skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It means that Microsoft are giving money in exchange for shares of Nuance instead of giving Microsoft Stock in exchange for Nuance Stock.
> IMHO, we should just say the hell with it, tax advertising revenue, and fund journalism as a public good.

What about the independent journalists and outlets that rely on said advertising revenue? Or the more mainstream ones that do likewise?

Seems like this may make it worse for those, unless you've got a way this can only affect ad network providers rather than those utilising their services.
I've also seen code written as:

_ = !isDefined(user) && throw new Error("User must be defined.");
_ = !isString(user.firstName) && throw new Error("User's first name must be a string");

But I while it is concise, I can also understand why people prefer regular if statements.

Doesn't seem to be valid JS, can't remember where I got it from
The quote from Nilay Patel's Vox article hits on one of my pet peeves.

> Nilay Patel wrote in Vox:

> "Taylor makes a nice little argument in favor of paying for music. 'Music is art,' she says, 'and art is important and rare. Important, rare things are valuable. Valuable things should be paid for.'

> This is an impressively-constructed syllogism. It is also deeply, deeply wrong.... On the internet, there’s no scarcity: there’s an endless amount of everything available to everyone.

How does such an obvious fallacy command such purchase among smart people? Swift is talking about "music" as an original work. Patel responds with an irrelevant point about digital copies of music. Obviously these are two different things! If you tell your mom "I made a song" she will be quite unimpressed if what you actually mean is "I made a digital copy of a song." A book or a song or a movie is more than the bits that make up any individual copy of it.

There is a like-with-like comparison in there, but it actually hurts Patel's argument. There is no scarcity of music on the Internet--not referring to digital copies, but because the Internet has made it trivial to create and widely distribute original music (often for free). If consumers were unwilling to pay much for Swift's music because of the vast quantity of alternatives available on the Internet, Patel would indeed have a point. But consumers still want Swift's music, not other peoples' music. Even in the face of huge amounts of free alternatives, consumers still want Swift's music. That only proves Swift's point!
Indeed. RMS has discussed the Epstein case in his notes muliple times before Selam G.'s fabricated hit piece, e.g., from April 2019 [1]

> I think the right term for a person such as Epstein is "serial rapist".

[1]: https://www.stallman.org/archives/2019-jan-apr.html#25_April...
Thanks for posting these.

I was out of the loop on this and tracking down the reporting to which RMS is replying was proving more difficult than expected.
No, it is fair competition because in both cases you paid money for the product, as I am clearly stating in the original comment.

In one case it just also happens to be impossible to avoid being further monetized via ads and tracking.

This, to me, is unacceptable for paid software, as essentially amounts to license fee + adware model.
+ Whoa, those aren't thumbnails - they are actually interactive site widgets? Cool, even though I don't really understand the underlying mental model; why would I want to interact with miniature versions of sites (other than it's cool, of course)?

+ App feels super fast. The site widgets were rendered instantaneously.

+ Yay dark mode by default.

+ I like the overall design. Feels very native to Chrome/Firefox with auto dark mode and styling in general.

- I don't get the purpose of the software. Is Pad a cloud based bookmark manager with interactive site widgets? Where's the "keeping tabs" portion of the app other than it visually organizes the sites using the widgets?

- I wanted to add a new site but hit the New Pad button - several times. Maybe it's the unfamiliarity of the term 'pad' or that I didn't expect that there are two levels of organization (pads -> sites). Maybe it's just me.
Oh wow. The Dragon headset is a very strange product space. It is used by non-tech savvy doctors to avoid having to type into the EMR.
if we believe their press releases, they seem like they've been in the lead for the last 10 years[1].

they had one of their very first demonstrations a year ago[2].

it's promising as heck. and I dont mind that it's taking a while. but it is also an area I have, after the many years, learned to keep tempered expectations on.

[1] https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2010/07/the-future-of-electr...

[2] https://www.servethehome.com/hands-on-with-the-intel-co-pack...
Unfortunately that tends to print the object with collapsed values, requiring you to expand the object to actually see any of the values.
Does it do anyone any favours by pretending that these countries are not "poor, small, and non-western"? I suppose you can replace "poor" with "developing", but it's a fine balancing act between unfaithful stereotyping and patronizing epithets.
Ask HN: What App Referral tool does your startup use?
I need some advice on fast & easy to use App Referral Tools to build powerful referral campaigns.
thank you. hadn't seen that before
Yeah, but that's Firefox and Edge fighting over scraps while Chrome, which has more than four times the market share of both of them combined (67% vs. 8% each), is still eating their lunch...
I mean you could easily weight it to ensure Pokémon and Big Data come up the same amount even with 800 Pokémon
RMS really stays behind what he says.

I'm very glad he is around!
Potentially yes, but also consider that a human is 50+% water by weight.
I wish we could have easier/cheaper ways to build keyboards like that could function with the emulation. A Symbolics without circle, square and triangle keys is not a Symbolics
A wave of sound is a wave of pressure — i.e. density. Sound waves are one-dimensional. You can have a material one atom thick in a vacuum, and it’ll transmit sound just fine, as long as that material has some elasticity to it.

Light waves, on the other hand, are two- [linearly-polarized] or three- [circularly-polarized] -dimensional. They’re heading in one direction, and also wiggling side-to-side as they go.

If light didn’t have a “thickness” — that is, if light could “sneak through” gaps narrower than its “diameter” — then 1. “Optical” fibre would be capable of acting as a waveguide for all frequencies, not just optical ones; and 2. the Faraday cage around a microwave wouldn’t prevent the microwaves from escaping.

(You might think we’d also get universal antennas out of that, but no, antennas are a quantum thing—it’s not about squeezing through a gap, but about exciting an AC electric field in the material, so letting the whole wavelength hit the antenna actually causes the induced field to destructively interfere with itself. Think of an antenna as absorbing the wave “head-on”, rather than “side-on.” Your antenna needs to catch half the wave — node to anode to node — to get the highest-power signal out. But you don’t miss the wave entirely if you catch less. You just get a less powerful signal — it’s still possible to do useful work [like power an optical receiver, or decode an AM radio signal] with just a 1/Nth slice of each cycle of the wave.)
Cigarnettes
I would say it has progressed compared to 10 years ago. Speech technology in general to. I remember when YouTube auto captions didn’t even hit close to what was being said we now they’re way more usable.
Dismissing someone's feelings and continuing to publicly shame and argue with them in a passive-aggressive to aggressive behavior is extremely unprofessional, immature, and very toxic. Doing something like this inside of a company with a coworker or business associate would likely get you fired.

You might want to consider counseling.
Didn't Minsky rejected her proposal to have sex?
Especially now that we know Einstein was responsible for the discovery of basically nothing. Not only did he stand on the shoulders of giants, but he essentially lifted much of his special theory of relativity from the thoughts and musings of Ernst Mach, amongst other earlier actual geniuses. Once you learn to appreciate these facts, the lore of Einstein fades, and Einstein becomes something the charlatan who traveled from here to there talking with important people, and playing science politics.

Pertaining the "atom bomb", Oppenheimer was instrumental in managing the Manhattan project... Einstein was sent a letter that described, at a high-level, what was going to be worked on, asking whether it seemed legit; he replied, essentially saying, "yeah that should work".

Einstein's only contribution to science was the photoelectric effect, which also leaned on the prior efforts of Alexandre Becquerel, et al.
I think that's an effect rather than the cause.

My guess is that Apple management doesn't see voice assistants as the "next big thing" to differentiate themselves from the competition. I think VR/AR is where they are focusing and Siri is on life support.
> And reading the article it explicitly says they will only show users this feature if edge is their default browser.

That’s not what it says. It says "even when Microsoft Edge is the default browser".
Afaik what the world really needs is a vim like editor with sane defaults, partly overhauled shortcuts that are closer to other tools and some common scenarios solved in less steps (e.g. exiting the editor, multicursor stuff, ...)
Its been weirdly variable- my Apple Watch and the HomePod mini seem much more accurate than my iPhone.
I really have no idea why anyone wants to keep RMS in charge of the FSF based on his work product alone. What has the FSF been doing other than slowly sliding into irrelevancy over the past 20 years?
I think a lot of big acquisitions make "sense," given the current market.

The most successful companies have lots of cash, high share prices, and amazing cash cows. They could borrow for (almost) free, so resources are practically unlimited. Their R&D is already well funded. Most of their big, growth oriented endeavours are not cash-constrained. There are usually no factories to build or production to scale up.

Google tried "20% time." They tried "let many flowers grow." Those things seemed ambitious at 2007-scale. In 2021 terms... new flowers need to be S&P 500 companies to represent growth, instead of just clutter. "Meaningful growth," for Alphabet, is a big number.

How else does a MSFT, Google or (especially) FB put $20bn to work? Acquiring "just works."

Of course, there are in-house alternatives. Waymo is an in-house investment by Alphabet that's bigger than this Nuance acquisition... especially if you consider the $bns Waymo will continue to need until some unknown future date. Self driving is looking more hopeful (certainly to investors) than it was when waymo started.... but waymo is still a dubious investment.

Consider that Google could have bought any car company, for about as much as waymo will cost eventually. Car companies have loans, so you could quibble the math... but details.

Acquiring is easy. The path of least resistance wins >50% of the time. We have that dynamic here, both in the human/managers sense and in the arbitrage-like incentives in the market currently.
Yes - it has played a major role in Australia’s elimination strategy - the key difference has been the Australian government fines individuals (starts at $1600 spot fine) and businesses (up to $100k per non-compliant location) heavily for non-compliance - which hasn’t happened in any other country that I’m aware of...
I'll start, in no particular order.

* better battery life (supposedly up to 40 hours on a single AA, but I haven't benchmarked this independently)

* consequentially from the above, your phone's battery is saved for when it _really_ matters, like when you are in the middle of nowhere and need a map to navigate the environment

* a more tactile experience compared to a touchscreen

* works offline, and even without mobile signal coverage

* no adverts

* no interruptions, constant bings and bops and notifications from other apps

* no need for updates - it's already a "dead" platform and was never updatable in the first place

* can still download music from a PC, albeit it takes longer and is slightly harder than loading something onto a micro SD card

* no need to fight stubborn mobile UIs, just the buttons to play, stop and control playback

* some players come with a dedicated remote controller, which is also much more convenient than unlocking your screen to change tracks

* you can focus on just the music or audiobook that you took with you, no temptation to shop for new listens while out and about and no temptation to doomscroll your multimedia feed of choice (Instagram, YouTube, Spotify)

* content never "disappears" from your streaming service until you erase it on purpose

* as long as the laser module works, this device will be usable into ~eternity if your model runs on AA batteries. Your battery life never degrades, and your device will never be artificially obsolesced by its own battery disintegrating.

* the discs are very light and quite small, so it's still possible to get a couple of albums or several hours of speech-quality audio to choose from on the go.

* and of course retro coolness

That said, there are downsides:

* you could mostly get all of these advantages with a single mid-end MP3 player

* cables are a pain once one experiences the wireless life

* download from a PC is a thing, but it's undeniably burdensome because of how long it takes, and until Web MiniDisc, because of the antiquated formats and runtime environments supported by the official software.

* shock-proof, not so much. I don't recommend this for heavy workout in a gym

* the proprietary nature of everything chafes. Downloading music back from the player is impossible, remotes are proprietary, DRM is still a problem when the rest of the world moved on.

All in all, it's an aesthetic choice. An art project, if you will. It's not for everything, but in some ways, on certain days, the coolness makes up for it.
> parameter type

laughs in JS
Short and to the point. I like an apology that doesn't read like an essay. The more they ramble on the less genuine they feel.

(I still don't believe this apology should have been considered necessary though)
I think they are not social anymore, having been overrun with politics and ads. However they are still a network. There is a network effect (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Network_effect) that makes it valuable to the participants and advertisers alike, which is the large number of users. It’s just that the network’s value went from being driven by positive actions (sharing photos with friends) to something negative - which is preventing others’ political views or business competitors from winning by influencing the network. All sides feel like they have to participate because others participate and they’ll be irrelevant otherwise. In that sense it’s more like a war zone.
I don't recall it ever having been proven that Minksy had sex with anyone. I'm obviously open to being corrected on this.
Hahaha Dunning Kruger or variant thereof at its finest
Look at a game of Asteroids: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_TKiRvGfw3Q

It takes place on what is topologically a torus, because the top of the screen and the bottom are the same, and the left and right are the same. From the point of view of the player, the space never ends; if there were no asteroids and you simply went left forever, you'd never find the end. Nevertheless, the X and Y dimensions are finite, because that is the shape of space in that game. But note you could grow or shrink those all you like, and all you'd change is the size of the playspace; nothing else about such shrinking or growing would be impossible or fundamentally change anything.

There is more than one way to hook such structures together: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jj5lDmaQTuo&t=0s In that video the author plays with discrete cases of topologies like the asteroids case where otherwise flat space is just glued together in various configurations but there are continuous analogues to at least most, if not all of them, along with options on how to handle the curvature.

The video also deal with macroscopically-sized things, using a model of Earth as its example, but if you can imagine it being shrunk down arbitrarily small in one dimension you can get an idea. Obviously, if you shrink one of them down arbitrarily small you would get a "3D space" that is effectively only 2D, because one of the numbers would seem to be irrelevant since it is always very small. In the real universe this would be some set of dimensions beyond the usual 3 spatial dimensions.
Bintray intentionally offline for 8 hours
It's good that he acknowledges his comments hurt people. It's good that he is pledging to do better. I think as far as apologies go, this one ticks most of the boxes as far as admitting personal fault and not using weasel-words to blame the victims or apologize "if you were offended."

With all that said, I don't think this is going to bring any of the lost sponsors back.
I think in monopoly playbook 2.0, it’s not a monopoly if it’s free. And it’s not a monopoly if your public relations are terrific.
> almost identically

But not identically. I can get a very nice print of the Mona Lisa, with very accurate colours. But it isn't at all an exact copy of the original. And I defy you to produce anything like a near-exact copy of a specific slice of bread.
House renovations can be incredibly stressful, which this may qualify.

As mentioned in the article, at least one individual spent thousands in preparation for his roof.

The time and effort of getting the initial work done and now the revelation of a double digit percent price increase, and a low key threat of further delays unless you sign right now?

Sounds quite distressful.

In fact, it is by design stressful, so as to pressure the consumer to accept the new contract.
I'd be surprised if we saw retractions, especially retractions reaching everyone who saw the original claims, but maybe Vice could write a piece attacking the daily beast article while the daily beast writes an article attacking the Vice one.
A believer in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Realism_(international_relatio... would say prosecution for war crimes is merely a side-effect of being on the losing side.

At least if you ask whether Xi Jinping will be put on trial - or whether the outcome of Saddam Hussein's trial was ever in doubt.
Generally there's a few lines script that disable a lot of stuff like onedrive, app stores, blabla and that's almost all I did when it comes to those things

I did it after fresh instal and didn't have to do anything for years.

I agree that sometimes there's that privacy settings screen once a few months
Are these slot cars? I don't see the "slot" and the implication that there is 0 control isn't my experience with them.

EDIT: Yeah this is "Mini 4WD" and not exactly "slotcars."

Still a very cool article/video though!
Very nice. I didn't know. Thks.
This is a very interesting post, thanks for sharing. If you come across anything definitely give us an update
> Is there still evidence for this type of contact tracing?

I'm not sure what you mean by "this type". What you've quoted is how contact tracing works. It does work, see for example
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-03518-4
I am happy about that. We go to stop this track and trace New World Order madness.

On a lighter note here is two rats arguing about wheather they should get the convid nonvax jib jab http://picc.io/p/tq2sFHU.png
The Creator Economy Needs Fatter Tails
This sentiment is a curiosity to me. I don't remember any public advisories claiming that a 15 day lockdown would be sufficient to stop the spread.

When I think about it, such a claim doesn't even make sense, because for it to be true, all transmission would have to be stopped, instantaneously and completely. But that would be impossible, as there would still be transmission within bubbles, and transmission through all the essential work that continued where social distancing was not an option. That would reset the clock, and since the infectious period was thought to be about 15 days, such a statement could not possibly have been true.

Does anyone have any examples of public health advisories claiming that the lockdown would only last 15 days?
In 1943 Philip was serving in navy fighting Nazis. Not sure why you are linking him to a famine over which he had zero influence.
The old FOSS model is not compatible with the kind of people who are being drawn into it these days. It worked decently with thick-skinned, more-or-less autistic men who communicated relatively infrequently over email and had an understanding that they weren't beholden to anybody.

Twitter and Github are like cranking the volume knob from 1 to 11, and those kinds of arguments are simultaneously very low signal, and directly activate people's fight-or-flight responses. There seems to be a lot of instances lately of people that just can't unplug from the rage-machine in a healthy way, without flipping the table and doing an Eric Cartman.
How much do you trust the independence of the Washington Post, now that it's owned and backed by Jeff Bezos? They clearly have freedom from market forces and political pressures now.
The constant mischaracterization of what he really meant, by reposting the same misquotes of his emails, was really shameful for a lot of 'journalists'.
You might like this link a bit better: https://www.rhino3d.com/6/new/grasshopper/

For context, "Grasshopper" has been a nodes-and-boxes plugin for Rhino 3D—a 3D modeling app—for many years. By "new" they mean that it has been promoted from plugin to just part of Rhino itself. But if you look for people doing things with Grasshopper, you'll find a ton of examples.
Speech recognition goes way beyond digital assistants. Plain old transcription is super useful, especially in terms of accessibility. I was voice coding for a while because of RSI and even as immature as the tech is, it saved my ass.
I can second that. MDs created from lossless FLACs are very clean.
It took a lot of resistance but I switched to Fedora after years of hating desktop Linux because this kind of BS is even worse to me.
Acquiring is a simple way to show the Board/Shareholders that you're "doing something" - but I suspect it's rarely very successful in the long run. Unless you acquire a business that ACTUALLY provides some synergies you're just on the path of transitioning from a successful company to a poor imitation of Berkshire Hathaway.

It does have the advantage that you can "spin off" your acquisitions once they fail to do anything interesting (though this is more commonly seen in sunset industries/dying companies (see AOL, Compaq, etc)).
I guess the one advantage is, that you learned Rust really well while creating the editor?

Oh and of course if the editor interacts with anything web, less exploitable buffer overflows and other memory errors come free woth it.
Calling Mexico small and poor is a weird choice. Would China and Brazil qualify as well?