skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Huge apologies on this one. Most of your tickets were still in the queue - and no one has gotten to them yet. Some other tickets were closed in error because it looked like the issue was resolved - as your original ticket had mentioned there was an unban.

As for the initial unban, a bug had caused the "successful appeal" macro to apply - but it did not actually unban your account. Hence the confusion.

We are definitely working on improving this and the experience - and I'd like to apologize for the quite honestly shitty experience you had. 2020 has been a wild year for us, and we are still playing catch up operationally on some things - with the rapid surge of usage on the platform.

Unfortunately the people handling these appeals don't have all the information necessary to explain exactly why you were banned - and as a general policy we try to keep those exact details under wraps to thwart attempts from people to try and reverse engineer / circumvent our anti spam. (Of which there are many, so... so many people trying to do this.)

We are working hard on improving our process around this - but it's a rather gargantuan effort. From both the improvement of automation and tooling, and also staffing in general. But we are actively working on it - and a lot of my day job is to make sure we are handling these kinds of cases in a timely manner and also making sure nothing slips through the cracks due to a bug like your tickets have.
Am I the only one thinking that these 10 tips for founders doing sales are shallow and useless?

At least the HN conversation is much more interesting.
Apparently RUNCOM is where the "rc" naming convention comes from?? (E.g. bashrc, vimrc, ...) Very cool. I always wondered what the "rc" meant.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Run_commands
would you be interested in taking outside money to run on your algo?
Nonzero values are truthy. You can use them bare in predicates. But they are not "== true."
As a front-end developer my professional experience tells me that in practice the ONLY (cannot stress this enough) thing that matters is developer convenience in the code. Everything else be damned.

That said if this UI failure was easier for the developers to code, such as no code and download from NPM, then it is most correct even if both the business and end user are both catastrophically harmed immediately.
The issue isn't whether or not your character encoding is always a multiple of 8 bits. It is whether or not you can use standard (octet-focused) parsing functions to deal with those strings. This is what makes utf-8 "special". No byte of a utf-8 multibyte sequence will ever have a value < 127. So for most "syntactic" parsing problems, you can use standard C functions to deal with utf-8 strings - something that is not true with most other multibyte character encodings.
Don't bother with technician class. It's pretty easy to get your general license. There are multiple websites that have flashcards for the exam questions. Amateur extra is actually a lot of work, but general class allows you to do most things. And you can get a used Yaesu handheld for a hundred dollars off eBay. Upgrade the antenna, and that'll allow you to do a lot of things.
Thumbnails?
'it is working'? No shit, we have these things for decennia in Europe
Ah that is not quite accurate. Sure many linux distros will install a desktop environment for you. FreeBSD will require you to install a package for the one of your choice which should also install all dependencies. As noted elsewhere, X pretty much works now with no additional config update unless you have a very unusual setup. That shouldn't be too high a hurdle as even on linux you will need to know how to install packages at some point too.

And if you don't want to do that, you can try something like GhostBSD which is based on FreeBSD with the MATE desktop.
Delta Fires Flight Attendant Who Called Out Facebook Trolls
I always wanted to say "How did you get the Attorneys Generals personal cell #???"
> You have plastic insulator around your electricity wires to prevent you getting electric shock. Is that a fix or a workaround? Because a fix would be to actually have continuous current at max 12V as power lines. But that's not economically viable.

Your examples are wanting.

Wires are also insulated to stop them from touching each other, not just to prevent electrocution. A 12V wire touching another can definitely result in sparks and fire. It can even amputate your finger if you bridge with your wedding ring.

In virtually all situations wire needs insulation - it's a feature not a workaround.
Exactly this. I work for a cloud provider and there has been a ton of push in the last year or so to develop customer communication teams and involve them at the first inkling of an outage. We can identify the subset of customers affected and contact them directly. Just publically saying there’s an outage would cause much more chaos.
My point to add is that Fairy tales are not always (maybe not often?) children friendly by modern standards.
Same as modern day "cartoons".

They can have quite graphic content.

My wife and I were reading from a "Trove of childrens songs, fairy tales etc" to our newborn, to get in the practice of reading to our child. Simple rhyming stuff, 3 blind mice, the luminous dong, tom thumb, jack and the beanstalk. It was getting more serious.

Then a story: man earns and travels with a reaver at his side and ends up winning the heart of a princess - who up 'til that point kept a garden decorated with the blood dripping heads of failed suitors. I mean, she was under the influence of an evil troll(iirc) so no disrespect to her but I thought I might wait a few years until I read that one to my kids...
Firefox Finally Adds Pinch to Zoom
I just snaked my sewage pipe. Can confirm this to be true
Huh? The point of offsets is to reduce carbon. I don’t care about the effect on you personally. If their existence causes more carbon through a combination of: a) ineffective programs and b) secondary physiological effects, then no one should support them (and ideally, they would just be disallowed by regulators — as it would be both in consumers and environmental interests — and replaced with mechanisms and incentives that actually work).

For clarity: I think they probably do work and there’s value there, but I think there are good reasons to be skeptical and evaluate carefully.
SCO was reasonably popular in the late 80's, into the early 90's before Linux took off. Locally there were a few BBSes (waffle BBS program, I think) and public access Unix systems that ran SCO.
I don't think they can yet..
No version of the rust compiler was ever written in C. The initial version was in OCaml, then bootstrapped to Rust itself.
The XPL0 Programming Language
In early 2019 CloudWatch had a major outage that was particularly nasty, where instead of just outright failing to report metrics it reported a small percentage of metrics. As a result a lot of autoscaling groups and DynamoDB tables that were theoretically supposed to avoid scaling in during a metric outage still scaled in, because they saw it as a 90+% traffic reduction rather than a metric outage.
> So you're still talking the atomic operation being >10x slower than non-atomics.

How did you arrive at this number?
That's a feature if you ask me. The whole point of scraping websites is to get the data I want while discarding noise like interface chrome and advertising directly to the garbage.

If they'd like me to pay for access, they should return HTTP 402 Payment Required instead of letting me download the page for free. Perhaps they could also rate limit the network connection to prevent denial of service. Why straight up block automated user agents though? That sucks.
I’ve got another good FAANG principal joke:

“Don’t be evil”

buys doubleclick
I think people do "want" those things, just in a soft "so as long as I can keep using everything I'm already comfortable with in the same way for the same price" sort of sense.
Great, however it currently doesnt have the sci-tech filter, and no comics filter too :-(
I've found myself fighting the spell-correct search more often too, worse, it's easily handled by giving me the results I searched for and then including other optional links or results.

There's just no excuse when what I'm searching for is right, and a search engine thought I'd like something else. It's dumb af.
Thanks so much! I am not sure there is a way to capture audio from a browser without JavaScript. Do you know if it's possible?
It holds enough sway that any time a conversation about veganism comes up, I find it easy to point out the flaws, again. Beyond that, it holds incredibly little.

For a short while I dated a vegan, and that was the most veganism has had any impact on my life. Planning meals together required more work to find viable options. I enjoyed the few vegan meals that I ate during that time, but it never changed my personal eating/purchasing habits. Nor have my beliefs been affected by any conversations I've had on the subject.

> you have created an imaginary idealised version of veganism

I'm pointing out glaring holes in its fundamental philosophy. You didn't respond to any points I raised about Nirvana Fallacy being a core part of veganism. Nor have any of my points been debated or addressed in this thread. Just a lot of "Pro veganism! Yay! Shun the non-believer" talk, which does nothing to actually support it.

The olive branch I offer from the other side of this argument is that there are positives to reducing the commodification of animals and animal products. It doesn't mean that I believe it's a solid, effective, or feasible philosophy to live by.
Coherent was my first exposure to PC "Unix", back when I was in high school. I had a 386SX laptop with 4 megs of RAM. It was amazing how lightweight Coherent was. The manual was also amazing, very comprehensive, including most of the POSIX APIs.
I’m 57 (and a half). I still code everyday and I founded a “real” AI Startup less than two years ago. Now get off my lawn!
That's still their data though, no?
A few years ago, when I was researching Michele Sindona and Propoganda Due, I stumbled upon a blog that talked extensively about the Kennedy case as well as the Bloomfield files. It also hinted about Montreal being the possible staging area for the assasination (as in Lincoln's case). Back in 2013 I managed to book an appointment to take a look at the Bloomfield files but dropped it because I'm not sure what I might find in the files (although I do believe that the most important parts have been well protected till today and won't be released to the public forever), as even the released docs look interesting (hint: involving Rothchild and Freemansonry).

After a bit of search I managed to find it again:

http://somesecretsforyou.blogspot.com/2010/04/why-bloomfield...
Certainly explains why having terribly slow internet makes my mac insanely slow. Shutting off I cloud helped immensely, but this is probably the deeper root.

Sucks to have a cellphone only internet.
He said it pretty clearly. It's easy money if you look at it and work at it. The issue is most people don't have enough capital to try or don't have the balls to follow through. I've had many try my system and they can't hold the hard times.
They aren't stupid, but they don't often have any good reason to know such shops exist or that their specific problem (e.g. phone dies quickly after charging) can be quickly and cheaply fixed at such a place and doesn't require purchasing the latest and greatest iDevice. In the last year I've taught a half-dozen non-technical acquaintances that such shops exist, and they all opted for the repair route instead of a new phone.
All I see in your response is, "We don't want to tell the truth because it might cost us money."

Maybe if it started costing the company actual money, it might make the investments necessary to ensure it doesn't go down in the first place.
Show HN: Always updates keeps you updated, always
I learned from that article that the shell had been around in Multics for 5 years before UNIX inherited the concept! There were no pipes, but it seems like there were command-line arguments even in Louis Pouzin's shell. Does anyone know what it was called? Wikipedia only knows the Thompson shell [0].

"i decided that it was close to a time sharing system, just
lacking an exec call, a shell, an editor, and an assembler.
(no compilers) the exec call was trivial and the other 3
were done in 1-week each" ... "in mid to late 1969" - Ken Thompson [1]

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_command_shells

[1] Page 34, UNIX: A History and a memoir - Brian Kernighan. https://www.amazon.com/UNIX-History-Memoir-Brian-Kernighan/d...
The next war will have new and unpleasant injuries so far largely unknown to the world.
It still gives me a giggle that the flops numbers you're talking about were supercomputer-level when I was a kid, and now I can buy that kind of power with beer money and lose it in the back of a drawer.
Hi, thanks for asking - I'm definitely open to that in the near to mid-term. I'm currently working to scale the systems and also expose my robust APIs online as a SaaS, but I'm interested to hear what you're thinking.

Feel free to reach out to me at the email listed on my profile!
I don't have a choice about whether I use an ePCR or not, New York State (and, AFAIK, most other states) mandates it.

The only place where PCR errors matter is on the witness stand... The PCR is certainly important, but any critical information is conveyed in a number of redundant ways, and I would be very surprised if there's been a single incidence of a PCR error resulting in a patient's death.

PCRs are not treated with a great deal of trust, nor should they be (I say this as someone who has written thousands of them). We're dealing with incomplete and conflicting information, patients that actively lie (or, more charitably, forget) about their medical history, and in the case of critically sick patients (the ones that are at risk of dying in the first place) I am more focused on the acute management of their condition. No one expects a PCR to be accurate in every detail. That doesn't mean it's useless, but it also means the system expects there to be errors and has redundancies in place to account for that.
Does it really matter when 0% of people I email could decrypt it, yet my work uses a "Hipaa" feature for office365 email and though I can send to anyone, zero checks that I'm actually sending to the right person.
Please read the second line at the very top of that page:

"Not Applicable to Third Party Websites. Please note that this Privacy Policy does not apply to any website, offering, product or service of any third party, even if it links to our Site or incorporates the Service – please refer to the applicable privacy policies before deciding to provide any information to third parties."

End user data is governed by the Data Processing Agreement, linked here: https://www.hcaptcha.com/terms
yes it will be an open source project.
which features are in your priority list?
Hmm... glad to see quite a lot of FOSS software projects here. Maybe KDE/GNOME should join as well.
> It's a pretty hard case to make that a disease which disproportionately killed health 20-30 year-olds led to mass prosperity.

That's exactly what happened during the black plague. It lead to the end of feudalism. A shortage of labor will absolutely boost the value of labor.
The Great CEO Within is now available in print and on Kindle: https://www.amazon.com/Great-CEO-Within-Tactical-Building/dp...

If you want to support the author, buy the book and/or write a review.
Godel's incompleteness theorems are really syntactic results rather than semantic results. The main consequence they have for modern mathematics is that there is no "one axiom system to rule them all," since you can always extend many systems with a new axiom, which doesn't change much, since mathematics since time immemorial has been engaged in the practice of tweaking various axioms and seeing what consequences emerge.

Indeed Godel's completeness (not incompleteness) theorem (which applies to most mathematical settings such as anything that uses ZFC) is a strong indication that everything mathematicians would care to prove is in fact provable.
Against the suburban ethos, lack of ambition to do new things
Amateur astronomer traces potential origin of the famous WOW Signal
Unrelated ask: Does anyone know of a good way to filter my Outlook 365/IMAP inbox using rules running on my Linux box? I want more complex and easily maintainable rules than what I can get via Outlook.
>Homes are not investment vehicles to make people wealthy - they are a fundamental human right that many people are priced out of, or subject to unscrupulous landlords and freeholders exploiting what is still essentially a feudal system.

I live in India I had the same mindset "home or land isn't investment" but then I thought about trying investment in property and it paid vastly more than what bank or other financial instrument can fetch me when adjusted for risks.

In India, properties in good locality of the city is a storehouse of value.

Here most deals are 80-20 or 70-30, which means 80% of the value you show in official record while rest 20% is paid in all cash to seller. This helps save bit of tax and avoid scrutiny by tax department as you aren't drastically showing a low value. When everyone does this, the property value to government/tax agencies always appear at 80% of its actual value (the money actually being paid) for the transfer of property rights.

What happens to the cash portion? Usually the seller will use that cash to renovate their house or pay for other things in cash or use it for their everyday expenditure.

High value property here don't fluctuate much in price and are considerably safe investment to hold and move money when you want.

I am in the market and I am seeing the guys with money during lockdown are getting wayyy better deal now.
I just read
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20277115 "what is salesforce" (linked from elsewhere here) -- quite an impressive story, lots of talented people involved it seems to me

(Incl Steve Jobs just a little bit others might find it interesting to know)
Id sue the billboard operator and hope that I work with people Intelligent enough not to make snap judgments on people based on what the billboard told them to. There’s really no idea that should ever require censoring. People just need to stop doing things because they were told to but instead do things because it makes sense to them to do so
I came here to talk about stress. I have been experiencing similar symptoms to the OP and I've finally figured out that stress/anxiety are HUGE factors. Depression could also be a contributing factor.
Or perhaps change the system that incentivizes companies to violate privacy over and over again
Your brain is full.

I don't think that's just a joke. There is a finite amount of space in your skull, so you can have a finite amount of neurons with a finite amount of interconnections and so on.

Some people fill up faster than other people do. You've done quite well compared to normal people.

The biology is even biased toward early learning. Humans have an unusually high ability to keep learning into adulthood, but it's still nothing compared to childhood ability. Learning tapers off in favor of stored knowledge. The elders hold knowledge and have less urge to shake things up, having already figured things out and obtained status.
Newsin.it – Free exam vouchers, free Udemy courses, free bootcamps, scholarships
Yup that was the answer :-) interleaving the two lets you get the best of both worlds at the cost of a constant-factor penalty. This is a pretty clever & general-purpose meta-algorithm that works for pretty much any problem where you have competing algorithms with different strengths.

Quitting and starting over as GGP mentioned is another option that also works for this problem, though it might not work as well for other problems where you can't put a nice bound on the number of steps.

FWIW there's also a very dumb (or smart I guess, depending on your point of view) solution, which is to just have 2 threads run simultaneously, and report the result of the first one. It might make sense for some problems. And in any case, this is basically equivalent to what you're doing on 1 CPU with the previous technique.
This is a very idealistic view that will appeal to a small percentage of people.

> What do we want from our technology?

What’s missing from this list is that most people want nice things that are affordable (or even “free”) and if they’re expensive, provide a lot more features. They also want things that just work in connecting them (preferably for “free”) to whatever content or people they’re interested in. On the latter, I think the economies of scale are always tilted to favor those who have scaled and can scale (unless the ones with scale become very greedy and/or ignore the competition).

It takes ideals and money to support products that are better in protecting some rights we consider important. That excludes a whole lot of people from choosing.
The first customers were definitely the hardest. I didn't do any classic marketing, just cold calls and emails. It took a few months to get the first paying user. I did target a specific niche.

I then went in a road trip around the northeast (literally camping in a tent at the nearest KOA or park) hitting different areas where customers were. I'd stop in town, call them up, and tell them I was passing through (which was kind of true) and ask if they could meet for a half hour. I got some of my first meetings that way.

It was extremely inefficient but helped grow the initial user base. It's definitely not an approach I'd recommend to someone - it's kind of ridiculous but it worked.

That said, the customers I was targeting were all part of the same trade association and the word spread that I was actually doing something pretty useful. That led to new customers and a lot of word of mouth.

I only seriously started with traditional outbound marketing this year, which is my 8th year in business. Other than that it's been direct outreach, word of mouth, and attending conferences and drinking my ass off with potential customers (not ideal, but every association has its own vibe and sometimes you gotta do what you gotta do).

Building partnerships with like minded entrepreneurs in your industry is a good approach too (referrals, integrations, etc)

All this said, it took 4 years to make enough money to pay myself and 5 years to hire my first employee which was a customer support manager. "Delegating and elevating" is magic and led to more time to focus on growth. I did a lot of freelancing in those first 4 years to make ends meet. It could definitely be done faster, but I was way more of a n00b than I realized at the time (isn't that always the case?)
There's a large set of these developed over the years,
though I couldn't compile a comprehensive list without taking some time.

Contact management (lbdb), numerous task managers, calendars, Emacs org-mode, vimwiki, schedulers, and more.

remind, calendar, and taskwarrior come to mind.
Did you know that when they first implemented electricity they just buried them pinned with nails on wood, no insulation? Back then insulating wires was more expensive than just eating energy losses via running current.

Like I said, it all comes down to economics.
Anyway, I hope the gov spending will get to sane levels soon.

Honest question, what mechanisms do you think will make this happen? Or is it more of a general hope-it-happens?

In my experience, getting anyone to spend less after they are used to spending a lot (be it a government, a company, a business unit, or even just your kids) simply doesn't happen, barring a fundamental change in circumstances whereby the alternate of continuing to spend a lot results in immediate ruin.
My understanding is that kicking something about with the aim of getting it somewhere or other existed in lots of different places, independently. The modern, codified game more or less resembling what we have today was invented in England.