skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Their stance relies mostly on the same tired canards that India disproves; that an uneducated populace, rural areas, etc are hindrances. They are, but they're not ones that Communism/Authoritarianism solves - And India has some authoritarian properties, too.

The 2016 Indian banknote demonetisation is perfect example of how a somewhat democratic state can pull off large scale action that China refutes as a possibility. Was it pretty? Was it effective? Who knows. What matters in this argument is that it's the kind of corruption fighting mechanism that China likes to cite as the domain of their heavenly mandate and not possible for democracies.

Again, China can keep yelling that their way is the only way for China, but there does need to be a little more supporting basis than that.
I'm sorry for not using your arbitrarily-preferred synonym for "plump".

Like, if you're literally incapable of recognizing the difference between those photographs and, say, the folks on My 500 Pound Life or whatever "Learning" Channel drivel you watch, then maybe you ain't the one to be lecturing anyone about "constantly moving the goalposts".
As always, I'm happy to answer any questions around this (though the blog post pretty much covers it!).
I grew up in India in the 90s, saw first hand the transition from the disastrous socialism of the Nehru era to open markets, capitalism and deregulation. (The end of "license raj".)

It started with PV Narasimha Rao as PM and Manmohan Singh as his finance minister in the early 90s. Thankfully Singh himself had a fruitful tenure as PM later. All it took for India to take off was the shackles of govt control to come off.

Sad to see that the lesson hasn't been learned and even today there is a strong strain of socialist reasoning calling for more govt control on markets.

Concrete example: before deregulation one had to pull strings (e.g. have family or friends in the civil service) to get a phone to your house, then wait a few months after approval to actually get the wire to your house. That was also the era that there were two channels on TV, both state controlled (Doordarshan) that broadcast maybe 5-6 hrs per day.
This is why we need proper sandboxing of applications and libraries. There’s no way tools should be able to silently run any code they want, with my user’s full permissions on my desktop machine.

Apps couldn’t get away with this sort of thing on iOS or Android. It’s inconvenient, but we need to raise the bar in the same way for security permissions and sandboxing on the desktop. (But obviously, with the user in control.)
Out of curiosity, what makes the nukes hate each other while serving? Something along the lines of having to hold each other accountable for every tiny little tedious thing on endlessly long checklists or something?

The funny thing for me was that, though it wasn’t obvious just by looking at me & at the time nobody would’ve known unless I’d told them, I medically couldn’t have done anything military because of some internal physical medical conditions & being on some arguably heavy medication to deal with associated nerve pain.

Or at least I presumed that would’ve disqualified me, & things only gradually got worse.

There was one other path the Navy dude mentioned they were pretty desperately in need of intelligent people for, willing to put up with the slog that it entailed & had the same enlistment bonus. Can’t remember what. Had a friend end up in communications on a sub though… definitely said it sucked the life out of him & gtfo as soon as he could.
My latest passion is cheating at solitaire.

One of my favorite hobbies is reverse engineering and modding video games, old and new. Zachtronics recently released a bundle of solitaire games collected from all of the wonderful games they released over the last couple years. I built a program that injects code into the game, reads the game's memory to find the board state, and passes that into an automated solver. I also figured out various ways to trick the game into thinking that the board has been solved.

Reverse engineering games is incredibly fun, and you can learn a lot as well!
Doesn't bstr replace memchr? Unsure if it replaces bytecount.
5. Fuck Around and Find Out

https://twitter.com/rogerskaer/status/1576025818182332416
A nitpick: please don't conflate C and C++. They're separate languages, this article is exclusively about C, and C++ is an instance of one of the languages that "speaks C". C++ has its own symbol mangling and ABI, which has not historically been nearly as stable or universal.
Heh, Amazon tried this back in 2000 and it was very bad for customer trust:

https://www.computerworld.com/article/2588337/amazon-apologi...
arewep2pyet.com gives the details for Matrix - we’re making progress :)
Welcome feature, as hopefully it increases adoption, but seems like Signal is going the wrong direction. Getting feature like stories right and picked up is hard. You need to do a lot of analytics and UX testing. Signal team is not set up for this. This something, that is nice to have and can be iterated on until a sweet spot found, but in the meantime Signal is missing some important features directly related to it core mission: secure communication:
1. support multiple phone numbers
2. support usernames without phone number
3. ios message export
4. Hidden chats(not visible unless a secret combination is entered) – this is really necessary, because oppressive regimes don’t crack your encrypted, they detain and ask you to unlock your phone and show your message history.
5. Call quality between the US callers is pretty good. But in Europe it wasn’t as smooth for me.
6. Offline mode - when Internet isn’t available. Either using local servers or mesh networks. This is a massive change, but it would truly boost Signal resilience.
It’s data brokers they are talking about.
Uhm, do you mean slrn? Never heard of strn (but that doesn't mean anything).
I guess what I was trying to say is that for classic consoles, they're more keen on selling collectors edition nostalgia that you play for 15 minutes, then put on your shelf. 4 player consoles that let you play Goldeneye would be expensive to produce (licensing, hardware), niche (violence) and would and cannibalize their current business even if they provided good emulation and a good gameplay experience.
I also assume that Elon and his backers will do far worse things with Twitter users' data.
No. Over here I'd call this borderline obese. These people are unhealthily fat and it's frankly an indictment of the US that people try to sweettalk this sort of behaviour with words like 'curvier' and 'plumper'.
An architecture astronauts in Java just use code generation and runtime reflection, which are bigger nightmares than type system features.

Architecture astronauts are going to be a problem regardless of language features.
Less so than you might think:

1. DMs can be restricted to followed profiles.

2. Abuse can be reported and admins will likely act. Such a spam would be a once-and-done affair.

3. I'd need to check the spec / code, but suspect there's an upper bound on the number of profiles which can be mentioned in a single toot.

I'm not saying there's no opportunity for abuse. But on the whole, and on a cost-benefit assessment for the spammer, there are probably more viable options for spreading a message.
My company, Magistrate [0], has elements that are heavily inspired by this book!

Legal documents should be written in plain text, not Microsoft Word. Then, typographical conventions from books like this one can be enforced at the editor level with linters and autoformatters.

Lawyers spend way too much time and money on formatting Microsoft Word documents. How much unnecessary effort could be saved if we had black (the python package) for legal documents? Uncompromising formatting and typography for legal documents would go along way to eliminating the bikeshedding that lawyers do around useless formatting.

If this is the kind of thing that interests you, please reach out!

[0] https://getmagistrate.com/
>As of Tuesday (or whenever they actually launch it) someone will be able to register the Twitter account @C0ca_cola and pay $8 to give it a verified checkmark.

And what are you basing that assumption on? Where did he say that for $8 anything goes? If anything he's been very plain that was NOT going to happen, yet people like you still are willing to assume the worse? Again, based on what specifically?
His channel is really good, I've learned a lot
The last 6-ish characters are a checksum. It would be very computationally intensive to generate a similar-looking address without changing the checksum, though of course not impossible.
I have never understood all the song and dance about stories. I can see how they differ from simple posts in the sense that they can be interactive and last only last some time before disappearing (and even then, it seems the concept was extended by allowing permanent stories), but I just don't see the appeal. It forces me to check another section of the app to stay up to date with things, while I could just check classic posts. There's nothing technically impossible in improving classic posts and adding stories-like features to them, but it seems the main goal is to fully leverage fullscreen media and autoplay in order to retain users as much as possible in the app.
> Have you been to Ohio?

Yes. Have you? Because no, that ratio is not "flipped". It ain't even flipped in Texas - and everything is bigger in Texas.

> several 500lb people a day

Yes, "several" meaning single digits. The average Wal-Mart has anywhere from double to triple digits of people in it at any one time. All but the tiniest of US towns have quadruple or quintuple digits of people in them.

Thus, even by your own accidental admission, people in the 500lb range are an extreme rarity. This really shouldn't be surprising; the human body can only take in so much nutrients and can only reduce its energy expenditure by so little, so at some point even an entirely sedentary lifestyle with an entirely unhealthy diet will result in a stopping point far short of 500lb. The people you see on TV are that fat because they are outliers, not the norm. That's also - again - what makes them interesting enough to be worth televising to an audience that's already disproportionately obese.

Put differently: if 500lb+ people were the norm, then Wal-Mart would sell clothes that actually fit them instead of them having to be limited to overstretched sweatpants. The fact that Wal-Mart does not should make it patently obvious that they are far too small of a market segment to be worth catering to, even in the very store in which you seem to disproportionately see them.
The cassette interface is a type of modem. It's not a telephone modem, but it is modulating and demodulating digital data to/from analog.
> Neither was signal taking your contact list and uploading a copy along with your name and photo and storing that data forever in the cloud.

It seems incomplete to not mention that that data is end‐to‐end encrypted, and that name and photo are optional.
You think it's true taht they get a lot more than that from "other tech companies"? (who is that? Facebook? Tik-tok?)

(As an aside, it seems cute that the guy thinks the change in ownership somehow makes it "safer" for him to share inside details, but I'm glad he did)
Hotels aren't as good at this as airlines are. The airlines have more legal support enforcing that tickets are tied to an identity. Hotels can't check the IDs of everyone who goes into the room. And there are fewer airlines, so they have more data and more market power.
Don't forget the bribes to get a blue checkmark.
This really isn't a just for Twitter; this is the danger of selling any application with a large install-base. Doesn't really matter if it's a social network app, borderline-useless mobile app, Facebook App (I'm looking at you, Cambridge Analytica), chrome extension, or pypi/npm module, all of these things are capable of collecting extremely fine-grained user detail, and selling it off.

It doesn't matter if the current owners don't/won't do it, there is essentially nothing that prevents someone else from buying it up, and doing nefarious things with the existing install base.

And as far as "Terms of Service" go, there is essentially nothing to prevent a future owner from updating the Terms of Service, and then doing the above.
I agree. I feel the same way about signal payments. signal has enough critical mass to start expanding to other areas that could benefit from privacy.
>They all exist because C is an emergent semi-agreement created by people that mostly didn't talk between themselves and meant different things with their words on the few times they talked.

Sure. But that is pretty much inevitable if you try to get people from a few dozen industries with vastly different goals to try to agree to some form of standard.
You will have to make bad choices, because the good choice is totally unacceptable for one group on the standard committee (maybe for a very good reason).

The problems in C exist because of the vast space of problems it tries to solve. If your programming languages targets x86 and maybe ARM, there is a vast sea of problems you will never have to think about.

>It's perfectly possible to create an ABI standard and have every symbol well defined, a completely specified grammar, and even keep it simple enough so people are able to implement it.

Yes, it is possible but as standard which goes beyond a single system this is about as realistic as people only using "one programming language" and "one operating system".
It might be a smidge snarky, but it's literally the only justification Signal provides for adding this feature to their app. Why is it not OK to analyze their reasoning?
>I found this disappointing because it means that for there to be a critical mass of content in a particular community so that it gains in popularity, then that particular community in that particular instance has to become popular on its own, instead of all instances contributing to one big community

Totally agree. The whole server focus is not user friendly or intuitive.

As an example I finally found someone to follow and decided to look at the people rhey were following, but it would only show me people from that server.

The complete lack of discoverability is jarring. Really not sure Mastodon is ready for mass market.
"Married people have higher net worths and are more likely to be homeowners" - homesless men are more likely to live in a tent, so the first step to get out of poverty is to stop living in a tent.
This removed-sms-without-reason is going to be a myth that persists for a while

> RCS is coming, and it doesn’t play well with Signal.... and Signal can’t add RCS support because there’s no RCS API on Android. Honestly, the days of any third-party SMS app are numbered.

https://community.signalusers.org/t/signal-blog-removing-sms...
> While the tech bodyshops (TCS, Infosys, etc.) might have a poor reputation in the US, these companies have been absolutely critical in helping move tens of millions into middle-class respectability.

The same goes for most "slavery" jobs. A lot of people's fortunes has turned all over the world by working under "inhumane" condition for American or European companies.

These are actually good jobs in respect to state of play in these countries. The harm comes from degrading the employment standard in the rich countries where it's impossible to compete with places like China when they work under these conditions and as a result the jobs with "humane" conditions disappear in the wealthy countries or get worse.

Overall though, the world becomes a better places as the people in the developed countries get their stuff for cheap and people in the developing world catch up.
I had to leave Signal when they dropped SMS support.
What you are describing is one part of the problem.

I have friends who earn in dollars. They can easily afford to buy a couple of apartments every year. They do this and let those apartments sit vacant for a few years, waiting for them to appreciate. When many people start doing this, it artificially inflates the prices.
There are several errors in your analysis, while it IS accurate that "suing IBM" is difficult for a small inventor.

First, patent trolls have a very simple business model (and I heard this from a former troll):

- Don't even sue the real easy marks, the ones who will just write a check for $50,000 to make you go away. Just threatening them is enough.

- Sue the slighter harder targets. For these, you have to actually file a suit. They will settle with you, and you'll demand more than $50K because they made you work a little.

- (This step is optional) Sue the real hard targets, like Google, who will file an IPR (inter-partes reexamination) to try to invalidate your patent. Again, many times you'll end up with a settlement out of this.

- (also optional): go to trial, and hope for a gigantic jury verdict. Buy a lottery ticket, in other words.

Now your statement "Patents are written so broad that they are essentially meaningless." is nonsense. "So broad" means that they apply to lots of products, and the jury just has to decide one of the claims applies to yours.

So, your "small inventor" might get some money by selling to the patent troll, but it might not be from defeating IBM, and it won't be 100% of the money.
And when there is a war?
Lights and hub from Ikea anyone? Super easy and the app works great for this.
It is neither. Just like in case of "second most powerful army in the world" this is just buffooning to atract attention of western press.

Regime that is absolutely financially and morally corrupt is absolutely incapable to implement anything like that on scale. It is not important how much money they have when 99% will always be stolen in process.

Unfortunately it does not make overall situation any better because there are less corrupt, more stable, but even more totalitarian regimes that capable of doing this.
What are you going to suggest next, a company consists of employees and a chair is made of atoms?

To neoliberalism, Countries and Companies are like the ghosts. They have a will of their own, they are immaterial and can't be pinned down.

Together with the omnipotent and omnibenevolent Invisible Hand they form the Trinity and Haunt the stock market.

If there is a recession, it is never a structural problem in the market, it is always because the consumers have sinned.
The point of patents isn't just to protect you from theft. It's to grant you a monopoly on the invention in exchange for publishing details about it (thereby allowing others to build on your invention). Trade secrets law protects you against theft. Multiple people having the same idea doesn't actually mean anything - the person who makes the public disclosures of its existence is the one who gets the patent.

No, you don't necessarily need to spend a lot of resources or even have a "research group" to invent something completely novel, and the price of research is actually a lot lower than you think if you aren't hiring people. For example, you can make a new silicon chip to prove that your new circuit works for under $10,000. A new electronic device of some other kind is only a few thousand. Software (for the few remaining fields where you can get a software patent) is pretty much free to develop.
I've been really confused by this regression of theirs. But I note that the shift will happen at the same time as they introduce Matter support, so perhaps that's related?
It was the value of the contracts for delivery at a certain time and place (e.g. the "May 2020 WTI crude" contracts) that went negative, because there was no capacity to accept delivery.

Sure you could have received money by buying the (undeliverable) oil on a tanker, but then you would have been stuck paying the oil tanker lease cost (tens of thousands of USD/day) until capacity to take delivery became available, or until the tanker could be moved elsewhere with capacity.
I've done some C/C++, a lot of JS/TS due to its web dominance. I found Elixir a year ago and fell in love with it.

I love the functional style of Elixir, it's elegant to write and read, but feels unsafe. The lack of a type system is hard for me and has been a nightmare when trying to find the origin of a particular error tuple and refactoring code, running the app to see if it works. Running it in production feels like a ticking time bomb, even if it does handle fault tolerance gracefully.

I've reached for Rust for the occasional project and have never regretted it, I couldn't justify its use for everything though. Very high-quality ecosystem, rock solid and predictable performance and tiny footprint. I've made a VPN supervisor process that fits in a few MB Docker image (without OS), uses a few MB of RAM, no idle CPU and wonderful latency.

Perhaps Erlang can manage tail latencies better under load, pre-emptive scheduling is awesome, but my personal experience has been that Rust is just much more efficient at doing the same task, giving you more free CPU time, predictable memory freeing that rivals Erlang's per-process GC. You finish that blocking computation before it even becomes noticeable. Erlang’s fault tolerance is matched by Rust’s type system and memory safety guarantees. It's hard to compare C++/Rust to Erlang/Python/Ruby, they're just different.

It's slower and more frustrating to write, but the language server gives you so much feedback and useful comments. I find the linter amazing, it finds some pretty obscure and neat improvements with the additional type information it has, and Option<T> and Result<T,E> have an almost functional-like chaining pattern.

For a small hobby project, Rust 100% of the time. No painful dependency management, no complex build process. For a more serious project, or for a client, not always justifiable. I always miss Rust’s language features and libraries when coding in another language that has the upper hand in their respective dominant fields, although I like that a lot of tooling (ESBuild, swc, Tailwind's compiler, fnm, Rome, ...) is being remade in Go/Rust, it benefits far more people than it inconveniences.
Because you can use it as your only messaging app if it has SMS. You can't if it doesn't.
Fontaine: Reduce cumulative layout shift / flash of unstyled text / jank
> in software, fixed costs are high, but variable costs (e.g., COGS) are tiny

In traditional software. SaaS has hosting costs, support costs etc.
There’s no jury if you plead guilty. He didn’t have to be convicted because he admitted to the crime as part of a plea bargain.
Well it might not be possible to be 100% sure, but there are several tells that likely is.

1) the wide brim at the back of the helmet with the right temple insignia

2) the epaulettes clearly featured on the shoulder.

3) The extra wide and dark collar

My years of experience watching Hogan's Heros tells me that is in fact a German uniform.
Clojure Turns 15
> Lots of reasons recently to develop deep distrust for Signal leadership, and start calling into question whether the app is still legitimately private.

How about when Signal started storing people's contacts, their name, their photo, and their phone number in the cloud ignoring cries from their users that Signal should provide a way to opt out and bringing up security concerns, then refusing to update their privacy policy to reflect the new data collection meaning that for years now they've been outright lying to people about what data is being collected and how it's used. That was when I moved off the platform.

If you want private/secure consider looking elsewhere.
A "simple quadratic model" is about as appropriate for extrapolating human weight from human dimensions as a microwave is appropriate for cooking steak.