skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> Almost all bills, utility and otherwise, can be paid for in cash at most supermarkets or other money-handling businesses.

So long as you are on a post-paid account you don't even need this. If you are on a post-paid plan of any sort, it's a debt. You have the legal right (via the Coinage Act) to pay that debt via cash regardless of any systems they might not have setup to do so.

It's a fun game to play sometimes to remind institutions of this fact, and usually rouses some bored corporate counsel from their slumber to first argue with you, then apologize.

Probably doesn't really help build a great business relationship, however.
> I benefit quite a lot from not having to use cash.

And you lose nothing by having more options, including cash. Nobody said you need to pay only with cash.
As Dirty Harry would say "Go ahead. Make my day."

Are the Germans dumb enough to shoot themselves in the foot, or what? Goodbye German industrial competitiveness, and Hello to China taking over those German markets.
Update: Bank accounts are already being unfrozen.

https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/emergency-bank-measures-fin...
So there may be people that usually don't use cash, that made a small donation for something they believe in (a non violent protest), and are now unable to pay for their food, rent, car gas, medication… All of this without any trial, without being able to defend/explain themself. How is this a democracy?
> The simple answer is to reject the cashless society.

I don't think you realize how cashless society really is. For a long time, we've been running on fiat money, debt, and other forms of monetary constructs that are, for all intents and purposes, just numbers in some database without the backing of physical bills. Imagine coordinating all of the stakeholders for a condominium building project with only paper currency; it'd be a madness only marginally better than bartering.

The idea of rejecting a cashless society is eerily similar to Project Mayhem from the movie Fight Club, with all the chaotic anarchy that supposedly comes with it.
Isn't any warm spot essentially pre-configured as a cat bed?
One of the subtle ways he didn't mention is that the words seem to use medium-frequency letters, so they aren't an obvious guess, but it isn't some word with no vowels or a bunch of z's, either. I did notice that after the NYT took over the words now seem to have fewer letters, so it's more necessary to logic out which word it is if you want a good score. Previously I could figure out what most of the letters were with three words, but now I have to work at it. At least until I can come up with well-chosen words for the new regime.
You are wearing the wrong helmets if it's not enjoyable/comfortable. I wear a helmet when I ride a bike, motorbike, snowboard etc. I'd rather not be one of those "he died doing what he loved" guys when it is entirely preventable.
>I'll take inconvenience over slavery any day of the week.

so much this. I simply do not want my money to be easy to spend. I want to enter a pin code and carry a physical card. That creates engagement which raises my awareness of what I am spending.

Same with cash, when you count it out, it creates engagement and awareness of what you are spending.
It is a great feature; Windows Firewall Control does notifications nicely, too, and it's now freeware since bought by Malwarebytes.

On Android I recall that this control was taken away from users long ago. Blocking an app's network access blocks its ads, after all. The argument was that without any other permissions, an app's potential for harm with internet access is limited. Only in Android 11 have I seen this restored, and I only noticed after digging around the settings after the major version OTA update. i.e., I don't get notified. Apps have internet access by default.

On that note, I recall when Windows started coming with a firewall, people like Steve Gibson criticized its allow-all-outbound-by-default rules as making it nearly useless to protect less savvy users.
You have no freedoms without freedom to transact
Well actually … I see these kinds of well actually forest for the trees statements all the time.

Anyone who has studied global warming or taken any science class already knows about the carbon cycle.
Ask HN: Is Amazon distributing malware infested laptops?
I recently bought an upgraded HP laptop from Amazon. The memory and storage were upgraded by Oydisen Electronics.
After 2 weeks of use, the laptop shut off. In restarting, an HP screen let me know that no OS was detected. I worked through some HP troubleshooting steps and the laptop could not detect an SSD. I tried taking the back panel off to see if the SSD had somehow come loose, but it is glued to something in the middle, and forcing it off would mean breaking the back panel and maybe the motherboard if that is what it is glued to.
I asked the seller about this and they just told me to return it, but I had already saved so many personal files to the drive when it disappeared, and I do not feel comfortable returning it like this.
I have tried Linux/Windows USB installations, but neither could detect any drives (after USB).
It seems that I will be taking the $1000 hit on this. Amazon refuses to refund me without a return, and returning it would mean submitting my financials, health records, passwords, etc., to the mercy of Oydisen Electronics.
Could this be a self-destructing laptop by design of Oydisen Electronics? It certainly looks that way to me.
This makes me think of an interesting theory I've been thinking of:

Say your brain has a bunch of neurons in place that form every experience of your life and form every thought system you have. Surely a specific structure of your neurons also causes you to feel the experience of being a "self" and everything else as being the "other".

Now, as we die, it's easy to imagine that our neurons are still living on that last bit of oxygen and energy. Systems start to slowly shut down. One of those systems is the one described above. The one which separates the "experiencer" from the experience. At some point, you transition to a point where you can't tell yourself apart from anything else. You lose the self forever.

Must be a wild ride.
The day "jazzy" is chosen is the day Wordle makes some enemies
Bitcoin is not totally lacking fungibility, as there are ways to make the coins more fungible, but it needs more developer support. Wasabi wallet has coinjoin support, although it's not easy to use, not automated, doesn't work on mobile phone and expensive for most people. Also of course exchanges try to AML-KYC them out, as govermnets are trying to fight it.

Implementing Schnorr signatures was a great way to get closer to fungibility improvements, as it paves the path for signature batching, which can make CoinJoin cheaper than a single transaction, and will change the incentives towards making Bitcoin fungible by default for every user.
It seems to me the biggest challenge for SE transitioning into ML is that ML is a very broad topic and people conflate a lot of roles together. From purely research based questions (backbones, optimizers, initializers etc), to more 'MLOps' like pipelining questions, which tend to fall into the classical engineering / dev ops buckets. So the real question is what type of ML do you want to do?

If you're looking to land a job at FAIR / Deepmind or Google Brain/ Nvidia Research as a researcher or ML scientist the expectations of knowledge are very different than 'data science'. These are research lab groups, that work on pushing the state of the art forward. They are also supported by great engineers, building awesome tools that improve ML research. So transitioning into this sort of role requires more than doing Kaggle competitions, it requires developing an intuition for the respective ML subfield / and trying new things and usually failing. i.e. this is a research role and will require a lot of study and learning

If on the other hand you are looking for datascience / take model and build pipeline to run AI, or perform hyper param sweeps or simply modify some model code, then on I would say that is much more engineering than research ML. This has a much lower barrier to entry coming from engineering and could be a good stepping stone to a transition into pure ML research.

On a more general note to consider when thinking of transitioning to ML is that these systems are probabilistic in nature vs purely deterministic as they are in more general software systems. People (ie humans) are bad at wrapping their heads around distributional processes - you can see this in all fields that deal with them (Quantum vs Classical Physics, Biological Systems etc).

In general I guess what I have seen is when engineers try to dip their toes into ML, what's required is a mindset shift in how to approach problems. Once that happens the depth of that shift determines the type of role with ML you wish to pursue.
Why does that make democracy stronger? It's just an elaboration of a particular interpretation of the rules by jurists that are probably already not uncomfortable with the state.

The outcome of those deliberations will be to some extent obscure and subject to yet further interpretation and arguments.

That doesn't in, and of itself, make democracy stronger.

I would argue that the use of this Act has already weakened democracy in Canada because it shows that the only response the political systems has to a very minor disruption is to use acts that everyone understood to be for much more extreme situations.

This has already deepened many people's cynicism about the idea of this form of government.
It's not an opinion, it's an objective fact. They don't have a strong track record.

Remember when BuzzFeedNews was peddling such fake news garbage that Robert Mueller's team had to call them out on their bullshit [0]? Pepperidge Farm remembers.

[0] https://apnews.com/article/north-america-donald-trump-robert...
A constitutional democracy protects its minorities. A pure democracy doesn't, but we haven't had one of those for well over 2000 years.
I would guess nginx config is suffering greatly from the requirements of backwards compatibility. Would be really interesting to see what a fresh attempt would come up with (although reaching feature and performance parity would take a really long time).
they aren't scare quotes, we just never got a good explanation for why there was a shortage, aside from some vague hand-waving about covid.
There is too much partisanship for the last part. So many people would salivate at the chance of banning their enemies for life.
If one were to build with the API from scratch. But in theory all you really need to do to deploy a “new model” just is write a short prompt and click a “create endpoint” button.
> I think some form of cryptocurrency could serve this purpose and move us away from relying on banks that act on behalf of the state.

If such a crypto would exist, with enough stability, trust and ease to make transactions, the state would be so unhappy that day that it would make it illegal faster than light. Removing monopolies from the state are huge challenges.
Linux Developers Discuss Deprecating and Removing ReiserFS
I won't bother to fight it, but I will miss it.
No-one is talking about banning the concept of a transaction.

It's about being able to pay for basic needs (rent, bills, food) via cash.

This is not some impossible crazy thing. Cash was used for >90% of purchases including weekly bills not that long ago whilst skyscrapers and big business deals didn't involve briefcases of cash being thrown around.
> All memberships are munition for weapons ("Bullet", "Projectile", "Bomb" and "Missile"), not exactly something you associate with "Saving lives".

In a simplistic view they don’t save lives, but without them what do you fight with? What keeps Russia from thinking they can just easily take over a country?
It's a classic bait-and-switch, you're an FB partner today but tomorrow you may be demonitized without notice. Extremely one way relationship, all hanging on the whims of your buddy mark fuckerberg's ego.
Wow, I had no idea American police systems were so numerous. In Canada, we have the RCMP (Royal Canadian Mounted Police). In most parts of the country, that's it—they do everything, from highway patrol to intelligence. Ontario and Quebec chose to take over from the RCMP for provincial policing matters with their own police services, and many cities have their own police services for local matters, but the RCMP is the national police service and has jurisdiction everywhere.
Once you are using monads you are now doing the thing that person hates, though: removing the control flow from the code (as it got moved into the monad); really the syntax for exceptions is nothing more than a hardcoded-into-the-language error monad.
I don't believe PI space comes in anything smaller than /24.
Not the concrete block homes, however a few decades ago they had to temporarily support the famous cantilevered roofs of Falling Water and then modify/restore its internal structure for longer-term survivability. I visited Falling Water while that process was going on and it was interesting to see how they were approaching modifying such an icon.

https://old.post-gazette.com/lifestyle/20011208lowry1208fnp3...

https://www.nytimes.com/1999/03/11/garden/an-icon-in-peril-s...
Does the figure being "only" 100-1 instead of 300-1 really detract from the point? Would that whole 0.9% even stand on the same side?
It is utterly amazing to me that despite all of human history being filled with stories of egregious human rights violations, lies, and propaganda coming from governments all across the political spectrum and world that people still trot out the "look, read this official information. This is proof!" excuse. How many more examples do we need before the opposite is assumed?
I have not tried it, but I'm told Rive is a good example of a very complex app written with Flutter.
"We can fix that"

You sure about that? Currently Chicago's mayor is trying to bring it back.
>What programs are you using in such a fashion that simply having the program autostart at boot is not feasible?

As a simple example open documents in libreoffice. I don't want to automatically start LO every time I turn on computer. If I have documents open I want to be able to return to the same place when I came back.
Any Android phone will be spied on by Google so long as Play Services are installed with elevated privileges(aka 99.9% of phones being commerically sold). At least with Pixels you don't have OEM bloatware on top of that.

For those inclined for more privacy, Pixels are one of the only phones that allow you to install de-googled Custom Roms without compromising the Android security model.
China says moonbound rocket stage was not from 2014 lunar mission
Compare IT Training across the whole market
Coal, iron ore, and titanium, for example
What's funny is the original CS:GO gui was built using flash.
I wouldn't be that worried about it. Sure there are ways to optimize it more and squeeze every drop of juice out the grape, but most of the time you're gonna be just fine. It might be the difference between running an extra app server or not.

Now that said nginx website has a ton of great examples. You can usually copy/paste them into whatever you need pretty easily, and once it's done it's not likely to change. I would especially do this if nginx is your internet-facing load balancer and has multiple upstreams behind it. Plenty of good examples out there.
I have no CamelCase key and I must write variables
Promoted.ai (YC W21) Is Hiring
Looks like they decided to conduct their large scale exercises in Ukraine.
The primary definition (OED) is "forming an exception", which is why I think this cliche is a tautology ("exceptions are for forming an exception") that does nothing to guide me on whether an exception is appropriate in a given case.

Btw, we don't say "exceptions are for infrequent conditions", because that's not what they're for.

I quite like the etymological "taken out", because it carries a notion of special handling - a control flow aspect that is the main point of using them.
The best explanation I've heard for why he'd stop with this region is to keep Ukraine out of NATO, which is a desire Russia has expressed before. The theory goes that a country with an active regional dispute would not be allowed to join. Probably (my interpretation) because it could immediately trigger the joint defense pact. No doubt nothing here is being done for the sake of the people there. The truth is no one knows what will happen, and if they do they won't tell you. News sources and governments have their own incentives and biases that encourage them to propose a maximalist idea of the situation.
I think this proves GP's point. Some people are finally starting to reject the "red vs. blue" false dichotomy.
Moral injury can occur in many contexts and populations, including the workplace
> detonated by rouge officers

Presumably they would be part of the red army?
His actual excuse (tweet 12) was that the ad agency did such a good job that he just assumed Coinbase owned them. Because he's just that entitled.
> I've never heard of any bank offering that service.

I'm not a cash person, but this is literally how cash deposits work (in the US). You fill out a deposit slip with your account information, hand the slip and the cash to the teller, and that's about it. If you own checks, your check book probably came with some deposit slips pre-filled with your account information.
Who drafted this legislation? Name?
What are you 3 actually on about? Something about free speech and tools? Care to explain for those who have no idea what’s going on here?
So with BLM there were blockages of one main road, then another, then another. Not continuous. At “protest time” which is when people were getting off work.

Lasted for a few days at most, not like in Canada.

Occupy protestors took a nearby park. Tried to stay out of the way otherwise.

It’s complicated whether they were responsible for blockage. Initially it was police who were in the way. After a while the police left but the activists stayed. The park and area around in became uninhabitable and unnavigable. Garbage in streets.

Very different protests. And very different from what’s happening in Canada.
> The government’s action is troubling enough, but what should really disturb us is the ease and invisibility with which it is being done.

This is such a great point. I'm not sure why it needs to be made over and over again, but it seems that's the only way it doesn't get buried.

Let's play a game. I will be the institution, you will be the person. You will get ability to record me with your cellphone and post stuff online to complain about various issues. I will get the ability to see all your financial transactions, listen to all your communications, track your location, arrest you when I don't like you recording me, smear you online and pressure companies to ban you from literally any service imaginable, including banking.

Both of us will be bound by the legal framework, but when I don't like it, I will have the ability declare the state of emergency and scrap all the rules. Also, I will have sovereign immunity when I break the rules. Also, many of my actions will be secret because of national security.

Oh, and I will be doing all the things described above using your money.

Sounds fair?
And the Russian oil producers are laughing all the way to the bank as the oil price (in dollars) goes up and the exchange rate of the ruble goes down. They win both ways.
Agreed. Laws work when there is a shared ethical base between the People and the governments that represent them. Unfortunately, there isn't, if there ever was. The very idea that just because there's a law means 1) it's ethical, and 2) it'll be ethically enforced is foolish. I wish it weren't as I consider myself a highly ethical person. That doesn't mean I'll deny reality.
Sigh, another “wheel being reinvented” argument. Do people realize aircraft wheels are different from car wheels? Someone had to reinvent the wheel to do that, but it doesn’t make the aircraft a mistake.

> Pretty much all of this stuff is just done for you by the browser with a traditional MPA/website.

It’s also done for you in a SPA. React-router is settled science. It’s done. We did it. You don’t have to invent anything yourself here, SPAs are not some unproven concept at this point.
"Talent of the first kind is mostly not a thing (but eg some people may be predisposed to certain kinds of athleticism)."

- Statements like this work reasonably well on HN and stupendously on the very receptive New York Times audience, but fail miserably when the first real-life punch lands (figuratively) on the speaker's jaw. "Talent" or "genetic quality" or "genetic predisposition" when considering a skill or activity is a fact of life and has been demonstrated in countless studies of twins.
I studied fish and birds for a long time and even there the main confounder when studying the effects of environment on life histories or physiological functions was "individual quality", the fact that just about everywhere certain individuals do much better than others for reasons other than "lucky breaks".

I've also seen people run very fast (much faster than me), draw very well (I draw houses and people the same way), tune their guitar by saying la-la (whereas I can't tell the difference between a piano and a church bell).
Eli Detweiler Is the Auctioneer
That's 10 million dollars, that pays for a team of 10 people for 4 years.
I've also begun to thing of Wordle as a meme. I know virtually anything could be framed as a meme, but there's specific aspects of Wordle and its rise in popularity that make it a particularly apt description. Its viral spread was fast and resonant. It's super easy to consume. Think pieces dissecting it end up in mainstream publications. The story about its origin gets mythologized.

And, most importantly: unending riffs on the base meme. There's basically infinite Wordle clones with slightly (or very) different rules. And the shared results themselves can be riffed on as well. It's done a thing that's usually reserved for image memes: it's created a whole new language that people are using to make fun(ny) things.

It's just really interesting to see that happen with a game.
It's an honest and legitimate question. The US government has been funding them, it's only fair we know if these funds are going to them.

https://fair.org/home/what-you-should-really-know-about-ukra...
The lesson I take from this is "masks work".

Seems like the US should be advocating for wearing masks during every influenza season, especially for those who exhibit symptoms, or deal with lots of other people.

Anecdotally, I have been very careful to wear masks in public places for the lst 2 years. I haven't had so much as a single head cold, or a cough that wasn't remediated by allergy medication. Essentially zero respiratory ailments. I'm probably going to keep wearing masks in crowded spaces from now on. I don't like respiratory diseases at all.
Carrying $50 in my wallet which gets seized with an extremely low probability is not how I "lose it all". It's how I "lose $50 maybe but most likely not".

How I would lose it all is if we go to a digital currency and I get banned at the flick of a switch!
That's very fair, good point.
Paper money in the usa is a fiat money... (as is bank ledger money)

All fiat means is that it is unbacked by physical things, such as gold or silver.
The problem as stated by the topic is that those who are cashless (which is a vast & growing amount of people) are subject to having their digital assets frozen on a moment notice.

These proposals that we need to focus more on cash-ed people are mishearted & distracting from the core topic. Sure, a more cash-ready society is better able to help someone who has to rebuild their life, forced into a cash-carrying state. But it does nothing to prevent or remedy having your assets stripped from you by the whim of some megacorporation trying to improve their PR spin on a hot-topic.

People need assistance before being thrown to rock bottom by the corporation, not just after.