skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The better question is why would someone buy a computer that is so user-hostile it requires "activation"?

Imagine buying a car that requires activation from the manufacturer, and they could permanently disable it at any time if someone stole it.

This place would be in hysterics, but since we're talking about HN's favorite computer company it's a different story.
Sorry to hear that! But I have no idea of what I can do for it. Technically, we could not detect if a content is pirated or not. Imagine that we could also use any video player to play pirated videos as well.
Maybe I'll update the caveat section to include something like, "This project does not encourage piracy."... Any other suggestions?
Forms that work. Every time. Everywhere
If you have one of the early Lytros there are some pretty nifty firmware hacks available for them as of January this year

https://hackaday.com/2023/01/25/unlocking-hidden-features-of...
As Woz said at his funeral, "Steve gave us some of the greatest tools known to mankind: Apple fanboys."
Broken, as in physically broken? Sure, but that can be fixed/repaired if it's not beyond any hope of that.

Broken, as in "the software is broken"? Well, at least all my devices are repairable, if that happens. Even if it might require the nuclear option of reinstalling/reflashing. But at least there are no shenanigangs such as these and the ones OP described happening.
I had to get a Dell XPS 13 laptop repaired in 2009. The hinge had broken (probably my fault for tossing my backpack around). I contacted support, and a day later the bell rang. A young tech jockie with slicked back hair politely appeared, a silver BMW M3 in the background. He quietly ignored the errant super glue residue around the hinge, my bodged attempt at a self repair.

He sat at our dining table for about 45 minutes and expertly conducted the repair. I remember the quiet rumble of that M3 V6 as it left the neighborhood.

That computer served it's duty faithfully for another 2 years, before I upgraded to a new computer (another Dell XPS).

I have no idea how that could be a profitable business model, but Dell's support really impressed me that day.
The ANOM service was widely used by criminals, but instead of providing secure communication, it was actually a trojan horse covertly distributed by the United States Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and the Australian Federal Police (AFP), enabling them to monitor all communications.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/ANOM
Don't be surprised to find out who owns the hardware when the time comes. All these "security" features are IMO excuses to remove more and more control from the user and bring it to Apple. If you fall for it, you have only yourself to blame. Next time, buy a machine that you truly own. This is the number one reason I will never buy anything from Apple, not even a simple air pod.
I read as far as “Or so I thought. About 30 minutes before my flight was boarding, I pulled out my laptop to do some last minute work. But when I opened it up, a stranger’s profile greeted me.”

At this point, everything below that line is working as intended. Be glad you still have your identity and bank accounts whole.

I know this sounds harsh but, your laptop and your data is just as personal and vital to you as your phone. When going through airport security, throw your ID and phone in the same basket as your laptop. If they make you separate them, throw your ID in the laptop basket. Better, put a sticker on your laptop. Stop keeping it pristine and uniform like everyone else’s macbook. Then you would easily know you picked up the wrong laptop. Next time buy a Lenovo.
That's a small irony given that Apple owns Beats as well.
For those interested in cross platform game development, don't forget https://haxe.org/! The usefulness / popularity ratio is very high on this one :).
To all of you extolling the virtues of combo locks, I guess you live in pretty secluded houses in safe neighborhoods with zero visibility of the keypad from across the street.

If I had a combo lock, I'd be more worried about someone with binoculars or an ultra-zoom camera watching me key my lock without covering my hand than my physical key getting lost or stolen.
Unfortunately Telegram is getting more and more useless gimmick anti-features. It was better 3-5 years ago, when it didn't have so much useless junk. Still the most streamlined experience.

While voice and video calls, screen sharing is nice, they are not very polished, good quality, and UI is overloaded, but the last useful feature additions.

(useless junk: animated stickers, custom wallpapers, emoji responses (though I use them), premium emojis, collectible usernames, (i get that it needs money to run infra), channels and social-media-platform related stuff (i guess those are revenue drivers and signup-funnels as well)

Discord has one killer UX feature: voice chatrooms. It is great for gaming, and great for remote work too for small flat-hierarchy companies. (no setting up of a meeting, just dropping in to a "meeting room". I have worked on a product with similarly streamlined ad-hoc remote meeting user experience, but it is defunct now unfortunately.)
Ask HN: Any no-fuss way to publish Markdown to blog posts
Seeking efficient ways to publish markdown files (with images, front matters, links between pages) in 2023. Found 11ty, which is pretty close, but aiming to convert an Obsidian knowledge base into a publishable format. What are your setups?
I hate this about the New Outlook, especially since I like to sort new messages to the bottom.

And if I go to a different folder and back I have to deal with it all over again.
I always loved the Solaris Nimbus GTK theme. It was one of the most polished GTK2 themes around. https://www.gnome-look.org/p/1080244
Fertility supplements are dietary supplements that are designed to improve fertility in men and women. They are typically taken orally and contain a variety of ingredients, such as vitamins, minerals, herbs, and amino acids. Fertility supplements can be used to address a range of fertility concerns, such as hormonal imbalance, sperm quality, and egg health.
Or if you buy something from abroad and have to pay import duties, if you return the item you’d think you’d get the duties cost back, but nope.
The concentration of wealth with the few is an abomination. It means that a few, with their idiosyncrasies are determining the future of the rest. Their biases are amplified instead of averaged out by the opinions of the many. It's not a harbinger of a sane society. And we're seeing the results everywhere.
From the rise of the alright funded by the thiels and musks and putins. To the money burnt of useless educational startups.
It’s a keyboard gesture
any possibility that the apple rep screwed up and unpaired/replaced the wrong pod? i.e your "pair" would now have two pods, neither of which are actually associated with the hardware you have access to
You can easily buy lanyards for your airpods pro.
> I asked you to defined what is genocide and how you can call what's going on in Ukraine a "genocide". [...] Because it's clearly not a genocide. Even UN acknowledged that.

No, it didn't. The most recent on the issue of genocide from the UN Commission of Inquiry on Ukraine:

“The Commission is also concerned about allegations of genocide in Ukraine. For instance, some of the rhetoric transmitted in Russian state and other media may constitute incitement to genocide. The Commission is continuing its investigations on such issues.”

https://www.ohchr.org/en/press-releases/2023/09/un-commissio...
Especially with the Dashboard shell [1]. Was very convenient: compact, always at your fingertips, with extended virtual desktop, fully configurable and stable: you lay out things some way, they stay this way.

It is interesting that modern UIs keep removing agency from the user. There is very little space in the system that feels mine because I am the sole owner of it. On Windows 3.1 I managed everything in the program groups. It was not too convenient (compared to that Dashboard shell or Mac), but still, if the system added a group now and then, I could always take it apart and rearrange to my liking.

Now the Start menu is completely taken over. The ability to manually arrange things in a folder is taken away. The folders that should be rightfully mine (such as Documents) are constantly invaded by every program that feels entitled to put things there. As a result “we do not go there anymore.” The only places that are left for me to manage are: the area to the right of the start menu and the desktop. But I do not like the start menu and do not like cluttering the desktop, so the only place I still govern is a tiny custom toolbar I added to the taskbar.

[1] https://winworldpc.com/product/dashboard/30
The mathematical representation of algorithms is now pretty standard undergrad stuff. Why is relational algebra not better known?
First thing I taught my children about roads was to always give right of way to any vehicle. Especially at marked crosswalks and regardless of traffic lights. Still, one of them got hit at the pedestrian crossing recently (she is 26 now, needs refreshment lessons it seems).
That title bar thing, good god damn. I have to concentrate my vision on the title bar to place my fucking cursor between non-outlined active sections just to grab that motherfucker and shove it over. It is entirely a user experience regression. There's no benefit gained, whatsoever, from moving content to the title bar. Easily moving a window by dragging the title bar was something that "just worked" for at least two decades if not three.

Maybe two-odd decades is about the time it takes for enough people to have forgotten the reasons and decide to just remove Chesterton's Fence[0] because, despite the fact that screen area is at an all time high, we still need to squeeze more shit in around the edges.

I've already whinged about both scroll bars[1].

I'll also whinge about "dead space" rarity on UIs like DevOps and Jira. "No, i want out of all contexts! Did I accidentally switch that slider by clicking like 10cm to the right of it?" (actual example from within DevOps right now).

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G._K._Chesterton#Chesterton's_...

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37774322
Thanks for sharing. That's a long and tough read (in his style) but pretty interesting.
Unpublished: a shell written in pure Ruby, blurring the line between "shell-land" and "ruby-land" (think xonsh, only it does not "fallback" to the other side of the world at parse time. it's all first class Ruby), and that can also work with mRuby.

Why mRuby? Well this is the first step of a larger dumb project where I'd have pure Ruby as Linux init/userland and boot straight to it (like these old Amstrad or whatever booted straight to BASIC), then maybe even write a toy kernel in Ruby and drop Linux as well.

I have little time to work in it so it's snail pace but I'm getting near the "I can use this shell" minimal featureset (basically basic input, exec, redir, and pipes) line. That's my "fail fast" part, and iteratively implement features as pain shows me that I really need this or that day to day by using it as my default shell.
This is cool — love it!

It would be a nice tool for kids on tablets if you added touch input. Maybe tap to pop up a menu with all the options.
> No. Not if only. If they have been away from their paired phone for more than a few hours, they beep whenever they are moved.

Far more than a few — I am away from mine all day and they don't beep when moved. Apple apparently says it's somewhere between 8 and 24 hours. Also, they don't have to be right up against the paired phone — if someone is stalking a neighbor in apartment building, they probably come close enough to fool the system.

Most importantly, it's trivial to disable the beeping: https://www.tomsguide.com/news/muted-airtags-danger#:~:text=....
It's a thread. The issue is Apple identifying the pair as mismatched
I have a custom setup using pandoc … but why not something like ghost or any other static site generator. They take markdown and convert it into html.
FastEval – Fast and more realistic evaluation of chat language models
> For me personally, Windows XP means XP SP2. Anything before that wasn’t worth using.

That is because Microsoft had its own versioning system:

- RC was alpha quality.

- Releases were betas.

and then starting with SP2 one can talk about a released product.
NT had 6 SPs, 2000 had 4, XP had 2. Even in Windows 11 they fixed things (taskbar) after release.

This really tells a not so nice story about engineering and quality at Microsoft.
You can currently purchase 3rd gen apple AirPods for less than $100 on Amazon
I worked in an office for 8 years and it was the worst experience of my life.
Lower gatekeeping requirements would solve it. Higher wages would solve the problem locally. Keeping gatekeeping requirements and increasing supply by paying for training and creating more training spaces. A % of education budget could be allotted to this yearly.
I literally linked an article going through why SAFe is MBA garbage that misunderstands why agile was created in the first place but if that's not specific enough for you then I'm not sure what you're looking for.
In my opinion, the issue is not so much that Apple built a tracking device (of which there are plenty of competitors) but rather that Apple built the first tracking device that worked at scale.

Some years ago a friend of mine bought a set of Tile trackers without knowing what they were. He then found out they were useless as anti-theft devices because no one in his area had the app. If his Tile was gone (along with whatever they're attached to), the chances of his tile being near a second Tile user were negligible. But Apple had the market power to overcome that issue.

I don't know how good other trackers are but I imagine a GPS tracker needs a battery and a SIM card, which would make them more expensive and with a limited battery life. If Apple truly managed to build a tracking device that's forever on and whose alarm can be easily disabled, I don't think it's a bad idea to wonder whether they've jumped too far into "bad for society" territory. Usually we would discuss these issues in the open, but nowadays lawsuits seem to be the only way to do it.
Much of CBF can be explain simply through rewards and incentives.

See, when I joined my current company, I was full of energy and I did BF. I fixed broken builds. I made our abandoned test suite green. I refactored our deployment pipeline. I hunted down the root cause of bugs and fixed them. But then I noticed several things.

First, rather than encourage people to behave like me by example, they did the opposite. Why fix a broken build when I would come along and do it? it turns out doing shit work just gives you more shit work.

Also the guy does hack jobs got promoted ahead of me because he is a master of optics and presents his work much better than it is. And look at how fast he delivers! it doesn't matter his code keeps causing problems in prod, by then he has moved on to another project and it's someone else's problem.

Oh, and that junior guy than I spend several hours a week helping makes more than me, because we hired him in 2022 when we were desperately throwing money at people, but I didn't get a raise in 2023 despite an "exceeds" rating because you know, it's tough times and we need to buckle up.

Listen, I love what I do and I want to excel at it, but is it any wonder and CBF? At the end of the day I work for a salary. If my efforts aren't rewarded, or sometimes actively punished, my motivation goes down the drain. Sure, part of it we do for ourselves, but at some point you have to question who is really benefiting from the situation.
I kind of started doing something very similar, but didn't find time to add more.

I had sql/code formatter, postgres query plan visualizer etc...
> For most homes and offices the primary source of heating is electrical

Source? I only know that people in isolated villa use electrical heating. Most apartments get hot water from a nearby garbage incinerator owned by the city.

> But clearly some speculative investment has more utility than me not stumping my toe when going to the bathroom at night.

We were talking about office buildings being fully lit 24h a day. Where nobody sleeps. Nobody is saying people should go to bed at 2pm in the winter.
Same, and same. It was pretty optimal too, where i remember getting the number of BG tasks down to 15 and I knew what each every one did. I haven't been able to make that claim for an OS for many many years now.
What straightedge CA bars are you hitting? I’ve been up and down from Crescent City to San Diego many times, and indoor vapers are everywhere.
Many Apple products are bought from third party resellers who don't capture this information.
You can disable the configuration in the `network.trr.use_ohttp` field.
It's already disabled on my Firefox 118.0.1 (NixOS 23.05)
OLED displays aren't coming to the MacBook Pro anytime soon
"If you can't work effectively with others, you're not a senior engineer."
Is it? Can you summarize it? I'm asking seriously.

This is not his style, for what it's worth, at least not for standalone long-form writing. His most influential cryptography writing is concise and lucid.
Googling a bit yields no results. I had them do this to me though. I think it’s not anywhere in settings. They can request this remotely.
Let's be honest, most aerospace/defemce related government contracts are, at least in some part.

I knew a guy who worked at the Boeing Osprey plant in Philly and he said it was a job factory, not a helicopter factory.
airpods are literal garbage; I never understood why everyone uses them
The problem is that “to watch sports” bit.

Apart from pirating, the only way to watch, say, NFL Football, your local baseball team and say Division 1 College Football games is gonna be with one of those $70/mo+ packages.

I would love to just pay directly for the sports/leagues I care about, but that’s just not an option.
I don't know if I think it has more shady stuff than whatsapp or other mainstream platforms (so sad we have to write this as there is no open federated standard *in widespread use* as with email), which are backed by megacorps famous for spying on users and selling it to whoever, and being digital goons of governments when it comes to privacy and freedom of speech. All are the same from my perspective, with UX being a main differentiator.
I've had my AirPods Pro for 3 years and they have never once fallen out of my ears, but I don't wear them while biking or running or anything like that.

But like I said, they are very nice. I've had probably 100 headphones over the years and these are the ones I enjoy the most. They are indeed a nice product.
> This is another example of rich people wasting money on things they know nothing about. If it had been paid in tax it could have been spent on more teachers by people who do know what they are doing.

On the other hand the rich person has a strong incentive to succeed - avoiding ridicule and getting more recognition. The public employee on the other hand gets no recognition, or ridicule, and is spending someone else's money.

If we could combine the incentives of the rich person with the knowledge of the public workers that understand the programs that work, we could have something on our hands.
They've been at it for over 40 years and grew to the most valuable company in the world. In many computer fields they still are THE platform (anything design for example) so clearly the software they do have is plenty.

Can you elaborate what you mean by shooting themselves in the foot?

Do you see them as a centipede who sacrificed one foot in exchange for all the riches in the world?

Or do you mean that if they were more open to developers they'd somehow be even bigger? What's bigger than a trillion dollar company? Would they be intergalactic?
The mouse has a scroll wheel, so the gesture is the same. Also you can turn on scrollbars. Also the gesture works on Apple mice.
I've moved 3 times in 7 years. But never has my old landlord or new landlord taken a month to repaint things. It's always been re-rented in under 2 weeks. This is all in NYC though, so things might be a bit different here.
Gradle Plugin for native semantic releasing: https://github.com/rethab/semantic-release-gradle-plugin Very much a proof of concept, but please feel free to try & ask for features
The Classic Super Star Trek Game
I did not skip any parts, previous commenter is generalizing from this major security problem to a non-trustworthy NIST in general, and one power NIST has is to choose algorithms as standards which are known (to them) to be weak. While this is a discussion on probability and trustworthiness, where you can reasonably take stand on both sides, the argument itself is sound.
Scroll slightly to make the scroll bar appear and drag the handle or click in the bar where you want to go in the document.
Do you have plans for automating the BIOS updates?

At the moment, my Intel 12th gen mainboard BIOS has several vulnerabilities and many people are waiting for updates.

In a couple of years, you will have to support even more mainboards and I hope you are working on software infrastructure to properly support that.
>You say it's that easy, but it isn't.

If it is easy, then people should do it (don't buy from Apple if you want to own your hardware).

If it is not easy, Apple is abusing their market dominance and should be regulated accordingly.
Thanks, it makes sense now.
A service for indian matchmakers would be interesting probably :)
Ah yes, nothing says "unburnt money" quite like the public education system.
I was using Bard and chatGPT in parallel, but lately I just default to Bard. To me it's a better model with much more accurate answers, while chatGPT just gives you bombastic words.
Adobe Shows Off Animated Dress by Project Primrose at Adobe Max
Questions about synthetic control methods in causal inference
> One plaintiff from Indiana, LaPrecia Sanders, lost her son after his girlfriend allegedly used an AirTag to track his movements and then "followed him to a bar and ran him over with her car, killing him at the scene."

This was one of the few explicitly mentioned cases. And something tells me AirTags were not the problem here.
A classic joke! https://youtu.be/9qh-1_tXeuQ?t=30
I'm glad there exists an accessory for purchase that turns your $250 wireless earbuds into $19 wired ones.
Generalized Stokes Theorem
“Stop buying their stuff” is a perfectly valid action to take, especially when many alternatives abound.

As computer manufacturers, they are not even in the top 3, with less than 10% market share in terms of units shipped.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Market_share_of_personal_com...

Your argument isn’t based on valid assumptions.
There was also A-code from British company Level 9: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Level_9_Computing#A-code
Scamming people
because they aren't literal garbage
https://archive.ph/oNoC7
Yeah, you did. "any non-trivial numbers have to have a documented generation path, and any non-trivial numbers in those steps also have to have a documented generation path". This doesn't make any sense as a concern if you understand what Kyber is.
Unfortunately, that feature can be easily disabled.
I wish we could know who funds these studies. Perhaps this one is from the mushroom marketing board..?
Cartel-as-a-service

So if monopolies and price signaling drives prices up, what can be used from the consumer's side to drive them down? Price comparison would work, but inevitably those engines will discover their own power to fix prices. What is better
There's a market for it: https://screenshotone.com/