skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Van Life is mostly fake marketing bullshit. Ever wonder why so many "how 2 van lyfe" videos feature brand new Mercedes Sprinters? Hmmm... I wonder who's footing the bills.

This is a channel by an actual van dweller, and a lot of his videos are about exposing how ridiculously fake a lot of the van life people are on YouTube.

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCp6T83rUNCt_iqtDelwSHNA/vid...

Even without watching his videos, it's pretty easy to tell that a lot of van life videos follow the same pattern:

- Ridiculously attractive white or "not-too-dark" interracial couples. Bonus points if the boyfriend has an ambiguous European or Latin accent.

- Scantily clad women who somehow have the time and the ability to do their hair, apply makeup perfectly, and have their nails done, despite how actual van dwelling would take the piss out of them.

- If they've got a camera person following them around in every episode, they're definitely living out of hotels, if not their own homes at the end of the day.

- Absurdly expensive vans that most young people couldn't afford without massive debt. I suppose they could bank on paying it off with YouTube adsense dollars, but that's a big gamble.

- Vans with interiors better than a nice apartment, but no mention of how they built it nor how long it actually took to construct. (Sorry, but I don't think noodle-arms there could manage a table saw)

- Living out of a van means pissing in buckets, taking shits at McDonalds, and showering at gyms. So many van life people don't ever talk about this, but spend their time filming all the vacation spots they visit. (you too can see the world... just fork over $35k for a van)

- Never talking about how dwelling in parking lots exposes one to encounters with crazy people, criminals, and hoodlums. How'd you like to wake up at 2am to the sound of boys pissing on the pavement right next to your van? Maybe you'd prefer crackheads screaming about how they're gonna kill the guy who stole their stash? Anyone who has spent a modest time living in a car will know what I'm talking about.

- Never mentioning how it's a pain in the ass to find semi-legal parking. You might be able to park your car out in the middle of nowhere, which is scary as fuck, or you can park in the city and expect to regularly hear a cop tap their night stick against your window.

It's mostly a big crock, and I suppose a lot of Tiny Homes are too, seeing as it's generally a pain in the ass to build one, find a place to put it, and comply with all the state and local ordinances. I know a lot of people have to build their tiny homes on trailer beds because if their shack has wheels then they can technically skirt building codes in certain areas, but then they might as well own an RV in that case.
I’d like to add that passenger buses are rollover-rated, as well. The “residential” area of a typical RV is balsa wood and paper* and a lot less safe.

* I kid, but they’re not much stronger than that.
Machine Learning and Privacy
Because with wireless networking, there is a major portion of the link that actually is wireless (and with some setups, it's entirely wireless). With "serverless" computing, there is no point at which a server is not being used.
We had fiveish developers for the first fiveish years. Then it sort of exploded after that.

To fair, five wasn't enough. We spent too much time firefighting and not enough time innovating.
Hans-Hermann Hoppe: Democracy, The God That Failed. I believed democracy was the "ideal" (basically the secular religion of the USA), and just flawed in implementation. This book does an excellent job of presenting the argument for ownership of the state, limiting the scope of those who could possibly own, and the short term vs. long term interests of different kinds of government.
On the surface, it's about how to have conversations about difficult topics. Often these are conflict resolution type conversations. These range all the way from "you never take the bins out" to marriage breakups to large international political conflicts. These conversations can often go off the rails and conflicts are made worse, not solved. Whatever the scale, these kinds of conversations tend to follow familiar routes.

If you dispair at the way that conversations tend to devolve into personal attacks in national politics, office politics or your day-to-day interactions, this book is a very insightful handbook.

The book is the result of a big study at Harvard Business School of a large number of case studies. It spots the patterns that humans tend toward. In each case it identifies the pattern, why it happens, what the result can be (usually negative) and how to spot it coming and mitigate it. It also has snippets of conversation as case studies.

It's been a while, so I can't remember each item. But one example is that people tend to connect their identity to the point they are trying to argue. You challenge the point but to your conversation partner it feels like a direct personal attack. If you can find a way to acknowledge that connection, gently separate it from the identity, you have a much better chance of resolving the conflict.

I find a particularly strong parallel in the Gang of Four Design Patterns book. These are the broad problems that people try to solve with software, the structures that tend to emerge as people solve problems.

And, like design patterns, some things are deeply insightful and some things are obvious. E.g. of course 'iterators' are a thing. But development is so much better for having vocabulary to talk about them.
You are mistaken about WhatsApp. It does end to end encryption by default. What needs to be explicitly enabled is that theoretically WhatsApp/some bad guy could steal an WhatsApp account, and it would create a new public key, and if you didn't turn on security notifications, you might not be aware that the person you think you are talking to changed. You also should verify that the end to end encryption keys match, but most users are not paranoid to that level.
They could have funded 150 startups for 10 years and created 1500 highly motivating startup jobs with that money but instead it will just maintain the status quo, pay Reddit engineers to be corporate cattle and allow reddit to be as innefficient as ever.
> It is reminiscent of the dot com era when land grabs were a thing

That's exactly what it is. A land grab of people's attention.
What's an example of the most impressive article written by a bot, in your opinion (fellow HN reader)?
In case someone missed it: replace "www" with "old" to get the old design back.
Transform your postman collection to HTML/Markdown documentation
What is the problem with that article? We failed to stop global warming, and now it's likely that - regardless of what is done, even cutting to zero net carbon emissions - that the Maldives will be lost in the century.
attempts to monitor passwords in a cryptographically secure and private way...

Google never learns your username and password in the process...

we don’t want any sort of trackable identifier for the user that would reveal any information...
What do you use to heat/cool the bus? What range have you covered since you started living in it? Do you stay within a given city, State, or beyond? Thanks
There are so many more issues with Reddit, I'm surprised they haven't been digg'd or myspace'd yet.
Nice overview!
> a tribe that always specified the direction [...] eventually she acquired something like a bird's eye view in her mind

Even when the language you speak doesn't have this requirement, you can still pick up this skill. When you live for a few years in a cold square-grid city like those of northern China, you learn to always know which way is north so you don't lose direction walking around connector overpasses and subway tunnels in the winter.
Reddit serves out a crapton of pages every day. They need a robust backend service which means you need people to maintain it.

Beyond that you have community managers, people to run AMAs, people to manage ad accounts, HR, etc... 230 people to run the one of the largest and most dynamic sites on the Internet doesn't seem out of line.
The Brothers Karamazov by Feodor Dostoevsky. At the time I didn't realize that it changed me, but looking back on it, the perspectives I learned from it fundamentally how I viewed and understood other people.
You can disable the redesign. Its also somewhere in the preferences.

http://old.reddit.com
2 things about Reddit's "use our app instead!" buttons:

1. They cycle through a couple of different messages, and the buttons get switched around

2. The wording is such that you read it twice and still aren't sure which button will just take you to the damn website

I don't mind them promoting their app, but these dark patterns truely rile me
Mind if I ask what is motivating this?

Is it "You want to have your next-of-kin benefit from the income stream?" Then rather than doing hard software engineering you should do easy financial engineering and purchase term life insurance on yourself. If you pass away suddenly, your heirs walk away with millions of dollars with zero execution risk and the servers fall over when they fall over.

If you think these projects create lots of value in the world and you'd be sad to see it go away, then this is business continuity planning. The thing you probably want to do is have a will which will entrust a pot of money (c.f. term life insurance, above) to a lawyer with instructions for them to spend some on a technologist to parachute in, prepare the projects for sale, and sell them on.

There is a variant of this where you fund a foundation to run the projects indefinitely but that seems like unlikely to be the best solution given "side project."
Show HN: AI driven generator for names of Swiss girls, towns and startups
If you need a service to use for email forwarding, try https://forwardemail.net

Source Code: https://github.com/niftylettuce/forward-email
Also, on Usenet 2.0, it's eternally September.
How to grow fast without VC funding
It was a place meant as a consolation/safe-space for people being hated on for not believing in stuff without proof.

It became a place to hate on everyone who didn't believe in atheism.
I remember being caught off guard by the main character being black, or at least dark-skinned. It was a really nice off-hand comment that shakes you out of the default world-view you can acquire or project when reading by inserting onself (younger white male in my case) into the novel. The way it was clearly established but then also not dwelt upon really struck me at the time I was reading it, and the entire novel still sticks with me.
Right, just like with bigfoot (?)
I'm aware of that, I'm just saying they own the corporation with the same name, which they got when they acquired Aaron's company.
But the AMP pages give them preferential treatment in Google search results. I doubt they'd want to give that up.
Moderation and composition contribute a lot to a sub's quality. On one end you have fantastic and popular subreddits like Ask(Historians|Science|*) which rely on extremely heavy moderation and qualifications or sources. On the other end you have very niche subs that are really only of interest to enthusiasts/relevant parties, and so composition keeps the quality high rather than moderation. The problem with a lot of subs is that they are popular and unmoderated, and so left alone they just converge to the mean (and the mean's not great).
"The key is to understand what people mean by the words they say."

Yes, it is -- and I'm not entirely sure I understand what "serverless" means when used this way, unless it's just a term that marketing people invented because their old term "the cloud" has lost its sizzle.
I Left My Google Job. And Life Became Hard
Dale Carnegie's Winning Friends and Influencing people is so simple, but the technique really works.

Become genuinely interested in people, make them feel good, they will appreciated it. The advice is essentially don't be a jerk and do talk to people about the things they are interested. When you start doing that it's like playing life on easy mode.
"Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind" by Yuval Noah Harari.

Hands down the book that most influenced me. The book had (for me) not one but several simple-yet-profound ideas that were forever inserted into the foreground of how I make sense of the world. For example, the existence of shared myths that allow humans to cooperate on a large scale. Or how I too, am religious, though I was sure I wasn't.

Can't recommend it enough.
+1 for this gem. At least once a day I catch myself thinking some everyday object (or app) I’ve encountered could be more usable if it had certain signifiers to better illustrate its affordances, or lacked certain signifiers to obfuscate unintended affordances. Should be required reading for anyone who aspires to put products out into the world.
Another clear red line was when spez started editing comments.[0] It was childish and non-consequential, but should have resulted in an immediate exodus from the platform. I'm not politically aligned with r/The_Donald, but I think this sort of petty power abuse should not be forgiven; the platform needs to die, as an example to other platforms.

[0] https://www.reddit.com/r/The_Donald/comments/5ekdy9/the_admi...
Honestly, Anthem.

While I think it's a pinch silly oversimplification of things, it makes good arguments against central planning and for individuality and liberty.

It really struck a chord in an impressionable 16 year old.
Please don't ever roll your own security. Use a language feature (if available) or a third party library... though do a bit of due diligence on the third party library to make sure it's endorsed by a trusted source.
On what grounds should an unrelated party (the government, via labor law) force their will on two voluntarily trading parties, blocking their transaction?

Because wage slavery exists and you can't shrug your shoulders and say "well, they're choosing to work for peanuts so it's fine!".
A People’s History of the US

A Pattern Language

The Alphabet Vs The Goddess

Aloud: Voices From the Nuyorican Poets Cafe

The Fire Next Time
Yes, such "offline bookmarked dataURI applications" are great, underappreciated and ancient things. Sadly, current trend in modern browsers is to suppress them in sake of security, because in the past some crooks misused them them. Currently you cannot even link to them like you could in the past; anything other than direct navigation from bookmark or URLbar results in better case in blank screen, in worse is silently blocked. For example in the past you could redirect to them, or make datauri editor that encoded itself into another datauri, or both [1], but now you can not [2].

[0] Check out for example this HTML / SVG sketchbook: https://gist.github.com/myfonj/c8ce74bf549e19600026ce9022388...
[1] http://tinyurl.com/selcoditor (see network log)
[2] https://blog.mozilla.org/security/2017/11/27/blocking-top-le...
mTurk, Crowd Flower, Spare 5, etc. are all popular platforms for gathering labeled training data. It’s a race to the bottom for lowest price per label while maintaining reasonably consistent quality.
Fake chews
Honestly I find it strange for some people to have TVs in their bedroom. I think it's nice to have some separation of concerns. I think sleep quality is better when the bedroom is mainly for sleep. Have you thought about moving the TV out of the bedroom?
I Heard You Paint Houses: Frank "The Irishman" Sheeran and the Inside Story of the Mafia, the Teamsters, and the Final Ride of Jimmy Hoffa

Amazing insights on the corruption of the USG/Nixon
And the ties between the unions/cia/and the mafia.
I mostly agree and think there are a number of points to be made.

1. There is nothing wrong with living small, but there is a point when every square meter/feet makes a lot of difference.

2. We really should be getting better standards of living over time as manufacturing gets easier. Most people should be having even modest vacation homes bigger than this.

3. Even if you don't believe in these things, it is to some extent at least an ideal. Maybe especially in the US giving up this ideal is a significant decrease in prosperity.

Ultimately one has to ask themselves "for what?". I can in many ways see the appeal and I am interested in things like house construction. But ultimately it is also a result of the absurd situation where we aren't producing new opportunities anymore. And you can't really compensate for the changes in the bigger picture.
that's 99.99% of the popular subs. But go to the non-pop ones or the ones with heavy moderation. And it's a gem of a place really.
"because it simply doesn't scale."

How do you decide to believe that it is because of lack of scaling and not another factor? I believe wage inequality exists because private property is allowed to be held by citizens and rent taken for the lands productive use.

I think people should be able to own buildings, but the land should all be the governments. A Land Value Tax would be something I would be ecstatic to see. There should be no incentive to hold land and wait for it's value to rise. To do so is unproductive to society and incredibly productive for a single person's return on investment. But their investment is stolen from society at large. (of course theft is a matter of opinion, I don't mean to misconstrue what I believe is fact vs belief)
I think it would be nice to see this happen, it could be what Adobe's Air platform was supposed to be... I would think that MS could do it relatively easily.

The biggest risk, however are those modules that are compiled to the platform and node version in question. There are now some abstractions that make this easier, but it's still far from perfect. And depending on the application there are more or fewer risks of this being a problem.

As it stands SQLite is specifically one of the most used compiled modules alone and is used in many projects.
Dale Carnegie's "How to Win Friends and Influence People" - it changed how I approach teamwork and conversations. It made me aware of how my behaviour was limiting outcomes. :)

Frankly, it made me aware that I was being an asshole and that I should change.

However, it wasn't necessarily the book, but the course that I found really useful.
Science Fiction Novels That Imagine the Future of Healthcare
The prevailing "business person" thought is that app users are more loyal (high value) while web users are temporary users that Google will eventually steal away from you when they decide they want to be in your market and want to stop putting you at the top of search result pages. See Yelp's decline as Google started putting their own local results above Yelp and the resulting lawsuits.

As a result, most Silicon Valley product managers are trained to think that websites are nothing more than the top of a funnel to eventually convert low-value search engine users into high-value app users. Once you realize this, almost every stupid thing websites do suddenly makes sense. They will do almost anything possible to grow app installs even if it makes the website nearly useless.

Sure, it's terrible if you care about the web and user experience. But most PMs only stick around a company for 1-2 years and they'd rather be able to show a hockey stick graph of "high value" app user growth to get promoted or get a new job then worry about what makes for a good user experience.
Are you sure about that?

I've seen people not realize they are implementing a linked list when they are working in a language like PHP or Python, have an array of objects, and those objects contain indexes or keys to other objects in the array.

Similarly, I've seen people not realize they have trees. For instance, suppose a program generates some kind of report. The report has multiple sections. Somewhere in there you might have a

report = [section1, section2, ..., sectionN]

to represent the report. But section can have subsections, so that section1 could actually be

section1 = [section1_1, section1_2, ...]

and so one with subsubsections and more.

That final 'report' variable references a tree, but a lot of people wouldn't notice because they didn't have to make a node structure with child and parent pointers and maintain those pointers manually.
This works with most user script plugins like GreaseMonkey, ViolentMonkey or TamperMonkey:

// ==UserScript==
// @name BackToOldReddit
// @namespace Reddit
// @match *://www.reddit.com/*
// @grant none
// @run-at document-start
// ==/UserScript==
const currentURL = window.document.location.toString();

if(currentURL.includes('//www')) {
const newURL = currentURL.replace('//www','//old');
window.document.location.replace(newURL);
}
Isn't that how every online community devolves? It starts as a place for a group to feel accepted, and then evolves to demonizing the other?
I always think it's really interesting how our upbringings shape us. I'd never even heard of god until I was 4, when I must have heard the word mentioned, asked my dad what it mean, and it was explained to me as a thing up in the sky that some people believe in.
Most people living in Manhattan are already doing this. It's really not that bad. You just treat the outside as part of your living room. I go on walks all the time, and hang out in coffee shops a lot.
Game Theory and Strategy, Straffin (https://www.amazon.com/Game-Theory-Strategy-Mathematical-Lib...)

A great introduction.
BTW, if you are in the Bay Area, you can hear several of these singers live each summer at the Carmel Bach Festival.

https://bachfestival.org/
Docker Commands You Should Know – Part 5 of Learn Enough Docker to Be Useful
Here's a thought exercise; we are moving into renewables with absolute breakneck speed. At this point, it's essentially cheaper to use renewable energy than fossil fuels. Market forces are moving us towards clean energy at an accelerating rate. Left alone, our economies will rapidly approach 100% renewable energy due to price alone. So ask yourselves why propaganda outlets like the Washington Post (DEMOCRACY DIES IN DARKNESS--give me a fucking break) or the NY Times breathlessly run article after article every day preparing citizens to give up their rights to choices; choice of what house they're allowed to live in, what kind of car they're allowed to drive etc.

But you can't criticize the golden calf of global warming^H^H^H^Hclimate change right? What's the saying, show me who you're not allowed to criticize and I'll show you who holds power over you.
But why not mine bitcoins client-side with millions of mobile users? (/s)
That is awesome, I also had a similar experience with a inspector.

My parents house kept getting water in the basement because of soil being sloped towards their house. Neighbor was too high and their house was too low. I ended up designing a solution, which was a retaining wall and french drain system. The last inspection, two inspectors came out and asked if I do that professionally because they have been impressed by the drawings submitted and the scope of the job seemed unreasonable to be tackled by a home owner. The older inspector said I should do it for a living and he thought there was no way we would complete the project.
Aristotle's Physics, Metaphysics, and De Anima.
"Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow"[1] by Yuval Noah Harari

[1]https://www.ynharari.com/book/homo-deus/
Design Patterns by the Gang of Four and Power Negotiating by Roger Dawson. They both showed me that there are advanced levels to things that can be learned.