skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
If you really wanted to talk to somebody in a "non-decryptable" fashion, could you set up like a channel that encrypts itself with a ton of different encryption methods, keys, etc. (encrypted payloads inside each other)

Signal encryption is its main feature (I think) and how easy it makes it (abstracts handling key transfer and all that), I'm just trying to think through... if I wanted nobody to read what I was saying , would I use an app/target as popular as Signal or something homegrown?
I propose: time spent offline.
Phone numbers have become the de facto version of "Internet stamps" for identity verification.

They are near-ubiquitous on a per-user level, but hard to accumulate without significant cost. (Unlike email addresses.)

But the down side is that phone verification tends to be on a per-service level. So, for instance, Signal incurs these costs when they verify their users, and every other service incurs these same costs when they verify _their_ users.

There are a number of businesses out there that are trying to act as clearinghouses, where they verify the users once, then allow the users' verified profiles to be confirmed by multiple services.

I wonder if any of those could be used to reduce these "registration" costs.
This was said in response to claims of intentional genocide, not civilian damage.
> we can rent server infrastructure from a variety of providers like Amazon AWS, Google Compute Engine, Microsoft Azure

Moving off cloud services to lower-cost provider like Hetzner, Vultr and DigitalOcean might provide a lot of cost savings.

I also imagine they're using managed SMS services from one of these clouds, and moving off them to a combination of local SMS gateways in each country can also further reduce costs (and in one case I've personally observed, by upto two orders of magnitude). This obviously pushes a lot of complexity on Signal's side, but is usually worth it.
> I'm wondering if this is actually a $$ issue rather than a "capacity" issue?

Short of hitting something like global exhaustion of necessary raw materials or other inputs, all capacity issues are money issues.
Notably, Plex sources its subtitles from OpenSubtitles when the media does not contain them. I wonder what Plex will do in this situation. I don't know the exact mechanism: does Plex download on our behalf, or does the client make the download themselves? Either way, there are downsides for someone now.
> Also no bundled cryptocurrency.[1]

It seems like Session relies on Oxen's network, so while there is no inherent coin it is blockchain backed.

> Session’s onion routing system, known as onion requests, uses Oxen‘s network of Oxen Service Nodes, which also power the $OXEN cryptocurrency. Check out Oxen.io to find more information on the tech behind Session’s onion routing.

https://getsession.org/faq#onion-routing
The script has its own separate copyright distinct from the full episode just like how lyrics and musical compositions have separate copyrights from a specific recording of a song.
> When I land in a new country it is normal for my cell/SMS not to work. But I can hop on some local wifi and get signal messages.

WiFi calling is a standard feature that does exactly what you describe for texts and calls, without using a third-party. I have cell connectivity turned off constantly on my phone and yet receive texts and calls via WiFi.

It is actually an awesome feature for receiving 2FA SMS at my parent's place where there is great internet but poor cell coverage.
That's maybe a location thing. I've never heard them referred to as "study drugs", but often heard then referred to as "smart drugs".
If you fed your text into any GPT, it would conclude you were disappointed. There’s a thread of comments with yours the only one being “I am completely disappointed”. There’s not enough content in your post to signal a sufficient degree of irony amidst the context.

Go look in the mirror before diagnosing others with spectrum disorders or personality disorders.
I agree but it seems to have more friction for some reason?
Humans and other animals have not only instincts, but also the experience of interaction with the material world. As a result, human language isn't free-floating. The relationships between things in the world we often observe both inside and outside of language, and there's a tie between language as humans use it, and the world. That's not true for LLMs, because they only have language.

For a better explanation and responses to objections, consider the National Library of Thailand thought experiment: https://medium.com/@emilymenonbender/thought-experiment-in-t...
This is useful feedback, thank you.
The style is getting in the way of the message. Did I finish the blog post? I did not. Will I read more from this author? Chances are very low.

Sometimes style is the message. I don't think this is a good example of that, as the author is trying communicate unrelated concepts. A better way to do that is, "clearly".

What the writing reminds me of is myself, when I was nineteen, in art school. That is not an association you want to have made, as I thought I knew everything when in fact I didn't even know who I was myself. Clever just gets you so far.

Show me that you are confident in your writing, rather than hiding behind a messy style that you so desperately want me to be impressed with.
My friend is a surgeon. When he went in for knee surgery he wrote "Wrong Knee" on the good knee. He knows.
Phone number verification is used to verify the user's registration intent, so not really.
Yeah. How do we use this? I assume since it's Google it's yet another announcement of a technology that they invented but only a few special people will be able to play with.
> However, I don't know how you resolve conflicts of two users simultaneously attempting to acquire a lock.

It turns out you just have to pick one... This all depends on a source of truth, and when you are there it's easy to pick one, say based on whichever arrived at the network interface first.
Or, people realising that their envisaged way of working is no longer or was never practical or self-sustaining. As much as you might love doing something for the sake of it, or for a community, at some point there are bills to pay. OpenSubtitles is something someone has to pay for, at some point.

Especially with such cases, assuming malice is weird. The site wasn't acquired by some shady private capital or whatever entity jacking up prices for profit (like Broadcom with VMware), it's the same people(person?).
Thank you. No relation :)
> Another $19 million a year or so out of Signal’s budget pays for its staff. Signal now employs about 50 people, a far larger team than a few years ago.

What? I know silicon valley salaries are a thing, but absolutely everywhere else in the world this would be insane. Maybe change the headquarters to somewhere cheaper?
If you check their costs, SMS (used for registration) is the most expensive part of their operation.
Chrome extension is an all-in-one assistive tool collection
This extension is a comprehensive assistive toolbox for individuals with various levels of ability or challenges. It is designed to empower the user to access the web in a more personally tailored way. It provides a range of features including text-to-speech, speech-to-text, image hiding, high contrast mode, image magnification, text input autocomplete, dyslexia-friendly font injection, etc. This collection of tools was designed keeping in mind individuals with sensory sensitivities, dyslexia, epilepsy, visual & mobility impairments, and intellectual disabilities. The features will continue to grow as more needs are discovered.
About nootropics, I really enjoy noopept, it allows me to perform long and focused session of work without any side effect.
The really funny follow-up will be applying for a whistleblower award. https://www.sec.gov/whistleblower/claim-award

(They won't get it; there's an exemption "If you obtained the information by a means or in a manner that is determined by a United States court to violate applicable Federal or state criminal law", but it'd be hilarious to try.)
Session depends on the Loki blockchain, so I dispute point 1.
You're in luck: https://www.theverge.com/2023/11/9/23953603/signal-username-...
> On the internet, there is much less discrepancy between their masking and their behaviour: if you only look at the surface, the web might seem more toxic, because there is less masking and sugar-coating (i.e. more honesty)

There’s a huge difference between being blunt/honest and the kind of abusive bad faith toxicity oozing with ad hominem and all forms of logical fallacy that make up the average thread on popular social networks.

The difference I’m talking about is not just about politeness, but about people’s willingness to have a good faith conversation and to see the other participant as another human being vs. a faceless other/enemy who is apparently so evil that all manners of abusive language is considered justified.

This is especially prevalent in anything related to politics. In the real world, I know and can have decent conversations with people even when we firmly disagree. Is this just us putting on a mask? Maybe so. But the end result is a result where we usually come away understanding each other a bit better, even if we still disagree on policies.

The anger/hate filled dialogue version of this conversation that happens online gets no one anywhere. The utility of the online discussion is often close to zero, because everyone involved goes into rage mode at which point no one is hearing anyone.

And even if it’s true that the online version is just the unfiltered version, that isn’t a ringing endorsement. If anything, it highlights the issue that the medium degrades our ability to relate to the other people we interact with, and this is important considering all of our psychological machinery has evolved around in-person human interactions.

If everyone behaved the way they behave online in the real world, the real world would be a far more violent place.

There are a few places left (like this one) that still value good faith, especially in the face of disagreement. But this has all but disappeared with minor exceptions in the prevalent online communities. It’s one of the reasons Reddit is a place I only go for football these days, when at one time, it was my primary online social outlet. And don’t get me started on Facebook/Twitter.

For what it’s worth, I’m in my late 30s, and have been participating in internet communities since I was 12. This is a shift that was gradual at first, but has accelerated in the social media era.
Guess this requires a Shuttle account, so that's a no from me.
So the implication is that there must be millions of students out there that are experiencing placebo effects from taking stimulants? Because there is practically an endless supply of feedback out there, from "normal" students, that report their ability to study/focus/cram going up, when using ADHD meds.
Under "Our Research" section near the top:

"At the end of the study, we conducted in-depth interviews with 14 participants."

I wondered something similar while reading, but recognized the choices of explicit gender and detailed inquiry inclusion while intentionally changing the names. These pointed me to the likelihood this was in-house/controlled research. I believe that is the case from the quote above, though I don't see any additional details about how the study was conducted.
What's behind that push? The $10 billion MS is investing in OpenAI, most likely. It's hard to tell from the interview with Nadella, though, because that was essentially just an interview-length marketing spiel.
Hey, I'm not the one who chose the analogy or the “with both"; if you would read what you wrote with more discernment before posting it, maybe we would have avoided this whole discussion.
SMS rates are absolutely bonkers considering the technical way they're transmitted. The US is an outlier in SMS rates actually being reasonable (usually unlimited or close to) for consumers - but for the rest of the world the insane mark up on that communication method has mostly obsoleted it...

That'd be all well and good... the technology would die naturally, but all my American relatives continue to stubbornly use iMessage.
That’s just born of either psychosis or naivety; but even when one does know SQL, there’s more to consider. RDBMS’s are awkward systems to work with, and SQL knowledge isn’t the issue

moving business logic into schema/queries is usually fine, (and perhaps the only sane place for the DB to directly interact with business logic) though schema changes has all the issues described. Queries get to live with your application code, and so can be treated sanely, but you only really get to a good setup with a decent query builder library (ORM-haters smashing strings together like an ape is naturally full of issues, and ORM-lovers get all the fun of table/object model-mismatch and poor query generation). But then you run into the issue that every database library tries to be database-agnostic, and you lose access to all the fancy features your database provides
Thanks for the feedback, we’re all learning in this world.

I’ll try to do better in the coming emails.

Cheers!
HR, payroll, time tracking, POS, online ordering, review alerting, online advertising, social media marketing, email marketing, integration services, financial reporting, website, email, rewards management.

And that's for a business that mostly operates offline. It's really easy for these things add up quickly and without you realizing it.

This is why I always object when someone points out that $50/user/mo is a tiny percentage compared to what you're paying for the employee. It's not $50/user/mo, it's typically ($50 * 10-20)/user/mo.
Which might be said to increase privacy. I suppose there's something to the point about combating spam. But surely there are other ways to do this, right?
The State of Math in Markdown
> The world where the gambler stops gambling doesn't exist.

Casually ignoring that a large amount of gambling addicts have stopped gambling.

Also, just because people are addicted and it's not illegal doesn't make it morally right. You're still financially benefitting from their addiction.

These online casinos aren't simply complicit in their gambling addiction they are actively fueling it trying to optimize the addictiveness of their platform.
I believe it’s common in the US for the intended (and/or unintended) surgical site to be physically marked in ink before the surgery to prevent left-right mistakes.
I'm picturing that meme with the guy sweating over pressing a button.

Add new features that generates revenue, or optimize the database.

Hmmm.

Of course the response is that you want to optimize the database so that when you do eventually add new features that generate revenue, you can scale to meet the demand.

Or is it...
>Alleged defects not barred by Section 230 include: not providing effective parental controls; not providing options for young users to self-restrict time used on the platform; [...]

It seems excessively burdensome to require websites to provide "effective" (interpret that as you will) parental controls. There is only so much you can do as a website owner to restrict children from misusing your platform without resorting to extremely intrusive methods (i.e. requesting some form of ID). Because at the end of the day, anyone can create a gmail account and sign up for Facebook while pretending they're 21.
My understanding is that real-time makes a system slower. To be real-time, you have to put a time allocation on everything. Each operation is allowed X budget, and will not deviate. This means if the best-case operation is fast, but the worst case is slow, the system has to always assume worst case.
I get the same feeling reading about Fossil as I do when thinking about how Netscape almost used Scheme in the browser or imagining if Babbage had completed the analytical engine in his lifetime or the Romans had built a steam engine. Like it's a glimpse into a different future because of some road not taken.
My hobby: interpolating
They will still require a phone number, it's just a alias.
The new scheduler, memory folio conversions, file systems, and other improvements and cleanups are also not coming.
"Code beautification" is not the point, but a tool. Smaller and clearer code could be faster to write, and harder to make mistakes using. This is why e.g. Rails can be so good at producing certain kinds of apps very quickly and in very few LOCs.

The problem is, of course, that simplicity follows complexity, not the other way around. Because of that, it's mostly "trivial" and "repetitive" tasks that receive polished tools for easy and compact expression. Anything new and non-trivial usually grows ugly and uncouth for quite some time.
I used to, now I consider myself a 'builder' - the difference being that I care that people use the stuff I make, whereas before not so much.
Adderall reduces your task activation threshold, the amount of effort required to start something.

It’s definitely possible to reduce this threshold too far! If you do you’ll end up jumping into the first project you come across and tackling it with gusto, whether or not it’s high value. Having too much caffeine with Adderall makes this effect much worse for me.

A little bit of laziness is good! You need to be able to power through the tedious stuff you have to do in life, but you never want to stop thinking, “this is tedious and boring, do I really have to do this? Is there a better way?”

It’s easy to lose the forest for the trees.
Don't get me started. If you ever have eaten that, don't click on this link and surely don't scroll down to the stinky tofu paragraph (1)

(1) don't click: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Food_safety_incidents_in_China
What would you call WMDs in Iraq? Do you have an alternate name for this kind of mass deception if not conspiracy?
The impossibility of rationally analyzing partisan news
Signal had 40 million active users in 2021 [1]. With 14 million in infra cost, that comes to .35 per user/year. Total expenses are about 33 million, so about .825 per user/year. All in all that seems very reasonable.

[1] https://www.businessofapps.com/data/signal-statistics/
If you force yourself to do something that sucks for long enough, you start to at-minimum get used to it, and at-best you start to need it.
This is a good thing. It democratizes access to a product that very, very few could afford when it required a lot of human talent and time to produce. In my experience, I only marvel at impressions done as an unexpected party trick and the novelty quickly wears off. If I hear a voiceover that sounds very much like some famous person I'm not imbued with wonder I just perceive that the audio was well produced and don't give it a second thought. I think this kind of automation may even be very good for people with unique voices who are looking to get into voice acting, they should be able to pay some service to clone their voice and then offer it on demand for a small fee. The amount of work they would have to put into this is greatly reduced compared to if they had to do all of the voice acting themselves and they are able to take more customers since the work can be done in parallel. It's like digital publishing for voice acting with the same benefits and detriments e.g. your voice can be cloned like your ebook or song can be torrented but you also get a much bigger market and it's much easier to enter it.
For me it was the Glove80 -- it is kind of mid-range pricewise in this space (but still around $400), but it immediately solved my RSI pain and they offer a ton of accessories like quick release mounts you can use to set each side up on a chair arm for example.

I debated getting something like the Freestyle 2, but I had a suspicion the the curvature following the shape of your hand was going to be a key feature, and I think I was right. No regrets.
That's unfortunate. Your attitude will end up empowering those you disagree with. By the time you understand who benefits from your position and why they are doing everything they can to encourage you to think that way, it will be far too late.
Cool, glad to hear about this - However, it is still coupled to a cryptocurrency (https://oxen.io/) even if not bundled wechat-style
Llama on a Microcontroller
Nile monthly launch – pg_vector is now available on Nile
Not exactly. A cursory glance of this [0] Wikipedia article shows that the Presidential Election term is usually 4, 5, or 6 years long. For so many countries to be holding an election in the same year is quite unlikely. And even if the numbers (of countries) are there, some countries have much larger populations. The Economist article states more than 4 billion people will go to the polls in 2024. That's not going to happen in 2028.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_next_general_elections
A $100/month GPT5 might price itself out of most B2C customers, but could still be hugely attractive to businesses. Both for chatbots, and as a productivity boost for knowledge workers. It just has to be good enough to justify the price increase over $20 GPT4.
You misunderstand how textsecure worked.
The warm hug my daughter greets me with in the morning, the giggles of my kids playing together in the afternoon, or the beaming smiles they wear as I toss them into piles of pillows at night are just the beginning. There are new stressful things to learn and deal with, but there are also unique moments you get to have. Having kids is by no means the only way to find joy in life, it can be one of many.
Laravel Pulse
What do embedded real-time Linux people use for bootloader, init system, utilities, and C standard library implementation? Even Android that does not have real-time constraints ended up using Toybox for utilities and rolling their own C standard library (Bionic).
I don't use these tools (I do backend dev), so perhaps I'm mistaken, but the benefits here are, I assume,

a) For UX people who have minimal programming knowledge but need to produce mockups.

b) For people like me who might want a basic UX to start with for demo purposes.
A philosopher would likely retort something along the lines of “it doesn’t come from human language, it comes from statistically modelling a giant corpus of readymade text, which isn’t the same thing as language but an encoding of it”.
Humanity 101: The Syllabus of Frankenstein's Monster
Will technology save us from climate change? (2021)
> Just let me walk up to the counter, read a physical menu, place my order with a human being and get out of there.

The problem is, as wages and COL go up, this gets harder and harder to do. Humans are expensive, and as they keep getting more expensive, it stops making economic sense to use them for low-margin goods and services like lattes. Notice how we don't have elevator operators, pump station attendants, etc. anymore, because eventually it became uneconomic to do that with people instead of making the customer do it themselves.

The future for most retail and food service businesses is fewer people and more automation (e.g. ordering at your table via an app and the server only comes by to bring your food); it can't really be any other way unless you want your food subject to Baumol cost disease.
U.S. states sue Instagram owner for making social media addictive to kids
There was no "registration" and TextSecure never sent you messages. It was strictly peer-to-peer.
You can prove that "thinking is happening", but when you go looking for the "I", you'll never find it — only more thoughts. Gautama, Hume.
Agree. Just based on the previous comments, it sounded like the goals was a "belt only" type of design. Figured there might be interesting functionality with variable belt object density arriving at a location being a determinant.
In my specific case, it's a simple fact.

It may not be everyone's issue, but cases like mine do exist.
It's not better or worse, it's just how it is.