skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'm on a prepaid plan. I had the maximum plan (unlimited data, unlimited voice) for two decades but with home office, I spend most time indoors so I've switched to a <10% cost prepaid plan which works mostly fine.

Some months my data volume doesn't last till the end of the month. I use SMS instead of the Signal protocol then.

Yes I might be a minority, but if you're not the market leader, cutting out minority groups of users will not make you more successful.

What's your mission: Giving secure communication to everyone or become the next WhatsApp?
You go from worrying about your own success to worrying about the success of your offspring.
My wife migrated from Android Device (Sony XZ2 Compact) to iPhone 13 Mini (because it was impossible to buy small but fast Android device when Sony was drown in torrential rain) a 6 months ago.
Every out friend with iPhone said: "You'll accommodate to iPhone/Android difference fast, and everything will be Ok".
Now, after half a year, almost everything is Ok, but not typing, editing text and interacting with text fields.
She is screaming and shouting and sometimes crying when she need to type substantial comment on Facebook or big message in Telegram.
Just to add some citations.

You can see various threads where people complained about the forced Apple emoji e.g. https://github.com/signalapp/Signal-Android/issues/3712 and https://github.com/signalapp/Signal-Android/issues/3675

Signal's own FAQ says

> Signal Android includes built-in emoji functionality for consistency between platforms

https://support.signal.org/hc/en-us/articles/360017561992-Wh...
> Happiness is extremely overrated

This seems like a strange conclusion to draw, it doesn’t sound like you were happy
I've used android phones since I've had modern smartphones and I've had a similar experience. The built in keyboard by google/aosp was always flaky and, especially on small screens, a pain to use. I'll describe my keyboard journey and what ups and owns I experienced on android here:

After using the built in keyboard for a while came swipe-typing and it was a lot better, but still limiting. To this day I believe that swipe-typing still hasn't reached its full potential, but the keyboards that focused on it seem to gravitate back towards hybrid regular typing and swiping which in my opinion removes many advantages it had before, making continuous use somewhat awkward.

The next step in my keyboard journey was fleksy. Fleksy was built much like the apple keyboard, in that the keyboard would look where exactly you pressed (not only the key you actually hit) and try to correlate the most likely word from that, powered by a a personal word frequency statistic lookup. It worked so well that they introduced an "invisible keyboard" mode which did exactly what it said on the box, and even without visible keyboard it would work almost perfectly, that's how good their system was. The other controls where designed around their algorithm, it was highly encouraged to, instead of correct something inside of a word, just delete everything and re-write, much like you'd do on a computer where it's much faster to just ^w^w^w^w then to go back and correct that one letter. In addition, they had gestures to cycle through the other likely predicted words their engine determined from your touches.

Unfortunately, fleksy had trouble raking in money and so the nice thing they had went the way every piece of venture capital software goes, which is down the drain. They began adding ever more things that began nagging away at their core competency until at some point they ventured to a joint ios/android app, a total rewrite. At that point they also introduced machine learning and made away with their previous engine, lowering the prediction quality noticably.

It was at that point that I decided to switch to another app and went f-droid only, because if fleksy would've been free software I could've just taken the source and maintain it myself whenever google decided to break an api it uses.

Currently I use florisboard, a fork of the aosp keyboard with some changes like the swipe behaviour of the space bar and selective deletion using backspace swiping. It's not fancy, typing hurts sometimes, but at least it doesn't try to be smart. Software that tries to be smart and fails is much worse than software that doesn't try.
This is like an ad for never having children.
This. And as the GP says, long live remote work - I'll wake up before 9 only in the rare days I go to the office to say hello to the mates. So can we basically say that with the remote work trend also the "accepted schedule in society" became less important? Progress!
Pretty much, but without the effort of going out, then buying, choosing and signing one.
I don't have four hours of free time even without children...
> It's not an idle fear. Before https there were ISPs that would literally insert ads and other javascript into returned pages.

In some countries known for lacking consumer rights.
I think visual cortex did not evolve to process dense symbolic information, with the emphasis on symbolic. Dense diagrams are much more difficult for most people than plain text arranged in lines or in a grid.
So the antidote to wanting to do interesting things and change the world is to give up on your ambition, procreate, and raise a new generation of people to go through the same cycle of ambition, despair, and duty? That sounds like an incredibly bleak world to live in.
Wow, I was thinking the exact same thing as I recently switched from an ancient Pixel 2 XL to an iPhone 12.

I thought it was just me...
Thanks for mentioning it!

My initial response on it being announced in the Signal app was "Oh no, that's terrible!". Followed by "Meh, all software goes to shit eventually. Now it's Signal's turn". Now I already don't really care anymore.

I have been using Silence [0] as my sms app for a day and don't really miss the Signal sms integration anymore.

What bugs me more is that the text message export from Signal seems incomplete. Oh well, I will get over that as well.

[0] https://silence.im/

(Funnily enough Silence is a fork of Signal for SMS only. I thought it looked quite familiar but just realised it is the case)
There are plenty of cloud providers that offer cheap and feature-rich services if you look away from the hyperscalers, disclaimer: I'm part of a team building one. However most users aren't swayed by only price so it's a tough market to break into.
Why are you people always so proud of having all your communication owned by Meta? With Meta dictating which phones you can use to communicate with others?
One trick to parenting is the almighty ROUTINE! Don't sacrifice it for anything. If your kid goes to bed at 7pm 6/7 nights a week, that's not a routine. Kids can't recognize complex routines, I find they're all or nothing.

We implemented a routine of bedtime at 6:30pm and it liberated our evenings. The routine means in evenings one partner always has to stay in unless we call a babysitter, but that's a small price to pay for being able to go out, or stay in and follow your hobbies and passions.

Now, to be fair, we have a good sleeper (but not a good eater, seems like you only get one!), but routines of all kinds help, and I think they can help all kids. Stick to the routine, it pays dividends.
I feel this is good foundation in CS and interested into more advanced ML and math. At least for me I feel excited when reading the toc since I have touched many of those concept over the years but never went deeper
> You can have the very best decompiler in the world and you're still going to be a rounding error compared to companies like Figma, because (1) not that many people use disassemblers

(1) could be changed by making a decent offer to hobbyists that they can't refuse, and making the buying experience for them hassle-free.
2012 is 3 years before Apache Airflow was released
The window doesn't close at 39 for either of you. From personal experience, I know.
As this line of comments indicates, there is no consensus upon whether instagram is worth having or not.

Why not let the user decide, which columns to show? You could start with a default, non-intrusive set which the user can expand as liked.
My sister had children at 39yo and 42yo (her husband older than that). It was all fine and pretty safe. With good medical support, it is not a problem for most women. Also, adoption is a pretty nice thing to do.
Yeah, I've hit this interesting attitude from Signal developers when I noticed they hijack the SMS datastore which then becomes inaccessible to tools like SMS Backup & Restore and tools that forward SMS notifications to other devices.

The developers were adamant that they know better than me what I want from my SMS tool. And then proceeded to work on crypto and stories.
Not only the Web, we are now doing at large scale what Xerox, Sun, Apple, IBM and Microsoft envisioned during the last century, distributed computing with RPCs.

The Web is only one form of exposing those RPC endpoints.
> As soon as a company's IT department is practically fully remote, why should they page a German wage for someone who is a face on a screen, when they can pay a fraction for that same face broadcasted from a few hundred kilometers further east or south? German is hardly used in business context here anyway and lower-wage countries within ±3 hours timezones abound.

This has already happened and has resulted in unification of salaries across region (and is probably why the German salaries stayed relatively low in the past decade). In Berlin, a lot of seniors are still making no more than 70k euros a year. People of similar caliber will easily make 60k euros a year in Poland, while having incomparably lower taxes and costs of living.
Exploratory Data Analysis for Cybersecurity Intrusion Detection
About to do a new release for marginalia search, also loading a new index. Hoping this means I'll breach the 100M document barrier.

A ton of changes in the pipe: https://www.marginalia.nu/October2022Release/
> It's insecure by default

Any proof? If you're calling MTProto 2.0 'insecure' then you should know it's already been audited multiple times in the last 2 years. If insecure means not using E2EE, then I guess the whole infrastructure of the internet is insecure.

> It's not even anonymous

It's more anonymous than Signal is. It requires phone number to register but you don't need to share a phone number or any personal detail to communicate with people.
Not common isn't quite right. Ofcom's report shows that SMS use is shrinking, but it is still an average of 51 messages per user per month.

Source https://www.ofcom.org.uk/__data/assets/pdf_file/0011/222401/...

SMS decline is probably inevitable though.
With Pro accounts limited to 100 users, I believe this is a good opportunity to recall [0], that lists businesses that overprice SSO

[0] https://sso.tax/
Paraphrasing Sun, the network is the computer, so it is a matter of who has more valuable distributed computing APIs and how they are exposed to the world.
I always find it so weird that the first time in my whole career that I ever got authority to spend without literally any approval was when we got our cloud account. Every single other thing, even a $10 cab ride, had to be authorised. But when we signed up for AWS I just do whatever I do and finance pays the bill. I still do not understand how this happened.
Because the early bird catches the worm yada yada. It's a fight uphill against the instagram self-care industry gurus telling everybody to cook a healthy breakfast, jog and gym all before work. Of course we late risers aren't that productive at 8am, if you force us outside our productive hours - said guru would be the same lag at 8pm when I'm breezing through code.
No, there isn't any, because outside Telegram and SMS, none of those apps really support any APIs or 3rd party clients.

Signal team is also actively hostile to any 3rd party client usage of their service.

And that's always cheered on this website - just remember the RCS topics where people were making fun of attempts to add some basic standardisation to this mess.
Oh only have no time to do what i love for the next 8 years huh? Sounds like a breeze! And that's the best case scenario, kids won't leave the house usually before 18-25 years of age.
I think the selling point of this app is that this is the only way you can start an idea on the go and then easily bring that into Ableton Live. Don't know if it works the other way around too but I'd be surprised. But it's interesting to see Ableton dipping their toe in mobile water.
Well I have to congratulate Signal on the thorough response.

I can't remember the last time I got such a response. It's a challenge to get them to respond to complaints
Not all plans have these systems installed.
The Manga Guides
Yep, ios 7 was the first version where I had to become conscious of where my touch lands vs where I see my finger over the letters. It’s both amazing how they could nail it from the beginning and then allow some idiot to break it and start a spiral of “degenerative enhancements” every few years.
That sounds incompatible with having any kind of social life, even when you don't have the kids around.
You can 100% have kids.

Not only biologically but also There are thousands of younger 30ish women who'd see 0 problem have a kid with a mature 40 y.o. (rather than a 30 y.o. whos head is not there yet)

Of course you probably wont have the same relationship with your wife but thats your life, not hers. And if you wake up with panic attacks over kids you HAVE to do it or youll never forgive yourself in 10 / 20 years.

And if you feel guilty about reversing your decision to be childless, think that same way that you can give and take back consent any time, you have the right to change your mind anytime.
But how does it take a over week to answer the question?

Sounds like the more basic problem is that we keep ending up working in companies where the "higher ups" are constantly shoving decisions down our throats.

Which, ultimately, is probably the root cause of most of the caginess, the yak shaving, the compunction to use cloud databases and cloud-everything, and the silly support tickets that stay open forever and ever and ever.
My mom was 35 when I was born, and that was over 30 years ago. I think my grandmother was 39 when my dad was born, and that was over 70 years ago. There's still a possibility for conception unless you didn't explain in your post.
While it is cool, it is similar to using a X Server like Hummingbird back in the old days.
text is superior (as in programming languages, not natural language) in the general case but there may be exceptions GUI builders, mock-ups, diagrams, tricking non-programmers into programming (iOS shortcuts(yahoo pipes), Scratch/Alice).
>The only large group of people who still primarily use SMS to communicate person-to-person is Android users in the USA.

BS. I visited city I grew up recently, met with a few (9+) people (25-32 years old) and only one of them had WA, most haven't heard about Signal, everyone simply uses SMS. It's simply multiplatform, works with their gradmas and no one wants to install __another__ app to send messages to people. No one cases about RCS that will be used to push QR codes and ads, people will use SMS for its simplicity and reliability. I'll be dropping Signal and moving to WA once Signal drops SMS support.
Personally I can't stand him. So much so that I can't bring myself to watch his interviews, even if the topic is interesting and the questions well asked.
2FA, NHS, gov.uk reminders, a large %age of my social group...

WhatsApp is a closed protocol owned by Facebook. It has its uses but relying on it is a mistake.
TrackerControl has a different target audience and sports a brilliantly designed UI. It can be much more easier to use than Rethink if all you're trying to do is block spyware and attentionware across all apps to the extent DNS blocking allows.

Otoh, Rethink is a userspace firewall (in line with LittleSnitch / Glasswire). Primarily meant as a way for Android users to keep tabs on network activity of installed apps and tame it where possible.
It does exist in Orion, which is also WebKit...: https://browser.kagi.com/
This worked great for me except for one thing (the “back to top” button was right under where I normally scroll the page and I kept hitting it by mistake.
"Modern principles of economics" start with great anecdote how British Government changing payment from £/prisoner boarded to £/prisoner delivered reduced death rate on Australia convict ships from ~30% to less than 1%.
It's down from the peak, but 40 billion SMSes were sent in the UK in 2021. I would be staggered if this number was majority B2C/2FA.

https://www.statista.com/statistics/271561/number-of-sent-sm...
The "there's no RCS API" sounds more like an excuse or at least a pretty shallow take. There is none now. But chances are that there will be an RCS API in the near future.

E.g. EU countries are split between plain SMS and WhatsApp as the preferred messaging platform for automated interactions with services. Google not offering an RCS API would be like pushing everyone to use WhatsApp for automated interactions. Would Google risk that? Probably not.

By pulling the plug from SMS support now, Signal just makes it certain that they will lose user base, no matter what Google does.

And it is also kind of disrespectful to anyone who spent their personal time advocating the use of Signal to friends and family.
I have multiple male friends who had kids between 44-46y. So the window is not closed.
My experience of mobile messaging the UK is different to yours as might be expected in a country of 60+ million.

The stats show a significant drop as mobile data became cheaper and richer services became available, but still quite a lot of traffic.

I suspect that the people I see using Nokia and Samsung dumb phones will continue to use SMS, so traffic will fall to a sustained tail.

https://www.statista.com/statistics/271561/number-of-sent-sm...
As others have said, if you're in reasonably good health, IVF is definitely an option for having kids. It could be good excuse to get that big enterprise job, as I know SalesForce offers IVF insurance as part of its comp.

Barring that, fostering is a possibility, but the requirements to do so and the ease of it vary on where you are. Fostering is not something to enter into lightly, but it seems to be highly rewarding. I have a friend adopting the child she fostered, it wasn't always easy, but she's very happy.
That's right.. but the use wasn't widespread.
The demonetization exercise and in quick succession to it, the covid lockdown helped UPI up the scale, exponentially.
> I think that becoming a parent fundamentally changes who you are. It's the antidote to all the worries and anxiety you had about success and coping before, but now don't have time to indulge in.

All the parents in Silicon Valley would like to have a word with you.

Trust me - having kids doesn’t dissuade everyone from pursuing riches as you seem to claim. If anything - I see people stress harder than before because now they have to succeed and so do their children. The families who don’t stress as much are those who already had success - they already got their tens of millions.
Except there is no way to support HTTPs without ending up with people sharing https:// links that won't work for non-HTTPs users.

I really wish SSL/TLS would have used something like starttls. And yes, that means needing HSTS preload (or better yet a DNS-based alternative) to prevent downgrade attacks, but we do need that with https:// anyway.
There's certainly a few hours you can grab for something; I'm sure the extra sleep young children need contributed to our survival as a species, or else few children would have survived to adulthood. :-)

I've got a side project I've been trying to work on, but there's just so much else that needs to be done: You've got to keep connections with family and friends, you've got to do your laundry and your taxes and your shopping, you've got to figure out what to do about schooling, and so on. And I can't tell you how many times I've managed to block of 3-4 hours on a Sunday afternoon / evening to do some proper hacking, only to have my son fall ill and have to spend that time getting him medicine or trying to help him fall asleep.

All that to say, it certainly is possible to have "side projects" other than your child, but as OP said, you really have to adjust your expectations down. :-)
A few posts here are suggesting that it's not too late. Perhaps so, but the way are describing yourself is worrisome, in a way that I think if you attempted to have kids (either biologically or through adoption), your stress levels would reach new heights that are unsustainable.

You are depressed, anxious, and have lost sight of what you want out of life. I don't know if kids are the bandage here. At the least, you need to figure out yourself before, or at least in parallel, to working on introducing young children into your family.

It's hard to offer specific advice on such a broad topic to a stranger. You've taken the right steps (therapy, counseling), but you have yet to find your inner peace. What do your social connections look like? Genuine social connection is usually highly correlated with happiness. Those connections can give you a sense of purpose (which is part of having kids) and a "place" in this growingly isolated world.

I'd start there, if you have not. Investing in people and in the relationships you have is absolutely critical to ones happiness. I'd be curious to hear more about how you see this part of your life.
The Visual AI Revolution
By being the gatekeeper of its evolution of course.
> I never understood Telegram.

Telegram has amazing user experience. It's available for any platform, the messages are always backed up, the apps are high quality and responsive and they have great features for group messaging and group organization. They even give you a library you can build your own Telegram client with.

It's *great to use* - something that Signal people never prioritized and always rather pushed their sometimes horrible preferences down peoples throats.
I mean..................yes. It's weird. I love our son, he's literally my pride and joy and I would do anything for him without hesitation. He's genuine pleasure to be around and makes me so happy every day. Having him also made me reconsider the priorities in my life, realize that work isn't as important as I thought and the world will keep turning even if I'm not doing 10 hour days, it's fine. I would rather spend time with him than do pretty much anything else.

But at the same time........the sleepless nights, the arguments with your partner(because you are both exhausted and the smallest thing can explode), the financial cost, the stress whenever something isn't right and you're pulling your hair out..........I absolutely 100000% don't want a second one. Nope. Not worth it.

So...............take that as you will :-)
Have you tried Twilio or some similar SMS solution that doesn't involve your phone. Admittedly this costs money but potentially you could use a number there to consume everything.

Alternatively if you are in Europe/UK the openbanking API is quite widely used now
Observability-driven development creates elite performers
> Did you ever think about how you'll never again be able to stay up all night and research new technologies, or have a hobby like kayaking, or .. All because of parenting?

Single dad with a 5 year old son here. These are self imposed limitations that just aren’t real. For example, I joined a kayaking club when my son was 2, and bring him on kayaking trips about twice a month in a tandem kayak, with proper safety gear. And I am up right now reading on the Internet at night while he sleeps!

Whatever you wanted to do as a non parent, you can likely still do. Be creative, bring the kids along and integrate them, or make deals with other parents to share and trade childcare duties.