skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
25% of Americans do not own a computer. 19% don't own a smartphone. 4% don't own a cellular phone at all. [1]

22% of Americans don't own a credit card -- although neither the Bankrate or Statistic Brain studies counted debit cards accurately, which are equally useful for tracking. [2]

All Americans do not even have Social Security numbers, as there are several moderately-sized religions who are excused from participating in the process. [3]

Finally, not everyone in America is here legally, and many of those people go to great lengths to avoid using technology or participating in programs which would lead to their identification and tracking.

All of these are good reasons to conduct a census now and then. But even if you find none of these convincing, the iron truth of the current situation is that none of these alleged panopticon efforts you're alluding to are allowed to release any of that information -- not to benefit allotment committees, not to infrastructure planners, not even to local law enforcement, so in practice it doesn't do anyone in the government any good at all.

1 - https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/fact-sheet/mobile/

2 - https://www.crnrstone.com/insightvault/2018/03/04/many-ameri...

3 - https://secure.ssa.gov/poms.nsf/lnx/0110225035
seconded "The Body Keeps the Score"
First, thank you for taking the time to take a look and write some feedback. It's very helpful.

You aren't the first person to have difficultly understanding now to get your bearings. We hear you (and others) loud and clear about an FAQ/feature list.

An actual voting system is an interesting idea. But we prioritize feature work 100% base on feedback. I think we'll probably end up favoring requests from license holders, but we're going to attempt to satisfy as many users as we can. Within the constraints of our desire to build out features carefully.

Navigation by name (to open a file for example) is in the works, but was cut from the 1.0. Errors and warning are also being worked on. Running/testing is highly requested, but we're focusing on those for now.

Extremely kind of you to support the work like that. We will try our best make it something you do want to use for day to day coding.
JavaScript has a huge upside because a lot of people already know JavaScript. The more tools and platforms switch to JavaScript the more of an office superhero users are when they know something about the language. The productivity of employees will jump off the charts. When you send someone to train for one thing that utilizes JavaScript you get the benefit that those skills may also happen to work with something else as well.
According to that, we should be just about out of antimony by now. Yet somehow the market for drugs and batteries still seems to be humming along. 2/10 fear porn.
Ruby is about equal to Perl as a language for interactive command line usage, and both are better than Python.

Comparing RubyGems to CPAN, CPAN is about 2x as large, has a better infrastructure, better testing, and is generally better.

Comparing CPAN to PyPI (the Python version), they are about the same size, PyPI has a worse testing story, has more up to date modules, is growing faster and seems to be of similar quality. If you want write a system that integrates with a recent standard, support from Google, or to use something like machine learning, Python is the clear winner.

Adding JavaScript, I consider node.js to have the worst command line story, worst repository system, but it is extremely popular.

I personally use Perl for command line stuff and Python otherwise. I use JavaScript when I have to (and sadly I have to a lot). It is rare for me to bother with Ruby. But I learned Perl first, and have written more in Perl than the others combined.

Does this answer your question fully?
I would say the key to decentralization success is making decentralized services that users don't even know are decentralized. As long as using a decentralized service requires more effort than centralized services it will only be enthusiasts using the products.
I was thinking today that it would be a good use of that map data thats recorded from our phones GPS for mapping the route of the virus.

Hypothetically: If all infected submitted their map data for the last few days (annonymously - no need to identify people) and all of that data was plotted over maps, you could identify the routes and direction of infections.

I don't know if it would be anything more than an interesting visualisation of the data already collected, but the comment mentioning Edward Tufte really got me thinking how to visualise the data we have properly.

We haven't seen something spreading like this in my lifetime anyway and at the same time, we've never had so much data on ourselves in my lifetime either, might be a good time to put it to good use for once.
Sure, but, we can hope for them to do the right thing and praise them as and when they do.
Should You Cancel Your Travel Plans Because of Coronavirus?
If you think that all 8 billion people can live with the environmental impact of a select portion of the human race who have already done irrevocable damage to the planet you are living in a fantasy. I hope that's not a guiding goal for you in life.
Every other first-world country on Earth has nationalized health care, so I don't find it unreasonable for me to question if your argument is sound when presented with no accompanying facts.

Asking for facts and being replied to with the effect "Really?" is far from effective persuasion. Emotional appeals won't work. Facts and data will.
Ask HN: How do you develop locally with Kubernetes?
What's your dev workflow?
> We have numbers, but every time people tend to ignore them or say we should not trust the numbers, take them with a grain of salt, "I think this is way worse, it's going to get way worse" and so on.

I think everyone notices it now because they all say the same thing and in the same manner. It's always, the numbers can't be trusted ( China/WHO/CDC/EU/UN/US/etc ) followed by an "anecdote" and/or their own made up numbers and without fail an intentionally misleading and false mortality/fatality rate. Every covid and even non-covid thread has the exact same fearmongering. Whatever the case, it's definitely intentional and feels a tad bit organized.
As bad as prosecutors are, judges an Congress and buried decide what's admissable.

Ultimately, when no one in the process has scientific/mathematical literacy, pseudoscience proliferates.
well for one thing it jams up the enzyme that reads out viral rna-

and it likely incorporates into the viral rna transcript and makes insertions that destroy viral functionality
At some point, I hope we can get past this argument. Learning a new language for rudimentary tasks is not particularly hard. I'm not sure why people decided that JavaScript of all things was what we had to all latch onto.
You’ve probably heard a lot about the coronavirus and it might be scaring you from pursuing your travel plans.

With this post, we aim to cut through some of the noise out there about the coronavirus (COVID-19) by providing you with:

- Reasons why many frequent flyers aren’t changing their travel plans.

- New facts about the COVID-19, including fatality rates and comparisons with SARS, MERS, and the Common Flu.

- Much needed context behind scary clickbait headlines.

- Some of our personal advice about precautions you can take.

- Information about whether COVID-19 is the new normal
The "big idea" folks typically go further by treating their ideas like their offspring and insulate critiques of those ideas from the big, scary world of reality. Also, making an analogy to "cattle" sends the wrong message to the demographics of developers these days; I would replace that with something inanimate.
I think the Pi4 has a better USB stack, but the Pi3 has some stability problems with USB peripherals. I eventually (with the right boot parameters) got a Pi3 to run OpenCV on a webcam without occasionally locking up; the PiZero still occasionally chokes on a USB sound card for me. It'll probably work, but audio hats (using I2S) or a camera using the dedicated camera bus are more reliable, though more limited than USB peripherals.
Wow that does look very cool! Development on the iPad is going to be something that seems to be in very high demand.
I love this website. Can anyone from the UK explain what a 'mutti-car' is?
They keep compatibility but abandon a lot of stuff. If they switch to JavaScript VBA development will slow to almost nothing and it will take years for the JavaScript stuff to catch up, if ever.

Something similar happened with visual studio. 2008 was really nice, very customizable and fast. Then they redid everything in 2010 and the result was slower with way less capability. And even now there are still a lot of features that 2008 had not implemented.
Of all the numerous and growing usability problems with macOS, this isn't one that's ever occurred to me.

Applications is, by default, in the Favorites bar of Finder. Which is where a user would find the Download folder, granted that Applications is lower in the list, but...

Second, a significant number of programs are installed from the App Store now. Of those that aren't, it's still quite normal to open up a DMG and have two icons: the application, and a link to the Applications folder. Often with a bit of icon magic so the application points at the folder.

Some applications still use an installer, in which case the app lands in the Applications folder, again.

Is this really a problem? I've been using OSX for far too long to be in a position to tell...
Not sure why they wouldn't go something C#/.NET based. If you're going to go the JavaScript route, at least pick TypeScript.
So long as there is a permanent criminal record and jobs can not hire people based on that no real change will come.
I guess on the road they're mostly a danger to themselves. I can't imagine a real car getting more than a smallish-dent from even a head-on collision with this thing. Lots of bloody carnage though.

Liability though...
Much of the work of charities and NGOs goes on behind the scenes. The public facing efforts, esp. with regards environment and other indirect causes (tho also in cases such as e.g. homelessness, social welfare, human rights), are generally attempts to raise funds or, more importantly, to shore up support and public sentiment for advocacy efforts with government, industry, and other power brokers.

It is rarely, if ever, about feeling nice about yourself. In fact charity work generally demands being confronted daily with what you like least about the world. My personal experience working for an environmental NGO is that, while not entirely thankless, it is exhausting and often depressing work.

Our charity is one of the many asking individuals to take small actions in their daily lives. It's a small request and direct outcomes are difficult if not impossible to measure, however our org has been directly involved in any number of environmental policy changes across the many businesses and even cities that we work with. These efforts bubble up. From little things big things grow.
I don't see why not. When you post your photos to Facebook, you are giving them a license to it, but that license certainly doesn't extend to companies that scrape Facebook's site. Seems ripe for someone to deal a punishing class-action to Clearview. One caveat is that you might need to register your copyright in order to be able to recover damages.

I also wonder if one might be able to use the DMCA process against Clearview.
It’s almost always better to use a standard than grow something at home. When your project gets bigger (which most projects of interest will), the inertia of the homegrown solution will become a detriment and liability. Only simple or novel use cases should be kept as internal libraries, and dates are not simple.
Most potential users of VBA don’t know JavaScript or any other language. And VB is way more accessible than JavaScript.
Literally painful to read. Both in content and formatting. I have no idea how someone can type that much about a kids' game.
New SaaS Subscription Manager
Really? Cmd left and right are built into my muscle memory at this point. I'm pretty good with vim but not a day goes by that I don't try this by accident and end up in the next terminal over...
I just felt the whole article was undermined by the focus on religious nonconformity.
It will be interesting to see how the subject is white Protestants passing the virus at church and work. I doubt their religion will be framed as the problem.

The religious aspect also obstructs the more interesting questions of privacy
It says in the message it's storing and serving build artifacts that is driving costs. This means the expense is in disk and bandwidth, not CPU and RAM. Switching to Gogs would cut down on the resources which are not identified as the problem.
The US doesn't seem to have millions of starving people; it does, however, have millions of obese people with poor but caloric diets.
This is not the case everywhere in the US. E.g. in Montana there is no minimum age to leave a child unsupervised. In our town young kids walk and bike to school. Probably not aged 6 but certainly by 8-10.
Joel Spolsky was making the claim that they had, fifteen years ago. (And I really tend to agree with him, both then and now.)

https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2004/06/13/how-microsoft-lost...

(Particularly relevant to this article, because Spolsky was the original 'designer' for the Excel/VBA integration: https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2006/06/16/my-first-billg-rev... )
This is not facebook, this is HN. You can't possible conceive that a user of HN does this confusion, do you? Because in that case you are not only insulting my intelligence, you're insulting yours as well. Also a simple click on my name and reading a few answers I've given here could tell you I am definitely NOT the usual facebook user who somehow got lost and ended here.

Let me tell you again, so there isn't any confusion: Starting mid-November last year when I switched from Chrome to Firefox, I had google Earth from day one on Firefox. And yes, I am very much aware the difference between not only google earth and google maps but also the difference between google maps 2D and google maps 3D possibilities. I have kids, I use all these 3 tools when my kids are doing their Geography homework. Is it clear now?
Individual initiative doesn't go very far because business isn't a worker's meritocracy. What would go further would be you and your coworkers walking out until your colleague gets a raise. Watch how fast it happens.
Betteridge's law of headlines rings true.
Short answer? No. Just like COBOL and fortran. With us until the heat death of the universe.
I feel like home NATs were one of the biggest developments that curbed decentralization and led to the dominance of a "producer vs. consumer" internet. STUN/TURN and IPv6 are big enablers of a move back to the roots of the internet, right?
By now, yes, this is true. When it was first released it was just Apple-flavored Growl.

I don't find myself using most of what's been added. I routinely forget that there's a drop-down with all the stale Notifications in it, and other than the evening Do Not Disturb which turns on automatically, I forget (sometimes to my detriment) that I can activate it manually.
It's not the truth. The grid could be powered with no "base load sources" at all. Intermittent + dispatchable could cover everything.
The last time so checked, I could not find anything preventing the use of Lora in space (if you are operating in the UK). However, the frequencies you can use are different over different territories so it is up to your satellite to use the correct ones depending on where it is and what it is pointing at.
I'm working on an excell addin right now. It doesn't use VBA (it uses microsoft interop libs for .NET) And I have zero interest in using VBA, but I will admit, it would have been much easier to do this project in VBA instead of C#.
Debugging would have been easier. I could debug inside the VBA code-behind instead of Attaching to the excel process in Visual Studio.
Deployment would have been easier. I could make an .xlam file and just give it to the users instead of A separate visual studio project that creates an installer on each build.
Excel interop would have been easier too(probably, I'm not 100% sure.) But using the Microsoft.Office.Interop.Excel libs are kinda hard. I don't have any good reference material for this lib, but for VBA, there are tutorials all over the internet for doing common things.
I mostly avoided VBA because I prefer the syntax of C#. I would imagine most people that only know VBA would have no interest in using C# to write office interop code, and I don't blame them. As for javascript, I doubt anyone that knows VBA well would have a hard time learning javascript, and if the codebehind for excel was slowly migrated to that, most devs would welcome the change.
Perl starts up really, really fast though, so invoking it repeatedly in a pipeline is more practical than with a Python program for that reason.
> so far

The really clever ways to abuse this kind of data haven't even been invented yet. We are still fumbling around with these technologies. Most of the currently visible examples of data misuse are "high tech"/"on the internet" variation of the scams and abuses humans have always done.

Current data misuse is a minor concern. The larger concern is that these databases will probably sill exist 20/30/50 years from now when someone invents a really clever way to abuse data. While it isn't possible[1] to predicting how technology will be used in the future, if the trends in technology over the last few decades suggest that this clever new abuse of data will be difficult for the average person to understand, highly disruptive to existing institutions, and the damage will cascade across the interdependencies[2] we've been adding to everything.

> Building a large list of potential suspects ... sounds very useful

Increasing the number of "potential suspects" is a terrible idea, because most of those suspects are innocent. Adding people to the suspect pool lowers S/N (actually-useful-targets/"potential suspects"). The ideal (magic) tool would produce a minimal list that simply identified the actual criminal. Adding more people to that list makes it less useful.

Also, see the Base Rate Fallacy[3] and the Birthday Paradox[4].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Connections_%28TV_series%29#Co...

[2] http://geer.tinho.net/geer.blackhat.6viii14.txt (section 10, "Convergence")

[3] https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2012/05/criminal_inte...

[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Birthday_problem
That's at least as old as the C language, including also years being since 1900:

https://en.cppreference.com/w/c/chrono/tm
You're right, we should automate everything with Rust \s

People both over and underestimate the ability of users to learn a language for quick scripting/automation. Languages like Bash, Python, JS, VBA... they're extremely accessible for quick and dirty work, which is why people latch on to them compared to others.
Ha - good timing! I've been using VBA today and yesterday actually!

Often only a few times a year I use it now but when I do it I feel productive.

In case your wondering I has a previous Excel VBA Macro that I wrote for updating a SQL Server Database based on data in Excel. The macro first has to run checks against data in an IBM AS/400 Database.

I ended up having to pull out the macro to do a bulk update in an ERP. It was faster to do this then re-write in an modern language (especially since I work with the data in Excel first).
I always find it fascinating things like subroutines that are obvious to us now had to be invented by someone. You can easily imagine an alternate history where computing would look totally differently.
Will VBA live?
> Refusing to serve, say, black people is illegal because of the pernicious societal harm caused by discrimination.

That is true, but that's not what the Colorado guy was doing. (In the Oregon case, you're right, it's much more similar.)

The Colorado guy was closer to somebody who refuses to make a cake for MLK Day. Not making a cake to celebrate Martin Luther King does make you a pretty crappy person, but it's not quite the same thing as excluding a customer based on their race.
So much for "our only customers are law enforcement"
This is crux of the problem with their take-off. A few weeks ago I set up a personal Matrix homeserver and when my non-technical partner asked me what I was working on I didn't even know where to start. She is not computer-illiterate by any means, but being outside the industry, a concept such as federation is completely foreign.

Even trying to explain federation to my work colleagues who are in the industry is difficult, because it is such a fundamental shift from the normal web infrastructure.
We have two compost haulers available to us in my midsize Midwestern city. The provider we use gives us a cart that's the same size as our trash and recycling carts, and accepts a wide variety of compostable waste (not just food scraps). We fill up the compost cart much quicker than the trash cart.
It's often cleaner than one in the cool, hip, vegan-only, fifty-craft-micro-beers-on-tap establishment I occasionally eat at.
What the Discovery channel, I mean ArsTechnica, calls "science" shall not be questioned! ;)

Also it has "Royal Society" in the paper so it has carte blanche to pick seemingly frivolous topics if they have merit. Furthermore, very good cooking is mostly scientific with some art. French Guy Cooking's Alex has more of a lab/workshop than a kitchen because he's so fanatical to improve the art and science of food.
Mac menus list the keyboard shortcuts for menu items right next to the items.
I don’t think it will. Microsoft might add another macro language but everyone is obsessed with backwards compatibility at MS and I highly doubt they would remove something as widely used as this. I used to be really annoyed by this as an engineer, but in contrast to Google’s culture where products are shutdown all the time I’ve started to come around that users should come first to avoid getting this reputation, even if it does become a combinatorial hell of different versions. I work at MS so I’m biased probably
"Eric Schmidt: I Used to Run Google. Silicon Valley Could Lose to China.

We can’t win the technology wars without the federal government’s help."

I don't think we have to get past the paywall to get the message.

Edit: Even as a non-US citizen I agree. US and Europe needs to use both their companies and their governments to avoid this.

Of course, Europe is still hoping to escape Silicon Valley control...
Showing the Android Keyboard Reliably
I'm not sure it's universally true. I didn't but that was years ago at a private school and I still took a summer Drivers Ed class for insurance reasons.

Given that most students do get a drivers license, it wouldn't be surprising if Drivers Ed were a mandatory part of some high school curricula. Note that this is probably just the theory part in most cases and doesn't include actual on the road instruction. (Which is typically done by parents or by a company--the latter again in part for insurance price reasons.)
Mothers. Japan is actually known for having very poor child support options outside of family. The percent of married woman with children that work is quite low.
looks linear to me
I had to open it in a private browser window
For context, this was only recently added; previously you'd have to do a couple of command line invocations.