skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
In the UK we have something called the "small claims court". The maximum compensation you can claim at the small claims court is £5000, but the important thing is: even if you lose, the company you're suing can't claim their legal fees back. All you can lose is your court fee (somewhere from £35 to £150 depending on the claim amount).

The idea of the small claims court is that you don't use a lawyer, so there are no complicated forms to fill in, and if it goes to court you just present your evidence in front of a magistrate in plain English with no legal mumbo jumbo.

Starting a case in the small claims is usually a splendid way to force your way past the army of bots and AI customer service shields, and get your complaint seen by a real person. It usually gets things resolved very quickly. But not always... here's a good story:

Last year I was overcharged £6 by Opodo on the credit card surcharge for a flight booking. I spent two hours going round in circles with their Facebook Messenger automated customer service bot. There were no other contact methods given. So I took them to court, claiming:

Claim: £6.23

My time interacting with chat bot (2hr 22min) @ £100/hr: £236.67

My time preparing claim (1hr) @ £100/hr: £100.00

Court fee: £35

Total: £377.90

... which I think is extremely reasonable of me. They didn't file a defense, so I won the case by default. Even after winning the case, I still had no method of contacting them, and no payment was forthcoming, so I went to the next step which is to file for a warrant.

This cost an extra £95 but it included a bailiff visiting their office, who would be able to take goods to the value of my claim. Bring it on, I say! So I apply for my warrant and wait.

Nothing happens for 6 weeks (this is in the depths of the first lockdown so I wasn't surprised by the radio silence).

Then I get a call from a very helpful chap who tells me he's the bailiff. He says I probably shouldn't hold my breath waiting for this money because the registered office is just a plaque on the fall with no staff or office... and he has FIFTEEN warrants outstanding for Opodo.

The next step would be a warrant against Opodo's bank which would allow me to freeze their account... but there was no easy way to do this and would probably require a lot of paperwork. So I gave up. My belief in the UK criminal justice system shattered.

Then about a month later I got an email from Opodo:

"We are contacting you from Opodo after receiving the Judgement for Claimant. In order to proceed with your refund of £377,90, ..."

... and within a couple of weeks they had paid me in full! I'd highly recommend the small claims court - it takes literally five minutes to file a claim here... check out: https://www.moneyclaim.gov.uk/
This [0] is from Jan 2021.

[0]: https://lists.nongnu.org/archive/html/gpsd-dev/2021-01/msg00...
The energy consumption is ugly though. I could see a drift towards proof of stake such as Eth 2.0 to avoid that. Maybe individual investors don't care but the institutional investors the bulls are hoping for are going to be pressured by environmental groups.
Is overseeing cloud operations the new career path to CEO?
Excel to SQL – Bridging the Gap Between Business Analysts and Developers
The GUI elements should have nothing to do with storing and interchanging timestamps. What you display can query the browser timezone to make it look nice, then send it down converted, over.
IANAL but the judgement seems to saying, you can't just use prepned an actualy allegation of fraud with "It is my opinion" to claim it is opinion.

My argument isn't that, it's to challenge the idea that calling something a scam can ONLY mean I'm accusing them of fraud.

>First, the defence of honest opinion. The Claimant submits that the defence of honest opinion cannot succeed in circumstances were the words used convey an allegation of fraud.

The foundation of this argument is to challenge the assumption the words actually convey an allegation of Fraud.

It would get pretty deep into the evolution of language/multiple meanings and slang and probably isn't worth fighting, but I still think it's a valid (or at least interesting) defense.
I cannot imagine how it could be in Chromium. It's a service, not software.
Anyone care to explain the downvotes?
It's not quite so cut-and-dry. UNIX timestamps unfortunately don't solve the problems of time because they don't contain enough information.

Time is something that developers get wrong more often than any other type. Your time data requirements change as your use case for the time changes.

From https://github.com/kstenerud/compact-time/blob/master/compac...

Aside from issues of synchronization, leap seconds, data container limitations and such, it's important to choose the correct kind of time to store, and the right kind depends on what the purpose of recording the time is.

There are three main kinds of time:

*Absolute Time*

Absolute time is a time that is fixed relative to UTC (or relative to an offset from UTC). It is not affected by daylight savings time, nor will it ever change if an area's time zone changes for political reasons. Absolute time is best recorded in the UTC time zone, and is mostly useful for events in the past (because the time zone is now fixed at the time of the event, so it probably no longer matters what specific time zone was in effect).

*Fixed Time*

Fixed time is a time that is fixed to a particular place, and that place has a time zone associated with it (but the time zone might change for political reasons in the future,for example with daylight savings). If the venue changes, only the time zone data needs to be updated. An example would be an appointment in London this coming October 12th at 10:30.

*Floating Time*

Floating (or local) time is always relative to the time zone of the observer. If you travel and change time zones, floating time changes zones with you. If you and another observer are in different time zones and observe the same floating time value, the absolute times you calculate will be different. An example would be your 8:00 morning workout.

*When to Use Each Kind*

Use whichever kind of time most succinctly and completely handles your time needs. Don't depend on time zone information as a proxy for a location; that's depending on a side effect, which is always brittle. Always store location information separately if it's important.

Examples:

Recording an event: Absolute

Log entries: Absolute

An appointment: Fixed

Your daily schedule: Floating

Deadlines: Usually fixed time, but possibly absolute time.
Thanks for making it easier for new developers to find work. As we become more seasoned, I think it is easy to get focused on the difficulties of being a medium or senior-tenured developer and forget about the difficulties of getting started.

This is tangential to your post, but it is the first I am seeing Telegram and I want to ask why you chose it as the platform to contribute to. I just finished reading the Wikipedia page on it and of the two brothers that own it and I am intrigued. I was expecting to see Google or MS owned it, but it appears to be a free, open communication platform with no big data tech giants backing it. Forgive my skepticism, but what is the catch?
> Stripping a wealthy family from all their holdings

An Act of Parliament could just ascertain that the Windsors exempting each other from Inheritance tax was unlawful, and ask the new Republican Revenue & Tax office to assess 40% IHT on every historical generational transfer of assets.

Just redressing the historical injustices that the Windsors benefitted from would strangely make them much less rich.
Slightly offtopic, but how does a license affect the idea of this sort? If I wanted to use this, and I couldn't because of the quirky mars license, would I be allowed to write my own implementation?
Few years back I worked with someone to build an Android OCR app.

At the time there were not may apps out there and we partnered with a 3rd party service who did the OCR off the app so our quality of conversion (at the time) was close to state of the art from a mobile once people got comfortable with this method (which of course not everyone did).

We made some decent money as a side project from it but I also started to appreciate the sheer complexity of OCR.

We spent a lot of time fine tuning pre-processing before hitting the OCR engine (e.g. orientation, shading) small changes here made huge impact to performance. We also built various prompts to guide the user on how to take the photo to help. Managing expectations was something we were very conscious off and it was tough.

The unexpected use (but rewarding) use case was when we found people who were blind started to use the app to help with their daily lives - only a few but it was making a real impact to them so we priortized a few features to this segment knowing we were drifting away from maximizing revenue but we were cool with this as it was not a primary income source.

In the end we all moved to other things, more apps / services came on the market, google lens became a thing so we decided to sunset the product and did our best to manage customers through this process.

A rewarding experience overall - lots of lessons were learn that I have used elsewhere in my life since and ticked off' Build an app that made thousands of $' of my bucket list (which yea I should probably review!).
The thing that just happened is like a catastrophic chain-reaction collision in space. Now we will have to use guids for everything. Nothing has meaning.
Re: small claims court: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26087997
> set it to return a hardcoded generic set of "interests" for everyone

That wouldn't improve privacy over simply not supporting the protocol at all.
Human-decided events in the future are an obvious example. E.g. "every second Tuesday at 8:00" or "May 17, 2025, 8:00" shouldn't ever happen at 7 or 9, even if your software didn't have accurate DST information for that point available initially (which countries do change, sometimes with only a few weeks of warning!).
An exception being made for the event, perhaps with strong travel restrictions towards the event, seems within the realm of possibility.

For better or for worse, the dutch government has shown pretty big flexibility and a willingness to deviate from stated plans based on new information and public pressure. I would say there's at least a 20% chance the government would change rules to allow this to happen.
>The main argument against Ubuntu, and Linux in general, is that it doesn’t have enough driver support...

There's that. And there's also the "Designed by Committee" feel of much of the interface. Maybe it's not so noticeable to people coming from a Windows background. But, as a primarily Mac user; when using my couple of Linux boxes, I find the lack of attention to detail, or to making disparate parts of the interface behave consistently, makes the whole thing feel just that much more amateurish than it should be.
Show HN: Need your feedback on our donation page. Internet access for students
Hi,

We are building a nonprofit https://giveinternet.org/ a platform that lets anyone sponsor monthly internet fees and devices for underprivileged high-school students living in refugee camps and rural areas.

Please give me feedback if our donation page is clear/unclear? And which version makes more sense to you?

V1) https://prnt.sc/ymum98

or

V2) https://prnt.sc/yne6c2

What is unclear? Anything you would change?

Thanks
George
> Eventually you containerize the container and realize that only a single if is enough for everyone.

You either have a typo somewhere or are not being very clear. Either way, keep editing.
Ding ding ding, we got a winner. No, absolutely do not query the timezone once then "convert" (aka remove) the information. Timezones change all the time.
A solution that works in every browser and gives the user choice is hardly nonsense (also cookie law != GDPR). It's much, much better than a dominant ad company forcing through a solution that works in their browser and which users presumably can't opt out of.
You cannot convert a time string in the future to a timestamp. You must keep it as a string with timezone information until the time actually comes.
And then your application has to schedule a recurring weekly meeting happening at exactly 9:00 CST, and suddenly, you have to update your DB schema and all code instances everywhere to actually deal with the time zones. And then you realize you'd be better off if you were just using a sane time zone library from the start instead of pretending time zones don't exist.
3rd party !== 1st party.

Same site cookies aren't going anywhere for the foreseeable future, the vast majority of user session capability is built on the existence of cookies. 3rd party cookies only affect embedding of sites hosted on other domains, (mainly ads), which don't use cookies for user sessions but user tracking... or to use the ad industries euphemism "personalisation"
Americans' perceived risk of Covid-19 is lower than any time since October
I think there must be some demand in having like an OpenStreetMaps overlay for internet speeds.

I am in a position where my home in Canada has only Rogers cable Internet but the home across the small major street (1 lane each way without a divider) has fiber from the other duopoly provider Bell. I called Bell over the years and they just gave me the “we don’t have Internet in your area yet” even though their online lookup service via postal code said it did. Last year, I politely lost my temper and asked the customer service representative for an escalation since it had been 12 years that my family and I have been at this address so what is going on. I was put transferred twice while being put on hold each time and having to repeat my account each time. Eventually, I was transferred to someone in a department that actually had a reason, but it still required digging. Apparently, the builder of my family’s home here made a deal with Rogers to be the exclusive Internet provider.

I planned on calling the CRTC after (Canada’s FCC), but I got tired and I have been dealing with an unrelated medical issue.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Canadian_Radio-te...

There are websites like https://broadbandnow.com/California/San-Francisco that might have city-level and/or postal code level information, but I want street-level information. As I said before in different comments related to Internet speeds, I would assume the migration to remote work would make having this information easily accessible when making a home-buying or renting decision.
I doubt that they actively partner with rip off companies, but the way they run their platform strongly encourages them.

It seems that it's more important for Amazon to have the lowest prices rather than being a trusted reseller.

(It's so bad that I've stopped buying from Amazon if possible. I'm just too worried that I end up with a counterfeit product.)
If it is a service, Google will be sent all of my browsing history. That sounds like a very bad idea that hopefully will get shot down.
> I find it hard to believe any high profile organization would allow their domains to expire

Off the top of my head I remember both Microsoft (hotmail.co.uk) and Foursquare forgetting to renew their domains.
Finding a long term career.
No idea which one to pick for the moment.
> implement this API but set it to return a hardcoded generic set of "interests" for everyone

Or just let people select their own interests. There's quite a few (particularly news / media) sites I'd be fine in disabling an ad-blocker on if the ads I was served were in any way useful to me rather than bottom-of-the-barrel "one weird trick"s
Maybe the tileset could be distributed via torrent, like how they distribute the main dataset.
A nice tool, I've been wanting to build smth like this as well.

Is it web-based?

I am asking because I don't want to create an account just to test it out :P
Thank you for the kind words! This is great motivation to continue writing about this stuff : )
The problem highlighted here causes one of the few gripes I have with PostgreSQL, and its logging capabilities in particular: It seems to only support logging time in one single format, which does contain a timezone identifier - but using the potentially ambiguous shorthand name.

A few moons ago, that led me down a whole new rabbit hole of its own that is Golang's time zone parsing capabilities (https://github.com/golang/go/issues/9617), which, at least for Elastic's filebeat, seem to vary at runtime depending on whether or not you have a time zone database available...

Moral of the story: Please just conform to ISO-8601 everywhere.
> I cannot imagine anyone catching covid while traveling at 40 km/h over the ice.

The big issue isn't the skating itself, but the logistics at start/finish and the stempelposten with its congestion, as well as the 1 to 1.5 million spectators over a course of 200 km with their parties and alcohol consumption, and the logistics to get everyone there and back (full trains and busses).

> It’s basically impossible to get outside in the first place (unless you are standing mouth to mouth with someone).

Source?
> i've never gotten a counterfeit or seen what appear to be counterfeit products on .fr

That you know of. There's really no way to know. Counterfeit products could even be manufactured at the official facility, just with no (or even failed) quality control.

https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2019/01/count...
I think audio pro's who spend the time complaining about tools that are known, outside their sphere of influence, to work quite well - simply aren't professional enough to admit when they haven't learned enough to get similar results as others, who are .. and UbuntuStudio has had decades, literally, to become that kind of tool. It is used by pro's all over the world to supplant what would otherwise have been a significant financial investment.

It is free, after all, and yet out of the box comes replete with tons of stuff that you'd have to spend, literally, a week getting installed on MacOS/Windows, dealing with licenses, etc.

Zynthian: The latency is really not noticeable - I have a 12 track multi-timbral project running on it right now, it sounds just as rock solid and tight as the 3 rows of 19" rack synths/effects and the half-a-room full of other hardware synths in my studio. It is an extremely capable little box, and its built around existing Linux audio technology - so the point is, it serves as a pretty good reference for how good things can get. Jitter? Haven't noticed it.

Zynthian integrates with all the DAW's in my studio, including UA and MacOS systems, just fine. Its a dream to be able to set it up for remote control over rtpMIDI, for example, and not have to run any cables.

Github issues are a professional way to interact with developers. If I had 2c for every time I heard someone complain about the support they -didn't- receive from Apple because of bugs in Logic, or crashes that Steinberg/Yamaha refuse to fix, or updates to Ableton Live that resulted in unusable projects .. I'd have enough to afford a decent UAD system .. ;)

On the other hand, if you look at the closed issues in the Zynthian github, you'll see so many successful contributions from around the world, making the Zynthian a better product. This is the future.
> If you already know and use all these tools, you won't learn much from the book I'm afraid.

Hah! If I kept count of every time I heard that about Vim, and then went ahead and read the article and learned yet another new thing about Vim, well, I'd be getting pretty good at Vim...

Don't sell yourself short. Even just seeing how others use the same software you use can be eye opening. I'm going through the linked PDF now.

One question: what did you use to make the book itself? I noticed the links in the chapter don't work, at least in Firefox's PDF reader, so if that is unexpected it might be a point to improve.
In other words a shitty clickbait headline.

Some 3rd party says "Wouldn't it be great if Apple did this?" Absolutely zero connection to anything Apple has actually said, done or proposed
It is. Normally, a match expression can bind variables to values. In lexical scoping, these variables exist inside the match expression. In dynamic scoping they exist outside. The design mistake seems to be to assume that the patterns inside a match expression should be regular expressions, whereas pattern expressions should be a dedicated syntactic category.
Bad UX (for some definition of bad) may be subjective, but that doesn't mean money won't affect it.

Suppose we want to optimize user productivity. For any given UX, some users will feel they're more
productive with it, and some less. Finding a UX that maximizes the number of users who feel productive is going to help attract users to the product, and money can buy the design expertise needed to find that UX.

It might be the case that users only feel more productive with a given UX and aren't actually more productive with it. Even then, if a majority of potential users think that the UX is making it easier to accomplish their goals, a project will have an easier time attracting users.
I believe the best move (literally) I ever made was to migrate from GMT-3 to (mostly) UTC.
As a support engineer living in Dublin “IST” is the bane of my life.
"Nei twa kear nachtfroast wol de Hollanner der foar

Hy ropt om 't hurdst: 'de tocht der tochten, die gaat door'

Mar wy Friezen witte better

iis is samar ek wer wetter

En dus hâlde wy de kiezzen op elkoar"
Using GetRight to resume the download hopefully.
For a similar project run by RIPE check out https://atlas.ripe.net. Atlas is a terrible name because everything seems to be named Atlas nowadays, but it's a fitting name for a cool project.
Maybe they didn't update? It's "no support" after all...
In Europe that falls far short of the requirements of GDPR law for personal data.
I'd say the moral is that server side should always be in UTC.
> Trying to carry timezone information around is a mistake.

No.

If a human says a recurring meeting happens at 9 AM Pacific time and the following week they are in daylight saving time, it'll still happen at 9 AM local time. Preserving intent is crucial in this case.
Those popups are not only necessary for cookies but for any kind of tracking that requires consent, e.g. all tracking for purposes of advertisements. So if you do browser fingerprinting instead of setting cookies, you still need that popup.

For using FloC data, if the granularity is sufficiently coarse so that a person cannot be identified by it and no specially protected groups can be identified (i.e. sexual orientation, religion, minors, etc.), then presumably using FloC data won't need that popup. But that remains to be seen, I guess it will take a few years of discussions in court until this is settled.
There has been a lot of tries with other treatments, a lot. The most similar to this is Dexamethasone, for example https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23538131 7 months ago, and it was apparently useful.

People also tried with many antiviral drugs that are useful against flu and other virus, but IIRC none of them worked. The infamous Chloroquine/Hydroxychloroquine (+Zinc?). There are some studies about vitamin D that apparently is useful, and vitamin C that apparently is not useful. And all the fuzz about Chlorine Dioxide that makes no sense at all.
It begs the question seeing as they've written a bot to determine what's offensive why don't they hook it directly to the ad servers and auto disable ads on the offending pages only?