Meekro

It sounds like the objection you're making is to the website and not the program. Do you think it's always inappropriate for executive branch websites to reflect the style of the person in office? I can understand the push for a more neutral style, but the level of shock-and-horror for something the next administration could easily redesign seems.. excessive?

The permanent residency card they issue won't look like that. It's an ID, and will have your photo and other identifying information on it.

Another argument for why it's good: if you're rich, you can either pay lots of money to an immigration lawyer to make sure your visa gets approved, or you could cut out the middleman and pay the government directly. Why wouldn't they just cut out the middleman?

This kind of thing is not new in the US. Check out the EB-5 investor visa[1], which has been around for decades and offers a similar investment-for-visa arrangement.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EB-5_visa

Harvey Mudd is a college in California, mostly specializing in STEM majors.

There's one slow-motion conservative victory happening that's getting relatively little news coverage (and that's a good thing, lest there be more pushback): allowing more alternatives to public schools, funded by taxpayer dollars. Charter schools are the most obvious example, but I expect this to eventually be expanded further. If 10 homeschooler families want to get together and hire a professional teacher, there's no reason why the state shouldn't pay for it (provided the kids pass grade-level standardized tests).

Like you said, 99% of what makes a "good" school good is the quality of the other kids who go there. Since there's absolutely no political will for expelling the troublemakers (even in most conservative districts), the only remaining option is to build more lifeboats.

"Poverty blended with hopelessness" sounds about right. I'd like to emphasize that it's not just poverty, since there are plenty of recent immigrant families who live in poverty but the kids are at the top of their class. Unfortunately, though, there's a certain kind of degeneracy some families live in: the parents have largely failed in their every endeavor, and they'll become absolutely furious if they see the kids starting to rise above that, get their lives together, and accomplish things. If you live in communities like that, it's part of the deal: no one is allowed to escape, lest they make the rest of them look bad.

If I had a choice about whether to give the presentation, I would choose not to. If you had a choice about whether to attend it, you would also choose not to. But, alas, both of us are there -- such is the way of the large bureaucracy.

Working fine for me-- when I search under Mac Apps for "ublock origin lite" (no quotes), it appears in 1st place.

I've been searching for the perfect "old school iTunes" program for a while. I'm pretty sure it does not exist, maybe I'll try to make one someday unless someone beats me to it? Here's what I want:

* Smartlists, preferably with nested rules

* Proper search, the way iTunes did it: you have a huge excel-like list of songs that filters as you type

* Volume leveling

* Corresponding Windows/Mac/iPhone programs, with the ability to sync my collection like Dropbox

I would gladly pay $100 for this.

Thanks for the recommendation! This one's the best "old school iTunes" program I've tried so far. I might stick with this one for now. I especially like how I can make smartlists with nested rules.

The main thing I'm missing is volume leveling.

Thanks for the recommendation! I gave it a try, but unfortunately this one doesn't have the stuff that I liked from old-school iTunes. At first glance: no smart lists; search doesn't work the way I want (I want a giant excel-like list that filters as I type); no volume leveling.

I totally disagree with the author. His main complaint seems to be this: "Games you purchased on a Windows 98 machine later had their system requirements bumped up to Windows XP, then to Windows 7, then to Windows 10."

Essentially, you can't run your Steam games without also being able to run the Steam client, and the Steam client will drop support for old versions of Windows after they are end-of-life'd. The author describes this as a violation of freedom, but to me it's totally understandable: when Windows 98 gets end-of-life'd, users have to upgrade anyway because security patches won't keep coming. Most people have, by that point, upgraded years earlier. Their Steam keeps working, and so do most of their games.

I'm not sure what kind of changes would satisfy the author. Should Steam still devote a small team to maintaining Windows 98 compatibility to satisfy him personally (as I doubt anyone else cares)? Should they do away with DRM entirely and just ship unlocked exe's (and have every major publisher bail on them)?

And, more broadly on the subject of game compatibility: the pre-internet method of shipping CD-ROM's also did not ensure that your games would run forever. You'll eventually replace your computer, and your Win98 CD-ROM games will generally not work if you try to install them on your new Win11 box.

It's interesting how, in just 10-20 years, we've gone from criticizing The Great Firewall of China to basically admitting that they had the right idea (to limit the ability of the foreign internet to influence Chinese culture) and trying to do the same thing.

Ok, clearly I had no idea of the scale of it. 200RPS from a single bot sounds pretty bad! Do all 100,000+ pages have to be live to be useful, or could many be served from a cache that is minutes/hours/days old?

I've heard lots of people on HN complaining about bot traffic bogging down their websites, and as a website operator myself I'm honestly puzzled. If you're already using Cloudflare, some basic cache configuration should guarantee that most bot traffic hits the cache and doesn't bog down your servers. And even if you don't want to do that, bandwidth and CPU are so cheap these days that it shouldn't make a difference. Why is everyone so upset?

That's definitely true, and it's a bad thing, but I don't think it's the core problem. If it was, you'd see massive differences between cities and the research would read like this: "City A is too car-centric, and all the kids are sedentary and obese. City B has great public transportation, lots of parks, and the kids are doing great."

Instead, we see the same problem everywhere, including places in Europe and Japan where the outside is just fine.

The captchas are totally optional. You can turn that off and just keep Cloudflare's DDoS protection.

If Netanyahu stepped down tomorrow, apparently the most likely successor would be Israel Katz. He would maintain basically the same foreign policy.

You're right that he cheated (in some sense), but I don't think "caught" is the right word since he admitted it when he was asked point-blank. He paid someone to level up his character before he played it, not to stream in his name and pretend to be him.

Paying someone to level your character is officially against Blizzard's rules in all of their games, but their lack of enforcement reveals that they don't care as long as the monthly payments clear. World of Warcraft is overrun with people selling gold and boosts-- given that they're openly advertising this in Stormwind, it wouldn't be a stretch to call it de-facto legal (or at least decriminalized). Heck, Blizzard is selling gold and level boosts on its own website! [1]

[1] https://us.shop.battle.net/en-us/family/world-of-warcraft

Has anyone posted an analysis of its security?

It sounds like an offhand comment that we shouldn’t read much into.

Bitcoin’s creator demonstrated an impressive mastery of cryptography—- it was made to be extremely resilient (including to quantum computing) and no one has ever broken it despite billions of dollars being on the line. Maybe Musk meant to say that he thinks his product will be similarly resilient.

He might also mean that the secp256k1 elliptic curve (which Bitcoin uses) is also used by their product in some way, such as for a key exchange.

You can read anything with the assumption that the writer is an absolute idiot, but I’d give the world’s richest man more credit than that.

Some things Musk claimed have happened, others have not. For example, he promised that they would release a satellite Internet platform that was better than most of the others, and they did.

On the other hand, he promised that Grok 3 would be massively better than ChatGPT, and it turned out to be comparable at best.

In a nutshell: we have unclear comments from Musk and unclear statements in the FAQ (which might not have been written by a technical person). Until they release a technical white paper, we don’t know anything for sure.

No, I'm talking about Wise. I was falsely accused of some stuff, my account was locked, and they were ignoring all communications even as I tried to prove my innocence. @patio11 helped me escalate and we had it resolved really quickly.

I'm also a Stripe user, but I never had a problem there.

Honest tip: When I had a Wise-related problem, I reached out to @patio11 (famous HN user) for help and he connected me with a high-ranking employee at Wise. We had the problem resolved a day later.

10/10, would escalate again.

Unfortunately, that box is going to have increasing difficulty connecting to anyone at all. TLS 1.2 was added to OpenSSL around 2010, and de-facto mandated around 2020. Any SSL/TLS software from before that will increasingly find its connections rejected.

Yeah, apparently OpenSSL dropped it almost 10 years ago.

If you've never used a TLS library such as Go's crypto/tls, that's understandable-- this is stuff most programmers never need to think about. Fortunately TLS does work pretty well: both sides of an encrypted connection will auto-negotiate and pick the strongest cipher that they both support.

TLS libraries do drop old, weak ciphers from time to time. But thanks to auto-negotiating, this will only be a problem if your TLS lib is so out-of-date that it doesn't support any still-trusted alternatives.

Which brings me back to why this story is so strange: "Gmail upgrades TLS library, drops old insecure algorithm that OpenSSL had dropped almost 10 years ago."

If someone's maintaining an old/obscure email client, I would expect them to be importing a TLS library under the "don't roll your own crypto" principle. Assuming it's been updated at some point in the last ~15 years, it's probably capable of auto-negotiating to something better than 3DES.

And if it hasn't been updated for that long, it probably doesn't support TLS 1.2 and is getting rejected from just about everything for that reason.