skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Book Recommendations for October 2020
My friend and I ran into this mess over the last few weeks.

I’m trying to find a longer cable for my MacBook. Right now the 2m cable that came with it is too short. So I started looking. I couldn’t find one that was at least 3m long from Apple and I couldn’t understand why. I had to look on Amazon and only these cheaper manufacturers made them. Except they are fully USB C, they are USB C 2.0 to USB C 3.0 or some nonsense like this. My friend went ahead and bought that and then it turned out that cable didn’t work for one of his laptops.

Then he also wanted a USB C cable for his new external hard drive but in order to support it, it has a max length of 1m. If he chose a cable longer than that it would silently be slower.

I previously ran into this issue last year with a usb c to usb 2 cable I had. It wouldn’t charge my Switch properly and I didn’t understand why until I read up on how the Switch needed a certain type of USB C cable and the cheaper cables weren’t compatible.

The entire thing is a mess. There are some advantages definitely. My family has different laptops but they all support usb c, so now we only need to bring 1 charger on trips (when we eventually get to go on trips). The USB charger will also charge the Switch. That is a huge convenience. If you have top notch charger like the MacBook charger and top notch cables then it will probably work. But the operative word is “probably” and when it does it’s a huge hassle.
Douglas Adams on Dongly Things:
http://douglasadams.com/dna/980707-03-a.html

Spolsky on Martian headsets: https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2008/03/17/martian-headsets/

It turns out that making power/data cables work without irritating the hell out humanity as a whole is a task that humans are uniquely unsuited to solving. We'll have to wait for AI or aliens to fix this.

Meanwhile, stop expecting the next standard to work as a standard. Buy a nice little bag for housing your cables, dongles, adapters and such. Keep it stocked. Remember to throw out defunct ones biannually.

The problem is not going away.
Part of me thinks we're just in a very long, drawn-out adoption process for all of this.

Things seem to have gotten much better since the first USB-C only Macbooks and other devices started to arrive, so my hope is that we'll reach a point within another few years where one can pretty confidently purchase a cable or charger and assume it'll work with a standard device. It certainly does suck for now that you can end up with the wrong thing if you don't do a ton of compatibility checking.
I really like interoperability and ubiquity of USB-C, but I think the part that I find frustrating is that the actual cables themselves are not standardized around data transfer rates.

I recently bought a small USB-C hub that allowed you to connect to it with your own cable, and it has an HDMI port. I also decided to buy a longer, but cheaper USB-C cable to connect it to my machine, thinking it would work. Well the HDMI port wouldn't work at all. Everything else was fine. I actually ordered a replacement because I thought the hub was defective.

Come to find out, it will only work with USB-C cables with e-marker that allows a higher data rate. This info wasn't clearly stated anywhere, it was only listed deep in a support post. So that was a fun discovery...
I seem to remember that it is an Altera FLEX 10K; I did scribble it down in a notebook. Thank you for common date information to look for. The machine was released in 1999, so I'm going to assume very much "older".
Interesting, thanks for that! Will try in the future.
Probably reputation among ransom-ware negotiators (by this I mean the cottage industry described in the original post)
I absolutely loved the iPod nano for my kids. It lets me give them easy access to an iTunes library in their rooms without worrying about other apps or messing with anything else. Even the youngest (3 years old) could figure out how to skip to the next track or start/stop the music to the Bluetooth-paired speaker in their room. I even bought an extra Nano for when this one dies in the hope that that gives me enough time until they’re old enough to handle a “full” iPod touch.
No, those cables are not durable at all. Cheap or expensive, they don't last more than a few months with heavy use.
Great points about public vs private owned networks, private competition at “higher layers in the stack” of a publicly owned network, and building a durable political coalition around that. I’ve been on this train as it were for many years, but building that durable political coalition is a really difficult thing.

In the US, rail is the only form of transportation that mostly privately owned. Whereas the other forms of transportation infrastructure are publicly owned and maintained as a common good: roads, airports and Air Traffic Control (ATC), and maritime infrastructure (seaports, canals, dredged harbors and navigable inland waterways, Vessel Traffic Service (VTS)). Ideally the US should do the same for its rail infrastructure. This is what Europe is pursuing, publicly owning and investing the infrastructure, and allowing multiple competitors to operate on top.

Much the American political hostility to rail stems the monopolistic practices of privately owned railroads. Central Pacific, which built the Western portion of the Transcontinental Railroad, was founded by the Big 4, which included Leland Stanford, Governor and US Senator in the early days of California statehood, and of course founder of the University. They merged with another railroad they owned in Southern Pacific, later referred to as The Octopus, with tentacles that reached to every corner of the state and dominated California transportation and politics.

The solution to this problem is to bring the railroads under public ownership, not destroy the railroad with subsidized competition from public roads. The consequences of this have been enormous. The US once had over 300,000 route miles of railroad at its peak. Today it has ~147,000 route miles, less than half of its peak. The US National Highway System is ~160,000 route miles by comparison. Many communities lost rail service entirely. Even a rural agricultural state like Iowa, almost 90% farmland, was completely criss-crossed by railroads to an extent that no location in the state was more than 12 miles from a rail line. Today only a fraction of that rail network survives.

It is hard imagine something like this happening to other forms of publicly owned transportation infrastructure, because of that durable political coalition. People would not accept half of all roads or airports being abandoned because they are not nominally profitable. It is considered a common good provided for by the state.
I don't know about the power rating thing so much. USB-PD is a lot more complicated than having a dumb brick with a rectifier and regulator. And while I trust my cohort of wall warts not to burn my house down, I spend way more on 3rd party USB C bricks because I have no faith in anything I buy on Amazon.
The fine will certainly hurt, it's not exactly a small fine you can just book as part of your coffee budget. But it's not going to sink the company.

If they do it again the fine will certainly be higher and sting a lot more. Possibly sink them.

It's certainly a shot before the bow, close enough to do some damage to the ship but not sink it quite yet.
> Hasn't this been possible for years on whateverthatgooglethingiscalled?

The only aggregation on existing Android TV seems to be “Continue Watching” across apps.
If it’s very difficult for developers to do a good job, the likelihood you encounter bugs as a user increases.

Even if you don’t write drivers, doesn’t mean you can’t suffer from difficult to implement standards.
I did read it, and for my use cases, I don't have issues. I understand others' use cases may not match mine, but this situation seems basically like any other connectivity standard in the history of technology. Except this time, the universality for what most people use it for has actually managed to catch on. :)
Regarding the first point: True, but the wrapper could also have been written in terms of foo.begin()/foo.end(), no? Second point: Yes, I would want the easy case solved. Obviously, if an algorithm cannot be wrapped like this, then I'm not asking for the impossible.
I think it probably would for at least some cases, and I'll give it a try definitely.
A good (read expensive) dongle will work fine. I have one that reliably powers 2 monitors (a 5k and a 4k), 1gb network and powers my macbook.

I think the real problem is we get a lot of cheap products coming from China with very little quality control. QC is poor because they have no incentive to build in quality. E.g. you likely don't realize how flaky the dongle is until after the 30 day return policy, the branding on many of these plugs is minimal so you don't even know which company to avoid for your next purchase.
Yeah, I've noticed that too. That mystifies me.
I haven't done much open source contribution, but it seems like we should be able to write some kind of flagging/filter system to check if PR's are quality. One-liners and comment modification? Highly suspect. Although I am not sure what GitHub offers as far as PR management API.

Just from what I am seeing on this Twitter, it seems pretty clear that there are some easily identifiable patterns. i.e. "Amazing". - https://twitter.com/ryan_southgate/status/131164593596180480...

I could be just completely out of touch with opensource.
To add, Democracy is more or less built around having half of all politicians actively working to reduce trust in the current government. That is intended.

I think the problem in USA has more to do with how easily people are swayed by emotional arguments. It is so easy for politicians there to cause people to lose trust in a candidate just by attacking unrelated things about them.
Actually it isn’t but I’m not finding the article I’d previously read on the topic.

Personally I think it comes down to both the charging profiles the switch will accept are limited, such that some chargers don’t work with the switch - each USB PD charger supports a different set of charging specs (volts/amps/watts). https://www.reddit.com/r/UsbCHardware/comments/ch99aj/apple_...

I’d also suggest that some PD bricks/chargers might not be as reliable at sending power, if so, or if a cable’s wiring sends it down the wrong path, it could be disastrous for many devices that don’t take this into account. I am reminded of reviews of USB-C cables from a few years ago from Benson Leung.
Why not just make feature branches and merge into the branch that auto-builds? Or only push upstream when you're ready to compile?

I guess this applies to solo developers who mainly work out of master and like to compulsively push upstream to save their work. (Or am I wrong?)
Or look at cash. :)
The survival of the airlines depends on frequent flyer programs
>and we're still in a world where this single cable for power, screen and ports just doesn't seem to really exist.

I have a Dell XPS with a dock. There's only one USB-C connection between my laptop and the dock which provides power, screen and usb ports. It's pretty nice to come into the office and plug only one cable in (back in the pre-pandemic days)
Promises in JavaScript: A Custom Implementation
Setting aside cost, space is also something of an issue. A couple power saws and a cloud of sawdust will happily consume a small garage. Even if the saw itself is small, maneuvering a large piece of work through the saw requires clearance.
Pitch Deck Teardown: DocSend
No. I'm planning on keeping the stuff I have and leapfrogging the current pile of USB-C standards. Once they settle down, probably the week before the USB-D connector comes out, then I'll consider buying all new devices.
I had same experience with life expectancy. I think the major factor in it is country of origin.
As a resident of Ontario I'm extremely troubled for several reasons.

1. This shouldn't have happened, cops should have known better.

2. It shouldn't have been possible for this to happen, the design & implementation should have prevented this from occurring.

3. Nothing will come of it. A number of years ago police in Ontario illegally arrested & detained protesters at the G20 summit. After years of litigation some people got a small amount of money, and no one was held responsible.
> I have never been able to find my way home without Google, if Google told me how to get here, or if my friend in the passenger seat did the navigating.

Are you able to say "I came from the west, I'm going to go west until I find a road I'm familiar with, and then follow that to an area I'm familiar with, and then get home from there"?

I can understand not being able to find a place you've been before if you weren't navigating the first time, but to find it difficult to get back home seems very alien to me. But then I don't use a GPS very often.
Holy shit. That was a wild ride, and in the worst way possible.
It did not solve human starvation. That is a problem of distribution as well as production. It did allow us to feed far more people, temporarily.

Meanwhile we will face mass starvation on a level never before seen if we can't figure out how to render agriculture viable in the context of rapidly eroding soils and changing climates within the next half century.

"Increasing the technological level of the human race" is not unambiguously good if that technology levers us even further over the entropic abyss (to use Joscha Bach's term).
Web Scraping Newegg RTX Inventory with Python
I agree all choices have drawbacks. I'm merely pointing out that using parents to judge the quality of educators due to the political leanings of educators implies parents themselves aren't politically led. I don't know if an apolitical education is possible- how does one teach history or social studies?
Stadia Doesn't Even Work on Google's New Chromecast
When you engage in the decision-making process, you learn, and sometimes get completely lost.

When you rely on something to make choices for you, you don't learn but you are never lost.

I'm not disagreeing, just wondering which outcome people prefer.
Here they are blaming it on refugees, small minorities that receive government support, some criminal actors (like pedophiles), and politicians overall - things that generate anger in some people.

Yet no one talks about implementing EU norms to deal with corruption, implement ISO standards for corruption in public organizations/companies, justice system reforms, ban politicians from having jobs in companies/organizations that had businesses with the state (law firms, telcos, energy, construction, etc - this is the standard path for a "successful politician" career in Portugal), etc.

This is the true siphon of taxes, private deals where the state is always the underdog and has to pay rents in perpetuity adding up to thousands of millions of euros.

It's not the support of minorities, or the refugees boogieman that's coming to take our jobs...
Letter to Chairman Clayton Re: Public Listing of Palantir Technologies [pdf]
https://nitter.net/arrington/status/1311520168200163328
The same happened in Germany, only apparently here it’s legal (because the states decide what the lists are allowed to be used for, but federal law trumps it for the police)… I wonder why people started filling the lists with fake names.
It's a consequence of consolidating on a single connector format.

It doesn't make economic sense for every cable with the same connector to support the same power or data rates. Sometimes you just need a phone charging cable, sometimes you want to charge and drive a laptop at over 100w, and sometimes you need to carry 4k60hz hdr video over 10ft which is pretty dang hard.
I got 6.9 (7.0 without glasses) -- definitely not more attractive than any of those guys. Even my mother would say Henry Cavill is considerably more attractive than me without batting an eyelid.

I would imagine there is some sort of penalty given the face is on a 2D surface.
Would you indulge me with an OOM estimate of your hosting costs for this use case?
The weird thing about this case is that it was completely informal data collection, about employees by their mid-level managers. Doesn't even look like upper management was involved.

Very different from the usual concerns about large-scale, organized collection of data about end users.
Yeah, I definitely understand the complaint. As I said in another comment, I think we're slowly approaching the point where you can mostly expect them to work the same. When the first Macbooks and other laptops with USB-C arrived, compatibility and adoption was awful, and we're finally getting to a point where things are less awful.

Would it have been better if they all worked exactly the same from day 1? Absolutely. Do I think we'll get to a point where USB-C is categorically better than what came before? Also yes.
This is something I learned in my on and off side career as a sailing instructor.

I used to start off as a navigator and walk people through a course, telling them exactly where to tack for an ideal path. Then I started setting buoys and letting them figure it out for themselves. Buoys start out perpendicular to the wind, which is not terribly challenging. When students do well enough and gained enough confidence I set them in line with the wind, which is incredibly difficult for someone new.

I give them hints pointers, but I never make the decisions for them. Without fail, everyone screws up the upwind and downwind buoys on the first lap but they eventually make it around. Gradually they screw up less and less and start to get it.
What Robots Can Do for Retail
That's what I was afraid of. It is mostly to satisfy curiosity that I asked. It's a strange machine.
sometimes. less often than you'd think.
Is it that digits are prohibited or that four digits followed by three letters is prohibited?

When that photo was published, WA was still running sequential plates as three digits followed by three letters; since then, they ran out, and they chose three letters followed by four letters. When that runs out, they will most likely switch to four numbers followed by three letters, so it makes sense to reject personalized plates that match the future series of sequential plates.
I can only think of the short-term money as the motivator
Yeah, best to remain skeptical. This seems like perfect material for a modern urban legend.

It's definitely plausible but not sustainable. If found out they might lose both jobs and alienate themselves from two major players in the IT business.
Why is it that most men cannot make good money on OnlyFans?
DHS Memo Told Officials to Make Comments Favorable to Kenosha Shootings Suspect
Is that true? Google is never approached by sales people? Never threatened by lawyers? Never protested by activists? Never receives petitions or gets unsolicited advice from thinktanks?

I don't know about $100 million but they get their fair share of what is essentially lobbying I'm sure.
> The "small government" movement has taken a long time but it's finally winning in America

From the outside looking in, it's either:

* the "small government" movement, which only wants to keep big government small if it's filled by the other side of the aisle and grow it otherwise, or

* the "less regulation is more profits" movement

Both variants are ultimately corrupt to the bone.

Real small government voices don't seem to be present or growing in Washington. Then again, I don't follow your news as closely as you might.
A fraction of people still blindly trust despots. The larger that fraction is the harder it is to topple the despot. If everyone was like that then the despot would never get toppled.
> Why do I now have to pay a monthly subscription to keep using them?

You don't. You can download paid and uploaded content from Google Play Music and use it anywhere. This has been supported since before Play Music even had a paid subscription service.
Greed! Mixed with some possible stupidity.
Another person in that thread said they did the same thing for 6 months during the quarantine. At least two other folks on that thread have said they know someone who did the same thing.
My IFTTT synced account was banned and my appeal rejected.

I used that account mostly for answering startup related questions and related content. If IFTTT was the problem why not just inform so? I used IFTTT to know if someone has asked any startup related questions on couple of subreddits.

I have never broken Reddit Content policy, In fact I have never received any warning before from moderators of the subreddit I participate in. I always post, comment relevant content appropriate to the subreddit and reddit rules.
It's unfortunately a tax nightmare for companies - even if you believe that it shouldn't be. Paying someone US dollars while the work in Guatamala might violate local laws.
> When you rely on something to make choices for you, you don't learn but you are never lost.

Unless of course suddenly whatever you're relying on turns out to be unreliable.
> Forums have no threading, that makes any kind of forking discussion unreadable

I don't think that's a good argument against forums. First threads can be split by mods, thus creating a new thread (not a perfect solution, but it can be useful when part of a thread goes too off-topic). And I've found that the reply mentions make forking conversation readable, even if it's not as good as the HN/reddit format. And even then, I don't really think the lack of forking is the biggest issue with niche forums, but rather than a sub reddit can be easily created (and many people already know reddit and may have an account), whereas creating/setting up a forums is more difficult.
Would appreciate feedback on our product,Try it at
Based on the rhetoric around this pandemic I would say never, because anyone even questioning any government policy is deemed to be a "murder" wanting to kill grandma by the masses for even suggesting that government power should be limited in anyway
This is a simple problem, and there's a simple solution.

Problem: Physical connectors previous encoded information about data/power transfer mode support. When USB C unified the physical connector, that information was lost.

Solution: Mandate visually encoded supported standards on the USB cable in colored ring form, a la resistors.

Make them plastic, so you can snip them off if the aesthetic bothers. But I should be able to reach into a bin of different USB C cables, and determine what each cable can and can't do.

The law here for specifications teams should be: assume the consumer is never going to read your spec. Their ability to use the technology shouldn't be contingent on their doing so.
I have had the opposite experience; USB-C is working fine for me on my MacBook Pro. I have a few legacy USB-A accessories that I can easily use an adapter for. Never had a problem.
How Not to Store Books
I don't know of any laws in the US preventing this. Unless one contact barred you from the other, in which case it would be civil.
> And tax office might be very interested at the end of the year.

As long as you didn’t do anything stupid about withholding (and even then, it’s just a $ penalty you pay April 15 if you way underpaid multiple years), I don’t see why they would care. They don’t care if you have multiple part time jobs either as long as you pay your income tax.
https://archive.vn/3pXIx