skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
How WhatsApp status tracker works and how to prevent it
I started testing few whatsapp trackers and it looks like it's working even if you disabled "last seen" option on your privacy settings.

The apps give you when and how much a person was online and it's kinda scary from a privacy perspective, so any idea how these apps works ? and the most important questions is how to prevent it?
classic dumb guy here
The US exports a lot of agricultural commodities to China. Those used to all be shipped in bulkers but now some are loaded into containers.
Of course, Arendt having a history of having an affair with Heidegger shouldn’t make her a contrarian by association. Even if Heidegger was a closet Nazi, it hasn’t really swayed her overall philosophy even one bit.

Still, you can’t still deny the relationship between Heidegger and Nazism after some of the contents of his Black Notebooks from 1931 to 1941 (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Notebooks) were revealed, which contained explicit anti-semitic comments. The relationship between Hedeigger’s philosophy and Nazism actually seems like a genuine controversy even among scholars and philsophers, and shouldn’t be taken lightly.
The JavaScript culture around dependencies is baffling to me.

The simplest of tools will easily have hundreds of transitive dependencies, making these sort of events a mess to deal with, and causing the blast radius to be avoidably large.
Apple has $200B, not $20B cash on hand.
Why are you lying? Gebru was fired because she gave an ultimatum to reveal the name of an anonymous reviewer, which Google declined.
Start with microservice and don't start with microservice
Right but the claim is that Google instituted a new policy, and applied it inconsistently without telling people, until it blew up in their faces when she was fired. Only after that did they formalize the policy, and saying that she was fired for circumventing and then questioning a policy that ostensibly didn't exist when she was fired doesn't have the same ring to it.
Ask HN: ICOs/DAOs as a Service?
Hey HN,

I'm just now getting into Blockchain and Web3, so forgive my ignorance in advance.

Are there any startups working on ICOs as a service? I know that in 2017 many shady ICOs occurred, and there must have been many shady ICO consultants/builders, but the value of raising funds and building communities in a decentralized way seems enormous.

Are there any companies working as a sort of "investment bank" for ICOs? Where they build ICOs/NFTs for scientific orgs, charities, etc?

One way to incentivize alignment is to have the ICO builder recieve a small portion of the ICO in place of a normal fee.

Would love some clarity, pointers around this.
It’s almost certainly because the tweet caused a bunch of people to call their elected representatives and exert political pressure. A couple dock workers aren’t going to be able to drum up that kind of publicity.
> It was the norm for a single programmer to be doing the work that would normally be a team (sometimes multiple teams).

I felt this so very often. There are economical paradoxes and sociological issues at play. People want to be impressed and a big corp makes it look like hard while 3 lispers does not have the glow and even at lower prices you may fail to sell good work.

A lot of this world work this way, if everybody worked smart and efficiently there would be a lot less jobs.
If you construct a fabric+wood ribs wing, it will easily look bat-like. Many early airplanes were like that too.
You have to understand, it’s incredibly frustrating to try to have a serious conversation with someone who not only pulls out the intellectually lazy “[citation needed]” trope, but makes no specific demands about what citation is acceptable until after the fact, when they can deem respected news agencies like the BBC or DW as “trash” and demand more citations! Is that Forbes article “trash”? I don’t think so - it’s a clear explainer written for a layperson by someone well-credentialed, and I had no reason to think based on your comment that you were anything but a layperson.

Anyway - the next article, from the BBC, is a report on a study published in Science. The study is linked to in the text, it’s called “Linking Arctic variability and change with extreme winter weather in the United States” if you prefer papers over news articles summarizing them.
Stupid question, why isn’t simple capitalism working on the port? This solution while admirable, reminds me of the USSR trying to set the price of bread.
Cunts

Openvaers.com
Another way to look at it, SQNR = 20 * log10(2**Q).

When Q=8, equivalent to 8bit PCM encoding, the maximum SNR would be 48db. So the cheap cassettes are like 8bit PCM at 12kHz.

Remaining values would be:

Q=9, SQNR=54db.

Q=10, SQNR=60db.

Q=11, SQNR=66db.
I don't see any evidence that Roku is taking 30% of anything. Roku does not require users to use its own payment system for subscriptions of streaming services, including subscriptions initiated from within the channel.

Roku help page for Apple TV channel: https://support.roku.com/article/360036652634

> If you subscribe to any Apple TV Channels, payment will be charged to your Apple ID account at purchase.

Apple TV channel listing on Roku: https://channelstore.roku.com/details/a20e3c294993147c6cda43...
Perhaps look at it another way: each of your actions and thoughts influences people today, who influence people tomorrow, and so on — your legacy lives on within the state space of humanity (same as you are a vessel for the legacy of those before you).

We live in a chaotic system — each action echos through the rest of time (and quite possibly is a deterministic echo of the past).
JavaScript Hidden Classes and Inline Caching in V8 (2015)
"The argument for a pay cut" ...

Another argument is that if tech paid everyone the same, everywhere, it would greatly exacerbate income equality issues in a lot of places.

Tech is certainly not altruistic, as you point out, and generally wants to pay market rate rather than output rate or whatever. But it doesn't make less true that it would worsen a whole bunch of social problems by paying people the same everywhere.
> Dr. Gebru was fired for having approached a lawyer about workplace issues.

That is just very dishonest. She gave an ultimatum. Execs accepted the ultimatum. You are gaslighting other people on this topic. At the very least, you should've acknowledged that this is up to an interpretation.

Regardless whether she was fired or quit, she was toxic as hell. She dragged Jeff Dean into an unrelated matter in public and implied Jeff Dean supported personal attack.

https://twitter.com/timnitGebru/status/1278569638532530177 -- this happened a few months before she left or was fired from google

If a direct report did this to me, I would've wanted them to leave. In this case, Gebru wanted to leave (according to her ultimatum). Jeff Dean wanted her to leave (I don't doubt this. nobody wanted to work with a colleage who attacked them on twitter). I see a happy ending for both.

Gebru and her supporters have been dishonest about the whole thing.
Is this book worthwhile?
I have mentioned this long time ago and would do so again: No matter how righteous be the cause, threatening your employers and instigating a mutinous conduct with fellow employees doesn't go down too well.
Both sides could have done better. Both sides includes Timnit's subsequent conduct as well.
Does this mean he's truly a closer? Does he get coffee?
Too soon?
I don't understand all the details of our voting system. Maybe you do. But how exactly our system secures itself is quite complex, and I think the evidence for that was pretty straightforwardly demonstrated in the last year.

The claims Donald Trump made about the election were false. But why, exactly, they were false is extremely difficult to explain, and honestly impossible for the average person to validate. The promise of blockchain voting is that a sufficiently motivated private individual could validate the entire election. That is presently not physically possible in our system.
I think they could have even done most of those things and remained small and lean. Most of the bloat isn't that they've entered these spaces, but that there are a million little sub-projects within each one chasing marginal (at best) improvements.
Thankfully, language mistakes are less painful to endure.
>What cause the jobs in Detroit to be outsourced?

Higher profit margins at the cost of lower quality and enabled with NAFTA. In the 90s until the mid 2000s, US cars were mostly top notch, now they're not that great.

You can read what the market thinks of the quality of a vehicle by its resale price relative to its new price. Used Honda and Toyotas are pretty close to a new price. Chryslers, not so much. This isn't exclusively a US problem though. You can get a used BMW or Mercedes for cheap, but you probably shouldn't if you want to keep it for a while and not spend a lot of money. Back in the 90s, you could expect to get 10 years out of a vehicle relatively hassle free, now it's about 3. YMMV.
Vizio in Hot Water over Smart TV GPL Violations
This is the best time to be alive, because we can leverage their platforms (ex. google search, YT) to learn anything and everything to ultimately destroy them by building something different.

Just excited to live in a time where we (anyone with basic internet access pretty much) can execute runtime hacks on capitalism by changing the inputs a bit while still creating value where it matters to us.
No, there was only one internal review. It didn’t pass, and it was too late for her to make revisions because it was past the conference deadline.
Does that tool resolve things like:

setTimeout("dan" + "gerous" + "func" + "tion" + "()", 1);

I'm only somewhat superficially familiar with JavaScript (and only in the browser, not NodeJS), but you can probably get far more obfuscated than that; or at least, you can in some other similar-ish languages. For example in Ruby on Rails they use (or used? It's been years so may be different now) all sorts of meta-programming stuff, which at times actually made it somewhat difficult to find a method definition if you didn't know where to look; it was all dynamically defined at runtime.

My worry with such a tool would be that malicious actors would go out of their way to hide their code from such tools, and that the tool would give me a false sense of security.
If management harasses its employees with 5 whys all the time, better call 911.
Here's a half serious answer: do not design it as a static object that can withstand the erosion. Design it as a dynamic process that can change itself and adapt to the environment.

Establish some kind of religion or cult or fraternity. Give them your personal webpage as a sacred document that can be passed down with some secret ritual. Develop a community of the admirers.

One example: a shrine in Japan kept the records of ice ridge forming in a certain lake (which they considered sacred). The tradition started around 15c and still continues today. It's one of the oldest climate record at a specific location.
That's the origin and emphasis of the Butlerian Jihad, for sure, but it seems to me that there's a more general disdain of machines in the galactic culture. Although they certainly do use a lot of machinery: shield generators, poison snoopers, spaceships, etc. so maybe not.
What happened with Dell abs VMware? I noticed recently Michael Dell has been on a publicity interview tour to promote his auto-hagiography and of course says nothing bad about the Dell - VMware merger.
But you claim she was fired for being critical of Google. Maybe what you are saying here is right and she was just the first person fired since nobody followed the new guidelines and at some point they will face consequences, it could just as well have been anyone else. But I don't see how that would make Google look bad, it is normal to fire one of the offenders as an example when a group refuses to follow new guidelines, either you do that or you fire everyone.

And hers case was especially easy, since she said she will leave the company if the policy isn't changed. Google didn't want to change the policy. What Google might have been wrong about here is if they reported this as her voluntarily leaving, even if you could argue it is Google firing her. But nobody really cares about that that detail, it isn't important and the story wouldn't blow up if that was the only thing they claimed Google did wrong.
Depends.

If you mean people who's work involves developing software by typing instructions into a computer via a keyboard interface... and this is what entirely defines a software engineer. Then possibly.

If you mean people who's work involves developing software by instructing computers in various other ways (e.g. via talking, feeding it pictures, videos, audio, or other data)... and this is what defines a soft-... er I mean data scientist. Then I'd argue data scientists are just a newer software engineer.

If you mean engineers in the true and general sense? Never. Devising new technology & solving problems are skills forever employable.
How would you load them on rail car? If there was a working railroad system connected to the docks maybe. A working railroad system would solve a lot of issues in the US. But it is impossible to get a discussion on infrastructure as it gets abused by both sides only for political reasons.
> Some people actually use those "takeout" features to collect archive data. So then you do get the archive, it's like having somebody's cuttings from a local newspaper rather than a complete set of local papers on microfiche.

The problem with these (at least the Facebook ones) is that the data is lacking all context. It's kinda OK if you just want copies of your photos, but I can't make heads or tails of most my comments from the archive, and posts are missing a lot without the comments.
That was just talk. With the current shortage there is plenty of evidence. Things are a lot different now too given how widely use semiconductors are.

That said, it remains to be seen how seriously the US government is about this. The $50 billion USD bill hasn’t passed through Congress yet. But if the US government does decide to make huge moves, things might change in a big way.

TSMC is no doubt pretty worried hence their setting up of fabs in the US now in an attempt to hopefully ward off US government action.
"Having been through the process, seeing the process from an IC, TL, TLM, and promotion committee member, if you think that L6 is unachievable, there is either a problem with your project or your expectations."

Lots of managers are also not good at talent management (and not just at Google). Which is sad. So they tell people it's a promo committee's fault, or ..
Realistically, it's also the manager's fault. If they don't have scope/work that can help someone grow to L6, the right move is to help the person find a place that does, rather than string them along. Stringing them along ends up with them leaving or unhappy or ...
Helping them grow elsewhere ends up with people who will likely want to come back to your org at some point when you have the need/scope/role for them.
The author did not say that the resistors decreased the power consumption, or if they did, I missed it. The stronger current draw on the IBM isn’t exceeding the USB power limits but it is causing a voltage droop on the mobo’s shoddy regulators or PS/2 interface circuitry that is rectified by effectively reinforcing the pull-up circuitry to boost the signal integrity by adding a second pull-up in parallel with the existing.
There's a few things here that are subtly wrong.

> How promotions work is a committee of higher-level engineers (eg L7s consider promotions to L6) and will have 10-15 packets to assess. These will get stack ranked by the committee. If you're above the line you'll get promoted. If you're not, you won't. Ruth's change just made that line a little higher.

FWIW this is no longer true for a lot of orgs, and will likely soon be untrue for all orgs. Also fairly sure that stack ranking within a single promo committee was never how it worked.

> That only applies to the salary plus bonus (since bonus is derived from salary)

Currently, however management is on record stating that this will change in the future, since I don't know exactly how, I'm not going to speculate, but the intent is for equity to reflect the compensation regions in the US eventually.
Sure, it is better for North Dakota to make high-value products there, but why would it benefit manufactures to be there (except during rare global logistics disruptions)? Transporting cargo by ship is super cheap during normal times
> The last election had volunteers from both sides of the aisle count votes, while a ton of normal people watched them as observers. Last year, we saw a lot of Trump supporters who were convinced the election was stolen act as election observers. The process is easy for them to engage in, as well as to observe, because they're literally just counting votes. Anyone can observe and see for themselves that nothing nefarious is going on, and they don't need to be experts to do so.

And how did all that work out for public trust in elections?

The problem here is that, even if you personally can go validate your local election, anyone can just claim the fraud was somewhere else. A cryptographic voting system allows any citizen to validate the entire election. The value of this is very significant. Right now a right wing website can just claim say, the CA elections were riddled with fraud. The only way to even approach "disproving" that is to request data from the city/state officials...who those people do not trust in the first place. A publicly auditable voting system would short circuit all of those issues.

It doesn't need to be interpretable to every single person. What it does need to have is no specific plausible fraud narrative. Right now Trump et al can simply claim ballot stuffing, or any number of other kinds of fraud. Disproving that requires access to records that most people cannot obtain, and so the narrative can retain credibility for those disposed to believing it.

It's true that most people will not understand the cryptography underlying an auditable voting system, but they don't need to. In order for someone to implant a fraud narrative, they will need to come up with an explanation for how the fraud occurred. Once they do that, it will be relatively straightforward to debunk those narratives in a clear way, that, critically, does not rely on faith in trusted third parties.
If you are in a democracy (or democratic republic) your continued citizenship is tacit approval of things like local zoning approval.

I dislike NIMBYs as well, but they come with citizenship. China has very few NIMBYs (or at least few visible ones).
Read online by chapter pages really need a "next chapter" link.

https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/herman-melville/moby-dick/...
Judging people who lived in the distant past by modern standards is such an ignorant exercise of self-righteousness.

You are no better than Jefferson by virtue of opposing slavery in the modern day. You had the benefit of social norms that instructed you of its evils, and made it easy to denounce it.
I'm using https://github.com/basti564/Oculess which works well for removing facebook. Caveats:
* most of the UI is broken
* you can only run untrusted sideloaded apks
* some telemetry services have to be stopped after each reboot
* you might still need facebook for initial setup (haven't tried it)
Left-pad was already a warning sign that something is seriously wrong with the culture. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11348798
Did she threaten litigation before or after she posted an angry rant telling her coworkers to stop working?

Before or after she demanded that the company release the name of an anonymous reviewer?

Before or after she told them to schedule her last day if they didn’t meet her demands?
Actually, that wasn't an invention of David Lynch. It was just something sort of pulled in from the second book.
I was extremely specific in what I was asking for initially. I asked for evidence that the number of extreme cold events is going to be increased. None of the first two articles grapples with that claim. That's why I called them trash. They're trash in the sense that those sources aren't addressing the claim that I initially asked to see a citation for. They outline a mechanism that will lead to more cold spikes but it doesn't address my question of whether on net we are going to see more cold spikes given the offsetting impact of mean warming.

I reject the accusation that I'm pulling a "citation needed" trope. The citation I shared above, which more directly addresses what I'm asking and is from more reputable bodies than your citations, says the exact opposite thing to what you're claiming and so what I'm doing is not an example of this trope (which is where someone asks for a citation for a well established fact as a rhetorical device).
PulseAudio obeys a (dbus) protocol that Lennart and I worked out that allows JACK (or Ardour) to show up and say "hey, I want the device". Any other application could implement it. Pipewire has (AFAIK) implemented the same protocol.
You're factually wrong. I was literally able to view her paper, and it's approved status, in the internal tool where papers are approved for publication.
Decoders are less than 1% of the chip, that's not a substantive difference. Both Intel and Arm decode their instructions into micro ops, so there is no difference to out of order and speculative execution prospects because of the instruction code.

The only substantive difference is that Intel provides a stronger memory ordering guarantee. This is theoretically an advantage for Arm, but there are disadvantages too, so I'd call that a wash.
It's not just engineers this applies to. Sure, if everyone makes $400k + benefits and profit share with good work-life balance and such, I guess that might fly. But most companies have customer support, IT, and other cost centers where you have entry-level employees who need to progress, and that necessarily means increasing wages over time to retain and advance good employees.

Besides, junior developers / interns are supposed to do what exactly if there is no increasing revenue at a company and no one leaves above them? Just hang out until someone quits even though they're not going to?

Retraining a junior developer is costly. Advancing them is as well, but less costly than constantly cycling in new junior developers and interns to do the HTML/CSS + ETL script jobs no one likes doing.

Growth is natural and important towards keeping your staff happy and moving up.

Both Basecamp and Valve were growing massively, so I don't think those are good examples.
I don't know maybe it is the thing with top level engineers hired at FAANG who deserve absolute truth, justice and equality.

To me earning nowhere at level as these folks, still it embarasses me to whine about pay/promotion when so many hard working folks doing important work in society are paid pittance.