skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
While I'm a fan of having a choice (as I consider myself a "power user"), I do think Apple is making the right decision in making certain things (like this OCSP check) default-on. It is true that the overwhelming majority of Apple users won't ever know enough of the technical details to make an informed decision about this, nor should they need to know.

Where Apple went wrong, IMHO, is:
1) not giving people a way to opt out (not just for OCSP, but so many power user-hostile decisions they're making recently), and
2) programming it in a poor way where slow responses ground the machine to a halt (it did mine in the middle of the work day, stopping my work completely for 30-45 minutes).

I don't think malice (i.e. greed) was involved in how this whole thing turned out. As Hanlon's Razor states:

Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by incompetence.
The soap was great. However, I don't know how much of that was the soap itself and how much was simply the experience of using foaming soap compared to liquid soap for washing my hands. If the dispensers actually worked, I would have kept buying it.
When it comes to "Swing", one thing that would be really nice is if you could have each quarter note broken into 1/8 note triplet cells. For example, for me the most intuitive way to represent a standard jazz ride cymbal pattern is like so:

[x--][x-x][x--][x-x]

Each square bracket is a quarter note subdivided into 1/8 note triplets where the x is struck and the - is not struck.

You can represent swing without triplets but it is way less natural and intuitive to me.
Nah it’s because Google and Facebook earn their money with advertising, which implies data. Apple, on the other hand, earns their money by selling hardware.

It’s a different value exchange, and Apple doesn’t really have a lot to gain by becoming a “bad actor” with data. See also, for example, their planned advertising tracking protections coming up in 2021. They don’t have a lot to lose in this area, and a lot to gain.
> it weakened our IP laws to that so they're comparable with the USA.

This statement literally makes no sense to me. Care to elaborate? As it stands, I have to admit that your statement suggests to me that you haven't the vaguest idea about U.S. versus NZ IP laws and perhaps have also gotten the idea of strong vs. weak IP laws entirely backwards. Enlighten me, please.
No it's not, you don't pay taxes on the first 105k. depending on the country where you are living, living abroad can give you a significant tax advantage.
My parents (in their mid 60's) haven't had issues with this. Not saying your point isn't valid--just the one data point I have to draw from.

My relatives recently bought a Mac because they liked how it looked (big on interior design). They couldn't figure out how to navigate up a directory in Finder or access files from an external hard drive.
Researchers determined that a NN of saliency maps could predict El Niño/Southern Oscillation (ENSO) in climate simulations based on relatively few observational records (page 2).
In my extended family, WhatsApp is used for chatting and calling by 4-90 age group quite easily and successfully. For lot of people WhatsApp and Youtube are the internet.
The face masks are a public health prophylactic that works.

Arguments against spreading diseased aerosols based on politics or some personal liberty are simplistic and ignore physical reality.
> The point is it's dumb to pretend that the CFR is going to be uniform, and that just because it's 2.2% in the US at the moment, it can be linearly scaled up to the entire population

This argument makes a lot more sense than your previous one.

> nobody is even trying to find out as far as I can tell.

As someone who has friends who have been working on this for months, I can assure you this is absolutely not true. There must be tens of thousands working on it, since the people I know are members of a group approaching 100.

Two of the big problems I hear about are:

Different interventions make modelling the effective reproduction number difficult, since this gets altered so much by the interventions

Different tests have different false positive (and false negative) rates and it is really hard to find out what test is used in which jurisdiction (and even harder to find that out historically).

It's not some big conspiracy. It's more that everyone Excel files are in different formats... sigh.
I heartily recommend the documentary Pretty Dyana, which follows a Roma community in Belgrade.

https://vimeo.com/66811641
:) maybe it's being part of the evolution. Once society is used to the presence of a machine, sees 5 years of trustworthy elections and recounts, and starts trusting it – then maybe the society moves on to the next stage, and opens up to seeing the machine and ballot as a small optimization. It took India 1 or 2 elections to get there.

Before the first step happens, expecting the next steps would be premature I guess.
First Hyperloop Passenger Test Completed Successfully
On highways in Europe it is illegal to pass on the right, meaning that the fastest-going vehicles are supposed to be in the leftmost lane. On top of that you're supposed to switch back into the right-hand lanes if they're empty.

Taken together this means that you can generally go pretty fast in the leftmost lane.
For the next upgrade, when the bears are already too familiar with this one, they should probably consider a costumed version of Spot.
What's the point of stealing these? Vanity? You can't exactly melt them down and sell them for scrap - their resale value is basically zero - when the value comes from being unique, doesn't that make it hard to make money off of the item?
No, just that it arrived much earlier than thought. Same as in San Francisco and France.
Judging by the numbers I would say international trade is of vital importance to the US.
For the same price I bought an Asus with Linux almost 10 years ago, which now has a SSD and 8 GB, with a DirectX 11/OpenGL 4.1 capable GPU.

Chromebooks keep being overpriced for what they offer.
In the long term I'm thinking that planets are the wrong approach. If you're going to get a significant fraction of the human race living off Earth you'll need to build something nicer than Earth, and Mars doesn't cut it.

Giant ring-shaped space stations like the orbitals in the Culture series seem like the way to go. You can build enough of them for a population of trillions simply by disassembling the moon, and build them with climate, gravity and aesthetics that are pleasing to humans.

Mars is probably a necessary first step, but it's small fry.
Gaming on Linux really got very good in the last few years. And that contributed to a bigger influx of Linux users.
I suspect you haven’t played much basketball! The same player on different teams can be much better or worse - some players fit in with almost any team and others need a team built around them.

(I don’t disagree with your larger point! Just that basketball is an example of a “very static environment“ relative to programming)
> You can just put up a UI forcing the user to update

sounds very user-friendly
People always seem to want to pretend it isn't a factor, but natural talent also matters, for both basketball and software engineering.

In basketball, it is quite easy to prove that some people are simply unable to ever be a great basketball player; there has never been an NBA player shorter than 5'3, only 25 shorter than 6'0, and only 10 under 5'10. Are you really telling me NO ONE shorter than 5'3 ever decided the trade offs were worth it?

No, at some point, it doesn't matter how hard you work or whether or not you have any outside issues; some people simply don't have the genetic attributes needed to be great.

Now, everyone can get better, but we all have some limit to our abilities that we approach but don't cross as we work harder and practice. Not everyone who isn't great should feel like it is because they didn't choose to be great, some people (most of us, probably) just aren't capable of being that great.

Of course, most of us aren't that close to our limits, and it is impossible to know what those limits are.... but they are there nonetheless.
That is misinformation. The CDC's best estimate of COVID-19 infection fatality rate is under 1%.

https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/hcp/planning-scena...

The link you posted is for case fatality rates. Those are essentially meaningless because so many infections are never counted as official cases.
But Intel saw it coming when they're left out of the mobile market and ARM had been advancing rapidly for over a decade, not to mention x86 has been too old now.
Given the overall upbeat tone of headline, subheading, and article, is "disingenuous" the word you want to use? Is it your impression that Ars is attempting to deceive or trick its readers?
I think this thread is not defining ‘greatness’ well enough. If we’re really talking about greatness, there should like 0.5% of HN that fit the bill, or something like that across the industry.

Reframe the question, who are our Bachs and Beethovens? Were they great because they created a lot of good work fast? Is good even enough? None of that shit defines greatness.

Our best developers came from open source. The stuff they made was undeniable. Is being super productive the same as making undeniably useful programs(languages, tools)?

Look at our greats and I think you’ll see they made a breed of work that sits outside workplace metrics of productivity, the same way a Hitchcock was genre defining.
We're shitty, terrible gods, unable to control our own power properly yet, but gods nonetheless - and just as responsible for the consequences of our actions and inaction. Like it or not, we have to face the reality that we can shape the entire face of the earth in days (literally) and decide what to do with that power. (Hint to readers: leaving it up to capitalism doesn't work out well)
* and a built-in method in system preferences to turn it off
mv image.png program.exe

mv program.exe sound.mp3

mv sound.mp3 text.pdf

Same file, always a PNG despite the extensions I can attach to it.
Ads providing information about proper precautions for covid and any new temporary regulations that should be adhered to have probably saved lives.

"All ..." frequently leads to obvious counter-examples and exceptions.

When you invent the new thing that completely solves the problem, how will you let people know that your thing is available and works just great?

Well the answer to that for designer labels is to hire film stars to appear in expensive tv ads so you can buy stink that costs cents to make for hundreds of dollars which obviously makes the world a better, kinder more equitable place for Chanel. /s
Same here. I used Linux for 10+ years, then at one point, copy/paste between browser and terminal stopped working. I got mad at that shit (yes, also constant tinkering, subpar drivers, etc.) and installed windows, never looked back.

And yes, font rendering is horrible. I went out of my way to find bitmapped fonts for coding. And yes, trying to get audio mixing to work on Linux was just a waste of time.

My Win10 machine runs rock-solid, when I'm done for the day I put it to sleep, and resume my session the next day in under 10 seconds. Like 90% of my reboots (and it's like WEEKS in between) are due to updates.
Building Sustainable Electronics
Safari too.
Why are voting machines available on ebay?
Up is pretty unencumbered by hoards of people in most places! But in Canada, you can just go north ;)
Logging at correct level by Suresh Sarda
I don't understand, the US east coast is further from it's west coast than Ethiopia is from Zimbabwe (I checked my measuring with my finger on my son's globe).
I appreciated the first 90% of your comment, and consider the picture of greatness you painted therein something to aspire to. Deep thoughtfulness, personal responsibility, craftsmanship, and virtuosity are all traits I hope to one day embody. But as a matter of argumentation the last line is simply discordant, it does not follow from the anecdote (beyond the obvious fact that the anecdote is anecdotal).

In my experience the most brilliant people aren't brilliant individually or brilliant as a team player or brilliant at X or brilliant at Y, they're simply brilliant. The one exception to this observation, in my experience, is that I've met a few brilliant mathematicians who are very narrowly brilliant.
I think that analysis is adequate for describing why Apple shouldn't be a bad actor with data, but, they meet the criteria for one - the security incidents the past couple years (supercookie, history leak, root, leaking app launches in plaintext...), assisting government access, softening E2E encryption to de facto unencrypted...
From the refs: Iceland revokes 400-year-old legal right in Westfjords district to kill Basques on sight

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/iceland-revo...
https://www.thetimes.co.uk/edition/news/charges-for-using-ro...
Thats interesting. Here they usually are not in classrooms, but at home.
Just not saying controversial shit on twitter will only get you so far, as someone could just post what you said to twitter
Was this the entire world, or just the US?
>> Bill stopped what he was doing, fetched the sources for emacs (using ftp), found the source of the bug, fixed it, and sent off a patch. After that he restarted emacs and continued right where he left off.

>> Greatness isn't about "team player", "hard working", (...) Greatness is a property of the person, a deep love of the craft, and a focus on "doing it right".

In your history I see a great deal of "hard work" and "team player". Moreover, to be able to perform like that, I'm quite sure he has been hard working for a long time. Of course, there is talent and virtuosity which I'm not downplaying. My point is that when people see such a virtuous performance (in all fields, like you mentioned), where there is clearly a lot of talent, there is a tendency to downplay the hard working part.
Let it be known: one asshole yelling on his personal blog can bully the largest company in the world into encrypting their shit and deleting their logs, and, most importantly, providing a way of turning it off.

Remember that, kids. I’m as surprised as you are.

Now I have an even bigger and more difficult writing task ahead of me: rms cold emailed me today to ask me, point blank (and presumably non-rhetorically), why I am still running macOS.

That’s going to be a doozy, because he’s damn well right.
If I bought a vacuum I didn’t like from Amazon I’d return it thanks to their generous return policy. Targeting ads based on returns could make some sense I guess if they wanted to roll the dice on recouping losses.
Please read my post again. What I said comes way before the kind of decision that you mentioned.
Hah, indeed. I had to build a custom Windows install image, so I had to learn about DISM and other stuff. Everything is documented, but rather badly organized.
German court declares techno to be music
...or at least it would be if that were what had happened. I'm outside the edit window and would have noted it in the parent post otherwise, but may have misread this based on the title and not the repo -.-
It's like musicians - do you have to go to great music school to be good? No. Does it help? Yes.
why not use a gyrocopter then? It's cheaper, easier to maintain and more safe. Even if they are not that fast you don't have to get stuck in traffic jam, wait on traffic lights in the city and can flight directly with straight line from A to B.
Assuming this is real, it is absolutely reckless and just not needed for kidneys. They can stay on ice for 24 hours or longer. Nobody ever needed an emergency kidney transplant, thanks to dialysis. Even if a helipad wasn’t on the hospital any clearing would do. And if the weather was too poor you use an ambulance or special transport going at a safer speed, which would still get there with time to spare.
It is a known fact that Lamborghini gifted the car specifically for this use, it was not payed with tax money.
Ask HN: Ex-atheists/agnostics, I will be 50 y/0 soon. Should I explore Faith?
You're not wrong, but with tracking and targeting it is able to become exponentially more invasive. So now instead of advertising to broad classes of people, they can exploit specific weaknesses and specific moments of weakness. Technology takes advertising from the ethical scale of a petty crime, into the realm of war crimes.
Hahaha. I was wondering if I shd mention this. Of course north is up (like on any map :-)). On a more serious not this is probably really a political bias, but a lot of globes can be taken out and rotated in the frame (maybe with tooling). So one shd check before buying if the north bias can be cured.
It's a lot easier to add the rest of the solar system if it rotates around the Earth horizontally, and you need that to explain the day/night cycle, seasons and tides.
Steam has that.
College Humor--may it rest in peace :( :( :(--did a great bit about this a few years ago. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KbKdKcGJ4tM It is absolutely ridiculous how useless targeted ads actually are... and seeing a real person try to sell you this stuff really underscores the insanity.
are there any advantages to using OCaml for making web apps?
That is unbelievable. Breaking VPNs is literally a life-or-death situation for many journalists and activists in certain countries; not to mention something that would (justifiably) give network admins a heart attack.

It also increases the attack surface, as malicious programs may find ways to hijack their traffic, or attach their traffic to OS traffic. All you need is an Apple service that relays the information somehow -- for example, a hypothetical Apple service that requests information/metadata from an application specified URL.
Curious, if there is no internet outside the VPN, does it fallback to sending traffic via the VPN?
I second this. Once I setup my mother with a Mac all the support I was doing for basic things like the WiFi not working or her pc being completely infected with viruses went to zero. I now only helped her with learning more about the programs she was using to create documents, look up stuff, send emails and messages, etc.
In italy the highest speed is 130,no other road allows you to go faster than that.
This seems like a reasonable estimate. I’ve done fairly long sections on the Autobahn at 230-250km/h, and this was in a slower car (Audi A6), without a siren, and without a kidney to deliver.

Even when going “just” 200-220 I often get passed by cars that are going much faster. With three lanes this is not a problem.
This sounds like it's trying to imply something very sinister, but pretty unclear what it is.

It's true that many Australian companies have significant US ownership, and that ownership has benefited hugely from Australia/China trade.

The Kerr dismissal has had numerous conspiracy theories surrounding it since 1975 when it happened.

If your point is "The US has a lot of influence in Australia" then I think it is better made by going to Canberra and looking straight out of Parliament House at the tallest statute in Canberra of the American Eagle staring down from the center of Australia's defence district.[1]

[1] https://placesofpride.awm.gov.au/memorials/190381
You only had the idea for slack 4 years before it was launched? IRC had it long before that...
Sometimes pictures help break up the monotony of the text, sometimes they're there because the editor said this is how things are done. I'd say the second case is true here because no sane person writing that text would think "This article would be too difficult without a photo of a glass of water."
Seems kind of contradictory.

FTA —

"These books are extremely valuable, but more importantly they are irreplaceable and are of great importance to international cultural heritage," said Det Insp Andy Durham, from the Metropolitan police's Specialist Crime South command.

The works were being stored in a warehouse ahead of being transported to a specialist book auction in Las Vegas, in the US, when they were stolen
This should be added for literally every single "security" thing they've added since at least High Sierra. They've continually added features for improving system security that have proved to be major impediments to a computer being used as a general purpose computing device. A separate section (maybe under Security & Privacy, add in loads of warnings, I don't care) with a deep dive allowing users to enable/disable security features of macOS would be ideal

The general taboo asking users to even disable any of the security protections of macOS needs to disappear in my honest opinion. With Big Sur and Apple Silicon, I don't think that it's hyperbole anymore of a locked up macOS just tailored towards casual users and dragging along developers in the process.
> You play basketball in a very static environment

I would strongly disagree - basketball is a highly dynamic environment, simply because you have an opponent. Everything you are trying to do, you have someone else trying to stop you. They are as adaptive as you are.

Because of this dynamism, many players who were great in previous eras couldn't survive in the modern era (and vice versa, really)... for example, most centers who played even 10 years ago would be abused in the modern game by opposing centers shooting threes. It simply wasn't part of the game 10 years ago, and now everyone does it. There was literally a player (Roy Hibbert) during the transition who was a star before and suddenly became unplayable as teams adapted to the new environment. He was out of the league in 2 years.
By "Tears for Engineers"
i recommend it, it’s a great read. Fascinating to hear how literate US society was 100 years ago
The issue is that there is no difference between smell-water and "new thing that solves problems", under capitalism. If an advertisement can tell you about a real problem, and make you buy (or quarantine) then that's good, but an ad can just as easily create a problem, and there is no way to differentiate between those. So while ads may have done occasional good, or made someone's life a little better by offering a solution to a problem they had, it's also filled the ocean with plastic.
Others have put forward great recommendations.

I would like to add a word of caution. Please spend as much time as you can understanding the complexity of your MVP and try to map that to what it should cost to build. Without having a good estimate of how much it should cost you will either spend too little and get extremely sub par results, or spend way more than you should have (more likely scenario) and get barely usable MVP. It's easy for dishonest parties to take advantage of your lack of knowledge and quote you an extremely high figure for what you want to do.

So my recommendation is to find someone with the right technical background that ideally has done many projects that may be similar to your MVP and that can put together for your an overall high level design and give you estimates on how much it would cost to build it based on hours and even tech stack used. They don't have to do the work but it should guide you on your next steps.
Emacs in odd places
There are. Private medical care is available in the UK.
The resale value of rare books is nowhere near 0. There are cases in the millions every few years, see Priore/Schulman conviction earlier this year.

The difficulty is fencing them for something approaching their value if you’re not part of “that world”, I’d expect that’s what the thief did not consider.