skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Show HN: I built an addon as I was getting distracted in this lockdown period
Hello Everyone,

I was getting distracted in this lockdown period. I started watching lots of online videos and started reading lots of online articles, news papers and forum posts. This ate up lot of my time and I was spending less time on what I should actually be doing. So I built a web browser (Chrome and Firefox) addon to avoid distraction. You can download it from https://switchoff.neocities.org

Here are the features of this addon:

1. Unblock specified websites only during a configured time and period of every day e.g. say, youtube can be unblocked only from 7PM to 8PM.
2. Only specified number of browser tabs can be opened to avoid information overload and distraction.
3. All the links that the addon refused to open* is temporarily stored as a list so that you can revisit those links afterwards.

Let me know what you think. This is my first addon so any feedback is really appreciated. You can send me your feedback at:

switch[dot]off[at]europe[dot]com

Replace [dot] with . and [at] with @ in the above email address to get the actual email id.

Thanks and kind regards,

Ajit

[*] Either because that domain was blocked as per addon configuration or because the max open browser tabs limit was reached.
As I get older, I more and more realise the negative health impacts of a mostly sedantry job - anything to offset that is surely in the interests of most HN readers
Ask HN: Where did the upvote count go?
I'm not sure if there is A/B test going on right now, or if there has been a permanent change and I missed the memo. But I can't see an upvote count anymore on comments. Any ideas why?
That's a huge intersection, and it sounds like you were crossing instead of just following Embarcadero, that's obviously a terrible idea.
That's it I'm going to Lithuania for vacation also. Pretty neat way to get tourists prepared...
Why not just have it all in one language? Why the English bait and switch?
Meet already has grid view, can show up to 16 people.
You won't be cold though, because you're doing 4sec of exercise 5 times an hour.
Animal Crossing’s Tom Nook Makes Front Page of the Financial Times
Best quote from an analyst: “Every writedown takes Wework’s carrying value closer to reality. Clearly the value is zero,”
It seems difficult to reach excess vitamin D levels though. From [1]: "Taking 60,000 international units (IU) a day of vitamin D for several months has been shown to cause toxicity. This level is many times higher than the U.S. Recommended Dietary Allowance (RDA) for most adults of 600 IU of vitamin D a day."

5000-7000 IU per day is probably a safe amount, despite the official recommended daily intake being 600 IU.

[1]: https://www.mayoclinic.org/healthy-lifestyle/nutrition-and-h...
> Encourage at-risk groups to self quarantine, and utilize testing to protect them...Those with obesity and COPD

Author suggests self-quarantine for the obese instead of quarantine/lockdown for everyone. The CDC suggests that +42% of the US adult population is obese [0]. Are we really going to isolate or quarantine 4 out of 10 US adults and imagine the economy can get back on track?

[0]: https://www.cdc.gov/obesity/data/adult.html
Run algorithms live, check results after X time has gone by.
One doesn't, which is why the tables will be spaced.
A brief history of quarantine, and what it can teach us about social distancing
How did Zuckerberg maintain his majority voting power throughout every funding round? VCs have to look at that very suspiciously.

Is it possible for founders today to retain the same level of control, or do VCs outright refuse to fund such companies?

Are there good reading materials or strategies for maintaining control all the way through possible IPO?

How did Travis Kalanick and Adam Neumann get removed? Did they not have the same level of control that Zuckerberg did? Couldn't they have told their dissenters to fuck off? Or could the same fate befall Zuckerberg should he fall out of good graces or become involved in some controversy?
That's the shortcut I use for bookmarking, get off my lawn.
RoboCup also has leagues for wheeled robots, where there's a lot less falling over: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Y5_iGxWFrQ

The humanoid robot leagues are constrained by cost - several of the simulated leagues, including the one shown in your video, have a corresponding physical league. And the physical league needs two teams of NAO robots, which cost ~$8000 each, and there are 11 on each team. So you're looking at $176,000 of student project for the physical league. You've correctly identified they don't work very well - but more agile robot hardware would cost even more. I've never seen two atlas robots together, let alone 22!
I am working as a data analyst. We had some cases were we were called to fix issues from other agencies.

The clients had forms data being sent as get-requests and from there email addresses and even more personal data in the URL (street, date of birth, and even more) was being transmitted into the analytics tools and also into marketing tools.

Regarding GDPR this is a breach and needs to be communicated to officials as well as the people affected.

Even a bank was affected by this type of implementation when customers wanted to open an account or make a loan application.
If you work with a large tree where a few files at a time change, you may want to look at lsyncd - backed by inotify and rsync, syncs the local changes to remote. Not really suited for interactive edits, but if you find yourself running rsync in a loop, this is a better replacement.
Your warm-up accrues though. You're doing a little bit of exercise every 12 minutes for 8 hours.

You're not going to get sick.
The tens of thousands of users with no desire to be introduced to 'the Nordic gamer yes image' disagree that this is unfortunate.

There are plenty of places on the internet that welcome memes, it isn't a missing feature that HN isn't one of them.
I remember that speech when DX 10 was not available on XP, I also used to believe in Desktop Linux dream, nowadays I just use Apple, Google, MS desktop and mobile platforms.
> Obviously to no avail. Nobody cares. People just want to open a service and have it work and Zoom excels at that.

Not true in my experience. Some people definitely care: the CIO at the mid sized company I work at has restricted Zoom usage; and my wife's company also cares (they started with Zoom and have moved to Teams partly because of Zoom issues).

Keep trying, not everyone cares indeed but plenty do, especially when it impacts data regulations/security.
Have you worked with CoreOS? It's fully driven by systemd, no problems at all. You know, when something works, nobody talks about it. But when it fails for just one time...
That's obsolete advice: could have helped 10+ years ago...
The shame is that they will probably blame all of this on the Pandemic, rather than fundamental issues with the business that were becoming clear long before the virus hit.
All fine. I had so much religious stuff shoved in my direction lately because of COVID - my tolerance massively decreased because of that in the last weeks.
Search the Enigmail forums for people who couldn't open their emails after GnuPG made MDCs mandatory (as a reaction of Efail). Especially people with old PGP keys were receiving non-MDC (SE) ciphertexts since ever. Mozilla's bugzilla (and a bank I heart of) were using non-MDC encryption. Reading the OpenPGP RFC, this is perfectly fine behaviour.

The Efail paper also describes a way to downgrade MDC ciphertexts to SE ciphertexts. This was known since 2015, but not addressed in OpenPGP.

So OpenPGP according to RFC 4880 allows SE packets with no MDC, and the MDC can be stripped away in a standard conforming way (tho with some guessing of bytes). If that isn't a problem with the OpenPGP standard, I don't know what is.

Just weeks after Efail, they made SE packets (those with no MDC) deprecated in the current RFC 4880bis. They were careful to not mention Efail, because it wasn't OpenPGP's fault. For some, it's never OpenPGP's fault.
Lombardy (the region of Northern Italy where this was concentrated) has a very very good health system.

And it still collapsed.

Don't get me wrong, lockdowns are super problematic and the economic hit is going to be really, really bad but it's better than letting health systems collapse.

For instance, Ireland (where I live) had 220 ICU beds before this started; we upped that to around 500 and around 350 were filled at the highest point.

And this was with a lockdown (started March 12th, massively tightened March 26th).

Our health service would have collapsed without the measures that have been taken, so I totally see why lockdowns have been introduced almost everywhere.

The best case scenario for this kind of event is that you react too quickly, everything's OK and then people complain that all the measures you took weren't necessary.
Probably. But I think the body gets Abit tricked when the legs come into play in a locomotive fashion.

Particular sprinting. It's primal.
Ok, sorry for being dumb. Is Google Meet actually an entirely new service, or just re-branded Hangouts?

When I make a calendar event and choose to add video meeting to it, it's now a Meet, when it used to be a Hangout.

My experience with Hangouts (as recently as a week ago) was rather poor. Is Meet actually good/better?
I don't think so, given I have been following the evolution of Windows sandbox model for a decade now.

Every time there were any issues, it was dealt with one step back two forward tactic.
Insomnia is great.
Support for Flatpak would be awesome ;-) https://github.com/Kong/insomnia/issues/1812
Reader?
There's also the product "treadmill" for chat and video apps that Google and Microsoft have had over the past handful of years.

There is buy-in even for a chat app. I often have to shuffle browsers, may or may not have to install something, have to judge if the other person is interested in trying new software. Does everyone have a Google account? If I'm joining someone else's meeting, what's the process? Is there a meeting id? Password? URL?

I think "mental space" is quite appropriate.
Yep "Today’s web let’s anyone spin up a fresh IP in seconds and use 100% open source software that they can freely modify to publish just about anything they want, while retaining full control of the entire stack down to the NIC, with total portability." If you are not techie and want easy use Wordpress, they use open web standards.
Wouldn't that link the account to the device's hardware ID and by extension, all the other accounts you've made on that device?
Not really. Their thesis disintegrated way before this. Their thesis was that that even in a market with weak network effects, customer acquisition costs are high enough that you can spend your way into such a dominant mindshare that you end up with monopolistic or oligopolistic returns. The thesis is basically trashed at this point. The upfront costs are too high and the mindshare dominance is too fragile.
And while we're at it, if you need remote X, consider Xpra instead of ssh -X - it's way faster, can survive connection drops, and is far more flexible.
Statebox's Finite-State-Machine Oracle: Release
What's a word press ?
> If you have a personal beef, say it clearly

I have no beef. I just stated my personal opinion. And I even stated a way how it could be framed with religious content in the text.

I still feel I did a reasonable critique with an idea of how to communicate in a less offensive way towards others.
Since you're doing this every 12 minutes, you'd stay relatively warm all day. American football players don't need to warm up every time they come off the sidelines
I separate their concept of the sandbox (app permissions) from the walled garden (the App Store & the lockdown of user install). You can totally have a sandbox without a walled garden. It seems that in this case, the walled garden did not help in any ways.
It’s not that strange, that’s what happens when you forget if you are a scientist or a politician. If you try to be both at the same time the result is you’ll misrepresent your scientific data to make it fit your political goals.

In this case they keep mentioning uncertainty and the argument is that otherwise the public may behave in a way they don’t want. Whatever your opinion on the arguments, that’s not science and it is also poor politics because sooner or later they’ll lose credibility and really that’s all they have.
No one cares to address point that have been addressed already.

If we talk about the numbers then opening up a country runs a risk of even higher daily deaths and longterm economical damage due to lack of workforce after the disease passes.

Americans want to be South Koreans without taking South Korean measures. You simply cannot have a cake and eat it too.
cooperative threading is just coroutines plus a scheduler.
I don't really buy this. Google image search "external link symbol", the symbol is just generically useful.

I can buy that the name in unicode should be something other than "external link". It could be something more generic like "external reference". Boom, now it can be accepted because it's not tied to <a>.

The problem with the rejection is that "that last bit of differently-formatted text is an active element in this application, leading to an outside resource" is that it's kind of a strawman: why be so specific just to reject it because you've decided to be so specific?

Though all of that justification is kind of unnecessary. Really, I just find it ridiculous that the unicode group is going to suddenly become prude about a ubiquitous symbol yet have 20 different check mark symbols. Sure, if everyone made the "but there are 20 different check mark symbols so why can't I have <pet symbol>?" argument, unicode would be even more ridiculous. And that's an argument to reject <pet symbol>, not one of the most ubiquitous symbols on the internet.

"Unicode has a bunch of stupid symbols, so it should at least add the most useful symbols that we use on the internet" really is a good argument.
No? The web's security model does not expose such identifiers. The best you can do is fingerprinting, which is actively and continuously defended against by browser makers
Oh, I see, that's what I meant. Clicking a logo is not really obvious. Maybe just add a visable "click here" or something to enhance discoverability for this feature. Because I really saw it as a logo, not a button.
I have had plenty of issue with Zoom. Quality being bad, people not understanding the interface and my university had people zoom-bombing or whatever it is called. I recently accidently logged into a session with the wrong credentials (whatever Zoom defaulted to, not my official uni login) and everyone thought I was zoom-bombing them. I couldn't understand why I was being cross-questioned by people in the session.

Unfortunately the media have pushed zoom so hard that everyone assumes it is the best option and don't want to hear of anything else.
+1 on the "Typical AWS issues" regarding policies. Even Amazon's own examples tend to confuse the issue more and it is typically after much trial and error do you attain the sweet spot for sensible policies that prioritize security. My only other gripe is MQTT retain is not supported, although as mentioned Device Shadows do provide this type of feature.
FSM-Oracle – A formally verified Finite State Machine oracle
I have seen the situation you describe many times in the past, the bit about being expected to be a code monkey, not the COVID19 caused challenges.

In many reasonable sized projects, there are several tiers. Domain experts provide the requirements and high level design. Technical architects design the overall architecture, then the team leaders and the programmers who actually produce the code. It is actually unproductive for programmers attempt to dictate the architecture.

I have seen projects collapse into chaos because everybody was an expert at architecture and nobody truly cared about the domain. You really need to have solid structure to successfully complete large projects. It doesn't mean you can't make suggestions. But the decisions lie with those who are responsible for them. If they make the wrong call it is on them not you.

I sense that you are unhappy with your circumstances. Can you rise to the level of team leader or higher based on your experience? If not, then might be a good time to be a valuable contributor at the level you have been hired.
> You are not an economist, you are not a doctor, you are not a virologist, you are not the statistics guy. Apparently you are a SRE.

Name any that were correct. Or that bothered reading the Chinese papers published months ago. I'll take an SRE over those demonstrated flakes anyday.

> because the risk of having corona, is actually for me, a bigger problem then just staying low for a few month.

It's not all about you, and your selfish rant is horseshit.

It's about public health policy. I think HNers don't understand the difference.
Hit Agree but no idea is 3 is true. If they scraped it, then they do not own it .

1. Is for information use only

2. Shall not be used for any scientific or academic research, in commerce, for analytical purposes, for or any mailout or information distribution purposes, as well as for any illegal purpose

3. Is the property of Unicorn Nest, all rights reserved.
Is your SSH session hung, and you can't even ctrl-C out? Typing ~. Enter (hit tilde, then period, then enter), will immediately kill the session and drop you back to your local shell.
TikTok was pouring money into ads hand over fist last year. Being targetted, you probably wouldn't have seen many if you aren't the right demographic and visiting the right sites.

Its rise is a sign that the Internet has become just another commodity platform where success is bought, not earned.
I am suffering through Zoom at university and I had no idea about virtual raised hands existed, the UI could be improved.
Does it ? I've looked and looked and looked for it. I'm not running Chrome/Windows though, so presumably I'm a second class citizen.
Funny how they admit that AFTER their IPO.

Lawyers: get your securities class action lawsuit in!
Biennial November elections are a minority of elections overall.
Nobody is entitled to return on their investment.

Not only that, these clowns cannibalized inventory for locals and sold it to tourists, gutting neighborhoods and pricing local families out (the very things that made them attractive to tourists to begin with). Hence why we've seen the long-term rental market explode +45% in London, +60% in Dublin, etc.

This is the same pigs get fat, hogs get slaughtered horror story of when people took out interest-only loans in 2007-2008 to buy up properties in places like Las Vegas.

I'm looking forward to a time when locals will be able to better afford their neighborhoods again.
I can think of a few. Most of these things could also be done with text-based code, but typically aren't when you're just starting out:

- No set up issues (visual programming is cloud-based)

- Less of a discoverability issue (visual programming shows a lot of things all at once)

- A sense of familiarity (people have seen flow chart like things before)

- It's easier to see the difference between arguments and parameters

Full disclosure: I have almost never seen visual programming languages, but I got the idea that there was no devil's advocate present within you. So here I am ;-) I find it quite easy to think from a beginner's perspective, because in some sense I can't fathom that I know what I know now since I never thought I'd ever know this much in my entire life (and I'm only 31, lol).
In some countries you just can just call the phone company and ask. In Denmark you can just call 118, give the phone number and get the address back or use one of the numerous websites that taps into to the same data. Here is the result of a query using a random Danish phone number https://www.krak.dk/97405354/personer
It's sane on C++ scale, but on absolute scale that sanity is still wanting, Sutter mentions this.
Determined: Deep Learning Training Platform
Nice try, Larry.
> That is actually the scariest thing about CO2. It's going to stay in our atmosphere for 100 of years. So even just stopping emitting is just about maintaining the status quo.

And the worst part about that is the status quo is still warming.

We need to have a net reduction in CO2 levels in order not to blow past catastrophic temperatures.
Honestly Zoom just works how you expect it to.

Other applications do exist and they're bad from a usability perspective.

Google hangouts maxes out my CPU.
Teams is a horrible electron app which I'm loathe to use.

So the negatives are that it's unencrypted, traffic might be routed through China sometimes and unknown participants can join if they have the meeting link with password.

For the majority of people they're not too bothered.

I'd argue that security is about having an understanding of the risk and mitigating it accordingly. And for a lot of cases zoom is fine.
not to forget there is also the case of installing a local webserver to bypass the deprecated NPAPI api (deprecated bc of security issues!), ... never mind that they have historically done one thing and pushed the opposite point in their PR, ... people will rather trust a vendor like Zoom and bend over backwards to make excuses (even it means getting rat-f*ed) than admitting Zoom's past behavior doesn't justify that trust.

here is ThoughtWorks' "Head of Tech" saying "we've done the threat modeling and trust us it will be fine for you too". https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:6660369... it's not how threat models work but nevermind, the post still has 80+ likes of people who call themselves engineers ...
App stores are a trap. As developers we should be doing everything we can to keep the web alive. Every power you cede to a third party gets abused sooner or later.
That's interesting.

I've had very mild but puzzling symptoms since late January when I returned from Thailand/Malaysia.

Sometimes absent entirely for a week or two and sometimes as strong as that "oh - I'm beginning to come down with something" feeling. Sore throat is common as is a slight heaviness in my chest.

Tends to come on in the afternoon and usually imperceptible in the morning.

It's only a nuisance if it wasn't just enough to trigger anxiety about whether or not it was Covid-19.

I've dismissed the idea that it actually was Covid-19 because I've never heard anyone say that it could last this long but it's definitely unusual.

EDIT - for various reasons I've been strictly isolating for almost 2 months anyway. I would have isolated earlier if the advice had been clearer.
> How did Zuckerberg maintain his majority voting power throughout every funding round?

He had a very popular product and everyone wanted in on the action. They were willing to accept founder friendly terms so they could get in the deal.
Facebook went a bit farther.

https://engineering.fb.com/core-data/under-the-hood-facebook...

> The biggest change was allowing only one drive per tray to be powered on at a time. In fact, to ensure that a software bug doesn’t power all drives on by mistake and blow fuses in a data center, we updated the firmware in the drive controller to enforce this constraint. The machines could power up with no drives receiving any power whatsoever, leaving our software to then control their duty cycle.
What You Need to Know About Lightning Protection Systems – NVent
Everything You Ever Wanted to Know About Robots
When you have the likes of the British Prime Minister screwing it up publicly, you don’t need any three letter agency.
https://www.dailydot.com/debug/boris-johnson-zoom-meeting-id...
> Google hangouts maxes out my CPU. Teams is a horrible electron app which I'm loathe to use.

A good example that there are some benefits to using Qt (like Zoom) to make correctly performing apps