skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
If you have the printer on your network, and any Amazon device on your network, the Amazon device could easily query the printer for ink levels. My Home Assistant does this and I never connected HA to the printer. It’s just part of the status information the printer seems to make available on the network.

It’s not surprising to me that Amazon would do this using one of their devices, as everyone seems to be grabbing as much data as they can. It’s probably described in the T&Cs somewhere (that they can scan your network and use data from it).
Well, high speed serial coms existed before USB, so the premise of the question is a bit wrong. RS-422 officially supports 10 Mbps over short distances, for example, and various serial WAN protocols supported >100Mbps over copper before USB launched.

I would argue that what USB (1.1-2.0) does differently from previous serial peripheral ports is mostly software and standardization, and really relate to making it cheap and simple for "normal people" to use:

1. USB 1.1 supports only two bit rates (1.5 and 12 Mbps), which is autoconfigured before device enumeration. 12 = 8 * 1.5, so the clock divider is cheap and easy.

2. USB limits cables to fairly short lengths (<=5m) compared to earlier serial ports (RS-422 supports 10 Mbps at 15m)

3. USB (pre-OTG extensions) rigorously enforced the idea of a "host" (upstream) and "device" (downstream), at both the protocol and physical connector level (which greatly simplifies things--for example, you can't create a loop, and don't need STP to detect it). A child can easily see that a B (device) socket doesn't fit an A (host) plug.

4. USB device enumeration and configuration are extensively software based, and USB defines a number of standard device classes so that many common types of devices (e.g., keyboards, mice) don't need specific drivers.

5. One thing that USB does that's less common among serial peripheral interfaces is to use a single differential pair for data going in both directions (it's time-shared: so the host polls the device then the device responds). The pin-count is less than a "regular" RS-422 port, but you still get the advantages of differential signaling.

6. USB carries power with only one more pin than needed to create a minimal bidirectional serial data connection, so "lite" devices don't need a separate power connector (ignoring very slow protocols like "1-wire").

7. USB does some funny things with packet framing (like NRZI encoding and bit-stuffing) and some things to help reduce device cost (like the JKJKJK packet preamble to sync the device baud-rate generator and using SE1/SE0 states for device disconnect and bus reset signaling), but none of that is really fundamental to making a 10Mbps-class serial interface.
Related to your quoted content, do you consider the Elastic License and Server Side Public License (SSPL) to be the 2020 updated version of the 1990 pragmatic idealism or do you consider them to be not similar in any way at all?
I think there is value in remembering that this was an era where peripherals were plugged in with a view of semi-permanence, most plugs even had screws. I also remember thinking at the time how much easier USB was to use than trying to align a PS/2 connector.

Despite the obvious design drawback, I can't blame intel entirely, a big contributor to the problem was that the ports were still being positioned in hard to access areas by computer makers. The first iMac design was a bit more forward thinking in this regard, whereby USB ports were prominently positioned on either side of the keyboard, this made it very easy to plug in the USB mouse and use the other for something like a USB stick. The problem with the type A design isn't just the orientation issue, the rectangular port design provides very little tolerance for off-angle insertion, having the port in full view helped a lot with insertion.
Mirror [1] in the event of regional paywall

[1] - https://archive.ph/diAU5
That whole channel (suckerpinch / Tom 7) is incredible. Extremely nerdy, thoughtful and funny content, and I just love his delivery. I cannot recommend it enough, especially to the HN crowd.
I disagree. Because you're not spending literal cash (it's already disconnecting the spending from the withdrawal of funds), a credit card sits somewhere along that spectrum. Once it's digital bits, the dissociative effect has occurred, credit or debt.

The only "pure" argument here would be to pay with cash, but the logistical cost heavily outweighs the psychological value if you go down that path, in my opinion.
> Android's JVM system is a collection of Java wrappers around C++ libraries.

This isn't even remotely true and it's obvious if you'd ever looked closely at Android. This take is as bizarre as saying that whole web/JS/React ecosystem is "just" wrappers on top of Skia.
what else would someone expect board members to care about? It's naïve to expect otherwise, really.
I was told this exact opposite argument about Lightning being worse than USB-C. The line of reasoning was that the springy part breaks and in USB-C the springy bit is in the cable, while in Lightning the pins are sturdy.
Regardless of the arguments this article makes, it can be surprising. One time back in the Core 2 days I was optimizing an alpha blend in software and I had something like x * y / 255. That operation was a tiny bit slower than table[(x << 8) | y].
Generally it's the users who do the purging and banning. If something isn't automatically filtered in the submissions bar, it usually has to be flagged by enough users to disappear.

It creates this illusion of double-standards, but it's mostly just decided by popular choice. I think a lot of people here take certain discussions on good faith, but flag articles and discussion threads that turn toxic or violate guidelines.
Related to your understanding of licenses, do you consider the Elastic License and Server Side Public License (SSPL) to be the 2020 updated version of the 1990 pragmatic idealism or do you consider them to be not similar in any way at all?
> Everyone has Mac Books now.

I don't even work there and I know that this is, at the least, hyperbole.
But even more, some number of shark bites occur each year and for the people bitten, the probability of having been bitten is 1.

The main thing is that sure, "the probability of this highly incriminating series of events happening to you without you being guilty" may be very small. But probability of "A series of highly incriminating and unlikely series of events happening somewhere, to someone" may be very high, nearly one.
How much evidence do you have that "storming the castles" was how sieges ended at all? Errol Flynn movies are not reality.

To quote James Wright, who is an archaeologist:

> we know a fair bit about how sieges were ended, and it was never the desperate violent rout on the staircases that is so beloved of Hollywood films.

https://triskeleheritage.triskelepublishing.com/mediaeval-my...
Care to explain what an ODM is for this of us unfamiliar with the term? I'm not finding any particularly clarifying search results from the terms you used, AFAICT it's just a very broad term for manufacturers of industrial controller boards, embedded "Box PCs," etc. and doesn't refer to any specific product category? The "box PCs" would be most analogous to this product, but the problem with those is as a rule they do not sell direct to consumer, and even if you do manage to find someone willing to sell you one they come with a generous B2B markup. But maybe you're talking about something else.
I'd argue that what Unity needs is someone who's got a background in enterprise software, because selling to game developers is very different than selling games. No one with (successful) executive experience in enterprise software would have signed off on Unity's original revenue plan, simply because the number one rule in enterprise is "don't fuck with the customer's business model," which the "pay per download" model certainly did. Hiring a game industry CEO who pioneered predatory monetization models and was responsible for horrifying managerial practices within and between studios was a terrible choice for Unity, and his evident contempt for developers showed through often.

Whitehurst, on the other hand, has a history of strong execution across multiple industries, and built a reputation as someone who protected Red Hat's culture against attempts from within IBM to "Big Blueify" it (possibly to the detriment of his own role within IBM). Even as an interim, having him onboard is a good sign for how Unity is looking to repair its relationships with developers.
With recent versions of GNU objdump, you can use --source --visualize-jumps=color and perhaps also --reloc or --dynamic-reloc for a similar experience with the native toolchain. (Unfortunately, -S/--source absolutely sucks for executables compiled at -O2.)

Other tricks include --no-addresses --no-show-raw-insn, which make the disassembly decently diffable.
Ah ha, it turns out there's a third option -- Alexa automatically finds printers on your network and checks their ink levels:

https://www.amazon.com/b?ie=UTF8&node=19820259011

So it doesn't seem to have anything to do specifically with Brother at all.

Mystery solved. It's an Alexa feature ("feature").

So feel free to be angry at Amazon, but it's not Brother doing anything wrong. It's just reporting ink levels to anybody on your local network who asks, just like every other printer.

You might want to change your headline since it accuses Brother rather than Amazon.
Time to learn everything they scan for, and set up a honeypot that makes people's Amazon devices fill with dummy devices.
Slightly off-topic, but the address system in Venice is fascinating. It's divided into 6 regions, and each building is numbered sequentially within that region regardless of what street it's in. Sounds weird, but I still remember the address of an amazing pizza place I ate at almost 20 years ago: Pizzeria Jazz Club Novocento at San Polo 900.
Every single time I read one of these it always ends up with some "and that's why you just need to buy real estate". It's practically a cottage industry writing these articles.
That doesn't make sense, how is it more private than ChatGPT if it's quite literally using the GPT-3/3.5/4 models which is hosted by OpenAI?
Assuming the company has a Microsoft 365 subscription, Mac users can just use the Excel web client in their browser to access the data via pivot tables.
My problem is that there are too many interesting looking books about rational decision making, so like the donkey between the bales of hay I read none of them.
I did have a disconnect issue with CAN bus on a Pi 3 though. Swapping out the Pi 3 for a Pi 4 fixed it using the same install/SD card. I even swapped back to test and it disconnected an hour into a print again. But CAN is a whole different beast that I'm not sure I'd recommend.

A 30$ Le Potato is still more than the 25$ Raspberry Pi 3A+. Which I like for it's smaller size. A single USB port isn't too big a deal if you get a CSI Pi Camera for monitoring instead of USB, or use the GPIO for serial.
Oops, you were right. I added South Africa.
The article doesn't make any arguments, it simply examines the arguments made by others, and points out that those arguments aren't convincing enough to conclude the myth is true (and thus we fall back to the default: that the myth is false)
What did they steal? The underlying tech? the name 'pivot table'?

The concept of aggregating categorized columns of data is not something Brio Technology invented.
with baud rate detection to boot (down the line)
Seriously? This is so blatantly someone associated with this app
Steam could take 90% and the 'gaming community' would probably defend it (and therefore developers don't want to be seen criticising the almighty Valve)

Epic got a lot of hate for merely trying to compete, to weaken the Steam near-monopoly over PC game distribution.

With Unity though, the outrage was over a loss of trust more than the cost of the fees themselves. And it came at a time when it seemed that the engine had been stagnating for years, after they'd made significant redundancies and cancelled the Gigaya project (their attempt to actually make a game themselves with their engine - which could have been very beneficial, creating internal pressure to fix/improve provlem areas), and while the main competition seemed to be adding exciting features at a much more rapid pace.
Location: Los Angeles, California
Remote: Remote or not Remote
Willing to relocate: Yes
Technologies: HTML , CSS, JavaScript, Node.js , SQL server, SSIS, Power BI
Résumé/CV:
Email: si.sijun@outlook.com
If you cared about privacy you won’t have an Alexa device in your house.
It’s probably described in the T&Cs somewhere

Which.. I never read but I concur with your theory.
Rust analzyer type checks rust and type checking is turing complete... it's only a matter of time.
That's a great answer
Ethernet hardware now has auto-crossover. However, that hasn't always been the case. There was a good decade in the 90's where you needed a special cable wiring if you wanted to connect two computers vs a computer to a switch.
OK, fair enough. We don't know how long it took to get approved. In theory they could have gone after MS. I vaguely remember that our rival Business Objects had some BI patents and sued us, and we sued them over pivot.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29240627
https://blog.cloudflare.com/workers-javascript-modules/

This is out of date: here is some now is cloud flare function boilerplate

```js

let body = `// sw.js this is runing in the browser service worker thread
console.log("Hello Service Worker");
`
console.log("Hello From Cloudflair Build Land")
export async function onRequest(ctx) {
console.log("Hello from cloud flair request land")

let r= ctx.request;
let cf = ctx.cf;
let p = Object.fromEntries(new URL(r.url).searchParams.entries());
let h = Object.fromEntries(r.headers.entries());
//todo get users personal application
//todo build service worker js for app
//todo inject analysis

return new Response(body, {
headers: {
"Content-Type": "application/javascript",
"X-ENDPOINT-BROWSER": "anon"
}
})

} // la fin

```
What is there to say? The decisions that OP says were not hers, were hers. And the claim that they chose an Asian woman for the intended purpose of setting a racist mob against her is completely unfounded and frankly racist itself. Believe it or not, there are some Asian women out there that have qualities other than being the target of racism.
Wow...I wrote up a whimsical account of what could happen after the price increases. I got the timing wrong (I thought it would take several months for the CEO to step down), but some of it is starting to come true: https://quiver.dev/blog/stepping-into-the-unity-ceos-calfski....
> Surely the new pricing is the solution to that?

Not directly.

$1,625,000,000USD spent buying Wētā.

$4,400,000,000USD spent buying IronSource (I think? It's a weird deal).

At 20c per install, every person in the world would have to install four Unity games just to make back what was spent on those two deals. At the lower 1c per install rate, everyone in the world needs to install 75 Unity games.

I've probably got the actual cost of the IronSource dal wrong, but there's also salary for what is apparently 9000 employees. Maybe $500,000,000USD/year for that?

It seems like the goal is to use promises of not having to pay the fee as leverage to get devs buying their brand of related services. For instance, they suggest you might earn "credits on the Unity Runtime Fee based on the adoption of Unity services beyond the Editor, such as Unity Gaming Services or Unity LevelPlay mediation for mobile ad-supported games."
Ask HN: Is it a bad time to take a sabbatical?
A tech employee (PM) at a startup with 2 years as a PM and about 10 years as a dev. Have been continuously working for those 12 years without a good break and I fear I might be on the verge of burnout. I’m looking for advice on the best approach to taking a sabbatical. The economy is what scares me. I don’t want a 4 month sabbatical to turn into a 12 month break. Is it a good time and how would you approach it? We have a dual income home and we will break even on a monthly basis if one of us takes a sabbatical. Any advice would be greatly appreciated. Thanks!
The point of Russell's argument is that we should not believe in the Christian god/the teapot. Not that we should believe that those things do not exist.

It's an argument against believing without evidence, not for believing without evidence.
I concur with this, their interim CEO is the person who can do the needful things with respect to cutting executive pay, laying off people, and outright firing others. Once the organization has been pruned, the "real" new CEO comes on board and is given a shot at rebirth with a new point of view.
I got these by accident, spent a month thinking I had incredible USB skills, then discovered and became fascinated by the tongue.
I mean, I feel like they prefer to keep using A-to-C or A-to-Micro because of power flow instead of packaging C-to-C (and from some quick Amazon searches, C output still looks rare, the majority of what I'm seeing is C input and A output on the power bank itself).
Then you'd have to close your laptop and walk into the woods forever, I suppose...
Has the comment been edited? That's exactly what doomlaser said.
> Twice already he's mentioned sieges where the attackers waited for the besieged to run out of water. The grueling wait is compressed in history.

That's happening now in Gaza. Israel has cut off water.
As a sample, in my computer science department there is only myself and a single other academic that still fight the good fight. The rest seem to have never learned or given up as "modern" e-mail tools certainly favour top posting. I am known for taking stupid fights and being too stubborn for my own good, so I do not see myself caving in any time soon.

What I wish for is a script to "correct" the order of e-mails botched by top posters. Having that would save me some time whenever I feel the need to manually unwrap a conversation. But I have never managed to find one (lacking in web search skills?), so perhaps I should attempt to write one some day?
I would not rule out some connection via the credit/debit card, like how every shop now emails you even though you never gave them your email.
This is why I stopped having swap on my desktop. I prefer a clean death than prolonged agony.
> This is one of the best examples I know of how software patents can be good for competition.

Small companies and startups with products in the market (before existing incumbents have products) should be able to get software patents to defend their innovation.

Big companies should be able to have patents, but not use them against smaller players.

Patent trolls with no products in the market shouldn't be allowed to have patents.

Universities and university researchers should be able to have patents, but they should be forced to license at not-unreasonable terms to startups.

My thoughts on the matter, anyway. The point is to encourage innovation, especially by enabling small players bringing new stuff to market. Give them a small shield against the big incumbents.
I'd imagine it would work for any binary with debug symbols, even though the tool is written in go?

Though I haven't tried it, on mobile right now.
Ask HN: Streaming Player Replacement for Roku?
Any suggestions on a streaming player that doesn't collect data and is easy to deal with? I'd like to have a replacement for a Roku 2. Something small, low power draw 5w, ethernet, hdmi, netflix, youtube, IR remote, and maybe play videos from USB.

I've seen some mini computers with Windows and Kodi that seem do be able to do this. But they also seem to have a lot of extras that might be confusing or a hassle for some people.

Please let me know if you have some suggestions to check out.
If anyone can save the stinking ship that is Unity, it’s Whitehurst.

This is said by someone who wants nothing more than to see Unity die.

Whitehurst was pretty instrumental in getting Red Hat sticky in places where it was just RHEL. Open Shift, Open Stack, etc all drove value-add for the business and for their customers. Cloud is fickle though so selling tools to studios and trying to compete with Unreal in the VFX space is how Unity moves forward. Take your lashings from the game devs. Shore up your presence in VFX, Movies, Film. Evolve.

The tsunami has squarely landed on Godot’s doorstep. It will be up to them on how they manage the swell.
Having been in board meetings where members went in on the nitty gritty of our _salesperson_ compensation structure, I would say yes.
At least one publisher jokingly (but not jokingly) said "developers: make sure you include which engine you're using next time you pitch us a game!"...
It's different now because AI is hot, which is going to motivate other companies quite a bit more to try to get in on the hardware side.

Prior to this year AI was much more of a niche thing. It wasn't seen as the unambiguous next generation of computing the way it is now.
Given those microcontrollers are 0.05 USD at worst, meh, though I acknowledge it sounds a bit crazy if you don’t recognize how cheap micros can be nowadays. Laptop chargers have used similar schemes (perhaps with bare serial EEPROMs instead of MCUs) since forever, FWIW.
Those C input ports are usually also output ports.
Aren't you allowed to "steal" basically everything except exact code in software?

Didn't the supreme court rule in favor of Google vs Oracle that Google's use of the JDK API was fair use?

Wasn't there also a recent supreme court ruling that you can't patent non-novel math (algorithms)?

I'm not sure how you could be convicted of theft in software outside of literally stealing and reselling someone's non-open source code.
This is what I do with these (terrible) screw-in connectors.

- Loosely plug in the connector

- Screw in the right side, relatively tight

- Use the right screw as a pivot point, by pushing the plug to the left, this will properly seat in the connector

- Screw in the left side until it touches, do not tighten

To unscrew, use the left side as a pivot point by pushing the plug to the right, this should loosen the right screw, unscrew it, then, unscrew the left side, which shouldn't be tight if you did it correctly.

Note: you can switch left for right and right for left.

The general idea is to wiggle left and right by using the screws as pivots. Do this to unscrew if it is too tight. If only one side is screwed in (don't do that) and it is too tight, screw in the other side and use the pivot trick.

I don't like not screwing these in as they have a tendency to come loose, especially since they also have poor feedback and chances are that they aren't properly inserted to begin with.

And side note: another thing I hate with this plugs is that when you pull out the cable, the plug tends to grab ever other cable that's on their way. In fact, some of these plugs look suspiciously like boat anchors and seem to be just as effective at grabbing stuff.
This reddit post from 3 years ago suggests that Amazon is using SNMP to monitor your local network printers.

Put your Amazon devices in an isolated "IOT" network if possible.

https://www.reddit.com/r/amazonecho/comments/ip5i1c/alexa_no...
without knowing anything about anything, I wonder about a multiverse oriented argument. Across the multitude of collapses/splits out multiverse-spanning self both makes choice A and not choice A. The cell becomes cancerous, or remains healthy. Dies, does not die.
Is there a space here where there is always at least one of our bifurcating selves who forever escapes the quantum splits that kill us, forever just eacaping death through an improbable journey through the eye of a needle, living until the end of all time? And if there is one that makes it through, were not their choices the ones that were truly free of the universe?

in all probability nonsense... :)
> Every new insert via Prisma opened a database-level transaction (?). An extremely weird design choice by Prisma.

Isn't that standard practice for inserts?