skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The most incredible factoid for me: These machines, the Smartmatic machines, weren't even really used in the election.

>Smartmatic technology was used only in Los Angeles County, California in the 2020 election. The system we provided to LA County does not count, tabulate or store votes.[1]

A single county in the whole of the United States used them. Verifiable or not, there's nothing this company could of done to change a national election outcome.

Someone somewhere started repeating that Smartmatic currently owned Dominion when their only connection was that they had sold off Sequoia Voting Systems——which Dominion currently owns, more than a decade ago.[2][3] Once that false factoid got in the system it was a convenient enough fact for some political factions that it got repeated everywhere.

[1] https://www.smartmatic.com/us/smartmatic-fact-checked/
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smartmatic#Sale_of_Sequoia_Vot...
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dominion_Voting_Systems
I think I understand British politics pretty well, being British.

Here [0] UK has highest death per capita behind Belgium

No, it has one of the highest numbers of "people who died within 28 days of a positive test" which isn't the same thing. COVID is highly infectious but not very deadly, so with this definition the more you test the more such events can be found. This problem becomes obvious when you look at excess death stats and discover more people have died of COVID than the overall increase in deaths.

The UK does more than double the amount of testing Belgium has done [1]. This will automatically lead it to reporting more deaths in proximity to a positive test.

Johnsons gov did multiple 180 when dealing with covid, recently promised schools will stay absolutely open, only to closed them after 1 day that they were open

Like almost everywhere except Sweden the UK has a problem with any attempt to reopen being sunk by supposedly 'expert' scientists who seem to consider lockdowns to be free. Johnson is trapped by the public's expectation that scientists know what they're doing, which in this case they don't. Constant see-sawing, announcing garbage numbers and other problems have been seen in many countries, not just the UK. Really only Sweden has managed to avoid this, thanks to Anders Tegnell who has been both (a) consistent and (b) correct. It'd be great if the UK had Tegnell too, but no such luck.

I am not going to change you mind anyhow so have a great day living in your political thriller.

You could change my mind if you raised points I hadn't previously considered months ago, or weren't claiming things that are obviously false about how the UK and Brexit are currently being reported.

[1] https://ourworldindata.org/coronavirus-data-explorer?zoomToS...
Parents prefer streaming services that don't expect them to watch kids shows in advance to make casw by case decision which boring show is ok or not.

Like antenna TV programming used to be - guaranteed to be inoffesive so you don't have to watch crap kids like to watch.
I think a loss of 100% of one's income is probably a risk so deep into the tails that planning for it is by definition a little stupid.

Edit: For a company - apart from Welfare you should have a plan as an individual
Firefly quote comes to mind: "They'll swing back to the belief that they can make people... better."
This is exactly it. Main reason there are no queues to get vaccinated in Russia is public distrust.
> And SQL is supposed to be the be-all end-all Standard Query Language.

It's Structured Query Language.
And still are doing! It's disgusting how selective their reporting is.
Indeed, and I'm not sure it would be a defensible position to just be stashing your donated funds into a gigantic rainy day war chest— the money is there to spend on growing and fortifying the service in other ways, so it should be spent.
It's baity because it's true.
I have no connection to and don't know Wikimedia Foundation, and the context for these references is not totally clear. (Maybe it was related to these https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_20/Events.)

Regardless, do you really begrudge the CEO visiting these places?

I get where you're coming from: it's easy to roll your eyes and dismiss this kind of thing as political correctness, pointless "diversity and inclusion" work, pandering to liberal friends etc.

But step back: Wikipedia aims to be the world's encyclopedia. I'm as much in awe as anyone of what a fairly narrow group of pretty obsessive contributors has been able to achieve (I just checked: I've made five tiny edits in 15 years, so not me). But Wikipedia will never succeed in its aim unless it has active contributors in places like Accra, Berlin and Chandigarh.

I honestly don't remember what the donation banners have said in past years. Did they imply they were funding servers and bandwidth only? Maybe they did. But if you actually believe in the mission of Wikipedia, you have to consider that servers and bandwidth will not be enough and that community—maybe including the odd party—is a core part of it.

In that respect, I'm not sure it's too helpful to lump it with Mozilla.
Similar to the Tor Project's Snowflake[1] Firefox addon?

[1] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/torproject-sn...
EACH of those F-150 plants is a fortune 50 company. You are talking about cutting production by 1/3 at one plant and 2/3 at the other plant. It’s a big deal.
That's fine. But its a hijack of a thread.

I admitted my reasoning is not moralistically ethical or law abiding.

My argument is that piracy is there for a reason. There was a huge dip in torrent usage at the dawn of Netflix, for a reason. The convenience of Netflix outweighed 'cost' of piracy. Now piracy is back up, why?

Thats the reality of the world we are living in.

The argument you linked is great and it makes sense. And shows issues with copyright etc. that is my long time belief.

But the reality is that I pirate things when its more convenient to me. As a lot of people too.
Saying otherwise is lying. And arguing how CP is bad and damaging doesn't change anything, because disney and company will uphold it no matter what.
yes. back after 5 august, i think i got my first crack at internet in february 2020 with 2G internet and a whitelist of "allowed websites". i found out in my own tests that ssh tunneling over random ports used to work. i had managed to set up a server on amazon aws, and i did a dirty ssh tunnel to that to get access to blocked websites. even that failed after some tries and changing networks.

>It's irresponsible of HN to put people in potential harms way, Iran is at a breaking point, they have nothing to lose and will stop at nothing to stop exfiltration and access to internet.

yes. shocked pikachu face gets a random HN reader nothing but people can die as a result of this. heck i have records of people who are locked up since last year because of "social media misuse" aka dissent
And many, in the US, don't alarm their emergency exits. I've used those to good effect when I've opted to see a particularly popular new release. You can usually park behind/beside the theater, not just in the main lot, so these exits are actually faster for accessing your car and then you can use access roads behind the theater to exit the parking lot as well.
This seems like the typical HN meme of looking at something and assuming the technical piece is all there is to it.

Wikipedia's biggest challenge over the years hasn't been building or hosting its website. It's been convincing the world that an encyclopedia that can be edited by anyone on the Internet is a credible and neutral source of information.

One of the ways you do that is by speaking at conferences, traveling to meet with people, etc.
Launch: Simply Snack – Daily Meals at a Glance
HN discussion of that post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13394900

I guess I'm coming down hard on one side of a controversial question, but in my mind, if it allows the server to intercept messages without users knowing about it under the default configuration, it's a backdoor.
This looks pretty interesting. Besides telephony and other message-passing applications, what are the hero use cases for an actor system on an embedded device?
Isn't it? Mozilla has cut or spun-off basically everything other than Firefox.
This "advantage" is also its greatest disadvantage. I can stick these macro definitions in any existing project and start incrementally rolling them out. Migrating something — even partially — to Zig is a much bigger task.
That is not an adequate theory of baitiness.
“Lavish waste” my arse.

You people will be dissatisfied so long as there is a nonprofit worker out there who isn’t subsisting on gruel.
Automated Testing with Spring Boot as an OAuth2 Resource Server
Not just 5 years. They were lead cheerleaders for the 2003 Iraq War.
Is that all that bad considering that Wikipedia is arguably one of the most important organisations on earth?

If it was as corrupt as the NRA (which is why NY is moving to dissolve them), then I would agree with the sentiment but a few million sounds about right (About 9k per employee)
Why not just use a closed loop hydrocarbon from electricity system as a shipping fuel if you have excess power and a need for transit?

The main theoretical point of hydrogen is very high specific energy per mass but it is essentially purest acidic gas and a pain. Bonding it to something else mitigates it so why 3 H per N instead of 4 H per C? Both are toxic gases at this point leaving ammonia's main advantage in the context being its own oderant.
There is open-airplay[777] doing that.

[777] - https://github.com/openairplay/open-airplay
It's like if you let the key to your house to a friend you trust, then that friend let your key to someone else without asking you. It is not okay.
Ask HN: Public company gets bought out and ESPP goes away
Found out today that the company I work for is getting bought out at somepoint in the future and that we're going to go private.

Right now, we have a decent ESPP. We can contribute up to 15% of our wages and it purchaes shares once a quarter at 15% below the lowest price at either the beginning or the end of the quarter.

Previously, I have calculated it into my total income, but now with it vanishing, that's going to be a good chunk of income that I'm not getting.

- Would you negotiate for a higher wage/salary as this program is no longer going to be in place?

- Would you negotiate for other benefits?

- What would you do & how would you go about it?
I use it in Emacs every day since a few years. It mainly works, but I still haven't figured out the best way to set the right feature flag combinations if I work in a crate that uses them a lot. In these cases, if some code requires a feature to be enabled, analyzer does nothing because it compiles with the feature disabled.

It's not bothering me that much that I'd find a solution, because I don't need the help of analyzer in crates that I maintain anymore...
New macOS Big Sur Theme Released for Linux
I can give you an anecdote. A modern car crashed on our nissan from 1990's a while ago and while absolutely nothing happened to ours the other car looked like a wreck. Maybe the behind of the car is made to be more durable than the front? I do not know.
How Bellingcat uncovered Russia’s secret network of assassins
> It is indeed. Iran does not shy away from blocking large swaths of the internet

> ran would not hesitate to block all AWS IP addresses as a solution

DNS will not resolve any .ir (.coms that are iranian) domains here in US, afaikt.
The proper way for non-profits to do this is to start an endowment fund, which provides consistent residual income that can help fund operations. Usually by identifying specific large donors who would wish to be named in the fund.
> "Poorly Documented Source Code Is Virtually Worthless".

And richly documented code is non-virtually worthless.

If you don't believe me, try parsing one of these so-called "literate
programs." Any 10-year vet will far more quickly grok a piece of code when
its textual flow isn't disrupted by verbiage that only makes sense to its
author.
Teams was always Sharepoint
Love back!
Hate the game, don't hate the player
From what (little) I've seen on the topic, the concern arises both from who that repo belongs to (many haven't rebuilt that trust) as well as that repo having general activity data from the update/install pings.

As someone who has a couple, I'm not thrilled about it but I'll just quietly disable it with a guide every time I install or update one. If they keep going in this direction, competition does exist.
I was thinking that it would localize cat (unix command) somehow.
AFAIK you can register URL handlers for a specific domain (signal.tube), but not for a specific hash. And you don't want Signal to appear as an alternative browser on every link.

Edit: On a second thought, I wonder if a custom scheme would have worked, e.g. signal-proxy://example.com?
I've been involved with some non-profit organizations that do work in post conflict countries, mostly Africa.

From my experience, these organizations throw parties because they have to. This is how non-profits fundraise. I don't think there is a non-profit organization on the planet that has a significant impact and is funded only by small individual donations. Money is raised by throwing a party, presenting all the great work you're doing, and getting rich people drunk so they either give you right there and then or secure you a meeting with someone who will on the spot.

These events are funded by your small donations.

This sounds like a horrible amount of overhead, and it is, but that's how the world works. Most NGOs will say they have very small overhead, something silly like 5%, but that's because they don't count fundraising as overhead, or they put fundraising events into "programming" which again doesn't count as overhead.
Google considers “less stringent” version of Apple’s anti-tracking for Android
> They will never step back and say "Oh well, I guess we'll have to spend less on advertising now."

Of course they do, what weird assumption is this?

If we lived in a world where advertisement was twice as effective at generating new revenue, far more money would be spent on it; if we lived in a world where it did nothing, no money would be spent on it and companies would search for other means to get new customers than advertisement.

It is certainly not as though the advertisement budged that companies have simply be a number they cling to on religious principle, rather than a number they have decided upon based on their perceived value of advertisement.
Can you explain further on how to recover my tabs? I lost a whole lot of them and panicking here.
I didn't watch the video but his article with the same title is almost entirely bad points.[1]

Email is end to end encrypted for people who make it a priority. It would be end to end encrypted for everyone if Google or Microsoft made it a priority.

The difference between XMPP and Signal is funding. Signal supports video on all platforms because Open Whisper Systems hired people to work on it. XMPP didn't because the popular clients are developed by volunteers.

People don't like using lots of messaging apps. So switching apps is much harder than changing your email address because you have to convince other people to switch.

Even Signal is moving away from using phone numbers.

[1] https://signal.org/blog/the-ecosystem-is-moving/
> Really I am quite surprised at how little the EU is doing, and should have looked that up much earlier, instead of taking your initial claim at face value.

Again, the number of blocked vs approved isn't particularly relevant. What matters is also the number that weren't tabled in the first place, and obviously, the number of things that didn't happen is a particularly challenging set to count. Companies aren't fond of public failure, and so they'll try and suss out whether regulators would be amenable to a merger before making it public.

6,000 vs 30 is a meaningless metric, because 6,000 small companies merging into 3,000 small/midsize companies isn't relevant to this discussion as it doesn't do much to alter the competitive landscape. 30 mega-caps merging into 15 giga-caps is what I'm talking about.

I'm not saying companies should never merge, that's fine, it's in their competitive interest to do so. Mergers are good for companies because they reduce competition and improve margins.

Again, what you haven't explained is why a small company merging into a small company is advantageous, a mid size into a midsize is advantageous, but a giant into a giant just wouldn't ever work. Of course it would work, the same dynamic continues to exist. Regulators are why.

T-Mobile just acquired Sprint, right? So we know there's certainly an advantage on the business front to consolidate these businesses. So why doesn't AT&T buy T-Mobile to form AT&T&T? Well, they tried in the early 2010s and the DOJ filed suit is why. [1] Further AT&T had to pay a huge amount of cash to T-Mo when it all unwound.

[1] https://som.yale.edu/sites/default/files/ATT%20-%20T-Mobile%...
Are all base stations directly underneath a satellite?

I think this is an over-simplification if we are chasing pedantics; There are cases where it will be more and others less so the slightly more precise wording might actually be "about 1100km."

To the larger picture: it seems we often lose that order of length on the ground due to existing network topologies and geographical limitations.
Feel free to convince your government and fellow citizens to use tax money to pay for such infrastructure. Google laying down their own cable isn't stopping anybody from doing so.
An optimistic view is that in the future, increasingly powerful automation can make it easier for Chinese to see the overwork as being unnecessary.

My inner cynic, however, is telling me that China will not become fat and lazy like America until it gains more geopolitical power and therefore more easily accesses resources and goods in proportion to it's enormous population.

Optimistically, in the future, a new type of more sophisticated and sustainable high-tech global monetary and economic system can provide some breathing room and reduce resource conflicts.
What Happens When You Buy a Stock?
I can't find any line-item in the Foundation Audit Reports named "parties" though. Is it under "other operating expenses"? How can I know how much of those $9M was spent on parties?
> e still don't make as much as the one who brings in the seed money and keeps most of the profits, but because reasons we haven't been relegated to the barely-tolerated and barely-paid status of the people who write documentation or make our products attractive, no matter how good they are at it.

I don't think it's lack of regulations that makes our salaries high (barring the sky-high wages at FAANG). For example, in banking - a heavily regulated industry - coders still make way more than people who can write well ("poets"). I think it's just basic supply and demand, there's just not enough people good enough at coding compared to how many are currently needed across all industries. Let's enjoy it while it lasts.
Show HN: Symfony 5 REST API running in Docker(php8,mysql8) – Run in one command
The only reason I checked was because of Jimmy Wales' past controversy regarding use of the foundation's credit card [0]:

> Wool wrote that Wales had asked the foundation to reimburse him for costly items like a $1,300 dinner for four at a Florida steakhouse. Wool alleged that at one point Wales was short on receipts for $30,000 in expenses before settling the matter with the foundation's lawyer and paying the organization $7,000.

> Wool added that Wales' foundation credit card was taken away in 2006.

[0] https://www.smh.com.au/technology/wikipedias-jimmy-wales-acc...
If an individual had no desire to ever retire and was able to pay all of their bills for the next 2 years with no further paychecks and no adjustments to their lifestyle, I'd call that a pretty deep level of financial stability. Especially since in this case their income sources are somewhat diversified across people, unlike a single paycheck from an employer.
> I read this twice just to make sure I didn't miss something, and I don't actually see a reason why. I don't actually see a reason why.

(Stated right in the sixth paragraph.)
I’m going to take a break, and a research fellowship, as a place to think about what’s next. It’s hard
to think about your future when you’re fully in your present, and for the past seven years, I’ve been
fully present for this movement. But as I look around, I see global challenges such as polarization,
inequality, and climate change, as well as opportunities for generational renewal and optimism. As a
Wikimedian, I lean toward optimism, and plan to head in that direction.
The mental model of UI = f(state) is really beautiful. And I got it explained to me that its best to use an SPA when you have 'interrelated, dynamically updated state' from Tom MacWright and I very much agree.

The issue I had with React is that it forced a lot of mental models and API's on you to achieve UI = f(state) but after finding Svelte and spending 20 mins on the tutorial [0] I feel like I can say I 'get it' when it comes to building web apps.

Though the things you throw away when you decide to go all in on the SPA approach for your site is crazy, I hate not having access to my freaking database while building a page and having to create a ton of unnecessary code just to express a page that pulls in bits of data from my database. I do not want to complex myself with GraphQL. I much prefer the approach of dhh were we should only be paying that interactivity cost on the pages we need high fidelity on (which is probably going to be one or two pages you have for 80% of apps).

I think Hotwire looks promising where you mostly have logical split up sections of html that you want to be independently rendered across the page or on a click. When it comes to communicating and weaving state between those I'd be thinking about Svelte if it starts getting too complex.

Some examples of Hotwire I've seen so far
https://twitter.com/tonysmdev/status/1355996616361205760
https://twitter.com/tonysmdev/status/1356460628819533824

[0] https://svelte.dev/tutorial/basics
> the Burmese military response to US military occupation will be to target their own civilian population.

Everyone would have to pick a side. Look at Vietnam.

> jihadism

TBH, I have just read about what jihad means now and it was interesting. Jihadism is definitely a commonly understood term in the west meaning religiously motivated military movement. It looks like there are many types of Jihad - and one is "jihad of the sword" which is what is understood in the west.

Non-violence is especially central to Buddhism. In practice is this the case...maybe not. But it certainly has that "image".

If you send forces to a sovereign nation, some might think you are violating their sovereignty politically. But if your justification is religious - like it was with the Taliban - in a sense that it offends their deity - then this is going to have a much deeper and long-lasting resistance - as the US saw. This was my point. There seems more religious motivation to resist occupation in Islam than there is in Buddhism. But in terms of who is violent and non-violent - I don't think that is a good point.

Thanks for the thoughts - I learned a few things.
Run Jupyter Lab for Python, R, Swift from Google Colab with ColabCode
Genuinely curious, what makes Weave and Pluto "completely different" styles of notebook? Is there some reason that Pluto features like interactivity and reactivity couldn't be incorporated in Weave, at least in theory? I get that they focus on different problems, but based on how R Markdown is often used in practice, it seems like there's a lot of overlap between the two problem spaces.