skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The implication here is that the fix for this problem is to make sure it doesn't happen to anyone who does business with Google, as if other people aren't important enough to concern yourself about. That is 1000% the wrong approach, and exactly the sort of thinking that gets tech businesses in to this sort of mess.

The correct approach is to make sure it doesn't happen incorrectly in the first place, and that it can be resolved quickly and easily if it ever does.
Made the same thing a while back in about 15 LOC.
Lived two years next to one of those XFinity Wifi hotspots that kick you off after an hour :)

https://github.com/chrislgarry/XFinityHotspotSpoofer/blob/ma...
>Why pay a human to do something? Let the computer do the thing

This is why I think Google/Twitter/FB were not that vocal about the section 230 business. Honestly if they got brought through it would be expensive for them but they have the money and tech potential to automate any problems that arise from it which would just extends their moat from any potential competitors even more.
> It was a different Google back then.

No it has always been the same company, and we tried to tell you.
Thanks for your work on Soldat. I still remember a bunch of us sitting in our living room, all with our desktop PCs, and the floor being a mess of cables connecting to power banks and an old switch, playing Soldat for hours.
Also South African - re the cigarette ban - this was really dodgy. (non-smoker and very anti tobacco in general so this is against my own personal biases)

There have been reports as far back as 2017[0] that Dlamini Zuma, who for all intents and purposes was the decider of this ban, is personally involved in the huge black market for cigarettes and therefore had personal motivations for the ban.

Linking an old news article to show that this isn't a case of retrospectively looking for dirt, though there are plenty of recent ones too.

[0] https://www.timeslive.co.za/sunday-times/news/2017-10-29-gan...
Do not rely on Google for anything but search. Even for that there are alternatives.
For a really shocking statistic on gentrification etc: "In the past five years, London has lost half its nightclubs and more than 40% of its music venues." (October 2016, [1]).

I hope they've reversed that trend, but I no longer live in London and haven't followed it very closely.

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2016/oct/22/london-sadiq...
Advertising is a cancer on modern society. Not only it messes the psyche of individuals, it also ties businesses in wasteful arms races. We need more than education, the industry needs to be reined in with a regulatory hammer.
I guess replacing "white" with "Chinese" is a good idea. Another option is "Russian".
His calls for more kindness towards humans are at odds with his endorsement of the persecution of the Uighur minority by XI Jinping:

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2020/sep/25/netflix-liu-ci...
I was affected by this. Funny how Malwarebytes wants to turn this into positive PR about how they reacted "quickly".

I installed just about every Android anti-malware app that I could find in late January, and none detected the bad app.

Finally by googling some of the ad domains that kept popping up, I found the forum discussion that they mention. In other words it took them about two months to react!

Edit: either it took forever or there are multiple barcode scanner apps that are affected and they didn't find all of them.
A lot of it has to do with the perceived elite nature of the MacOS platform for Audio/Video in comparison with other systems.. and its true, Apple have prioritized audio/video on their devices for decades - see for example, iOS versus Android audio thread priorities, which until recently were very much in Apples favour.

The trouble is, most "audio pro's" don't really have the technical chops to understand why this is the case with MacOS, nor why Linux represents a parallel advance in audio processing technology. You can do things with Linux audio that are impossible with MacOS, due to its general-purpose nature - but MacOS still provides great value to the consumer, not just professionals.

The great thing about Linux audio is that the devs pushing it forward don't have any of the constraints that the MacOS/iOS folks have to work under. This gets mis-underestimated by audio pro's, imho.

But with things like kxStudio and UbuntuStudio and Zynthian out there, this is going to change radically. I think the audio world is in for some very big upheavals in terms of Linux adoption over the next few years .. but I have all of these systems operational in my pro studio, and have poked these beasts multiple times. Linux rules for audio, and hardly anyone knows .. thats another kind of elite realm left to be explored by the curious and adventurous.
Desktop notifications

Multimedia Keys

Are in the premium tier? Are you kidding me!
Yes and it's proof there is no such thing as "AI", just stupid pattern matching programmed by not very brillant people.
Many (most?) last hop DNS resolvers (ISP) set their own cache time, sadly.
Not agreeing/disagreeing on the misinformation, but regarding the failure:

The EU negotiated badly, and AZ used that to fool them.
I think AZ deserves some moral blame here as well.
It obviously depends on the company, but it is possible in lots of places.
A list of companies that use formal verification methods
I think there is a simple solution: the "fail2ban" approach.
Instead of banning, lock out users for some times (1 day).
An AI system should make temporary changes to your IAM, and then report too often disabled guys to a human being
> Gnome now refuses to run without systemd.

Is that true? The gentoo documentation says that you can chose your init system independently of your desktop manager, and puts openrc+gnome as an example:

https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/GNOME/GNOME_Without_systemd/Gen...

You can also install GNOME on OpenBSD, which of course does not run systemd.
You have to understand that this is SINO (service in name only), an offering that is there on paper to satisfy procurement requirements of businesses ("Does this product offer this service with that SLA? If yes, you can buy it. If not, you can't"). That doesn't say anything about the efficacy of this service. In fact you will find that it isn't very useful (I've only had to use it once, but still, useless and frustrating, not much different from talking with GPT3). Many if not most enterprise software vendors have SINO offerings, Microsoft and VMware are just two I experienced personally that provide you with certain 24/7 telephone support lines which will not do anything but waste time until the next morning (if you're lucky) where you might be able to get an escalation. So if you're buying ESXi hoping that VMware might help you fix a pink screen at 2 in the morning, you are mistaken. But management will be able to tell everybody "yes, we have a 30 minute SLA on this with the vendor". Sure.

Lastly, you might also find that you will not be able to access the support options anymore if you have real problems or once your account has been locked for whatever reason. There are several services like this out there and I have seen it happen once at an old company: Provider locked a whole group of users out of the platform because of "suspicious login activity" on the admin account (admin was overseas). To access the support page you had to login first. Which you couldn't. Because it was locked. Took three weeks and snail mail (!) to get access to the platform back. Cancelled right after.

I would be extremely surprised if paying $6/month meant that your experience was different. Not that it shouldn't be, mind you, of course it should. I'm just saying it likely won't, so don't bet on it...
A full reverse engineering analysis of the emotet trojan
It's not as easy. In ye olde times, car manufacturers had railway uplinks for shipping stuff around... they still have these, but trucks are (way) cheaper than railway.
I must have missed its rise - is substack "the new medium"? After medium jumped the shark (i.e paywalled itself)
"Linux is about choice" is the most toxic and cancerous idea in the Linux world.

Linux has always been about software freedom and open source, it was never about choice. When people made it about choice, infinite fragmentation started and there's no end in sight.

Though with their shortcomings, thankfully somebody is fighting against that concept, and trying to build a stable base for everybody.
Reading inaccurate information and taking it all seriously still leaves the reader ignorant, it just gives a false illusion of being well-informed.

I try to take everything I read with a giant grain of salt while remaining humble and recognizing my own ignorance. If a topic really catches my interest I'll try digging into it by going through primary sources, but otherwise I try to not hold very strong opinions about things I haven't researched extensively. Even after I've done a bit more research on a subject I try to remain humble since there's often many concepts with which I'm unfamiliar.

With social media you can now follow many real experts on a wide variety of subjects and they'll happily help explain new and interesting developments in their field. Although even in that situation it's still important to exercise caution, since the illusion of expertise is often abused as a means of advancing some political or financial agenda. Another possibility is that the person explaining the topic might not actually be that well informed or they might've even misunderstood certain parts.

I'd recommend reading Epistemic Learned Helplessness [0].

[0] https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/06/03/repost-epistemic-learn...
I feel this article both understates the effects of having a free plan, but also arrives at an unfair conclusion. It's probably smart to not offer a free plan when your startup is looking for PMF and iterating features, a la that Superhuman trope. Which is indeed impactful as that could kill a startup. But in the case of Trello or Jira as mentioned by top comment, which are established companies, they are indeed pointlessly leaving behind $.
IIRC, they have an Excel plugin. So it's more like: stick with our SaaS; if you really prefer a desktop app, stick to Excel (and our plugin).
This is why I use one of the new, privacy-focused email providers instead. It feels like the sweet spot between starting my own server (headache, dropped messages) and being one of a billion Gmail/Outlook users (no-one cares if I don't get email)
Yeah, and most of the time I feel amazing after gym.

One definitely should aim to eat well and sleep enough, but that's generally true anyway.
It reminds me of when powerful institutions treat lie detectors or facial recognition systems as infallible.
I dread moving towards electing lists of candidates drawn up by central party committees.

They way it works in Norway and Sweden at least is that while you vote for a list of candidates drawn up by the party, you can also select your preferred candidates on that list and as such affect which candidates on the list get seats.
True! I tried several times to comment on his blog - but Calegari didn't confirm my comments

It's hypocritical to criticize but to avoid criticism ...
It won't change until they start bleeding enough users that it actually starts hurting them. In other words, when they mess up with someone "important enough" prepared to hold a serious grudge.

[EDIT: I still hold a grudge against DHL for 20 years ago listing my credit cards as "in transit to South Korea" while I was in Santa Cruz, waiting for them. If Google hits someone with an actual large following or sufficient clout in a large company, then they might just find that one day they do so to someone prepared to hold a 20 year grudge even if they eventually fix the immediate issue -- I'm not mad at DHL for the initial mistake, but for the amount of trouble and lies I had to deal with before they took it seriously]
Objectification is where you disregard all aspects of a person in favor of what they look like; the word literally means treating a person like an object. Think posters of swimsuit models on the walls.

Anyway like another person in this thread mentioned, while it's shit, at the same time it feels nice to get complimented on a feature of yours, especially if it's a novel experience. I've never felt like I was particularly attractive, because I got zero feedback on my appearance during my formative years - good OR bad. But I'm in my mid thirties now and my girlfriend has the hots for me, so that's nice :D.
Here's my improved answer from previous - "Don't offer free plan" post.

I recently shut down my free plan and instead introduced Trial on paid plans for my SAAS [1]. Brought in a new entry-level plan that is significantly cheaper to make the transition easier.

As an indiehacker, the free plan allowed me to iron out bugs and improve the overall experience of the platform. But the amount of effort it took to maintain the free plan was enormous so, I shut it down. I informed users about the decision and, I am glad few converted to being paid customers.

The most difficult part was to convert free users into paid ones. I tried everything - Coupons, discounts, emailing customers, lowering the limits, limited offers etc. Nothing really worked.

I have a lot of free time now and I can focus on delivering value to my customers. The server load has also reduced due to the reduction of free requests and database writes/reads.

For a large SAAS company like Slack, Trello etc, it makes sense to have a free plan since you have a lot of resources at your disposal but, if you are a small team or worse alone, then hell no.

[1] http://blanq.io/
> It would take a use another 3-4 seconds per app installation to prompt the user

I yes, I too rememeber the FirefoxOS. Good times.
How much money should I waste into Google Cloud to have good support for my Google account ?
Polish game modders for the game Gothic (very popular RPG in Poland) are using "AI" to reproduce the voices of the Polish voice actors who did the original dub of the game. The quality isn't there yet, the voice clarity is all over the place, but it's already a much better option than using a generic "Microsoft Sam" kind of voice. And when technology matures, it will allow modders to have in-game characters sound as they "should sound like", instead of being silent or resorting to amateur dubbing as it is now.
A vim shortcuts cheatsheet with nice diagrams
Multicore OCaml: Dec 2020 / Jan 2021
ALSA has had support for software mixing for more than a decade now. Similarly, PulseAudio can work with ALSA to route any application that uses the ALSA API through PulseAudio.

AFAIK ALSA-only distros tend to have SW mixing configured by default and PulseAudio-based distros have ALSA intercepting enabled by default. So in practice an application that needs some basic audio playback can just use ALSA and it'll work everywhere.
Ask HN: What did it take for me to get my cheeseburger?
I just ordered a takeout meal from a Denny's restaurant 4 blocks from where I live. I called the local number and ended up connected to a call center in India, where they completed the order. Then I went and picked it up and paid with a credit card. After chuckling about the absurdity of ordering a cheeseburger on the other side of the planet, I started to think about all the infrastructure it took for that process to happen.

On my phone I opened the Denny's app and tried to place an order. I order often enough for the app to be useful, but failure rate is about 20%. It failed that time so I called the direct local number, which in turn routed through a central phone tree that handled all Denny's calls. After navigating the phone tree, there were three clicks over 3 seconds or so and I heard a man with an Indian accent declare the full street address of the location I was trying to reach.

That was probably a VoIP connection over the internet using undersea cabling going from California > Japan > Chennai/Mumbai. His call center routed the call to him and he entered it into his workstation. That triggered a hand-off to APIs from the Denny's servers which connected to the actual Denny's location and its ordering system. Then it got displayed on a kitchen status screen for the cook to complete.

So we've got multiple protocols of traffic routers along that whole path, servers that are load balanced and distributed, many databases of different capabilities, security checks and firewalls, network redundancy, custom software for Denny's at different layers, boilerplate VoIP, network, accounting, and scheduling software. App development and distribution, UI and front-end development of the status and entry screens for the operator, cook, and hostess.

What else can HN think of? What other global tech did it take for me to get a cheeseburger from 4 blocks away?
Perhaps, you're looking for BeyondCorp style networks? https://research.google.com/pubs/pub45728.html

https://tailscale.com and https://cloudflare.com/cloudflare-one come to mind, though there are likely to be several implementations at this point.
Samsung phones have it in the camera, so I guess most Android users do have a barcode scanner built-in.
“What’s bigger Scotland or a toaster?” Show me an AI that can answer stuff like that
https://godbolt.org/z/d4838K

Doesn't happen, apparently.

edit: For a short while libc++ adopted mpark's variant visit, which AFAIK compiles down to switch case with some hand coding. AFAIK it had other problems so they rolled back to the constexpr array of function pointers.

https://github.com/mpark/variant
“The risk of not doing research on this outweighs the risk of doing this research”
I will look into it. Thanks.
Not that you wrote it, do you think the article means to say Notion has unseated Confluence? Do you agree? :)
> If you actually called them, then they lost money on your consumer Windows license

That's why if you have an OEM license for Windows (where the per-unit cost is more like $40/unit rather than the retail $100-$300) your first-line support comes from your OEM, not Microsoft.
Honestly, a shower in the morning, a brush and maybe some product and being reasonably healthy already puts you at a great advantage over others. It doesn't take two hours of Bateman level prep (unless you aim to supermodel levels), or a life dedicated to sports.
A gorilla who was brought up as a boy in an English village
Those are not really specific questions. But I will try my best to somehow provide useful information.

> 1. Energy efficiency of the transactions and the network

If by "transaction" you mean a single economic exchange between two agents, then the energy cost of a single transaction is impossible to measure. Many of the on-chain transactions in Bitcoin today are "batched" to reduce their total size thus saving on fees. Each of these batched on-chain transactions can easily represent dozens of individual economic exchanges. Lightning Network (LN) takes this even further with bi-directional payment channels now representing potentially tens of thousands of transactions over the lifetime of a single channel. It requires one on-chain Bitcoin transaction to "open" a bi-directional payment channel, and another transaction to "close" it. Closing is not strictly necessary and will be less so as infrastructure and tooling improves.

Bitcoin is not really one single network. It is a few different networks operating in their own niche with their own specific optimizations. Miners can operate as dumb hashing computers with no visibility or knowledge about the blockchain other than the next chunk of data to hash. Full-nodes are typically operated by the "users" that wish to carry on the mantra of "don't trust, verify"; value their personal privacy; or are a large commercial entity. The last estimates that I saw were about 10,000 publicly reachable full-nodes and another 100,000 private or non-reachable. There are also mobile wallets that can be custodial or "light clients". Then the Lightning Network (LN), which consists of public and private nodes, mobile and custodial apps, nodes backed by full-nodes and LN's version of light clients.

> 2. How democratic the process to mine new coins is.

Mining appears much more centralized than it is - due to the success of mining pools. Mining pool operators do not control all the hash power that congregates in their pool. Instead the owners of mining rigs/operators can point their rigs at the mining pool that offers them the best ROI. Of course sometimes other reasons override the profit motive but usually only temporarily - see the SegWit political / governance drama from a few years ago. Corporations (and governments) have already started investing in mining equipment in an effort to secure their own interests in the space. They will compete with each other here just as they have competed with each other over territory and natural resources for hundreds of years.

> 3. What steps are taken to manage frauds, speculations bubbles etc. to protect malicious actors from gaming the system.

Bitcoin is governed today by the same laws and rules as other systems. Fraud is fraud is fraud. Criminals, scammers, and fraudsters use banks and cash too. From the sound of it, you would prefer to err on the side of institutions and regulation. I disagree, and would prefer that individuals take personal responsibility for their own education and finances. The world is a messy place and there is no answer for 100% of the people 100% of the time.
AWS has a terms of service. They'd warned Parler for months about their lack of moderation [0]

"Amazon says. Amazon's filing included copies of emails it sent to Parler in mid-November (PDF, content warning for racial slurs) containing screenshots full of racist invective about Democrats, including former First Lady Michelle Obama, with a series of responses from other users to "kill 'em all.""

" Those posts call for, among other things: killing a specific transgender person; actively wishing for a race war and the murder of Black and Jewish people; and killing several activists and politicians such as Stacey Abrams, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.), and former President Barack Obama."

Their CEO was recently fired for apparently wanting to have stricter content moderation [1]

Parler isn't entitled to be their customer after violating AWS's term of service.

AWS had a dialogue with them over multiple months.

It's not equivalent to someone losing their Google account for no reason and having no recourse.

People trying to make Parler some martyr is so silly.
They could have hosted their platform co-located in a data centre in Alabama.
Or hosted it in a friendlier to their content country like Russia.

[0]https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2021/01/filing-amazon-wa...

[1] https://uk.pcmag.com/social-media/131526/parler-ceo-fired-ov...
It depends on whether you understand racism as a systemic phenomenon that disenfranchises people, or as one group of people actively disliking another.

Your statement rests on the latter understanding, but that's inadequate for South Africa. There has not been centuries of injustice meted out to white people in addition to name calling. Even unintentional prejudice now from white people ends up affecting black people in South Africa far worse than hatred that just stops at words.
I am very happy with this
https://gioorgi.com/2020/mail-server-checks/

It is a docker based email server setup very well done.