skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> Volkswagen said it has a procedure in place with a third-party provider for Car-Net support services to help with emergency requests from law enforcement.

> “Unfortunately, in this instance, there was a serious breach of the process,”

Outsourcing support to third party call centers is a bad idea for anything important.
And now your system can scale better, saving you enough money to justify the optimization work long-term.

The StackOverflow folks famously take their DB design and performance very seriously, and now they do not need an army of overpriced "architects" to plug the performance holes with more insane and expensive complexity.

https://stackexchange.com/performance

Coincidentally I just wrote up a post about the importance of minding your database skills:

https://renegadeotter.com/2023/11/12/your-database-skills-ar...
It's all perspective: layers, details, abstraction. Sometimes it's not visual but perceptive instead, like the passing of time.
I had a frustrating number of job interviews in my early career where the interviewers didn't know what realtime actually was. That "and predictable delay" concept from the article frequently seemed to be lost on many folks, who seemed to think realtime just meant fast, whatever that means.
Right, so we're agreed most of the websites that show a banner need to show a banner or equivalent to obtain consent because they are collecting data that the GDPR requires they gain consent to collect.

In that case then, a banner is the best and least intrusive way to do that, given the alternative is a popup or redirect.

Thus, for many of these sites, the GDPR does directly mandate the banners.
They could use a free plus subscription model for really pro features, like “extra privacy”, “faster sending speed”, “create bigger group rooms”, these are bad features but you get it
Out of interest, their top vendor costs on their 2021 form 990:

$7m Twilio

$4m Microsoft

$3m AWS

$1.3m Google

https://projects.propublica.org/nonprofits/organizations/824...
I don't think you need a pure CRDT either but I think locking and presence is a bit of an oversimplification.

LWW is a good place to start, and updating the smallest piece of information possible is the right idea in general but there is a lot more nuance to handling complex applications like a spreadsheet (I'm working on one) and whiteboard apps.

Things like reparenting or grouping shapes [1], or updating elements that aren't at the lowest scale like deleting a row or column in a spreadsheet make locking challenging to implement. Do you lock the entire row while I'm moving it? Do you lock the entire group of shapes?

With the exception of text editing, the popular libraries like Yjs don't just give you a perfect CRDT out of the box. You still have to construct your data model in a way that enables small scale updates [2], and CRDT libraries and literature are the best source of thinking for these problems that I've found.

[1] https://www.figma.com/blog/how-figmas-multiplayer-technology...

[2] https://mattweidner.com/2022/02/10/collaborative-data-design...
I think the pit is significantly smaller then a bowling ball, probably closer to a softball or a grapefruit. The diameter at critical mass is 95–99mm.

They make it subcritical by putting a hollow in the center. This hollow was about the size of a golf ball on the fat man design. It has to be large enough so that is does not go critical when immersed in water, but outside of that you want the pit to be as small as possible.

On older designs they filled the hollow with a safety chain made of cadmium balls(like the chain on a ceiling fan) as a Neutron poison. The bombardier would have to pull out the chain to arm the bomb.
Ackman's Pershing Square Nearly Doubles Stake in Alphabet's Class A Shares
You're right, chatGPT and AIs will go nowhere.
Feature Flags and OCI
> the deputy was informed that the vehicle’s free trial period for the Car-Net services had expired and that a subscription of $150 was required before the location of the vehicle could be provided.

> In a statement released last February, Volkswagen said it has a procedure in place with a third-party provider for Car-Net support services to help with emergency requests from law enforcement.

> “Unfortunately, in this instance, there was a serious breach of the process,” the statement read. “We are addressing the situation with the parties involved.”

So the refusal was at a first glance a humam error rather than company policy regarding sharing of private data with authorities.
That's a neat workaround for the people that can figure that out, but doesn't change the underlying problem for the majority of users at all.
I manage our small company’s Microsoft 365 / Azure tenant and only rarely need to use the portal.

A month or so ago my laptop was requiring a BitLocker recovery code before it would boot. I spent ages looking for Azure AD, before eventually discovering it was renamed to Entra. They should have had a transition period where it would have “ (formerly called Azure Active Directory)” on its name.
Hmm. Perhaps it has to do with another add-on I'm using.
Why UDP for a local service rather than a unix socket?
Not every API is a simple CRUD app with a user at the other end.
Inb4 wasm with native extensions
I don't think the goalposts have changed. Websites (not webapps) are one of the easiest things to automate because the patterns used are ultra-predictable. All the way back in 2017, there was a semi-vaporware startup called theGrid.io that was going to automate that using prompts. It went dark in 2020:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22399357

GPT 3.5 should be able to handle this functionality easily on the basis of these demos yet a full-fledged product that does this has yet to make an appearance. Squarespace, Wordpress page builders should be all over this, yet they're not. Neither are any "disruptors" like Webflow. Maybe they know something that Hello World prototyper does not?
> they very early on established direct-connection infrastructure for sending SMS, meaning that they have a marginal cost of literally $0.00/message in most markets.

I am very, very interested to understand how that works, because without more detail or sources I'm calling bullshit. I definitely understand how Twitter could have greatly reduced their per-message fee with telecom providers, but at the end of the day Twitter is not a telecom and is still at the mercy of whoever is that "last mile" for actually delivering the SMS to your phone, so I don't understand how they have no marginal cost here. Happy to be proven wrong.
This does not reduce the overall cost, it just shifts it to the clearinghouse. Who pays the clearinghouse so that they can cover their own exorbitant SMS costs?
Logging can be essential to security (to auditing). It's your record of what happened. If an attacker can cause logging to fail, they can cover their tracks more easily.
Ok, have they decoupled my identity from my phone number yet?

I mean, to donate to them I'd have to use it. I don't need another WhatsApp.
If your employer matches don't forget that ... Easy way to double your donation
I like what you’re saying.

I’ll think a bit more about this and see if it changes the point I’m making in any significant way, otherwise I’ll correct the statement in a future email.

Is it ok if I mention your comment there?
Failing to work with police is a bit different. To be fair VW say they have a process and it wasn't followed (by them), which may well make them liable or not.
"evidence"
Videos are great but much better to experience the magic yourself
Apps are dead.
> Attorneys for the family claim Volkswagen refused to assist authorities in tracking the car until payment of their tracking system was paid and activated.

Considering all news is engineered for maximum outrage, I wonder what the reality of the situation is from VW's side.

Did Volkswagen refuse to assist, or was compliance not possible because the tracker wasn't active due to nonpayment?

If the tracker wasn't active, it's unsettling that it could be activated with an exigent-circumstances request. Those don't even need a warrant.

But if they had the data and refused to share it, VW was rent-seeking during a fucking hostage situation involving a baby. I don't put anything past anybody but that seems too monstrous to believe.

VW continues to eat shit for the emissions scandal, but the media has historically been way more dishonest than VW.
You admitted you were posting an anecdote and were under the mistaken impression people wouldn't spend money on something that doesn't work. I provided homeopathy as a very expensive example of how you were wrong.

The burden of proof is on you. Proof might exist, but I'm not convinced you have it. Otherwise, you'd lead with it instead of an anecdote.
To be cynical in another direction, if it wasn't run by an ex-Googler it would probably cost 1/3 of what it does now to run it :)
So Last-Write-Wins (LWW) basically _is_ a CRDT, but not in the sense that anyone really expects, because they aren't that useful or intention preserving. Especially if the two writes happen in very quick succession / concurrently.

LWW becomes useful if you can:

a) help humans to see who is doing what on a doc

b) reduce the size of the change that is LWW

As you've said:

> However our LWW texts are individually small - one block/paragraph in size

This is really important, because by reducing the size of the individual element that any single user is updating you can also reduce the chance of conflicts. With a small amount of contextual feedback (like the notion icon next to the block) a lot of the problem cases are just avoided.

Clearly locking and updating the entire document would be terrible, but if you can do it on a small enough scope that others can change other elements, it can work really well.

(If you've worked on the notion things you're describing then I'm sure you know this better than I do, but just spelling it out really clearly.)
The fact that we're still relying on a human brain having a perfect mental model of the tens of thousands of lines of code he wrote, interacting with the million ones other people wrote, is baffling.

At this point i consider it a miracle things are still working about fine.
> Nobody wants this.

Not nobody.

> iMessage won over SMS because of cost and spam filtering.

Really? I've never used imessage.
did anybody test the AWS feature to limit bots in application load balancer? it costs a lot, and we are not sure if it is worth
If you are going to disagree with my opinion than please disprove what I said instead of dismissing it as projection.

I use OpenSubtitles a lot. You can still freely download subtitles, but their will now be limits on the new REST Api they build. You could in theory scrape the site. You can jump on and download things freely. There might be full dumps including the subtitle text itself out there, I would guess nobody cares given the community around it but thats just a guess.

The move is from I understood over the past year to
1) Deprecate the old hard to maintain API
2) Get applications that are using OpenSubtitles to either introduce a OpenSubtitles link in their app or to work with OpenSubtitles to pay for direct access.
3) Help support continued work on both the site and the API.

The new daily usage limits against the API still allow unauthenticated users from using the API, downloads are limited to 5 a day per IP. Authenticated users but non-paying get a bump up from that, and paying (VIP) users get 1k per day. Is it change from the old API? Yes but my impression is the core user base are happy to support. It costs money to maintain the entire system and you can still download subtitles without signing up. The data is still freely available but the transport, API, has new limitations.

Do you use the OpenSubtitles API or website?
Nobody is demanding them to stop supporting phone numbers as identifiers/verification methods.

I'm not mad at all if somebody prefers using their phone number and not having a password for a service – just give me the option to use my email address and/or a username.

There are too many "phone number only" services out there these days.
I've done it - twice, I think. Downloaded a film in a foreign language, couldn't find subs anywhere.
Stack Overflow is the poster child of over-optimizing DB engineering while neglecting every other product feature that end users actually want, so not sure if that should be your example.
Windows AI Studio
Do you think he'd be further along if he did? He'd likely spend it all on cars.
It uses Circle.
My children would simply not be in the way.
You’re right. I should add a link in the footer! I can’t believe I forgot about it!

Thanks :)
Whatsapp was asking for $1/year [1]

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/jan/18/whatsapp-...
If only it was possible for a service to support both!
There's one missing piece in that article, and it's the CNAM database (US only).

CNAM is the database that carriers use to give you alphanumeric caller ID ("SMITH JOHN" instead of "+1 (555) 123-4567"). Many carriers don't display this data as far as I believe, but most of them make it available.

Querying that database isn't free, but you could probably find a way to do it for a few hundred numbers relatively cheaply. People's names and emails are often similar, so you could probably figure out an algorithm to give you the most likely candidates.

The data is often wrong in interesting ways (I've seen everything from deadnames to people's exes they still share a plan with), but it is still pretty useful.
That is because some people are scared of words like genetics, and its hard to explain secondary effects to the general public.

But if you listen to people actually in the know, they will tell you its more about market manipulation than the genetics themselves. The genetics are often begin, and include many beneficial things like blight resistance.

But it goes bad when you are locked into using specific chemicals bought from the the only company that also sells seeds. Or when a multinational company sues a farmer because of accidental hybridization with their propriety genetics. Or when a few companies have such a lock on crops with superior output, that you have no choice but to buy them, because it would mean bankruptcy otherwise.

There is no open source-like alternative for seeds.
I'm an American, and am familiar with some of those. Never heard kilopound before--that one seems the craziest to me for some reason.

It's like, lets take this wild unit system where we have bespoke units for every scale, but then for this one we'll use a sane prefix.
I would even remove the "minimum" part altogether; the point of realtime is that operations have predictable upper bounds. That might even mean slower average cases than in non-realtime systems. If you're controlling a car's braking system, "the average delay is 50ms but might take up to 80ms" might be acceptable, whereas "the average delay is 1ms but it might take arbitrarily long, possibly multiple seconds" isn't.
I understand the nuance, I think you're just wrong. LLMs augmented with memory are Turing complete [1], so they do process information. This distinction you're trying to draw is a mirage.

[1] https://pub.towardsai.net/llms-and-memory-is-definitely-all-...
That's one way to run DPDK processes under LINUX -- you get the whole processor for doing whatever network processing you want to do -- no interruptions from anything.
No, it's great! That way when something terrible happens, it's not VW's fault.
Android's messaging app does much the same thing.

My preference would be that Apple drop SMS support from Messages all-together and market it as an iOS only communication method. People with iPhones would then have to pick some alternative, perhaps they would use Signal or perhaps something else.

I already have to install a handful of applications to talk to all of my friends and co-workers, at least I wouldn't have to continue to use SMS.
Kinda, companies of that scale regularly spend more than that on (often) random R&D.

Sure if there is a plausible ROI, they’d have no issues dropping that much money (actually far more). Revenues for fortune 500’s are going to be in the 10’s of billions anyway, and it wouldn’t be hard to make an argument that random AI project could increase that by a couple percent or decrease costs a couple percent, which would more than provide that ROI.

Their biggest issue is usually having anyone in leadership that has a clue enough to even propose something plausible, let alone get a team together to give it a plausible go.

If they have that, Capital is not the issue.
I just donated $10 to Signal. Here's how to do so on iPhone in less than a minute:

1. Open Signal and click on your user icon in the upper left.

2. Go to "Settings" --> "Donate to Signal".

3. Click "Donate", select your donation options, and pay with Apple Pay.
> If you're going to sanction somebody, keep at least some screenshots around.

That might not've been a consideration when the offending posts were removed. The ones doing the removal might not even be the same people handling suspensions.

> I could find nothing even questionable the banned person did.

That might be an issue of legitimacy. I'm involved in some discord modding, and we got admin-only channels mirroring the others to keep logs of everything. I have no idea how suspensions are handled in the NixOS community though, maybe moderators are picked to handle things in their own discretion.

> The fact that you don't agree with some person on an issue is no grounds for a ban.

That's not what's happening here though, it's the intentionally provocative behaviour?

Say some person argues that Israel is a nazi state dehumanizingly enough to get a warning, and gets told to stop derailing everything into a discussion about that since it's a detriment to a community that in itself has no connection to the issue. Agreeing to this they instead start sporting a green flag, or a little image with a free country between a river and a sea - maybe with a green flag on it - while linking to a page about how Israel is a nazi state. Then the issue the moderators have to consider isn't whether they agree on how to describe Israel, but if the actions of the warned person are still acting inflammatory and derailing the community.

A bit over the top example to make it clearer, if you find it an incomparable situation just tone down the actions in it accordingly.
I'm not saying what we should do, or what I'd like to happen. I'm saying what I expect to happen.

I'm a born cynic, so it could just be me, but I am not at all optimistic at this moment that humanity will overcome climate change without suffering massively, if it survives at all.
Copilot for Office Is Not Generally Available, Despite Microsoft's Claim
Definitely reasonable but the ultra privacy-conscious/paranoid can't easily donate or pay privately.
> none of Michelin-star, tasting menu, $200 and up per plate restaurants have QR code menus

Waiters and Bussing staff cost money, and are much more expensive now. Margins and salaries are high enough in $$$$ restaurants that they can afford staff.

In all honesty, I don't really remember ever having concierge waiter service at restaurants as a kid in the Bay Area, but then again we never really went to white people restaurants.
The Archimedean lever of all languages: Prolog.

I’m of the controversial opinion that’s it’s only not used more because of the cognitive overhead of its simplicity. Its few capabilities are so extremely overloaded and productivity very much depends on the savvy of the programmer.

It is also the clearest language I know for writing down thoughts in a computational logic.
It depends.

Some systems the logs are journaled records for the business or are discoverable artifacts for compliance. In highly secure environments logs are not only durable but measures are taken to fingerprint them and their ordering (like ratchet hashing) to ensure integrity is invariant.

I would note that using disk based logging is generally harmful in these situations IMO. Network based logging is less likely to cause blocking at some OS level or other sorts of jitter that’s harder to mask. Typically I develop logging as an in memory thing that offloads to a remote service over the network. The durability of the memory store can be an issue in highly sensitive workloads, and you’ll want to do synchronous disk IO for that case to ensure durability and consistent time budgets, but for almost all application disk less logging is preferable.
Nothing seems out of the ordinary in terms of costs. But there some features that would be pertinent to their core mission of providing a secure messenger, and stories and payments aren’t some of those. Stories button takes up half of the bottom navigation bar, I have not seen anyone using that feature.
Their non-product approach is what prevents men from becoming a recurring donors. They are finally testing a build with usernames, but it has been long over due.
Maybe they're a spam business? $15k a year spend at AWS will get you the ability to send 150 million emails.
Maybe they should flip it on its head - get a thousand? Ten thousand? numbers that can accept SMS and tell people to "text 473843 to this number" to verify.
https://web.archive.org/web/20231116155824/https://wgntv.com...
does it make sense to limit incoming connection to HTTP/2 to stop (at least many) bots?
Don't many companies do similar things to hook kids? Would candy companies be liable for making their products appealing to kids, knowing sugar is an addictive substance? The same argument applies to breakfast cereal companies as well.
Here in the US, we have a corn-farming industry that has captured the Agriculture department and can block passage of essential legislation. To be expected: legislation proposed in Congress that all US jet fuel henceforth contain X% bio-product.
Yeah, my RSS extension didn't pick it up. I think it's because the alternate link had type=atom+xml instead of type=application/atom+xml
This should be an easy to try case. Just bring in an expert witness about addiction. There is only one behavioral addiction in the diagnostic service manual: gambling addiction. And that one is basically just grandfathered in from before addiction was understood and had a clear medical/biological meaning. Nothing that happens while looking at screens is inherently bad or addictive. To use that word here is to devalue it and marginalize it's meaning in cases of actual addiction all just so they can try to sue to make noise and bring the DAs involved fame (so they can run for public office later) while exploiting the ignorance of the public re: medical science.
At least in T-Mobile's customer UX, you can set this to whatever you want per line [1]. Have tested by changing line CNAM and querying with Twilio number lookup [2]. You're supposed to be honest wrt person's name, but it's honor system.

[1] https://www.t-mobile.com/support/tutorials/device/app/ios/to...

[2] https://www.twilio.com/code-exchange/lookup
I lost my Jeep a few years ago downtown after a parade. Wandered for blocks and blocks looking for it down streets that looked exactly the same.

Had an epiphany, opened my Uconnect app and called to restart my GPS service and they wouldn't do it. Or they said if they did it wouldn't find it that night or something. I forget exactly what it was, maybe the Jeep had to be turned on or it was just a 24 hourish delay. I just remember getting annoyed and walking for another 45-2hrs until I finally found it.

This was before google/apple maps had the parked here feature.
In a world of plastics, clay pipe still stands out
> The fact that a banner with the slogan "from the river to the sea" is banned in Germany speaks to the massive self-defeating overreaction by some parts of the West.

Germany, and Europe in general, has the cultural understanding (as a consequence of 1933-1945) that no, not all speech has to be allowed - particularly not when it calls for or supports terrorism.

And that is precisely the context in where this slogan is currently being used.