skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'd like to know more about "all phones are hacked" in Hong Kong. I believe you, I just want to read about the details because I've been thinking about this lately.

(For instance: this includes Apple phones, or you would have mentioned them, the way you did Pixel, right?)
I'm using FF since Mosaic days and it was always slow. But how come if everything was bad back then, it isn't blazing fast with 100x faster hardware from my SGI days and several rewrites?
Yes, just be sure to open a legal entity and file a form W-8BEN-E, or IRS will want a 30% cut from US company at the end of the year.
Again that’s from standing next to a highway, try and work out the percentage of land being covered by highways in that region. They are highlighted on maps and travelers tend to spend a lot of time on them, but they don’t actually cover that much surface area compared to local roads, houses, etc.
Not OP, but those are well known facts. Quick Google search would show dozens of articles from multiple sources of media.
Ask HN: Anyone a social entrepreneur, i.e. placing social impact above profit?
For a few years now, there's been a rising tide of activism and talk of capitalism 2.0 -- is anyone actually riding this wave, or is it mostly talk?

If anyone is actively working on (or with) a social enterprise, or if you know of any, I'd really appreciate it if you can loop me in!

Thank you in advance!
Super pretty! UX-wise it might be a bit too minimal, you could take some inspiration from https://excalidraw.com/ (which itself is inspired by many other drawing tools). Concrete example: If you only have 6 "things" to choose from, why not place them directly in the UI, saving one click + menu expansion (similar to the tool bar up top of Excalidraw).
J and K remind me of the essay about the Lisp Curse[0], which mentions that the expressiveness of the language became a sort of Achilles heel in its culture. It talks about people writing their projects in Lisp and not expecting other people to adapt to their conventions or combine their efforts on one library, where every solution worked well enough initially - but only for one person, its author.

In K the error messages are far harder to understand than most languages, and you'd need either enough comments or many hours of experience with the language to understand what a piece of code does, due to its sheer expressiveness. Also, there's comparatively less documentation for when you're trying to do something practical. I can't imagine introducing J or K in an open source project will be helpful if other contributors have to catch up to my understanding of the language and need to internalize and remember which single-character symbols mean "print" or "iter." I imagine that at least a Python programmer could reasonably understand the gist of a similar Ruby program, merely due to the fact that "class" and "map" and "length" are sequences of characters that usually show up in both languages. Not so with K.

Still, I find the vastly different ways of doing things with K interesting to see, even if I will only use it personally.

[0] http://winestockwebdesign.com/Essays/Lisp_Curse.html
Pub/sub subscription server and framework for event driven apps and infra
They have a pretty significant cash pile which they mentioned last year. The quarantine kinda threw a wrench in things, but they are still paying the people they let go through the end of the year. So it's not like they're imminently about to run out of cash.
Book Design
Doesn't this do what you are referring to?

https://docs.aws.amazon.com/awsaccountbilling/latest/aboutv2...
Comments like these give proper context to foreigner like me who don't know how inclined the Indian government is to follow through on their promises.
As someone who has and still run a SaaS product, I’m amazed at the number of HN people saying this is a toxic/bad customer. This is an incredibly low bar for “toxic”.

Apparently for some here, making a post where he made a legitimate complaint made him toxic just because it’s on Twitter? Twitter has become a standard way for some people to communicate with companies or to vent frustrations whether you like it or not. Deal with it instead of calling them an “ahole”.
Not sure, I'm in the EU, and it's my 3rd Passport because of the reception problems. Perhaps it's a Berlin problem.

You're commented prompted me to take out my Passport again, and we'll see if things have changed, thanks.
How much is that biased because everything has been optimized to Chrome? From frameworks to your implementation.
How this effect the Chinese startup valuations?
As per the "$100 startup", one should drop the 20% of clients that take up 80% of your time, and focus the ones that are cost effective (noise-free profit). They may have (or not) learned their lesson and gave a full refund and closed the door.

As a precaution/suggestion, when I work on an app (a website is a different thing but the analogy remains), I take a backup not (just) at the EOD, but "every now and then". It could be something simple such as zipping the folder with the xcode project (and files-images-etc), screenshots every now and then, so my time is not completely wasted.

Ghost does have shitty controls (and probably practices as the article implies), it cannot be that they "forgot" to limit the value of number X to >=2 by accident. It's the typical scummy practice so you slip, they catch you red-handed and then charge you it since you already got used to using 4+ accounts.

On the other hand, the author is also a bit shady. He knows that the limit is 2, creates 4, gets the warning, DOES NOT get charged, and then nags about it. Tried to cheat and got caught by someone (equally) unethical?
This is basically one of the reasons large outsourcing firms exist.
> My main reason for disliking Snap is the fact that it allows anybody in the world to publish a package with minimal moderation. This completely undermines the inherent trust that system package managers should have.

Where do we get more maintainers? Sometimes in my development I release one new Wekan version per day. Canonical's Snap build servers download Wekan source code directly from GitHub, it is very transparent.

> On the sandboxing - it's good in principle, but rarely seems to be implemented in a truly meaningful way

Wekan Snap has strict sandbox, so code can not access any other directory that /var/snap/wekan/common. So in case someone would find exploit for web service, it can not escape sandbox. It is very important.
There’s also the whole fringe topic of disequilibrium economics, which eschews most of what all economics assume by fiat (that economies are in equilibrium and get shocked out of it, and then resume some kind of trajectory back to the new equilibrium).
Try to keep up with Android development and Play Store policies...

I stopped publishing own apps on the Play Store, and unpublished all the one that I had, because of the stress and the time used just to follow the damn policies.
Cyber Squirrel 1 tracked animal-inflicted power outages around the world, up until early 2019: https://cybersquirrel1.com/
I don't think that would have made sense: Mozilla stays relevant by producing a browser that lots of people want to use. This requires substantial investment in developer salaries, or else other browsers get better and you don't.

If they had taken your approach, I think they wouldn't have been able to get out Quantum, and then Firefox would be much smaller now, and be even less able to influence the direction of the web.
Konqueror[1] can toggle between KHTML and Webkit at runtime.

GNOME Web (formerly Epiphany)[2] is Webkit based.

Surf[3] (By the suckless st/dwm people) is WebKit based.

That said, Surf would be unlikely to move to chromium from my perception of the views of the suckless group, and their opinions of how software would work are really opposed to mainstream appeal, Konqueror undoubtedly will eventually replace QtWebkit with QtWebEngine for at least the Webkit support (if not dropping KHTML entirely - KHTML's own readme suggests not using it), so that leaves Gnome Web as the one open source browser aimed at a wider audience using Webkit.

[1]: https://kde.org/applications/internet/org.kde.konqueror

[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNOME_Web

[3]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Surf_(web_browser)
Links to course playlists on youtube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC12LqyqTQYbXatYS9AA7Nuw/pla...

and the corresponding github repos:
https://github.com/search?q=org%3Aaws-samples+%22aws-machine...
I really want to like and use Firefox, but the difference (on a top-end computer) is very noticeable and annoying. Perhaps Firefox should work on their perceived speed, if that's the difference.
Or, stated another way, it's the tragedy of the commons.
> My point is that there is no indication that hate and prejudice where ever part of Eich's views.

Can you explain to me how donating in support of Prop 8 (which would have banned gay marriage) isn't homophobic (and thus hateful, prejudicial, and discriminatory)? Can you explain it in such a way as it would make sense for LGBTQ people but not, say, people of color?

> I agree, in that era my comment would have supported people campaigning against slavery in racist states.

This isn't a good faith response. Being pro-slavery was never a valid political position. It was simply hateful and cruel. We cannot accept stances like this as civil discourse. Any debate over "well, does group of humans X get the same rights as group of humans Y" is done. The answer is always yes.
It will likely be point to point optical networking (Ethernet/OTN) on these links. Once you get to the last mile, PON (probably GPON for now; XGS-PON is starting to come down in cost now, but is still probably 2x GPON generally).

Point to point kit is cheaper till you get to the customer-facing aggregation, at which point per-port cost of PON vs PtP is much more in PON's favour, and PON customer kit is very cheap from benefits of scale.

PON on the other hand isn't good for long range links. Even amplified (which is £££, and not normally sensible) it has quite a low range compared to point to point at the higher split ratios that make the cost of kit per user so attractive.
I guess they are called Gamecards. I guess some people forget but Facebook has had games for ages. They sell cards to pay for in-game stuff.
> But by their own admission, they were crap at C++. They didn't really know memory management at all, and they didn't really get the whole "ethos" of C++.

That seems normal and expected. Why would these people know memory management and c++ "ethos" if they've never worked with c++ in a professional capacity?

> Moreover, they periodically tried (and failed) at picking up functional programming.

Presumably the reason they didn't learn FP was because there wasn't sufficient motivation and assistance. I work at a company that does all FP and primarily hires people with no FP experience. We have a week-long FP training and tech leads spend a few hours per week with each new person helping them get ramped up. Of the hundreds of people we've hired in the past few years, I've never heard of anybody who failed to learn the language and our codebase style. There are plenty of reasons that certain people haven't worked out, but this is not one.
Looks like the control room has a little TV in it, to help with the timing.

https://youtu.be/slDAvewWfrA
It's really interesting that Mozilla doesn't funnel donations to software development interests. There are successful open source projects that do so, such as Linux Mint [0]. Maybe what's really broken is the idea that a browser needs a backing corporation to fund it?

Personally, I can see no better way to keep an open internet than through the development of meaningful software that serves that purpose.

[0] "Donations are usually quite high after a release and Linux Mint 20 is no exception." https://blog.linuxmint.com/?p=3953
> I find JDownloader2 to be very scammy feeling. It feels like adware software.

That's because it's not in fact open source. From Wikipedia:

> Some parts, but not all, of JDownloader are open-source.

> Mid-2012 there were complaints that JDownloader's installer added adware without the user's consent.[4] The JDownloader installation contains adware according to several sources, including the developer's own forums.[5][6] There were further complaints mid-2014.

JD is basically junkware. There's a reason why it doesn't seem to be packaged on any Linux distribution. It's not community-focused OSS in the ordinary sense.
Misinformation: falsehood

Disinformation: weaponized falsehood

Malinformation: weaponized truth
> Are you suggesting there might be an issue because they are ‘using your resources’ to do this?

Not suggesting, but asking. It certainly feels invasive to me, though.
"completable software". that's the ticket. the maturity to say no more features will be accepted; it is done.
for the past 20 years we have been teaching the agile way, that points to the constant churn of requirements, the pivots, and the idea there is always another sprint
Yes.

In other words: if vectors are column vectors, then covectors are row vectors, and vice versa. In this case, taking the dual is transposing your vectors, and the transpose of a transpose gives you back the original vectors.

But mathematicians try to build the most general, most abstract framework, which doesn't rely on the specifics of a concrete example (i.e. the dot product of finite-dimensional real vectors).
Is it true though?

Keeping your stuff up and running, patched with the latest security updates takes time. And opensource systems also break compatibility at times. Sometimes the installation/upgrade process changes over time and you need to learn how to do proper upgrades even if the software technically can be made to work with the rest of the system.

It's hard to quantify, but I don't think it's so clear-cut as Yegge makes it look.
> Do the security services count disinformation as a threat to nation state security?

They probably do because they need to justify the huge, ever-increasing and uncontrollable budgets they're receiving. It also seems like "disinformation" and "fake news" have taken the place of the "terrorists" from the 2000s and early 2010s, I'm 100% sure I've seen many articles with titles similar to "Terrorists can bring down city's/country's power grid" back during those days.
My pet theory is that labor force participation declines and "automation" go hand in hand across all industries.

Automation isn't robots it's what used to be a 10 person marketing team doing the same amount of work but being more productive as they're all much more cross skilled and have more tools at their fingertips.

Same with some aspects of dev/operation. Same with some aspects of legal. Same with some aspects of medical/surgery.

The net result is that you end up with more roles that are senior level and less opportunities for entry level.
Snaps have already taken off in a big way. Many individuals, companies and enterprises have selected Snap because of secure sandbox and automatic updates.

It is just that FUD from Linux Mint causes many HN articles with FUD.
I didn't know this would blow up. Thank you for answering! :D

I know that all of this shouldn't be interpreted as legal advice [1], strictly speaking, but it is hugely helpful that I now have a much more targeted vision on what to think about and to look for.

The reason I'm asking this question is because it's Saturday and I'm in a daydreaming mood. But upon reflection, I realized I'd love to work for a US company as I want to see the difference between US software development and Dutch software development. This is especially the case for silicon valley. Reading HN almost daily since 2015 definitely contributed to that. Based on the upvotes, I don't think I'm the only one.

So I hope I'm planting the seed for some US companies to think about this option more often.

[1] I almost accidentally did interpret this thread as legal advice, which is why I am making this explicit for if others tend to do the same.
Even if the foreign entity sends an invoice and pays their own tax, I don't think it's quite that simple. If the company hiring the contractor wants to deduct their expense from their taxes, the IRS will want to know why because typically a 1099 would be filed. I am not an accountant nor tax attorney, but I think that at the very least something like a W-8BEN would need to be filed:

https://www.investopedia.com/terms/w/w8form.asp

https://www.irs.gov/instructions/iw8ben

Long story short, at the very least, the person should speak with an accountant familiar with these filings to make sure all forms are filed. There will be some amount of paperwork to ensure they can survive an audit. These tax issues are separate from any additional legal considerations that may apply.
Intelligence and Investigation Talent Moves (15 August)
Wow! This is really good.

Few days back my brother-in-law happily announced that Jio Fiber has reached their homes and that I can visit my home-town and stay longer without swearing about the Internet "availability". For context, I'm from Manipur[1], a pretty remote corner at the extreme north-east corner of India.

Earlier, I was consulting with a friend who owns a part of an ISP there. I wanted to pull a fiber all the way home and setup station there I can replicate work (and school for the kids) and actually be able to work from there. Now, I've asked my brother-in-law to get any plan possible. When I go back there, I'm going to just carry a whole bunch of equipments to wire and wi-fi the whole home. The homes there are really massive and few stories, so this is going to be fun.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manipur
Love the isometric views. I was actually looking to build a similar diagramming tool (but for a different usecase). Do you mind sharing which libraries/tools you've used here?

If you're looking to productize this in future, best of luck in advance.
Lyft removed all of Amundsen on GitHub
This was kind of the case before the Syrian civil war though. "Unskilled" Labourers from Syria would work the week in Lebanon, live in miserable, cramped conditions, then go home for the weekend. Rinse/Repeat.

The earning power was simply different - and a Lebanese would rarely do it for the rates those jobs ended up paying because of the abundance of Syrians who were willing to do it in Lebanon.
> I'm not against building your own castles (I love doing that, esp. in my free time) - I am just a bit triggered by the previous blog post arguing unconditionally for it..

Yeah, I totally hear you. God knows I've built not only "castles" but immense, complicated and unsustainable architectures (or balls of spaghetti); deadend frameworks that started deprecating the moment I wrote it; under-documented or -tested (or not at all!) libraries with unclear interfaces..

As much I love creating things from scratch, experience has taught me to be cautious and conservative when deciding to do so - especially in a company/team environment. It's almost always better to research first, study what exists in the ecosystem/community, and use available tools and building blocks.

Many articles get posted on HN that describe how and why a company decided to build their own database, operating system, language, framework, or library.

It's not as exciting to read or write about using "boring technology" to build stable, reliable systems with a decade-old, tried-and-tested framework. But this latter is, and should be, the standard approach: mostly "engineering", with just enough "programming" to glue and orchestrate it all together.
How to Increase Your Attention Span
Seconded. I love the iso view and the way the edges drag, reminds me of SimCity2000.

All these online tools make me slightly uneasy. I avoided draw.io for a long time, expecting it to fold one day and take my data with it.
Why are cop families always so obsessed with Disney?
I think the whole framing of this discussion is inappropriate. The interesting thing about this fungus is that it can use the radiation as an energy source to sustain life. The fact that we can’t use the fungus as some kind of miracle lightweight radiation shield is missing the point.

Here we have a life form that has adapted to make use of a very unusual (on earth’s surface, anyway) energy source. That should not be taken for granted. It’s an amazing demonstration of the adaptability of life. It also warrants a deeper investigation into how this ability works and how it came about by evolutionary processes.
Did you see two rockets return to earth and land side-by-side?
sounds kind of like this famous linus rant: https://lkml.org/lkml/2012/12/23/75
D also supports POSIX positional arguments: https://dlang.org/library/std/format/formatted_write.html
I am Sahin founder&CEO RemoteTeam.com.

In RemoteTeam.com we can help you to pay and manage contractors very easily. We have a solid payments platform (fastest, cheapest and dollar transfers for most popular countries). Also we help you to do in a more compliant way. (W8ben forms and contractor aggrements with specific sections for each countries). Our in house lawyer works with 40+ lawyers globally.

We have hundreds of companies with team sizes of 20-40 and they are mostly remote and non-US contractors.
> digestible version

Ooh, was wondering if the fungi were good to eat /s
5G Conspiracy Theorists Hire Lawyer to Sue UK Gov over Health Fears
> Firefox built its userbase by being different than the dominant browser

Not really. firefox rose tu domination as bland copy of the Internet Explorer, the dominating Browser that time. They also added parts of their own like tabs and addons, but that were just gadgets for those who knew about them.

> The 25% of internet users who wanted what Firefox offered ten years ago still want the same thing now,

What 25%? Addons are hardly used by anyone, except Adblockers. Even the most well known addons are only used by around 1-2% of the users. Adblockers are more popular, but even they seem to stuck by just 20 or 30% of firefox-users.
Can you imagine having to respond to all these "chrome ate my tabs" tickets?
Can’t you run draw.io locally, though?
> 100k for working on open-source is a pretty good salary.

The kind of people you're trying to hire have the option to earn 3-4x as much working for a FAANG. Being excited about working on something you believe in can get you a long way, but that's still a lot to ask.

(See discussion above: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24157803)
Coronavirus: We’re Paying for an Epidemic of Stupidity
How about a plaintext transcription?
It does seem that way at first, but (stipulating that it's a thing) cancel culture is based on someone's actions. Discrimination is based on someone's attributes that they cannot change, that are fundamental to who they are. This is why deplatforming someone who's being a racist (or a cop, or a Democrat) is not the same as deplatforming someone because they're LGBTQ.

You can go a little further with this into ascribed vs. achieved status [1][2]. I'm not saying achieved status discrimination is good or OK, nor am I saying it isn't. But it's not the same as ascribed status discrimination.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ascribed_status

[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Achieved_status