skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
My problem with all these similar privacy-oriented services is that they're basically saying: "Don't trust others, trust us". And, OK, Aral Balkan is a well-known figure so I probably would trust him on a word, but I'd much more prefer to have a way to truly, physically have a full control of the sites and the data. I can do that now by having a server under my desk, but most of people can't. For that to become available to the wider public we'll need something more innovative than just updating EULA on 3rd party hosting services to be more privacy friendly. Not that it's bad, it's better than nothing, but I'd really like if we could move the focus more into the direction of p2p web or coming up with something new, even better.
> It being a walled garden is the only way I’m willing to trust it for accessing all my account recovery emails, my 2FA SMSes, my bank details, and the sensor package that can listen to everything I do while GPS tracking me and monitoring my heart rate and gaze if I happen to be holding it where I can see the screen.

Sorry I'm not following. What does any of this have to do with the app store?
So the day after writing this i noticed that Inigo went ahead and made a raymarching rendering of the bunny on _CPU_ in a _MINUTE_, seems there was problems with the GPU variation that probably would have been interactive.

https://twitter.com/iquilezles/status/1295932323242811393?p=...
> Instead, people think I'm subhuman for where I work and went to school.

My email is in my profile if you want to talk to someone. No one thinks you’re subhuman. People are incalculably more likely to be indifferent to you than to despise you. More people don’t care about you than have any opinion whatsoever about you.
I tend to believe Ray Dalio's theory about the long term debt cycle but we will see how it pans out. If the oracle of Omaha is still of any value it also signals tough times ahead
> It's just that in many cases the value-add for customers doesn't justify the price difference.

Let the market decide that.
Be curious how you plan to prevent access to Apple's private APIs in Objective-C, which uses dynamic dispatching, without breaking existing code.

I am sure Apple would love to know how you've managed to solve this.
The shell is the tool that allows us to talk to our computers, and for our computers to talk to us.

Until a better way comes out to tell the computer what to do, the command line will prevail.
someone could write a simple grammar checker that looks for words in that list, passive voices, sentence length and whatnot and suggests alternatives. It wouldn't work without human oversight but then again, no automated checker really does.
Read it. And read more from the blog. Certainly some truth to this, but the blog is a great example why peer review actually matters.

The article itself is a bit of a straw man: one example of a bad peer review dismisses the whole process.

Other articles are similar. For example one talks about how "green parties want 100% safety", which simply isn’t true.

Some are click bait like "if there is no Corona vaccine, how about we ask anti-vaxxers how to deal with this?" And gives some generic advice that every doctor also says while neglecting that the core argument of anti-vaxxers often goes like "vaccine is bad for you and you actually should contract a virus because it makes you stronger in a natural way".

Stopped reading after having found too many of these fake arguments in several posts.
Jamming and ECW. You can't rely on communications being possible in key moments.
I think there are two kinds of long sentences.

One just keeps adding detail. It's essentially a list. Breaking it up into multiple sentences would require a lot of unnecessary conjunctions as you say.

The other kind of long sentence forces you to keep a lot in your head until the meaning is finally resolved at the very end. That's the kind of sentence that should be broken up because it creates unnecessary mental burden.
In the UK, the Plain English Campaign awards certifications to numerous insurance companies, among other businesses and organisations, for writing their policies in Plain English.

The point they are making is that plain English belongs is present in domains as hefty and complex as insurance.
> you're eating into the restaurant's margins

Some restaurants in Australia have higher menu prices for delivery services.
Intentional and intended are both adjectives. They both mean intended. They are synonyms, so they can be used mostly interchangeably. However, one or the other may be conceptually more clear in various cases. As a native English speaker, intentional character is understandable to me. I likely would have written intended character, but I don't think that intentional here is clearly incorrect.
Apple here is no different than the Telcos wanting to avoid only being paid for just being dumb pipes.
If everybody else is making money building on that basic service they want a piece of that pie too.
The era-appropriate rendition of Golden Brown during the game is a lovely touch, all coming out of a bit-banged resistor ladder! It's a shame game development on this platform seems to also require era-appropriate levels of concentration. That's a device to be proud of.
Don't make your readers hold parts of the sentence in their head. Reorder or split sentences until it can be avoided. In other words, use a really small buffer.

"You must fill form 331 unless you are over 60 years old, in which case you must fill form 445."

"You must fill form 331. If you are over 60 years old, you must fill 445 instead."

"If you are over 60 years old, you must fill form 445. Otherwise, you must fill form 331."

You might have noticed that the last version is an if-else statement.
> My preferred Sushi place will recognize me by my phone number and take my order within seconds.

What about a new restuarant?
I'm curious. Is there a specific reason why the trend for our use of the English language went towards this direction, when in the past, a lot of the historical material I read seemed intentionally verbose?

Sure, it's all for ensuring we are understood better among ourselves, but I wonder if writing this way makes us cognitively simpler.
I wonder who will hold political office when this happens so they can say "no one could have foreseen this type of devastation."
There's a bit more to it than that - once reactionaries started saying that 2 + 2 could only be 4, anyone who was woke and knew a bit of maths started brainposting about how actually 2 + 2 could be defined to mean 5 in various ways, and that was perfectly valid mathematics, and the reactionaries were showing their mathematical ignorance - all as a dunk on the reactionaries, not a defence or explanation of the original joke.

I'm not sure how widespread this was. I may be friends with an abnormally high number of radical leftists who like abstract algebra.

This was all mildly irritating, but the worst thing was when some of them said 2 + 2 could be 5 in modular arithmetic.

The whole thing was pointless and stupid. It was perfect Twitter.
I saw that but couldn't square it with the earlier sentence.

In my previous role we interviewed tens of small business owners and nobody knew what was in their docs. I hope insurance companies will be as bold to go beyond simplifying language but also simplifying terms (e.g. Lemonade's https://www.lemonade.com/policy-two)
They can't be prevented reliably even through the App Store process - that's simply impossible.

The point of a private API not security, it's to distinguish between the public interface that is meant to be stable and implementation details that might change.

They might do some rudimentary checks to catch obvious usage of private APIs, but it's not part of the security model and still apps show up on the App Store that use private APIs, all the time.
I mean, that’s exactly why I have an Apple device.

No, wait, not that I’m stupid. Though I’m sure some people would call me that.

It’s that they make the decisions for me. I’m specifically paying a premium to delegate the responsibility for making those decisions to them.

I spent years running Nexus devices (since before they were Nexus... still have my ADP1 in a drawer) on Cyanogenmod and LineageOS. At some point I got busy and didn’t have time for my phone to be a hobby or even a thing I had to think about and chose to delegate those decisions to Apple rather than Google because they generally seem to lean more toward privacy-conscious decisions and making money on hardware and apps rather than decisions to support violating my privacy and making money on advertising.

I already paid more for what I agree is a privilege by buying an expensive Apple phone. If you don’t like the rules, then don’t sell here. I’m cool with that. Leave my walled garden alone. I’m comfortable in here.
Unless they are sharded and replicated distributed databases...
a) Not all programs can read multiple configuration files. It's either in the one configuration file or a hardcoded default.

b) Not all settings done in defaults can be simply undone later on (e.g.: apache's httpd.conf, IIRC the same for nginx - good luck getting this default listener down again)

c) If you want to infer which changes were made by you or by the system's update procedures, explicitly creating snapshots before every manual or automatic modifications would be the way to go. Preferably one after each as well, so you have something to verify the integrity of a system against in case of security issues.
You must also consider people who are not native speakers. I'm sometimes appalled by the complexity of the letters I get in Germany, especially when they are related to immigration.
Huh? This (the TFA, the "Single-chip 2D Retro Game Console") is single-chip, all the work is done in software on a PIC microcontroller with 48 KB RAM. This includes generating 16-color VGA-compatible video, with sprites, and 5 channels of sound.

The Basic Engine is based on the 8266 (4 MB of flash) and has a separate hardware video controller chip, plus an I/O expander so at least three chips. It has way more "custom hardware" than the TFA's board.
Spark/Databricks + Delta lake would be a good solution for combining streaming and batch analytics. MemSQL is good for low latency streaming.
Whose perspective is that, though?

Individual companies don't benefit from low productivity, and neither does the economy as a whole.
Personally I really dislike that example text.

Starting a paragraph with However doesn't seem right. It ties the paragraph too intimately to the previous one, from which it should stand apart. Similarly, sometimes it may be ok to begin a sentence with But, but in this instance it doesn't read quite right. I'd have preferred:

> At first you may still find yourself writing the odd long sentence, especially when trying to explain a complicated point. Fortunately, most long sentences can be broken up in some way.

Something the article does but doesn't mention, is to use short paragraphs. I do this instinctively on Hacker News/Stack Overflow/email, I think it improves readability, although it might not be appropriate for more formal writing (papers, books).
Can anyone explain exactly how Apple "blocks" Unreal Engine? I was under the impression that it's a 3rd-party library, available directly from Epic, that anybody is free to link their game to. So I'm struggling to understand the mechanism by which Apple blocks it. Any clarity on this would be appreciated.
Site looks to be down. Is there a mirror somewhere?
This 'indieweb' was sponsored by Google, hardly going to be in line with the goals of Aral's 'Small Web'.
Your last one requires keeping the first clause of the first sentence in your head; just because you've split sentences doesn't mean you've avoided that, because “otherwise” imports the conditional in the previous sentence by reference and then inverts it. To actually avoid requiring the reader to keep sentence parts in their head, use if-then or do-if constructs, but not if-then-else constructs.

“Complete form 445 if you are over 60 years old. Complete form 331 if you are 60 years old or younger.”
One of the worst things mobile did was completely destroy reasonable expectations for software pricing.

Don't get me wrong, it's good that more software is more accessible to more people than ever before, but for a long time we've been at the point where it's very difficult for an app that costs anything up front to succeed on mobile.
Thank you for the correction. I'm not really sure about that but I type it anyway, hoping for correction from someone.
sign existing code.
[1] says "Craving and chewing ice (pagophagia) is often associated with iron deficiency,", not what you claimed which is the opposite.

As far as I can see, there's no indication on this page as to how frequently iron deficiency leads to ice chewing.
Useless in what sense? And which of those things?

Eg backups and data integrity sound rather important.

Eg build systems are only useful as an enabler for the other things your company wants to do, true.
I've been involved in debugging a bug in a software that occurred on Kubernetes cluster at the client site but couldn't be reproduced locally. Reproducing that is so much harder than a similar software installation. You have so many moving parts that it's pretty much impossible to create a test cluster with the same properties.

Also, with SaaS you can get access to log files, if it's installed on prem that can be heavily restricted by regulation.
> The answer is maybe to auto merge what has not changed locally?

Yup sysmerge(8) does this on OpenBSD. Not sure if other BSDs have similar mechanisms, from the article I would guess not.
Wireless “photosheets” turn CO2 and sunlight into clean fuel
they revoked Epic's developer account. if Epic is restricted from getting the tools needed to further develop Unreal Engine, that effectively prevents Epic from doing further development on it.
Does seem a bit quicker, although I've only used it for a few minutes, so not long enough to tell whether it still suffers from the old Firefox malaise of becoming slower and slower with each passing day. So that's promising, but....

Still no text-reflow. Sorry, but any browser designed for mobile which doesn't offer this as a standard feature is just unusable, in my book.

It might not be obvious to the beardie young hipster developers out there, but some of us older folks are no longer able to read text at 6pt and might actually like you to prioritise making the web legible on your browser, over junk like themes and picture-in-picture video.

Curated list of plugins. OK, so they've got some of my regular 'must-haves' on there now; uBlock Origin, HTTPS Everywhere and Privacy Badger. But I can't use my password manager [Bitwarden]. Is there a technical reason why most of the extensions which work on Firefox desktop version aren't automatically compatible with the mobile version? [see note on Yandex below]

Nice try Mozilla. But I'll stick with Yandex which offers text-reflow and works with nearly the full range of Chrome desktop compatible plugins.

And was already fast.
> Sadly, thanks to the bureaucrats of public service industries, local councils, banks, building societies, insurance companies and government departments, we have learnt to accept an official style of writing that is inefficient and often unfriendly.

Interesting. I thought the use of "thanks to" as a preposition indicating a causal relationship with negative consequences was generally discouraged, because, by its very nature, it's a metaphor. But I can't find any style guide that would support this.
For companies that have a few hundred of these running at a time, it sure does! Also, it's a 2000x ratio, not 200..., and 1/500 years vs. 1/1,000,000 years.
This is arguably false. The only license that would’ve been withdrawn was Epic’s.

Not a single other developer using UE was targeted directly by Apple.
a technology company’s operational work is larger than its development is a bad signal.

The reason reminded me of when I get quoted a large price for an hours work like dentist or plumber and they are like i have insurance and car expenses ;)
Epic needs access to Apple's developer tools and documentation to continue developing the Unreal Engine software and libraries for macOS and iOS.

Without access to those things, it would be difficult for Epic to produce new versions of the Unreal Engine, and game developers wouldn't want to use it any more.
Offtopic: anybody else find it hilarious how this completely serious news piece is followed by a section of spam-grade garbage "advertisements?" [1]

How the hell does a news organization decide this is a worthy way of pumping up revenues?

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taboola#Reception

ps. not on my usual computer, yes I know of adblocking :-)
Overflowing that buffer really does feel like a stack overflow, too. Your whole mental state just suddenly disappears in a puff of smoke.

This resplendent sentence in the Vulkan spec did it to me the other day:

The layout of subresources of images on other logical devices that are bound to VkDeviceMemory objects associated with the same underlying memory resources as external memory objects on the lost device becomes VK_IMAGE_LAYOUT_UNDEFINED.

I got about half way through and suddenly discovered I didn't know where I was, what year it was or my name.
I would say IT is an industry that made itself, as well as other industries greatly reduce the number of employees.

Not quite zero employees but numbers were reduced greatly, ie accounting. Example: accounting, before you needed a team of accountants for a mid level enterprise, not sometimes even one is sufficient.
Again, the forest does not burn each summer. Is the job of arsonists in the majority of the times. This is a criminal problem. Is domestic terrorism

Claiming that fuel is increasing and somebody should burn the forest attract lunatics and does not help to have a future with water, or to decrease the levels of CO2 in the air.

We desperately require the CO2 stored in plants and in soil and this is not compatible with the old "time to burn" parties and traditions. Brazil and half of Africa is burning today and this is not acceptable. We must change our speech. Now.
https://web.archive.org/web/20200825090517/http://www.voja.r...
If you cannot get a TLS cert for internal infrastructure in a few minutes, I'd recommend you start looking into why.
Companies saving money on backups pay for it at some later date. Also, you won't/shouldn't really pass any audit without sound processes in place.

Billing is easy until you have to serve 200 countries, each with their own regulation and tax systems. Sure, you can outsource that but it won't be much cheaper once you reach scale (as parts remain manual).

And I don't think many would agree that customer support is useless. As a developer, I wouldn't want every customer request to hit my desk. Having customer support that cannot only filter out requests but also respond in a less technical way than most developers is invaluable.
> Unity definitely seems like it has lost sight of what made the engine rise to prominence in 2010-2015.

What made the engine rise to prominence in 2010-2015, in your view?
Aren’t the tools freely available without a developer account?
I'm glad there isn't. I wish more people making documents would get that I live on phones, tablets, notebooks, all with screens of varying sizes. I never print unless some government agency requires it and then I curse that my country is backward compared to say Estonia where rumor is everything is online.
You mistake socialism with authoritarian socialism. Which is one form of it and that can be on a scale, too. Socialism does not inherently forbid the use of a free market, just as capitalism doesn't mean there is a free market available. Those things are two different characteristics of an economic system.
"Protesters say their peaceful assembly has been disrupted and escalated by the police. The police argue they've only been intervening in riots to maintain order and protect property."

Done.
‘Funk Money’: The End of Empires, the Expansion of Tax Havens
Yes, this argument, along with the practices of cross checking within one project, is what saves science from the total doom its software practices would otherwise deliver.

However, reproducibility is a precondition to automation, and automation is a real nice thing to have.
Have you written about that somewhere? What kinds of services do you run yourself?
Banning the unreal dev account makes sense when you take it as setting/following precedent of removing access to the legal entity responsible for the breach of contract?

It also follows that Apple could claim that Epic used this unreal dev tooling to break the contract and thus the tooling is "illegal" and subsequently must bear the consequences as well.

I don't think there's anything overtly malicious to the unreal part save for usual corporate lawyering of go big and then back off rather than not reaching far enough and losing.
For most companies I've seen, enterprise sales is what costs most money. It's worth it in the end but there's nothing you can automate around all the calls, forms and processes you have to go through to get a big enterprise client.

Yet many companies invest in it because in the end, the client is happy to pay for all your additional expenses, knowing that they can trust your service.
Why not just use AA vehicles on the ground?
Posting some news worthy claim on the internet without a link to an article or a story... why even bother.
You're paying for the phone, there is no cost nor can you pay for iOS. The current and all future versions is & always has been free.
I made the mistake of buying his Trump book on a whim.

It was terrible, couldn't get far into it.
Ironically, you obviously didn't read the OP, as it clearly mentions people could at least bother to read the, free, abstract.
So it seems like it ends up being a moral dilemma:

If a software issue causes for example a data breach, it could cause lots of people to experience mild annoyances, like time wasted on changing passwords, money lost through more effective scamming attempts, etc..

If we compare an actual life lost in an accident with lots of people losing some hours/days from their lives, when can we say they are an equal loss?

1 people = 100 people losing 1 year?

How about if the person is your family member?

This gets waaay too complicated to resolve rationally..
I would argue stealth makes dogfights more likely, allowing opponents to approach each other unaware of each others presence.
> Not a single other developer using UE was targeted directly by Apple.

But indirectly. If Epic doesn't have a developer license anymore, they cannot reasonably support their clients in implementing UE on any Apple hardware (and, depending on the licensing terms, they may not even legally support it...).
Maybe in the past, written material was consumed by the elite, educated fraction of the population, and this was a way to "show off" their knowledge. Today, reading is accessible to a much broader percentage of people who may not all be as educated.
> It was a perfectly good asynchronous discussion after that.

Yes but if someone asks you if you are there, they most likely want an actual conversation. It's the closest you can get to ringing your phone or droping by your office to see if you are available.

If it made sense to have an asynchronous discussion, most people would probably just send you an email.
Also keywords like "resume"