skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: How small can a social network get?
Okay, this may be a difficult question, but what's the _bare minimum_ disk size of a social network?

For clarity's sake, we're going to assume:
- text-based, like HN
- no inherent relationships among members, like most forums
- ~40,000 members, so robust but tiny
My understanding is that they were 30 blood clotting cases - not deaths. Am I correct?
I think the zoom level for Chrome is global per window at the least, it's definitely not per tab.
...and not many other extensions on Android. They killed most of them, leaving just 17 or so. Oh yes, and you can actually install the rest of them on nightly if you follow some weird procedure, just so that we all know there is actually no technical reason for it. Thank you Mozilla, appreciate it.
We're all eagerly awaiting the most recent "World survey: the assessment of incompetence and dullness of the para-governmental organizations" report you forgot to link to.
Nice bump in specs. Perhaps now they will announce the Zen3 Threadripper :-). As others have mentioned the TR can starve itself on memory accesses when doing a lot of cache invalidation (think pointer chasing through large datasets). If the EPYC improvement of having the chiplet CPUs all share L3 cache moved into the TR space (which one might assume it would[1]) then this could be a reason to upgrade.

[1] I may be wrong here but the TR looks to me like an EPYC chip with the mult-CPU stuff all pulled off. It would be interesting to have a decap with the chiplets identified.
Technoking of Tesla
>more than 10 times in last 2 hours

You could utilise the noprocrast option in your HN settings.
It's also very difficult to keep two separate Firefox installations from interfering with each other, so a lot of people like me switched to using Chrome for 90% of their browsing and kept an old version of Firefox for some use case they couldn't do without.
Actually, I believe it explictly includes this idea of consent. For example, they state that when you use a cart system you consent to the cookie because you knew it would be needed.

But my point was more about the basic idea that people know Facebook is data mining them and use it anyways therefore the idea that you haven't opt'd into it is a bit silly. I wasn't talking about the legal point of view.
I'm honestly not sure what I'm missing when avoiding Telegram's non-private conversations. There's no desktop client support (unlike Signal which works on a desktop mostly seamlessly, including group video) and no option at all to backup and sync conversations between devices (unlike Signal's rather limited options).

If I was alright with Telegram's non-E2EE conversations, I would prefer WhatsApp for its wider adoption among my contact base.
Actually it does, this is from one paragraph from the article (there are more examples, and probably more from the book that the article is a review of):

"Hawking became “as much a brand as he was a person,” says Seife. Billionaire entrepreneurs traded on his name, from Yuri Milner to Richard Branson and Jeffrey Epstein (whose vanity conference on gravity in the Virgin Islands the physicist attended in 2006). In exchange, Hawking was taken on zero-gravity flights and invited to glitzy events and launches. This hawking of Hawking continues today: for a mere £19,000 you can buy a gold watch inlaid, like some medieval jewel-encrusted reliquary bearing a shard of Christ’s cross, with wooden disks “taken from the desk at which Hawking contemplated the mysteries of the universe.”
It's funny to see this towards the top of the comments here. Feels like not that long ago that Telegram updates would be downvotes on HackerNews because "you should never trust an app that designed their own encryption protocol."
UK parliament to debate requiring verified ID to open a social media account
I agree to an extent. But I don’t think carbon-per-dollar captures the full picture. You speak of quality of life improvements but the economy is largely measured in consumption not quality of life. If maximizing quality of life per unit of carbon is your goal it presupposes that all economic productivity/consumption contributes equally to quality of life. I think there’s an argument that the hedonic treadmill makes this an incorrect assumption
They only have one server, iirc.
It is a huge pet peeve of mine that,

a. the status page update took as long as it did.

b. the status page still only claims that AAD is down. You're not "up" if a required dependency of yours is down, IMO, and most of the Azure services right now are severely degraded to the point of not being useful due to the AAD outage. Now, that would make your status page look bad, yes. (And I would clearly message on it that the other outages are fallout of AAD on that.)

c. I don't have any real expectation that we'll get a public PM about this. (And a PM must include sufficient information for me to understand what went wrong, and what's been done to prevent it going forward.)

I had been starting to wonder what sort of incident it would take for them to actually update the status page. I guess this is it. We've witnessed a number of outages in various services over the past few months, none of which made it to the status page. I pushed a support rep on the issue, and was told that they don't want to cause a panic.
After this event, they should switch to two servers in different DC.
This just allows you to post links to your Twitter, etc. I am curious if there is a service that pulls this data for you into a single stream of your online presence.
right, I'm talking about electronic transfer, mail you just need the address and who to write the check out to.
For sure! I'm an SF-based software engineer who's also on an improv team that did monthly performances in the Before Times.

There are three "big" improv theaters in SF which I know of: Endgames Improv in the Mission, Leela in SoMa, and BATS Improv in the Marina. The show you might've heard of is "Your F'd Up Relationship", which is put on by Endgames Improv's main house team on Fridays at 9 and 10:30. That's a great one to start with. Speaking as an improviser, those performers are especially strong, and the format helps them be consistently funny.

You can also take classes from those theaters, or from a couple other spots, like Thunderbolt Comedy (who actually have a really neat online platform called Pineappl: a web app that's designed specifically for improv, so that performers can simulate being on stage, maintain consistent relative positions to each other, set custom backgrounds, etc. without wrangling any of the messy Zoom stuff like covering up your camera when you're "offscreen".)

Unfortunately the city's comedy scene has taken a massive hit due to the pandemic. I have to imagine that being locked in a crowded room with 50 strangers all laughing is just about the last thing that the city is going to allow to reopen. It seems like Endgames is in financial trouble, since they've put one of their theaters up for rent and the other one is running GoFundMe's. To me, watching Zoom improv really just isn't the same -- really, so much of the improv experience is sharing it with an audience. I really do hope the theaters survive the pandemic so we can have in person shows again when it's safe!
Maybe you are right, and Linux desktop improved probably a lot in the last 10 years, I was just very frustrated because I bought a high-end gaming laptop last year with Windows 10, and the system slowed down all the time (for example I had to wait seconds for the start menu after pressing the Windows button).

With the new Macbook Pro everything is just instant (I love the instant wake-up, the instant log-in with the fingerprint sensor...not sure how the Linux desktop compares). I remember how much effort Microsoft put in these things in the old days.
I know I'm being repetitive of points already made by prior posters, but the logical fallacy of this article is so egregious that I can't help but post it again.

The opening paragraph of this article:

"From the onset, we have chosen to use one of Wall Street's measures of a better CEO – namely, market cap. In other words, by this measure, CEOs that create the most value are the best CEOs. Sure, there are other measures perhaps more virtuous; but market capital is well-known, generally reliable, and historically trended. So, let’s just roll with it as our measure of “better CEOs” as we have lots to discuss.

An objective review of the data leads to the conclusion: top companies are increasingly founded and managed by software engineers."

The first 100 words in this paragraph and the "objective conclusion" drawn is all you need to read to know the remaining 7000+ words are completely logically flawed. It's like making the assertion "the best restaurants in the world serve the most meals, so an objective review of the data leads to the conclusion that fast food restaurants have the best chefs."
In other news, Safari in Big Sur is also engaging in this kind of egregious vertical space wasting [0]. The toolbar becomes taller, with no way to customize.

This is not a Firefox problem. This is an industry-wide UI/UX problem.

[0] https://www.dropbox.com/s/tqz1bn20pu9j4v3/big%20sur%20safari...
it's per subdomain i think.
Better technology to capture nuance in performance, but also better acting methods such as the American schools of Stanislavski's method as well as the Meisner Technique. These new techniques brought a richer psychological dimension to acting. Also, we don't have many very early films due to the combustible nature of silver nitrate, so more and ultimately "better" films survive from later in cinema history.
Found my current remote job on Indeed.
>> Most sites don't work as well
>Citation definitely needed.

Cite me. Impossible to pay my elec bill w/o chrome on my country's biggest energy provider.

Silent errors on many sites.

FF-esr on Debian
Affecting Teams, Azdo, and likely more services.

It turned the whole afternoon into learning time at our company. Thankfully our Okta integration goes through our on prem AD servers and not purely AAD. Otherwise I wouldn't be able to get to learning resources which authenticate through AD!
Ask HN: How did you spend your time while HN was down?
"What we know is 17 million people have received the vaccine and 37 people have developed these blood clots. That corresponds to .0002% of actually anybody that has been vaccinated getting a blood clot,"
Hm, they might.

Funny thing is I had been using the address bar as search bar (removing the search bar using customization) even since before it was really supported (it just happened to work, somewhat, unreliable).

But I still hope they wouldn't do so as there are clearly situations where a combined bar just doesn't work well at all (like searching a URL or domain name in your search engine).

And if I wouldn't be using mostly a laptop and 1080p24" monitor my setup might have been different.
Will one of these make grayed out comments easier to read? I often find it very hard to read those even when I intend to, which I feel like is a design flaw. It would be better if there was a toggle button to let me read a specific comment with normal coloring.
New menu? Ugh.

I think people underestimate that Americans have a hunger for homogeneity when they go out for fast food. Everywhere in the continental United States, a hamburger from McDonald's tastes the same. If I find a few things I like from a restaurant, that's what I am going there for. If I want to be surprised, I will go somewhere new.
Asymmetric Opportunities and the Cult of Optionality
Are you using a high dpi monitor but not using > 100% display scaling in your OS or something? It's roughly the same size as most other sites for me.

(And pretty much all browsers have a zoom function for exactly this, it feels like a totally separate frontend would be more hassle to use than just ctrl + scroll wheel once)
Having two servers is a lot more than 2x as complicated and expensive as having 1 server.
Reddit Is Having Problems
"Ultimately, NFTs prove that society respects artists." Or they prove that people will gamble with all kind of things?
Is this related to the Northern Ireland protocol?

https://edition.cnn.com/2021/03/15/europe/eu-uk-brexit-grace...
Thailand, South Africa, DRC
There is such a discursive wall around the vaccines, there is no quarter for any idea that one of the vaccines could have risks that should give anyone pause. Covid will kill you, vaccines will save you, end of story.
Founder of ConvertKit Comments on Gumroad Fundraise
> This may also be partly related to Qt's security backports only existing on commercial LTS branches and not the public LGPL branches.

The 5.15 LTS branch for QtWebEngine is still public:
https://code.qt.io/cgit/qt/qtwebengine.git/log/?h=5.15.3
https://code.qt.io/cgit/qt/qtwebengine.git/log/?h=5.15

The 5.12 LTS (supported until the end of the year) also is public, for all of Qt.

Debian/Ubuntu just don't seem to care enough about security issues in QtWebEngine to keep it updated (it can be combined with an older version of Qt itself, so that wouldn't be an issue, at least in theory).
I'm not sure if this is still a thing, but at one point you could open up a JS console on cookie clicker and run game.ruinTheFun() to unlock everything. :)
LOL, same. In fact, every site I visit often is one char + enter in the browser. With the exception of W, being east of the Mississippi every station starts with W.

That got me to thinking about 'first letter advantages.' If a site has a first letter not currently in use, I'm much more likely to visit it more often(mostly out of boredom, sure).

V and X are still available if anyone is wondering. Zillow got Z!
I suspect there's a kind of selection bias in a discussion like this. People who care about this feature are motivated to comment. People who don't care aren't.

Interface variations have a cost as a complexity multiplier, adding another variation to consider and test when making improvements and testing.
Well, I did say "about 37% if you consider .gz as baseline", but I agree that it could have been worded better.

The problem is what you are measuring. If you have to compress a 100MB file, and algorithm A/B/C/D compress it to 10/9/1/0.9MB, respectively, then we can argue that "B is 10% better than A" (because the file is 10% smaller) and also "D is 10% better than C" (same).

However, moving from A to B saves us 1MB for this file. Moving from C to D only saves us 0.1MB. So depending on how you look at it, you could also argue that the difference between C and D is really only 0.1% (of the original file size). It may not be what you want (for a particular situation), but it's not wrong.
This is really dangerous, and it really risks being the literal spanner in the works for the already compromised EU vaccine program.

I find really likely that, no matter the result of the EMA's investigation, the already pretty skeptic population of certain countries will outright refuse being inoculated with the AZ jab from now on, making the goal of vaccinating everyone in the EU before summer absolutely impossible to reach.
I am using it, and I always hated gratuitous redesigns or feature cuts. It doesn't even seem to be the kind of feature that requires enormous attention to maintain, on the other hand though regular browser users stick with it for a long time and it can take some of it or some power user posts about "that great feature I've been using and you should too" for it to become popular and later mainstream. I don't see how a fat bar isn't a downgrade and I sure hope it is not some kind of hamfisted attempt to differentiate Firefox from it's competition that puts content first by reducing UI around it.
I didn't notice unfortunately due to the Azure outage blowing everything up :(
I played Universal Paperclips, and converted a HectoVerse (100 Universes) to paperclips.

Long covid sucks.
Except UK, Austria etc
You might be interested in the qute-lastpass userscript: https://github.com/qutebrowser/qutebrowser/blob/master/misc/...
California Rethinks Single Family Homes to Tackle High Housing Costs
Do the code generators create efficient relational queries? I don't know about everyone else but my production data is highly relational.
Yep - in the past I've done "special orders" for not-publicly-advertised CPU configs from our hardware vendor to get low core count, high-clock servers for products like Oracle DB.
I think algorithmically detecting paid stickers on upload can work. I needed to detect duplicate images for a pet project once and I've got satisfying results out of using perceptual image hashing. Building up a database of hashes for existing files takes time, but after that looking up an image to see if it's in the database is fast, and it handles some basic color transforms, as well as minor cropping.

I'm not sure whether this particular approach is feasible at the scale of Telegram. But I believe this arrangement can be a good income source without upsetting users the way ads might.
Dupe of https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26467045
> ... and has a strong commitment to diversity.

Experience has shown that comedy and "diversity efforts" are negatively correlated
what would need to change if someone forked it beside name and logo
"I'd like to buy a drill."

"Here you go!"

"This is... A board with a hole in it? I want a drill."

"This is better for regular people: the hole already exists, you can screw things right to it."

"Yes, but I want to drill several holes in my wall. I don't want a brand new board with a single hole, I want a drill to make holes."

"Most people, when they say they want a drill, really actually mean they want a hole. So we call these hole-boards drills now."

"But it's not what it means. I want an actual drill."

"Ugh, why all the gatekeeping, it's irrelevant, just buy this 'drill.'"
I don't think your metaphor is in any way accurate, I think it is disingenious and an attempt to disempower the individual.

It's more like both my spouse and I and my kids are each over-spending on a daily basis, and I tell them that we all have to cut our spending, and start doing it first, leading by example, and not buying two lattes per day.

I'm not picking pennies in the parking lot, I'm not spending dollars on things, literally! I am amazed at the level of inaccuracy in your metaphor, thank you for that.
We didn’t when we started with ozone. There were not the full suite of non-ozone-depleting alternatives to CFCs when people were starting to draft legislation. Additionally, we absolutely DO have the technology to make carbon neutral cement. In fact, we can make carbon negative cement if we store the CO2 emitted during the calcining step (as the cement itself will reabsorb CO2 from the atmosphere over its lifetime). Secondly, on Mars there isn’t much carbonates anyway so you’d use alternatives like polymers or elemental sulfur (this is easier than it sounds) as the binder.

The fact that you don’t think we have the tech (which is different from deploying the tech broadly, which no one did for CFC alternatives, either, until there was policy pressure to do so) is exactly the problem I’m referring to: the engineers and technologists proposing to settle Mars actually KNOW of the technology needed to operate completely carbon free. It’s ironically the environmental activists who lack the knowledge of the necessary technology and therefore propose we have to not have any children around and abandon any pretense to luxury or comfort in order to solve climate change.
Universal Paperclips is the cure for all other clicker games.

Once you've played a fair and truly exponential clicker through a few times you can't tolerate the forced linearity of a pay-to-win clicker app.
oh indeed it is, wow that's subtle, always escaped me where the focused setting applied. In that case yah probably a bug.
Like flatbed scanners.

Most are still USB 2, and the resolution is still 600 X 600 (like it was ten years ago). I have an old HP that I got a decade ago, that basically still has the same specs as their current flagship.
Sounds fun. Best of luck.
No I'm not. The font-size for most text on the site is 10pt and 9pt.

Zoom doesn't fix line lengths of 1500 characters and terrible color contrast.

The link to the site guidelines is 7pt with a contrast that fails WCAG 2.0. No wonder no one reads them.
Policing the Police by scraping court data – *An Update
About 8 months ago, I posted this (https://old.reddit.com/r/privacy/comments/gr11aw/i_think_i_accidentally_started_a_movement/), the story of how a post I wrote about utilizing county level police data to "police the police."

The idea quickly evolved into a real goal, to make good on the promise of free and open policing data. By freeing policing data from antiquated and difficult to access county data systems, and compiling that data in a rigorous way, we could create a valuable new tool to level the playing field and help provide community oversight of police behavior and activity.

In the 9 months since the first post, something amazing has happened.
The idea turned into something real. The Police Data Accessibility Project (https://PDAP.io).

A core group of highly committed and passionate folks have completed the necessary organizational steps enable us to realistically accomplish the monumental data collection task ahead of us.

Let me tell you a bit about what the team has accomplished in these 9 months.

- Established the community and identified volunteer leaders who were willing and able to assume consistent responsibility.

- Gained a pro-bono law firm to assist us in navigating the legal waters. Arnold + Porter is our pro-bono law firm.
Arnold + Porter helped us to establish as a legal entity and apply for 501c3 status

- We've carefully defined our goals and set a clear roadmap for the future (Slides 7-14 in the deck linked on the site)

So now, I'm asking for help, because scraping, cleaning, and validating 18,000 police departments is no easy task.

The first is to join us and help the team. Those with scraping experience are especially needed.

The second is to either donate, or help us spread the message by sharing this post, liking it, or tweeting about it.

Police data accessibility is possible, and we are going to make it happen.. Thank you all so much
On Win10 with default settings, fonts on most sites are totally comfortable to me.

HN is readable - just - but it's definitely on the small side.

The complete lack of some sort of horizontal constraint doesn't help either. 200 character lines are no bueno for reading.
Even if these deaths are in any way related to the AZ vaccine, it is still VASTLY less dangerous than risking getting the virus itself, which has a clear and well known risk of ending in the ICU, fighting for your life.
I noticed a lot of hand-waving in "Section 11: Parallelism can be used to speed up garbage collection". Clearly, the authors did not have much experience with concurrency when this paper was written.
Well of course. He was attacking Brazil when the US is a far far far worse polluter, so since it wasn't a good-faith debate in the first place, I felt a fallacy or two couldn't make things any worse.
Sure. How about 441-pages long US counterpart?

https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/GPO-STYLEMANUAL-2016/pdf...
Reddit Degraded Performance
I'm using two different profiles at work simultaneously with the Firefox Developer Edition. When Firefox updates in the background, sometimes new tabs just don't work anymore and keep loading indefinitely.

But I cut Mozilla some slack for it since this is a pretty unusual setup and the Developer Edition is updating quite a lot compared to the release branch and it doesn't happen all the time.
Now halted in Germany, France, Italy, Spain, Ireland, Thailand, the Netherlands, Norway, Iceland, Congo and Bulgaria.

Meanwhile Trudeau has the gall to assure the AstraZeneca vaccine is "safe and effective": https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/trudeau-astrazeneca-safe-1....
Elvish knots as seen in The Lord of the Rings, which are secure but auto-open when the user needs them to...