skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I wonder if it would help to rank a provider based on retention and CSAT and give more incoming leads to providers with more in-app retention?
Around 20 years ago, friends in college used this French social networking website Zdarmanet. We mostly used it as a distributed contact list. I often wonder what it could've been if they had been a bit more aggressively commercial.

Realistically though, the strong (at the time) French database and computer privacy laws likely would've prevented it from every doing the slow-boil takeover that Facebook accomplished. In the end, even those laws were ineffective in handling the foreign behemoth that Facebook became.

Edit: website is now closed, displaying "After more than 15 years I am stopping this service. Sorry... in case you would need anything related to that please see notojo.cz for how to contact me." and I guess it was of Czeck origin, not French?
I've been on Tildes since Early Days, same username, really like the features and development.

And I've got a few invites. Reply and ping via email (see my HN user page) if interested.
Boeing's 737 MAX, despite heavy regulations, designed the software to depend on just one sensor. Didn't put any limit on how far down the plane could be pushed.

These are not any individual who would do deliberately. I bet these conversations go differently for ex need to certain kinds of debugging vs the improbability of actually pulling off an attack or prioritising a release dealing and making a design decision to implement a feature in a specific way which is intended to be updated later on opening up windows for attack. They would genuinely be improbable unless someone knows that they are there and committed enough to try.
Captcha is also a kind of proof-of-work, and a very nasty one, where users are made to do the work instead of computers.
That makes sense. I meant increasing the ad buy spend of a firm's competitors helps Google
I'd love to use an open source/more beneficial to society version of ReCaptcha - say validating OpenStreetMap data/project Gutenberg/something else. Maybe this already exists and I don't know about it!

Would sites then move to this and reduce the lock in and inflexibility with ReCaptcha?
Do a large majority of people in the US even have central air? It's virtually unheard of to have an HVAC system in older buildings in California.
Blocking GA and AdSense doesn't render websites unusable.
64 bit file descriptors doesn't work unless you create a whole swag of new system calls, because file descriptors are type `int` and most 64-bit POSIX implementations are I32LP64.
Yeah, I've always encountered resistance when wanting to report accurate SLAs. I have found that typically SLAs are based on what the marketing team thinks sounds good, not what the technology can provide, so the goal is to hide outages and write legal documents that say "when we say uptime is guaranteed, what we mean is that we'll give you some insignificant amount of money when you're down for several days." So everything is legally in the clear, but customers assume some sort of reliability that doesn't exist. What this means is that it's a race to the bottom; if one company claims 100% uptime, the next company either has to explain why that's bullshit (and people react negatively to negativity, even when it's true), or do the same thing. The result is that everyone now has 100% uptime.

The problem with this model is that it doesn't allow engineering teams to set realistic goals to improve reliability. Because a customer being down for 3 days doesn't cost the company any money, you can't deploy expensive engineering resources to prevent that sort of thing from happening again. Meanwhile, if you track your SLA accurately, and compensate customers in a way that's commiserate with the inconvenience they experienced (something like "the entire month is free if we're down for 8 hours in a row"), then you can start doing real engineering. You have a clear number that shows where you're at now, and you have a goal for where you want to be, and you have a cost associated with that goal... suddenly you can make intelligent decisions about what to work on. This class of outage costs us $600,000 a year. It would take one engineer at $200,000 a year 3 months to fix it. There's $550,000 of free money. Instead of being a cost center, you're a profit center! And customers get a better product. How is that not a win? I'll never understand.

One thing I liked about working on Google Fiber back in the day is that US-based telephone support was not something that we would compromise on. It was expensive! So when we could eliminate classes of problems that people call in about, like poor WiFi connectivity or bad TV remote Bluetooth pairing, you could directly see the savings in support cost. You could spend a year debugging WiFi, and instead of looking like flushing money down the toilet, it looked like making money. It was a joy to work on. But obviously a very uncommon way of accounting. It's easier to say "everything is perfect, we dare you to cancel" than to invest in engineering. As an engineer, that's sad; we want the world to work better... but it's only possible with resources.
I suspect they can text without looking at their phones -- I know kids could with physical T9 keypads. Having your phone in your lap while looking forward isn't as obvious as staring at your lap is.
Show HN: Extension to not see Google results as ads
Is attacking Grewnwald's character relevant here?

Anyways, if it is, Greenwald has been one of the most outspoken critics of many aspects of the Russiagate accusations against Trump(1); and in consideration of your aforementioned "liberal agenda" of his, it hardly makes any sense at all to label him on this hand a Trump defender--as he has been accused of--and on the other a 'liberal commie.'

1-https://theintercept.com/2019/01/20/beyond-buzzfeed-the-10-w...
I actually have a bone to pick with them too. I tried canceling my families accounts recently. Despite two confirmation emails I was still charged. Their site makes it very hard to find support.
> I believe the problem of centralization can be solved by looking at the problem differently: what if we continue using these giants for hosting our data (with all the amazing benefits that that brings) but we urge them to provide us with ways to control the way they show us this data. We need better ways to explore our "connection graph", not just a static feed of people we know and things they post.

That's exactly what the Solid [1] (or as a sibling mentioned, SoLID - Social Linked Data) project is about. Solid proposes decoupling the presentation layer and the data layer, having data providers specialize in helping FOAF or other RDF data be stored and easily queried, while the view layer would contain logic that queries your FOAF/other-triple data and gives you the experience you are looking for in an app.

1: https://solid.inrupt.com/
If you mean the lack of quotations, then the behavior is well-defined and is presumably what was intended. Per POSIX,

> The print statement shall write the value of each expression argument onto the indicated output stream separated by the current output field separator (see variable OFS above), and terminated by the output record separator (see variable ORS above).

The default value for OFS is <space> and for ORS, <newline>.
Hah after reading this there’s no way I’m getting near the light rail for the next month or two.

It’s a direct line from SeaTac where people we be flying into from SE Asia after lunar new year is over, and is currently undergoing construction so railway cars are packed at rush hour.
When the very first line of that table tells people that iCloud Backups are encrypted on the server... to then have the last few lines add effectively "Oh, but not end to end!" is just taking the piss.
I was expecting x11resources color themes, so I'm not far behind you...

edit: for those who are interested, try these

http://ciembor.github.io/4bit/

http://terminal.sexy/

https://bashcolors.com/
from a physics perspective there is nearly no lower limit on the pressure differential for a given flux (liters per second) of air (ignoring the mixing entropy).

just make the analogy pressure ~ voltage, flux ~ current, filter ~ resistance.

A doubling in flux can be achieved either by doubling the voltage across the resistor ( ~ doubling pressure differential across the filter), OR by halving the resistance of the filter ( ~ placing 2 filters in parallel, without halving the filter thickness) so technically a PC fan could blow at a typical PC fan pressure differential and flow rate purified air across an arbitrary number of layers of HEPA, as long as enough of those [N layers of HEPA] in parallel...
What did you expect from the advertisement company?

I'm pretty sure ad providers liked the changes because they are getting more traffic to their websites. So, the actual clients are happy why so much dislike towards a new change.

The most disappointing thing for me in this thread is recommendations to install ad blockers. This thing is harming the web the most because instead of focusing on the issue (bad UI) we just supporting such behaviour by using websites with bad UI.

p.s. I'm in risk of being downvoted because of just expressing unpopular opinion about ad blockers.
Trevor Perrin and Moxie Marlinspike won the Levchin Prize at Real World Crypto for Signal's cryptography; the Levchin Prize referees are a who's who of academic cryptography, including Dan Boneh, Kenny Paterson, and Nigel Smart; other Levchin winners have included Hugo Krawczyk, Mihir Bellare, and Joan Daemon.

Any suggestion that Telegram's cryptography is somehow comparable owing to "half of them Ph.D's in math", or that Signal's extensively-reviewed cryptography is backdoored, is pretty clearly risible.

OTF, meanwhile, funded basically the whole of the privacy-preserving cryptography field, for years (they may still, for all I know); for many years, they were simply throwing money at privacy projects to hire 3rd party auditors, none of whom were at all affiliated with OTF (how I know this is that we participated). People who claim OTF is somehow a snakey USG backdooring enterprise are saying more about themselves than they are about any kind of sophisticated understanding of how crypto software is built.
> Your comparison feels like talking about soldiers with PTSD and then saying "all humans have jobs and deadlines and they depend on these for their livelihood! All humans have stress, how are soldiers different?"

Wouldn't the animals in nature be more like soldiers with PTSD and livestock be more like humans?

> I have no desire to look for images of how disgusting the living conditions and lives of these animals are in an attempt to prove this, but you are welcome to.

Are they any better than the animals in nature being eaten while alive?

> There is no doubt in my mind it is far worse than their state in the wild.

Then you don't know what it is like in the wild. Ever wonder why you don't live out in the wild but rather live in human factory farms instead?

The vast majority of livestock don't live like the few cherrypicked photos/videos pushed by "activists/propagandists". Just like the vast majority of animals in the wild don't live wonderful lives.
Able Health Is Seeking a Health IT Product Manager
After a decade of writing application software in C family languages, I am now working on a big devops effort in a Linux environment. A lot of the syntax is janky but it's pretty amazing what you can accomplish with a shell and the Linux command line tools.
Wouldn't be surprising if Bezos rolls out Amazon's own messaging platform soon. In some sense Amazon is already half-way of being a social network on its own now - if they add personal feeds and "follow" they would become full blown FB+Instagram+Pinterest and adding messaging would complete the package. "Your margin is my opportunity", and the Zuck's margin is among the largest out there.
> and then circumventing the compensation model
> spend some money to compensate the search provider

what?

Wait so you're saying everyone owes it to Google to click the ads? How much? Always? Sometimes?

Does this mean that if you go to the movies you are literally obligated to buy popcorn and soda? I agree with you that if no one clicked ads then Google wouldn't "be able to operate it" for free. But I think that like any business they operate in the aggregate. Some people make you money, some don't. In Google's case, everyone I have ever watched click ads 100% of the time so I don't think they're hurting.

And also, I think if everyone stopped clicking ads and Google was forced to just charge users say $12 a month for search as an informational service with zero ads, I would gladly pay it. And the Internet and the world would be a LOT better.
I use Perl similarly to awk if I need to use regex rather than white space delimited fields.

I think if you know Perl really well and can remember the command line arguments - particularly -E, -n, -I and -p - then it’s a good swap in substitute for grep, sed, awk, cut, bash, etc when whatever 5 min task you’re working on gets a tiny bit more complex.

Similarly a decent version perl 5 seems to be installed everywhere by default.

I’m curious to know if anyone would say the same about python or any other programs? I’m not particularly strong in short python scripting.
I have not changed the subject. Apple clearly delineates which data is e2e encrypted and which data is not. Those same standards apply in the US and China - unless you have evidence otherwise.

I no more trust my privacy to the US government than a Chinese citizen should trust China.
Surely in the context of "End to End backups" the user is the "End" on both ends. The servers shouldn't have the keys. They can be as compromised as they want, but the most they should be able to see is when, how much and where from you're backing up data, but not the actual data.
If unencrypted iCloud back ups is the price for us getting to keep fully encrypted devices, so be it
Super-rich elites making London 'off-limits'
And the existing competitors are apparently charging a 40% cut!

Even more depressingly, good music teachers, once they get established, will typically have as many students as they want through word of mouth alone. So the teachers you'll find who are desperate for students and willing to give up a 20-40% cut are probably mediocre.
AMP pages hosted by the publisher, Google's AMP cache, Bing's AMP cache, or some other company's AMP cache? GGP was complaining about sending any information to Google. Only one of those options does so.
That's surprising, Hajj gets a lot more press/prestige it seems. Saudi is a similar sized population as Iraq, that infographic comparison is interesting to say the least:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Middle_Eastern_countri... (Iran, not listed, is 81.16M)
> Here's the thing: these arguments all too commonly focus on subjective notions of "simplicity", and toy examples divorced from actual common practise, and or solid comparable benchmarks.

I think your missing the point of awk. The O'Reilly sed and awk book has some complex examples, but when I look at my own usage they are all toy examples within a much larger scope. It's more like a special DSL extension for my shell than something I'd pick to build the entire solution, so a comparison to perl, python and ruby don't really make sense, they are general purpose languages but awk just has a couple of features that make it a very specialized yet useful one.

As an example, a have a system for importing and parsing log files that mostly done from a shell script, awk is used in two parts. The first is to transform a structured and easy to read file (records '\n\n' separated) into a csv easier to consume for bash, there's probably quite a few options to do this from tr to bash and it's done inline. The second is to filter the results down to what I need, so I have scripts like:

#!/usr/bin/awk -f
/some common error I don't care about/ { next } #skip line
/other common error/ { next }
/Error/ { print $0 } #this prints error lines, alternatively:
/Error/ && !errors[gensub($1", "", "g", $0)]++ { print $0 } #print each error once
{next} #skip everything else

Apart from one single line which wasn't in the original that's something you could teach a total novice in minutes, the /pattern/{action} syntax is about as simple as programming can be. Execution speed could probably be improved with a specific program but I suspect the bottleneck would be the spinning disk anyway, I run this over hundreds of MB every few minutes and it's not a problem, when I run it manually it's near instantaneous, I spend longer waiting for the desktop calculator to open up these days.
Would you accuse other campaigns of swinging the election for using similar tactics? For example in Obama's 2012 campaign his online organizing director admitted to micro-targeting, harvesting of friends lists (and admitting the users of their app probably didn't know this, and it's now against FB ToS). [1]

This same person recently founded a company that publicly boasted its tech could "sway" the 2020 election. [2]

[1] https://www.npr.org/2018/03/25/596805347/how-does-cambridge-...

[2] https://techcrunch.com/2019/07/01/higher-ground-labs/
Shouldn't Bezos be using an Amazon Fire Phone?
I went through a phase where I tried to curb my casual profanity and use “dag nab it” or “confound it” or the like.

One day I stubbed my toe and came out with a “gosh fucking darn it!!!!”
rails and activeadmin.
define models, include a gem and you got basic crud admin interface.
Unpopular opinion:

We users are better off if Apple is "compromising" on something like this at the stage we're in now - especially since nobody forces you to use iCloud Backups - than we'll be when/if the US gov makes Apple an offer it can't refuse and forces a real backdoor master-key on the whole system top to bottom.

Assumption: That not going full encrypted backups will prevent the government from having the political capital to enact a "crackdown" forcing a backdoor on the devices, iMessage, etc.
I definitely need to give this a whirl. Does it use Python 2 or 3, and is it as simple as importing its ipynb to run it in a local Jupyter notebook?
isn't the google star dead already ?
> malicious actors and abuse

It's hard to consider simply viewing content to be malicious or abusive, no matter how automated.
Like a coming tsunami of people travelling. At least it's all over the country, not just in one place, but still tons of close contact on the train systems.

There are some good docs on Chinese New Year transit on trains and it gets dicy and competitive for space.
Build world-class apps with advanced location and mapping features using rich geographical data without having to roll your own geospatial database.
Had Frontier after ATT Uverse sold their lines to Frontier (Southern Connecticut). The service quickly went downhill and a year later I got out of my contract. They had abysmal customer service and outdated equipment that seemed to be required to use the former ATT lines. The biggest issue came down to service quality and speed. As well as lengthy outages that only increased throughout the year.
w2aew's electronics channel on YouTube
If you or anyone else is interested in this topic I strongly suggest the book Tribe: On Homecoming and Belonging by Sebastian Junger.

That book really made me think pretty hard about this stuff. It's also a short 180 pages.
Can someone explain to me which of the five links in that image are ads so I can have the "aha, sneaky google" moment as well?
Absolutely Valve also! Proton made my GNU/linux only life so much nicer the last few years!
It feels like the part that's missing is the ability to abstract over these different types of function, polymorphically. At least, that seems to be where things fall down when we try to talk about e.g. implementing a Functor trait in Rust.

As a concrete example, the `compose` method given should clearly be the same for `Fn`, `FnOnce`, and `FnMut`. Can we write it once and reuse it for `Fn`, `FnOnce` and `FnMut`? If not, why not?
Does Amazon then proactively email all of the buyers telling them "you may have received a counterfeit product?", or do they figure that if they didn't notice then no harm no foul?
Thank you for the correction.

IEEE's $193m is where we should focus our attention, when it comes to this expense line.
Proton is improving but a lot of games still don't work or have random issues.

And for linux, forget any game that uses BattleEye for anti-cheat detection.
That's interesting. How would that work? Under Android, all apps effectively run inside a Java sandbox, right? So how would the attackers be able to install spyware through Whatsapp?
Can the Linux Foundation Speak for Free Software?
Well it's pretty much driven by customers but same diff really. People who book a night or two then realize they want to extend and ask to pay cash, mostly.
Someone who's already stayed with you just texting the next time, etc.

It works since Airbnb is mostly there to hook you up and protect from crazy people's wanton destruction, so once you know you're dealing with safe people and you've gotten the review, eh.

Wouldn't really be worth the penny-pinching, except people tend to forget about the long-term booking discounts and actually end up paying more than they would've just using airbnb.
Your comment reinforces my point. Google would be extremely reluctant to utilize warrant canaries because of the uncertain legal consequences of doing so.

The same applies to declining to cooperate with government surveillance operations. We don't really know how the government likes it when a big company obstructs its surveillance goals.

On HN today was a headline about Apple reversing course on a business decision voluntarily, simply to please government.

> I'm also not sure how warrant canaries relate to your parents' point.

The points above I believe link the two business decisions.
Interesting perspective. Wouldn’t it be best to do some combo of both? A low volume fan/filter that maintains positive pressure and an internal filter/fan combo?

I mean in labs and manufacturing facilities that need ultra pure air, I’m pretty sure they maintain a positive pressure inside the sensitive areas. Otherwise you’ll be sucking in bad crap from every nook and cranny...
Two full years for an evergreen web browser, which contains probably the largest surface area for software exploits of anything on the machine? I’d argue absolutely yes.

As others have echoed, this is probably a huge marker for malicious bots to Cloudflare.
Nobody except Apple, that is.

That's no different from me offering a remote backup service on a LUKS encrypted box, using sftp or whatever, and then making those claims.
That's a super valid complaint and also completely orthogonal to any of this nonsense about the web being killed because a URL was obfuscated.
The iPhone is plenty open for this. You just need a computer. The rest is fully open source.

https://www.libimobiledevice.org/
FYI to save people some Googling...

I thought "Pancake" was an auto-correct mistake, because I'd never heard that surname before. But it really is the ACM president's surname.
Ironically, the best phones to do that are Google's own Pixels - to give credit where it's due, at least the phones have unlockable bootloaders (unless you buy the Verizon variants).

eg GrapheneOS currently only supports Pixel 2, 3 and 3a:

https://grapheneos.org/releases
You might enjoy this classic story.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Roads_Must_Roll