skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
As someone whose time at UT Austin overlapped your nephew's and who has opportunity to work on campus with UT students regularly, my experience is nothing like his.

Being a middle/upper class straight white male does not make you a persona non grata. On the Contrary, due to the automatic admission requirements the most common person you'll meet on campus is an upper/middle class person from a Houston suburb.

I've never encountered the "white men being the source of the world's problem" thing in person at any point, only in characterizations online and in some people blaming some perceived slight or disadvantage on it. I even took a wide range of the "softer" liberal arts courses to supplement my CS education.

I also disagree with UT Austin being a particularly liberal campus beyond a typical college campus. Austin itself is plenty liberal compared to the average city in Texas but again, due to the automatic admission requirements, UT is really a fairly average distribution of upper/middle class people throughout Texas.

I've also had more professors try to sell me on the ministry of Jesus (3, insistently) than on any sort of leftist politics (1, in my Eastern Philosophy course) and had one professor that moved to UT Austin after being ejected from his prior university for in his words "being too conservative".
A "left-wing activist" actually shot the house majority whip in 2017, and he was actively trying to assassinate other republican politicians as well. [0]

I'll never vote for another republican for as long as Trumpism remains a part of the party, but we can't pretend that only one side has been radicalized to the point of violence.

[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2017_Congressional_baseball_sh...
Not really gone, Ruffle[1] is being actively developed and as of now is able to play most of the early Flash content, including some AS2 games.

[1] https://ruffle.rs/
Dilbert and Corporate Sourcing
Ask HN: Is Lending Club Dead?
I have an account with a small sum on Lending Club. For the past two months, no email to their support has been answered. I reached out to them about a dozen times.

What would be the best way to determine whether the company is being quietly shut down? I'd like to discover this in advance, if possible.

Did you have any experience like this with other services?
>What I do see is a company whose mission was not explicitly political

Take a look at their investors and you'll see otherwise
Just a repeat of the "Kevin" a few years later. I'm afraid this is never going to stop, though we have to fight it.
Colocation, equipment, and admin time should be no more than $1-2 million/year. Reference OpenStreetMap, Wikipedia, similar non profit infra expenses in their IRS non profit return [1]. You most definitely don't want to be at a cloud provider with their bandwidth charges.

The Internet Archive runs ~50Gbit/sec, peaking at ~62Gbit/sec [2].

[1] https://projects.propublica.org/nonprofits/

[2] http://blog.archive.org/2020/05/11/thank-you-for-helping-us-...
yeah I hear you and while I totally disagree with OQLF practices in the grand scheme of things I don't think it's a big deal, especially for a tech companies ... most of the posters/HR stuff is probably done by bilingual people anyways. The real shortage/competition is for engineers.
You think the average user doesn't understand email?
use a different keyboard.
Could've just been a network issue, or simply because it was 7 years ago. I've been using Teamspeak daily with my friends for 6 years, hosted on a 5$ digitalocean droplet and the audio is far superior compared to anything else.

Discord is pretty sweet too, with screensharing, videos, better chat etc. But once more than 2 people talk at once in a channel, even with Nitro/whatever, it starts cutting people up. We can really feel the difference when going back to TS after a Discord call.
https://z0r.de hosts a bunch of swfs and has a Ruffle/Flash switch.
100k+ lines
> It's to be interpreted in the sense that additional legislative weight should be put behind disrupting the quasi-monopolistic dominance of these entities.

I tend to agree with your read, i.e. this has nothing to do with freedom-of-speech type issues and everything to do with Germany (and Europe more generally) positioning themselves against Big Tech; my only question is why now.

I'd love nothing more than to see Facebook/Twitter take a beating, but in this particular case there isn't really any strong argument that the government should have intervened and prevented Twitter from blocking Trump. Is this just an extreme case of carpe diem?
As linked in article, scraping code here:

https://github.com/ArchiveTeam/parler-grab/blob/master/parle...
I'm thinking of this from the users perspective, of course Facebook has an enormous amount of soft-power with it's media empire. That is an extremely worrying thing.
This is part of why George Washington warned against the trap of National Political Parties. It never ends well. The factional tug of war inculcates itself as a supreme overarching conflict and priority rather tham having Government doing what it was meant to do. Mitigate universal problems for everybody that can't be handled at lower llevels of abstraction.
I miss really miss this feature... having 2 devices, I can have signal in just one.

I don't believe syncing in multiple devices can be a problem for the app purpose, mainly because the new whatsapp features they announced.
I was researching drag and drop in JS recently, and what I found seemed pretty disappointing. Wondering if anyone can reinforce my opinion or counter it.

Drag and drop still seems like a mess. Browser support and touch support varies so you can't just use native APIs. Every popular library sits with tons of open issues and open PRs. Corporate solutions that have been open sourced appear abandoned. All the libraries I saw clocked in over 100kb.

Am I wrong? I want the "preact" or "day.js" drag and drop library. 10kb or less poly fill that gives me the basics. Does that exist?
That is true in the legal framework. In practical terms the Janitor however will say "I work at Facebook" (as long as they are proud of the brand) not "i work at sublease janitorial management corp" in a social situation as Facebook is where they are. And going back to the original article: Even such contractors sometimes get corporate swag at such places.
Exactly and I am sure all the people who logged into FB have not died off or moved into a jungle so they are still targets.
Corporate trials always take a long time because of the a) the amount of evidence created at a corporation of any reasonable size is huge, b) rich people can afford good lawyers who can gum up any process and c) the laws are written such that the person actually knew/participated in whatever crime they're being charged with. (A) and then (C) is where a lot of time can be wasted and if the executive was being crafty about 'not knowing' and only getting the good news officially it can be tricky to prove they actually knew they were lying.
That's fair, although credentials != proof. Working for Waymo, Lyft, Uber, Nuro etc is a credential. The engineers you mentioned have verified that what you wrote fits with the method/ approach they think will work. There is a possibility that they're/ you're wrong.

(This isn't intended as a personal attack)
As a developer from a lower-cost country: all of this is true.
There's a galaxy-brain idea that the Constitution says you can't be banned from Twitter from accidentally inciting an accidental sacking of the Capitol

People will repeatedly attempt to complain this is unfair by attempting to find 'double standards' - here, the idea is if anyone tweets 'kill trump' and we can find the tweet an hour later, clearly Twitter has a bias towards Duh Dems

Thinking people will find these concerns obviated by the platforms consistently kicking off groups when things turn violent. It's just that the only examples of this until now were international and off most people's radar.
Ye my understanding too.

There are alot more thought and there seem to be no moderation:

@xxx
someone just fuckin kill trump already
6:11 PM · Jan 7, 2021

I removed the username to not expose her.

The problem is that you can close down any site with user generated content and point to your ToS while looking through the fingers concerning sites you like, like Twitter. Imagine having some full time employee generaring illegal content to get your competitors closed down where Twitter are immune. It is way too easy.
In a previous startup we used Ledger in git as our accounting system. Was pretty cool to submit expense reports as PRs.

Also, we had some CI automations to report company runway to Slack etc
The first sentence of the article ends with "citing two people who seen the results." How does such a glaring grammatical error get past Reuters editors?
A car license is required when driving or parked but the fine was issued to a parked car without a driver in it. I proved that I was driving the car when the ticket was issued so the claims made by the metro officer about how they issued the ticket were not true.

My car was licensed at the time and the license was displayed correctly. I was not guilty of the offense and the whatsapp messages allowed me to prove that the officer who issued the ticket was lying.
It certainly depends on the brand but I’ll give you two counter examples. First, I have two charcoal Weber grills. One of them had rusted and lost one of the moving pieces. Bad news. Good news: I was able to cheaply source replacement parts. A no name grill in that situation would get tossed and a whole new grill would need to be bought to replace it.

Second, motorcycle gear. I know that TCX is going to have better boots than TourMaster. I know that a Shoei helmet is going to be better than a Walmart helmet. Is everything they put out perfect? No. But I can trust the brand overall.

And as a bonus, rock climbing equipment. I would much rather buy a Black Diamond or a Perzl carabiner than a Chinese knock off.

Clothing is somewhat harder this way but still, I am very happy with my Smart Wool socks and LL Bean insulated jeans vs something from Old Navy or similar.
Darkmarket Taken Down
Yes exactly. When I look at the settings in the app it says "PINS keep information stored with Signal encrypted only you can access it."

However the page that you linked does not mention encryption. I can't see anywhere explain exactly what the PIN does. Does it encrypt your data or not?
Best Foldable Phones to Look Out for in 2020 – Smartprix Bytes
Study: Some kindergartners are more likely to be heavy users of online tech
There's so much to unpack here. I am hoping someone with a legal background can weigh in.
> I have a HomePod that I have to manually press the touch button on top for it to listen

What's the difference? You trust it not to listen without the button press, I trust it to not listen without the wake word. To think that the distinction is meaningful is wishful thinking.
That's my thing as well. Actually screen -rdU - U from old times when weird text chat apps were used with my weird non-utf locales.

Tried tmux a few times, but I'm not gonna re-learn everything every 15 years, come on! Also luckily when I switched jobs all admins used and installed screen everywhere, so that was an easy fit.
Besides being a joke, I was a dispersive PDE guy and so have a perverted idea of what the Schroedinger equation is. It’s common in that field to study a nonlinear variant. A u|u|^2 term, for instance, admits sech type solutions.
It’s great to see competition in the sector.
Seems to me Linux success is largely due to commercial vendors developing many features as aggressively as they would do for closed source products. If it were just engineers working gratis on saturday afternoon Linux wouldn't be where it is today.
> She faked her voice in public for years.

Maggie Thatcher did a similar thing, lowering her voice to make herself sound more authoritative. She managed to pull it off reasonably well I think. Possibly the fact that she was a bit older at the time helped.

I never understood why Elizabeth Holmes persisted though because, in her case, it mostly made her sound incredibly odd, and actually quite difficult and unpleasant to listen to. This may have been due to some sort of uncanny valley effect: the disconnect between Holmes' youthful and almost dainty appearance, and her weirdly boomy void giving her a sense of the unreal. The result to me was that it undermined her authority and credibility rather than enhancing them.

Still, as you say, next-level dedication.
You are not wrong, but the argument is a text file could hold the link to the audio file and any metadata. I am a right tool for the job person so I use plain text for personal stuff but when it comes to work, there are so many more requirements at play that plain text is rarely the best answer other for, say, exchanging regular tabular data with third parties.
And yet http://get.adobe.com/flashplayer/about/ :

> Adobe Flash Player is the standard for delivering high-impact, rich Web content. Designs, animation, and application user interfaces are deployed immediately across all browsers and platforms, attracting and engaging users with a rich Web experience.
They're already enraged and they have no desire to engage in civil discourse anyway because they'd rather believe in conspiracy theories.

I liken it to having a toxic person in your life who can't admit that their actions are ever wrong - what do you do in a situation like that? At some point, you just have to cut them off.
Thnx, but my point was that if there are no outliers, there will still be values that are located more than one stdev from the average.
While this does still mean you have to trust your keyboard app, you can tell Signal to trigger your keyboards incognito mode.
I don't think it should include its own keyboard. But this could be an extra app in general.
Also not cheap but I really love the Remarkable 2. It's great for handwriting and good for reading. I had an onyx boox note 2, which would be a good size for reading text books, but it's even more expensive. Seems like anything with a large e-ink display is expensive. Right now I use an Onyx boox poke 3, which I found reasonably priced for a flexible e-reader. It's small but I mostly read non-technical books so it's fine.
I've been using beancount [1] and fava [2] to organise my personal finances for a while now, my beancount file has about 3 years of transactions/financial data in it.

I've automated a few things but it's still largely a manual process to update the file, which I do maybe 2-3 times a month. Requires some patience but I think it's worth it. Also the emacs mode for beancount is superb.

The main advantage is it's very flexible, you can track investments, bank accounts, credit cards, pensions and even abstract things like digital currency wallets (e.g. Playstation Network) or vacation time. I've even used it to track RSUs from employment etc.

[1] https://beancount.github.io/

[2] https://beancount.github.io/fava/
What about data-ox? Anyone has experience using this service?
> The place we compute shifted from a central location to anywhere; the time in which we compute shifted from batch processes to continuous computing.

An interesting case of a true statement that is (imo) actually turning facts upside down.

Yes, it is true, "the place" where we access information and computing services is now "anywhere", since we carry a jazzed-up dumb terminal in our pockets.

All computation is now actually happening in central systems called "clouds". This was Larry Ellision's vision as articulated in late 90s.

The kicker of the analysis is this:

What is notable is that the current environment appears to be the logical endpoint of all of these changes: from batch-processing to continuous computing, from a terminal in a different room to a phone in your pocket, from a tape drive to data centers all over the globe. In this view the personal computer/on-premises server era was simply a stepping stone between two ends of a clearly defined range.

Centralized clouds are not the "logical" conclusion of what happened in the 80s and 90s. Personal computing was precisely that: Personal. Your machine, your code.

My personal speculative understanding of this transitional period in history of computing is that PC caught the policy makers by surprise. What we have now with clouds was the vision of IBM in 60s and early 70s.

The 'black swan' of PC, which was coincidental with public cryptographic breakthroughs (PGP), placed serious obstacles in terms of projected policy goals, which certainly included considerations pertaining to sensitive national security capabilites, such as dissemination of information, and ad-hoc network communication. (Raise your hand if you remember clipper chip efforts, for example).

So yes, the "range" was "clearly defined" per policy recommendations coming out of think-tanks, then PC happened and we spent 2 decades watching the co-option of the PC champions by Big Tech and SV money, and now we're treated to convenient "this is where we were supposed to be folks!" narratives.

Try again.
And it'll be forever hard to answer what the people in the Capitol had with them because they were just let out and weren't arrests didn't really start until that evening when supporting LE finally came in.
I've stuck some painter's tape over the logos that are in my face all day long, like on my workstation display. Might be a little bit excessive but it feels good to exercise some control over my environment.
One person's insurrection is another's standing up for their rights in the face of outright oppression. When dialog stops and consensus can't be built, this is what happens.
Ah, the might makes right argument.

Global corporations are for global corporations. If you think that Nike, Amazon, Apple, Microsoft, et al. are going to be good companies that help the human condition and raise people up...you are not looking at the actions of these companies.
Airbnb Is Reviewing All DC-Area Bookings for Hate Groups Ahead of Inauguration
Signal already has problems with pissing people off by having annoying user interfaces for security reasons. This seems like a pointless measure.

If you can’t trust the keyboard software installed on your phone then surely you don’t trust the os either. But if you don’t trust the os then what’s the point?
damn I have a habit of only reading HN comments and guessing what the article is about
List of features landing in few days:

https://twitter.com/signalapp/status/1348785240819466242?s=1...
why cannot signal foss server be built to be installed like any other sane service on a server and apps that just support custom urls? its not rocket science
You said:

> So roads are as narrow as possible and congested, which in itself is not great for bikes but also makes bike lanes near impossible.

They replied:

> Do you think the centre of Amsterdam has wide roads? It does not.

That is the relationship with your comment. The centre of Amsterdam does not tend to have wide roads (with a handful of exceptions) and yet has bikes. Indeed, it is possible to drive down most of those roads, however the city has put a lot of effort into discouraging it which reduces the congestion and makes biking nicer.

Now, newly built areas tend to have wider streets, but there are plenty of old city centres in the Netherlands that are bike friendly, despite their being as narrow as possible. Congestion can be dealt with much more easily.
Because dogmatic regression.
New York City’s Vaccine Scheduling Websites Are a Disaster
I am also quesitioning if shutting down Parler servers is a pure business decision.
90% of Americans don't know what AWS servers are so I don't think they would care
if AWS kept running them or not.
On the other site 70 millions Trump voters will certainly take notice.
I am one of them and a big fan of AWS but I am going to redirect my buying
to other online companies as much as possible.
Go to any public discord server with hundreds of users and you'll see them. I got my friends to pitch in to boost the server so that we can stream to each other in 60 fps but turns out our internet connections cannot handle it
It's very broad description find it hard to know what are you exactly looking for
Google Search is trending in the same direction and could easily end in the same place, with search results skewed to support (or suppress) particular narratives and ideological beliefs. Look at the "ML Fairness" debates and ask yourself whether their workforce will at some point decide that they have a moral obligation not to present the raw content of the internet for a given topic, but rather to elevate the "correct" content.
>Is AWS selling something like water & electricity, a basic neutral service needed for many businesses?

This is what I find so disturbing about the Parler fiasco. Every tech person I know has interacted with AWS directly at some point. Everyone any of us knows has interacted with something reliant on AWS. What's the percentage of web services that run on AWS now? It's well over a third IIRC. AWS is essentially indispensable at this point. It might very well be called a technological utility.

Moreover AWS's core market has, historically, been startups. Parler, being a startup, was in their core group of customers, dealing with a service that had effectively become ubiquitous among startups. They were an American company, with a CEO and investors and users and capital.

Being a B2B service, bordering on a technological utility, rather than a B2C online community like Facebook or Twitter, the idea of AWS banning users seems almost a category error. The idea of AWS banning an American startup would have been unthinkable to me before it happened.

EDIT: Moved some phrases around for clarity.
The Importance of IP Peering in Cloud Computing
True, except there are manufacturers like Apple or Sony which won't provide genuine spare parta to retail people (tried that). Then you have to buy parts from "for parts" eBay auctions or counterfait/bad quality batteries from random Chinese seller...
But Git is a distributed VCS. They could just as well cleanly merge pull requests into the main branch as hosted on GitHub and then merge GitHub's main branch into their canonical system's main branch.
The "time ago" for comments on Parler was always a little suspect to me. I was poking around on there and noticed how so many of the comments were from seconds ago. The timestamps could be legit but it also seemed like maybe an engagement hack. You could argue someone might be more likely to respond to a comment that they think someone literally just wrote.
Does it really matter in a 45W power range ?

I have a 2018 15 MBP with an i9-8950HK that has the same power range - this thing is unusable at full load for anything but burst - and the way it taxes the thermals makes it a terrible laptop (people in the office start turning their heads).

I'm not convinced any portable laptop can handle that TDP efficiently - so maybe this is interesting for gaming laptops - but to me this looks like Intel is still making shitty power-hungry chips for laptops

They are boasting performance comparisons to AMD Navi 2, Navi 3 also brings a ~20% IPC improvement which they claim to have over it. I'd speculate that Ryzen 7 5800U should outperform this chip in most relevant use cases (eg. sustained load like running a simulator while developing/running build watchers or running VM/docker and IDE/compiler) while being in 25W range which can be handled reasonably at this device size.

Unfortunately laptop manufacturers are so slow at adopting AMD in premium line laptops (I preorder a surface pro with an AMD 5xxx CPU). I don't see myself buying an Intel based laptop until they improve the thermals.
Computer-Generated Patterns: a Game and Solution