skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
None of these seem like problems to me. This is just adding some commands to Alexa for convenience, like being able to submit an apartment maintenance request.

Amazon isn't making it possible for your landlord to spy on you -- first of all, as the article notes, the landlord would have to associate the Alexa account with their own, which makes no sense, since the point of Alexa is it's tied to your Amazon account, so you can order things from Amazon. (Unless my landlord wants to pay for all my shopping...) But more importantly, spying is highly illegal. I don't care about Amazon -- I trust the police and courts here.

Second, Amazon has zero business reason to allow landlords to spy on their tenants. It would be a huge PR backlash for virtually zero financial benefit. So I'm not even remotely worried about that, because capitalism.

Third, the idea that one day you might only be able to fulfill apartment requests through Alexa, instead of a website, is just ludicrous fearmongering. It's about as likely as requiring it all to go through an Apple Watch.

Finally, one random author's opinion about whether or not an included Alexa is an amenity worth paying for is completely meaningless. Every apartment comes with a set of amenities (or not) and the market determines the ultimate rental price for that set. Landlords aren't dumb. They're not installing amenities nobody wants. If the author thinks it's not worth the price, they're just not the target demographic for that building, which is fine, but it's not exactly news that's worth publishing.
>I am considering ditching my smartphone

Do it. Your health will thank you almost immediately for that.

>going back to an old-school phone or not owning one at all.

Personally, although I love the idea of going landline-only, I think a "dumb" phone can serve one well in a certain number of circumstances, so that's what I've been using for four years now. I use a Nokia 6250 at the present moment, but I keep switching between old phones I like and have lying around--some of them are brand new, never been out of the box.

I don't even text. I only make phone calls, and if someone doesn't pick up, I leave a voicemail telling them when they can preferrably return the call. That's it. I only use e-mail for more formal exchanges, but never to have anything that resembles an informal conversation.

Mind you, if you are still relatively young, doing away with IM, texting, and social media can be fairly alienating, as you will no doubt realize how utterly addicted everyone else is to their smartphone, and how a great deal of social activities and interactions that used to happen not that long ago don't come about that often anymore. Many opportunities to think deeply, to reflect, to have a conversation, to laugh, to question something, to go through your own personal memories, to find new things to do, to live, in sum, are now wasted on a regular basis.

Good luck with it, and don't be afraid to be an outlier.
PayPal has always sucked, at least to some level.

For example: paypalsucks.com was set up some time around 2001[0].

[0] This is the earliest snapshot the IA has of the site: https://web.archive.org/web/20010215013627/http://paypalsuck...
'And pity poor PhD students whose entire programs seem designed to make their life one enormous Ugh Field.'

This is uncomfortably on point for me. I'm mildly dyslexic and suffer with mild anxiety issues. Currently I'm trying to write up my PhD thesis and the whole process has got to the point where it is fairly unbearable. The problem is I'm the person that will probably be let down the most if I don't complete. I'm a part time student, requesting my third extension, and have now accumulated 10 years worth of 'ugh'. It's embarrassing.
Is anybody working on (VR/AR) telepresence/fpv stuff with Elixir? (Think of the new Nintendo toys where you control an RC car through an UI on another device). Elixir and a combination of Nerves and Phoenix seems like a good fit for applications like this..
Eh, it's a reasonable post if you look past the headline.

The profanity likely comes about from frustration with facebook (particularly for playing the pandemic card) which I don't think is particularly unjustified or from a place of fanboy-ism.
Pay a tax, or actually pay for the bag? The bag is not free. If previously they were being provided free, the cost of those bags was being folded into the cost of all the goods in the store.
How would they know what transactions were true positives vs false positives? That would require them to know whether a transaction is bad or not, which as we know, is a hard problem
Show HN: Inoffice – Voice chat for remote teams to encourage small talks
One glance and swipe down in Dark Sky shows me more weather info than Alexa could tell me in two minutes, I don’t get the weather part.
Sales by itself is a fulltime job as is marketing. That’s like looking for a software engineer who will also take care of accounting.
IPv6 seems to be a good example of security by obscurity, with up to 64 bits of random IP adresses per machine, making scanning impossible in practice ?
Weird proxy for "normal"
Hi everyone,
My company has allowed us to work remotely since the pandemic and although it's great but I do miss the office small talks I used to have with my colleague. The asynchronous nature of tools like Teams and Slack makes it unsuited for small conversations so after a 2 days hack I created https://www.inoffice.chat.

There are some things that make it different from other solutions.

- It is voice only. The reason for this is because I believe voice is less intrusive than video and not everyone is on their best looks when working remotely.

- No calling concept, you can just click a button and voice chat instantly. I want to make the process of talking to your colleague as friction less as possible.

- See who is talking with who and join instantly. Just like in real office, I'm hoping this would encourage you to talk more with your colleague.
I hope you guys give it a try.
Thanks!
This is an interesting question. I was technical lead for CCPA and GDPR implementation at my company. We keep hashes of email addresses that have asked to be forgotten and we compare new email signups with the hash list to make sure we never collect their information. Both laws allow companies to keep lists of requests but we like to be extra secure.
Zoom for Music Education
I mostly use reddit [0][1][2] to build my TBR list. I follow only a few on goodreads, but my twitter timeline (which is mostly catered around book reading) comes up with nice recommendations.

[0] https://www.reddit.com/r/Fantasy/

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/booksuggestions/

[2] https://www.reddit.com/r/suggestmeabook/
Still, it makes testing and finding bugs much easier, because you can relatively easily ensure correctness of the safe part of code, and unsafe parts get visible.

It's not as potent as say Isabelle/HOL prover or top of SML or SPARK Ada, but much easier to write, and safer than Java at memory management in practice.

(Where you get to write very thick foreign interfaces with no way to even try to make them safer, and cannot control memory allocation manually easily.)

A decent balance.
> ...C++ committee's ignorance towards practical concerns such as debug build performance, error messages, build times...

These practical concerns have no place in an ISO standard.

Do you even know what the C++ committee's purpose is?
> If third party App Stores are ever forced onto iOS devices, that market vanishes completely. Crashes, slowdowns, battery drain, malware, and information theft will become the norm.

This is a wild projection. Having alternative app stores on iOS, especially if gated behind a hard-to-find switch with a scary warning sign, will be totally different than any PC experience, partially because iOS has a sandboxed architecture (and incredibly solid engineering in general) that is far more secure than Windows, and partially because Windows allows you to install stuff incredibly easily with no signing or app store required. It's really obvious that iOS will have a fraction of the security issues that Windows has had over its lifetime.
Those go against the GDPR.
I agree that changing the SSH port may not be the best example of a low cost measure, since bypassing is also low cost.

I would like to see a list of suggestions of "low cost" ways to obscure systems that are (relatively) harder to counteract. But I guess as soon as anyone publishes such a list then hackers will start checking for them.
Python, Numpy, Pandas is very inconsistent in comparison to R. For example, calculating and adding a column to existing dataframe using df.assign.

Coming from R, working in Python Pandas world, I am constantly googling, and checking the results of each command to make sure no errors and consistent output.
Governments spend a lot of money on agricultural subventions, especially on meat and milk production. So from the perspective how the taxpayer money is spent, these specific pets probably got more financial support than several poor families combined.

Of course, this is mostly a problem of the system being designed so that it is trivial to abuse it. But currently, the system is what it is, and the lady's behavior is what it is.
(Ignore my previous reply I found it myself). To be fair to the authors, it is not their primary specification, that was a linear probability model. The logit model is just a robustness check to make sure the linearity assumption isn't driving the results.
Yes, Chrome had some MathML support but removed it (I think as part of their forking of Blink from WebKit).
I got massively down voted in another forum for critiquing FS2020 for being "self-important", for want of a better word.

For example, take the FS2020 downloader. Instead of using the game-store downloader, with its highly optimised CDN and streaming package format, they wrote their own downloader.

Okay, fine. Let's accept for a moment that perhaps Steam, or XBox, or whatever couldn't handle the enormous size of their game, despite being roughly the same size as COD5 or Doom Eternal and that the FS2020 team needed the game to load faster to "deliver a good experience".

So the FS2020 team clearly spent effort to write "something better". That something better was atrociously bad. So bad that the game immediately earned the nickname "download simulator", because that was the experience most users had of the game for the first 24-49 hours or so.

It took 5 hours to download on gigabit fibre internet. It should have taken 30 minutes!

The FS2020 downloader makes every mistake possible to make in a downloader. It's synchronous. It downloads tiny files. It doesn't use a local CDN. It decompresses files after downloading them in a single thread, without downloading anything during this time. It downloads the base game and then the patch separately, instead of the pre-patched version. It doesn't recover from interruptions properly.

I could go on and on.

Someone in the development team of this AAA game decided that they know better than the people that operate the Xbox content distribution network.

It's arrogance born of ignorance.
Agree, Its a good/cheap first step !
That's how you know the author is cool and irreverent. An iconoclast!
>But for regular banks service to private citizens is also compulsory

what country is that? AFAIK in the US most businesses can refuse to do business with you for any reason, except a very limited set of reasons related to discrimination[1].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protected_group
Let’s assume for a second that TikTok really is a surveillance app designed by the PLA cyber command as some in the Trump administration allege. How, then, is a forced sale not a form of aggression or even warfare?
It's really hard to identify sarcasm on the internet.
It's hard to predict. There have been improvements since the first generation "bronzed" CDRs such that they won't deteriorate as nearly as quickly. Most of mine will stay stored in their cases the majority of the time. I don't see my small collection as an appreciating asset so if it only lasts my lifetime, fine.
I agree that the headline is in poor taste. (And I say that as a frequent DF reader.) Still a good article though.
Buzzfeed started out as a purely clickbait outlet, but they made a stunning transformation into a very successful investigative journalism outlet.

Also, this is on HN probably because it's about someone who is very influential in tech circles.
A Secret Recording Reveals Oil Executives’ Private Views on Climate Change
Just wanted to say that I love this website. It’s a static site that’s been maintained by one person for 20+ years. For me it’s like a campfire, a great spot to come and find discussions, communion, and information in general on all thing DeLillo. So for anyone who likes this post I encourage you to check out the rest of the site: http://perival.com/delillo/delillo.html
Crypto is an emergent currency voluntarily used by a global group of people. It is nothing like government-backed fiat currency.
Do you think they have API calls to the communist party's surveillance backoffice?
The Secret to Good SEO Content
This is a really easy problem to solve - add a scary sign and/or void the warranty when a user decides they want to use an alternative app store. Then they at least have the option - and if they take it and suffer, they're the only one to blame. There's absolutely no collateral damage among users, and this feature would not meaningfully weaken security (if implemented properly) - "the user could do something dumb that only affects them" is not reduced security.
You are feigning surprise at a common practise that goes back hundreds of years in most countries?
> Financial regulations require any transaction that is "suspicious" in any way of having links to terrorism financing or money laundering be reviewed, and there are large and personal penalties for not doing so.

Unfortunately, PayPal's advanced KYC and AML verification process is hilariously incompetent and rigid.

Some months ago, they asked me to provide charity information for my personal account, and subsequently limited my receiving/sending privileges.

Phone calls to them trying to sort this out have always ended up at some call centre in the Philippines, where the agents can only tell their users that the account limitation is "for their safety".

That account of mine is still limited.

They've also limited the personal account of a friend of mine (who was interestingly enough ex-PayPal) before, also asking for charity information.
You're 100% right. Everything Apple does can be construed as "abuse" if someone is willing to argue in bad faith.

iOS now tells you when one app pastes content from the clipboard, if the contents of the clipboard came from another app.

e.g., You copy a zip code from Messages, and then switch to the "HN-Maps" app. If HN-Maps sniffs the clipboard in order to suggest that zip code as a destination, you see a notification that "HN-Maps pasted from Messages."

That sounds like a good feature for me as a user, but a terrible feature for app developers that want to constantly and silently scan your clipboard for keywords they can add to the data they sell on their shady data exchanges.

They can and will complain that Apple is "abusing" its monopoly power, but this isn't abuse at all. Next, I expect them to complain that Apple's feature that shows you which apps are draining your battery is also abusing their power to make users uninstall apps that are greedy for battery.

iOS is a shopping mall, and when you write apps for the platform, you're renting a space in the mall and must able by all the regulations in the lease that were put in there for the benefit of the landlord. Part of the landlord's interest is their pocketbook immediately--see the app store's 30% haircut--and part of the landlord's interests are the long-term viability of the mall.

The landlord--Apple--has to care about things like user satisfaction, because the tenants--facebook, et al.--would happily burn down the entire platform for a buck or two.
How do you "quickly go through" a stack of 100 resumes and choose a handful of top candidates in a way that is not subject to personal (conscious or unconscious) bias?

I remember an interview training exercise, which also covered resume screening. Each person got the same stack of resumes, and the instructor said, "You have 60 seconds to pick out the top 3 you'd like to bring in for an interview. Find them." At the end of the exercise we found that we all basically picked out people who were a lot like us. White people picked out "whiter-sounding" names, women picked more women, etc. Also, Ken Thompson's resume was one of them (with a different name) and nobody picked him.

I think the point was that human eyeballs and brains are terrible at objectively or fairly pre-filtering.
"You can still purchase all our tardigrade items with a credit card through Shopify, but not through PayPal. "

Good, use Shopify, screw PayPal . . . .
Maybe. But I would say this is a case where the consumers’ interests aligns with Apple’s.
Nobody is saying that it's impossible to implement. However, someone would have to write that up as a plan, including all the details, and put it through the RFC process, and get folks to agree that that plan is the one that should be implemented, rather than other possible plans.
When I advise decision makers on reading statistics (in my case, state-wide health data), I urge them to focus on effect size and only use significance as a filter. Two reasons:

1. Effect size is the most important thing. The point of the study is (usually) to guide decisions. Sticking with the article's example, let's say combining both studies shows the increase is likely 0.35 standard deviations. Is the intervention still worth the cost? Is it still the best option?

2. If there's enough data (e.g., an observational study) or a good chance of omitted variables, there's going to be a "statistically significant" difference. No matter what's measured. I would bet my life's savings there's a statistically significant difference in profits of New York businesses depending on whether the owner's named Jim or Bob. A replication of the experiment with all Jim and Bob businesses in another state would also guarantee significance. So it's a coin toss whether the second study would "successfully replicate" the same direction of effect.
Rust is not supernatural. It addresses limited classes of bugs. Techniques to mitigate bugs in other languages have been developing rapidly. Bugs are not the only determinant of success.
I used to live in Florence, I'm familiar. Yes, cars are dangerous even at low speeds, but I find it annoying that if I drive at 50 km/h in a low-vis, twisty and narrow hill road the car before me will almost invariably ignore the safety distance to signal displeasure towards my slowness.
I feel like there is still a fundamental misunderstanding... 4 year degrees are not intended to be vocational training. I'm all for increased vocational training options in our society. I just think saying the new certificates will disrupt 4 year degrees is analogous to saying that electric motorcycles will disrupt the 4-door pickup truck market. Sure, they are both vehicles that can take you somewhere, but they do not serve the same use case.
As I stated in the original comment, cryptocurrency violates innumerable laws every time a block is produced, but governments have not shut them down. The laws are already not being enforced!
This is probably true for all billion dollar tech companies.

Imagine how much dirt Facebook, Apple and Microsoft has.
If you are willing to accept something obscure PulseAudio actually has the best thing. Look into the PulseAudio native module which just let’s you put a speaker on the network as a normal boring sound output that works as if it was connected to your computer.

- Install the zeroconf module on both server and clients.

- Enable the native module on the server and open the port and tell PA to publish an mDNS record.

- See the speaker just appear in your sound options. Play!

Actual instructions if you want to set it up https://blogs.gnome.org/ignatenko/2015/07/31/how-to-set-up-n...
If its Amazon they are probably looking for you to say the worlds “LRU Cache” in any context during the interview to receive full points /s
That's a terrible analogy, for two reasons.

1. Post and phone have an expectation of privacy so the government can't review them (in the US, at least)

2. There is already a system in place to review all phone calls in real time. It's run by several Western intelligence agencies to get around the monitoring rules mentioned in #1.
First world problems :-) How about moving to a quieter city?

I personally hate "unnecessary" noise, like a neighbour drilling on Sunday morning, but I don't mind big cities buzz.
This is why you want to have laws protecting the privacy of one's home: landlords shouldn't even have the choice to do this.
I Finally Broke Free of My Instagram Addiction
The network effect is a billion dollar value.
I mean, why stop at just "Bitcoin". Might as well put a bunch of the words in there to increase your chances (eg. iran, nuclear, uranium enrichment, north korea, isis etc.), kind of like https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-1-e&q=tiananm...
This is a solvable problem that was largely solved in the past.

And then Microsoft elected to save a lot of money by firing the entire QA team.

You are their QA team now, so don't be surprised if you find bugs. It's your job.
Frankenstein the CIA Created (1999)
Lots of cheap Android smartphones do, why wouldn't TikTok? I just don't think they get anything material out of the integration due to the unbelievably low signal to noise ratio.
It's also a precedent. Now it would be TikTok, which company would be next? Especially since the border between state and company is less clear in China, I could see why China would not allow this to happen and strengthen the US economy with a loss on their side.
Seems to me that you are not looking both ways before crossing the street.
It's completely justified in context.

Nobody could be mislead into thinking that "Vitamin Water" is a healthy drink.

Same level of idiotic justification for the detriment of the consumer.
> that still leaves the question of why they [edit: the crates.io team] haven't made such a RFC

Because as I said before, coming up with an RFC means putting together a viable plan. The team has not come up with a viable plan yet. Therefore, there's no RFC from them.

Anyone who feels that they have a viable plan is free to submit an RFC, and then the team will discuss it and give them feedback.
I found this article [1] which might explain why the updates are so bad.

[1] https://www.ghacks.net/2019/09/23/former-microsoft-employee-...
evidently not given the downvotes, but then I don't understand, if their terms of service say we pay out unless the payment would be of type X and then they keep from paying out on payments of type Y they have violated their terms of service and thus would be open to being sued.
The light and the dark side: creating a UI colour system in 3 steps
The former NSA boss was hired to close future deals between Amazon and the DOD for AWS. The DoD, and the NSA in particular, have had a close relationship with Microsoft going back to the 80s so the Pentagon selecting Microsoft for JEDI was always the default in my mind. Hiring Alexander is an attempt to make inroads with the active duty brass to spread the Good News about AWS. Even at a salary in the seven figures it’s a lot less expensive than advertising and litigation.
You misunderstand. The customer can use Google Wallet if he wishes.

On the Web, payments almost always go through the credit card system, using one of many payment providers (PayPal, Stripe, etc.) set up by the seller. The customer also has the option of using a "safer" virtual credit card to avoid the possibility of credit card theft.
Definition of war has changed since nukes and the cold war.