skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
If you're using android, is it actually possible not to?

I'm not using any google product except android at this point. I need to use a few apps that require the BS of safetynet, and when this happens you're pretty screwed. I remember some years ago I was still able to setup an android phone without a google account, but it was so _intentionally_ broken there was no point.

People suggest Apple, but apple is just as bad if not worse in my eyes. I'm a dev, and I do not eat their kool-aid.

The "turning on activity tracking" of the post is nothing new to me. I have no means to prove this, but I'm quite privacy conscious and I went through every single setting in the google account and android during setup. The settings reset by themselves to tracking a couple of times per year. I do the same treatment to my family members, and I see the same end result (although in that case I cannot know if they were just coerced to tap "allow this thing" somewhere).

The end result is that I stopped trusting google quite a long time ago.

Regarding search, you can switch to pretty much any other search engine right now. DDG, bing.. it doesn't really matter much. They all got better, but the real kicker is that google got a lot worse to the point that I no longer see their engine useful for search queries. I've read some people here say "google still has better verbatim search".. HA, that's so far from the truth it's almost laughable. The only way I can get my terms in the results so far is with kagi and searx with additional filters.

I can say the same for most of their offerings. The technical excellence is still there, but it's being intentionally corrupted to the point that doesn't matter anymore.
Then the title is wrong
Ask HN: Is there any software capable of testing your spoken English?
I'm a beginner in AI/ML and I've been wondering for a while if it's possible to create software that would test your English level automatically.

For example a callbot that would have a conversation with you, and determine if what you say make sense and if your accent isn't horrendous.

Do you think state of the art AI could be able to solve this problem? or is it way too early for that?

Have you heard of anyone attempting this?
EDIT, nm it has no tcp stack or outbound connectivity
It turns out that Netflix thumbs down conflicts with thumbs up.

For example, pick a movie that you like, yet don't ever want to watch on Netflix; perhaps you've already seen the movie on a different service. Do you click thumbs up ("I like this") or thumbs down ("Not for me")?

Next, if you watch some of the movie, then it shows up in your "Currently Watching" list, with icons for thumbs up ("I like this but don't want to continue watching"), thumbs down ("I don't like this"), and a broom ("Just cleaning up").

What I am suggesting as an experiment is a choice that means "I like this but don't want it on my main page".
Yep, though "clown car" seems dismissive, maybe we could call it "sort of legal for the road golf cart", as it does makes lot of sense for some EU city centres or for local deliveries in places where streets and parking spaces are tiny.

The UK site for it envisions a possible use for the "cargo" version for "last mile deliveries":
https://www.citroen.co.uk/models/future-models/ami.html
Singapore is as much of a tax heaven as Hong Kong is. When you live there, it's not.

Now if you re a chronically over spending under budgeted country and look at Singapore you're like "how can they be so rich with so little tax, they re robbing us", but that may hide a few things you could try on your side.
The internet is permanent, and if Twitter themselves don't remember a display name you used to use, 3rd party services will.

If you need to erase your old identity, it's best to create a new account and use your right to be forgotten to have Twitter delete your old stuff. And while the GDPR and the like mandate how that SHOULD work, you can't trust that it WILL work.
Gutenberg as a document content editor, is a good concept with truly awful execution (endless bugs).
Channable - https://www.channable.com | Utrecht, The Netherlands | ONSITE (post Covid) - Remote EU (in consideration)

Join one of the fastest growing scale-ups in the Netherlands. We currently have several open engineering positions to join our team in Utrecht.
We are a young company with a strong engineering culture and some unique data problems, that we are solving for our customers. You can read more about the kind of work we do on our blog: https://tech.channable.com/

Our Stack includes: Haskell, Python, JavaScript, TypeScript, Ember.js, PostgreSQL, Redis, Ansible, Terraform, Nix

We currently process tens of billions of products per day and offer technically interesting and challenging work. We are looking for highly motivated and skilled engineers to join our team.

Open positions:

- Haskell Software Engineer: https://jobs.channable.com/o/haskell-software-engineer-3

- Security Engineer: https://jobs.channable.com/o/security-engineer-2

- DevOps Engineer: https://jobs.channable.com/o/devops-engineer-3

- Python Software Engineer: https://jobs.channable.com/o/python-software-engineer-4

- Front-end Developer: https://jobs.channable.com/o/frontend-developer-2

- Integrations Engineer: https://jobs.channable.com/o/integrations-engineer-python-3
nilenso | Senior Engineer | India, Canada | REMOTE | https://nilenso.com

We are a 9 year old boutique technology consulting firm. We care about the impact that we make in the world. As an employee-owned cooperative, we all are stakeholders in how nilenso is run and can prioritise employee happiness: we don’t need to justify how happy employees impact the bottom line. We’re currently a fully remote team of friendly people across India with one member in Canada, and are hiring folks based in either of these geographies.

We have designed, built, and delivered complex, distributed, scalable backend systems for the web that have stood the test of time. We have written production code in Clojure/ClojureScript, Haskell, Elixir, Ruby/Rails, Python, Go, and Javascript, and are partial to a functional approach to programming. You can read about some of our projects[1], their technical details[2], and check out the talks[3] we’ve given to know more.

We’re looking for senior engineers to work with us. View our full job description at https://nilenso.com/senior-developer.html, or email us at careers@nilenso.com to apply!

[1] https://github.com/nilenso/media/blob/master/presentations/g...

[2] https://nilenso.com/recent-tech.html

[3] https://nilenso.com/talks.html
Hmm. Transpile C to "Rust"

edit: I see it is part of a broader toolchain, which makes a bit more sense
That's because they would get flooded by bug reports, like how right now they get flooded with people flagging accounts and tweets (brigades) and I'm sure there's more engineering effort going into automating that system than, say, Spaces or Twitter's primary experience.
I don't claim that laws don't have catching up to do, or that Cruise shouldn't be liable for any loss to life or property they may cause. We can be appreciate their achievement while being cognizant of the need for laws around this.

My second comment was targeted at naysayers and pessimists who find faults and issues everywhere. Yes gaps exist and that's how tech and society plays catch up, but let's not miss the forest for the trees here.
I used Binary Eye and it works reliably
https://github.com/jonas-schievink/rubble

Their whole training is situated around BLE! https://embedded-trainings.ferrous-systems.com/beginner-work...

Edit: wrong link
I recently found that brltty/orca package on Arch conflicted with CH340 driver[1] and prevented nodemcu from being detected over USB(tty). I uninstalled those packages, But it might not be an option for visually impaired.

Installing every Arch/AUR package could break some hardware compatibility which we've taken for granted(Story link is not opening as of writing, So not sure whether this case has been covered in it).

[1] https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/670636/unable-to-us...
I share your... Whatever feeling this is. How can you have a feature and not make it accessible. Not even by internal customization, you have to go out there and install an extension "who is not monitored by Mozilla and could present a security issue". This is beyond me. In the meantime I am bracing myself for the next UI total redesign that will make sure no user can ever get used to using Firefox while disappearing features.
> The US thought it could play nation-builder like with Japan. The continued involvement in afghanistan was part of the ongoing "war against terror" to reduce the chance of afghanistan becoming a heaven for terrorists again.

I would more easily characterize US external politics as nation-destroyer than nation-builder. Even if you disregard the evidence, it's quite a stretch to believe that the situation in Afghanistan is solely due to incompetence despite US good intentions.

> If you look at history, the victor would more or less burn the invaded country to the ground and enslave its people to avoid similar long term issues

Even if this has happened with some frequency I'm not so sure it's the rule; certainly there are many exceptions. In any case, it's no argument for doing the same.
Doesn't really follow. a) Google is a lot more than search and b) it's not like people noticing "crap, search results are getting worse" suddenly stop using it entirely, given there is no clearly superior competitor. Similarly with many other products.
Not always the case. At the European company I work there are many rules and regs on who can legally access employees email, depending on the country of the employee. Luxembourg and the Netherlands can be really tricky for example and they are not the only ones.

It's not automatically solely owned by the company.
Evolutionary psychology has been critiqued for being too essentialist, and essentialism and existentialism are relatively opposite concepts, so I'm curious as to how the situation you describe has come about.
Myanmar Junta's new law to jail anyone is using VPN, total control on users data
Pathbird – Interactive Courses
It's not so simple. There is a layer of power between Israel and the children of Gaza Israel is not in control of (that's Hamas). It's also not about starving, nobody is starving, but for sure there are electricity blackouts, and a poor life quality in the strip. In fact Israel provides Gaza with food and electricity. And there are wealthy Gazans with super villas, luxurious cars and diamond covered iPhones (powerful people and cronies)

As I wrote Israel could reconquer the strip and remove this layer, but that's very difficult to do.

Qatar money transfers (yes, everybody minimally informed knows about that, it's not a secret) are in my opinion harmful errors on Israel's part. It's basically protection money, it makes Hamas stronger. But that's an understandable error, considering the few options Israel has. The short term solution is to pay for quiet, politicians love that.

And Hamas is not harmless by any means. It has a big rocket arsenal, contacts with Iran, it has showed it can instigate civil unrest inside Israel, it kidnapped in the past civilians and soldiers, it has a good defense force (Israelis had great difficulties entering the strip in 2014), it launched tens of thousands of rockets and thousands of incendiary payloads causing life losses and fires, it has drones, earth to air missiles, it penetrated Israel borders a few times. And it's growing more powerful. No it's not harmless (and that's even not considering their soft power in terms of propaganda and controlling news sources)
> You are not explaining how different email addresses can be cross-referenced with a custom domain or how spammers can guess additional emails to reach you.

Oh sure, I can do that! So for me, one reason to use aliases is to be able to trace who leaked my email. However, it's pretty obvious if my email address is news.ycombinator.com@mydomain.com, that everything @mydomain.com is going to me. (And possibly, but I'm not an expert on this, if you use a service that handles that for you, it might even be automatically detectable via my MX records?)

And if you know that, you can both know that facebook.com@mydomain.com is also me, and that you can send me an email at whatever@mydomain.com to also reach me.

Whereas if my email address is, say, sd4k23@mozmail.com, then you can't know my other random aliases, while I'm still able to see who I gave that email address to via the relay.firefox.com dashboard.

> The risk of leaking personal information via a domain is the same risk as giving your real name when you signup for a service, or use your real name when you send emails.

Yep! I'm just saying that minimising the opportunities for me to make a mistake is a benefit.

Note that I'm not saying you should switch to a service like this; I'm just trying to show why I've started using both: my custom domain for sensitive services, and Relay for one-offs/few-offs (e.g. if I just want to get a coupon code or something).
> The draft law would grant the regime unlimited power to access user data, ban content it dislikes, restrict internet providers and intercept data, and imprison those criticizing the regime online and employees of non-compliant companies
...but don't worry the rich assure me it'll be alright
> There is no actual harm in offence alone.

But there's also a lack of a purpose. The reason we have free speech is that it is beneficial to society to have it. This is not one of the cases I'd like to use if I had to support its benefit for society.
"If you want to lie with facts, use statistics." - anonymous
the enemy might even shoot mirrored rockets just to reflect the beam and scorch what's below ...
7 days to die
Audrey Tang is a minister in the Taiwanese government:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Audrey_Tang

https://metacpan.org/author/AUDREYT

(And of course she is the initiator of the PUGS Perl 6 implementation project)
Show HN: What do you think of my new social app?
Hey there,

First time posting on Hacker News in about 2 years! The reason I’m posting is that I thought I’d write about the product I’ve been building, in hopes it resonates with people.

Why build yet another social app? Because I deleted almost all social media around 3/4 years ago as it was just net negative on my life. There was very little that was truly interesting, I didn’t care about looking good to other people and because of the ‘media’ and ads, the apps were all designed to make me spend too much time for what I was getting. I hated it and what it meant for people’s behaviour, including mine and my friends.

I also noticed that the vast majority of my friends were pretty much passive on the services, even if they had an account. Turns out that most people felt uncomfortable sharing to people they didn’t know too well, which inevitably happens as you meet new people, add them, and often don’t develop the relationship much further. I had a sense that there could be a better way.

In that, I remembered the days of Path and Google+ which had the model of focusing on particular people in your network, both through the feed and in how you shared. Path in particular was a ‘real life’ social network, something that despite being brought to market in 2010 or whatever, seemed to be more relevant today.

So problem found, problem solved. I took the journey of learning how to code when COVID hit (I was working in Architecture and Design and was about to start my masters degree at Harvard GSD in Boston), then one thing led to another, my prototype garnered some investment interest, and Circles was born.

The idea is very much like the name suggests, it’s about adding your contacts (synced through your phonebook) into Circles that define what the relationship is. This means that you only see things from people you have tagged (rather than everyone) and when you share, you choose exactly who it goes to (rather than all your friends or followers).

It also takes cues from other privacy focused social products. Posts are encrypted, reactions and comments are only shown to people who are contacts with eachother, and user profiles only show that which has been explicitly shared to the user viewing the profile.

As they were mentioned briefly before, it’s essentially a crossover between Path and Google+ with a wrap around layer of privacy, so the potential revenue has to eventually come through paid features rather than ads.

We’re in the app store and google play store (yay, cross-platform JS frameworks), the invite code is ‘FULLCIRCLE’ and download links are below:

Landing: https://oncircles.com

iOS: https://apps.apple.com/gb/app/circles-share-more-with-less/i...

Android: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.oncircles

I would love to hear your feedback and suggestions on the idea. Hit or miss?

PS: If you want to chat about the idea or are interested in working together I’d love to chat. Always interesting to meet people on HN and we have the funds, ideas and drive to continue making cool things that can solve big problems. Send me an email at james@oncircles.com

Thanks!
Nice write-up.
I am a bit concerned with the part about fingerprinting.
It sounds so easy to make that it made me realize that everyone must be doing it.

I am not sure if the use-case here is to track people that delete their cookies or if the author found it easier than using simple UUID stored in cookies.
This is not the focus of this paper, but they do mention consumer safety and KYC and AML issues, which if the ecosystem matures they will try to enforce for sure.
Electrify America and Electrify Canada are subsidiaries of Volkswagen.
> The default should be off

If you split a control into two, more granular, controls, the default should be whatever I, the user, set the original control to be.

Having the default be a more privacy protecting setting is better than the default being the best for ad tracking, but really it should be what I wanted.
Fellow Dutchman here, who initially wondered the same. Yes, it's Lingo, but:

- One word every day, same word for the whole world.

- You don't get a start letter

- No ballenbak :-( :-(

- No purpose

Note that as a fellow comment suggested, Lingo itself isn't an original show either. I don't know where the idea originated but certainly not on Dutch TV, so Wordle is simply a new iteration of an old idea. The innovation is in the accessibility and the low-key virality, not the game dynamics.
China to launch chipmaking platform as it targets Intel and AMD
This is exciting! I've met with people from AdaCore and Ferrous systems (individually) several times and they're all serious, competent and motivated.

I'm curious what kinds of software they want to (eventually) verify, my PhD thesis is developing a verification tool for Rust (https://github.com/xldenis/creusot) and I'm always on the look out for case studies to push me forward.

The road to formally verified Rust is still long but in my unbiased opinion looking quite bright, especially compared to other languages like C.
Ownership typing really, really simplifies verification.
not OP, I live in Germany and 2 things happen with Geo-IP:

1. When I look for English words on Google, it prioritizes german dictionaries, sometimes for many pages instead of a) English dictionaries OR b) actual English pages relevant for that word

2. When I search for programming stuff, it prioritizes german pages, such as blog entries to the english documentation/english blog entries, which I find in any case more complete and diverse. Some peope prefer reading everything in German, but that is just not my cup of tea
I almost had a heart attack when I read this. I've been using bitwise operations to speed up the Wave Function Collapse algorithm... and the prime minister of Singapore has done something very similar years before!
Happens to me often. I'll be browsing and then suddenly I am told that before I can view the next webpage I MUST restart. Giant PITA if I have a ton of private windows open, as none of those are coming back.
We're currently having painful performance issues with Craft at work.
It takes 300ms+ just for an empty craft installation to return an empty page.
Saving entries to the database programatically is slow too, one of our sites has a nightly sync process, only needs to touch a few thousand entities, with a normal database schema that workload is doable in seconds, with Craft it takes hours.
Angela Merkel's dissertation lists five programs she wrote for various physical chemistry calculations. Two ran on an HP 9810A, two on the east German Robotron EC1055 mainframe, and one on the Soviet BESM6 mainframe. Maybe the listings are still on a shelf somewhere.
> Clearly that seller is getting some benefit for selling the product through Amazon, probably close to 20-40% of the value of their product if they didn't.

Or the small pool of people who refuse to use amazon are willing to pay 40% extra out of principle, and the seller is happy to exploit this behaviour while it lasts.
> I'm dropping (paid) GSuite/Workspace/whatever it's now called for my family, and for a couple of businesses.

What are you switching to? I'm in the same situation of a couple of family groups and a couple of small businesses on GSuite and looking for alternatives.
Yes, that's correct. rqlite does statement-based replication, which means it has the limitation you outlined. This could be solved by parsing the entire SQLite statement passed into rqlite before it's written to the Raft log, but I haven't got around to that yet.
> AFAIK the main purpose first and foremost was to prevent the health system from collapsing.

You're arguing against the wording of the title, but the overall conclusion is clear - that lockdowns (in the common use of the word) did not have the effects that were used to justify them.
Nothing wrong with "please take this wearable sensor (which might be a phone) with you if you go outdoors" and still making the indoors safe for occasions where the person at risk of falling fails to prepare like for a minor expedition. It's not either/or at all.
"Because all network requests go through one socket thread, this loop blocked any further network communication and made Firefox unresponsive, unable to load web content."
Why side functionality (telemetry) of a tool uses only one network thread and can block any network communication ?
The value of getting personalisation right
Are you using Linux, by any chance? IIRC, the issue here is that the update is done by your package manager, changing Firefox's files out from under them. If you use the direct download from Mozilla, it shouldn't be as disruptive.

I still hope a fix or workaround to this can be found, but knowing why something is the cause makes it easier to accept, at least for me :)
Former US Senate and Presidential hopeful and anti-vax poster child Herman Cain had a bachelors in mathematics, a masters in computer science and wrote ballistics software for the US Navy. Although he never actually succeeded in holding elected office, so I don't know if he really counts.
I'd love to see a POWER9 laptop. It'd probably be more or less the same thickness as this one.
In a documentary about the VietNam war (I think it's Ken Loach's), there's an army guy who says this:

> When you can't count what's important, you make what you can count, important.

That's the McNamara fallacy in a nutshell. Kill counts started to become the end-all be-all of the war because bodies are the easiest thing to count, but it wasn't the relevant metric.

Tragedies are often the result of people persisting in something and failing to see the big picture. Even more so when numbers seem to tell them they're right.

It doesn't matter that the numbers are right if we're looking at the wrong numbers.
No! It was an issue with the trucks! They shouldn't have been in the way in the first place! Don't they know a Tesla is driving through? They mustn't have been able to see it since they lack exceptional cameras.