skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This year I happen to work for a client that licenses all of their brand fonts. Licensed and pay-per-use fonts have easily and quickly worked their way up to the top 5 most agitating things to work with.

- They track use by embedding a link to the third party font provider, which does a 302 redirect to a file on your server that requires revalidation every load. So while you host the actual file delivered to the client, you can't optimize away the time added by that needless redirect on every single pageload[1].

- On some clients, invalidating that original link will also invalidate the cache for the destination of the 302 redirect, so the user is forced to truly redownload the font each pageload.

- Automated bot traffic, whether benign, malicious, search engines, or anything at all, becomes very expensive. A flood of scrapers hitting your site shifts from a minor nuisance to a very big deal. Something that your infrastructure can absorb without a hiccup can easily rack up hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of font usage costs. You can put security measures in place to prevent some of this, but at the risk of adding friction to legitimate traffic. And don't wan't to stop legitimate bots like social media crawlers and search engines. So you can either leave the risk open ended or "fail open" where, rather than blocking a visit, you selectively decide when to include the custom font and when not to. Cloudflare's SSE[2] comes in handy for this, combined with dynamic inclusion in the server side code to exclude it from being served to legitimate bots like Googlebot which don't need the custom font. I've also experimented recently with using Cloudflare Workers for handling that process and abstracting it completely from the original site. While Cloudflare Workers also have variable pricing based on usage, it's over an order of magnitude cheaper than the usage-based pricing of the font itself, and well worth the cost.

- Maintaining that added complexity, purely to cap the risk of the pay-per-view pricing model of the font, adds a needless amount of friction to the website management and development process.

[1] https://www.smugmug.com/ is a site that shows this workflow. They load a font file from cloud.typography.com which 302 redirects to the real font file hosted on Smugmug's CDN. While the response is usually fairly quick, I've seen inconsistent response times from the third party providers. And the fact that in some scenarios the must-revalidate flag from the 302 response causes the cache setting from the destination font file to be ignored as well, making it get downloaded every single pageview.

[2] https://support.cloudflare.com/hc/en-us/articles/200170036-W...
Thanks for caring. I was always weary of biocides but after reading Silent Spring about five or six years ago, I am regularly confronted with the appalling widespread use of poison. Between the aisles of enough poison to exterminate a wilderness in every hardware store, ludicrous plans to manage invasive species and pests, and an army of shills perusing social media, your comment was a brief moment of respite in an ongoing personal crises. You'd think the thought, "well if it's poisonous for one organism it's probably poision to others." Would occur to more people...

Meanwhile us weirdos will be appreciating our beautiful yards that we don't need to maintain, overgrown with flowers and bustling with life.
Maybe he's fishing for an offer on e.ht?
The nature and beauty of language is that it changes. There is nothing static about it. The problem with chronocentric thinking is that you expect things to remain the same forever. Language changes, that's just how it is.
55, and I plan to see the start of the third act (which is arguably, umm, now), but I'm confident I won't get to see the credits roll. For the sake of everyone else, OMG I hope I don't, at least.
It might be interesting to hear the answer Eric Schmidt himself gave to the question: "Is Google willing to accept internet censorship to enter China?" here: https://youtu.be/3tNpYpcU5s4?t=4296.

TL;DR: He said no.
Try to do that at Oracle or IBM. This is the culture fostered by Google executives, so they shouldn't be surprised if employees are publicly outspoken about their business decision. Is it a good or bad thing? If the higher ups are OK with employees publicly voicing their opinion then I don't see a problem. Management doesn't seem to be fighting this and Google does seem to work that way. The only issue I'd see is if a public petition was created and employee were coerced into signing it by their fellow workers under threat of being put "on the list".
Agitating would be step 1. If enough employees speak up, perhaps the plans get changed or the practice stops.

Leaving is step 2. If the employer continues to make choices that don't align with the employee's morals, the employee should leave.

For employees at a company like Google, both are important. Google is massive and impacts many people across the globe. And the employees are extremely employable - they could leave and go elsewhere with little personal sacrifice.
Given how trash of a search engine Baidu is, Google would likely achieve market share dominance in China within a couple years - should they move forward with Dragonfly. Complying with demands of the Chinese gov't is the only way they can penetrate the Chinese market.

Search engine advertising constitutes close to 85% of Google's revenue. And unlike Project Maven, which was ended due to internal resistance from employees, doing business with the second largest economy in the world isn't an expendable venture.

Curious to see how they move forward. My guess is they will: human outrage never really lasts long, especially when their livelihoods are far from in jeopardy.
The typical ramp up time for a new Google engineer is roughly 3-6 months. So it's more like replace them within 3mo at a generous estimate. Also a few of those were staff You can replace those in 2-3yrs maybe.

Does Google care about this cost? Hard to say from the outside. But for every signature on this you can bet there are many more inside being very vocal. One part of Google's culture is that it encouraged feedback from the engineers and the engineers take advantage of that freedom pretty frequently.
what the hell, how is it legal for anybody to tell you what to do with your land?
Google is already censoring specific searches all over the world, in the EU for example, the right to be forgotten and many "hate speech" laws already force google to censor many sites that are filtered out.
Seriously, how long has he been online as an "ethical hacker"? For everyone who has the experience of looking for some texts should know that there are millions of this type of websites out there, the spam farms. Many of these sites don't even have the files (a common tactic is putting the links to your spamsite in a PDF, and name the PDF as some other documents people are looking for but you don't actually have, to disguise your spam as a file, polluting the search result for everyone, bastard!), and are just making the visitors to click ads, or scamming people to enter personal information, to pay for another related service or a premium account, and they can probably make more money. And some other websites are even distributing malicious software.

Meanwhile this website is actually an "honest" one that works for the visitors as advertised! I think it would be great injustice by selectively just enforcing the copyright laws by seizing this individual websites and its income. After all, 30% of the websites on the entire Internet are like this. I don't think the blog post really have a point.
> Google’s effort to create a censored search engine for the Chinese market that enables state surveillance.

You mean Google's effort to break into a market that it's currently frozen out of.
(Spoken as if to a Google employee) — Someone will build them a search engine. In fact several someones have already. Your company doesn’t have to do it, and you don’t have to work for them if they do.
It also sounds like a strong negotiating position, should they want to change terms.
Why would you start with ultimatums and demands? I think it's better to start soft and get a discussion going. Maybe these people are smart enough to realize that they don't know everything.
Also, I tried to use my bluetooth headphones with my Macbook air, even knowing the steps, and it said I had to upgrade the OS to use them (I think the OS was like a year old at the time, and the computer four years old -- El Capitan, I think?)

Seriously? Both OSes knew the version of the bluetooth protocol they needed to use to communicate, and it still doesn't work? Never had that problem with a headphone jack.
Seconded.

I do not use a smartphone (my last one broke and the RMA process was too much trouble on top of moving and doing my job, and now I'm used to not having it), and while it seems that some people assume you have one, you can generally get by without one just fine.

Now, I will say: given that Microsoft was charged for bundling IE with Windows in a highly integrated way which competing browsers could not replicate; it seems that some case can be made. Granted, I'd sooner make the case that Paypal is enforcing the anti-competitive desires of their neighbours against those neighbours' competitors.
And that’s a good thing. The average user is more secure and the advanced user can jump through a few hoops.
Apple launches app development program to support women entrepreneurs
I get misgendered all the time due to the fact my first name is used almost exclusively for girls in the USA. It does not bother me very much.

I know this is annecdotal, but you did ask.

Edit:

In case, one is curious or unbelieving. Consider that my name is Nikita.
What is it that you think I don't understand?

I think they all agree that they'd like other people to change as an acknowledgement of their power.

I also think that they can't both use the same justification to argue for opposite changes. What did I miss?
"They" is commonly used as a singular third-person gender-neutral pronoun in English — so much so that it's often unconscious. I glanced through your comments; you used it yourself just yesterday [1]:

> Anecdote time: a friend from one of the nation's major universities was involved in a road authority funded study to evaluate the safety impact of newly installed speed cameras at several intersections. [...] They found there was none.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18532386

Edit: after I replied, you edited your comment to add the caveat "except sometimes in 3rd person". "They" is always a third-person pronoun, and there are no criteria that would make it acceptable only in a subset of situations.

Edit 2: now the caveat is gone. Can you just reply to me rather than changing what I'm replying to retroactively?
Documentation as a key to the strong tech community
Wow just had a facepalm moment realising what you said is spot on. To make matters worse small-engined tools that pollute the environment are used weekly to keep the yard nice... what a waste
well, the company doesn't have to do it, I agree. the discussion is, if the company were to do it, would it be a bad thing for the company to do, conditional on professed company values? I don't think so.
Wondering if the way to go is in Incognito mode from a different IP. But then the moment I authenticate with Amazon for example, my profile (and associated data points [All IPs used, cookies, etc.]) could be used to target advertisement.
A future AI will fix this by removing both men and women from the equation.
Not mentioned in the article, and almost certainly not known to NATO authorities at the time, but Able Archer 83 came a few weeks after the "1983 Soviet nuclear false alarm incident"[0]. See also "Stanislav Petrov, a Soviet officer who averted nuclear war, has died"[1].

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1983_Soviet_nuclear_false_alar...

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15273228
I think it is generally better to state your complaints to management first rather than leaving quietly. Give management a chance to fix whatever issue you have or to come up with an alternative. You can always leave as a last resort.
"I see where you’re going, but can’t this criticism be applied to any factual journalism?"

Selection of what facts to present is intrinsically political. (Related, I can't find it in myself to get too upset about "filter bubbles", because you can't simply absorb "all data", and consequently, you are always going to be in a filter bubble merely due to that fact. You can question the nature of your current bubble, but you can't "escape" the way some people seem to think they can.)

The specific case of prompting you to feel an in-group reaction is not always a primary goal, though anyone would be excused for thinking otherwise if they consume too much mass media or explicitly political media. Of course if you try hard enough you can always pattern match to a given story somehow, but it's certainly sometimes a more explicit goal than other times. As an example, a straight-up insult targeted at a group may prompt in-group feelings, but not necessarily any "secret knowledge" feelings.

"And isn’t it therefore vacuous?"

In the strictly logical Aristotelian sense of "statement is true or false and nothing in between", yes, all statements are political, and the statement is vacuous since it fails to distinguish between cases. In a logical system with degrees of truth, some statements are definitely more political than others ("Vote $PARTY" vs. "Wheat is a staple crop of humanity" vs. "Vote $PARTY or you are despicable human being unworthy of life"), even if you never really reach true zero. In the human sense of "things that are vacuously true but you still need to keep in mind even so", it's something to keep in mind. There's a surprising number of statements that are obviously or vacuously true, yet we still need near-constant reminding of or we just somehow forget them.
> a war which no one wanted

History would like a word with you: https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/world-history/first...
They also do not give you any easy to understand centralized view of where you're spending money.

I spent a week trying to figure out why AWS kept charging me a $1.36 every month. Turns out I had a reserved instance that I forgot about. However damned if any of their "cost explorer" can help you at all.

The only way to deal with it is to open the EC2 console and then switch to each zone one by one until you find one that has any running or reserved instances.

The AWS console is a joke, I have no idea why its so popular.
So if Android would be similar to iOS, no side loading, and we have only 2 bad choices each with 50% market share we are still in a shit situation but no monopoly.

What we need is laws for ownership of the hardware, I should be able to ask Apple or Sony to unlock my hardware because it is mine, the warranty is debatable but ownership should not be debatable.
First thing they will do is try to take the dialog "indoors" and it being Google that means some internal tool
Admittedly, npm can't control the "semantic" in semver as that will likely always be a human judgment call, but npm has a lot of general control in package versioning. Their semver recommendation [1] is pretty strong in their docs, and embedded in the default version range specifiers ^ (a previous default) implies semver major, and ~ (the current default) implies semver major.minor.

Other small ways that npm controls versioning is that it does not allow you to publish the same version number for a package [2], and `npm version` [3] is often the most common tool for incrementing version numbers, which itself provides a number of semver-focused shortcuts.

So yes, it's certainly a common expectation in npm that packages follow semver, largely due directly to npm's documentation and tools support.

> If you are operating from the premise that the maintainer is potentially compromised, why would you trust them to stick to the semantic versioning spec?

The suggestion was that in the current case the maintainer changed with no warning. One warning system that npm provides is semver major breaking changes. npm does have enough version control (for instance, the part not allowing previously submitted version numbers to be reused) that they could theoretically force all new versions submitted after a maintainer change to jump a semver major version. That would at least send a signal to the large number of developers that don't pay attention to the changelogs of minor and patch versions (and may naturally have a ^ or ~ scope in their package.json) to at least check the changelog for breaking changes. That's possibly the easiest "sufficient" fix for this problem of an otherwise unannounced maintainer change.

[1] https://docs.npmjs.com/about-semantic-versioning

[2] https://docs.npmjs.com/cli/publish.html

[3] https://docs.npmjs.com/cli/version
Radiation can affect the electronics themselves (by corrupting data, or by slow physical degradation of the physical hardware) but other than that, I don't think it has any particularly noticeable effect on communications.

The "radiation" from a reactor core mostly consists of highly energetic particles and gamma rays. It's not going to directly interfere with anything in the radio spectrum, or induce significant voltages on cables.
Your container = your environment.

When your container is not running (say, 99% of time), other customers' containers are running. No need to ever boot the kernel, etc.

One might say that an unikernel has advantages over it. But it also has a higher barrier to entry.
Prior to becoming a software engineer, I worked in various industries, including restaurants (server), hospitals (data entry), and landscaping.

It may be true that in some companies, engineers are treated as cogs, but this line of work is _heaven_ compared to those other industries.
I don't understand why this domain is "prized". Is it because it is a single letter?
I'm curious about that definition of lawn, does it only apply to residence property or commercial spaces, athletic pitches, &c?
Maybe google is fine not dominating search and ads market. Maybe having a foothold is enough for them?
How to Make Your Startup More Agile
Depends - if it's a non sensical, hard to pronounce 2 word domain, then it might be worth only a few hundred bucks.
Denied by WikiLeaks:

"Remember this day when the Guardian permitted a serial fabricator to totally destroy the paper's reputation. @WikiLeaks is willing to bet the Guardian a million dollars and its editor's head that Manafort never met Assange."

https://twitter.com/wikileaks/status/1067430101548027906

In response to Glenn Greenwald, who asked:

"Did the Guardian seek comment from WikiLeaks or Assange before publishing its story? The article says it sought comment from Manafort's lawyer but not from WikiLeaks or Assange."

WikiLeaks write:

'The "Guardian"'s Luke Harding wrote to former lawyer Melinda Taylor just hours before publication. WikiLeaks then tweeted Harding's email publicly, outing the "Guardian"'s fake news disaster prior to publication. The "Guardian" didn't include the denial and ran regardless.'

https://twitter.com/wikileaks/status/1067440565762048000
This attitude puzzles me a little, especially on Hacker News where there is a good-sized contingent of libertarian free-market types. Domains are an asset with value. What's wrong with buying them and then selling them for as much as you can. How does it differ from the sale of any other item or piece of information with value?
I wonder if these things go in both directions though. Google becomes beholden to the Chinese government on threat of being kicked out of the country. Maybe in a few years Google is making a bunch of money in China, and then the govt asks them to censor search results in the western world too.

Also, as China requires more surveillance infrastructure to be built for Chinese google, that can bleed over to western google. Let's say Google starts to enhance China's social credit score system with users search behavior. It's easier for western governments to point to these capabilities on China's Google and request for them to be instantiated in their own countries.
> my only regret is that I won't live long enough to see the end of the movie.

Wow, that's a new perspective! Never looked at it this way. I've been pretty depressed about the whole climate situation. This attitude is a good way to cheer yourself up.
The USA has been content growing the economy at any cost, and this type of protection simply had no money behind it and would have easily gotten massive political blowback.
All the more reason to take a stand right now.
>which are explicitly copyright-free in every major jurisdiction //

Not sure what classes as major jurisdictions for you but I thought that lack of protection for typefaces was a peculiarity of USA-ian copyright?

Certainly it appears in the UK that there is typeface protection [CDPA S.55 limits it to <26 years though] and that you can't trace to work around it?
And speaking of latency, technology has broken in another respect here: rhythm games. If I play Dance Dance Revolution from a PS2 on a flatscreen, they add so much lag that the visuals are unusable, even in video game mode. Others have told me they have the same problem even on games for newer consoles intended to played on such TVs.

So I end up needing to find a CRT to play them.

I also saw this on the Nintendo Wii emulations of SNES games on new flatscreens.
I’m not saying our current system isn’t capable, more that it might not be best suited to describe our physical existence—like how base 16 allows you to visualize the underlying bits better than base 10. Is there any physical law that demands negative numbers? I think not. We just like them.
Sounds reasonable. In Amsterdam, if a house has been empty for over a year, it's legal to squat it.

(Note that in that case the squatter is the one making actual use of it, whereas a "domain name squatter" is more like a real estate speculator who buys a house and keeps it empty hoping to sell it at a profit.)
Is popular open-source Storybook project being commercially hijacked?
At a size of Google, the company has to be mostly constructed out of "cogs", to be resilient. If Google couldn't handle losing ~40 (as of right now) employees, that would be something seriously strange for one of the most valuable companies on the planet.
China Might Make CRISPR Babies a Reality
> Choke ourselves with CO2?
If you look at the units of the Keeling Curvy [1] you will notice that we are around 410 ppm of CO2. The PEL is 5000 ppm [2], so no, we won't choke soon especially because plants grow faster[3] with more CO2 so there is a negative feedback loop (to some extend).

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keeling_Curve

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_dioxide

[3] https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/ask-the-experts-d...
Come to think of it, that's exactly what it could do by refusing to do business with them. If China is left out in the cold for long enough they may move a little.

That said, they need to be rewarded for moving or a boycott wouldn't help anything.
Google releases Web.dev, a tool to quickly measure website performance
It's only condescending in a nationalist sense. I look at my own government and how well it chooses what is best for me, and I have to ask, who is the Chinese government to decide what is best for the Chinese people?
Business don't decide that kind of things, consumers do.

If there were clear intention from the majority of Western people to stop using every Google product the same second Google launch the censored search service in China, then Google would never do it.

Western people don't really care much? Well, they should blame themselves then, not Google.