skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> Take my colleague Connie Loizos’ article from yesterday reporting on a new venture fund. The text itself is about 3.5 kilobytes uncompressed, but the total payload of the page if nothing is cached is more than 10 MB, or more than 3000x the data usage of the actual text itself. This pattern has become so common that it has been called the website obesity crisis. Yet, all of our research shows people want high-definition images with their stories, instant loading of articles on the site, and interactivity. Those features have to be paid somehow, begetting us the advertising and subscription models we see today.

It was kindof upsetting to read this after having switched the article into Firefox's reader mode, because the page was completely unusable.

If you want to talk about consumers' wallets not existing in a vacuum: if your 3.5 KB article is sending me 10 megs of crap, then your mobile users' carriers are charging them more than the advertizers are paying you.

There are some real challenges in figuring out how to fund journalism, but if bandwidth is one of them you're doing something very wrong.
Probably keep making more until the publishers were forced to negotiate. This method is successful. See: Uber.
2 out of the 5 ferries running between Helsinborg and Elsinore are now battery powered. The ferries leave every 15 minutes nearly 24/7, and arrive after 20 minutes: it's the largest amount of ferry departures on a single rout in Europe.

The route supposedly was mentioned as far back as the 11th century and the bridge across the Øresunds strait has yet to kill it.

The ferries are 8 thousand tons (the article says just 8 tons) and take 1200+ passengers and 200+ cars with them. They contain 640 6.5 kWh batteries which recharge in just 5-9 minutes (the ferry is only very shortly in the port before leaving for the other country).

As you go on board you get the usual tax free shop but amusingly you can buy tax-free alcohol only while the ferry is the Danish waters. Halfway through the journey, a bell sounds -- and you are now allowed to buy tobacco, as you've entered Swedish waters.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HH_Ferry_route
> But then you point out that there is no viable micropayments platform. Doesn't seem like there's much to mention beyond "yup, still doesn't exist."

Sure there is: "Micropayments are fundamentally infeasible".

Which is to say, payments are trivial to do. There have been dozens and dozens of startups doing online payments in various schemes since the beginning of the internet. But the fraud problem is not solvable on that kind of scale. Batching payments such that you buy one "thing" for at least a few dollars gives some level of assurance that one human being looked at the transaction and that the seller gave enough thought to be sure it was worth selling as a unit.

That all falls apart when you get to "one article" scale. You want this to be a purchase that the user doesn't even thing about (because seriously if I have to stop and think whether I want to pay $0.13 to read an article the answer is "NO"). But without that promise of thought it becomes impossible to reasonably authenticate a transaction. Users will be absolutely flooded with fraud schemes tricking them into OKing these tiny things.

This is what killed ad-supported platforms too.
I believe he is right though. You are considering future probability chance, and are right, but he is considering past average. In this case his factual outcome trumps your potential forecast.
> ... gmail - because it's centralised, it can use ML to filter out spam much better than any other mailing services.

For me, GMail is worse than useless as a spam filter. I don't know if I have especially unusual email or what, but there's so much ends up in the spam bin I need to wade through it all anyway, so it costs me time.

At least, it did. I've given up on it.
I think maybe I am, but I have some tricks up my sleeve.
I like how this page's auto-hiding header keeps jumping around and rescrolling the page making it impossible to read the first two paragraphs.

How did the web get this bad?
Not to be that “just add blockchain” guy, but this would be a great usecase for permissionless cryptocurrency micropayments, e.x. Lightning Network. Create an open protocol, build it into browsers, let content sites ask you to pay $0.01 (or whatever) to view an article. Maybe you could set your browser to automatically pay for the first N articles or M dollars per site per day. Or maybe a site could offer an unlimited subscription option through the same system.
most often on education websites, teachers having their ~<shortname> page
Most likely you are not the target of this subscription. You will be just collateral damage.

Just like most people wouldn't pay 2000 a month for access to their terminal software.
Is SMTP and the decentralized nature of email not a real invention? There are a thousand ways to build something like finger, whether centralized/decentralized, what info is disclosed, to whom, privacy models, how it gets updated, what media is included, etc etc.

Given it could have been a variant Facebook, much like MySpace could have also been Friendster before it shows how there is a lot of real innovation in things that seem obvious in hindsight.

I’d argue there are many, many more “obvious” ways to port existing social conventions to the digital domain that haven’t yet been done.
It's not a perfect solution, but I usually use the X11 primary selection trick: highlight some text with my mouse, and use the middle button to paste it. Any X11 window that supports text selection should work with it, including terminal emulators.

The downside, of course, is that X11 selections aren't real clipboards: they disappear as soon as their origin window is destroyed. That means you have to keep the source window open while you do your pasting, which may clash with your workflow.
I used it, and I would disagree that it was "complex" to use. No more than non-transacted Win32 file APIs anyway.

We did a nice P/Invoke wrapper around native Win32 functions in C#, exposing FileStream and such, that the rest of the code could then easily consume.

I think the main complexity is that there are no "official" high-level wrappers the way there are for non-transacted APIs. But at the level of Win32, there is no significant difference.
In bash I use ctrl-X-E and paste into the default editor using the emulator's paste function (ctrl-shift-v in my current emulator). This works in bash ssh sessions too.
I think ellipticals are quite a bit pricier.
> If say, there was a 1 in 30 chance of a rocket exploding using the method described, but the escape capsule failed to save the astronauts 1 out of 10 times. Then the real risk of killing the astronauts is 1 in 300.

That's the same kind of mistake NASA made, just multiplying stuff like it was a high school textbook question.

What if the very things that make a rocket explode also make the escape capsule fail?
“It has many memories of accidents occurring during fueling that resulted in the loss of the spacecraft.”

Does it? I did a brief search and only found SpaceX’s explosion and an old Soviet ICBM accident where the engines ignited during fueling. I certainly may have missed something.
Proxy and cache articles using a standard set of credentials from a set list of origin IPs, most likely. The traffic would appear as that of an average reader.
I don't know about any software that is supported indefinitely. One day you need to upgrade, it's fair enough.
I am also the older brother to an autistic sibling. Thank you for writing this, I have the same thoughts and fury.

To be glib, I wish there was a specific category of disorder for those people who reflect the tale of the Princess and the Pea when it comes to their 'neurodifferences'.
Y combinator backed company developed world's first indestructible sheer tights
> We already saw an extreme example of misallocated resources in Peru. But even in a ``wealthy'' country one has to be concerned about this problem. Many educators in North America share the feeling of betrayal of the teacher who said,
They can give us the axe, but they can spend thousands on computers. We have to fire our music coordinator, we have to fire our music teachers, we have shitty libraries. (Lynn, a Canadian schoolteacher, quoted in [14, p. 41])

I’ve seen this happen in the relatively wealthy schools my kids are in. They spend many thousands on smartboards and iPads, and they’ve gotten rid of the “non-essential” arts and music teachers. Parents are personally funding some arts educators on a part time basis a couple of days a week. I think it’s an egregious misuse of funds, wasteful and ultimately damaging to the kids.

What’s worse, the tech is not being used effectively. The teachers don’t have enough training to incorporate the smartboards and iPads, and they don’t have the budget for tech training because they spent it on the iPads. Kids play games on them that they have access to at home, but they’re not being taught about the technology or being taught to use it to do things they can’t do on paper.

I don’t mind computers in the classroom, as long as the arts are funded and the teachers are paid enough. What I’d really love to see more of is using computers to integrate math and arts together... digital arts with an emphasis on both rigorous math and rigorous art. Give the mathy students some aesthetics training, and make sure the art students are capable with computation.
I'm inclined to agree with you. I just want to add something I heard said by a retired NFL player in an interview. He said that when he was on the field playing football, he "knew he was alive, on planet Earth."

I'm guessing he was talking about an immediate, all-consuming experience—a Zen kind of thing that he experienced, playing a physically tough and dangerous game at the world class level.

I cannot believe that that compares with what you describe. But I'm inclined to believe that there is some kind of continuum to which both experiences belong. Can you allow for the possibility that the football playing described by the athlete is at least a pale facsimile?
I'm certainly a big fan of solar power, but rooftop solar is a little silly. Rooftop solar would make sense if we had some shortage of land and couldn't just fill up empty fields with panels, but that's not the case. It's much cheaper for utility companies to buy up big plots of land than it is to try to figure out how to outfit odd shaped surfaces with panels.

California is really missing the forrest for the trees here. There's so much low hanging fruit (things that could kill two birds with one stone) that they're ignoring. If the state would focus on higher density living and public transportation over imposing regulations that will drive more people away and lower the standard of living for those who remain, then we would see a much bigger global impact on reducing climate change. Because of this, more people will decide to live in Texas instead of California, where they'll run their air conditioners 10 months out of the year in their huge, inefficient houses which draw power from coal plants.
I think the point was that some people seem to think "freedom of speech" also means "freedom of being criticized", as if they wouldn't have to account for their own actions.
Thank you for that I was wondering about it too. I'm pretty happy with Gogs as it is.
What a wonderful idea. Thanks for sharing.

I especially like the ability to tag items and then search on them. Having a feature to edit tags after the fact, or search on them by entering a tag name as opposed to clicking on an existing tag would be really neat.

Bug report: I got a 500 when trying to empty the trash of 2 items.
How well would that work for humans? 2000 ppm is well above the threshold when we start to find negative cognitive effects. And I imagine CO2 in buildings would be more like 3000-4000 ppm.

This is leaving aside sea level rise hurting infrastructure, crop failures due to shifting weather, and areas becoming regularly above 35 degrees wet bulb.
That is a true statement. Another true statement is that Earth's greenhouse gases are basically a trace compared with Venus's. Another true statement is that the current human causal rate of CO2 emissions will rapidly change our environment to one unsuitable for human life.
Doing it successfully, defined as a measurable outcome, requires that you have a pretty accurate assessment of both the landscape, your abilities and the path to achieve the goal - with some factor considered for deviation from the charted path.

I agree, but for longer term goals, an extremely large amount of luck involved. Sometimes the right opportunities and persons just line up. I often realize that I'd be in a completely different (and probably worse) place if my 22 and 26-year old self didn't encounter the right persons and opportunities.

My current career path was largely unplanned, but is better than I hoped for or planned when I was in my early to mid-20ies.
Autism skyrocketed, we had 1 in 59 kids in 2014 in the us.
https://www.cdc.gov/ncbddd/autism/data.html

I don't want to even think about the present.

Unfortunately autism cause research is governed by scientific dogma that prevents acknowledgement of the source of such rapid disastrous increase, this shows how scientific progress is controlled by corporations and government through funding and politics.

Just like the church controlled it in the middle ages.
Well for the interrupted() case the typical Android app never gets a close signal, it's just kill -9'd. So it's very plausible that simple no Google app ever noticed because thread.interrupt() is pretty unusual, and if nobody uses it nobody finds the edge cases.

The Android standard lib these days is OpenJDK-based, but bugs still happen there, too. Even the best of standard libs still have bugs.
You doubt a microkernel can approach Linux kernel efficiency, yet here a typical kernel task is delegated to user-space for efficiency under Linux ; an approach that is similar to how networking might be handled by a microkernel?

I agree that it'll be interesting to see how fuchsia turns out.
I don't know. I think a lot of people have decided they like things like the Adobe products subscription.

Instead of the several thousand dollars you would have had to pay for the various softwares in the lineup up front, you just pay $50 a month. Which is reasonable of you previously used more than just Photoshop and maybe upgraded every 3 to 4 years.

If the end result is a similar cost, I would much rather keep my capital in the business and make a monthly payment.
Ignoring the party that is keeping your server up etc, don't most ISPs block 80/443?
There's little functional difference between syntax and options in this case, as the options in systemd serve the same purpose as the syntax iin crontab.

I just don't want cron doing randomized delay and repeats. That should functionally be determined by the application.
>There is no local produce in winter

Depends on the country -- and region of the country. There are countries that sport different climates and micro-climates. And there is stuff that thrives during the winter as well. And if it's really needed, we've had greenhouses for ages.

But that's part of the proposition: don't eat out of season stuff, even if it means changing the diet in an annual cycle (which, e.g. tons of Italians has no problem doing -- even if it means no, of much fewer tomatoes in winter).
I thought this bit was interesting:

"As a scientist, what concerns me the most is not that we have passed yet another round-number threshold but what this continued rise actually means: that we are continuing full speed ahead with an unprecedented experiment with our planet, the only home we have," Katharine Hayhoe, a climate scientist at Texas Tech University, tweeted Thursday"

We really are going ahead full speed. Global emissions have been rising in recent years, not falling.
Actually, it works in software that many of us use every day. Once again, there's more nuance to making an argument than being able to point out a single absolute example. Why is this such popular rhetoric on HN? Especially in such a varied imprecise world of pricing structures?

I use various bits of successful software like Transmit and Alfred that let you update until the next major version in which you must pay again.
The launch escape system would have been able to safely get the crew clear of the rocket in the AMOS-6 incident if it had been a crewed fight.

(Based on the performance of the capsule during the pad abort test)
Space science is cool and useful, but is it so crucial to humanity's progress that we shouldn't be super extra careful with our astronaut's lives? Waiting an extra year or two or ten to learn about how fruit fly DNA mutates in space seems fine when the alternative is maybe killing astronauts with a decent probability.
No, I'm laughing at the thought of cron being impenetrable and complex.
Never lower than not eating them -- or not eating them out of season though. Or, in other words, with promoting self-sustenance.
Working hourly is the worst form of income for most people - you’re literally trading your self for money.

Working salary is a step up, if you set reasonable goals and keep your commitments in check. You can work 20-30 hours and make the same money as if you were working 40-60, as long as you have the skills to generate enough value in that time and negotiate a truly results-based position.

Working for yourself and contracting to others is like salaried with more flexibility. That can cut both ways - you can overcommit and work yourself to death for a pittance if you aren’t careful.

The real magic seems to happen when you’re no longer trading your skills and time for money. That’s typically through dividends of some sort. That could be stock dividends, patent licensing, franchising, a subscription app... whatever. I’ve not been able to make this happen for myself yet but I feel like I have a good understanding of how to do it when my kids are a bit older and I am willing to invest my time to make it happen.
What online comments? I was talking about the article. The mother thought swaddling "made no sense", and he himself said "no one knew about swaddling" at a dinner.
I'll say this: While reading this post what really blew me away is how configuration PostgreSQL is. You can set up a primary/replicas cluster where some workloads are strongly consistent and others are eventually consistent. And that setting is at the per transaction level. Nuts.
Which is why most companies do a mixed model. Pay an amount for a version, get one year of updates (or that specific version + it's updates), then pay to upgrade (and/or reup your year of support).
Sorry, these are terrible instructions. It would be good if someone with more experience could take another stab at this.
I like software subscriptions. It’s a way to ensure that the software developer is going to have a predictable revenue stream to continue to improve features and fix bugs in the software. That is valuable to me as a user.
I don't think that model will work, honestly. There's friction anytime you ask someone to spend anything, even if the price is de minimis.

Look what happens whenever a city adopts a $0.05 plastic bag tax. When Washington DC did it, plastic bag use dropped by 50% - 70%. I'd see people that just spent $30 bucks at the store with their arms overflowing with stuff rather than pay that extra nickel.

I'd expect prompting users to choose whether reading a story is worth $0.05 to them every time will cause them to read and engage significantly less.
No, I think it’s the other way around, you make a target safety number as the customer, and the engineers use a fault tree to try to reach it. So this number can’t come from a fault tree ( unless it’s a weird comparison like “we had 1/90 on our fault tree in our internal projects last time, we want private companies to reach 3 times better”)
Really nice blog post. Regarding the free page-check without login vs requiring login; I’m not so sure it’s as clear cut as put there. Signing up for a service with significant community backing is a lot less scary/annoying than signing up for something that no one ever heard of.
The Muse Is Hiring a PM for Data and Analytics
It is not about time spent on training, it is about progress. In Aikido, you practice bokken techniques from 100 years ago, as they were trained in old ryu schools. Kendo is modern competitive martial art, where many old techniques died because they are not efficient in actual fight.

If Aikido schools would adapt even basic but modern kendo footsteps and strikes, Aikido practicioners would have much better view on efficient sword fight.
A bit of a nitpick: the observed failure rate is quite a bit lower. Each launch involves at least two fuelings, since they do a static fire before every launch (which is when the accident occurred). Every booster also gets tested at their facility in Texas, and there have been a lot of scrubs after fueling, so the average number of fuelings per launch is probably 3 or so. That’s around 150 total fueling events for the Falcon 9, or around 100 if you only count the ones with densifier propellants, making the failure rate so far around 0.6-1%.
Yet you left your entire argument up to our imagination.

I explained why I find the description fitting. You could at least entertain us with why "future users pay for your upgrades" does not fit in the context of one-time-paid "perpetual license" software beyond disagreeing with the phrase I chose to name the predicament.
Yeah, approx. 3700 micromorts [0] is not to be sniffed at.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Micromort
3 reasons... nobody has time to put their ads on specific websites - it has to be automated to reach thousands of websites/communities at once. Second no advertiser trusts an individual website selling ads, unless there is tracking and reports and they know everything about the demographic of people who see the ads. Third - since advertisers are used to highly targeted ads and tracking... an individual website would basically have to rebuild all those tools in their personal system. That would be impossible without 3rd parties.
“Entitled” may not be the right word, but I agree with this.

There’s a huge difference between someone able to build what a business needs and someone who understands the business’s needs and can work hand-in-hand with them to explore their needs and optimize to that. It’s very much worth the difference in cost to the business.
Cultural dimensions.. describe national vs. organisational vs. personal traits
Why I'm leaving Open Source
The skills to sell something useless and something useful are the same.
Considering pork-barrel spending is a well-known problem with Congress (See: the F-35 program), I found it a cute way to concisely describe a problem.
Check out the Servless Stack guide. I used it to deploy my React app.

https://serverless-stack.com/chapters/deploy-the-frontend.ht...
It looks like you can get the same caliber of exercise bike as elliptical - about $700.

I wouldn't recommend that most people spend money on at home exercise equipment though. Most people don't use it unless they are already in the habit of going to the gym.
I seriously considered buying TSLA a few times over the past couple years. Every time I think and begin to regret that decision, Tesla ends up being in the news for the wrong reasons.

Not that it would necessarily doom their company, but I'm actually relieved I never invested in them. Too much of a rollercoaster IMO.