skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Go into the Preferences, Video Systems (last item), uncheck "Automatically discover nearby devices"

The default behavior of Webex is to grab the microphone and keep it always-open looking for audio signals from Webex-compatible hardware.

I found this because I was bothered that even though I wasn't on a call Windows was telling me that Webex was actively using the Microphone, so I dug in. IIRC the post that guided me to this, on Apple devices with their earbuds it apparently also significantly degrades the sound due to some codec issue (or did in the past).
Great article, thanks for sharing
> We (as a civilization) need to take care of the people who aren't the ones making the new fortunes.

OK, outsider here. But it's my impression that people "making the new fortunes" are a much smaller subset of the startup economy than many think. It's arguably similar to the common US middle class belief in being temporarily embarrassed millionaires.
You can join Zoom meetings on your browser without creating an account. It's a bit off the beaten path:

1. Go to zoom.com
2. Click "Join a meeting"
3. Enter meeting id and click Join
4. Ignore the automatic app download
5. Go back
6. Click "Join a meeting" again
7. Enter meeting id and click Join again
8. Ignore the app download again
9. Click at "If nothing prompts, click here"
10. Click "Join from your browser"
11. Agree to terms of service
12. Enter password and name, click Join
This is a hard problem. The evidence for this is the decades of failed attempts to get people to use pgp and other systems where I need to have a freaking party in order to figure out who I can message and how before I actually start communicating.
Hey Mike, congrats on the launch, Zappy seems like a handy tool so far. Here's some quick feedback:

- The signup process felt disjointed. I was excited to give Zappy a try but then fell into a Zapier signup and onboarding flow with Zapier messaging, etc. I was greeted with a Zapier trial when all I really signed up for was Zappy? Anyhow, not to nitpick but the experience and value perception here could be better. I understand Zappy is an acquisition tool but think it could be more relevant, example, when I actually do take a Zappy, poke me with an automation suggestion on how i might leverage Zapier to easily share that to a slack channel..

- I honestly could not figure out how to use Zappy. I installed the tool successfully, clicked the donut in my top bar and couldn't figure it out. I finally realized you have to click the orange donut in the drop-down to activate the tool. Suggestion, instead of your empty state CTA being a push to join a Zapier paid plan, make it an arrow pointing to the orange donut, I bet you a donut that'll alone increase conversion on # of Zappy's taken. Run an experiment and let me know. I bet this also represents a large friction point for your users.

- How do I delete a Zappy? I still can't figure this one out.

- I am unable to create a shortcut. I keep pressing "press combination" but can't seem to create a shortcut.

One thing I always try to strive towards is extreme empathy for the user, literally put yourself into the shoes of your customer and make every effort to see/experience the product through their mindset. Complexity is an unfortunate aspect of most products, the good products just do a good job of emerging users into that complexity.
Google should have no problem replacing Zoom. They have 14,638 chat apps to choose from. Wait, they just released another one, so make that 14,639.
a) The economic snowball we're finally starting to see for renewables is largely driven by governments finally being forced by the undeniable reality to take real regulation steps.

b) The economic cost of waiting 10 years to address an exponential process is going to far outweigh the cost there would've been to give an extra "oomph" to action, I'm sure.
We've priced it relatively high at first, but we've also put the language "If you want to get on the paid plan for Hallway, but don't want to pay, just email us at support@hallway.chat with a link to yourself sharing Hallway on social media and we'll give you a discount"

We can look into adding tiers
who else thought about son of Anton, from Silicon Valley show ?
Ryan (2004)
Yes, but dependencies are handled by the package manager. So if one is missing, it's a simple matter of adding it to the list of dependencies.

In any case, the point I was trying to make is that the development cycle with containers, in my experience, is slower because you have to go through the build step every time you make a change. For an intpreted language like python, that shouldn't be necessary until close to the end where you test a fresh build before submitting the changes for review.
Your claim reeks of settled financial and maybe even first world comfort. It's really much more than 0.001% of people that could use something which doesn't require them to have access to an easy credit card, debit card or formal digital banking. There are millions of unbanked even in many highly developed nations and crypto or some middleman-free version of it could be a viable solution for many of them if it's user.friendliness could be improved a bit as well as wider knowledge of its usability.
Vectrex on Launch Day
You do realize that in fact most developed countries actually have a healthcare system much like the US. Also most of the countries with a single payer health system have 3rd party health insurance that can be purchased. A true one payor only plan is the exception not the rule.
> #2 Gig-style businesses tend to vastly underpay employees.

Yes and as said below, that's by design. Uber/Lyft for example would not survived if they priced their service to allow a fair pay for the gig worker after accounting for vehicle costs. This whole system is built on underpaying workers and making people believe that a ride could "really" be that cheap. It isn't. There is a reason why taxi rides were expensive before Uber became a thing.
And while we're add it, make health insurance premiums paid by individuals 100% deductable from their federal income tax.
I would not call NoSQL data stores more agile. While it is true that you can add new columns at any point in time the same cannot be said about supporting new access patterns you didn't design for.
The ability to create an email alias is very handy to arrange that emails from specific contacts reside in their appropriate Inbox. For example credit card notifications might be sent cc793xyz@fastmail.com and a `rule' (instruction) ensures their correct storage.
NOTE: this technique hides your normal email addresses.

I use and recommend Fastmail. https://www.fastmail.com/
Big fan of mosh, I've used mosh + tmux + neovim for years
Great comment. I am part of the minority that is dreading being forced to use Typescript some day, at least until they come up with a solution to annotate partial function application and the like.

TS solves problems I don’t have, and promotes a style I don’t want. I don’t want thousands of global symbols in hundreds of files in my project. At least TS has the decency to infer types in some cases, or at least put the type clutter after an identifier instead of before it, but it’s usually only superfluous clutter to me personally.

I realize that many people like TS. I just hope they understand why some of us are less enthusiastic.
Not "underpaid" as in "not a living wage", but underpaid because once the cost of equipment is factored in, people can end up being paid less than minimum wage. It's a wage floor loophole that should be closed. Though to be fair, rideshare isn't the only guilty industry.
For everyone freaking out about zoom security, some facts: 52 CVEs for Zoom https://cve.mitre.org/cgi-bin/cvekey.cgi?keyword=zoom 240 for webex https://cve.mitre.org/cgi-bin/cvekey.cgi?keyword=webex 1 for gotomeeting https://cve.mitre.org/cgi-bin/cvekey.cgi?keyword=gotomeeting and 2 for pexip https://cve.mitre.org/cgi-bin/cvekey.cgi?keyword=pexip which means nobody is looking at the last two...
> It looked at 6,696 operational plants and 1,046 in the pipeline and found that 46% will be unprofitable this year, up from 41% in 2019

I thought this is due to Covid-19 but apparently it's a chronic trend.

> That will rise to 52% by 2030 as renewables and cheaper gas outcompete coal, the think tank said.

A very slow one too.
or is the difference that any other tool runs in the browser (which might be old or locked down), while Zoom childishly just gets admin-privilege to turn the tables in its favour?
Both C# and Kotlin have a 'Dynamic' type for just that escape hatch. IMHO, That's a better way over TS - since types might not be the right thing 100% of the time, but they are 95% of the time.
> a threat that materialises in 2050+

What the heck are you talking about? We see the issues globally for last 20 years at least. Droughts, heatwaves in Europe killing tens of thousands, Islands in pacific being flooded due to sea rising and so on and on.
Hmm. Possibly the landlords as a group could initiate bankruptcy proceedings against Staples. That would undercut Sycamore's asset values.

Disclaimer: I am a landlord,and this is what I would envisage doing in a similar situation. Just right now, we are watching several tenants who are possibly about to go down the same route. In my country, there is no one set date for rents to be due as leases begin or end on any day of the month.
To make this more timely, DE Shaw Research has been posting COVID-19 related simulations done on their Antons: http://www.deshawresearch.com/resources_sarscov2.html
Yeah, I expected this to be a joke
> How do you propose to take away everyone's possessions and give them to the state without full blown authoritarianism?

Property is supported by the state. Property rights are meaningless if they aren't recognized and enforced legally.

Like I said, "communism" is very broad.

A central theme in communist ideology is that workers own the means of productions.
That can have many forms, but does not necessarily lead to a centralized state, like the Soviet one.

EDIT: I find that the bs jobs are a symptom of centralized/privatized means of productions. Which is why I made the "pretend to work" comment. Corp style jobs resemble soviet style labor.
Bureaucracies come in many forms. Some look like the USSR, some look like middle management.
In order to do this, the signal server must maintain a list of who is allowed to talk to who, otherwise the list of people available on signal can be obtained through enumeration.

This is a privacy trade off. Some services chose to keep this list. Signal chose to use phone numbers.
A second hand Herman Miller Aeron chair.
If you have a bigger "lumberjack" body, they have a Large size.
If you are on carpet, I recommend upgrading to larger wheels (3").
Or just use Libreoffice and insert the image in the right place. Has worked for years.
Or Matamo. Its free and I've found it to be excellent.
That sounds like an appropriate response. I do think the BYOD push over the past 10+ years has improved Enterprise experience for end users and I expect things like Zoom and the current push for work-from-home does the same for working remotely.

I hope both Zoom improves their practices and other enterprise tools step up their game, too. It's been a joke that the first 15m of a meeting is spent getting things working for decades now.

Zoom seems to have spent time in some areas almost completely ignored by most others: Linux, more than a handful of simultaneous users, and poor connections (I feel like Zoom has other benefits, but these are egregiously bad with competitors). At my previous job it wasn't just slightly-more-blocky video chat in a slightly-more-awkward GUI client. We used our own equipment (and mostly used Linux in-house) and were spread all over the world (some countries had poor connectivity). We also had our company meetings via Zoom. We often tried other software and didn't bless any one of them, but I don't think any other single software would work. Without Zoom I imagine we'd do most meetings via voice--likely over POTS.
You should check out CleanShot then, it has everything mentioned
Do you have a budget of some sort that your company provides? Or is it just on an ad hoc basis
What should I look at conversing with another person? I used to look in the eyes or just in the face, I don't understand why is it harassment? Should I look at tits instead, is it less harassment or what? Shall I just close my eyes? West culture is weird.
The moment someone points out Google makes a huge amount of money on scams and malware, and due to Section 230, can't really be held responsible for it.
In both the elephant and orangutan examples, this dichotomy might be because resident males have already built a social structure that works. The value of another male alpha male might be redundant. If that is the case, the younger male physiologically self regulates because the destruction of a new alpha male isn't worth the marginal benefits. In other species this is not the case and constant fighting to be the alpha male is worth it in aggregate.
Which isn't a reflection on Google's security practices, but that of cell phone companies. My OS is secure and, if third party vulnerability prices are anything to go by, as or more secure than any other consumer OS. That would reflect well on the Android security teams.
Protections? Tell that to all of the "full-time" workers that were laid off within days of the economic crash. If the money isn't coming into the business, it won't be going out of the business in paychecks. Period. You can wave your hands about magical "protections" but accounting is the real master.

Gig work lets the businesses and the workers adapt weekly, daily or even hourly. Full-time work is onerous to startup and so businesses wait until they're desperate before hiring anyone. You would do the same. None of us have extra cash to toss around.
Yeah we need better language. It's just a fun way for teams to stay connected. So for $1 a day a company can add it to as many channels / use it for as many teams they want.
What you call "comfort level" is in fact the primary value proposition of a tool like signal and the fact that they have chosen to compromise on it to drive adoption is symptomatic of the many things wrong with the setting in which this decision was made.
Not unlike calling out the EARNIT senators on using child abuse justifications in bad faith to promote the agenda of censorship and surveillance.
I find that pretty far fetched. I'd need to see some actual data on that that isn't explained by the commodity parts getting cheaper to be convinced.
To be fair, the mortality rate could be a lot higher than estimated. That has huge error bars too. We all look on the bright side (why it might be lower). There's also a dark side.
I think I have a greater risk of dying from deep vein thrombosis in their cramped seats. I'd roll the dice on a 737-MAX any day of the week.
Disney+ hits 50M paid subscribers globally
Stealing and coercing people is unethical.

Lying or misleading is unethical.

Offering a product or a service for someone who willingly wants to pay for the product or service is not unethical at any level.
I think this readjustment would tend towards extracting more money from fewer people who can pay and letting the rest go without care.
Hello, World – Zerodha
I (single male, no dependents, early 50s, a "previously existing condition") am paying approx. $750/month for an ACA "Silver" plan (https://obamacarefacts.com/silver-plan/) from Blue Cross/Blue Shield (the only provider in my area).

Yes, it is possible to purchase your own healthcare independently. Prior to the ACA, however, things like preexisting conditions were not covered, which is how I know a Symbicort asthma inhaler costs about $700/ea.
It's a Chronic Strain on the coal industry. The coal industry is going up in smoke. Profit estimates are in the weeds as green energy is at an all time high.

Sorry... couldn't resist.
Exactly. There's an exclusive mindset in tech that it's okay to automate human problems and then just say there's nothing they can do when automation isn't adequate. Other businesses have huge percentages of their workforce tackling problems that tech companies just say they're not responsible for, like content moderation, customer service, etc.
Uh, really? In my experience Chromium takes far longer than Firefox to build, especially from scratch. Not to mention all the steps and bespoke repo-management tools involved in just checking out the code and bringing up a working build environment.

What problems did you run into building Firefox?
I would say it's likely that the SV Anton was named after this.
Half-Life: Alyx isn't VR's killer app – but it's modding community could be
Tiled layout was recently released which allows you to view a grid of all people on the call in addition to the shared screen.
If they were doing it over (which they now can't) the US should insist on competent independent oversight for EMV and its card issuers. EMV ("Chip and PIN" or in the US case "Chip and Signature") is a proprietary system, and so inevitably the priority for the three card networks (Europay, Mastercard, Visa - hence the name) was to get something they could roll out cheaply and hopefully save some money, security wasn't irrelevant but it wasn't priority #1.

There are a bunch of choices that EMV makes which seem dumb, and then a bunch of choices for issuers that invariably get selected for the overall economic impact for the issuer (typically a bank) not the cost of fraud to individuals.

I don't want to oversell this. Automatically EMV's chips are safer than magnetic stripe because the whole point of magnetic stripe is that writers are a cheap commodity. A bad guy who wants to clone magstripe credit cards can buy everything needed in a hobbyist electronics store, assemble it at home and they've got a cottage industry. Cloning modern protected microchips is by no means impossible, but it's not a viable plan as a side hustle for your job waiting tables.

BUT EMV could have been significantly less fragile, and consumers could have come away from this with all the same protection and the knowledge that this helps them as much as the banks.

Example: An EMV card can be dumb. It can offer Static Data Authentication. SDA is something you could copy from a real card and play back, not so different from the magnetic stripe problem - whereas the more expensive Dynamic Data option prevents this. Why is SDA allowed? Because it makes the cards slightly cheaper. For end users the card seems the same, for the issuer they just saved a few bucks. But now the end users have less fraud protection. Maybe your bank uses these cheaper "dumb" cards for accounts it deems at lower risk, or with smaller credit limits, or at random, you have no way to know.
> "Gig-style businesses tend to vastly underpay employees."

to your point, this is a function of information asymmetries in the labor market. based on a rough calculation from a couple years ago, a gig driver needs to make about $18/hour (including downtime between rides) to break even against a minimum wage job. between that and additional tax and benefits burden, it's no wonder most people forgo deeper consideration and focus on the gross income of gig work.

it's obvious that workers need to be given direct and upfront information about this. another remedy is to make it as easy to comply with labor, tax and other regulations as a w-2 job (where the employer does nearly all the work). you could also let workers set their prices, but riders hate having prices fluctuate a lot so maybe the platform needs to take on some of that risk.

lot's of things could be changed to make it a more even playing field between worker and platform.
Emacs was first released 44 years back
I'm not going to tackle #1 other than to say I do agree that health insurance shouldn't be provided by your employer.

But for #2, you seem to be asserting that there is some method by which it is possible to determine that a particular salary/wage is "fair" and that "fair" wage must be mandated for all people.

You've asserted that gig businesses are underpaying and yet lots of people continue to take those jobs. Are you asserting that all those people are incapable of determining what is best for them? Are you asserting that what works for a college student on the side or a retired person or someone who needs extreme flexibility in their hours is unimportant and that the only the particular compensation package that you declare to be "fair" is valid for everyone?

Not everyone puts the same value on different job criteria. Some people want flexibility, some people want safety, some people want benefits (see #1), some people want to work outside, some people just want to keep busy, etc. Declaring that there is a "fair" wage for any particular job presumes not only that jobs are identical but that people are identical also.
The ICHRA[1], which came into effect on January 2020 is an interesting step in the direction of decoupling health insurance from employment.

There's even a YC company that offers ICHRA functionality for employers[2].

[1] https://ichra.com/

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22527102
I think you've gone well off the reservation with lack of perspective. In most modern western societies your spouse that you cheat on can indeed very easily leave you any time she or he wants to, and they're certainly not powerless in either a legal or practical exit sense. If we're talking about a non-legally binding girlfriend/boyfriend relationship, even easier for them to walk away. And no, cheating on someone sexually or romantically is not the same as abusing them in any legal sense, and it's definitely far removed from being a child beater, torturer or rapist. Drop the absurd hyperbole please. These are literal criminal acts of violence against another person, whereas the former is an act of dishonesty to one consenting, adult who understands basic fidelity risks in life and sexual license with another consenting adult. Neither of these is enough to get someone classified as "human garbage" in such denigratory terms in my view, and certainly not enough to put them on par with the genuinely vicious acts of coercive predatory behavior you're comparing cheating to. Your view is absurdly emotional and outside reasoned analysis of moral comparisons dude.
> Protections? Tell that to all of the "full-time" workers that were laid off within days of the economic crash.

Full time employees get benefits like unemployment, health insurance, COBRA, FICA contributions etc.

And tons of other legal protections that contractors do not normally get.
A few questions I have left unanswered:

- does the deploy commander create the hotfixes or the engineers who authored the commits?

- it seems that the deployment is fully automated, but engineers still have to be available in case of problems, does that impact productivity?

- "Once we are confident that core functionality is unchanged", is there a particular metric to assert that?

- how long does deployment take currently?

- switching directories doesn't seem like a fully atomic operation yet, isn't there a delay from loading the files and wouldn't that generate 502s from the service? Maybe it's better to create new instances with the new files and then change the router to use those (blue-green)?
I get that, but you don't get more information than number of DNS queries - nothing about users
> we found a way to make EBS work.

Can you say more about what you did with EBS? It seems like it would be necessary to make some compromises in availability and disaster recovery because any given EBS volume is restricted to the availability zone where it was created.