skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> I recall UnitedDomains ...

United Domains rely on manual things very for a large part of domain related service processes which are "uncommon" for a private or small domain owner.

> If somebody wants to found a noprofit to create a free registrar, I'm 100% in.

For the German market I remember the good old times with InternetX before they were bought by United Internet. Had some good talks with their tech support back then.

A "free" registrar is maybe not the right solution. The key is "care" for your domain. Take your example of "letsencrypt". They exist because they automate everything. They don't "care" if your certificate causes troubles, they'd just fix their API. With domain registrars the story is different: You need a good support to prevent fraud, you need a good contact to registries if something goes wrong. Key learning here is: In 99% of the cases with domains, everything is fine. But if you find yourself in the 1% where trouble occurs, you need immediate support of competent people. Not sure if this is a case for a "community" or "free" registrar. More a business case for MarkMonitor without the Brand Protection: Simply a domain registrar who cares.
That is true, but in my experience in small scale personal desktop and cloud computing, NixOS is in practice reasonably reproducible on the system level.

For me in terms of interface, the strength of the Nix ecosystem is declarative system, ops and service configs in the same language used for package and build specification. The technical strength is striving towards reproducibe builds by hashing the dependency tree to build an immutable store. Yes sometimes this means getting binaries but you can always pin the package version or even have multiple versions in tandem. The practical upshot of this immutability is system level rollbacks, which are generally reliable although there are ways to break it. Yes there is garbage collection.

Nixpkgs has is quite an achievement, and yes it has its warts but we are working hard to make it better. If we manage to shape up the data science I will try it out at work too. Im very curious how it might scale.
Ask HN: Are Ads on a Small Free Web-App Worth It?
Basically I have a small web-app I've run a few years and recently decided to finish up some overdue features and 'release it' nationally.

I am considering putting ads on it to generate some minor passive income; really though the ads are meant to drive people to the pro (ad-free) version etc.

Since I don't expect the ads to generate much is it even worth it?

And given that it's likely to not make much off ads (possible the 'pro' account would make an ok passive income), what are the easiest/simplest/best options to put ads on a small web-app? Rolling my own is another option.

Any experience anyone has had with ad networks for small web-apps would be greatly appreciated, thanks !
Ideally the guarding of valuable company (and incidentally customer) data.
Google domains for most well known extensions, GoDaddy or Gandi for others. Usually with these 3 I get the best price and services.
> sit down in a warm or hot room

While I agree with everything else, I'd have to vehemently disagree with this. Studies [1] have shown that warm temperatures severely diminish our performance on complex mental tasks.

As some examples [2]:

> Sales for scratch tickets, which require buyers to choose between many different options, fell by $594 with every 1° Fahrenheit increase in temperature. Sales for lotto tickets, which require fewer decisions on the part of the buyer, were not affected.

> participants were asked to proofread an article while they were in either a warm (77°) or a cool (67°) room. Participants in warm rooms performed significantly worse than those in cool rooms, failing to identify almost half of the spelling and grammatical errors (those in cool rooms, on the hand, only missed a quarter of the mistakes).

[1] https://www.bauer.uh.edu/vpatrick/docs/Influence%20of%20Warm...
[2] https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/warm-weather-make...
As a submitter of original content, it's a little different. From the article:

> Sudden dramatic 50% increase from 2016 — 2017

I've felt that. I write a bunch of tech articles on HTTPS, nginx, HAProxy, CSP, EV verification, Brotli, TLS errors, and other HN-worthy topics (https://certsimple.com/blog/). In 2015-2016 I'd continually get on the front page simply by writing about something useful regarding these topics in a relatively straightforward way (maybe with some Sketch diagrams and other useful graphics). These days, while I still get a bunch of traffic from Reddit and Google, HN frontpage doesn't really seem to happen for my content.
Freedom of Speech is not literally being able to say anything. Few people would agree that doxxing or harassment would fall under Freedom of Speech, for instance.
Much wow only 2.7 mins to load at 38.2MB transfer.
Feel sorry for whoever paying for bandwidth
What sort of Fortune x00 company doesn't use a corporate VPN?
Are you going to notice and reinspect every invisible OTA update?

It's a perfectly valid concern when you install a plugin. We just don't care because most people are trustworthy.

But for example there's a market for selling your browser addon to someone that wants to do this.
They got lucky, because if it were me and I left on mild terms I would be invoicing them $50k a year to renew their domain.
Do not rely on other people to resolve time-sensitive issues when you can easily avoid it.

In this particular case as soon as it's clear the domain hasn't renewed despite being billed then manually renew it using the usual user interface, pay the extra $10 and then contact support after to get one of the charges refunded now the time-sensitivity is gone.

The stress alone isn't worth being out of pocket $10 let alone only for a week or two.
Yep.

"“Sunkenness” refers to the fact that intangible assets tend to have little or no market value, unlike, say, land or a factory.

They have value as part of their owner’s business, but not to anybody else.

This means that investment in intangible assets is risky."

https://www.ft.com/content/a01e7262-d35a-11e7-a303-9060cb1e5...
A large part, I believe, is the ease of moving a git repository around. Back in the day, the central repository was a choice that stuck you to it for a long time. You literally had to setup the server, in many cases. Git, though? You just install the client and you can get started on a repository in your current directory that can easily transition to a remote hosted one.

So, in a way, it is not unlike pathogen spread. Low barrier to get started combined with basically frictionless ability to spread out. Even the hiccups people used to have only slowed individual level adoption. (Complaints about the UI and such.) The spread of currently successful repositories was not really slowed by those events.

I'd be highly interested in if anyone has something like this modeled.

I'd also appreciate challenges to my point. Mercurial, I believe, should have had similar strength in spreading. It just didn't have the bootstrapped successful project like git. (The kernel, is what I'm thinking of.)
I've always heard good things about gandi
Look at it this way: if their technology cannot separate them from their competition, they effectively are a marketing/sales driven company.

I’m not saying that should spend time and resources on a font now, but I’m also not saying they shouldn’t.

A font can help their branding, and having a strong brand can help keeping their margins high. Typography works for Coca-Cola, for example.
>> Salesforce relied on things this 'privacy law' would make illegal in order to get where they are today. This law would prevent other companies from following in their footsteps.

> Are those things we want other companies to be doing, though?

Apparently if someone got successful doing something bad once, we're supposed to be OK with people doing that bad thing forever, lest we risk some "regulatory capture" boogeyman.

The solution to regulatory capture is an actual solution to regulatory capture, not a general aversion to regulation.
Thanks, sounds good, will check those out.
It's nice until you need to do any remote collaboration with whiteboarding there's not really a good way to allow someone on the phone to interact with people in the room. Even with a camera the remote person has to describe anything they want to add to the whitebaord diagram. I think that's where there's no real substitute for being there in person at the moment in most offices because digital whiteboards have never really caught on.
Seattle Unanimously Passes an 'Amazon Tax' to Fund Affordable Housing
to go a step further, adding out of band contact info is a big deal.

Forward mycompanyname@gmail.com to info@mycompanyname.com and give it out in the emergency support info for support contracts Add it to your status page as needed, (which should be running on someone else's service or mycompanynamestaus.com).

Customers that really need your service, like the ones who pay, will check the status page and can update the endpoint as needed.

Make sure your sip lines don't point to mycompanyname.com.

If you publish a client side app, use 2 domain names as endpoints, mycompanyname.com and mycompanyname.io. Have the app or service check for and fail over if one doesn't work.

Make sure paging and technician notification is handled by a system that won't be affected by this. (nothing more amazing then getting 200 pages AFTER you've spent 2 days recovering a total failure of a system. You just want to go to sleep but you have to wait for the email queue to drain since you can't turn your pager off.)

Either way, use 2 domain names, and set them to expire at 6 MO intervals. Buy the domain for 2 years (or more) and renew every year so you always have 1-2 year lead time to sort out issues.

The list above would probably cost about $200/year and a few extra hours but it keeps you from getting backed into a corner. Everything else in our infrastructures has fail overs, and limited blast radius for failures.

We tend to us domain registration as a single point of failure and one one even things about it.
> Note IceCat is not very well maintained.

Its maintainer is working on upgrading to the latest ESR now. If anyone is interested in helping maintain IceCat, please e-mail maintainers@gnu.org.
I've noticed that at weekends articles require fewer points to hang around for longer on the homepage as well. I should probably stop reading HN on weekends really because the clear reason for this is that the people who aren't reading (and voting things up) have a life.
Sometimes it's just worth getting everybody on board rather than having the perfect tool.

Maybe in 50 years there will only be one package format for applications across the major operating systems. One can dream.
facebook doesnt sell data. facebook sells attention and billboard space. you pay facebook, facebook runs your ad on their platform, and gives you some paramaters for which people are targeted. the data never leaves facebooks black box.
afaik, only pixz does this; they store the index in xz.
Question is why they are ripping out fully working settings dialogs then, before the replacement ones are in.

Never mind the number of "power user" tweaks that are locked behind arbitrary "professional" licensing or plain inaccessible outside of registry diving.
what's the traffic and the avalable budget to hire a vendor that would be a Ultra-simple version of cloudflare: i.e. a caching proxy with a let's encrypt cert for https fronting your ghost blog?
You need to reread my post. Those two comments are perfectly in line.

My point is that GDPR sucks (as does DMCA, etc). Extra-territorial laws have wide ranging unintended consequences, and hence should be avoided. That's why we have treaties.
Stock photos.
Last year when I was deciding which laptop to buy for personal use I ruled out the XPS15 (partially) on coil whine (I'm 37 but thanks to never going to concerts and rarely listening to music beyond half volume I still have decent high frequency hearing).

In the end I went with a Thinkpad and having seen the issues people I know have had with the XPS15 I'm pretty glad I did.
For those who want the short version: Never EVER use domain.com as your domain registrar. Yikes!

i really feel bad for those guys at uptimechecker.io
Salesforce is a company that operates in Europe. They already have to comply with GDPR (and have already spent tons of dev time on scrambling to comply). They're ready for GDPR, and so they're probably betting they're ready for whatever (likely weaker) US law inspired by GDPR that would come along. Any new competitors, on the other hand (or any non-multinational competitors) would have to scramble and pay heavy costs to "catch up".

It's using the legal system as a tool for their competitive advantage -- force everyone to do the thing you're already doing.
Two questions/thoughts. First is if this is just confirmation bias on your point.

Second is if this is not so much that there is a smaller group that are pushing back, but a larger group that is excited. (That make sense?)
In Riter (https://riter.co/) we use "clean" and "dirty" hours for time tracking. You can read about them here: https://riter.co/docs/time-tracking#estimation-types.

If briefly, developers estimate tasks in clean hours (or minutes), that's approximate time they need to implement this particular job (without taking into account time required for solving technical problems, meetings, reading manuals and so on). As a rule, developers can estimate clean hours rather accurately. But not dirty hours – they are less predictable for most of us.

When working on tasks, developers specify clean and dirty hours spent on them. Based on different estimates, we can calculate the coefficients of performance and accuracy of all developers and more accurately estimate the deadlines in the future. We plan to use AI later to obtain more accurate deadlines on the basis of these coefficients and collected statistics.

As far as I remember, we have described why we don't support points estimation here: https://riter.co/blog/time-estimation-missteps.
Coal miners get black lung from coal dust. It is possible that if the port is very stupid about their design they could put so much coal dust into the air that it would affect the community.

Note that I said possible. Ports normally would not do the type of things that would cause this problem even in the complete absence of legal and moral controls.
POKE 65495, 0

:-)
Banning removable media is 100% the right direction (of course there needs to be exceptions for DSLRs and install media and whatnot, duh)

The amount of idiocy I've seen with storing sensitive and work intensive documents in USB sticks is horrible.
I posted this article that answers this question and provides some more background info...

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17085208

https://www.marketwatch.com/story/the-sec-created-a-mock-ico...
It's not selfish at all, however anyone who isn't a complete idiot will realize that it's a dodge to answering the question of whether you liked the food. You risk an uncomfortable exchange and negative social consequences with a move like this. It's much easier to just lie and tell granny that her crappy food was good and move on to another topic. And really, saying "it was good" isn't a complete lie: it could have been worse, much worse (assuming the food didn't give you food poisoning or kill you outright), and "good" is a relative term.
Serverless and lambda: what to do when you run out of disk space
I'd like to take this moment to remind everyone of the tale of HBGary[0]. When your security company is beholden only to earning more money, it isn't a security company

[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HBGary#WikiLeaks,_Bank_of_Amer...
A zip file is a concatenation of gzipped files. A .tar.gz is a gzip stream of concatenated files. Anything that could do random access into the contents of a zip file entry could do similar things with a tarball.
That's the point. Domains causes no problems. Only in some weird scenarios, things can become troublesome. In those cases you need a support. In others you don't.

If you have a domain registrar with a good support, account the premium you pay as such: a premium for an insurance when things go bad.
s/Marc Benioff/Donald Trump/ and you'd see that this is not a defense or an indicator of any sort of good intent, it's just an unrelated bit of trivia.
speaking of true --help, did you know that GNU true can exit non-zero? the exact way is left as an exercise to the reader :)

(if you're actually trying it at home, remember that "true" is virtually always a builtin. AFAIK there is no legitimate way to have shell builtin true return non-zero. (overwriting the command doesn't count :P))
Pretty much. Seated was another gravy train. You got a $15 Amazon or Uber gift card just for going to restaurant with a second person. There were no minimums. you just had to show up and had to order food. There was a 2-3 month period where my girlfriend and I were getting good meals for a net $15-$20 total. It was awesome, but I knew it wouldn't last. Then they put in restrictions - to qualify for the $15, you needed at least 4 people or spend $X. It's no longer even a "good" deal, so now I don't use it anymore.
I am genuinely curious, how much ops is hand written in just plain old bash or simple scripts?
Why did the fertility rate stop falling so abruptly in 1975?
'Everyone' in a classroom meaning 'everyone in the class' is reasonable.

'marketing is evil' meaning 'tracking based retargeting is evil' is not.
Junior high? No wonder you didn't have problems getting a break, you'd been working towards it since childhood.

The fact that you get plenty of offers probably means you're not in the situation where someone would consider lying to get a job.

Edit: Not trying to criticize you, I'm just trying to point out why you might be an exceptional candidate. But I guess your original point was just that "not everyone" lies, so I suppose I'm just saying that I agree with what you're saying. It's true that not literally everyone lies, but many many people exaggerate, even if they don't tell outright lies.
Happy name customer with .io domains that roll over properly. I've used most of the big guys as well (including The Network Solutions).
I'm not sure the domain registrar is completely at fault here. If your website going down will "kill your business" then it's a good idea to use a reputable one and not the cheapest you can find.

And looking at domain.com just now, they don't seem to offer .io domains, so I wonder how he even got the domain there?
I'm as excited about the achievements of the Islamic Golden Age as the next guy. It certainly helped lay the foundation for the scientific method, just as the achievements of Classical Greeks did. It's just that it was over before the scientific revolution started.
If someone else on my train is going somewhere different than I am, I'll have to wait. Because trains don't go up my driveway.

I can imagine a system where I drive to a highway, let autopilot engage or I drive on to a "track" of some sort and then at my exit, I disengage from the track and continue on my way.
Britain had no competition at the time. Slavery cannot compete with free labor.

> but it is still recovering from

I.e. slavery did not benefit the Indian economy, nor the Kenyan economy, etc. Neither industrialized.

The US economy did industrialize (except for the slave states), and did not rely on slave labor from other countries, either, and it grew to economic dominance.

I know there's a theory that the northern economy depended on the southern slave economy, but when it was cut off from the southern economy in 1860, it prospered while the slave economy crashed.
Senate approves measure to save net neutrality
Heh, I've recognized that feeling too but I feel HN is still one of the most reasonable foras I know of.
This is one of the best technology books I've ever read. I spent a few years diving into big data architecture. I thought I had a reasonably good handle on it, then I read this book. So many insights.
Regardless of cost or how great the customer service, having all your eggs in one basket is not a good idea.
Downloaded the whitepaper hoping it would involve oranges. It didn't - still awesome!
Good Eggs raises $50M from Benchmark and others
Stop being deliberately dense. The act of "moving ions" has huge externalities, mainly in the form of pollution, and that is obviously the morality that is being referred to here.

Your comment is like saying you're baffled that shooting someone is immoral because it's just "moving metal around".
One of my coworkers is in that photo. Is that yesterday?
The desktop belongs to Electron
I was too lazy to look up what these sequences represented, but I did a quick test with the Euro symbol example from Wikipedia, and it did indeed reject the overlong sequence:

#include <stdbool.h>
#include <string.h>
#include <stdio.h>
#include "simdutf8check.h"

int
main(int argc, char *argv[])
{
const char euro[] = "\xe2\x82\xac";
const char eurolong[] = "\xf0\x82\x82\xac";

bool valid = validate_utf8_fast(euro, sizeof euro);
printf("validate_utf8_fast(euro): %d\n", valid);

valid = validate_utf8_fast(eurolong, sizeof eurolong);
printf("validate_utf8_fast(eurolong): %d\n", valid);

return 0;
}
Astronomers find fastest-growing black hole known in space
The point is newcomers have a disadvantage against any type of regulation they need to comply to - simply because they often have less funding/resources than a giant company. This happens in practice all the time.
Thanks everyone. You've convinced me that discourse can work :-)
not full circle enough https://www.destroyallsoftware.com/talks/the-birth-and-death...
DeepMind's AI taught itself to navigate like a mammal
Senate votes to reinstate net neutrality
What about a state senator or representative? Could your state start enacting a privacy framework, that would apply to businesses that wanted to do business in your state? Sort of like California emissions for cars.
Still timing out at 1:05 PM PDT. I guess they weren't ready for the HN front page treatment...
> its a massively distributed general AI

You've just described a centralized system.

Centralization can happen at different layers - not all technical. The ultimate centralization is ownership, as defined legally.
> Under the Howey Test, a transaction is an investment contract if:

> 1. It is an investment of money

> 2. There is an expectation of profits from the investment

> 3. The investment of money is in a common enterprise

> 4. Any profit comes from the efforts of a promoter or third party

I don't know if the crypto-currency community have a widely accepted view of how this applies to specific currencies, but I feel that "store of value" / HODL coins are dangerously close to failing the Howey Test and thus not being accurately classed as currencies.
Securus is in the news today [1], an excellent example of how irrelevant it is that the private sector vs. the government is performing the surveillance. It's just information, information knows no boundaries.

But those largely cosmetic boundaries certainly play a large role in public perception and acceptance of living in a surveillance state.

[1] https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/gykgv9/securus-ph...
We had this same argument about certificate expiration on a code signing project I worked on.

I maintained that having to remember to renew a cert every September was more likely to stick with someone than 18 months or two years. It also keeps your blacklist smaller because dead ones age off faster.

I don’t recall how it ended up but we added automated reminders every 30 days starting three months before expiry.
> exactly

Which day, specifically?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Day_length_fluctuations