skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Signal is being used by at least 10 well-paid medical professionals (group chat) that I know of, and one of them proclaimed today that Signal is owned by Elon Musk (probably because he tweeted about it). I did not care to educate them. And this is in a first world country with a rather wealthy population.

Why am I saying this? Users don't give a damn, they expect free things, and they expect things which work. They have been taught to use appstores on their phones where tapping on a button installs an app and everything just works with zero effort on their end, while completely ignoring the work that someone put into creating the very app they depend on. Majority will never, ever, even think about it, let alone click on the developers website to find out who created the miracle they use.

This practice needs to end. I believe that it is time to stop making free products. Developers should unite in this and finally start to value their hard work.
Status uses public keys, but you can optionally link an Ethereum Domain Name (ENS). So it’s basically like license plates where you can buy a vanity plate if you want. Also, friends can just add their own nickname for you in their contacts.

Personally I think that’s the best way to do it. Public keys aren’t very different from phone numbers at this point. Nobody memorizes phone numbers anymore either. Each person just has their own Rolodex mapping of keys to names.
January Update: Happy New Gear
Cantillon effect
Very cool

Is there one for deaf people? i.e. converse over video and text
Going out on a limb here I know, but I think among the very most important things we can do are to be good to our families, and continuing to practice at honesty and treating others the way they would want to be treated. Those things seem essential for maintaining anything, long-term. (cf. the "Anna Karenina principle" ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anna_karenina_principle ), for families or cultures that last across many generations.)

(Edit: to clarify that: Tolstoy said something like "All happy families are alike, and all miserable families are miserable in their own way". I think there is much to that: multigenerational unselfish service to others, in a widening circle, brings greater sustainability and peace. Seeing what families' and/or cultures' traits allow them to persist over time is interesting.)

From the political side of this (also relevant), things might seem distressing now, but it can be OK. Some more thoughts:

1) Honesty, the US Constitution, and the rule of law seem much more important than other policies, even ones we care about deeply (per some of my Church's scriptures, such as D&C98). Let's pray for our country/ies!

2) Jesus Christ said "love your enemies", & more ( https://churchofjesuschrist.org/study/scriptures/nt/matt/5.3... [churchofjesuschrist.org] ).
(And: "By their fruits ye shall know them": Matt 7:11-21;
and see D&C52: https://churchofjesuschrist.org/study/scriptures/dc-testamen... [churchofjesuschrist.org] .)
This means treating others with respect, for starters, and the way you would want (or they would want) to be treated.

3) Please, along with seeking wisdom & kindness, let's try to get
info and news from reliable, trustworthy sources. (Many; refs avail.)

4) Trust is earned by (trustworthy, good, uplifting) behavior over time, not just promises & piles of words.

5) We all can learn, help & encourage each other, grow & be better if we keep trying.

I deeply believe, with some reasons, that the US Constitution and some other good things will continue to be in place in the long run, in spite of difficulties.
I agree. My friend group watches a lot of British media. Peep Show, Would I Lie To You, Pointless, etc. Even shows like Who Wants To Be A Millionaire had their start in England.
There's no reason ladies can't message first on Tinder.

The mechanism is still there.
Signal is having difficulties because of load. Does your messenger have ways of reducing load?
bbbut 2 whole ex girlfriends said he was meeaaaan!! /s
> calls them assholes that don’t care about what happens outside of western society

That's hardly her main point:

> For Chinese who are used to a specific IME- like Sogou, trying to type on something else is a tiny bit like a QWERTY user suddenly faced with Dvorak- we can make it work, but it's slow enough day to day that 50/50 they just install Sogou because what's the big deal right?

> The Signal "fix" is "Incognito Mode" aka for the app to say "Pretty please don't read everything I type" to the virtual keyboard and count on Google/random app makers to listen to the flag, and not be under court order to do otherwise.

> Needless to say, Sogou/Baidu dos not respect the IME_FLAG_NO_PERSONALIZED_LEARNING flag. So basically all hardware here is self-compromised 5 minutes out of the box.

> so unless journalists tell them otherwise, which they have not been doing- users will install Sogou.

This is important.
The studies I have seen show minor energy loss (a few percent a day) although this is a function of scale.
How to Make Google and Facebook Care About Privacy
Rather than just criticise, can you please suggest a better alternative?

I am always looking for better tools and tutorials for the people I mentor, but LPTHW has been great, I have mentored 15 or so people so far from no coding to starting and running their own companies, and I have yet to find something better.
Counter-argument here is that what the author wants already widely exists. There's a ton of one-stop "install this app & start coding!" apps out there. Someone wants one of those for node.js, sure, knock yourself out, go for it. It'd be just one of a dozen such apps, not a new concept, and not unexplored territory.

But the authors request that this is built into the browser seems insane to me. Why would we bloat browsers with unnecessary stuff just to avoid hitting an app store, which is also extremely user-friendly? It's literally a request for bundled bloatware. No, hell no.
Whatever reasonable excuses the signal team has are completely irrelevant from the perspective of casual users.
Snowden showed that Signal went from 10mil to 50mil downloads in 1 week (since competitor TOS changes & Tech-industry censorship)
Did you by any chance read the _Three Body Problem_ novels? It is partly about this problem, but I won't describe the details because of spoilers. Highly recommended.
Also keep in mind that sugar is the enemy. Your body has chemistry to make sugar - there is no-need to ingest it.
Free speech to hate speech, now 'harmful' speech, and discomforting speech will be probably next step. But that slippery slope is just a fallacy.
Bitcoin Mining Comes to the Arctic Circle
Really good article.

I don't know much about nuclear policy myself, but I know this guy @DavidSantoro1 in Oahu who works on that, and recommend following him if you are interested in nuclear issues.

This is especially relevant to people in Hawaii, which is the only state, as far as I know, to have sent all its residents an emergency warning that a missile was about to hit (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2018_Hawaii_false_missile_aler...). Luckily it was a mistake and the only affect was a million funny stories about how everyone reacted (btw: someone should write a book cataloging the best reactions!).
Signal is having problems because of how "successful" they are being right now. This is a good problem not a bad problem. They'll adapt.
> assuming there is any kind of trade relationship between the country and the country of the satellite internet provider

Assuming the other country has something worth trading for. I imagine Uganda wouldn’t really have anything to bargain with the US if a US satellite internet company rejected Uganda’s request.
DS Lite, with something like a SuperCard [0] (or whatever is being sold these days).

DS Lite directly supports both DS and GBA cartridges, has great battery life, and its battery can be easily replaced. And I love its form factor, folds nicely compact.

A micro SD card mounted in the SuperCard can be loaded with good emulators for NES, SNES, GB, Sega, and probably others. It's plug-and-play, no hacking of the DS Lite necessary.

[0] http://www.eng.supercard.sc
What I repeatedly hear is that even with the proprietary drivers, it’s not terribly uncommon for people to still have serious problems, and that not everything can use the acceleration (e.g. from elsewhere in the thread, “VDPAU does not have browser hardware accelerated video decoding yet”).

I’m by no means sure, but the impression I’ve received of AMD GPUs is that all functionality of the GPU is available and functional. And no one ever seems to have trouble getting normal things working.
> since the latter wasn't end to end encrypted in the first place

I’m pretty sure keybase is end-to-end encrypted, at least that’s what they are claiming. What makes you think it isn’t?
This sub thread here goes into some detail. I'm also very curious about the same. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25793526
Totally agree, but looks like they just got Slashdotted. Hard to imagine it'll be down much longer.

Shame they couldn't anticipate this, or scale better. Curious what their postmortem will have in it.
Uhm, Keybase is totally E2EE. Were you thinking of forward-secret (which Keybase chats are not by default)?
I hope not.

I like the multiple use USB-C for also charging. I never charge my two MacBooks (one is a new M1 pro) because they charge when I plug into a monitor.

Plus, with about 20 hour battery life, returning to MagSafe is less important.

I really like the physical escape key and Touch Bar on my new M1 laptop.
Yeah, I agree. I think we are going to see changes in dating attitudes after this. At least in my circle of friends and extended circle, I have seen the desire for serious relationships go stronger in this period. Also, the appreciation for family for those who were able to live with them.
https://twitter.com/Snowden/status/1350123606601322496
But then you would be back to the problem of a yank on the power cord throwing the laptop on the floor. At least with usb c you have a chance that it unplugs. With a bottom charging mat there’s no chance. What would be the point?
It's even more obnoxious than breakcore, which is saying a lot.
The US has enough submarine launched ICBM's to retaliate.
> it's just very difficult

It's really really simple, as shown by Uganda, Egypt, Pakistan, Turkey, India and many more countries.
GitHub Enterprise Server 3.0 is here
They're a non-profit, so their financials are publicly disclosed. ProPublica only has it as recently as 2018, but here was the financials then: https://projects.propublica.org/nonprofits/display_990/82450...
Hindsight is 20/20 as they say and looking forward investing in "random tech stocks" is not likely to produce stellar returns. I think if there is a key takeaway it is:

It is a challenge to top index funds and most professional advisors have a hard time besting them.
Blockchains can still operate on decentralized P2P internet even if the main internet is shut down.
And in traditional fashion many people (mostly just one group, lets be honest..) throw out the baby with the bathwater on social safety nets. Because some people exploit it, the people who need it get damned.

edit: Edited to be a bit less pointed... A bit.
Which Matrix server?
Obviously - the point being, this command chain is optimized and conditioned for compliance.
Problem is that the largest of the free products aren't free. They are surveillanceware. "Free" is used as a gimmick to get them onto as many phones as possible to surveil people. Those players have zero incentive to change that, and will be more than happy to use "free" to edge out any paid competition. This is how paid apps became almost non-existent outside of professional niches.
What are those random emojis in voice calls for, then? I assume (warning: assumption) the voice calls are actually encrypted, even if it's with keys received from the server and opportunistic unless you verify the emojis for a particular call. (Video I don't know, and group chats and most 1:1 chats are definitely plaintext yeah.)
I think it’s because many people from India joined Signal after Dhruv Rathee published a video suggesting people uninstall WhatsApp and install Signal or Telegram. He’s got 1.7M views within a day, and I’m sure he’s bringing lot of new users to Signal [and NordVPN because of the paid promotion].
How about Tether's refusal to do an open audit of its books?

Or when they had some funds seized and loaned funds between Bitfinex and Tether, breaking the 1:1 peg?
Good call. Donated
If there was ever a time it was going to go down its preciously after qulck exponential growth in the 10s of millions of users.
My choices are grid, solar, propane. I only use propane as emergency power backup.
I dunno, mate. Why can't I open Jira tickets, access corporate apps and resources, monitor builds and deploys and app health, all from my code editor (Emacs)? Because I'd rather do that.

Although, his idea almost came to pass: Back in the day, the W3C's reference browser, Amaya, had a built-in HTML and CSS editor allowing for in-place editing of any content the browser could view. You could only save back if you had upload credentials, but still. With continued development, Amaya would have probably grown a JavaScript editor as well.
Uber planning to spin out Postmates’ delivery robot arm
@RadioFreeTom is also a good source for this stuff.
The best resource I found for understanding deep learning was neuralnetworksanddeeplearning.com by Michael Nielsen
Busy intersection seems mildly dangerous given the possibility of lag.
Why are there so many Telegram fanboys astroturfing in this thread? This thread has nothing to do with Telegram.
> People also don’t realize that moderate inflation is a good thing.

Price stability is a good thing, and moderate deflation (which discourages productive investment) is worse than moderate inflation, so policy targeting moderate inflation is a good thing. This isn’t because moderate inflation is a good thing in and of itself, its because you can’t perfectly target price level outcomes with policy, so you want to bias missing on the less harmful side.

> You want a gentle inbuilt mechanism to encourage consumption.

The utility of consumption encourages consumption. To the extent that inflation is good its more as gentle inbuilt mechanism to discourage nonproductive saving of cash in favor of productive investment.

> There’s a reason nobody spends Bitcoin

Right. You definitely don’t want deflation, which encourages hoarding currency that is surplus to immediate consumption desires and thereby sucks money out of productive investment.
If someone in Russia has decided my family can be incinerated, I don't see why the favor can't be returned. I mean, if we had a mindset of "one human family", nuclear weapons wouldn't even exist.
Oof. We made it this far, can we not talk about this until next week?
Signal grew 5x in one day[1]. A week before Musk amplified the WhatsApp story with his "Use Signal"[2] tweet. It then did the rounds on MSM. WhatsApp shoots itself in the foot (though IMO it's a blip in their stats). Parler (thankfully) has been kicked off AWS. All good news for alternative messaging technology.

https://twitter.com/signalapp/status/1349577579091566592

https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1347165127036977153

edit: as daniel_sk points out this is not a x5 increase but crossing the threshold from 10+ to the next 50+ mm downloads.
Hi, I'm the author.

> He doesn't have an investment strategy, and probably never heard of portfolio re-balancing.

This is perhaps a reasonable inference to draw based only on the information in the article, but it is incorrect. Without going into too much detail, the missing context is that I have effective long exposure to certain markets through my ownership of founder stock in a startup that operates in those markets. And while I place a high expectation value on that stock, it's also illiquid and can't be easily hedged. For reasons I didn't go into in the piece, I believed Bitcoin would also serve as a partial hedge for that market exposure, which justified a higher allocation than one might naively expect.

(I'll also observe that portfolio rebalancing isn't the right decision in all situations. Startup founders rationally concentrate their net worths into their companies, which is justified by their overwhelming informational advantage.)

> He got in lucky and made some good returns. Now he thinks he is a genius because of that, and as a result can predict the next market move.

I agree with the first sentence. I would strongly dispute the second. It's precisely because I don't think I can predict what will happen next that I've zeroed my exposure to this entire ecosystem.

> He didn't do good market research. For example, most of the volume in USDT is faked by the exchanges. Coinbase, GBTC, and CME each one of these is are probably bigger than USDT in size and volume. Unregulated derivatives are an alternative to USDT for more sophisticated traders and they are also huge.

I'm aware of these claims — there are rumors of wash trading by the big unbanked exchanges that I consider quite credible. I didn't include those in the piece because I wasn't able to find confirmatory evidence in the time I'd allocated to research it. I would be extremely interested if you could share any evidence you may have collected about these claims.
Advent of Code in Polar (logic programming)
That’s helpful, thanks.

So they’re 4mil in the hole? How is it possible that they’re still running?
Glad you like!
This is all probably correct, and should change in the long term. In the short term, I hope you've donated to Signal, and it would also help if you'd dispel the misinformation when you hear it.

The world would be better if the world were better, but until it is, would you mind helping out a bit?
The fascinating story of these dualing theories of cancer (somatic vs. metabolic) is told in Tripping Over the Truth: The Metabolic Theory of Cancer [0].

I've read it twice. Strongly recommended.

[0]: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/23496164-tripping-over-t...
Can I use it if I don't want to host a server? Are there any trustworthy public servers?
Crypto: The end is nigh for Tether
Congrats, this story is a good reminder to founders that it's not just having the right idea, and execution. It's about the persistence and willpower to get to that right idea & execution.
I think it does. People send USD to Coinbase to buy Bitcoin. Coinbase maintains the stable value of USDC by creating new USDC and selling it to people for BTC. The cash to back USDC comes from people depositing USD to buy BTC.

You can think of it virtually as three balanced flows:

USD -> USDC -> BTC (Retail BTC Investors)

BTC -> USDC (Tether refugees)

USDC -> USD (Coinbase)
for changing amazon smile: is it "Signal Technology Foundation - Location: Mountain View, CA"? no description available unfortunately. seem to be a bunch with the name signal and that was the closest in name to what seems to be the signal foundation
It looks like they are using getCanonicalPath to ensure that the file is under the serving root but there is some behavior that confused the Tomcat code. I can imagine this bug could manifest in other software that depends on this behavior on Windows.
According to the CVE, the root cause is unexpected behavior in the JRE caused by inconsistent behavior in the Windows API.
The issue lies with people like you labelling speech that goes against the narrative "fascist" speech. Clearly the definition of fascism is lost on you if you are supportive of banning speech.

Its dishonest to label all of the speech coming out of sites like parlor fascist. Its clearly politically motivated censorship.

I can find 1000s of examples of people calling for violence against Trump supporters on Twitter or Facebook, but no-one is calling for Twitter to be removed from the app store...
Short on Coinbase Pro, or Kraken
Flashback: Bob Dylan Performs at the 1963 March on Washington
Didn't say it was a replacement for Click. I said it was simpler if you're already using type annotations.
And that also elevates the risk since countries that might launch nuclear arms at the US understand that needing to second-guess the command to launch our weapons gives them an advantage.
Quite some time I had classes on this - but I believe chemo (some at least?) is designed to attack cells with same growth-rate as cancer cells. So they're not attacking just everything in a non-discriminatory fashion - but cells with similar growth as cancer cells, become collateral damage, so to speak.

This is why some chemo will result in for example hairloss; Because the cancer you're being treated for, has the same growth rate as the cells in your hair - and thus the chemo will also kill those cells.
When are they fixing keyboard?
You can kind of bring MagSafe back to your laptop on your own by buying a magnetic USB-C adapter like this one: https://www.amazon.ca/Magnetic-Adapter-Connector-Transfer-Co...
>"Not really true, Bumble engages in less shitty behavior than Tinder, so they don't prevent you to match with the people who are compatible with you basically."

Can you elaborate on this? What is Tinder doing in this respect? How does preventing matching compatible people allow them to capture more profit?
Your argument makes no meaningful differentiation between UBI and any other forms of income.
It's sad to see what has happened to Uganda.

I lived there in '72 and '73. We had to leave in a hurry.

It's one of the most beautiful nations on Earth. Absolutely stunning.

Except for all the skulls.

Bad Things Happened there, and it has never recovered.

It has become a haven for religious crackpots. They had a Jonestown-type thing, a number of years ago, and it's a really, really bad place to be gay (even closeted).
I don't use it that often, but last I tried switching to it this was also one of my biggest problems, it was simply using too much resources when it was literally doing nothing, where chrome, doing much more, used much less CPU power.

I don't like chrome, firefox is feature wise better IMO, but I am not patient enough for it.

Maybe it is just my setup, and the plural of anecdote is not data, so my experience may be an outlier, but I wish it was not my experience.
Probablistic P2P Content Moderation
Windows OS as a production environment for any Tomcat webapp seems very unlikely.
If they get rid of the touchbar I'm trading my mac immediately
I have always believed that the MagSafe connector should be on the brick. A short, regular USB type C cable to the power brick and a MagSafe connector between the brick and the wall.

Bonus points if the brick incorporates a small hub with additional ports. This would allow you to choose between using a regular USB type C power cable or the proprietary brick with MagSafe built in.
I was tempted to self-host, but went with https://element.io/matrix-services

If I had an IT department and a secure server center I would for sure self-host. In the mean time I will get used to the tech and support the cause
How would things work in practice for a decentralized network? Regular people won't host their own servers.
> Since "run-only" AppleScript come in a compiled state where the source code isn't human-readable, this made analysis harder for security researchers.

Surely no more difficult than your average malware binary blob?
The first step in most data science and machine learning workflows is obtaining and preparing data for analysis. Imperfect data jeopardizes the end result, and in the case of detecting cancer, can have numerous negative consequences. At GRAIL, many data sources are factored into our cancer predictions, including a patient’s clinical information, lab processing metrics, genomic data, and bioinformatics pipeline output...
Speaking of, DHH looks like he's using tailwind with Rails, so the use-case is getting some love! DHH created this gem:

https://github.com/rails/tailwindcss-rails