skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ars Technica did some detailed testing of these drives a couple weeks ago. See "We put Western Digital’s dreaded SMR Red drive to the test" [1]. They found that they won't work for ZFS but are actually OK in most NASes.

Here is their conclusion:

-------- begin quote

We want to be very clear: we agree with Seagate's Greg Belloni, who stated on the company's behalf that they "do not recommend SMR for NAS applications." At absolute best, SMR disks underperform significantly in comparison to CMR disks; at their worst, they can fall flat on their face so badly that they may be mistakenly detected as failed hardware.

With that said, we can see why Western Digital believed, after what we assume was a considerable amount of laboratory testing, that their disks would be "OK" for typical NAS usage. Although obviously slower than their Ironwolf competitors, they performed adequately both for conventional RAID rebuilds and for typical day-to-day NAS file-sharing workloads.

We were genuinely impressed with how well the firmware adapted itself to most workloads—this is a clear example of RFC 1925 2.(3) in action, but the thrust does appear sufficient to the purpose. Unfortunately, it would appear that Western Digital did not test ZFS, which a substantial minority of their customer base depends upon.

These tests may not be great news for either the American or Canadian class-action lawsuits currently underway against Western Digital, but they aren't the end of the line for those lawsuits, either. Even in the best case, the SMR models of WD Red underperform their earlier, non-SMR counterparts substantially—and consumers were not given clear notice of the downgrade.

If the same firmware was being used to make substantially larger drives available to consumers than would otherwise be possible, and the limitations of those drives were adequately explained, we would probably be gushing over its utility and function. Unfortunately, Western Digital has so far only chosen to use it to cut manufacturing costs on small disks, without even passing the savings along to the consumer.

-------- end quote

That last paragraph may be key. It sounds like if these drives had been marketed a little different and priced a little different they could have been a good deal for many NAS users.

I wonder what the chances are that they were originally intended for just that, and something got mixed up or miscommunication between design and release?

[1] https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2020/06/western-digitals-smr...
Your examples are extremely contrived.

> Suppose that they'd already been on trial for it, found guilty and served their time

Ok, so I'm supposing a convicted felon is trying to purchase a gun, which is illegal under 18 U.S.C. § 922(g)(1).

> Do you sell them the gun, knowing that they intend to use it for violence?

No, I do not sell them the gun, because it would be illegal to do so.

===

Bottom line, I believe in "innocent until proven guilty." I don't deny services or tools to someone legally able to purchase it because I think they might use it to commit a future crime. I might report them to authorities if my suspicions are backed by evidence, but it's not my job to prevent future crimes. If I work at a glass blowing shop and someone wants me to create a custom bong for them, I wouldn't deny them because they might use it to smoke illegal drugs. Who knows, they might be scientists that need it to conduct a study.
They have their place in vacation spots with poor pedestrian infrastructure, and middle ground cities with poor uber/lyft service. Rental cars might be done in boston and nyc, but still viable in Cleveland where getting a lyft from a suburban office campus could mean 30 minutes of waiting for the driver who grabbed your request all the way from downtown to show up.
TIL: you can use "cd ~number" to navigate back to previously visited directories
It is a common tactic to claim support for something popular when you know it can't pass.

Last I checked, the Democrats are in charge of virtually all of the cities where this is happening, as well as most of the states. No reason this can't get done at the state and local levels.
You know what else speaks to a fundamental disinterest in the law and its uniform enforcement?

The Gunship Video itself.
What is the scope of this geographically? Does disparate impact apply locally, or is it generalized nationally first? If the discrimination took place somewhere like Palm Springs, in a place where half the population is LGBTQ, could they get away with it?
It was so easy to ditch the Fisher-Price UI and pick the Classic UI in WinXP. I really can't imagine holding that UI against WinXP!
Typetalk.

It also has a free tier up to 10 users, that retains the most recent 10k messages.
US justice system is a meme.
>there are already thousands

Are there? Got a reference to some of these bulletproof documents?

EDIT: crickets ..
It's still correct the vast majority of the protests are peaceful.
I think I can speak for millions of security-minded folks: Well, it’s about time.
yeah but the successful insurance of new stock to cover debt means it may no longer be worthless
No, you need to realign to something other than the close-knit UI choices made by Ableton. They're trying to do something different here.
I can’t get verification codes from ZipCar on t-mobile
I see this as a parallel to deplatforming, but instead of working to silence a particular speaker by shutting off access to popular distribution channels, here we have calls to shut off a company/government's access to basic software development tools.

I think this is a particularly distinctive case, for example, by comparison to the recent news that Amazon is blocking law enforcement access to Rekognition (facial recognition). Facial recognition and AI in general is fraught with massive ethical concerns to the point where leading developers/researchers in the field are actively abandoning it (e.g. YOLO). There's no such concern about development of source control, certainly no more so than would apply to any business productivity software, or virtually any networking, infrastructure, or database projects. Interestingly, this may signal a developing rift between Open Source licensing ethos which strictly forbids limitation on use, running head-on with political agendas which would seek to limit access to software based on the user. Licensing isn't really a concern in Github's case, but will be a consideration that developers have to make when choosing a license in the future, namely... do I release my software as Open Source and give up my right to stop Bad People from using it for their own benefit?

For a company like GitHub (owned by Microsoft lest we forget) to cut off access to a branch of the Federal government would be extremely foolish, but I believe also not only counter-productive, but also ethically questionable and politically dangerous. I don't believe Github (or most any workplace) should be a political battleground for debates over border policy, and I believe that a vocal minority attempting to weaponizing neutral parties like Github leads to bad business outcomes (lost income, hostile workplaces) as well as bad political outcomes (breeding resentment and polarization).

As far as the particular issue of cutting off ICE from its source control software, I think a less political assessment would find that it's in the best interest of immigrants and refugees for ICE to have top-notch software custom built for the populations that they oversee. I'm not particularly familiar with the many tasks that ICE officers perform on a daily basis, but I know that things like trying to process hundreds of thousands of refugees applying for asylum, or trying to place ~50,000 unaccompanied minors in homes throughout the country is a truly massive logistical challenge, and we don't want a single child slipping through the cracks. Cutting off ICE access to software development tools IMO is actively harming these populations.
> The great thing about this, is that someone else will realize there is now an under-served market, and create a business to fulfill that need.

Except that every other business can now refuse to serve that business services, because that business serves people nobody else likes.

Given even time and systematic discrimination, that business owner and everyone they serve will be driven to destitution and cease to be a meaningful market segment. They, along with the people they serve can't afford to buy anything anyways.

Should society should just let them die because of the magic of capitalism and (???) rights?
> "We show that this architecture"

They are demonstrating a new technique, Gated Linear Networks.

> gives rise to universal learning capabilities in the limit

they claim to show that with an unbounded amount of time and memory (network size / # params) this architecture can be used to learn/approximate any function

> with effective model capacity increasing as a function of network size

Model capacity here refers to the ability to memorize a mapping between inputs and outputs. They show that a network with more layers/weights will "memorize" more.

> in a manner comparable with deep ReLU networks

"Deep ReLU networks" are referring to commonly used modern deep neural network architectures. ReLU is a popular activation function: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rectifier_(neural_networks)
These are really good illustrations of the quote from this article:

> “Qualified immunity means that government officials can get away with violating your rights as long as they violate them in a way nobody thought of before,” said IJ Attorney Joshua Windham.

https://ij.org/press-release/institute-for-justice-asks-u-s-...
As an AS3-focused developer in the years around 2010, this is too heavy-handed. The Apple announcement followed a youtube announcement in Jan 2010 of an experimental HTML5 video player. It took years for that player to become the standard. Apple may well have seen the writing on the wall, but to say "everyone hated or was avoiding flash" is objectively false.
From a business standpoint, IBM abandoned it years ago and HP has gone back and forth between whether it wants to keep their PC unit for years.

Almost all of Apple’s former competitors are either dead or worth nothing. From a business standpoint, Apple’s strategy seemed to have been the right one. Apple probably makes more on computer sells than any one else and they only make up 10% of Apple’s revenue.

So HN posters can complain about Apple’s strategy until the cows come home, but the market has decided it was the right one.
Norway suspends virus-tracing app due to privacy concerns
Good faith means that if you have a pre-existing condition then you disclose it, and it means that if your insurance company doesn't insure pre-existing conditions then they disclose that. This is all before signing the contract.

It doesn't mean there can't be robust discussions about what the contract covers when particularly unexpected sets of facts come up.
A revolutionary new iPad IDE startup
The heartbreaking story behind the fitness model Jenny Mosienko
I have Debian running on my TS-451A for quite a while now. Except the front LEDs, everything is working completely fine. It is pretty much just a plain x86_64 PC with an UEFI firmware. The TS-251A is exactly the same but with 2 instead of 4 drive bays, as far as I know.

It's very neat for its low power usage and small form factor.
That's called "financial repression". Sorry that it causes you to take excessive risks, there are many like you.

Walter Bagehot, the de facto founder of The Economist, was of the opinion that people will never stand 2% rates (and he meant plus :) ). They would rather fund anything, any project, the weirdest thing that offers any hope of yield; no matter how stupid.

And here we are, 143 years after Bagehot passed away. Sir, you are still absolutely correct!
> Now we have powerful browsers, web standards, and you can do amazing things in them

Flash had it's flaws, but it was a much more coherent interface for users and developers than what has become of the web. The mish-mash of HTML, CSS, and JavaScript (with all of the different styles of API) is really unappealing to me. It's rare, but when I do make an application out of a web page, I gravitate towards making a large canvas in the middle of a static page. This is exactly like having a Flash applet except the programming experience is worse, and animation is more complicated.

Also note that Flash was usable standalone, and in addition to having much better development tools, giving someone a .swf file was much lighter weight than the Electron stuff. Moreover, Flash had an onramp for non-programmers which is pretty sorely lacking in the web world.

I'll agree that modern web standards can do everything that Flash did, but only in that "Turing Complete" kind of way where you can do everything with Brainfuck but you'd be happier in a different languge.
This is an exceptional comment.

Especially point A.

I used to work for a company that made health insurance claims benefit management software for first and third party administrators.

We would get requests from clients to do data mining in our databases that was well in excess of what was legal - one example included the fact that they were using genealogy services to build family trees and while they couldn't mine DNA for familial information, surely there was no harm in looking over your distant relatives for diagnosis codes, right?

"We can't do that".

"Why not, it's all in the databases, right?"

To the OP's point, that would oblige the traveler to notify their insurance if they got a text from the airline advising of delays, etc.
Companies Need to Share More of Their Riches with Workers
I believe the April 20th (bottom) section of this blog post is the post in question:

https://blog.westerndigital.com/wd-red-nas-drives/

TLDR: They suggest different RED drives should be considered for different workloads. While that may have been their intention all along, that was not communicated well at in marketing or retail, where the drive colors (red, blue, purple, etc) used to be the appropriate method for selecting the right drive for your workload/purpose.

The way they have worded it, the blog is not wrong, but they left out an important fact: consumers didn't have the necessary info to make the decision they're suggesting people should have made.

Even if you read the data sheets that were available at the time, one would expect the listed transfer rate was a limit that the drive was capable of, not the rate that if exceeded would cause the device to perform very poorly. Worse, there would be no way to know that was the case because the fact that they were SMR technology was previously unreleased and the drives themselves actively hid that information from the host computer (since they were "device managed" SMR).

The data sheets still aren't clear on how the performance is impacted with workload, but at least they're clear about the technology they use now.
The iPhone did two amazing things:

1) it offered full web browser experience. No one had done this in a phone yet. They also banned flash from day 1 and favoured development using standard web technologies. The side benefit from all of this is that the data demands crippled our cellular networks and forced major infrastructure upgrades :)

2) Apple took control out of the carriers hands. By standardizing on the web, no more special+favoured applications! Just load a web page :)
Make an iPad version and I'll pay $4.99 for it
Tasers are nonlethal weapons, and also don't work at that range anyways, or the police would've tased him. Multiple other cops had tasers.
The idea is kind of cool, but doesn't sound very practical. The beam width is my concern. If it's really narrow, then we have to know exactly where every nuclear warhead is to hit it. If it's really wide, then the power draw will be that much more immense, plus a huge risk of collateral damage to any life, human or otherwise, that happens to get in the path of the beam.

Not to mention that the prospect of detonating every nuke in the world, even at only 3% or so of normal yield, sounds pretty destructive too. If we're gonna get rid of some nukes, how about Megatons to Megawatts instead? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Megatons_to_Megawatts_Program
Most brokers aren't allowing regular people to sell tons naked of puts or calls. For almost all retail option traders, their losses are fixed.
Once you're already profitable, it's probably not that attractive. I've explained it to myself in the past by thinking about the would-be founder who's bootstrap-inclined, but who'd rather "go for it" now rather than doing nights and weekends for 18 more months before quitting their job. This person might not want or have access to traditional VC, and wouldn't be able to get a traditional loan. If all goes according to their plan, when that 18-36 months is up, they've paid back this "really expensive" loan and own 100% of their now profitable company.
A bit disingenuous for the presenter to completely ignore the obvious vignetting of his dim projected image, the results seemed pretty mediocre from where I'm sitting.
Looks great, but the $99/year price doesn't exactly scream "email rebellion".
Not all Win32 software ran on Win32s, as Win32s didn't support things like memory protection and multithreading, right?
Clojure for Lisp Programmers (2012)
Open source streaming speech to text recognition
Don’t Blame the Public for Coronavirus Confusion
This one has been in the oven for some time now and I've finally got around to releasing it!

Inspired by the Roland MC-4 Microcomposer and various Eurorack sequencers, I decided to create an JavaScript environment/IDE to do read–eval–print loop (REPL) style musical pattern and composition system that can be used as a standalone or as an Audio Unit (AU) plugin inside your DAW.
Panther Enterprise: 10x faster searches and 60% less storage overhead
It’s more boring than that. It’s about making a slam dunk case for the jury. Criminal cases are not tried against a general moral standard. It begins with a reading of the specific statute offended. Including any evidence ancillary to the case, and that will not emotionally sway the jury for your case, undermines your case.

There are several venues for trying “war crime” cases, this is not one of them. I think if anybody really cared about the journalists who died you’d see lawfare leveraging UCMJ, but I’ve yet to see that. Seems the outrage is rather performative.
For a flight to have gone from 120% to nearly empty would mean that some large group didn't show up. Maybe an entire tour bus was delayed by a flat tire or something. Statistically speaking, a hundred people simultaneously missing their flight is vanishingly unlikely.
>Github refuses to work with ICE today and hypothetically tomorrow will only host code for Democrats?

I don't believe that political organisations are considered a protected class so yes, GitHub could decide to only host code for Democrats.

Your point seems to be "This is a slippery slope. Where do we draw the line?"

I think it is entirely reasonable that there _should_ be a line.

To take your example to the disturbing extreme, consider this: "Github refuses to work with ICE today and hypothetically tomorrow will refuse to build crematoria in extermination camps?"

There must be a line _somewhere_. Finding the best place to draw that line is a major challenge that requires significant and likely fraught discussion but it is something that must be done.
I don't know this is wholely true. Democrats and Republicans have been breaking rules of order for the last 20 or so years it seems, alternating based on who's in control.
A few of us managed to collaborate a bit... Not really going to change the world but it was fun while it lasted https://i.stack.imgur.com/rV8gQ.png
It's even stronger than that. They just have to violate them in a way nobody thought of and was succesfully convicted of before 1967 when qualified immunity was established.
Robintrack: Track of how many Robinhood users hold a particular stock over time
"Live and let live" and "golden rule" are great philosophies to live by.

But you still have responsibility when you assist others in doing things, whether you agree or disagree with those things.

Otherwise you are ignoring the "let live" part of your own philosophy.

For example, someone comes to you asking for your services to help them kill a third person.

If you believe in the "let live" part of your philosophy, you cannot assist in depriving someone of life in that way.

Same applies to the golden rule. It's easy to say you don't want to be denied assistance from others, so you won't deny it to them. But that's the easy scenario. Consider, when Alice is asked by Bob to help damage you, do you think the golden rule tells Alice to deprive you of life and liberty? I don't think it does.
Many American cities also decentralized their business cores, and developed suburban office parks far flung from airports, the city, any infrastructure, or each other, but very convenient for the managers who live along the fairway at the nearby country club. For those cities, it's impossible to get a rideshare from the suburbs. Unless you are in a college town, drivers do not patrol there and you will be waiting for a car to come from downtown or the airport to pick you up and take you to your hotel. The rental rate might even work out ahead given how expensive rideshare gets over time and distance.
> There's nothing wrong with the idea of qualified immunity. A government worker should not be held responsible if they make an honest mistake.

This implies that our legal system holds people responsible for honest mistakes. Our legal system is entirely prepared for these situations without qualified immunity. Qualified immunity exists only to shield people from breaking laws.
Personally I won't buy another WD or Sandisk product ever again. Companies like this don't ever really come off as being sorry for the scams they pull, so it's best to just cut them off completely. I de-Googled too because of their shady practices.

EDIT: For those who can't use the Internet to look things up, Sandisk and G-Technology and some random thing called Upthere are all WD brands.
Let’s say we’ll go that far and companies accept that...

Does everyone refuse to work for Komatsu, John Deere, Liebherr, etc? Is that even possible?
Indeed this is a very interesting artifact, the fact that it was designed by Léon Theremin, and the technical know-how that went into it.

> Because it was passive, needing electromagnetic energy from an outside source to become energized and activate, it is considered a predecessor of radio-frequency identification (RFID) technology.
Not only that, it sounds like the latest version(s) might already have a timebomb in them to prevent playback of content after the sunset date, and they seem to be aggressively pressuring everyone to stop using it:

>Q: Will Adobe make previous versions of Adobe Flash Player available for download after 2020?

>A: No. Adobe will be removing Flash Player download pages from its site and Flash-based content
will be blocked from running in Adobe Flash Player after the EOL Date.

>Q: If I find Flash Player available for download on a third-party website, can I use it?

>A: No, these versions of Flash Player are not authorized by Adobe. Customers should not use unauthorized versions of Flash Player.
>American lives at risk

Failing to prosecute legitimate war crimes puts American lives at risk.

This is duplicity at its finest.

Assange is not really on trial here. The Wests' public opinion of American war criminals is, however.
The audio seems to be a let down though: plug something into the (disassembled) phone's audio jack.

I wonder if phones can deal with USB audio cards (that have surround options), or if there are any Bluetooth audio solutions that offer surround sound.

Or I guess you can replace the phone with a PC/laptop, and have the display connected to an LVDS driver..
Could somebody motivate the comparison being made? It is not apriori obvious what Grassman numbers have to do with linear solvers. Thanks.