skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I remember most of the countries used to be laws against coining currency for several reasons... but for some reason which I don't understand (the lack of power to enforce the law?), the crypto currency was never considered a currency but an "asset" to declare.
I am sure I will get downvoted to oblivion, but I think GDPR is a colossal waste of time and money.

I think mandatory do not track settings are great, but the right to be forgotten is to onerous to implement and not present in other domains.

They do make it harder for smaller businesses to compete.

I can't go to my school or a credit bureau or an insurance company and say that all my past history should be forgotten.

Why should we enforce such a regulation online?
Convergent evolution produces similar phenotypes, not exact ones.
The Surprising Benefits of Relentlessly Auditing Your Life
Thanks for the suggestion - I'll give it a look!
I partly misuse Zotero as a bookmarker that does offline copies, indexing and gives me the possibility to categorize and tag.
Shooting journalists in a video game seemed fun, but
no, that's the same as <hX>

I'd probably go with just a styled text, maybe with an aria-label.
> Maybe someday, but society has to deem it morally acceptable first.

Err, please let's not make individual freedom dependent on what society finds morally acceptable.

> I’m European, I trust my government in a way many Americans simply won’t understand.

I am as well, and I don't trust my state + federal government. Not to the extent that it seems common in the US, and in slightly different ways, but I certainly want my government to have as little data on me as possible.

Even if you do trust your current administration, imagine that the most extreme party of whichever political side you consider crazy & generally wrong wins with a landslide next month and has all that stuff available that you figured you can trust your government to have.
Python libraries that helped a healthcare startup grow
At least from what I read, it is the slant of the entire piece than anything in particular. If we removed environmental protections we would also see a boom of growth in the industry, but we decided that those benefits don't outweigh the environmental cost, same here with GDPR, after Cambridge analytica using digital micro targeting to heavily manipulate populations and elections it is simply too high a cost to pay for what is otherwise a pretty shifty industry otherwise

I'd heavily recommend everyone here to read the book surveillance capitalism it is an incredible explanation of what goes behind the curtain

In short, GDPR has some relatively minor problems and externalities and blogger wants to scrap the entire GDPR because of them....
Agree, and it doesn't even exist in most domains. I can't expunge my school transcripts or information from credit bureaus.

Do we really think a society where there is no public information about people better?
What you might be (mis-)remembering is Eric S. Raymond’s description of the production of The New Hacker's Dictionary printed book:

http://catb.org/jargon/html/personality.html
as far as reflection goes, whenever I see a satellite photo of Africa and I look at the bright, sandy Sahara Desert, I always wonder: does it help? or does it hurt?
OK, can you also post here all your personal details, so I could sell them to anybody who wants to exploit them to earn money? OK, fine, you don't want to post it here. Could I get them from your bank, work, friends, family, post it here and sell to anybody?
If you use Firefox on mobile I made an extension to make mindlessly browsing blacklisted sites inconvenient - https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/impede/

It's undocumented but it wouldn't be hard to add. Essentially you blacklist a domain in the 3 dot menu (toolbar icon on desktop). Blacklisted sites will show a word and key-value pairs of letters and numbers, you have to add up the values for each letter in the word to unlock the page. You can change the word length in the options page, also in options you can set the extension to sleep for 5, 15, and 30 minutes when you want to disable it without having to later re-enable it.
I'm judging by "Compliance costs are astronomical" when the supporting evidence is largely estimates from before it went into effect.

So you can't take everything too seriously, but still, it's good to collect more links. Also, the author is being clear about the weakness of some of the supporting evidence.
I was going to say that Kiyosaki is a charlatan and people should steer clear, but that goes for most of these authors. Keep in mind that founder books are not written by people who are good at starting a business, but people who are good at telling stories to wannabes.
Not OP, but for me it helped to understand what is actually happening. Definitely recommended. Nowadays I use mostly Context (mainly because fonts and creating your own layout is made easy), and never plain Tex, but still I think reading the Texbook was one of the best decisions I've made concerning desktop publishing.
The problem with DSLs consists of trace debugging, in my opinion.

First, one more counter example to add to the mix already presented here:

https://www.scholars.northwestern.edu/en/publications/pop-pl... Florence et al. – POP-PL: A patient-oriented prescription programming language (2015)

Citations: https://scholar.google.com/scholar?cites=4536900861193079588

The debugging issues which came to light as part of the development of POP-PL led to the new Racket trace debugging facilities in the form of Medic and Ripple, which I've previously commented about here, and which unfortunately barely anyone seems to know about:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19962087
Donald Trump and Swine Fever Are Creating an Economic Crisis
Snuba- Sentry's New Search Infrastructure
but that's the problem: the ads and trackers don't work!

unless you're willing to pay them with your data and eyes, they won't let you see the site.

not that I agree with this.
I expected infinite recursion in the screenshot :)
What is a markdown email? Is it a mail body written in markdown, using the unprocessed markdown for the text/plain part, and generating a html part from the same?

Pretty sure you could to that with pandoc and heirloom mailx or something similar.
So its ngrok with a prettier website. Neat.
So the guy getting his public court records removed doesn’t exist?
You can specialize and play a bunch of things. Pretty much everyone does it. You can be a chess prodigy and still play checkers, monopoly, video games, etc. Using your logic, nobody specializes because they all do other things.

As for Sanders, I'm well aware of his football and baseball careers because I was a kid who grew up watching him in the 90s. 1 "decent" season doesn't make a "phenom". Okay? In 1992, sanders didn't make the all-star team, he didn't get over 100 hits, he played less than 100 games. Sanders career batting average is the .260s. He was nothing special in baseball. Unless your definition of "phenomenal" is different than mine. Deion Sanders was phenomenal in football. He is arguably the greater cornerback in NFL history and a hall of famer. If deion sanders was a phenomenal center fielder, then what is ken griffey, kirby puckett, etc?

As for bo jackson, how about he specialized in track&field, baseball and football. You can argue all you want, bo jackson specialized. He didn't go into curling, badminton, tennis, hockey, etc. He didn't "generalize". He was a rare phenomenal athlete who could specialize in multiple sports.

If you disagree then your definition of phenomenal and specializing is different and we are simply never going to agree and I'll just leave it at that.
Ask HN: Has anyone experience with moonlightwork.com
Hello HN,

I am developer starting a consulting business and stumbled upon moonlightwork (https://moonlightwork.com) which seems similar to popular freelancing hubs (Upwork or Freelancer.com), but they seem to specialize in quality developers and hopefully clients.

The creator is also active here on HN and the business seems decent, although there is not much discussion about it (most mentions are contributed by the creator).

Obviously I would like to be independent in the future, but maybe it can help me to get first clients? I plan to specialize into a niche domain, but although I have a small network (where I asked if they have some work for me), it would be nice to get additional clients to get me going.

Cheers,
Julia
I think to this person's point, though – managing something like an online community is a microcosm of what social media platforms deal with, and if you've done it before you know how hard it can be to set the boundaries of acceptable behavior without finding yourself in spot that is viewed as hypocritical.

I can't think of anything harder than that to scale.
Urban Heat Island — https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Urban_heat_island
>“Since 2016, newspapers in Belgium and Italy have removed articles from their archives under [GDPR]. Google was also ordered last year to stop listing some search results, including information from 2014 about a Dutch doctor who The Guardian reported was suspended for poor care of a patient.”

>All consequences seem entirely acceptable.

...I am not sure I agree with your worldview.
those are the whitehat climate vandals, I think...
It’s the same mindset that gave us obligatory Web Fonts. I control my computer not some developer or website builder.
Invoicing support, maintenance and custom development of open-source software is a more established practice than patreon-style donations to open-source developers.
>They do make it harder for smaller businesses to compete. //

Do you have examples of particular businesses or classes that are particularly affected?
Have you heard of the free energy principle? The two ideas seem related.

From Wikipedia:

> The free energy principle is that systems—those that are defined by their enclosure in a Markov blanket—try to minimize the difference between their model of the world and their sense and associated perception. This difference can be described as "surprise" and is minimized by continuous correction of the world model of the system. As such, the principle is based on the Bayesian idea of the brain as an “inference engine.” [Karl] Friston added a second way to minimization: action. By actively changing the world into the expected state, systems can also minimize the free energy of the system. Friston assumes this to be the principle of all biological reaction.
For the inexperienced, what are a few key principles that we can take away from your experiences?
You could probably get tangled if you accept money from EU citizens. If you don't take money from them (or use cryptocurrency), the EU can't really do anything.
Verify if your email will go to spam
I'm sorry but anti-trust for foreign companies is kind of a joke. The French government et al literally cannot "break up" Google or Facebook et al, all they can do is ban Google from their territory.

Also, deep and hearty guffaw from me regarding "the business moat is irrelevant". Thinking like that is why American companies dominate European tech and not vice versa, just saying. Thinking like that is why domestic competition just took a 40% hit in Europe as the business went to largely American firms. 40%!
Thank you! I'll have a look at it as soon as I get the time. I already have a long long list of paper on complex but fun algorithms to wrap my head around.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20008482
This is my projejct if you are interested.
I'd agree with you for synthesizing, particularly with a master volume knob. But playing live my volume range is from audible to just me (So I can plan what people will hear), to easily the loudest thing going ;) Which is louder than you want to set your CD player :)

Also, I strongly believe in using dynamics throughout the set. The min-max range I use is one of the strongest impacts I have on what people feel. Tinkled whisper to roar

Though yes, like you, I love my other variables too like strike position, angle, etc
I have a different recommendation. Now that WiFi standards have stopped evolving so fast, used commercial-grade WiFi access points are a fantastic deal. I replaced AirPort Extreme with a pair of used Ruckus R600s. (They’re AP’s so you need a separate router. I use a Linux server as an access point, which allows using the CAKE packet scheduler at > 1 gbps.) They are $150-200 on eBay. The Airport is great, but gets a bit squirrely when your internet connection can deliver packets faster than the WiFi can offload them. With the R600, same-room performance stayed the same, but off-axis performance improved dramatically. In the bedroom right above the access point, I used to get 100 Mbps or so. Swapping out the R600 raised that to 300 Mbps. (The Ruckus has some cool directional antenna technology.)
This all is a reflection of the old talks about the costs of doing technical things right. One way of looking at them is that if something works for business, we should not pursue better software architecture or improve security or usability. Another way is to analyze and estimate the technical debt and eventually start paying it. This is exactly what happens with privacy now: business may cry about "removed incentives", "prohibiting costs", "eliminated opportunities" and other BS, but in the end it's just a compliance debt that they are not willing to pay. GDPR identified that debt and the mechanisms for claiming it, that's it. After the dust settles, there will be plenty of best practices and educated people which will make compliance easy, certain business models unpractical and the business will go as usual. Yes, compliance isn't a piece of cake, but there's nothing written in that law which a sane engineer or manager would not implement. Even the right to be forgotten makes sense: information about past crimes distributed via search is a kind of extrajudicial punishment which makes it much harder for people who already served their sentence to find a job and return to normal life. It's a job of a government to prevent them from committing another crime, it's not a job of a search engine or a news website.
Show HN: Check air quality for your location in Telegram or Messenger
Organizing Complexity: How Ant Colonies Self-Manage
Credit bureau information tends to expire off the record over time doesn't it?
No that's the unintended consequences of collecting data in the first place.
This is the centre of a hot button issue in Alberta, Canada's politics. The previous provincial government passed a bill that prohibited schools and teachers from telling parents that their child had joined a GSA [0]. The new conservative government decided to change that aspect of the legislation and controversy ensued. Many believe that this change would put LGBT children at risk [1][2].

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gay%E2%80%93straight_alliance

[1] https://globalnews.ca/news/5102167/alberta-election-gsa-rall...

[2] https://edmontonjournal.com/news/politics/ucp-education-plat...
Agreed. I don't think there is anything wrong with linking to one's own posts here, if they are relevant. I do it now and then myself.

BTW, commandlinefan, your page:

https://commandlinefanatic.com/cgi-bin/showarticle.cgi?artic...

has the right pane text overlapping the left pane (main body of post), at least when I increase the font a bit with Ctrl=+. (Chrome, Windows). Please check and fix if can.

It happens for the other two posts about reading Knuth too. But not for your About page. FYI.
One lead-in question: are you in the USA? If not, most advice is going to be fraught as hell. Assuming you are: this is a well-paved path these days.

A few things as they come to mind (and, disclaimer, I am not an expert, I've just done this before):

- Any advice you read here, including mine, should be immediately superceded by that of your tax professional or your lawyer. If you do not have a tax professional, I strongly advise at least getting a consult even if you elect to do your taxes yourself (and if you're a single-member LLC, see further down, this is not unreasonable). It is not merely a "strongly advise" to have a lawyer on tap. Get a lawyer and make sure they're the kind of lawyer who is comfortable telling you when you are a dumbass. That kind of lawyer is invaluable.

- Corporations and LLCs are not the same thing. You can elect, as an LLC, to be taxed as a corporate entity, but that's a question between you, your deity of choice, and your tax professional (who I encourage you to think of, in this venue, as your deity of choice).

- IANAL, IANYL, and TINLA, but you will notice that many don't-dig-for-gold-sell-shovels outfits like Clerky will tell you you want to be a C-Corp because, as their website says, it's the best for "high growth startups". I assume you are not a "high growth startup". I would look at LLCs long before I looked at a C-Corp and an S-Corp long before a C-Corp. Minimize your hassles as best you can because otherwise it'll bite you in the ass later; IMO and IME, this means "default to an LLC".

- Formation is a moderate pain in the ass. I used Harvard Business Services for registration and continue to use them for registered agent services. No relationship, they just work fine and I don't have to think about it much. https://www.delawareinc.com

- Single-member LLCs are the easiest way to manage your stuff, if not the most tax-advantaged way. (I do this because I optimize for simplicity.) Effectively you just file a Schedule C with your personal income taxes.

- Once you've formed, get an EIN immediately. You can do it online, it takes like ten seconds. It will help with the next point.

- Regardless of how you do it, it is incumbent upon you to do some real careful management of funds. The second you get that LLC, go to your bank and open a business checking account. Route everything business-related through it. Eventually you will, if you're successful, want to take money out and that's fine--but having this structure to start will make it a lot easier to, if in the worst case, demonstrate enough separation to retain your limited liability if you get sued into the ground.

- Relatedly, I like QuickBooks Self-Employed for keeping track of revenue and expenses. It's free if you use TurboTax.

- If you're successful, get ready to file taxes quarterly. QuickBooks Self-Employed has helped me deal with that stuff, too, and if you make enough to have to file quarterly then it'll help you with reminders, etc. about that.
> Does Europe have some way to require its ISP's to firewall you off or blackhole your DNS?

Not in a systematic EU-wide way. Courts sometimes force individual ISPs to blackhole websites used for copyright infringement.

I guess if your company ignores the GDPR, it's treated as an illegal organization. So you may still be able to provide your service in the EU, but people cannot legally pay you, including paying you for ads.
Meanwhile, people started to believe that Google reads their mind and society evolved the way they behave as The Internet transforms the consequences for acts such as chatting or posting things in public (or having certain opinions in public)... I think GDPR same as other laws protecting citizens from The Internet failed to protect the user, even if it was a good first try, to begin with. Hope some standardization will come in the future to prevent all cookies or some HTML tag standard or whatever.
If you start out with an opinion and look for evidence to support it, yeah, that is biased. But it doesn't mean it's not a useful contribution to the conversation. Certainly it's better than not looking for evidence!
If you're only moving packets, you generally have nothing to fear until the EU develops into an empire, at which point there's a good chance that they will have a mandatory firewall mechanism (some members already do impose firewall rules on ISPs through the courts, AFAIK).

If you have no business in the EU, generally the worst they'll do is censor your website.
> If there are no consequences, why don't US tech companies just completely ignore it?

Once you grow big enough the EU will inevitably have leverage over you: Servers rented in the EU to lower latency, payment streams from EU customers, offices in the EU to get talent, subsidiaries created for tax reasons, executives on vacation, employees on conferences, money spent on advertising, etc.

If you are a startup in SV the EU migh not have much direct pressure it can apply, but how would an investor react when given the choice of "we could spend some more money now, or we could do nothing and be significantly limited once we grow to a certain size, basically unable to do anything significant in one of the largest economies of the world".
I've skimmed through it, and it's a fine guide if you're starting a traditional startup that plans to raise money.

If you're starting any other kind of business it's a little over kill.

Generally registering an LLC, applying for a business license and then requesting a Tax ID number from the IRS is really all you need for a web based business of 1 person.
It is 100 times worse to be stuck in a position where you can't learn anything and your title is lower than what your actual skill is.

For example, I have been yearning for a position as a distributed systems engineer. Even though I don't have the experience for it, I highly doubt I will ever find a job that can keep up with my rate of learning.

You too can learn things faster than how long it takes for them to figure out you don't know. It is just a matter of dedication. Stay in a couple of weekends and read a lot of tutorials.

There's a lot of mythicism in software development. Developers get a big head because they solve complicated things all day long. It is hard to give a chance to someone with no experience.

My advice is to take the opportunity. Regardless of what happens, you will learn a lot.
Or they'll block payment processors from transferring money from EU customers to you

It's hard to imagine what a startup would be doing that makes them interesting enough for the EU to notice and want to levy fines, yet be completely out of reach.
Yes, it has social security benefits. They aren’t especially generous but they’re a lot more than £5 a week (plus unemployed people can usually get a significant chunk of their rent paid).
> Of all the places I could waste time on-line, HN really is one of the better ones

That's the main problem with it. Other places are obviously such nonsense that I'm not even tempted. HN has this quality where it tricks you into thinking (feeling?) that it might be worthwhile. And the worst thing is - it might be true. I have no idea, but I do know that it's by far my biggest time sink.
Slow Light
Here is an interactive article (https://www.theguardian.com/environment/ng-interactive/2019/...) on The Guardian which explains: «Air pollution may be damaging every organ and virtually every cell in the human body».

The Air Quality Bot helps you check the air quality index and get an explanation about what it means for you and your family. It works in Telegram and Messenger.
TL;DW from the video

>Spacecraft orbiting the Earth have remained in space since the 1950's and may last for centuries more, but spacecraft orbiting close to the moon can crash within weeks. The reason for this is the lunar gravity field is lumpy, with geological features making the smooth orbits of space probes distort until they hit the surface.
The first version was made in 70's so maybe it made sense since they where dealing with letters and perhaps the word didn't have the connotations it does today.

Anybody got some info on the etymology and the practice of labeling alpha and beta. Apart from obvious that it is the first and second version. Why is not gamma a thing for example?
The OP is not talking about starting an investor-bait C-Corp, though. That's what Clerky specializes in.

Unless there's something not mentioned in the OP, he doesn't need a board, he doesn't need shares, he doesn't have a partner. He needs a disregarded entity.