skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
X-Windows IS a dozen layers of poorly-designed abstraction, itself. To the core. Most of which nobody even uses any more. But is still required to be there. And yes, it is extremely bad for remote applications.

The X-Windows Disaster

https://medium.com/@donhopkins/the-x-windows-disaster-128d39...

>X: The First Fully Modular Software Disaster

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17056516

John Steinhart wrote XTool, a nice snappy reimplementation of X11 on top of SunView! ;)

https://web.archive.org/web/20171008204348/https://minnie.tu...

X and NeWS History

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15325226

Jon Steinhart wrote:

>XTool was very small and fast compared to the X sample server because I wrote the server from scratch. I think that I'm the only person to write an X server outside of the X Consortium. One of the things that I learned by doing it was that the X Consortium folks were wrong when they said that the documentation was the standard, not the sample server. There were significant differences between the two.

>The only really worthwhile thing about X was the distributed extension registration mechanism. All of the input, graphics and other crap should be moved to extension #1. That way, it won't be mandatory in conforming implementations once that stuff was obsolete. As you probably know, that's where we are today; nobody uses that stuff but it's like the corner of an Intel chip that implements the original instruction set. As an aside, I upset many when working on OpenDoc for Apple and saying the same thing there.

>The atom/property mechanism allows clients to allocate memory in the server that can never be freed. Some way to free memory needs to be added.

>The bit encodings should be part of a separate language binding, not part of the functional description.

>Had he done some real design work and looked at what others were doing he might have realized that at its core, X was a distributed database system in which operations on some of the databases have visual side-effects. I forget the exact number, but X includes around 20 different databases: atoms, properties, contexts, selections, keymaps, etc. each with their own set of API calls. As a result, the X API is wide and shallow like the Mac, and full of interesting race conditions to boot. The whole thing could have been done with less than a dozen API calls.
In Germany, a fax is legally considered an original copy, a scan/print is not, despite a fax often being a scan that’s then transmitted via fax protocols. Law hasn’t caught up with technology yet in that area.

You also get a confirmation from the recipient when using fax.
I am a former Emacs user and now a VSCode user. VSCode has great 'remote SSH' capability - running a whole session locally on a codebase that is remote. Everything works seamlessly - find in files, code navigation etc.
mosh is very useful for intermittent connectivity. Anytime I had to rely on spotty 2G/3G/wifi, the usual workflow "work locally ; git push" failed, as it's TLS/TCP and not resumable. Had to autossh+rsync the diffs out onto a stable host in the cloud, and then essentially worked from there.

Also, I have a mosh client on my smartphone; setting up the dev environment there would be a bear. Essentially the mainframe model ;)
These complaints about Google "moving too fast" used to really confuse me. I couldn't really spot a meaningful difference in mean survival b/w Google products, start-ups similar to individual Google products, and other businesses' behaviour.

But I've now attained zen-like clarity on the issue: the complaints are coming only, and always were coming mostly, from people whose idea of appropriate change over time is to still complain about Google Reader almost a decade after it happened.
Observe how well and quickly new engineers come up to speed in your system. What problems do they hit? Think about them while designing. For example what hinders them from solving issues as they come up with customers.

Their experience in my view is a representation of the architectural complexity and cognitive load you are inflicting with your design.
I have many bad things to say about MS Teams, but it does allow you to join a meeting multiple times on multiple devices using the same user account - so you can watch a screenshare on your desktop. machine but use the microphone or camera on your phone.
car engine noise model: get an app that plays clicky sounds and headphones?
CoronaExpress – Defend Hong Kong from the CCP Virus
Survival Lessons from the Great Depression
Carbon removal, Direct air capture, negative emissions.

You should read it because carbon tech is changing rapidly and can have a huge effect on the climate.

I write a weekly update at http://tito.co
Sounds like their document management system was tied to a fax line and they didn't want to bother upgrading. IT departments at banks have like, zero budget.
Can you explain the chest wound on your right side part?
Why is GTK going back to constraint based layouts after Apple is going in the opposite direction?
It is close to the other country with a lot of testing, South Korea.
That's really cool that Wyze did that. These are also great for making HD time-lapse videos of plant growth, etc, when a large internal SD is used for the price.

The normal function of a security camera is also good, however, a warning that these contain active microphones. So if you transition to using these as indoor, facing-outdoor security cams to strongly consider pulling the microphone from the circuit board. There are youtube videos, it can be done easily in under 10 minutes.

There is a software disable, but I do not believe this can be trusted.
Captchas are fundamentally anti-human. I'm not saying there isn't a problem to be solved, I'm saying Captchas are a behavior enforcement mechanism overseen by robots and are anti-human.

I write the site owner short note when they go bad explaining why they just lost a customer and go somewhere else. Life is too short to put up with shitty tech.
Terminals in mosh are still fundamentally character mode, though. That's a fairly inescapable part of the POSIX general terminal interface. A better analogue for something where there's a block-mode send of form data is, ironically, a WWW browser and WWW pages with forms.
Most of mine lately have been traffic features also. This is a little tricky in some cases, e.g. with crossings, as it sometimes gives me things that I don't think are crossings but it insists I select, perhaps they are in the US, or the perspective is weird, or someone else has told it that a series of white squares is a crossing and it requires me to agree.
I don't think I've ever been "hellbanned", but I've certainly spent more than 5 minutes on trying to get a captcha to work.

After a while I usually need to ask friends in the US to help me, because it asks me a non-localized question.

My favourite question was: Select all fire hydrants.

I selected only the classic red one's you see in movies. Fail.

I selected the one's that were yellow too. Fail.

I sent a picture of the grid to a friend. He spotted that some of the pipes on a wall were fire hydrants, which I didn't know. Pass.

In my country we don't have hydrants. We have holes in the ground that are covered by a lid. After removing it you can attach the water hose there.
Looks like this is having some knock-on effects, G Suite email deliverability is having issues now.
Zoom hires former Facebook security chief to beef up privacy, safety
> Zoom can argue that the stock price has gone down because...

Two general steps to a securities suit.

First, show the company defrauded investors. That can be as simple as omitting or mis-stating material information. (Zoom publicly claimed to use certain encryption standards that it didn't.) So the battle, here, will be around materiality. Critically, this step does not typically require proving damages.

Once materiality is met, the second step is showing damages. At this point, the change in (and attribution of) stock prices comes into play.

Once fraud is shown, the company is in a bad place. Even if a particular investor faced no discernible loss, everyone who bought at higher prices will now sue. It also invites state and federal investigators to start pursuing management and senior staff.

> this feels like a short-seller trying to profit, no?

No. You have to disclose your positions when entering into a shareholder lawsuit. Shareholder lawsuits are comically common. And there is limited precedent for short sellers doing this.

Disclaimer: I am not a lawyer. This is not legal advice. Don't buy or sell securities based on my internet comments.
>If those people did the prudent thing, and invested into an index fund, as opposed to picking stocks of companies that are being ran irresponsibly, their retirement savings would, on aggregate, be fine.

Index funds go down with the market... but perhaps more importantly, there _has_ been a massive shift to index/ETF trading. You know what that did? Pumped up the market as a whole. Now individual business assessment is less valuable because businesses with crap fundamentals go up and up and up due to index buying. Just another bubble.
I've never really been that impressed with Feynman's responses in that interview. He seems to be uncomfortable with just saying that physicists don't really know on a fundamental level why magnets repel each other. Obviously, explanations can be more or less fundamental.
If I used to produce 100 units per month because that's how many I could sell, but now I know I can sell 10000 units per month, that is incentive enough to increase production. Notice here that raising the price is not at all required to increase profits. It's just something companies tend to do because they know they can get away with it in high demand markets.

And since raising prices to increase profits is not necessary with hugely increased damand, it's seen as profiteering to do so on essentials (or in this case things that make you feel less isolated) during a global crisis.
International health care orgs are using bots to help fight Covid-19
Tradition and law both disagree with you. Perhaps it should be the way you say, but it isn't now and never has been.
I am going with train of thought were tested and confirmed were tested because they had high chance of getting virus. You don't test people who had no chance of getting a virus so I don't think those numbers are that much higher.

Second thing is that testing already was increased in a lot of places but last 2 days new cases number did not grow it stayed around the same.
Apparently at least one more. That sweet sweet $AMZN is too tempting.
All the while we actually have a pretty good law about digital signatures since basically forever, but ~nobody supports those. (and they missed the chance of using the new ID cards to establish them more widely, which was really stupid)
That page hasn't been updated since late 2015, so I would assume basically all that work has been finished.
Good stuff Andrey! Sounds very familiar :)
Yes. The US is weirdly behind in a variety of things it got into early, but let stagnate. Until fairly recently, text messaging cost $0.10/message, for inbound and outbound. We only just got chips on our credit cards in the last few years. Broadband over 10-15 megabits is in a similar boat - only recently has it started to catch up with the rest of the world, and there's a lot left to go, especially in rural areas .
I’m more shocked that this massive tech industry has like one decent solution to remote video conferencing. Maybe we really have gone too far down the road of making bullshit apps, and stopped solving real problems.

Shame on us.
Out of curiosity, where is the GCP slack? Is it public?
> You can quantify these with numbers.

You can!

Using the age statistics from NY and the Social Security actuarial tables, we're currently losing something like 11.75-17.1 years of life per death, depending on whether you weight towards the life expectancy at the beginning or end of each age bracket. The current update to the "dialysis standard" for the value of a YoQL is $129,000, so we're currently losing $1.5-2.2 million per death.

If the true fatality rate is 0.66% (https://www.livescience.com/death-rate-lower-than-estimates....), and 70% of the population would catch it if it is not contained before "herd immunity" is reached, that would put the total number of expected deaths in the US at around 1.52 million. If we're expected something like 100-200 thousand people to die even with the measures currently being taken, then we're averting 1.4 million deaths and that amounts to a savings of about $2-3 trillion worth of human life.

If $2-3 trillion is suspiciously similar to the magnitude being thrown around for various "coronavirus relief bills", well, it's probably only a little bit of a coincidence.
"Why not? It seems like some people are eager to not be on any mailing lists, and the worst downside seems to be that they won't able to reset their password."

I think you missed his double-negative there - he is saying that you shouldn't not be letting users sign up with ...

... which I agree with ...
As a layman, no. "Our Ignorance About Gravity" at <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OTMELHUAzSM> explains what we don't know about gravity at small and large scales.
We actually work on LIGO's seismic isolation, too. We are adapting some of what we know from that work to improve our own isolation systems. Torsion balances have slightly different requirements, so it's not just drop-in use of that technology, but it is pretty close.

Regarding van der Waals -- yes. At the moment, we block all electrostatic/Casimir interactions with a metal foil. When the distances involved are "sufficiently short", we won't get complete screening any more. That day will be an interesting day.

On the bright side, if we start to see Casimir leakage, that will be a boon to the people who try to understand the Casimir force at finite temperature (another open problem), so we'll learn something useful no matter what...

In the short term, though, I'd love to have that problem. It will take a lot of work for us to get there.
Show HN: Podurama Podcast Player for Web, Windows10, macOS, iOS(beta)
I wonder why they don’t negotiate with Msft to use Bing or even DDG instead. Seems... incredibly odd... to put oneself in a position where a third party is directly antagonizing your users, reducing your user satisfaction and likely dramatically increasing churn, but you can’t do anything about it because that same party is your main source of funding.

(Disclaimer, I work at msft. Nowhere near this though).
This is actually an extremely gray legal area. The only reason platforms are viable is because they have legal protections that don't make them responsible for user content.

At some level of "taken responsibility" (which I think should have been passed), they should be considered publishers and be stripped of their legal protections.
zoom announcement on front page: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22813192
>Sounds more like it simply doesn't work very well, rather than any of the reasons you listed.

The use case you've described has a defined problem and a measurable metric. Problem: We think load times influence conversions: Metrics: Measure load times and see if they are correlated with conversions. Maybe in your case somebody decided to skip the research part and just pay to reduce load times.

Imagine a totally difference scenario. You work for a established (30+ years old) company that sells consumer goods. Executives approve a $25 Million budget to "improve the customer experience" over the next 3 years.

This directive goes to all the various organizations: Sales and Marketing, Product Development, Technology, Customer and Market Research, Customer Support, etc. The various orgs have 3 months to come back to executive management to justify how much budget they need and their execution strategy. Each org thinks thinks they are the key mover in improving customer experiences and wants as much of that budget as possible. Every org works at a difference speed and with different philosophies (e.g. all work is done in-house versus some or a lot of work done by external agencies).

Let's add some more reality into this. Even if the CXO of an org thinks they don't need to be in this process, it looks bad if they don't say they have a strategy and need budget. There's also a significant chance that 9 months into this project somebody will get restless and the whole initiative will get restructured with different timelines and goals.

I could do on, but armies of Analysts and Data Scientists will get pulled into this to drive "data driven decision-making." A lot of the expectations will that the "smart people" will show that everyone's particular biases will be the most important one and needs.

It's hardly an environment for anybody to do rigorous analysis or for anybody in an Analytical role to shine. Think the scenario sounds insane and made up? It's not. Welcome to big-co.
"You never let a serious crisis go to waste. And what I mean by that it's an opportunity to do things you think you could not do before."

[0] https://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/rahm_emanuel_409199
I think the more important question was how they came up with the number. If you lack the ability to go through your apartment in your mind and count the windows AND do not happen to remember the number outright, it might indicate something like aphantasia.
How, in your opinion, should Google have handled the matter in a way that does not give spammers or other abusive users ways to get around the measure? Bear in mind that any such approach has to be scalable to many zeros daily, the vast majority of which will not be empathically awful cases like your brother's very real pain and distress - most will be genuinely abusive behavior.

I want to be clear that I am not attempting to minimize your brother's pain or emotional suffering. I'm hoping that there might be an approach that's kinder and more compassionate to him while still accomplishing the same goals.
My entire point is that we need to give people from centuries past some leeway and make an effort to view their lives through the lens of their time. And we should view them through our current lens as well but we're not likely to learn anything but that we think our morality is the best morality.

My chain of responses is meant to highlight this tension. That I can personally find something reprehensible in 2020, but taken in it's cultural or historical context, also find it enlightened or inspiring. In the USA we have an increasingly militant progressivism and we close ourselves off to our own history if we can only judge things by one set of standards.
By the look of their Twitter timeline the launch seems to be a bit of a disaster...

I spent about 15 minutes buying, downloading and installing Arq 6.
Then, i spent about 10 hours trying to fix things, and eventually downgrade back to Arq 5 from another backup made with borgbackup...

https://twitter.com/arqbackup/status/1247845283326803968?s=2...

Also, the documentation has been offline all (launch)day: https://www.arqbackup.com/documentation/arq6

It's a shame because i've been hapily using Arq4 and 5 for many years. Hopefully they get their shit sorted quickly.
Free Zoom Video Backgrounds to Hide Your Mess While Working from Home
Can't you just drop a .png on there? I think that works and adds it to the library. But I might recall that from somewhere else.
Bernie Sanders Is Dropping Out of 2020 Democratic Race for President
Show HN: I built a Dapp to Automate Dollar Cost Averaging from DAI-ETH
As the title says, I built a tool that allows you to buy a constant amount of ETH (with DAI) at regular intervals. For example, if you decide to buy 100DAI worth of ETH every week, dca.land will send 50 DAI from your wallet to Uniswap, swap them with ETH at the current price & send them back to your wallet, and will do this once per week.

I built this as a side project for personal use and I’ve been using it to automate ETH purchases for a while, but I though this may be useful to others too. Right now I’m also providing the relayer service, however anyone can become a relayer really.

So far the system has proved reliable, however consider this as a beta version. Also, the smart contract HAS NOT been audited, so test it at your own risk. If you have feedback or thought I’d love to hear them!

https://www.dca.land/
> And businesses are okay with Google denying them money

Make sure they know. I write to sites and tell them they just lost a customer because Google doesn't give a shit. I've gotten replies from smaller outfits that had no idea what was going on.
Not a doctor but it was quite clear to me reading the page that Apple was just listing the various cleaning solutions that they know won't damage the shield. I'm sure for legal reasons they won't dare tell doctors how to sterilize medical equipment.
Mosh is awesome! I use it all the time to connect to servers over a slow and high latency satellite link. Highly recommend it for high latency connections.
https://www.dca.land
Oh, _that's_ the reason behind naming anti-union laws "right to work".
Jax is compelling because it’s a lot simpler than other solutions. It’s hard to quantify the value of simplicity over new features, but I’d argue we usually undervalue simplicity; it helps move way faster and makes debugging & maintenance exponentially easier. Helps focus on the 80/20 of helping customers instead of internal bullshit...
Understanding the Power of Lisp
It seems that 'all available' would diminish the signal of Iceland's good stat. What we really want is 'all good stats'. I think only South Korea is the other country with extensive testing.

According to my model NYC should only have a max of 13.5k deaths, without any mitigation.

Based on the Greg Mortimer stat, this bumps up to 41k for NYC.
What we’ve learned from this Corona scare is the best way to protect people is to incarcerate them in their own homes. Take guns and hard instruments from people. Isolate everyone into their own cell would reduce the murder rate to zero. All communication would go through the Internet. No chance for physical abuse any more. No more transmission of disease since we’ve shutdown direct human interactions. It would be the perfectly safe world. Of course agency gets thrown out the window.
I didn't take it as downplaying at all. We are very grateful for the public support we receive, and are always happy to expound on why it matters.
Yes! Even the Pythagorean Theorem is a mouthful if you express it in Latin prose rather than algebra. And I assume universal gravitation is the same way.
Interesting, what about looking at a photo - say of a red apple on a green plate like this one:

https://previews.123rf.com/images/anthonycz/anthonycz1711/an...

Then closing your eyes and not trying to imagine a red apple on a green plate but instead trying to recollect the image you saw ?
Maybe there should be three terms acknowledged in the study of privacy:

Public

Obscure

Private

For the longest time we have interpreted obscurity as privacy. Such as what your house looks like. Or how many people know of your legal immigration status.

There are very few pieces of information that are truly private, like social security number, health records (known only by Healthcare providers), and the actions you did in secret where no one was present, and maybe even the thoughts you have and the writings of your journal.
Well, Google may be an anomaly too...
That preference exists on macOS, Windows, iOS, and Android, so it's not an unusual expectation for users to have. Supporting system dark mode means that you can do things like have all applications automatically switch themes based on the time of day.

Revising my opinion; Firefox dev tools has a dark theme, but it doesn't support dark mode.
> probably the most popular platform for emulation due to SIMH

soon there will be an amd64 port, which should make emulation straightforward. Sad to see last vestiges of VAX going away though