skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Alphabet uses this information to expand its influence, be it soft power, political power, or economic power.

For strong democracies to flourish, you can't have one corporation control the way its citizens access all information, from sea cables to browsers to proxying all the web through AMP.

The impact of these things on your life are major, disproportionately so according to your privilege and station, but the causality can sometimes be subtle, so we just shrug and carry on.

Right now, you're getting your needs met. But eventually, your needs, or the needs of someone you care for will be at a cross-roads with Alphabets best interest. Feeding them the information and critical mass they need to continue to exist now is what will allow them to take advantage of you in the future.

This is the classic "well, MY house isn't on fire yet" kind of thinking that gets us all burned in the end. All because the browser with the pinwheel logo is more familiar than the one with the fox on it.

I can only urge you to try to inform yourself, the information is unequivocally there for anyone to see, mass data collection by massive multinational corporations are limiting your civil liberties every day.

https://globalnews.ca/news/3983626/google-alphabet-washingto...

https://whyprivacymatters.org/

https://www.ted.com/talks/glenn_greenwald_why_privacy_matter...
I am not saying LA public transit will ever be able to produce something like Uber, but the way they grew public transit in the last 10 years is way more complex than an app based business funded by unlimited VC capital. This includes building transit lines connecting a city of 400 sq miles and has a ton of hilly terrain with the worst traffic congestion and always constrained by tax dollars
The clip from 250km away looks like the sun on the horizon.
I personally think this genie is out of the bottle and will never go back in. A huge portion of the population is extremely receptive to conspiracy theories and is very willing to mobilize behind political movements who embrace these narratives. This is now essentially empirically proven in the Trump Era.

I think the concept of a major party catering to these people is an idea we should get used to.
Those stories about how Kohl messed up the "future of Internet in Germany forever" by going for his buddy's copper instead of fiber in the late 90s never made sense to me. How about just trying again instead of just giving up?

a) Germany has a very high population density (232 people per km^2)

b) Germany is kind of rich

These two factors makes me think there is something else at play. (Germany would be able to afford doing it all over again, but right this time.)

And then there is this - wow, lack of GSM coverage in such a densely populated country?

In my experience this would would only be explained by systematic incompetence, systematic corruption or a combination of the two.
Companies Step Up Distribution Automation Under Pandemic Strains
Trouble is that webpage is largely a meaningless waste of time. Anybody who has done business with the mobile operators can tell you that.

It doesn't take into account the different types of contracts (e.g. are we talking about personal or business contracts, pay as you go or contract etc. etc. etc. etc.).

Nor does it take into account the infinite and ever changing commercial promotions the operators run.

If the chart on that website was to be believed, the data on my mobile contract should be costing me 15x more per GB than it actually does !

Load of codswallop.
With so much multi-image computational photography and video processing these days, I've been wondering whether we could have a multiple camera system (with cameras on the top, bottom, left, and right of the screen) and a processor that can simulate a camera in the center of the screen - or even dynamically moved to the eyes of the caller.

I know there's a bunch of research on viewpoint interpolation, but how close might we be to a dedicated processor to be able do this in a laptop, or at least specialized VC monitor?
If only Google were my 10th biggest problem. Try to get Exxon, Shell, et al out of your life who aren't violating abstract principles but are literally killing the planet. Then let me get unethically farmed or raised foods out of my life (which, thanks to the US preoccupation with corn and the nitrogen it requires, are frequently overlapping with petroleum). Then let me get Oracle and Microsoft out of my life. Then let me get the Murdoch empire out of my life. Then let me get Facebook out of my life. Then let me buy a consumer good that isn't designed for obsolescence. Then let me get intermediate middlemen in the healthcare system in the US out of my life. Then I'll take an eye at Google.
MegaMilk: Charting Consolidation in the U.S. Dairy Industry
Think Bitcoin Is Safe? It's Not Nearly as Safe or Anonymous as You Thought
Cryptocurrencies are run on the Blockchain Technology, which is believed to be the hardest technology to hack. What’s more, you’ll have to go through a two-factor authentication process to be able to transact. But, even with all the securities in place, trading and storing cryptocurrencies comes with its own risks, which have been heightened due to the Covid-19 pandemic. Let’s look at some of the security risks of trading and storing cryptocurrencies and ways to protect yourself.
Why does it have to be a hydrogen snowball? Because no tail was detected that would have indicated a dirty methane-etc snowball? What about an stony asteroid-like object?
I don't understand, why is it that it costs less than $1 in countries in Asia for a GB of mobile data but costs ~$15 for the same in the United States?

Can someone with knowledge of the industry please explain the reasons for this discrepancy to me?
A wealth tax would have limited the amount of early investment available to Amazon (and the start-up ecosystem as a whole), and it very well might have forced liquidation of shares at critical points in the company's early history when Bezos was wealthy on paper as an Amazon shareholder.
Google Voice is the hardest service for me to replace. I don't see any alternatives on this list. I appreciate that they let me seamlessly send and receive calls and texts from my Android phone or my desktop. I have a hard requirement that my phone should be optional for all parts of my communication workflow.
I drove around Africa from mid 2016 to mid 2019[1]. I bought a SIM in most of the 35 countries I went to, uploaded YT vids, hi-res photos and just video chatted family. Overall the 3G connectivity was impressively fast, and almost always a fraction of the price of Canada or the US.

Overall, I was extremely impressed.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=waQGUz0Z97Y&list=PLNiCe5roBX...
Going Full Static with Zola
Worth mentioning for those who don’t know that Mercatus is a Koch-funded ideology and policy generator (I prefer this to the more obfuscatory “think tank”).
> Anti-fraud == verify identity.

That card has my whole name on it and the bank has a trail of everything I do with it. MS also now have a verified phone number and can see they both come from the same country.

> Remember, it is to stop bad actors from using azure services for phishing, tricky things, etc (since a default instance w/ IIS, or any web service will literally be on windows.net.)

Nothing prevents me from doing that with a regular credit card.

Nothing prevents them from shutting down services/instances that break their ToS.

How convenient for them the only way to try out their free offer is to give them the ability to withdraw money from me.
> Google is like Gravity.

Great comment :) What beats one body gravity is bigger body's gravity. I escaped to Apple few years ago, except search. Safari should have custom search engine setting, though. Is it missing because of the deal with Google for default engine?
That's how traditional teleprompters work: screen below reflecting off the half-silvered mirror, camera behind.

Many laptop screens don't open completely flat, so that may not work for this particular concept.
Why Microsoft over Facebook and Google? Recently I've been thinking that MS is the FAMGAN/whatever that I'd be most willing to work for, so I'm interested to hear your case.
Down voted because this seems like a flippant response in the face of evidence that human activity is significant. And that regardless of whether past estimates were accurate to the decade or even century.

Mercury didn't suddenly fill the oceans by itself. If the core samples are to be believed.
> These movements are non - existant in France

I think they exist but just have a different flavor. In the U.S. we have Christian extremists, in France you have Muslim extremists.
Exceptions are not “goto.” Exceptions are an example of “structured control flow” while “goto” certainly is not. Throwing an exception is an example of a “non local exit” which Rust also implements (in terms of “Return”).

Also the exception does not leak into rust-space. Like it or not, any serious c++ ffi must accommodate C++ exceptions, since that is a standard feature (not to mention idiomatic error signaling mechanism) in C++.
Not sure about South Korea, for instance, being at 202nd place for affordability there when unlimited plans for even pre-paid tourist SIMs are a thing.
Similar physics - it's a fusion bomb, hence the low residual radiation. Wikipedia claims, BTW, that the energy released by this explosion was about 16.6 times all explosive energy released in WW2, and about 1/10th of all energy released by all nuclear testing.
SnS Crystals Open Pathway for Improved Next Generation Solar Cell
>Growth of Large Single Crystals of n-Type SnS from Halogen-Added Sn Flux

https://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10.1021/acs.cgd.0c00617
Well, then you'd have the UK in the 70's pre-Thatcher, or now, basically.

There is some wisdom to putting dull people in charge of governance tasks as they manage to keep themselves mostly out of the way. Too sharp, and you get sophisticated corruption as a way of life, which is the irony of countries where their cleverest people are in government. Too dull and you get mob rule and petty corruption, a junta with proverbial DMV clerks all the way down. The modern UK 'elf'n'safety state seems to lurch a bit toward the latter, so Bletchley could be a rallying point from a time when ordinary people were indeed capable of extraordinary things.
Why not wrap for use with dlopen()?
Apologies for the kind of tangental question but just really curious.

In the really early days of Amazon, did the company and/or the group of people feel like something really special, or did it feel like a totally regular bunch of people just working on some idea that was half decent? Was there any sense at all of the type of company it could become?
California is quite aggressive at taxing income from stock people were granted while living in California.
Huh, I had no idea about this. Thanks.
Thanks for this beautiful story:)
If you're using IaC and have it set up in a CI/CD pipeline, you could also achieve the same by having a cronjob set a flag outside of work hours, and use conditionals in your IaC based on the value of that flag (e.g., for Terraform `count = var.scale_down ? 0 : 1`)
The horror! ;)
This film shows a number of what appear to be ordinary off-the-shelf cameras being used to record data, for instance at 5:01 and 12:55. Are those Zorkis?
Demand and supply. Clearing prices are higher in the US for a variety of reasons.
Didn’t feel like it. But thanks for asking
Maybe the word 'cost' is not the right term, better would be to talk about 'price'. The price is as high as the market will bear, clearly people are used to paying more for data in the USA and as such there is less incentive to bring down prices. The actual cost - as in what it costs to send data from A to B inside a carrier network - does not vary much between countries and can even be higher in some of those countries where retail prices are lower than in the USA.
> Not sure why society should care (beyond preventing people been radicalised into becoming a danger I guess).

What I find most interesting about this reaction is that it often comes from people who wholeheartedly believe in kindness, compassion, and empathy. In almost every other context.

Yet for these people, they're told that their feelings don't matter while everyone else's does. No wonder they sometimes react poorly. Perhaps if we want to avert their radicalization, we could consider the possibility of treating them with the same sensitivity we readily offer others when they express subjective pain and suffering.
Has "the internet community" ever "come to an agreement" on literally anything?
Woah that's quite an adventure!

How come you stopped in Egypt and didn't go back to Morocco?

Tunisia is a great country to visit.
...and apparently, going by a surprisingly sizable volume of the literature of abduction narratives, a whole lot of at best dubiously consensual butt stuff? I mean, forget the whole "aliens would definitely be a lot like Star Trek humans" thing, I want to hear how you explain the butt stuff.

Yes, I'm poking fun, but only a bit - any general exegesis of modern alien visitation on Earth, that attempts to incorporate claims such as Lazar's, really does need to also have a position on the butt stuff. So where do you stand on The Alien Butt Stuff?
Exactly, just take Canada for example, most expensive 1gb: $99usd, it's clearly not just for a simple "1gb data" plan, it's probably one that allows unlimited call worldwide without any charge...

Some places probably doesn't even have those kind of plan so of course they will rank lower if every plans are under $20 because there is nothing worthy in it...
> Kids attending school in person is not.

But you're not owning up to the possible irreparable damage to children's psyche, mental wellbeing, career prospects, etc.

At least be honest about the tradeoffs. If I'm saying that people are overestimating risk and people will blame me for associated mortality and effects of the disease, it's like the other side of the debate is never that open and explicit about the very serious drawbacks and costs of their choices.

Let's be fair to both sides: you're responsible for suicides, health effects of prolonged isolation, etc.
None of this is a problem for immersive theater experiences. I think in this case you build a product that doesn't scale. This way you don't have to think about children playing games because you can enforce 18+. The cost per sessions doesn't matter if you find product market fit with your experiences. I know that SV startup types see games as disposable time wasters to sell microtransactions to whales, but if you think of it at ondemand high quality TTRPG sessions or scalable immersive theater I think there is a profitable business with a good sized market. Matching actors don't matter because you can do short form content and sessions, etc. The last point #5 puts the business in an even better position. If you can eventually automate the product you can scale parts of it much better. Also remember players aren't paying for voice actors to read lines, they're paying for someone that can react and be improvisational. If you play AI Dungeon (which is state of the art), you'll see that AI is still a ways off from this.
It checks whether `python3 -V` ends successfully in a Node JS child process. Is it possible that `python3` is not available in your environment? Or perhaps `python3` isn't linked properly? If you use brew, `brew link python3` could be helpful.
Yes, I did not push an agenda. I also linked to an article that was all about how we can reduce the gap. But the very first step is to admit that said gap actually exists.

But my point is that people's current experience is going to be based on the reality that the tests reveal. Which is that the average black that they meet will, statistically, be noticeably less intelligent than the average white. And experience is going to lead to prejudices. And the fact that these prejudices are shocking and horrifying to people is obvious from the comments.
I managed to build a 0.9T Hall effect measurement system with two 1.5 inch diameter N52 magnets.

The scariest part was successfully assembling the magnets into the yoke. If we made a mistake, could easily use a finger, or, if they touch, we'd have to scrap everything and buy more to try again because you couldn't pull them apart.
Cool! Personally, I like the idea of building a Dyson swarm out of it (sorry Mercury!)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pP44EPBMb8A
Your comment is technically correct, but misleading.

In fact California specifically does not tax ex-residents for income arising from the disposition of stock acquired with ISOs, which is usually the way pre-IPO employees acquire shares. This is true even if the ISOs were granted for work performed in California.
Thank you, will check it out:)
Perhaps heavy negative campaigning previously by Microsoft (Scroogled?) and still by Murdoch's media outlets had at least some effects.
Their fail fast, watch growth metics and bad product leadership also don't help
Do you know if they’re required to use the +alias format? I’ve been burnt in the past by bad contact forms silently stripping out special characters out of email addresses.
Ask HN: How would you tackle building a successful G Suite alternative?
Hi HN,

It seems to be a bigger interest in 'degoogling' lately. I'd like to ask the smart folks around here how would you tackle building a successful G Suite alternative as a sustainable business. What strategies / partnerships / business model would you pursue?

For example, being such a big effort, I think open source is required in order to attract contributors, both hobbyists and companies (and maybe governments). It would also be the main differentiator.

FYI I made a proposal for Mozilla (https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/open-letter-mozilla-please-offer-g-suite-alternative-marius-andreiana/) which seemed a great fit, but they weren't interested.
The politicians and rich and powerful are the aliens.

https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.indiewire.com/2014/10/john-...
Yes, they're generally available in some form (now generally including the ‘originals’ now that V8–V10 have been published). And they're all very simple, which is the whole point of Unix tools.

I've found I'm using the `put`/`take` pair, for splitting a pipeline across shells, more again in the WFH era where I often have multiple ssh sessions into a machine, when I would probably have used the clipboard in a GUI session. Also useful for things like seeing stderr from different parts of a pipeline in different windows. `put` is just `cat >>$(mkpipe "$1")` and `take` is `cat $(mkpipe "$1")` where `mkpipe` is

fifo="${TMPDIR:-/tmp}/fifo-$(id -u)-$1}"
test -p "$fifo" || mkfifo "$fifo"
echo "$fifo"
Related discussion from 43 days ago on an article that used this as its source data: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23795147
Rent. American businesses love extracting rent.
What amazes me the most with my telco is that they charge $60 for a regular plan which includes 4GB of data, SMS and phone calls, but if I want to buy 1GB extra, it's $30-40 bucks. For a single 1GB of download.
As I said in my post (which seems to be being downvoted despite telling the truth). The webpage is very naive and is not really telling the truth about mobile contracts.

The wallet cost of mobile data is lower than the inflated prices shown on the website.
Cellular service clearly can be delivered more cheaply in poor countries. Telenor for example is Noweigian (very wealthy country) but offers service at lower prices in Myanmar.

One reason is labor costs. Imagine how much it costs to build and maintain one tower in Norway with its high standard of living for everyone vs in Myanmar where people will work for much less, and with lower safety standards.

And obviously providers will charge more if they can, less if they have to.
This is an amazing visualization and clearly shows what I found while traveling through Asia. Would love to see this mixed with average salary per country, which I expect will show an inverse correlation.
Wouldn't surprise me if Apple's first to market with iPhones and MacBooks with iSight cameras embedded in the display. But is it even possible? Wouldn't the camera lens have to be of comparable size to a display pixel?
Because I saw how they behaved in the 90s, see how much passive telemetry they collect with their share of the OS market, how much they push Windows logins with antipatterns, and because they own Github (when now controls npm).

edit: Let me say some nice things about them. I put them towards the end for a reason, and they probably don't belong with Oracle. I don't think they are a big problem in the world, if at all. They aren't the company they were in the 90s. Gates has become one of the worlds most staggeringly successful humanitarians because of his direct effort and indirectly from the giving pledge, and it has redeemed him many times over again. Nadella seems like a decent person and truly great executive, and they have improved enormously as a company under him. I would probably work for them. But I don't have any problem with Google, either. What Microsoft does have is a vastly greater potential for abuse.
Around my area of the Midwest the cash offers are from investors. Guess the only alternative to equities is real estate.
Data from Chernobyl and Fukushima provide answers about the risks of nuclear
Fair point - though in those cases they did make the news. (The entire US is also just a much bigger place with a lot more cities, but you’re right that I did make that comparison.)

The London outages seemed common enough to not be news.

Hard to say without more data though.
Apple had this in a beta iOS and then removed it.
Also little things like the w.mu.Unlock() at the end of the function instead of using defer show that this was probably written by (Go) beginners.
College age kids have exhibited poor behavior since ... forever? You can rage against this, or you can design systems designed to function despite the poor risk/reward calculations of some people.

Only one actually gets results, the other just lets you shift blame.
I really appreciate your kind words! From your experience using a static graph by Doxygen, is there any feature in particular you'd love to have? I'm actively improving this tool based on the awesome feedback from HN, and what you wish for will have a large chance of landing on the next upgrade :)
Today is Saturday the 9853rd of September 1993.
It was always my dream to complete the loop, but the situation just didn't allow it.

It is impossible to get a visa for Libya, and with the ongoing civil war the safety situation is B.A.D.
Even if I got a visa, the Egyptian military wouldn't let me get anywhere NEAR the border. They're extremely protective of tourists and won't let them go anywhere "dangerous". They also wouldn't let me drive the Sinai over to Isreal.

Also, the border from Algeria into Morocco has been closed for years, and nobody could tell me what would happen if I showed up and tried to cross.

So, unfortunately Egypt was the end of the line on that one!
But there is something wrong with them, or else they would get laid. If people swipe the wrong way it must be either the looks or the composition of photos?
IOS 13 has a feature that can do something to that effect:

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2019/07/facetime-feature-in-...