skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> Discord is privacy-invasive and heavily censored. It is not a viable option for secure communication, but instead tends to be a great place for fluff.

Apart from the bit about “secure communication”, which is obvious—Discord is proprietary software that doesn’t bill itself as security-focused—could you explain the basis for these judgments? I’ve been using it for years and I’ve never been censored, have never felt like my privacy was invaded, and far from being “a great place for fluff” it’s been (for me) a source of great happiness, connection with good friends old and new, and a godsend during the pandemic.

If I were looking down on it from some Stallman-esque ivory tower, I imagine I’d have a lot more to complain about. But when I’m not in full-on tinfoil hat mode, it honestly seems like one of the least-worst offenders in the consumer-facing SaaS world today. I’d rather send somebody (my) nudes and SSN over Discord than bring one of those fucking “smart TVs” into my house, for instance.
Aw. Based on the domain, I was hoping this article had something to do with Floppy Disk Drives.

Nope, political trade stuff by some think tank or whatever and not anything to do with /dev/fd0.
>And people also like interactivity and group chats. Group chats weren't a thing when I built my slowly dying forum, but they are now. And now I'm in like 5 group chats. And Discord is just an extension of that desire for interactivity that isn't just f5ing a forum. There's more to life and human interaction than writing paragraphs to each other on a forum. Something isn't lost just because people find other casual ways to interact online.

You're cherry-picking a specific use-case of a forum and constructing a straw man out of it. Forums are (at least more than Discord) a very good tool for discussing strategies, making counter-arguments, posting guides, or organizing information.

> But as someone who spent a summer of my youth arguing on forums that Xbox > PS2, I don't see gaming culture as something that's gotten worse.

Except that wasn't what gaming culture was at the time for everyone. Because the attention economy is now concentrated on unthreaded discord chats, you have more drive-by commenters, messages taken out of context, lack of deliberate information, and more hoops to go through to get good information organized. Pinned messages aren't obvious to everyone and the UX for those limits the utility gained from it. Therefore it becomes much harder to disseminate good information to your community, guild, or whatever. People just aren't going to see it as much. That becomes baked into the culture, and the notion of sharing or teaching becomes seen as a thing for "boomers" or "autists" (actual words I've seen people use on the subject). This system might be an upgrade if you're getting drunk or doing drugs with the homies on a Friday night, but if you take gaming and teamwork seriously, it's a massive downgrade.

> Also, 20 years ago my friend and I were voice chatting by strapping our house phone to our head with headbands.

Ouch, depending on the model those have been known to emit 5000 times the RF radiation that a cellular phone typically emits. http://www.emfrf.com/how-green-is-your-cordless-phone-report...
wooooooooooooooooooow!
Ask HN: Mask for air travel during Covid
Next month I'll be taking my first flight since COVID-19 started. I'm looking for recommendations of what mask to wear through my flight.

Any tips? Also, are goggles worth it?
> Because even creating an account on discord after clicking a "join server" link only requires you to put in an username.

I also want to add: you don't have to install a thing either. I played a few games that heavily encouraged community coordination and still remember people backing out of VOIP because of the download ("I'll do it when I log off" and then never do). In addition, because of a central API, users can be authenticated with in-game/game account info and automatically assigned a role, instead of sitting about waiting for an admin.

Discord removes every barrier of entry possible.

> to mailing lists that 97% of their users will find fucking annoying.

This lets you measure engagement. Discord trusted their product enough to know engagement would happen.
I would say public schools are so much better than nothing. But they're not the best option by far.

Not everyone can do homeschooling, not everyone who can, will do it well. Many kids are not able to handle it either. But it can lead to much better outcomes. Like most things, general advice doesn't apply to everyone.
That sounds good in theory but research seems to suggest that homeschoolers overwhelmingly perform better on every single metric. Although I'll grant that there may be data bias in that smarter and more devoted parents are more likely to homeschool.

https://www.nheri.org/research-facts-on-homeschooling/#:~:te....
I'm not so sure this is correct. [0] says that Hashlife has logarithmic complexity on average. In the worst case it is O(n) since it could have to look at every element to see a pattern if one even exists [1]. Therefore the worst case for any algorithm running in a Life turing machine using HashLife is the same as if it was running directly on the machine.

[0] https://fanf.livejournal.com/83709.html
[1] https://softwareengineering.stackexchange.com/questions/2345...
You can be alarmed by and critical of Signal's insistence that it begin storing your data under any scheme without an option of "hey, just don't store my data, thanks".
providers like this dont migrate data for no reason. there was probably a bad drive in the array or something, or some other known defect, so they are opting to migrate off the host before things get worse
People interested in unschooling, may also be interested in the discourses of Ivan Illich.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deschooling_Society

L. M. Sacasas on his mailing list and podcast, 'The Convivial Society' recently interviewed one of Ivan's close friends, Gov. Jerry Brown. I've found the mailing list really worthwhile to read, and has surely affected the way I think about technology.

https://theconvivialsociety.substack.com/p/remembering-illic...
Optional security isn't security. Especially with the sort of metadata that is in _someone else's phone_. Basically, everybody who has my phone number probably has it in their iOS/Android contacts. I can't opt out of _them_ using a bad identity server.
Another project that is doing interesting stuff in this space is Loki.

https://loki.network/

They have built a tor/onion network and use it as the backend for their messenger (forked from signal). Its end to end encrypted and doesnt have centralised servers.

https://getsession.org/
Buying, Selling Calls and Delta
Fuck off dang. Your censorshit (yes that is correct) isn't welcome.
I've often found that laziness in reading is correlated with difficulties reading.

For example, I know a lot of people who say they are too lazy to watch a movie with subtitles. When you dig deeper, they then tell you that it's hard to follow the movie because they have to concentrate on the subtitles or that the subtitles go too fast. That shows that they are actually not very good readers and.

For the specific example of the OP. You might be right, it might just be laziness but those parents do take the time to reply to the email to ask for clarifications. So, either the email was ambiguous or a lot of people just have a hard time reading a block of text. In my experience, the later is often true.

That said I fully agree with you that allowing a home schooled kid to be illiterate at 10 is criminally irresponsible. Reading is the key to knowledge and any parent homeschooling their kids should make damn sure that their kid will learn to read and see the value in it.
>The CA legislature just passed AB323, which exempts journalists from AB5, with a 71-4 margin (94.7%) in the Assembly

The link you provided says 67-4. The Assembly has 80 seats so 67/80 is 83.75% and therefore wouldn't be enough to amend Prop 22.

One big difference between that change to AB5 and this one is that almost zero journalists actually wanted AB5 to apply to them. Journalism is profession that is much closer to true freelance work than rideshare workers who flip back and forth between a couple employers.
Where do you suppose your oxygen will come from?

A lot of our oxygen comes from the ocean.
"Looking back, we will see Covid-19, just like September 11, 2001, as a time when governments gained new, intrusive means of controlling their citizens."
Firefox not supported.
Memory access is generally much slower than computation, so I don't think you could actually speed up mining in this manner.
> I really do want people to be able to communicate directly with one-another, without multi-billion dollar companies.

It's just really hard to imagine what this could look like in practice while remaining a compelling experience.

Downsides aside that we both agree with, it's just hard to compete with centralization. You register @ve55 on Discord and you click "Join" on any server and anyone can find you and it's not confusing.

Meanwhile, literally every discussion of a federated system like Mastodon on HN is full of confusion, even among us the tech savvy crowd.

Example, just yesterday this was posted to HN: "You may be using Mastodon wrong" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24819387 and the comments are full of confusion. And it's just a Twitter clone, the simplest social app possible, that isn't even trying to solve real-time chat and voice.

And the traditional siloed bulletin board model (vBulletin, phpbb) had massive downsides too like fragmentation and having to "host it" just to start a community (not something everyone can do), which is why they struggled to compete with, say, Reddit.

It's hard to pin what a Discord would look that maximized the ideals that took us away from a centralized corporation controlling it. Seems we're still in the very early stage of experimentation, or maybe centralization will always have this sort of advantage that lets it dominate social spaces?
> All answers are in that email they are responding to.

My gf works in inside technical sales for an industrial instruments rep/distributor, and therefore a large part of her job is passing information between customers and manufacturers while trying to keep both happy and process orders. On a good day, she probably is forced to send the same requests for information at least two or three times on average before finally getting an answer. People just refuse to read even extremely short emails asking for straightforward information like shipping addresses which simply must be provided to proceed with the order. I wouldn't last a month doing her job without losing my damn mind.
OTOH, Telegram's crypto is... suspect.

https://security.stackexchange.com/a/49802
How does this argument not apply to Facebook and Google?

Hint: It does, 100%. Epic could pick a fight with Google, tomorrow, that culminates in the same exact outcome.
You mention Signal is fine as an insecure messenger. I'd be very curious if you know of an app that is fine _secure_ messenger. Do you know of one, or is your point that nothing that's made generally available can be considered secure?
I have no idea what that is, and I don't think I want to.
CSS3 Animation Loop Sprite
Apple removes browser for Stadia from App Store
Apple removed a browser from the App Store today, notifying the developer they were "'extending WebKit' by hooking it into the native GameController framework and thus Bluetooth controllers, which they didn’t like."[1]

Apple has no rules against having Bluetooth and web views in the same app, and there are plenty of other apps that do this.[2-4]

I think this is an excellent example of the 'heads you win, tails you lose' nature of Apple neutering WebKit's support for web APIs while simultaneously claiming the web is available as an alternative to apps on their devices.

[1] https://twitter.com/zmknox/status/1318315932268204032
[2] https://apps.apple.com/us/app/bluefy-web-ble-browser/id1492822055
[3] https://apps.apple.com/us/app/lightblue/id557428110
[4] https://apps.apple.com/us/app/webble/id1193531073
Far from "compromise", Signal implements the only privacy conscious possibility here.

Without automatic contact discovery "Signal private messenger" would be forced to default to not-private for all contacts until manual confirmation could occur. Adding UX friction to the primary use case would hinder adoption among non security-enthusiasts. With protection for the casual user eliminated, the truly sensitive communications of those motivated for privacy would stick out like a sore thumb, revealing many more bits of meta data than just "this number had signal once."

Elite users who care about being "outted" simply for signal participation can take steps to mitigate. The rest of us need automatic contact discovery for Signal to not be useless.
You can blame the worst supreme court decision in the 21st century for that. (Kelo v City of New London)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kelo_v._City_of_New_London
Amazing corporate power play by Foxconn. Congrats. The fact that they do it around the world with little repercussions is amazing.
Look what they did with Julian Assange. Secret indictment until he was already in friendly custody.
There are random joke-lines when you open the program. Also the logo is funny. That's about it for fun, but I think the joke-lines are there just to deviate attention from the fact that discord updates every 2 or 3 days which is annooying.
In my experience VPNs are used by everyone I’ve interacted with, including very tech unsavvy users.
> True collaboration requires that both parties open an investigation into why they may be wrong and consider changing their beliefs.

> Debates about personal identity, like race, gender, religion, or sexual orientation, can easily become inflammatory. When people feel that something so close to them is in question, they often lose sight of reason and argue instead from an emotional perspective.

I think this document does a good job describing ways that people who want to can have a fact-based, clarifying discussion.
But in cases where I and my interlocutor both have the curiosity, openness of mind and desire to come to a better understanding ... I don't think we need this document to have a productive debate, and it might not even feel like a debate, but rather a conversation.

People have vitriolic debates because they feel threatened, marginalized, attacked -- and then their goal is to defend themselves. We have ugly fights because we don't want a richer understanding in that moment. And for issues in which no one feels at risk, I think people tend to have either useful conversations, or none at all due to lack of interest.

If a colleague and I, neither of whom have put a lot of work into any specific approach to building compilers for functional languages enter into a conversation about the relative merits of compiling with continuations versus administrative normal form, either we can have a good nerdy time, or one of us leaves bored.

If I, a renter in a rent-controlled apartment, and a family member who is a landlord have a conversation about rent control, property taxes, the mortgage interest deduction, and the policies which have benefitted each of us, we can both feel attacked and defensive even if neither actively wishes the other ill, even though both of those groupings are potentially temporary states which apply to us. The goal becomes not just to better understand, but to walk away feeling ok about your life. Am I a parasite for paying below market rate? Is he a villain for being subsidized by his less wealthy tenants?
Once the stakes involve how you live your life, or how you view yourself, it's hard to keep wanting it to be a collaborative and open-minded exploration.
But all the exceptions were carved out because the people who would be affected directly by the law hate it so much. Doesn't it seem like a law that draws this much antipathy from the people it's meant to help should be tabled and rethought?
I feel I need to come back and report that my manager just sent this in slack: "I Agree!!..."
Interesting! It seems that both spelling are actually used...
You are a hero. Thanks for the link.
Enphase's claim to fame is the "microinverter". In most solar systems the direct current from all the panels is combined and sent to one big inverter. With microinverters, there is an inverter per solar panel and the power is combined as alternating current. I gather the advantage is that the operating point of each panel is optimised independently, so you get better performance across an array when light conditions are different across the array (eg. a tree shading part of the array).
I think you watch too much Doomsday Preppers
Interestingly, Discord's developer documentation and API still consistently calls them "Guilds", which I find a much better name, personally, but of course is even more of a term with gaming baggage, and "Server" was the eventually official neutral choice after that.
I was homeschooled k-10th grade, after which I entered community college.

Certainly social contact and learning is something you want to encourage, but I would not let that hold you back from homeschooling your son if you feel it's working very well. It's complicated to do in the current situation, but playdates, sports, field trips with other homeschool kids, etc. go a long way. There are likely also co-op classes where your kid can meet other kids.

I'm still friends with dozens of kids I was homeschooled with. Most have had very good outcomes. I don't feel that the few who haven't would have done much, if any, better in a traditional school environment, but that's an educated guess.
Segmenting this data by signup date is useful as well.

If I'm not mistaken, you're aligning all time periods to the same imaginary start date. This gives you the grand perspective but ignores very real changes in your application, team, marketplace, advertising, and product-fit over time.
Obviously I was implying all other things being equal.
> The other initiative, called Foxconn Future Leaders, targeted recent college graduates

> Employees ..., no matter what role they had been hired for, were told to figure out what Foxconn should do in Wisconsin themselves.

> The new management seemed increasingly open in its disdain for the local workforce. “Why are Americans paid so much and do so little? I can’t tell you how many times we heard that,” said one employee. “It was certainly a toxic work environment”

> the office began to fill with people who had nothing to do. Many just sat in their cubicles watching Netflix and playing games on their phones

Well its obvious: politic and corporate are at fault: should have hired at least some people who actually know what the job is they got hired for, not just slackers and slavers. This is far too typical for large corporations: no real plan, hire cheap, have n-layers of management where everyone pretends everything is going well, but since no one has any clue the whole thing grinds to a halt, fails and burns once the initial inertia runs out.
Great article but even this article contains some minor nitpicky inaccuracies in modeling churn.

The Lomax distribution (sometimes described as the gamma-exponential) would only be appropriate if we're modeling a continuous time process.

For a contractual product with discrete time intervals (aka monthly contract), it would be more accurate to use a geometric rather than exponential model such as the Beta-Geometric.
Yes. And go back and fix your typos.
> intersubjective ethics doesn't admit of an objective Good

I agree, but intersubjective ethics might not actually work in practice in a world in which people are approaching ethics from wildly different starting points. Consider an issue like abortion – people who support the legal availability of abortion, and people who oppose it, have such widely different ethical views that I think there is no intersubjectivity to be had (on that issue at least)

> Kantian ethics don't admit of an is-ought distinction (all "ought"s are in fact "is"es that are bound in actions).

I wonder, if you could expand on that point?

In my mind, Kant's categorical imperative could be viewed as either a proposed definition of the good (in which case Moore's argument is applicable), or a claim about what actually is good (in which case it escape's Moore's argument)

Kant had a lot to say about normative ethics, but the question of what his metaethical views actually were seems more disputed: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/kant-moral/#Meta
Thanks, sorry to feed the troll. Would you delete my comment to the troll below please.
has his name and signature on it. i guess he kept it to expense the $10. a bit too convenient. if true, it means this guy is a spy carrying a ticket in his pocket that says "i spy for russia". he is so bad at his job that we have nothing to worry about
I have engineering degrees and was a product manger for a long time. My jobs over the last 20 years have almost nothing to do with anything specific I learned in an unrelated field of engineering--though learning to think/problem solving/etc. may well be. And far more to the fact that I've written for newspapers and have increasingly spoken and written on tech matters over the years.
I think as usual, most people who like something don't have much to say unless they really like it. Hence why this has enough up-votes to be on the front page but a relatively negative comment section.

For what it's worth, I enjoyed the interview! I wouldn't say I learned anything new, but I don't need that out of everything I listen to.
> They can't extrapolate that forM_ works for any monad in the future.

To be fair, this is a problem with Haskell as well; forM_ is more properly known as for_, which works with any Applicative, even if it isn't a Monad. :)
In another generation or two, I would expect it to be port-less (wireless). This generation was the one to change to USB-C if it were on their roadmap... but I guess time will tell.
"Edwards is a different kind of quicksand fan, though. He has no interest in getting muddy himself—he's more a looker than a doer, someone who likes to see pictures and film-clips of other people being submerged...

To hear a quicksand fan describe his interest can be unnerving: Many describe what amounts to a sexual fascination with helpless women flailing for their lives. But there's more to the fetish than a bondage fantasy."

Going to be honest, that is not the direction I expected that one to go.
I fixed some of your spelling errors:

"Shameful fraud by foxconn. Shame on them. The fact they do it around the world with little repercussions is shameful."
> I’d also contest the idea that Matrix can never have a client as usable as Signal, but I’ll agree that there isn’t one yet.

After being around for multiple years and having not managed to do it even once (or come close) I think I am inclined to bet they won't. Or they'd just focus on being enterprise software (which I think they are doing and they must if they want to earn money).

Of all the IM apps Matrix is my most favourite in the spirit and least favourite in usability. Any attempt to introduce friends and family has failed miserably. Irony is, I myself was not convinced and I was trying to convert them.
As a card game .... (comedy sketch)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p2X-qQ-uMW8
Facebook's new AI can translate languages directly into one another
Top Big Data-Driven Sustainability Use Cases You Should Know
A sufficiently conspiratorially-minded person could wonder if this is just kabuki, to cover that they can already break encryption at some exorbitant cost.