skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: Are private companies required to tell shareholders anything?
Kind of a broad question, I know. I left a company a few years back and exercised a bunch of stock. Since then they've raised a new round of funding, and apparently taken a bunch of bridge loans. Rumor has it this has absolutely crushed the value of my holding (into the fractions of a penny territory), but I've never received any correspondence from them about any of it-- I've only heard it from current employees.

Do companies have absolutely no obligation to shareholders when they're private or something?
Is it possible to do this without violating the second law of thermodynamics?
I haven't given any real thought to this, but maybe in terms of regulations, we should think of free software products as another kind of price dumping. It's essentially price dumping down to zero.
They are motivated to provide cheap, managed, reliable, plug-and-play units. Changes are driven by feature sets they need to stay competitive (eg new WiFi or wps standard) and wholesale deals.
Because it can be copied and doesn't have a defendable business model.

For most people, consolidating many services into one is just more convenient, even if it means using a "good-enough" version of that feature.
> I guaran-fucking-tee you someone smart enough to flash a custom firmware will likely have scoured the Internet for the answer first.

Or they followed a "how to get free movies/tv/sports" guide which told them to follow these simple steps, and something went wrong, and they have no idea what to do next, and they're offline now too.
We need these writeups for iOS as well. Distribute IPA files without a problem!
Yes, using patents.

They got lucky and a handful of their early patents became required parts of early cellular standards. Since then they've lobbied the standards bodies to include features that require their newest patents. When that fails, because the mobile manufacturers are tired of Qualcomm's monopoly, they simply buy up more patents to make up the difference.
Looks like you can get it from Mouser for $665 as well:

https://www.mouser.com/ProductDetail/SiFive/HF105-000?qs=zW3...

Found that link from this SiFive page:

https://www.sifive.com/boards/hifive-unmatched
I think Fedora is using Btrfs now. Does Dropbox not support Fedora and RHEL?
I don't see GNOME devs going around asking people to use it? And you can do what you want on a piece of software and still have it be a "serious tool". I don't see a contradiction.
So there's a need for it, it's just that you don't have a need for it.

I'm happy with my 1gbps connection where I can download a 50GB game in less than 10 minutes.
That's two separate mechanisms; PatchGuard protects against hooking and rewriting sections of the kernel, and the kernel only loads signed drivers (and since 2016-ish only Microsoft-signed).
I'd guess that being coastal is pretty important here as well. But definitely interesting to think about in the context of a hypothetical new landlocked city.

Pedantically, I think you probably mean 105 mile/(2*pi) radius circle.
I believe US could see rolling series of “Ireland events” over next 2 months
If you're doing serious business with your WiFi then the UBNT stuff is probably not quite good enough.

I have one of the flying saucer shaped APs, but it's super old and only does B/G. It was under a hundred bucks and unlike my old APs it doesn't get angry at certain devices and deauth them randomly from the network. Or other APs I've used that start disconnecting users once you have more than 15 devices connected at once. The configuration software is a bloated Java daemon that I have to manually start then connect to with a client. It's not all that user friendly, but I've been around networks enough to get it working.

So it's basically the cheapest AP that isn't regularly malfunctioning consumer garbage.
The post discussed a few days ago was about shutting off the app stores and YouTube, whereas this new post is about an escalation to block off WhatsApp and other social media and messaging platforms. I think even VPNs have been blocked, as my Ugandan friends with VPN can't even access these platforms.

It seems significantly different to me to not be a dupe, and yet I really appreciate how you moderate HN so I leave that decision up to you. Thanks for your work!
The DC government asked people to not assemble. The government is free to make requests that it would not legally be able to enforce, and parties are free to comply or give the government the finger. In this case AirBnB has decided to voluntarily comply; I am sure there are other hotels and private lodgings that will do the opposite.

This is not a story about trampling of rights. This is actually a story about what happens once a party loses the presumption of good faith. After 1/6 a lot of people are looking at the planned inauguration "protest" and saying "No, I think you're going to try another insurrection and I want no part of it".
For one, we need rule of law to be followed. The government seems to frequently violate rule of law. For example, the constitution says that Congress shall pass a budget, yet all we get are "spending bills" and last minute stop-gap legislation.
Not OP, but I also have a project that would slot in nicely.

I run a service that tracks work/sleep/exercise/meditation (along with a couple other data points that don't fit the duration model) via an SMS interface.

I text it when I start/stop these activities and then it sends me reminders based on when I normally do those things during the day if I haven't already.

It would be great to be able to push the data I collect into your service to have a unified view of how I spend my time, and also to pull events from your service to send reminders to do certain things via my bot.
I know the feeling. In college (and for a year or so right after), I had the same answer.

A few years later, I've finally realized that any code I write at 2am almost always needs to be fixed--often substantially--soon after. I miss things. I write stupid bugs. I don't see the requirements clearly.

I've found writing things down (sometimes a few words, sometimes a few pages), sleeping on it, and reviewing those notes first thing in the morning--before email, before showering, before anything--to be a much a better strategy.

YMMV, of course.
I ask my father for a lot of investing advice and then he goes and asks his advisor. I can’t believe I failed to consider that I could just get my own. Thanks for the response.
I believe that one lesson here is that it's not because it's now possible to have a thousand dependencies that you should have a thousand dependencies. It'll make your sysadmins very sad.

I don't want the latest libraries on my servers. I want my servers to be boring and not change often. I want them to run the time-proven, battle-tested and well-understood software, because I don't want to be the first to debug those. There are people better at that than me.

If, and only if, there's a blocker bug in a distro-provided package, I'll think of vendoring it in. And then only if there is no plausible workaround.

Of course, I also do testing against the latest stuff so I'm not caught off-guard when the future breaks my apps.
Technically it should be LASER, since it's an acronym.
To think that you can somehow not be emotionally invested in the thing you spend 20% of your time on is a bit naive. Maybe you're a level 9000 stoic, but for the rest of us, I think it's fine and normal to be emotionally invested in our work, it allows for genuine motivation, team spirit and yes disappointments, but what the hell are you living for?

You rather be a robot for 8 hours every day? I'd rather be sad every once in a while but be myself at work and care about it and the people in there with me.
Going rate seems to be about $20 (and if Amazon isn't your thing I bet Ebay and all the other usual suspects have them too). If that's worth it to troll people IRL is up to you.

https://www.amazon.com/s?k=Make%2BOrwell%2BFiction%2BAgain+h...
I create a lot of media and shoot raw.

I do back up my Steam library, btw, because occasionally they remove games. That folder is at about 4TB.
Because they like engineering?
Thanks. I checked, and it costs $15/year per additional 100 GB. Hence it reaches Dropbox’s $120 at 720 GB. Of course, you also get a managed NextBox instance for that price.
I studied physics at Glasgow. You can still see the pipes in the ceiling of the corridors on the ground floor of the Kelvin Building which were intended to be used to heat the building using the laser's cooling fluid. That was apparently the only way they got permission to install something requiring so much power! I heard though that the laser coolant was never actually used for heating in the end...
You can revive a dead comment if you feel it was unjustly killed. Just click the timestamp then click "vouch".
I was on my honeymoon with my fiancee and at the end of the night, we liked to relax by opening a bottle of champagne and watching Ancient Aliens. Don't get me wrong, both of us believe in the possibility of life in outer space but that show was funnier than most modern sitcoms.

Heck, even Monster Quest was more believable.
That’s also a positive
If the throughput is fast enough 3+3=6 seconds latency doesn't really sound that bad. There are websites with that kind of lag. You can't use to build a chat app, but you can use it as a cloud for general computing.
That makes more sense to me than the other way around.

As a workaholic, and learnaholic, I did it as a path to financial freedom and to accelerate my learning at at time I knew I had the bandwidth and will. It made me a better entrepreneur and business owner later, which is what I really wanted to do.

But as I've gotten older and have a family now I've been removing obligations for my businesses. And working more normal schedules. Taking random times off to help. Being better at triaging what's really needed from my time.

Yet, I wouldn't have change a thing with my path. It's hard to get to financial freedom and the goal of owning your own businesses with 40 hrs a week.

I don't think working more than the normal is necessarily a bad thing. Some people actually do enjoy their jobs. Or their team. Or they enjoy learning.

I know it's hard for some people to understand why some people are workaholics. I certainly have friends that don't like their jobs that have said I work too much. If you hate your 40 hour job, it's hard to imagine doing any more than that.

In the right environment, the 7+ hours per week extra to be considered a workaholic isn't much different from reading books or practicing your craft in your free time.
trump being kicked off Twitter et al is not because of his personal beliefs, sexual orientation, or race. He is being kicked of for inciting violence. Something that he agreed not to do when he signed up for the service.
I can't believe great, generous people in their best intentions keep developing FOSS for a closed platform like Apple's.

Do they want a closed platform? Let's give it to them. Stop developing FOSS for Apple. It's a "market share" I'll happily give up (and I did already).
As processing power cheapens, programmers will settle for lazy and inefficient code for everyday consumer applications. It will be easier to be a programmer, because you can get away with writing shitty code. So wages will fall and the prestige of being a software developer wanes. The jobs requiring truly elite skill and understanding will dwindle and face fierce competition for their high pay.

Before this happens, I recommend having your exit strategy for the industry, living off whatever profits you made working as a developer during the early 21st century.
Then there is still the issue of storage. With the amount of channels and groups i am in none of my devices would be able to hold everything. While i can just redownload everything from telegram.
Their are some striking similarities between how systemd and Gnome interact with the community. Disregard for portability, feature creep, the way they attempt to monopolize their respective 'markets' and the way they treat everyone that disagrees. Those are all worrying. And the company behind systemd and with significant stakes in gnome (RedHat) recently showed how well they treat open source projects that stop being valuable for them as a company.
Until you get a message that you cannot save until it verifies your account again. Multiple people at my company including me got hit with it on OSX.
As an American who has friends in sane countries, I feel the same way. But keep in mind we still have unemployment insurance in the US, where the government pays you for a few months after you lose your job (although it's capped pretty low). Also sometimes the way the USA does it makes sense too.

I was at a company that did a layoff once where they wanted to get rid of some underperformers in Europe, but Europe had such strong employment protections, the company was forced to get rid of good people in the USA instead to maintain cash flow.

After the layoff, I had coworkers in Europe who literally just stopped showing up, but had to be paid for six months anyway.

If the US had similar protections, the company would have just closed up shop and put 200 people out of work, instead of just a few.

Now if the US could just get a decent social safety net, then the way the US did things wouldn't be so bad.
From what I can tell, my friends in UG with VPN can no longer access WhatsApp. It seems they may have also blocked the VPNs somehow.
Also, he would have discovered eventually that mesh networks are slow and can't support many simultaneous users. For general Internet access they aren't a great solution.
Yes, for general computing, that would be feasible.
What does this have to do with bitcoin?
yet another instance of webapps going full circle when it comes to ui.
Sounds like IBM in the glory days of mainframes. Non-US operations were controlled by American IBM employees. No country outside the US made enough parts to make a full computer. IBM employees used to say the initials stood for "I've Been Moved".
How do they compare with e.g JourneyApps?
I'm a bit surprised by the loss of nuance in this and the CIA HN thread.

UFOs doesn't mean aliens, and equating the two limits fruitful discussions about the actual phenomena behind them, which in my opinion are much more interesting, and, based on your prior, also much more likely, e.g.

* yet unexplained physical/weather phenomena (see David Fraser et al. evidence)

* secret military technology (see SR-71 sightings)

* ... ?
It might be worth appealing that rule by claiming that the payment is a donation and optional.
It is first hand information and he posts a screenshot of the evidence. It might not be Hacker News related and should be flagged for that, but has a decent amount of substance.
I can't trust any company that has to read my contact list PERIOD! It's not something anyone should be having to share ever.
Maybe Steve Jobs is right, but maybe it's also good for the world if you can build a sustainable business on a feature.

In the world of music, an effects pedal or guitar stomp box is more "feature" than "product". You can't write a song just using a chorus pedal. But there are many many thriving companies that do nothing but produce and sell pedals.

Much of this likely rests on the fact that the "protocols" that music gear use to talk to each other are simple, well-established, and legally unemcumbered. Also, for reasons that aren't clear to me, even dominant companies in the market do not seem to have pushed very hard to extuinguish that interoperability in anti-competitive ways. Or, at least, not yet.
> Not that that's necessarily a bad thing, if we're getting more than proportionally more utility out of the processors, but I worry about that too

I have two points to comment on this matter.

Point 1: The only reason I would worry or be concerned about it is if we are using terribly-inefficient programming languages. There are languages (that need not be named) which are either 3x, 4x, 5x, 10x, or even 40x more inefficient than a language that has a performant JIT, or that targets native code. (Even JIT languages like JavaScript as still a lot less efficient because of dynamic typing. Also, in some popular complied-to-native languages, programmers tend to less efficient data structures, which results in lower performance as well.)

Point 2: If the inefficiency arises out of more actual computation being done, that's a different story, and I AM TOTALLY A-OK with it. For instance, if Adobe Creative Suite uses a lot more CPU (and GPU) in general even though it's written in C++, that is likely because it's providing more functionality. I think even a 10% improvement in overall user experience and general functionality is worth increased computation. (For example, using ML to augment everything is wonderful, and we should be happy to expend more processing power for it.)
Interesting tradeoff:

AQFP logic operates adiabatically which limits the clock rate to around 10 GHz in order to remain in the adiabatic regime. The SFQ logic families are non-adiabatic, which means they are capable of running at extremely fast clock rates as high as 770 GHz at the cost of much higher switching energy.
Patent and copyrights are embodied in the U.S. constitution, so if you have an issue with that take it up with the Founding Fathers. The specific details of IP protection are determined by Congress, so if you have issues with the details take that up with your local federal legislator.

Tax optimization is generally promoted by accountants not lawyers, though tax is an area that both accountants and lawyers can practice and so some lawyers are certainly involved in tax avoidance advising. Though as tax is also one of the few areas where advisors can go to prison for their advice (and moreover, for advice that was technically within the bounds of the text of the law at the time the advice was given), few lawyers are willing to get involved in tax avoidance that is borderline tax evasion.

Guiliani and the rest are facing disbarment or worse for their roles in threatening the foundations of democracy. Like most punishments, this one must take place after the offending act is committed, since we can't preemtively discipline someone for something they haven't actually done (yet).
Seems to be a classic example of the old security vs convenience tradeoff. If you want everything available all the time then there is a good chance that everything is also available to others. Smartphones by their nature are insecure and should not be trusted with important data.
> Unless you have an endless supply of conviction, it’s time to admit your company’s pivot probably isn’t going to work.

The dynamics around shutting down a company in Silicon Valley today are fascinating. YC and the market forces underlying the VC ecosystem as a whole have pushed things in the "founder-friendly" direction to a degree that's pretty amazing. Seed-stage VCs will tell you they invest in people, not ideas, and as a founder if you go to your investors and tell them that you've decided that your business isn't viable, the default response you're likely to get is "Got any other ideas you want to work on?" I think the list of hard pivot success stories (Slack, Twitter, Soylent, etc) and the general SV ethos of never admitting defeat drive this glorification of the hard pivot as well, but what I don't think gets talked about enough is just how psychologically difficult they are to execute properly. If you have an idea, develop enough conviction about it to quit your job, and spend the next several years of your life throwing everything you have into building a startup around that idea, then end up reaching the conclusion that your hypothesis was wrong, it's incredibly hard to switch gears within a few weeks and reach that same level of conviction about a completely new idea (unless you have Steve Jobs levels of confidence) -- but that seems to be the expected outcome today.

I think Fred Wilson's take on this is the right one: https://www.inc.com/fred-wilson/pivot-business-failure-start... -- failure is the norm when building a startup and we should encourage a culture of failing fast and moving on from it.
I am part of an organisation called the LAAC, which is the LVK Academic Advisory Committee. The LVK is the LIGO-Virgo-KAGRA collaboration. LIGO is the Laser Interferometric Gravitational-wave Observatory, and Laser is Light Amplification from Stimulated Emission of Radiation. So the L of LAAC is a 5th order initialism...
Do they have a bitcoin/monero donation address? I'd donate today.
The FTC brings privacy cases under its 'unfair and deceptive acts or practices in commerce' prohibition, which does not provide it the legal basis to impose civil penalties. There are possibly other things it could have required (the recent Ever case requiring deletion is a good example), but it is currently constrained on what it can force for a first violation. The two Democratic FTC Commissioners issued a useful statement on what else they would have required: https://www.ftc.gov/system/files/documents/public_statements...
Sorry if this comes across as blunt, but what self-serving decisions has Signal made, how do they benefit Signal, and how do they compromise users' privacy?
You bet: It's called Timey 3. I got it off the ios app store. $3 USD!
https://apps.apple.com/us/app/timey-3-menu-bar-timer/id14211...
I know exactly what this is though I can't remember where to find the source. It was an exercise they gave to a bunch of scientists and mathematicians to see if it was plausible that they could even decode the meaning behind an alien message, if one were ever found. (And also probably to provide some credentials for candidate experts to consult in such a scenario.) They did quite well. That said, the code itself was created by a human, so I'm not sure it has the value they think it does. One thing higher education in STEM taught me was that human thinking is actually really easy to spot. We, for the most part, really just use the same tired old tricks again and again in different contexts.
While FPGA:s are often used for implementing CPU:s, that's really not the best use of an FPGA in my oppinion. Of course, very usefull when prototyping a CPU, but if you only want a CPU... you can just buy one.

I think a more interesting use is for hardware that you can't buy. Like the balls in this project:

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

Those balls contains frequency analyzers implemented on FPGA:s, essentially doing Fourier transforms using lookup table maths. This means they can do transforms much, much faster than in software.
Robert C. Nelson has been doing a stellar job of maintaining the omap-image-builder repo:

https://github.com/RobertCNelson/omap-image-builder

(and https://elinux.org/BeagleBoardUbuntu)

It's pretty easy to use to build an image for Debian Buster/Stretch or Ubuntu Bionic Beaver, he has various configurations that cover IoT, console only/headless, GUI and a few other combos. It's pretty easy to create your own config with the Kernel and packages that you want.

The images can be used for flashing to the eMMC via an SD card (or via USB).

I've found images built this way to up very up to date and absolutely rock solid thanks to Robert's curation.