skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I work with many people who are against writing; they never write anything and they only want to do sync meetings (phone/in person); I am on the tech team usually which makes that even more painful as 'talking through tech' is a horrible thing. Nothing sticks as everyone needs time to think about things.

Inevitably, after a while, you get people losing track of things that were actually said, that were actually agreed on etc because there are no documents or that kind of tracking for that matter (there is stuff in Jira, but that's only following the hard tech points, not all the rest that was also discussed).

My business partner and me write a lot but we know nobody is going to read it; we do it anyway because I don't want to end up with a feeling of insanity in yet another phone call with 'but we did not discuss that!'.
Doesn't iOS ask you for permissions when granting data to an app? This seems completely bizarre to me.

The App Store verification process does not seem like a reasonable single line of defense. If applications can just get data from the rest of your phone without prompting the user then something is seriously broken here.
What? I don't think this is accurate.

From what I recall, the US was/is spying on the major tech companies and would regularly demand data and place gag orders on those companies.

Neither actions are willful forms of data transfer. The first is actually an eternal game of cat and mouse. NSA finds a leak for some data, Google fixes it, new leak, etc. The second is targeted handover of data, and only affects a few individuals.

Equating these with the US government having full access to everyone's data is misleading. If you think otherwise, please provide more detail.
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Related news: Juul sees interest evaporate from potential buyer of SoMa high-rise

https://www.bizjournals.com/sanfrancisco/c/juul-sees-interes...

Juul bought the building in mid 2019 because SF landlords were increasingly hostile to it and often unwilling to rent to them. Their response was buy a building, right around their peak. Late last year, they took some big hits related to e-cig deaths (which I don't think they actually caused) and dropping their flavored offerings, massively hurting revenue.

Meanwhile, their new CEO (fall 2019), K.C. Crosthwaite, is an ex-tobacco exec, and some googling says he lives in Richmond, VA.

As others have said, part of this is probably lobbying, but part is that they're city hostile to them that the CEO doesn't live in.
yeh I guess nerds are an exception to the rule, but honestly relative to all of the industries out there outside of engineering alot of business, marketing, etc etc is fluff. VCs are in business and finance.

At the end of the day, they have money. Assume they are selfish and want to not lose money, so they probably have some rationale on which they give out money in hopes for a return on investment. That being said, I've seen way too many tech bros with bad blockchain ideas get way too much money which usually goes straight to their heads before they lose it all, and I assume the V.C.s have a really good strike price and know exactly when to liquidate.

For others, it was my general understanding VCs lose money on most investments, hoping that a few end up going really big and canceling out the losses on the rest, but I don't really know anything about VC stuff. I'm not sadomasochistic enough to try to start a company, I just try to work on my skills and people are willing to pay me to invest in myself because I tend to discover interesting things while I tinker about and also keep things from failing often in a raging dumpster fire but I don't know if thats a good way to market my skills.
We are in complete agreement - the current station is untenable. However, what can you do about it as an end-user?

By the time you are deciding whether to update candy crush or whatever application, you can't actually check all of it's dependencies. You can postpone updates, or only update manually, but what difference does it make?
How knowledgeable are you on this subject ? Do you read Russian ? Chinese ? Watching native TV channels, listening podcasts in Russian and / or Chinese ?
Isn't this what John McCarthy called "non-monotonic reasoning"? I wonder if they still call it that in the literature. It always seemed to me that semantic networks would solve this problem. "match", "wood" are not that far in the network from "fire". Anyway, I'm sure there's a reason this kind of GOFAI never worked.
An idea of a more radical decentralized social network
FWIW, I believe that all TestFlight app releases also undergo the automated portion of the App Store approval process, which would be able to catch entitlements.

If you're installing from source, that's another thing.
No, this is based on the Psychic Paper “exploit” that was described a few days ago that allowed developers to sign their apps with extra entitlements, including ones that would allow for accessing files outside of the normal application sandbox. (To be clear: there is no app, other than Messages, that should ever be able to access your messages. Such an app is not allowed on the App Store.)
Heavy curation is unfortunately rampant in the genre of "wow check out this AI"
I find it disingenuous that u use antivax in your argument. First of all the tech industry has been thriving on selling out and exploiting personal data for decades, and this 'business model' has become in practice unavoidable on the online world. And while big pharma has many deep flaws, making people deliberately ill through vaxination programs isn't it.

Secondly, everyone that understands low powered radio wave signals and keeps abrest of covid-19 infection vectors can plainly see that any correlation between those two are going to be extremely weak at best, and extremely easy to game.

No vaxine with such poor results would be allowed on the market, let alone prescribed.

This is a bad case of tech utopist solutioning gone awry.
Sure - and there are nuanced/interesting discussions that can happen about the risks, but that’s not what most of this commentary is.

Most of the comments are empty of any actual content from people who haven’t even tried to read about the protocol they’re working on.

The protocol is designed by people aware and concerned about these risks (which is why the way it works is pretty interesting).

A lot of interesting work happens in the challenging areas where it’s critical to get things right, there are real risks, and the answers aren’t obvious. Engaging in those areas where things are complex is important.

It's easy to just remove yourself from the problem, say something can't be trusted, and then feel good about your moral purity, but that doesn't mean the problem doesn't exist. It does, and there is real value in putting work in to solve it.

If you care about these issues then you're the type of person that should be involved in solving it exactly because you're concerned about the risks.

Jeff Hammerbacher's quote from working at Facebook reminds me of this, “The best minds of my generation are thinking about how to make people click ads,” he says. “That sucks.” I think he's right, and working on these bigger non-ad software problems is where the effort should be, because they are hard, and because the outcome is important.

The governments of the west need to be capable, but still protect the privacy of their people - that isn't an easy problem.
The crops we cultivate to feed ourselves and our animal slaves are grown outside. It’s a obvious statement, but it feels easy to forget when we spend most hours of the day indoors. Key stages in plant development are sensitive to temperatures. I used to think, it’s just a few degrees of warming. Well a few degrees hotter at a critical time of plant growth will affect yields of key staple crops like rice [1]. There’s a lot of suffering to come this century.

[1] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/B978012387...
The tech behind is sound. There do exist similar "antigravity" devices. And patents.

The problem is to make gravitomagnetic fields efficient. Currently it's barely measurable.
Pais' idea does look good, esp. the idea to hook up two such spinning superconductors and twist their axis a bit. That's the UFO patent. AFAIK he is trying to build such a thing with the navy right now. In the lab in my city they tried similar things, but their lab is very small, and they cannot verify Pais' idea. The navy should be good enough. Interesting moonshot, but probably nothing will come out of it.
> The only non-systemd init that hasn't dragged their feet on this has been OpenRC, and even they still would not make any effort to be systemd-compatible because of objections over other things. So what is the solution here?

You either hammer out a common interface with compromises from both sides, or you implement the parts you want as progressive enhancement from a lowest-common-denominator baseline. It's not easy, it's not glamourous, but it's the right way to do it. Look at how e.g. web standards stuff happens when there's disagreement between different browser makers.

> Also, just going by the data, the repos for KDE (collectively) and FreeBSD (a monorepo, like systemd) are much, much bigger, just as tightly-coupled if not moreso, and get a lot more activity than the repo for systemd. It seems strange that you would pick those projects to contribute to.

I'd disagree with the idea that KDE is more tightly coupled; in my (limited) experience it's very cleanly factored and it's clear where the interface boundaries lie. It's a big project but if you want to fork and patch one part of it you can do that.

FreeBSD is theoretically more tightly coupled than GNU/Linux, but in practice I've found a lot less of the kind of interface churn that you see in Linux. Linux went through two or three rounds of different audio APIs where on FreeBSD you still just use OSS. I've lost count of how many times the way you do network config on Linux changed - I genuinely can't set up a network on Linux any more - whereas in FreeBSD it's all just ifconfig. Linux forced a quick migration to HAL followed by an equally quick deprecation in favour of udev; FreeBSD is still using HAL. There's just so much more commitment to stable interfaces, both in theory - a deprecation cycle for even the kernel ABI - and in practical experience. Or maybe it's just that the project doesn't have enough manpower to churn as much as Linux does, but either way the end result is that I can patch my system and expect my patch to keep working.
FYI: https://sci-hub.im/https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ijantimicag.202...
Thanks, looks like spinning up a cluster is AGPL, so it's a no go.
Could you maybe write a word on what it is that reminds you of that? Or are you just hoping it’s wrong? I mean, you can dig up any number of wrong or right historical predictions, but that doesn’t really help anyone draw any conclusions about this one.
Does anyone know where to buy good quality music videos from the 1980s?

Currently some are available on YouTube, some on iTunes, some nowhere. Quality is very hit-and-miss.

Why doesn't Apple have all of these for sale? Is it an issue of rights? Do they think there wouldn't be enough demand? Is there is a lot already available in torrents and that would compete with iTunes?
There is no code available at that link, and no indication whatsoever that Google and Apple’s implementation of the algorithms and protocols described in those documents will be open source.

I believe your claim is false.
I mean if you already believe that the press is mostly Right in their reporting, it might be difficult to convince you otherwise. But there are so many instances of fake news related to Trump reporting that it's really not inaccurate to call it that.

If literally everything you said was twisted in a way to misrepresent you don't you think you'd get a little tired of it, roll your eyes at it, and shrug it off sometimes too? That's not an absolute defense for doing this exclusively, but he doesn't do this exclusively. He calls it out, then answers.

But this is altogether besides the point of what I was responding to, which is that this kind of talk is existentially dangerous to the press as an institution. You could claim Trump is a liar and a deflector and is doing bad things and says a one-liner instead of justifying, and that would be a fair criticism. But then it would be a danger insofar as it means we have a lack of responsibility and accountability in our leadership, not insofar as it poses a threat to the freedom of the press.
The fact that the WHO is sometimes wrong does not mean that they are always wrong. It also does not mean that any WHO-sourced fact should immediately spawn this reply. In general, the WHO gets more right than they get wrong.

I’m critical of the WHO too but I don’t think it’s productive to make this kind of left turn in this kind of thread.

Do you have any data that suggests the specific WHO-sourced claim in this thread and on this topic is not accurate?

Otherwise it’s just ad hominem, which is noise.

Let’s put it another way: There is no currently available evidence of airborne spread of ncov. That’s a fact regardless of whether the WHO says it or not.

Please remember to keep in mind that the data and the messenger are separate.
Not to mention https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/fertilizer-runoff...
Could be the plot for the next James Bond movie, I think they have had movies where the villian is trying to corner the market in oil, gold, water, media, space, etc. Maybe cornering the market in frozen tundra could be the next villainous objective.
Or maybe because Vegas isn't Vegas (I mean this - https://www.reviewjournal.com/uncategorized/knowing-vegas-wh... ) and most of the participants came from abroad or other cities in the US.

So if people got contaminated there, in a couple of days they probably were somewhere else already.
If you do a local backup, there are tools to decrypt it (if encrypted) and view/dump the messages. If the backup is not encrypted, you can skip the decryption step.

The message db is just a sqlite file.

iOS backups are in
~/Library/Application Support/MobileSync/Backup/ although the file names are obfuscated. There are tools for browsing the obfuscated file names, or you can just grep for a known string in your messages, find the sqlite file, and rename it to sms.db.

My friend wrote a cool tool called sqlite2json at my insistence which, if you don’t know/care to use sqlite, will dump an sqlite file to json. It’s available on pypi for installation via pip.
Clock/time namespaces are something we've needed for years - is this actually integrated into the current kernel?
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Note that Uber was given that entitlement by Apple. It was explicitly granted an exception to use a private entitlement (which is in of itself unusual) and then submit such an app to the App Store.
This is pretty much the freemium model. Free gives you free marketing as people will be talking about it. Sharing on social etc. The pricing page is effectively:

Free: Book

Premium: Book + nice feeling of helping out a nice guy

And sounds like a lot of people thought the premium version was worth it. Great stuff.
System call namespaces. ;-)
"round up slightly" by >100 million humans?

You don't see a difference?

The point being made is that human civilization is making leaps and bounds globally because that number isn't a billion, and most importantly it has a strong, predictable trajectory downwards, towards zero.

"I don't see a difference" is like saying "we were going 80 mph towards the wall, and we braked, but now we're going 50, and I don't see much difference, it's practically 80 if you just round up." Are you not interested in the fact that we're continuing to brake?
Just to clarify: I'm not saying there is a significant difference between map views and indices, I'm saying I prefer the directness of programming with them over trusting the query planner and table statistics. In couch, to do a table scan, I need to program it as such, otherwise I'm forced to use a view - things like forgotten indices for some edge cases are impossible. Sure takes longer to do things, but when performance issues arise it's easy to reason about while with SQL based DBs I've seen a lot of time being spent at that stage. They work well 99%, and then that remaining 1% takes 99% of your time.
Correct. This is why iSH cannot dynamically generate code like say UTM can and must use software emulation via a threaded interpreter.
E=mc^2 is a consequence from special relativity, not a theoretical framework. It also has very little to do with the understand of nuclear reactions. The reason why nuclear reactions release much more energy than chemical reactions is that the binding energies inside the nucleus are much larger than inside the electron shell. Mass-energy equivalence exists in both cases.
5.6 and newer, yes.
Contact tracing is also in general a lot easier to do for STIs
Installing an app even through a cable requires clicking through permissions.
Looking more closely at it, this only seems to implement clock offsets rather than changing the length of a second. Changing the actual rate of system time progress would be helpful for a number of things including finding time-based synchronization errors.
> Less commas. More periods.

Fewer commas, surely.
I currently use a 3-layered solution: browser blockers -> custom host file on each machine (StevenBlack hosts for linux and windows, nebulo for android) -> nextdns

I'm actually satisfied, but I'm trying to setup pi-hole+unbound on a cloudatcost host I own to reduce the load on nextdns, so far without success.
Been posted here several times. Re-upped because of the Amazon thing?
Maybe "he" is short for "Helios" :-)
Release the source code and provide some mechanism for users to have verifiable proof that the published code matches the application running on the device and we can start talking about trust.

Given past track record of both companies, this is the only way I would ever have of not being skeptical.
Not a single video of Adam Curry's magnificent 80s hairdo? It's a bleedin' outrage!
CoreData, which is commonly used as object storage by apps on Apple’s platforms, is backed by SQLite.
I am incredibly jealous and somewhat outraged.

$80k/yr with pension benefits and a third of your work days off is better than a lot of private sector comp. I'd happily take that last benefit.
That reads really weird. Putting a greeting in the middle of an email is jarring.
Absolutely. While this article does not come from a well known outlet, all of the evidence presented comes from peer-reviewed studies, universities, and organisations like the International Laboratory for Air Quality and Health:

> The frustration lies with the fact that WHO is clinging to a 90-year-old medical dogma. The droplet dogma, articulated by William Wells in 1930 for tuberculosis, holds that contagion is largely limited to the distance covered by droplets that are larger than five to 10 microns in size.

> Several types of studies now challenge that view.

> A 2003 paper in The New England Journal of Medicine documented a flight in which one SARS case led to 16 possible infections – eight of whom were sitting within three rows of the symptomatic patient. Another study the same year suggested SARS transmission through an air shaft in a housing complex in Hong Kong.

https://australiascience.tv/is-covid-19-airborne-dont-know-b...

Another scientific article directly on the airbourneness of COVID19: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S016041202...

As an anecdotal evidence, I'd like to point to the Diamond Princess cruise ship. Infections continued to grow on the lockdowned cruise ship, where meals were individually delivered and people weren't allowed out of their rooms except for brief exercise with no contact.

How could so many people have been infected if COVID19 is not airbourne? Air recirculation is a prime suspect.

My view is that it is not reasonable to adopt a position that COVID19 is not airborne; and the position taken by the WHO should be discounted (not that we should always take the opposite of WHO; but that should NOT be the end of it given all the failures they have had to date).
Having been to 18 conferences in the last 6 years I cannot imagine how online conferences are worth it. Meaning worth it for both viewers and speakers.

This isn’t to diminish efforts to put on these events. However, it’s important to look at the motives behind conferences:

1.) boost your status as speaker - speaking at conferences can land you a new job, get you investment, etc.

2.) gaining insight that you otherwise couldn’t gain online as an attendee - hallway gatherings, random discussions, etc is why a lot of people go to conferences. The chance that you might catch that one expert in your field and pick their brain is high.

3.) acquire leads as an attending company - for conferences like re:Invent or Ignite you’re year is made by acquiring thousands of leads over the course of 4 days. I’ve seen companies spend $250k on a booth and close over $5m in sales just from one conference.

4.) build good will with the community as a sponsor - when people see you throwing money around sponsoring social events and after parties they tend to give you more attention. Companies do this ultimately to close more business.

Given those 4 motives, I don’t see how online conferences are a thing. Perhaps my definition of conference is too enterprise-y and narrow though.
Evidently Apple does not know how they work, as their multiple parsers can’t get them right ;)
A PDF document with a specification is not even close to "open source code". There is no way to know whether the specification actually matches the implementation.
Grab Unlimited Leads Right Off Google and YouTube
Apple’s T2 Security Chip Has Created a Nightmare for MacBook Refurbishers
Totally Rad!
The very idea of special relativity is that EM-fields exist without an aether.
Well it's not exactly a risk, but people might get miffed their email is part of some website without their permission.

Also, in a rather grim coincidence, one of the emails I googled belonged to a person who had died in a car crash few years ago.
I don't think you understand that entire industry sectors would not exist without Nasa.
There would be no GPS, no Google-maps, and you wouldn't know when a hurricane is coming.
Please don't cross into personal attack on HN. And please don't cross-examine other users. That's not curious conversation, which is what we're here for.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Kelvin also publicly stated we would never have heavier than air flying machines.
I wasn't going to post more but since some other people are taking an amusing point seriously enough to try and bury:

- No victims in the UK were Russian dissidents; in fact most were not even Russian.

- Skripal was a Russian military intelligence officer working for MI6.

- He did not live in swinging London or some random backwater, as a typical Witsec might, but in the top British military county of Wiltshire.

If an American working for China's intelligence service and living right next door to the Wuhan lab was one of the first victims of Covid-19 anyone insisting it could only mean the US carried out an attack would be written off as a conspiracy loon.
I once took 15 years off, partly cos I was uninspired by the dominant environment, and came back enjoying it all once again.
What? XML is super easy to parse. If you think XML is hard to parse, maybe you're trying to do it with a DOM interface, or wasting a bunch of time manually shuffling data around. The XML 1.0 spec is super short, once you ignore DTD stuff and things like entity references.

In this case it's just a plist, which makes things even easier.
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This reminds me of the time that MAD Magazine did parodies of entries in the old Spencer Gifts catalogs.
thing is, you won't see much of a difference if you hit a wall with 80 or 50 (mph/kmph)