skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
My friend… Russia invaded Ukraine in 2014. Two different US presidents warned Europe about Russian energy dependency, publicly. Who knows how many times this was brought up in private conversations.

This was so easy to predict that even Donald Trump managed to put two and two together and make four. He brought it up, publicly, and German leaders literally laughed at his face.

European politicians deserve no benefit of the doubt here after 2014. They were told this was a huge risk and chose to do nothing.
I was an established freelancer when the bubble burst in 2000-2002. I'm too lazy to dig up my old records to get the timing, but recall that there was an initial lull in work offers, then a pretty sizable bump maybe three to six months later from companies that had realized they'd cut too deep but still had work that needed doing, then things leveled off again at pretty much the same level as before the crash (well before the crash was "over"). I had one recurring job that had used to come up twice a year that stopped coming up; other than that I wasn't much personally affected.

Later boom-and-bust cycles I barely noticed, things stayed pretty steady.

It's a very different industry than it was 20 years ago, though, so I'm not sure how much predictive value that anecdata has. This time around I expect companies to be more willing to experiment with the low-cost offshore options than they might have been last year; offshoring wasn't really a well-established option back then.
I really like using generators in test code for setting mock/stub.

You can be really specific about how you want it to run, without having to memorize a new language of function calls that have to be triggered in specific orders
Can We Trust Self-Reported Mystical Experiences?
> functional looking stuff

That doesn't look "functional" at all. The "slamTimTam" function is modifying an object it's been given. Modifying an object that you've taken as an argument should almost never happen anywhere in any codebase, much less a functional one.

Although it's not totally your fault: TFA seems completely confused about what "map" actually does, itself. I can't really tell whether they know what immutability is or not.

In fact one of my biggest pet peeves is "fluent" style code that modifies the object it's being called on. D3 in JavaScript is a perfect example of this abominable perversion of that "functional" style.
Itself built with a compiler you verified and built yourself.
That's already the reality.
If you're putting PHI in a presentation, you probably already have HIPAA problems.
Yes, you consented to this when you clicked through the TOS without reading it.
I don't have PowerPoint on my computer so I don't know if it works without Internet connection. Can someone tell me what happens if there is no network access?
This is essentially what Estonia does I believe. They for years have been making it clear to their citizens that factions outside of its nations borders are directly trying to manipulate their elections. I don't think they discredit any particular sources, it is more of public service announcements for people to do their due diligence.
As humans we like to think that we can control effectively however it's clearly not the case. Something like geo-engineering while certainly possible to study certainly wouldn't be able to understand the ripple effects. Its tantamount to releasing a a non-native species into the wild to control another species will creating another whole host of problems. Geo-engineering is just that on a larger and potentially more deleterious scale.
I mean, Elon Musk also bought Twitter; I'm not sure that I'd necessarily go to him for advice on anything.
You might be right, but, the perspective you're describing basically advocates disregarding the lives of those at risk of a COVID death in favor of making more money.

How much does a life cost? In the rest of the world that basically failed to contain the virus, it wasn't a question to begin with, since lockdowns didn't really work. China was somewhat successful in its lockdowns because it had ways to enforce the admittedly draconian measures -- so, how much does a life cost?
At least in Kentucky both Kroger and Target have them randomly in the imports section of the cookie aisle if you look for them. (Depending on supply chain presumably.) In Kroger it's often the hard to see/hard to find top shelf. They rarely get the fun or the especially good flavors, but they often have the originals.

I don't think Kentucky has an especially large Australian influence, so I assume that they distribute Tim Tams somewhat broadly nationally, but I don't know.
The moment I realized that that was going to be the pretense for the final season (a simulation) I groaned out loud.

That idea sounds exhausting to experience after seeing how the writers have handled things lately. I love dialogue-heavy shows, but the last two seasons of Westworld were needlessly ponderous and often melodramatic without a density of stimulating ideas to sustain interest.

More often than not later episodes felt like never-ending exposition. You're just sitting there being told what IS or how the character feels without experiencing anything for yourself.

Seemingly this final scenario (a simulation) would be super-fluid and un-moored from the internal consistency of a real-world setting, and that makes it hard for the viewer to give a damn about anything because the rules are so far beyond anything they can predict. So I was gearing up a full season of characters talking in a lofty manner with a diminished amount of substance at the core.
Having checked the Pleroma source [1] I can state that there are no default domain or user blocklists. It does support blocking on domain and user level but it is up to the administrator to provide blocklists.

[1] https://git.pleroma.social/pleroma/pleroma
I mean, if we're talking python here, functions are callable objects.
Yes that type of person exists but they are not the ones looking for a twitter alternative because of Elon Musk right now.

There are shades of gray between the people who understand the technical definition of federation, and people who, as you put it "browse the web by accident". The people who are looking for an alternative right now understand e-mail well enough (from an end-user perspective) to make the comparison.

If we ever get to the point where enough people use mastodon that the latter category would also be interested in participating in it, it would be so ubiquitous that they would ask someone with a minimum of understanding to et it up for them. Just the way it works now with other things.
Ireland sold seized Monero (XMR) and Bitcoin (BTC) in an online auction in 2019. I think they even opened it up to foreigners.
Researchers report finding "mechanical structures" in Pfizer COVID-19 vaccines
Oh nice, didn't know about that flag!

Another option is to use a custom mark on the test you want to run, and then do something like "pytest -v -m onlyrunthis"
> The book 'Invisible women' by Caroline Criado Perez has a section about this, I highly recommend it.

I asked for this book for my birthday and read it. However, I couldn't help but notice that when the author wrote about my field (computers, broadly speaking) the research was often... lacking?

She wrote a solid 3-4 pages on large phones and it was just surreal to read. Paraphrased:

> Phones are very large. This is bad for women; they have smaller hands. Nobody knows why tech companies make large phones. It is very silly, because women actually use their phones more than men. I asked multiple tech journalists for an explanation, they had no idea either. Here I present some theories that can tie this issue to sexism: companies simply design phones with men in mind, companies expect women to carry a handbag all the time so a large phone is no bother, and so on. And sure, women could buy an iPhone SE but that model hasn't been updated in two years.

Nothing about better battery life, nothing about better media consumption. It was so confusing, as every tech journalist, literally every tech journalist, knows that bigger phones have better battery life.

Sadly it made it a bit difficult for me to fully trust the rest of the book.
This is the key point that's often missed: asbestos isn't used anymoee in applications where the risks outweigh the benefits.

We use incredibly dangerous materials in photolithography, nuclear weapons production, armor piercing projectiles, and aerospace... because there are no alternatives and/or the benefits outweigh the risks.

What changed is that we learned more about asbestos (it causes cancer) and phased it out of applications where alternatives existed, even more expensive ones.

In the C analogy, there may be places C continues to make sense... but it shouldn't be used anymore out of default, because it's the way things have always been done, or any other reason that doesn't end with "... and that's more important than an increased risk of security vulnerabilities."
This place was almost exclusively into him until the cave diver thing; it was kind of cult-like. I think the "wait, maybe this guy is an arsehole, rather than a magical super-genius" tendency started growing at that point.
yeah, the panic people are putting forward about server choice is really strange. my account is on a friends invite server and 99% of the people i follow and interact with are on all kinds of other servers. my timeline is almost entirely people from dozens of other servers.

im not at all sure why people are panicked about this.
I think a much more efficient method would be to make the rule that if a citizen finds prior art more than 5 years older than the filing of the patent, then the patent holder must pay $1000 to the citizen and the patent will be invalidated.

If the patent holder does not pay within 6 months, then all the patent holders patents since then will be invalidated.

It has to function without involving the courts as they will bleed anybody who are no rich.

This is simple, gruesome, but effective. I just can't imagine the politicians wanting this efficiency.
Well the fog of information in this respect works wonders, considering how influential these think tanks are, is there any surprise foreign autocratic terrorist regimes just use these to peddle their propaganda.
Because it is accurate
He's not literally Putin's chef. He owns restaurants, but he's Putin's fixer and also owns a large mercenary military company that has committed atrocities around the world.

He's more like the head of Putin's SS than the head of his kitchen.
Related:

The Onion files Supreme Court amicus brief defending the right to parody - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33481989 - Nov 2022 (53 comments)

Defending parody: the most important amicus brief yet - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33175057 - Oct 2022 (22 comments)
If you can't see fundamental economic differences between the UK and US, I would caution you that, while it may not be visible from your vantage point in Andromeda, Jupiter is indeed larger than a duck, even if they seem more or less much-of-a-muchness when one has proper perspective.

When roughly 50% of the imports and exports of such a piddling island, services included, are directed towards the EU - obviously, from a very great distance, it makes no difference at all if those goods are subject to tariffs, and if the industries producing them get no input into the regulations they will have to adhere to.

If you were observing, say, from Pluto, you would probably note that the little smudge of the EU is a mite bigger than the little smudge of the UK, and 50% of the UK's import/export economy, while no big deal on the cosmic scale, probably matters a bit to the people who live there.
I wonder where it goes from here. Maybe at some point the whole thing will implode, and chrome will come up with a simpler skinning toolkit and people will start using that one and css gets forgotten
Yeah don’t know what parent is on about. Esp if you were richly compensated through RSUs, I think it’s very hard to find that again in this environment
Telling people what to think is what Sweden is all about. :)
In common use, average means "typical" or "central". There isn't one specific statistical meaning.
More asbestos! More asbestos!
I second OpenSnitch, I haven't face any shutdowns due to it yet. For those coming from LittleSnitch on macOS might have to look into the finer details of the connection in the Allow/Deny dialog on OS to get the best results.
Just wondering along the lines of 'perhaps a cigar really is a cigar'.

What would Microsoft be doing with the text of every PowerPoint presentation once they have analysed the style/font/content information?

Must be thousands of slides per hour 24/7 for years. How long is this information kept?
Thanks! Was old firmware, update did the trick.
> Using the network printer requires Bonjour for Windows.

Offtopic, but I'm shocked that Windows still doesn't support Bonjour/Zeroconf out-of-the-box.

I guess RFC 6762/6763 aren't enough for them?
It uses the windows firewall.
Do I trust Windows firewall to block itself? NO!
You can use mastodon this way of course and ignore the local feed.
I keep 3 copies of every CD I own (4 if you count the CD itself). A FLAC copy ripped using EAC that lives on my NAS and gets streamed in my home. An MP3 copy at a 192 bitrate for use in our cars. And a 128 bit OPUS file that lives on my phone.

It's a pretty easy workflow. EAC to rip. FlacSquisher to convert to MP3 and OPUS. Then copy the files where they need to go and delete them from my laptop. CD then goes into a bin in the garage until I need it again or want to admire the artwork.
I think you mean the frog should not give the scorpion a ride on its back.

Frog on top of a scorpion is a recipe for flat scorpion.
That is exactly what the crumple zone in the car is for though. You only have X meters of margin before you need to be at full stop. Assuming (dangerous to assume, yes) it does its job perfectly the most important factor becomes to react, that is to start the slow down as quickly as possible so you can utilize the crumple zone to max effect. I feel like flesh compression will mostly delay the impact rather than properly slowing you down (fast enough), which would be a bad thing.

That is in part also why it is so important to have a properly tightened seat belt and why we have explosives to tighten it up further when a collision is detected.
Rounded to the nearest meaningful number 0.00 cubic feet of gas was going to flow through those pipes in the foreseeable future.

Blowing them up did everyone, on both sides, a lot of favours by ending the whole will they / wont they charade that was taking place on both sides.
For sure we're getting an allergic reaction now—the hivemind is breaking out in hives. This happens when a major ongoing topic (MOT) [1] gets tons of followup stories [2] that don't contain significant new information (SNI) [3].

The solution is to downweight SNIless followups. Users do that by flagging them and mods do that when we see them on the front page.

The flipside, of course, is that when there really is SNI, the topic becomes viable again.

We came up with this approach after the Great Snowden Snow-In of 2013 [4] and it has held up well, though when HN is being pelted, some followups inevitably sneak through. It still requires a judgment call about what counts as SNI, but at least that's semi-objective and there's an underlying principle to it.

[1] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

[2] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

[3] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...

[4] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
An absolutely despicable individual, but it's quite interesting how he ran a catering business, then a troll farm and currently a private army.

I happen to have just finished reading "Trump / Russia: A Definitive History" Seth Hettena. I think it's a good book and it covers, among other things, Prigozhin's role in some of the past goings-on that are relevant for the present.
Not so funny considering that more than half of fatal car accidents in Germany happen on exactly those streets (744 in 2021). Followed by Bundesstraßen (606 in 2021), which only sometimes have dividers and are usually limited to 100 km/h as well.

In compare, on the Autobahn, which always has dividers but often has no speed limit at all and is not below 100 km/h under normal circumstances there were "only" 318 deaths.

Source (German language, Federal Statistical Office):
https://www-genesis.destatis.de/genesis/online?operation=abr...
No.

Lets say Weinstein was the target. Then all the executives around Weinstein are the lackeys. So you offer immunity to the lackeys (aka: the executives in the inner-circle) so that you get Weinstein.

Offering immunity to the low-level janitor doesn't do any good. You need someone high-enough that they're in the "inner circle" of the target. Someone with real dirt on your target.

---------

Its very common in criminal court to give immunity to mob bosses, to get dirt on even bigger mob bosses.

Making an article saying "Only mob bosses get immunity" is counterproductive. That's the damn point of the grant-immunity system. You grant it to criminals to help catch other criminals.

------

Lets put it this way: lets say there's some innocent bystander who happens to know what is going on. Police / Investigators don't even offer immunity to them, because they committed no crime, so there's no point offering immunity. You just ask the innocent dude to come to court and answer a few questions / testify on what they know.
The product images show that it is a low cost PCB with no active components and a $3 Wemos S2 Mini added. Am I missing something? Why is this $80?
> No. The guy he "wanted to kill" was a moderator who didn't even steal from him.

Ross Ulbricht commissioned 5 murders fully expecting each of them to be carried out.

> All that for no tangible investigative benefit other then strengthen their 2yr old bro-bond.

The murder-for-hire evidence denied him bail. But the prosecutor already had Ulbricht nailed and decided to avoid complicating the case by formally filing the murder-for-hire charges. Would your tax dollars have been better used if Mr. Ulbricht had additional life sentences and decades of prison? No, he is going to die in a prison cell either way.

Ross Ulbricht built his empire, in large part, by profiting off people's suffering. And he exhibited time and time again that he would murder people to protect it. He is nothing short of evil.
I had this exact idea more than 5 years ago, but the only thing my city provided were horrible PDF timetables. No GTFS, not API, not even an easy to scrape HTML table. Ever since then, my constant side project has been to create a hub for transit and other mobility data from all providers in the country (Slovenia) and just this year, all the work has started coming together.

That stupid bus clock will become not only possible, but trivial to build in just a few more weeks. It took a many meetings with company executives and government officials, freedom-of-information requests, hours of reverse engineering apps and subsequently arguing with lawyers... I accidentally stumbled onto two entirely separate multi-million-euro cases of clear corruption in public tenders, several CVSS >= 7 vulnerabilities, got both job offers and legal threats (once from the same company) and throughout the process learned more about multiple different CS fields than I did about even a single one in 3 years of university.

So if anyone else wants to build such a clock, but is disappointed that their local bus company doesn't have an API, don't be discouraged. There is always a way. It might cost you a year's worth of free time and most of your sanity, but you will end up with some shiny LEDs on that wall that still won't prevent you from missing the bus and a bunch of extremely niche knowledge. 10/10 would recommend
Outsourcing of justice starts to be really popular in US I see.
I would love a USB audio(4) (OpenBSD) compatible FM transmitter.
That's it, an FM transmitter detected as a USB sound card.
Most VCs list $ value created, $ AUM, and # active companies
There's a pervasive lack of precision in privacy discussions. There's a difference between a network request that does some computation on the server side, one that does the same but may log errors and increment counters, and one that actually stores the data temporarily or for a long time. And in the last case, there's a difference between the data being nigh-impossible for internal employees to access (perhaps only used as input for other automated systems), and data with few controls. What about the ability of the user to invoke a delete for all their data on the server side? There's so many dimensions.

This is not a useless feature. I can imagine it might help someone make a better presentation. We have to weigh the potential privacy implications against that.

And asking the user to consent for every little thing isn't the solution either. It's so annoying to be pin-pricked by dialogs. At work, this sorta thing should be decided at the organization level, by setting appropriate fine-grained org policies for Office.
That's my understanding. I think Putin would probably get killed if he found himself similarly weakened, but that's not certain. Assuming he's not killed, he'll get old and weak too eventually.
> But since this is "blockchain", is it more like... they weren't polling for the right confirmation/status/update from the blockchain network API thingie?

That's the exact same mistake I referenced. The consuming website should not be in charge of the atomicity of transactions.

It doesn't matter whether the API was used incorrectly, blockchain was used, or finanglesperunk was the technology. The vagaries of the implementation don't matter. Sending money should be atomic with the request instead of whatever this was, otherwise the result might be $3.36 Billion in theft.

PS Blockchain is a database. The developer can choose to enforce SALT instead of ACID, but something wasn't done right.
You know how you can do Ctrl+Shift+K in Firefox to open up the browser console and inspect all the bits of the page, see the code (and fuck with it), see all the network traffic, and so on? I dream of being able to do that for arbitrary applications. Imagine having a Super+Ctrl+Shift+K that opened an OS-level GUI showing all the pertinent details of the running program.
I'm a patent agent and I worked in Google's Patent Litigation department. This is a slight hyperbole, but only slight: I can bust any software patent. I found the prior art that prevented Google Maps from being shut down in Germany:

https://www.themarysue.com/google-maps-facing-german-ban/

@btrettel is right that examiners need more time, but that would mean the PTO would have to hire a lot more of them. A better solution is just to change patentable subject matter to (effectively) exclude computer software. Congress will have to do this since the courts and PTO are unwilling or unable.

As for @blobbers below: patents are not a shield against trolls. They're only a shield against your competitors who actually build things. Trolls don't want your patents; they only want your money.

Lastly, as for the tools: I was told, 10-12 years ago, that when it was suggested that examiners use Google as well as their mandated tools, the union objected that this would be more work and they'd have to be paid more. Perhaps this is no longer true, and I know that the conscientious ones always did.
Which is especially nice if you install Owntone ( https://github.com/owntone/owntone-server/ ) -- now you have a nice web interface for playing music to any or all of your systems.