skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I can just slap Owncloud or Nextcloud to a VPS and build a relatively secure system within three hours but, some problems will arise.

- Integration with 3rd party tools: Trello or services which provide "Dropbox Apps" support won't be able to sync to my space or directly retrieve from it. I'm sure there will be many other tools which can talk with Dropbox but not with my server.

- Collaboration: I bet that not so many people would install another client and remember a username, password, URL triplet to just work with me (e.g. academic research, side project, etc.). They'll either force me to use other tool or things will just break down (just experienced a similar thing at work).

- Maintenance: OS, service, add-on updates, licenses, security, monitoring, etc. will be additional time consuming obligations.

- Pricing: If I use a VPS, excessive network traffic or resource usage will result in a price hike.

- Price/Performance: You cannot beat the competition at the price/performance ratio. I will pay more, spend more time and get less. Why bother?

- Environmental: In my case, self-hosting at home is impossible. I neither have the bandwidth, nor the space required to store another system and keep it quiet at the same time. Additional power bill and heat is not welcome, either.

These are just the issues coming from top of my head, and can be expanded further.
> 2. They stipulate that lots of people didn't get tested, but believe it to be an order of magnitude less than the CDC estimates.

That would imply that we've verified 23M out of a total of only 30M infections. Given how much of a hassle it is to get tested (even more so 3-4 months ago), it would be utterly shocking if we've tested ~75% of those infected.
It’s the norm with great apes and what few hunter gatherer societies we can observe. The vast majority of Europe also has male genes from only the Yamnaya implying a massacre of all men and interbreeding with the women. I can’t imagine all of that was consensual.
Oneplus requires you to wipe your phone to root it. Add to this that there is no way to backup the phone without rooting it.
I don’t think they can chase the consumer market either though - it’s too competitive.

Both iPhone and Android have support for cloud sync baked into their operating system as a core feature for their own service.

The issue with things like Carousel or Google Photos is that the sync is actually a fairly small part of the engineering effort - the hard part is making an amazing photo viewing and editing app which with mobile devices includes the end to end user flow from your mobile phone camera! Google photos and iPhoto make a little more sense as products when you consider that these are really about viewing the photos you took on your Apple/google device and providing native sync from their camera app. I’m not sure what Dropbox’s long term competitive advantage could be in the space from a corporate strategy perspective.
I never said "payment ENTITLES you to support", I said having access to the source does NOT mean NO entitlement to support, one does not control the other either way because access to the source and paid support contracts are separate things.

> "there can be explicit contract where you are funding specific feature"

Yes, I said as much when I said you can have a contract for support and also have FOSS software. Here, you are downvoting me and agreeing with me. There can be a explicit contract where you have the source source and also are entitled to some development that you're paying for.

> "You can stop using the software if it does not provide you any use. That is the only thing you are entitled to."

NO, here you are changing your mind again and narrowing it back down to "it was free so you have no rights". You cannot make the judgement that because someone has open source software, they didn't pay for it, and you cannot make the judgement that if they have open source software, they are not entitled to anything. The three are DIFFERENT things. The original point of FOSS was to avoid vendor lockin, not to get free downloads from Github.

In case it isn't extremely clear, downloading a free and foss tool from Github does not entitle you to feature requests or support. Donating to it does not either. Saying "every FOSS user has no entitlement to support or feature requests because the code is FOSS" is incorrect, and a bad idea for the programming/tech industry to be spreading, partly because a lot of developers would benefit from spreading the idea of paid FOSS because they want to work on it and get paid, and partly because users would benefit from the increase in paying for software and also getting the source as part of that, including whatever entitlement to support paying would have got them normally.
Maybe it's remnants of some sort of universal signage system that tells what animals are in the area, and what tools you need to hunt them.
tl;dr: Don't make false assertions and throw insults in the exact way that you just have.
In some pacific cultures, and probably others, parents and other close family members masticate food and pass it via the lips, not dissimilar to birds except the food isn't regurgitated. I always thought this is how kissing began.
There's a lot about Signal in particular that they get right. AFAIK:

(1) All Signal messaging is E2EE; (2) they don't store messages on their servers; (3) the client code is open source, and it seems like a good portion of the server code is open source.

Where I think Signal could go further on being the most secure, useful, and privacy-conscious messaging app/company in the world:

1. Open source ALL of the server code. They have something called Signal-Server (https://github.com/signalapp/Signal-Server) on their Github, but it's unclear if this is the server they use, or simply a server one could theoretically use to run a private Signal server.

2. Open source all server-side services/infrastructure code that doesn't compromise security in some way.

3. Better features. Signal is currently the most secure and privacy-conscious of the messaging apps, but solidly the worst overall user experience. It's not that it's bad, it's just that the other apps are much better. People like gifs and giphy and emojis and a fast-feeling interface. This is important, because it's hard to be a privacy-conscious individual when all your friends want to text on other apps. At least in my social circle, Signal is still the thing that people jump over to when they want be extra super sure they're not leaving a paper trail, but not the default messaging app they use.

4. Introduce a user-supported business model. This probably makes a lot of people uneasy, and while I appreciate the current grant and donation-based business model (the Wikipedia model), that model comes at great cost of efficiency. By operating effectively as a non-profit, you are inherently in a less competitive position relative to your competitors (the best product and engineering people are more likely to go competitors who can pay more), and you're persistently in fund-raising mode (again, see: Wikipedia). There are lots of ways to skin this cat, maybe the easiest is to ask power users to pay like $5/mo. Or just give people the option to pay with absolutely zero obligation. Some non-zero cohort would inevitably take them up on this.

Most of these suggestions, of course, especially 1-3, are very very hard and come at an enormous cost. Building in public as an open source business seems to massively slows things down and introducing a huge amount of community management overhead. That said I'm sure there are ways to manage/mitigate those costs.
What is the purpose of a startup? Is it to put keywords on your resume, or is it to create a product?
> that if much of the populace is armed

Where is that the case? US and Switzerland?
You understand that half of people ever born lived during last two thousand years. 7 percent of people ever to walk Earth are still alive.

Prehistoric humans are actually small minority of all people that ever lived. It is estimated that about 1 to 2 percent of people who ever lived were born before advent of agriculture.

So, while prehistoric people lived for hundreds of thousands of years, the population tended to be very, very small.
> I'm curious what makes this an out-of-date design.

I'm not a designer myself but the things that strike me immediately are that the fonts and colors seem out of fashion and the site looks somewhat awkward on mobile. But that's my whole point. You wouldn't want those things on the homepage of a startup, but this isn't that. It's just a simple blog and it does a good job of being a simple blog.
I'm not sure I agree with that. I've been there now over 8 years and the only difference since Dell bought emc is they are cross selling. In terms of product development, staffing, benefits etc they have no influence. This is in opposition to EMC, who had a lot of benefits and nice things like free coffee cut to match with dell.
To be fair, it says “one possible route” ;)
So again I ask, who does it better?

I ask because I'm not sure it's possible to be politically neutral, well before asking whether it's desirable. Everybody has a political opinion on almost everything. Even if you're only reporting what has happened, you will find people questioning why you're looking at these things, and not others.

NPR absolutely has political influence, but is it disproportionate? I don't think so. Is it unbalanced? I don't think so. I think we've just spent 6 years beating each other up over extremes, pushing every envelope, that we struggle to recognise neutral coverage.

I know you didn't write the head comment, but I think we need to regain trust in neutrality. Perhaps reinstate some laws to redress balance in things calling themselves "news"... I know I don't know, but what I know is NPR seems like one of the goodies.
By the modern standard of consent, as an example, the patria potestas [0] rules effectively meant a power imbalance such that all hooking up would be under duress.

I'm not arguing that anyone thought it was non-consensual then, because I don't think it's appropriate to try to apply modern emancipative thinking to societies of previous millennia, but one could certainly argue it.

edit: markup

[0]https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/patria%20potestas
Twitter bans Trump, but Ayatollah, Farrakhan, Chinese propagandists still active
> The success of locked-down iPhone and Android is a great example

It's the example that everybody uses, but because of the nature of vertical integration and the network effect, you can't use popularity as an indication that people actually want any given individual aspect of those products.

Suppose it's 2010 and you need an app that only exists on iPhone. Well, you might not like that it's locked down, but you need that app. Then once you've had one for three years you're locked into their ecosystem indefinitely.

It's also a trap. When the lockdown first comes, they say they're just using it to exclude malware and other things you actually don't want. You have to get your apps signed, but they sign all the ones you care about, so what does it matter?

Only after mobile platforms that don't do this have reached negligible market share and have no network effect do they start excluding apps you might actually want. But by then it's too late.
JavaScript Rising Stars 2020
I recommend anyone who's interested in early humans and human development to read the book Sapiens: https://www.amazon.com/Sapiens-Humankind-Yuval-Noah-Harari/d...
I really enjoyed it!
Donald Trump Impeached, Again
I'd say it's a fair assumption given how much of the world has approached relationships for such a long time. Sex slaves, brothels, selling women off to be married, pillage villages and taking their women, etc..

Women couldn't vote in the U.S. until 1920. That's closer to today than it is to the founding of the country. These are relatively new and human history is much much older.
The whole thing comes off as a rant supported by gut feelings about his own questionable figures and quickly dismissing contradictory sources as political.

Author does not provide sources or analysis as to why he trusts his figures and remains skeptical of others.
It will happen. So far Telegram has developed without consideration for revenue, but it cannot last too long.

According to his own numbers [1], Durov's entire net worth [2] can only sustain Telegram for about a decade.

[1] https://t.me/s/durov/142
[2] https://www.forbes.com/profile/pavel-durov/
Is there evidence that surviving infection results in immunity forever? I don’t think we know since the disease is so new. For all we know, you can get it year after year like the flu or a cold.
Can you put some numbers on how much time is too much? I've never seen anyone go this far to avoid using a database for what sounds like the only "real" reason is to avoid testing latency (a problem which has many other solutions) so I am really confused, but curious to understand!
Close to impossible but not entirely. There is Fairphone: https://www.fairphone.com/
That’s a very beautiful usage of it. I hadn’t thought of it as a way to construct DSLs, but it makes a lot of sense here.
The worst pieces of code I’ve ever seen
Seeking Alpha link has the changes over time. They were able to reduce the expenses in the last 2 years, but the investors are going to compare them with their competitors, not only with the previous years. FB for example has engineering expenses of 21% better position on the market place and better growth.

Dropbox in the current state can become a target for activist investors like Elliot. The high percent R&D expenses make them more attractive because there is more to cut.
We need to introduce human population inflation factor and normalize the numbers :)
while i understand your argument, enterprise/ISP routers have completely different functionality then home devices. most people in the network engineering field cut their teeth on enterprise gear in lower level positions.

for instance, home routers do data and control plane processing on a single CPU with no or very little NPU involved, while enterprise gear has this functionality.

not to mention the large array of technologies that are not even usable in small scale networks like VXLAN, BGP, IPVPN etc..
Signed zeros are a tricky design choice, for sure...

https://www.johndcook.com/blog/2010/06/15/why-computers-have...

I like this comment:

> To other commenters: It’s important not to confuse floating point with mathematics. In floating point, both zeroes are considered to be exactly equal to zero, to each other. The redundant sign bit is “piggybacked” information which retains a sign across a series of multiplies or divisions, and it only affects downstream results in a few exceptional cases (eg dividing non-zero by zero, yielding inf or -inf). The behaviour has been standardized based on various pragmatic considerations, and will not always be consistent with evaluating infinitesimals in mathematics.
I can see the reasoning that log(-0.0) should give the same exceptional result as log(-1). But bear in mind it can arise from something like log( -(a+b)) where a+b evaluates to 0. Whereas ((-a)-b) would be +zero. I.e the sign of the zero is generally not meaningful when the zero originally arises from a sum or difference. Indeed, in such cases, if you consider a and b to carry “rounding fuzz”, then the proper sign of a+b is indeterminate, and not correlated to the sign bit generated by the add. When zeroes are generated by underflow of mul or div, at least the sign is “correct”.
Donald Trump becomes the first US president to be impeached for a second time
Good point, I don’t use Ecto so I wasn’t aware of this.
If the EU would like to do so, why hasn't it done so a long time ago?
I'm calling out the difference between the storage mechanism (SSDs, Block Storage, etc...) - where transactions and journal-logs are dumped, so as to allow recovery if the database server goes down.

Once you design your database server/application/transactions such they don't care whatsoever if the database server goes offline - you not only get the ability to run fine in containers, you also make your application stack just significantly more robust for all sorts of reasons.

I have colleagues who bemoan a major application server going down - which is a no-op in my world where the ephemeral nodes rarely last more than a day or two in GKE - so we're completely used to them going down.

Building transactions, idempotency, tasks in rabbitmq/celery rather than memory - not only do they make deploying in containers straightforward, they also give an overall robustness win for all applications.

I mean, physical servers go down as well.
Medium requiring an account to read. Ugh.
> Linux is just 2% of the desktop market.

However, there are concentration points of this 2% which is beneficiary to both parties.

Dropbox can target this 2% better and users of this 2% can use Dropbox to collaborate and sync their other systems which have more popular OSes.
Would you please stop posting flamebait and/or unsubstantive comments to HN? You've been doing this repeatedly and it's not what this site is for.

It is particularly important for comments to remain thoughtful when a topic is a divisive one. That's in the site guidelines too:

"Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive."

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
this will probably never work.
I doubt it, but probably true for the period between paternity and/or virginity emerging as social things that mattered and some quiescent point afterwards.

Go back far enough and my assumption is there's a lot of pleasureful promiscuity going on, just look at bonobos.
I was going with "Hobbesian" in a nutshell. I wonder how much exogamy ("hey, you look interesting!") played into it, aside from just being lonely.
My father has a story about being in Irish bars in New Jersey in the 70s and 80s when Irish men would occasionally come into bars and announce they were collecting the 'Irish tax'. People would chip in a dollar or two, with the understanding that the money would be used to support the IRA in some way.
Among the classics I read, this was the only one I did _not_ like. It's an interesting read if one enjoys the setting of a whaling ship of that period. The story itself, I didn't find engaging at all.
A big problem is that nobody seems to be monitoring Covid antibodies in a large-scale, consistent way. Here's the CDC's "COVID-19 Serology Surveillance Strategy" [1] They have a few tools. One is a blood donor test, where donated blood is tested for antibodies. Another is random sampling of blood tests taken for other medical reasons. Those establish bounds - blood donors are healthier than average, and people getting blood tests for medical reasons are less healthy than average.

The results, though, are very spotty. The most recent US data published seems to be from September 2020.[2] "In this repeated, cross-sectional study of 177 919 residual clinical specimens, the estimated percentage of persons in a jurisdiction with detectable SARS-CoV-2 antibodies ranged from fewer than 1% to 23%. Over 4 sampling periods in 42 of 49 jurisdictions with calculated estimates, fewer than 10% of people had detectable SARS-CoV-2 antibodies. ... Samples were obtained during 4 collection periods: July 27 to August 13, August 10 to August 27, August 24 to September 10, and September 7 to September 24, 2020."[3] Those are from anonymous random blood samples taken from people who had a lab test for something else.

For blood donors, there's this data.[3] "Data from the American Red Cross, which is providing serosurveillance data as part of the MASS study, indicated that 8.4 percent of U.S. blood donors it tested in a week in late November carried antibodies to Covid-19 in their blood."

So that's the US situation from November. Those set upper and lower bounds on how many people in the US have had Covid-19. Those are actuals, not estimates. One would expect this would be tracked and updated weekly, but if it is, the data isn't widely available. The main thing one can conclude from this is that it's nowhere near "herd immunity". That would require 7x-10x as many people showing antibodies.

The CDC's estimates based on a flu-based estimate of how many people need medical attention per infection seem inconsistent with that actual data.

As for the "Ireland event", here it is on the Financial Times graph with other countries.[4] From 5 cases per 100K to 130 cases per 100K. For comparison, California is now around 105 cases per 100K.

[1] https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/covid-data/serolog...

[2] https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamainternalmedicine/fullar...

[3] https://www.medscape.com/viewarticle/944035#vp_2

[4] https://ig.ft.com/coronavirus-chart/?areas=eur&areas=usa&are...
I am not sure how, although I agree to abolish copyright and patents; copyright and patents are bad idea.

(Note: I live in Canada.)
Organizing an insurrection to overthrow an elected government is not political speech. It's a conspiracy to commit sedition.

If you have a problem with corporations complying with laws that clearly prohibit violent overthrow of an elected government, are you sure you want to live in a democracy? Or do you just not understand what that word means?
Neat. This is very similar to [0], which is _not_ a cache but rather a complete mirror of an Etcd keyspace. It does Key/Value decoding up front, into a user-defined & validated runtime type, and promises to never mutate an existing instance (instead decoding into a new instance upon revision change).

The typical workflow is do do all of your "reads" out of the keyspace, attempt to apply Etcd transactions, and (if needed) block until your keyspace has caught up such that you read your write -- or someone else's conflicting write.

[0] https://pkg.go.dev/go.gazette.dev/core/keyspace
listened to a good podcast about this a while back

https://softwareengineeringdaily.com/2020/12/02/bgp-with-and...
All those hundreds of millions of dollars Intel shelled out over the past five years for SJW and "diversity" initiatives are finally paying off!!!
To clarify, by "subsume the janky Perl version" I did not mean touching any Perl code!
Viterbi was a founder. He is an historically significant engineer.

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

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Viterbi_algorithm
Current data from Ireland
https://covid19ireland-geohive.hub.arcgis.com/
But in the same vein, look at all the great apes besides bonobos. Bonobos are the exception because of the abundance of resources.
How To Respond to the Great Deplatforming of 2021 [video]
Maybe. I think the people who are most benefiting from Dropbox (creatives, etc) are heavily impacted by COVID recession.

There is no business case for running Dropbox in a large enterprise (I tried... our creatives cried about it), and it's an increasingly difficult case to make for a home user, as all of the alternatives are pretty good.

The other thing is that Dropbox is an easy app to fall out of love with as an individual.

They constantly upsell, even after you bought the product. I was paying >$100 year for Dropbox for years and they pushed Dropbox Teams at me relentlessly for most if it. Problem: I don't have a team! They also didn't pool storage (I think they do now), so sharing stuff with my wife like video would consume 2x the storage, unless I paid 5x for the business product. Google Drive or Office 365 are a way better value in any dimension.

Basically they have a solid core product, but instead of doing something productive with it, the surrounded it with layers of bullshit. While meandering around, they eliminated the portion of the product focused on the #1 generator of storage needs (ie. photo/video), segmented basic features like PDF search, etc. All at a 20-70% premium over competitive offers.

Good riddance.