skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
How many of those are installed on more than 1% of mobile devices (however broadly construed)? I think the answer is two. Amazon has like 10% of the tablet market share, but the tablet market is like 1/20th the size of the phone market.

Just to demonstrate that this is the variable that matters, consider the case where there are exactly three devices that have each of the other marketplaces installed on them, respectively. Would they present a meaningful competitive alternative to the big two?
> Except no, because Epic wants to move out entirely. They don't want to use Apple's house (read: payments & app store) at all.

Epic may want you to think that, but it's just not true.

My reasoning? They already tried it on Android, and it failed miserably. They moved out the house entirely, taking their listing off the Play Store and allowing side-loading via their website. I'm assuming they also handled payments themselves, too.

A year or so, they came crawling back to Google, presumably due to a massive drop in users.

It's pretty clear that side-loading is not a commercially effective means of distribution, and publishers need the App/Play Stores to get to users.
Yeah. I used to face the same problem. The links would get converted to a different format. But it got fixed, and I didnt change anything. It is getting automatically converted everytime now.
Just tried to find research on how much the nation wide BLM protests cost public health. Let me know if you find one.
I have never heard of the other three.
Master the basics of Microsoft Azure–cloud, data, and AI
Nah you can use AltStore (or others) and it will auto renew your certs. I’ve had an alternate YouTube app and an emulator sideloaded for months and haven’t even thought twice about it.
Not generally, but maybe as "Borat In The Wild West"
First time I heard about microG. I don't get it -- why is it called "LineageOS for microG" and not "microG for LineageOS"? Am I missing something? Isn't microG something that runs on top of LineageOS and not the other way around?
Apple store is on like less than 10% of phones to be fair
IANAE(conomist), but my naive interpretation is this: let’s say the pandemic causes 25% of mortgage holders to become delinquent, a number I don’t think is unreasonable. If the Fed owns a third of all mortgages (and their ownership is a normal distribution of all mortgages, I have no idea if this is true), that’s 25% of $2T that is suddenly at risk.

If the total Fed balance sheet is $7T, that’s 7% of their total assets that could disappear. That seems like a lot to me.
TIL. Thanks for the info.
Aren’t all world-wide c19 measures made on assumptions? Slowly people are realizing that such assumption-based „science“ might not have been that scientific at all.
Upside-Down Markets: Profits, Inflation, Equity Valuation
Eh, overclocking is still not a great analogy.

Overclocking can cause harm (worse battery life, excessive heat). That potential for harm is a plausible reason to void the warranty.

Tesla is just voiding the warranty as a punishment for opting out of their software-gated features. Those features aren't harmful to activate.
> People are forced to use many products of big companies and others which are largely responsible for this.

Same way as dev employees are forced by companies to prioritise features over optimisation.
A 50000 people study is likely to see adverse events completely unrelated to the vaccine. Halting the trial is not a sign that they think it is related either, since it is protocol to rule things out before continuing.
There would be no inherent problem with having the Fed hold this much debt, if the tax system then soaked up distortions in how the resulting stimulus was distributed into the economy. That is, if the tax system is structured to pull back currency from unproductive sinks before it yields inflation, then there's no problem with the Fed holding that debt.

A better structure, as others have pointed out, would be to have the Fed just hold the government's debt, so that allocation and taxation can both be managed by the government. At the moment, the Fed and Treasury (via Congress) are both competing to play an allocating role in the economy at the same time, with no real coordination or plan.
A grocery store would be a fine alternative.
I'm not so sure that's true. They might have come to the Google Play store as part of their plan to sue Google. Their Google lawsuit has complaints about Google interfering with their third party deals with phone manufacturers.
It is because microG isn't an app but a system component of the operating system. It gets baked in when building the system.
No single employee at a company is productive enough that them leaving literally doubles a person's workload, especially when most people aren't actually productive for an entire day and there is a lot of evidence that 4 day work weeks are just as productive. If this environment did exist, the employee should quit unless they are making A LOT of money.
At the place I work it was never mandatory to take parental leave.

All these years I always said congratulations when coworkers had kids...when I really should have thanked them.
> How many of those are installed on more than 1% of mobile devices

4/5 in the examples I gave.

Google, Apple, Samsung and Amazon all have decent market share.
This is called charity. It turns out voluntary charity by individuals isn't enough to redistribute enough worth from the wealthy minority to the poor majority. Charity as a system is only really capable of keeping the poor majority from rebelling. To make it work, sending a portion of your paycheck every month needs to be mandated, and we call that taxation.
As a kid I enjoyed games so much that I felt the need to understand and create them. That’s how I started doing this. The craving to pick every detail apart was incredibly gratifying to satiate and actually made it so I got so much more out of the games. It gave me insight into all aspects of creating them, which was more or less my passion and obsession for a very long time.
It is funny because I have seen this reflected a lot with my older co-workers. They work OBSESSIVELY ( although don't seem to get more work done... ), and I independently identified exactly this sentiment: Work is kinda fun when you have a family. There is a beer keg, you hang out with your friends at work, there are clear goals and metrics and putting in more work often has positive results, people listen to you and respect you...
I just skimmed the article, and I don't doubt the issue is real, but they cited, I think, one actual human who had a specific complaint.

It feels like an article written with its narrative before its 'research'.

My anecdata is my company is (publicly and at the middle leadership level) very supportive of the compromises parents and others are making, I harbor no resentment towards parents, and have seen not one shred of it in informal communications. YMMV.
> The question is whether those pages are doing more for me, or whether they are doing more to me.

The best part is that I'm paying for that privilege when I'm not on WiFi.
You haven’t heard of Samsung or Amazon’s OSs?
The latest POSIX standard is 2017.

However, I'm not aware of a certification program for the POSIX 2017. As far as I am aware, UNIX V7 is still the latest certification program.
Your are not naming platform, you are naming alternate app store on Android... completely defeat your point.
I've always refused the idea that any sun == bad.

Being in the sun (not excessively) feels incredible, at a very deep level. The same way eating a really healthy diet and exercising every day feels.

I frequently wonder: if I'm correct, what other things are like this? Fats are good for you, not carbs as they've said. That's one example that comes trivially to mind. But I'm convinced there is a ton of stuff we do because it's "good" when in really, the positives far outweigh the negatives.
Yeah I think it's a bit unfair too. Taking things apart to learn how they work is fun, it's part of the hacker mindset. I view FAQ and walkthrough creation the same way.

Teaching is also the best way to learn or retain knowledge, and the process helps you get to know and appreciate a game you already enjoy.

I've never done that but I've played many games where I spent more time outside the game thinking and plotting and planning than I do actually playing the game. I mean, there's a reason people sometimes tease Path of Exile by calling it "Path of Excel" because of all the interactions you can reason out.
True, but the risk is to kill or disable more people than the virus could.
The hundreds of thousands of deaths are not an assumption. Nor are the people still in recovery or with other probably permanent damage.
I find it funny how the ancestry logic (presumably European) sounds so alien to US ears. Our majority isn't 30th-generation immigrants.

But what claim does ancestry truly offer? If my parents are from the UK, do I qualify for Super Citizenship there? What if those parents had only been UK citizens for 2 generations? What if it's my great-grandparents, but they were part of a lineage that spent 22 generations "building" the UK, surely an absence of only 3 generations is just a rounding error!
There's a nice discussion here: https://math.stackexchange.com/questions/20578/why-is-integr...

on why integration is a fundamentally harder problem than differentiation. New techniques would be required to programatically analytically solve integrals as well as current differentiation programs, but it would be exciting to see.
I went down this road once and ultimately didn’t have the patience for what a nightmare scraping the modern web is, parts of what I built I still use for myself. I wish you luck though.
It almost seems that a law like that would be something out of a sci-fi or cyberpunk universe.
Yeah this is what I settled on as well. I still use GMail and PGP for those very few who are willing to go the extra route (like 2 people I know), but use it unencrypted 99.9999% of the time, and secure comms go out over Signal.
These are all distinct platforms - their code base is irrelevant in the context of marketplaces (as I already noted)
> Despite frequent threats by the developers to remove them, the GIMP application had (at time of composition) some obscure and infrequently-used features permitting the creation and manipulation of image files.

I chuckled.
Seattle had 60,000+ masked people walking silently in the rain in June: https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/thousands-march-in...

It didn't get any appreciable national coverage because nobody broke anything, but the size of the march was roughly ~10% of the in-the-city-limits population of the city. Judging by the number of colleagues and friends we encountered, a substantial fraction of those marching were local.
Libreoffice writer has this: https://help.libreoffice.org/6.0/he/text/swriter/01/03100000...
The authors spend 15 pages or so describing the calculations, its limitations, and alternative calculations.

Focusing on one parameter to throw out the whole paper would be junk science.

http://ftp.iza.org/dp13670.pdf
I’ve heard that CDC has corrected down c19-related deaths to a merely 6% of the initially c19-reported deaths. The other 94% had other health issues as well and it can’t be said any longer that their death is related to c19. Isn’t that true?
From personal experience in my job, I've seen ad networks abusing the following APIs for privacy invasive fingerprinting:

- AudioContext API (introduced as recently as last year)

- Performance API

- Widevine DRM

- Speech Synthesis API

If you put a lot of thought into privacy and security, we certainly wouldn't be seeing this level of widespread abuse by ad networks.

Let's deep dive on AudioContext for a second.

Chrome's AudioContext API allows ad networks to pilfer latency information about the user's audio hardware (which is used in the wild for fingerprinting today) with zero user interaction, zero indication and zero approval. A web page that never plays audio (!!!) has access to this silently and without approval.
Doesn't surprise me to learn that the NT-level API is nicer.

The NT API is in general much better thought out than the Win32 API. It is a real pity that Microsoft chose to leave the former largely undocumented and tell people to use the later instead.
Azure Security and Frameworks
I mean, they made Tropic Thunder more recently which is at least as offensive. I think it all comes in waves.
Designer and engineers are not the people you should tell off.

Go to the business owners and product managers who actually drive the product and more often overrule design and engineering.
Not OP but I feel like I can an example here.

The workplace I am at solves a very prevalent set of problems For retail industry. But there is nothing creative about it. (Of course, there are some creative workarounds but it wouldn’t be characterized as creative work)
Hahahaha, oh, wow, the market is free, hahahaha. Please tell us how to start processor manufacturing business in your own garage, I for one am all ears. Computing is fucked forever, it is in the hands of the powerful few, and Stallman was right all along.
As much as I do feel COVID is a real threat and that the Sturgis Motorcycle Rally probably helped spread it somewhat, this paper (and even more so, the article) far overstates the case.

Copying over some key points from the underlying paper [1]:

> In counties with the largest relative inflow to the event, the per 1,000 case rate increased by 10.7 percent after 24 days following the onset of Sturgis Pre-Rally Events. Multiplying the percent case increases for the high, moderate-high and moderate inflow counties by each county’s respective pre-rally cumulative COVID-19 cases and aggregating, yields a total of 263,708 additional cases in these locations due to the Sturgis Motorcycle Rally. Adding the number of new cases due to the Rally in South Dakota estimated by synthetic control (3.6 per 1,000 population, scaled by the South Dakota population of approximately 858,000) brings the total number of cases to 266,796 or 19 percent of 1.4 million new cases.

> If we conservatively assume that all of these cases were non-fatal, then these cases represent a cost of over $12.2 billion, based on the statistical cost of a COVID-19 case of $46,000 estimated by Kniesner and Sullivan (2020).

The Kniesner and Sullivan paper cited [2] gets to the value of $46,000 by using the Department of Transportation's "value per statistical life" of about $10 million per death (scaled down to ~$11k per asymptomatic case), which is not a public health cost estimate. It's probably far higher than what hospitals and the health system spends per case.

Not only that, but the paper claims, without any controls, that ALL case count increases in counties that sent lots of people to the Sturgis Motorcycle Rally in the weeks following it were caused by the Rally itself. They did not control for any other factors (e.g., the baseline spread of COVID in adjacent counties with lower attendance.) This is unplausible, given that other factors and events (e.g., college parties, indoors dining) may have also contributed.

[1] http://ftp.iza.org/dp13670.pdf

[2] https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3680348
I actually have an idea about how it would work that side steps all of this. I need more time to develop it but watch this space. But I agree with the local vs global relationship, in fact the whole trick is about handling this.
I want to know the scam behind the rash of SMS message I and many of my friends have gotten recently. The text is different each time, but similar to:

Johnny, urgent alert regarding your USPS shipment 6G55M7 from 03/25/2020. Go to: [url redacted]

For the past couple of weeks I've gotten one of these every day or so, always from a different number. I keep marking them spam, but I doubt that helps if they just keep making up new numbers.

I haven't had the courage to click on the link to see where it goes.

Does the link try to exploit my browser or download malware? Is it just an old fashioned phishing attack?
Network Optimization for Sustainable Software Engineering
> This means that if you can save a malicious DLL next to that executable you can make a perfectly legitimate executable run malicious code.

Some people install browsers onto a USB drive -- or even run a browser directly from their Downloads directory. Such people are easy targets for this type of thing.
I am skeptical that Amazon has 1% market share. I found a datum that Samsung has like 25M MAU in the US, but I doubt that they do more than 1% of the total app transactions in the US. Maybe in Korea.
That's because "Protests have been called ‘dangerous’ by chief medical officer, but research shows racism can be as deadly as coronavirus": https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2020/jun/12/black...

""we do not condemn these gatherings as risky for COVID-19 transmission. We support them as vital to the national public health and to the threatened health specifically of Black people in the United States." The letter conceded that mass protests carried the risk of spreading coronavirus": https://reason.com/2020/06/04/george-floyd-protesters-corona...

“In this moment the public health risks of not protesting to demand an end to systemic racism greatly exceed the harms of the virus.”: https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2020/06/04/public-hea...
I don't disagree. Yet individually, they are a choice. We're at a strange time in human history, where "(almost) everybody has children" no longer holds true. While children in total are necessary for a society, any individual person's children are not.

We encourage having children by severely lightening the load that comes with having children, but we're not encouraging having children as a life-style choice where you get to cuddle with them and the state takes over any other duties.

Yes, raising children is hard work. No, parents are not doing it for altruistic reasons. Yes, we should support them. No, we shouldn't just push more and more work on non-parents so parents can have an easier time.
I spent most of today playing Civ6 which was on sale (I’m on vacation)

I played the tutorial and then one and a half games against the AI.

It took 8 hours and not much happened. It had a fairly overwhelming UI and was really slow for each turn (even on fastest speed, tiny map, two players).

I’ll probably never play it again, it wasn’t fun.
Commonwealth of Australia Registration as an American Company with the SEC [pdf]
It came from a political machine to enrage it's base against the other. Only a few months til the election and thus we'll see more & more stories that rile up both sides against each other.

Downvoted (?) cause politics isnt allowed or you don't believe either side does such a thing?
I have hundreds of hours into Deep Rock Galactic, and I still play it almost every day. And I'm no anomaly - and there are plenty of games in a variety of genres that players stick with for hundreds of hours.

Maybe Civ needs a little touch up in modern design - maybe the first playthrough is quick and easy, but "willing to spend time" with a game is definitely not a problem.
Definitely not an expert but there's a fundamental hurdle to this.

One way to think of this is to realize how easy it is to multiply numbers but how much more work it takes to divide numbers.

For something like automatic differentiation, you're essentially applying the chain rule for partial derivatives repeatedly. This is analytically pretty straightforward to do for most applications. All you need is an analytical derivative for the simple functions your more-complex function is comprised of (e.g. a neural network).

For integration, the analogue of the chain rule is integration by substitution [1]. The toolbox for solving integration problems is more limited than for differentiation. You run into issues where the answer cannot even be expressed using standard mathematical notation [2]. Sometimes you get lucky and the answer can be expressed via an alternating Taylor series so you can estimate the answer within some margin of error [3].

Stan is a piece of software that runs state-of-the-art MCMC methods to basically just compute fancy integrals. A Stan model will take an order of magnitude more time to run than a simple neural network via something like PyTorch on the same dataset. But they answer different questions.

[1] https://math.stackexchange.com/questions/1635949/is-there-a-...

[2] https://math.stackexchange.com/questions/1397132/why-cant-so...

[3] https://math.stackexchange.com/questions/145087/how-to-calcu...
So where are all the AMD fans "will never buy either Intel nor NVidia" now?
Booting from disk is the BIOS's job. The whole point is to guard against a compromised motherboard.
How are the first amendment protections on the right to protest not an explicit distinction?
Wait so if i flash malware into the firmware, i should also have a spare fresh EPYC CPU i could install?
The law doesn’t need to be international, only one large enough market needs to do it. The market has to matter enough that the manufacturers won’t just say “screw them” and pull out of it. Then the mechanics are there and everyone benefits even those who live where there is no such law.
"We have reasonable but not conclusive evidence that there is a risk of forced labor in supply chains related to cotton textiles and tomatoes coming out of Xinjiang,” Smith said in an interview. “We will continue to work our investigations to fill in those gaps.”

Xinjiang produces 20% of the world's cotton. The reality is, most farmers in Xinjiang are independent entities. They are the little guys. They grow cotton or any other produces on their land, and sell the produces to distributors. Many of these farmers are minority ethnicity, Uighur included, but there are others as well. These people lived in villages and in the country side for generations. Farming and the "primary" sector of the economy is how they make a living for generations. They are the low to middle income bracket of the society. They depend on agriculture to raise families, provide food on the table, raise children, and take care of the elderly in the family. A blanket ban of all cotton produced in this region will devastate the life of these people. Think about it from the perspective of these people. They grew cotton on their farm, and one day they are told "The U.S. stops buying your product because they want to protect you from forced labor", and because of that, you will be out of work. The farmer sits there and think "Wait, I am farming because I need money to feed my families". This ban sounds like its standing with the Uighur people, but in reality, it hurts them the most. Rights to live, rights to livelihood, rights to income and bringing food to the table is also human rights.

Target companies or organizations that actually committed forced labor and present concrete evidence. Maybe require a document of the name of the farmer, require disclosure and certifications of the practices of the producers. There are many ways this could be done to both protect legitimate producers, farmers, and rule out the bad actors. Or at least act like you are trying. A blanket ban blew the covers off of the PR statement this is about protecting human rights and stand with the people. Instead, the actual intent is to suppress the Chinese economy, and prevent the people living there from getting richer and achieve a better quality of life. Its sad that there are people in the world who don't really care about other people's quality of life. They can enjoy themselves a good paying job, nice cloths, good cars etc. While for other people, farming, doing hard, manual and labor intensive work on the farm is all they can ever dream of. And what little they have now will be "taken" away from them.