skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
But St. Nicholas et al. did not start with Christianity - isn't the myth of 'Santa' an amalgam of all kinds of different pagan cultures and traditions? It seems like the whole 'Christmas' holiday is mostly an artifact of the church trying to tie together wide and diverse groups of people under their umbrella.

I guess you could use a snowflake or a cornucopia or something as a generic 'winter holiday' thing, and people have been doing that for awhile; "Happy Holidays" usurped "Merry Christmas" decades ago. Or you could use a bevy of emojis representing the holiday's secular roots, but would it have been better if they added emojis for St. Nick's mythological companions like Belshnickel, Zwarte Pete, and Krampus next to the santa hat? Maybe if they really wanted to polish this essential feature for production use, they could have different emoji sets for different holidays and a modal to choose which one you wanted.

I dunno, I feel so bad for people who haven't had the drive to do anything fun or playful beaten out of them yet. "Cry, the beloved country, for the unborn child that's the inheritor of our fear."
> the symbology has been non-religious for some time

In the US, sure. In many other countries the related symbology is still heavily linked to "Saint Nicholas", not "Santa Claus".
It will be interesting when the election cycles start to cross over into eachother. For instance, start lining up primaries for an election 5 years away. We could be in a permenent election, with people slowly positioning themselves to be elected sometime later.

Then, we can finally give up and just draft our representatives. Two months before it's time for new politicians to take over, they would draw names, and do 6am door-kicking raids to abduct the "candidates" and take them to D.C. to represent us.
> even a single person being offended is one too many

This is how you make things bland, soulless and ultimately inhuman.
Sadly, I rather wish I could read the original book. I might read the book that resulted.
Novartis to Offer World’s Most Expensive Drug for Free via Lottery
Apple’s Bug Bounty Opens for Business, $1M Payout Included
A lot of us process the world using rule-based algorithms. This makes us natural programmers but sorely inadequate to handle the world.

For example the rule of "if religious, then don't include in product" is usually pretty sane.

But near a decision boundary, you will always get disagreement. A certain portion of programmers would've arrived at the conclusion that isReligious(santa) == False while some will be dead set that the answer must be True. Both side are confident that the other side is making a fatal mistake because they are confident in their logic skills. But the real problem is that binary logic can't handle these sort of high context fuzzy situation at all.
Even though I'm a strong atheist who always rejects the pushing of religious values in our laws, I really enjoy the Christmas/Holiday season because it's honestly just a happy time around family (and unless you go seeking it out, you hardly see Jesus mentioned.)

I don't understand the idea of being offended at what is essentially a happy time for many people where they are celebrating something that matters to THEM. Again, they're not pushing it on anyone.

Maybe it's my polytheistic upbringing (grew up Hindu by name in India, with many relatives that also prayed to the infant Jesus alongside their Hindu Gods).

The Santa hat is about as harmless a sign of the holidays as I can imagine (it's not like they showed a cross or something). To borrow from the Reddit phrase, this is the most boring kind of dystopia where a completely harmless sign offends people.
Wawa Data Breach: Malware Stole Customer Payment Card Info
> I dont know if Cisco even supports the use of ssh with certificates.

They do -- in addition to public key auth, as GhettoMaestro mentioned.
Hackers keep dumping Ring credentials online 'for the giggles'
Lmao, already starting on this bullshit narrative for 2020? Face it Americans love trump.
cITaTiOn NEEdeD
And yet that doesn't change anything.
This Cities: Skylines build recreates the honeycomb Detroit that could have been
Exactly what I've been looking for - but, a few caveats, what is the business plan? Is this going to be open sourced? Who is behind the project?
There's another story (I assume of many) over at the NY Times with the headline "Facebook Discovers Fake AI-Generated Profiles".

I rather like the "People Who Do Not Exist" in this headline.
It sounded like it was "150 tracks since last reboot" which is absurd, since the workaround was to manually delete out-of-range tracked objects.
Christmas is the birthday of Jesus.

Jesus was killed by the Jews. (Or the Romans egged on by the Jews?)

So Christians historically didn't like Jews.

So anti-Semitism is rooted in Christianity.

And anti-Semitism led to the death of millions of Jews.

Or something. These aren't my beliefs. Hope that helps!
Regulators warn banks, if fintechs mess up we're dropping the hammer on you
I think the answer should be “we hear your complaint and we will listen closely to hear if others feel the same way and act accordingly. We will also weigh your feedback when deciding what to do for next holiday season. In the meantime if you find it offensive we suggest you turn it off or use a version that doesn’t have it”.

There are so many dimensions to this. No one is forced to sit and watch it. It’s not front and center in the community forums (making the community itself exclusive) and so on.

One person being hurt is one too many, but one person being offended for what the absolute majority probably have decided is for the sake of being offended can’t be the cause of this.

We have come a long way when it comes to having more inclusive communities especially for miniorities. I‘m sure there are trans people in OSS now that wouldn’t have felt welcome ten years ago. I just fail to see the parallel and believe there is a minority somewhere longing to get into online communities but that don’t feel welcome because of Santa hats?
I just feel sad for the folks at Crosoft putting their time and love in the product and have to put up with this stuff. That's the offensive part to me, littering other people's work, down to having them close the repo.
Reminder that the Russians primarily targeted black americans to agitate us over police brutality, and that every single media piece that gives more than 3 example ads without showing a single one target black americans is, with high probability (a statistician can formalize this), peddling an agenda. "White working class voters" were never the primary target and they targeted them less as the campaign went on.

Primary source: https://intelligence.house.gov/social-media-content/social-m...
F5 to acquire Shape Security for approximately $1B
This is the best Excel tutorial I have ever found. Even if you don't remember much about Excel, the following from this video allows me to basically get started with any data very quickly:

1. Ctrl A : Select all the data

2. Insert table : This will allow you to be able to filter or sort on any column, provide a row for stats if you want, and will auto format and color the table. You can also choose to go to a pivot table easily from here.
It amuses me that it is an 'Easter egg' another similarly confusing conflation of a Christian holiday with the commercialization of that holiday.
Anonymous photography project explores family life through amateur eyes
I was recently diagnosed with osteoarthritis of the hip at the age of 35. This finally shocked me into action. For a long time, I have been very active playing sports everyday and exercising but always had a little extra fat on me and was a little slower than I could be. I never had the motivation to change my diet until now.

I went out and read everything I could on osteoarthritis and as it's a degenerative disease you're only hope is to make it last longer at this point and maybe a cure will come. The proven ways to make it last longer are to lose weight and to do exercise.

I spent about 160 hours researching what to do and discover the diet inflammatory index (DII). This is based on every dietary study related to inflammation since 1950 till 2017. I designed a diet specifically around that. I am combining it with intermittent fasting and prolonged fasting that I found through my research is also very powerful in causing autophagy which can help with diseases like osteoarthritis.

I actually have found that since starting this diet my focus and brain power have gone through the roof. I have tons more energy in my hip feels a hundred times better. I am excited to continue this journey. I'd highly recommend anyone interested to look at this as well. I'm not one of those people that sells any crap related to this, this is just the research I have done into scientific studies around nutrition and its impact on disease.
Ericsson to Build Its Connected Vehicle Cloud on Top of Microsoft's Platform
In other words, uhh, don't use these projects:

https://github.com/Mictronics/pluto-gps-sim

https://github.com/osqzss/gps-sdr-sim

Or if you use them, do so in a completely RF shielded environment. You wouldn't want to wreck havok with drones, Lime scooters, Bird Scooters, cell phones, etc. Right? :)
This story's worrisome in that it makes the Navy sound very vulnerable to electronic warfare.

I mean, if overall operations are so hazard-prone that they're not reliable in the absence of hostilities, how could they possibly be resilient against an advanced actor?

Is the situation as bad as it sounds from the story?
Very sensible viewpoint, thank you. Perhaps perpetual licenses and subscriptions could co-exist as alternatives, and customers can choose whichever they prefer.
>All my friends us Messenger and the rest is on other social media platforms for content.

Be cognizant of your bubble. All of my friends (aka people I actually regularly interact with) don't ever use FB anymore, but a quick glance at my FB feed shows that a huge population of people from my high school (people in their mid-to-late 20s), mostly the ones I haven't interacted with in years, still use it heavily.
Check out Google Cloud Run and pay per second of runtime
"The snowflake on vscode insiders is very offensive to me, as people with delicate sensibilities are typically referred to as "snowflakes" as an insult. This is very politcal and has cost many Jews their lives, or something. Please remove it immediately and make it your top priority. To me this is almost equally offensive as a Santa hat."

I'm sure if we continue to cave to these people they will eventually stop.
It works for the scammy valley companies with their mantra of "move fast and break things". It's only logical that trickles down.
Was that the tradition of St Nicholas, the saint, or "Saint Nicholas"/Kris Kringle/Father Christmas = Santa Claus, the cookie-eating guy with a red hat thatdeveloped mostly after the 18th century?
New federal rule will hurt renewables, help gas and coal
Santa drives around in a grossly polluting truck delivering obesity-water to children. He's a monster, not a saint.
I think that we consume a lot more content through computer recommendations algorithms. These filter bubbles makes us more alienated towards different opinion and views than our own preferred way of viewing things. Thus the more we consume media through filter bubbles the more alienated we become.

Plus technology is replacing human interactions.
For example:
Bookstore vs online bookstore
Renting movies at a video store vs online Movie streaming
Spontaneous interactions at cashiers being replaced by software.

Not one of these one interaction may make us more alienated but summed together they make something bigger.
A question to ask is what technology replaces?

Also people are a little bit less religious nowadays and religion serves as a gathering point for local community where people come together and meet.
Im curious about that too. If you were a skilled programmer who studied common bugs, you could introduce those bugs intentionally but with plausible deniability if caught. Then again, in a smaller system that would be easier to detect. But in a multi page web app or something with a big back end, def could slip those in
Hmmm maybe eBay (i got one of mine there)?
The ones that vote in high numbers.
Meh, I use spacebar to page-down, but am ready to fall-back at a moments notice because so many sites draw their header over the body, so a spacebar will end up by scrolling by more than a page...
The immune system listens in on bacteria signaling to each other
love how the only facebook comment under the article is a fake "make money from home" bot
It seems like movement would be effective for averaging out random noise, but the described process isn’t for eliminating random noise, it’s for eliminating persistent hotter pixels on the sensor.
Less than a watt could get you around the world.
I think one of the reasons Comic Sans got such a bad rep is because it was one of the relatively few available fonts back in the pre-woff “web safe fonts” era of a decade ago. Microsoft should had given us a more general purpose font, such as a nice looking slab serif to fill the gap between the somewhat old-fashioned looking Georgia and the very stylized Trebuchet MS font.
I actually just published a guide on how you can help ensure that ("deepfake") tools that you make are less likely to end up misused like this: https://www.technologyreview.com/s/614912/ethical-deepfake-t...

Curious what folks think. I also just posted it to /newest if you want to respond there.
Antony Garrett Lisi of E8 Theory and the Pacific Science Institute, care to weigh in on that?
It's not the journalists but their bosses that are the problem.
I'm not so sure. One of the reasons cell phones work at all is that they are relatively close to the antenna. This service requires to antennas to be at least 100 miles away and doesn't have any provision to improve the gain on the client side. SMS may be roughly the limit of what they can provide in the available bandwidth. The inverse square law is a harsh mistress.
It's implemented in the same manner as the traditional "panels" (how we refer to the non-Launchpad windows). It's the same code, same implementation, same development environment. Everything's integrated. When it started out (~17 years ago) it was different and new, but the work there was taken back into the main panels to replace what you think of as old 80x25 screens. All of it is now rendered using Chromium (Blink).
Also AFAIK GCV uses techniques beyond better OCR that greatly help accuracy. It does image fixing, boundary detection, NLP, spell check, etc.
I am an Eastern Orthodox Christian and I am offended by Santa, which has nothing to do Christianity and it's nothing but a blatant display of overconsumption, wastefulness, not to mention the environmental impact of all this, which, against, goes well against Christianity, modesty, and actually conflicts with the Nativity Fast. Will I file an issue? No, never. It's childish, it's silly, it's not something an engineer should ever do. By the way, I'm offended by the plastic eggs and bunnies around Easter as well. None of these holidays are religious and here in Orange County, Southern California, I see many Muslims and Jews decorating their houses with the pseudo-Christian symbols as well. Every act will affect at least one person - I expected Microsoft to think about this starting this tradition and ending it. You can't make everybody happy, period!
I despise Nuclear power mainly due to its cost but it is very safe. The most dangerous form of electricity in deaths per 100,000 MW-h is rooftop solar.

Hint, it does not generate a large amount of power and if someone is injured, it is dangerous.
Are incomes inflation adjusted? The average income when I was a kid was $50k per year, about the same as it is now, except that $50k has 50% less purchasing power today. $50k today is the equivalent of $25k 30 years ago.
I work on a globally-distributed team.

My colleagues in India had a Christmas celebrations in their office. I asked them if they celebrated it growing up, and they told me they first started celebrating it in University.

We have Diwali parties in our US office. Everyone has fun.
Every time I see things like this I always want to think that it's someone wanting to make a point of showing how mere feigning offense is enough to make a huge company bend over to your demands, and that there's some bigger lesson to be learned from this, but alas, that is probably not the case here...
I graduated with a PhD in math, now working in software.

I went to two math conferences this year, and plan to work on an unfinished paper next year - and hopefully start something new. The only thing stopping me is the lack of time away from the day job (and attention span that it allots). Switching between a software job and mathematics turns out to be hard.

So on that note: why did you use to be a mathematician? What would it take to continue research for fun in any amount?
Not just on GitHub. Christian wrote up a huge response to the issue spam here: https://github.com/Christian-Schiffer/SignalRAngularMVC6/iss...

Basically sounds like his entire online presence is being roasted by 4chan.
The red hat is clearly associated with Christmas which is a Christian holiday. The complaint is silly, but we should not counter that by ridiculous claims like saying a Santa hat has nothing to do with Christmas. I think the red had originates from "Father Christmas" rather than Sct Nicolaus, but in any case it is clearly associated with Christmas.
How to run a better customer interview
Truly puzzling how that letter neglects to mention none of a scientific journal's income goes to the researchers, but instead tries to blur the line between research and publishing, making it seem like research will suffer, despite deriving no profit from publishing.

Perhaps someone should tell them they have their facts confused, and that they should add some clarifying language to their letter.
Somewhat addressed in the linked issue:

> We’ve added a new setting to Insiders that lets you choose the icon. If you like the red hat, go for it! Maybe you live in the southern hemisphere or you are heading to the beach during the holidays, there’s an icon for you too.
Stanford’s Driverless DeLorean
>For a lifter trying to gain weight, a milkshake might be perfectly fine.

Y’all should look into insulin resistance. Huge loads of sugar being bad for you is fairly settled science, with foods that have a High Glycemic Index(GI) being linked to the development of Insulin Resistance. This is only the most tested link between high GI foods and higher all cause mortality[1]. The linked study is on a population of high Cardiovascular risk, however considering the website is for dieting that might make it more relevant. There’s a good reason the WHO guideline for sugar is a maximum of 10% of your caloric intake and a recommendation if 5%.[2]

I want to eat 1800 kcal in 2 vegetarian meals and a sample suggestion is 3 eggs and veggies(which is great) for the first meal, followed by 2 apples and almond butter and 2 bananas with yogurt for the second(labeled lunch). That’s terrible, and going to set my diet up for failure. That’s like 18% of your caloric intake as sugar, and in your last meal no less. You are going to burn through all that sugar and then feel hungry/hangry as hell when the insulin load in your body doesn’t match your blood sugar.

Seriously, the way your website treats sugar is completely negligent considering it’s proposition is that it’s an alternative to counting macros. I’d love to be able to suggest your website but my impression today is awful.

[1]https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4176720/

[2]https://www.who.int/mediacentre/news/releases/2015/sugar-gui...
I want to broadcast (unidirectional) UDP packets over the air on 2.4 GHz or 5 GHz at 3+ Mbit/s at maximum (legal) power. Is there a good way to do this with any current SDR hardware? Or is my best bet to ab(use) wifi cards for this purpose?
That is really cool. Can I ask where you are storing that data? Is it something you cooked up yourself or a service you are using?

One of my back-of-the-mind ideas is to combine GPS data like this with some kind of basic activity-type id. Like "working", "practicing guitar", "socializing with friends", etc. Then I could get reports on how I spend my time.
New WebKit Features in Safari 13
> American's 35+?

FB has >1 billion real users. So by the simplest arithmetic, the vast majority of its users cannot be American, regardless of age.
For many use cases it would be great to have a real/verified oauth service. Dutch government does something like that with digid. Imagine how much fraud could be prevented if there was something like that in the US.
it's saddening and upsetting that such benign acts are blown way out of proportion by people, often with agenda, who simply are not happy or can't let other people go on with their life!

it just seems that we can't agree on anything anymore. i mean that's okay, but it starts to become worrisome when we can't agree on civility, decency, or even science in some cases!
That would ruin both the "live commentary on TV" and "giant thread" twitter genres. If it includes replies as well .. well, you might as well remove the reply feature entirely and save everyone a lot of pain.

I find it OK, but I'm fairly selective about who I read and liberal with the block button. 500 follows on the regular account, 100 on the Eurovision one (more used for reading hashtags)
Multivac to the rescue. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Franchise_(short_story)
There's always the option of increased gain on the serving side as well (both transmitting and receiving). 5G and related technologies allow beam steering which may improve gain (and selectivity) on the client side, and it's possible Apple may be working this angle on their side for whatever they're working on.

In sparsely populated areas where the service could be valuable, I think they can get away with a lot more (as far as frequency usage) than they could for mobile in dense areas. So I think it could indeed be useful.
I dont understand why the response

"Dear <user>, We apologize if you found the icon offensive. Please be assured that no offense was intended. Thank you for bringing up the issue so we could clear things up."

Was not a sufficient response and an end to the conversation? Leave the icon where it is. Now that the user knows that the icon wasn't meant as an offense, he can move on with his life.

If he finds the swastika offensive, he shouldn't visit India. Swastikas are everywhere. The context matters.
> You really need a way to track who is using what and how they automatically get renewed a long time before expiry.

If you have any sort of monitoring system in place, it should also be able to check for certificate expiration (or "validity" in general). Even the old antiquated nagios has had this ability since the dawn of time.

As a sort of last resort and/or where no other solution is in place, you can do what I did on a customer's network a few years ago. Fortunately, there wasn't much "security" in place (internally, at least).

nmap can easily 1) detect/identify TLS and 2) produce "grepable" output.

I simply gathered a list of all IP subnets that were in use and scanned all of it. Afterwards, it was fairly simple to go through the results and figure out which hosts were running services using TLS on which ports.

There are existing tools that can connect to services using TLS and gather the information from the presented certificate. If you can't find one that does what you need, that's no big deal, it really doesn't take much to write your own tool just for this purpose.

(In fact, something like this -- running on a host that has access to connect to all of your TLS services -- might be nice to have even if you have a "proper" solution in place. If (when?) something falls through the cracks, you'd have this as a sort of "fallback" or "backup" to alert you to anything your proper solution might have missed.)