computer Bulletin Board Inventor, Dies at 74
Why the Dodgers Sell “The Los Angeles Dodgers of Los Angeles” T-Shirts
> In the U.S., reaching 100 percent renewable energy by 2050 will require an investment of $7.8 trillion. It will involve building 288,000 new 5-megawatt (MW) wind turbines and 16,000 100-MW solar farms...

I know it’s a contentious topic, but what would the equivalent cost be to do just do this with nuclear as France did in the 80s?

Very back of the napkin says we’d be talking something in the vicinity of 500 new reactors at $5b a piece. That’s only $2.5 trillion so a third the price.
I think this is what a lot of overly optimistic "rehabilitation" advocates miss. They seem to believe that if you provide just enough nurturing, opportunity, and understanding that people who act outside society's acceptable boundaries will be drawn back within them. They fail to recognize that you're not returning these people to something they deviated from, you have to create an entirely new worldview for them that they never had any experience with.