skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> The '30% of rural Americans still not on broadband' point is, understatedly, one of the most important points of the article by far.

I didn't care for the metric. How many rural Americans are there? Is it 1% of the population? 50%?

According to the 2010 census, roughly 20% of people in the US are classified as rural. So that means 6% of all Americans are not on broadband. That metric would be a lot more useful to most people.
Well, the page really loads in three requests, minus the images. It lazy-loads the images and player afterward (and drops them into the page without reflowing). It looks like the the images come in document order, too, so the visible part of the page is fully ready to view, images, included, before all the images load.

Something is a little screwy with the page though -- the main HTML page, which is 27K, takes two seconds. Some infrastructure somewhere could be running/configured better.
Here the Woods Hole oceanographers talk about it without the couch analogy:

https://www.whoi.edu/news-release/why-is-sea-level-rising-hi...
Thank you! For all the data collection of Facebook, it doesn’t even come close to the non-agreed upon infringement into my personal life of the credit bureaus, who, in turn, seem to have limitless ability to resell whatever they might know about me to their hearts content...or, you know, just lose it to even more nefarious agents
Do you think think that taxes are a primary source of stress for most Americans? Remember, the US is now passed the threshold where 51% of people get more back from the government than they pay in taxes. For around half of Americans, they have an easier month when their taxes filings are processed.

The way that lowering taxes might help is in ending the massive subsidies the government hands out to various businesses to try and bolster this negative feedback cycle. While I am a strong proponent of a social contract and socialized health care, they are potentially enabling poor working conditions by having the populace pay for the care required as a result of those conditions.
Not Negotiating Your Salary Could Cost You $800,000
Makes me think of Dawkins' demonstration of eye evolution, where he shows the usefulness of even simple photo-receptor designs:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nwew5gHoh3E
Can you really sue Fortnite for 'stealing' your dance moves?
There are a lot of crimes that have no direct victim or 'offender' at all - drugs, prostitution, etc. And these crimes are actively prosecuted. I'd fully agree with you in cases like this that the enforcement is a complete waste of time, effort, and money. But in this case stealing stuff from somebody is a crime that very much has a victim and an offender. Crimes against property are second only to crimes against people. I think these should always be very actively prosecuted.

Beyond that the video also shows a second reason why these crimes need to be actively prosecuted. The creator and his friend trialed their trap packages for what couldn't have been all that long. Yet in that time period they caught around a half dozen thieves, probably around a dozen once you include accomplices. When crimes aren't prosecuted and you have the sort of people that would take advantage of this, you're incentivizing crime.

A third issue is that without enforcement you start to encourage vigilante justice, which can be disproportionate and extremely dangerous. In this case the retribution was good spirited and presumably aimed at embarrassing the police into action and getting some social media love. But you could just as well have somebody who created dangerous packages, or an armed individual seeking to engage in confrontation with the thieves.

---

And as an aside, with criminal theft it doesn't matter if the item is returned after stolen. A big difference between criminal offenses (including misdemeanors) and civil offenses is that the latter is generally about making material loss right again. The former seeks to right the material loss, but the punishment also includes purely punitive measures. Break a contract to the tune of $100 and you're generally on the line for $100 and some court costs. Steal the same amount and you're facing e.g. 6 months in jail and a $1000 fine.
... to figure out how the current technology works, and determine how to make it faster.

I'm not a Musk apologist. The idea of underground freeways in tiny tunnels is not good, but real innovation generally comes from grinding, evolutionary progress. You need to iterate to figure out what works and what doesn't work.
I suppose Corel Draw is still popular, even though it's not the favourite of most graphical artists/designers.
There's 7.1 million open jobs in the U.S.
https://www.bls.gov/news.release/jolts.nr0.htm

Plus this is hackernews. Does anyone here think software isn't hiring right now?
https://github.com/Kickball/awesome-selfhosted - list of Free Software network services and web applications which can be hosted locally
Am I under the wrong impression or are these 'sharing economy' companies, created and grown successfully by using other people's real-stuff, now moving towards owning that stuff? Seems like I read about one of the 'sharing transportation' giants buying fleets of cars, and often hear about how Uber's endgame is to own the cars (and for the cars to drive themselves).

IF it's true, I'm not sure it's surprising. If your entire business model is software that can run just as well with commodity hardware, what exactly is your advantage over the competition other than 'first mover' inertia?

Is this a naive view? It seems supported by the fact that the few super-successful loci of 'sharing economy' have been populated by several players by now. Just look at how many ride-sharing platforms are there: Uber, Lyft, Ola, Careem, Didi, Lime, Bird, 99, Juno, etc. A quick google search tells me there are many AirBnb competitors, too, although maybe due to my profile I've never heard of any
Fine, the top 0.05% earners in the US.
Do not take this the wrong way, but I am always a little confused about people feeling about the whole planet-dwarf_planet thing so strongly.

Pluto is still out there, just as it was a hundred years ago, when nobody knew it existed. And just recently, NASA sent a probe Pluto's way, that managed to amaze me, an outspoken Pluto-hater[0]: Turns out that Pluto is much more complex than people had anticipated.

Who cares what the IAU decides to call it? It is what it is. You could call a rose a turd, and it still would not smell as badly. ;-)

[0] Okay, I do not hate Pluto. I just wish NASA, ESA or whoever would send a couple of probes to Uranus and Neptune. I feel very strongly about this.
"Instead, the FB account is mostly used as a way to passively receive content."

It's funny when people paint such wide strokes for 2 billion people. I would assume people use Facebook for literally hundreds if not thousands(if you can imagine) of use cases.

Probably one of the most complex consumer products ever made from that perspective. I don't think it's useful to reduce Facebook to something as simple as "most people do X on Facebook".

For instance, Facebook in India has nearly 300 million users. They all use Facebook the same way as the 215 million in the United States?

The only people that know how Facebook is used by people is Facebook.
Why do developers always get blamed for the state of everything? Developers love creating efficient, optimized solutions. Developer happiness is rooted in a feeling of fulfillment that comes from creating a good product.

You give way too much credit to the motivation of developers. Developers are just like anyone else working for a living....our primary motivation is to make money.
Ethereum Social Impact for Women's Empowerment, Sust. Farming, Poverty, Hunger
JavaScript Bundlers: Yet Another Biased Comparison
Slack is free for users in FOSS communities. So they beat IRCCloud by 5$. Why would people with a question pay those to get into your community?

I hate Slack for open communities as much as the next person, but IRC or fixes on top of it aren't really the solution.
So, you feel that someone who is brilliant with a given skill, who uses his trade for benefit of society should have the same outcome (same amount of income, same housing, same quality of life) as someone with below average intelligence who sits around and plays video games all day?
Perhaps not "recording",but I can see a real case for an extension that:

1) automatically grabbed a screen text (so it snags the text hidden inside a scrollable container, for example) capture (with notification) when you had a page with a button or link with the text "Agree" or "Understand" or "Accept" in it. Capture would be "tagged" with referrer url, current url, and timestamp. Possibly a screenshot of the rendered page as well.

2) Allowed you to manually trigger such a capture.

I'd think that would involve reasonable space, and even if I wasn't trying to gather legal evidence, it'd be interesting to see the results after, say, only a month.
Because unless everyone simultaneously acts with coordination, these problems are too big and complex to address without some kind of coordination. Even if that coordination is decentralized, it has a cost. Weirdly, no one ever donates to "coordination of cancer fund collection."
Virtualbox is not your only option if you want to use Vagrant. Vagrant has decent plugins for qemu (vagrant-libvirt) and lxd (vagrant-lxd)

Make sure you get your KVM, Qemu and libvirt setup right and run:

vagrant plugin install vagrant-libvirt
vagrant init generic/ubuntu1804
vagrant up --provider=libvirt

You can export VAGRANT_DEFAULT_PROVIDER=libvirt to avoid passing --provider=libvirt to vagrant all the time.

vagrant-lxd is less mature but just as useful, especially when you need to run stuff with erratic RSS graphs.
Not a great analogy since you normally can't shop at an American grocery store from Cuba, but you can use an American web site from there.
> really shouldn't be a single unit controlled thing.

Right on - all we need is a suite of standard protocols and data format for information exchange between social networks.
Try Network link conditioner, built-in part of macOS and iOS. It includes options to set bandwidth, packet loss % and latency in each direction.
100% agree. I am terrible at mental arithmetic, but I am exceedingly good at performing symbolic operations playing bullet chess. It's primarily a visual or geometric calculation, not purely abstract like math.

I think most people don't realize that our brains have this ability. But all you need to do is spend a few months learning chess and you'll see for yourself.
That's not difficult so I doubt it.

For MD5 we have what's called a chosen prefix collision. Given a start of a file, you can get back two "next bits" of the file which are similar but slightly different, and both those files (the chosen prefix plus A or chosen prefix plus B) have the same MD5.

Then because this is an MD family hash you can add any fixed suffix whatsoever to both and still get the same MD5.

So you put A and B inside a part of the file that isn't visible but can influence a conditional test elsewhere. Then you use the conditional test to flow the two different outputs, all the rest of the file is the same.

Some day this will definitely be possible with SHA1 and almost certainly (though it could be decades away) SHA256 too.

SHA3 is different, despite the name, we might perhaps never find any way to collide it, and if we do it's not MD it's a sponge design, so you can't just add a suffix or the output diverges again.
Why not use KVM via vagrant-libvirt? It's pretty easy to set up and works like a charm. See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18727059
i fail to see why this is different than the act of turning on the tv, reading the paper or whatever else people did to keep up to date in the days before digital communication
Matrix is terrible in as it is purely focused on building a protocol. Everything else is underserved. People are into Chats because of the clients.
Try to propose running your own chat server at any medium to large company. No VP of engineering or CTO wants to worry about that and the possible security risks. If Slack messes up they can blame Slack but if you mess up and expose some Healthcare data to the outside world because of your chat server they are screwed.
The big companies are collecting and selling our personal data but since we care more about sharing photographs of our lunch, dog and/or holiday we click away all Terms of Services.

Not until congress is void of financial incentives can the US expect a somewhat decent political solution like Europe tries to do.
In the meantime try not to act like part of the herd and don't post anything that makes you their product.
They had AM/FM radio alarm clocks tuned to a news channel. Is that really any different?
That's a good reason to be careful with one's money by not wasting it on video game skins and other luxury goods.
I live in Italy, and the chart shows 24 jobs openings for Napoli on Hacker News (64 in Rome...). I checked and I could not find a single text match for the words Italy, Rome, Napoli, Neaples, Naples, etc.

Can you better express how you extracted the location data?
I would love to know thw answer to above question
Beyond the black hole singularity
> This only makes sense if overall stress, specifically workplace stress, is going up over time. My general impression is that workplaces today are more pleasant than they have ever been. Managers realized non-monetary benefits are cheaper and often times more effective than purely monetary benefits. This means flexible working hours, ability to work remotely and overall workplace environment.

This comment strikes me as possibly true in the tech/startup world, but definitely not true in the vast majority of jobs that people work at like retail/restaurants/other service. While these jobs have existed for forever, I could see them being more stressful these days as competition has forced managers to be more cutthroat with hours and benefits offered, and especially in the bay area where workers can't even afford to live near where they work and must commute an hour to wait tables.
That's great if all the people who might use your code are in Europe, but for those in places like Canada, Japan, etc, they can't use your code without exposing themselves to risk. It's great if you say, "I won't sue you", but best to put it in the license ;-)
Probably could between Aberdour and Burntisland, as you pass silver sands
I try to have clocks in every room for that reason, but then I forget about my phone and people keep asking why I take ages to respond -_-
Except that you could upload a list of e-mail addresses or phone numbers, or even an e-mail address or phone number list of one, and target that one person.
There's this, from 2015: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8555079

And colliding SHA-1 in pdf form in 2017: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13723892

Not saying you didn't, but I'm unable to find any earlier reference to making 2 arbitrary, existing pdf files collide with MD5.
I could count the number of good, modern, high featured XMPP and IRC clients on one hand. At least compared to their proprietary counterparts. Matrix has at least as many either mature (Fractal, Riot) or up and coming clients as I'd consider usable with anything else, and it has bridges into all that legacy, something I have never seen IRC or XMPP manage well.

If you have legitimate grievances with the protocol and feel you can see flaws in it, make an issue on the tracker now while its still a 0.x release, doesn't have the broad adoption you describe, and while the team (knowingly) can make breaking changes simultaneously released to matrix.org and riot.im and cover 95% of the users still.
Go to the bathroom, brush your teeth and make breakfast? That's what I do.

I've noticed the tendency to check my phone/computer when I wake up, and I consciously try to avoid it. Checking within a minute really a sign of addiction, just like people who smoke a cigarette in bed after waking (and yes I knew somebody who did this.)

I definitely don't check my phone/computer within a minute of waking up. Probably 10 or 15 minutes on a good day, 3-5 minutes on a bad day.
None of the Google developer-oriented resources are accessible from Iran. For example, you have to use a VPN to download Android Studio or access Google educational materials. Golang is just yet another Google project that has blocked Iran.
Biggest problem is that apple doesn't support hardware acceleration for vp9/8 decoding which YouTube uses.

So our battery empties faster on appple devices.

Neither google is doing anything about it nor apple.

Google is pushing their own Chromebook and my friends who are pissed off at their YouTube performance in regard to battery switched to Chromebook.
Bitcoin's terrible 2018 doesn't bode well for the future of crypto
Ask HN: How to transform event/clickstream data into personalized user metadata
I would like to capture every time a user views a brand, seller, or listing on our app. Then I would like to have a method that returns a list of their brands, sellers, or listings based on the ones they visit the most.

I see a lot of software like mixpanel allows you to capture click stream data, but that seems more like "business analyst wants to track x stat against y stat in the last 30 days."

Requirements:

- relatively low cost (we're small-medium scale)

- can't use postgres extensions like pipelinedb (on gcloud managed sql)

Current idea:

Create an event record in postgres (e.g. user_id, "viewed", entity_id, entity_type)

then write an sql query to fetch their favorite brands, sellers, etc.. based on the aggregation/sum of their events in real time.

Concerns:

a) Should raw event data be stored in postgresql? Won't it just cause an unnecessary amount of writes, and requires involvement to maintain performance. We would probably have 10M events every few months.

b) Moving to something like big query, red shift, or whatever "analytics" db seems like the wrong tool / overkill. We would like to rapidly query the data for user facing apps, gather personalized stats for users on the fly (e.g. "my favorite brands"), these tools seem like they're more for generating reports, big data analysis, etc...

c) this leads me to believe that raw event data should be stored somewhere like s3, and aggregated offline, and the results be stored in postgresql for rapid querying

Am I over complicating this?
> Apparently Facebook did it the wrong way. Why?

Do you honestly think that Facebook was trying to allow users to make the decision in an informed way? I suspect most people instead think Facebook was trying to get some way of SAYING that the users agreed while maximizing the odds that the users would be surprised to discover the implications.

That'd be my answer as to "why". I could be wrong, but I can't think of an occurrence where FB seemed to be acting in their (non-advertising, non-paying) users' interests. Yet FB will claim otherwise.

And that disconnect is what people are finding "wrong".
> I'm not sure how to monetize this

Make it good enough to pay for.
Ugh. Should say the minimum income for immigration was set "higher" not "lower" than nurses are paid.

Sorry wasn't awake enough when I first wrote this.
Other way around. The EU is the one who bears the burden of forcing American companies like slack to comply with their laws. Though jumping straight to a shooting war feels like an overreaction. Maybe start with a fine and ban the company if they don't pay.
Top Countries with the Best Computer Programmers
Meanwhile, in what's supposedly the best labour market in 50 years salaries just aren't rising. Who cares about software, software doesn't employ enough people to make an impact in the economy.
Corel still maintains WordPerfect too, last release was 7 months ago
Drones will be an inflection point in the “War on General Purpose Computing”
Don’t phaseout dates set in the future create a spike in demand near the deadline?

Either people will be bored of ICEs for other reasons long before and make this a non event. Or, everyone will try to buy a new ICE in the year or two before they stop selling them. Automakers will use this as a justification for trying to move the deadline out. If that happens then the spike in electric drive will come at the next tradein time, not the deadline.
Ill add to this. If you listen to his interview with Kara Swisher on recode, he has a pretty compelling case on what he thinks the established industry is overlooking. According to him, the technology used for tunneling is very outdated. The Diesel engines could be replaced by something far more powerful without hitting thermal limits reducing drill time. Current technology also fills the tunnel with exhaust that needs to be pumped out with oxygen

It’s not hard to see how trying something high powered and electric/lithium-ion based might change the cost/benefits of tunneling, and Elon/Tesla also seems like it might have a uniquely special knowledge of electric motors to succeed

I see no reason why this isn’t worth the experiment.
That way of looking at it - that the company is lying but the individual is not - is fascinating to me.
Ignoring that was just an example of adapting the source material. There have been many adaptations of Snow White which have not been produced by Disney which have seen 0 legal issues from Disney.
These days it seems like basically acquire software companies. They own Winzip, Paintshop and Painter, for example.
While it's a bit long and I don't agree with everything, the article raises important reminders for web development with empathy and accessibility. This part felt especially relevant:

"[Progressive enhancement] won't work with something like React though, and I don’t cry about that. This is a distinct robust design pattern, which we feel is durable and doesn't lock us into a limited-life framework that will get replaced by something else in a year or two." (emphasis mine)

I imagine this last line gets some people reacting emotionally. I've spent the last few years in React-land (in addition to a soon-to-be-legacy stack slowly transitioning), and benefited much from the paradigm shift. It has moved the web (and web dev) forward in many ways, especially conceptually. At the same time, I can't deny that it will eventually get replaced, just like the rise and fall of jQuery. That means we must keep in mind not to be locked-in, to emphasize the core concepts which will outlive any framework du jour.

Progressive enhancement is certainly doable with server-rendered React, but it does seem like the recent trends have favored developer experience at the cost of user experience.
Biohacker injects himself with DNA sequence made from Bible and Koran verses
Violating principles and respect for others is a vector for profit, which is why it always feels like a losing race. Its people in their spare time fighting against substantial revenue streams accrued from the violation of the freedoms and principles we want to uphold.
but... molten salt has no grains
I just want to bring up a difference that I've noticed living in both London and the US (Chicago and San Francisco). Note that I am also not trying to make a point here, as to what is better for a city. I think it's much more complex than spying on your citizen. Just trying to bring my perspective and things I've seen:

London is one the safest city I've lived in (along with Beijing). Chicago and San Francisco are the most unsafe cities I've lived in. People often don't realize this there, it's just that they have been desensitized to it.

I've seen countless accidents in the US, people getting bullied or mugged, cars getting broken in, homeless people everywhere (sometimes shooting themselves up with syringes). Walking in the streets at night can be really dangerous. Most people avoid public transport here and take uber.

On the other side you have London. You'd see single girls walking alone in the streets at 4am. Everyone takes the public transport, never seen anyone fight, almost no homeless people, everybody loves the cops. It's a different world.