skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> Is using your political office to benefit your spouse's business a criminal offense in California? If not, it damned well should be. This is pretty blatant corruption.

Receiving bribes and 'integrating' them into economy, through a network of relatives, is not that uncommon, unfortunately.

More sophisticated forms take 250K per hour speech fees, book+documentary 'deals', and buying expensive property much cheaper than market price (from the willing 'donors').

To find info on links between a politician and his/her bribe loundering network, you have to use non-google/non-yahoo search engine. And plugin the names of the relatives.

As examples,
Pick federal Congress representatives from your district that have not changed for, say, 7-10 terms or more, and that live 4mln+ homes. And do the search.

Politicians who sit on the committees dispensing money (eg aid), or government contracts tend to be more corrupt (proportional to how much money they oversee being dispensed out).
There's also 1 person who is the whole company, a single point of failure comes with the territory.
As far as I know, 1Password has never suffered any hacks or critical vulnerabilities the way that LassPass has. I have used both in the past; I would never, ever recommend LastPass to anyone. 1Password, however? A nearly perfect product (with great support)
> The "puppet masters" are just the American voters

If we're using Occam's Razor, I think "Defense Contractors" would make a closer shave.
> I'm not saying any of this is fair or unfair, because I'm not an economist so I don't believe I have a full understanding of the situation.

It’s unfair.
This feels like bragging but I also run a one man company and the loneliness is what I enjoy most. Granted, I only work from 08:45 to 14:30 and some hours in the evening, because I bring my kids to school and I pick them up in the afternoon, but the hours when I’m alone, I am 100% productive. When the kids are at home I mostly do some kind of manual labor to get some sort of exercise. Right now I’m building a shed. Last year I built my home office/guest house.

To make up for the missing social interaction I play football with friends, do some consultancy jobs on the side and I help where I can with my son’s football club.

This really is my dream job and I enjoy it thoroughly. I have no problems staying motivated and every day I have loads of inspiration.

The moment I lose motivation will be a sign for me to sell everything and start something new. I ran an online marketing company before this and that was really exhausting for an introvert like me. Selling that company was the best decision I ever made, apart from marrying my wife.
Cryptocurrency can do this, but Bitcoin artificially keeps the blocksize to 1.6KB/s so people think that small transactions are not practical in a general sense, since they aren't practical there.
Take out US and some EU countries* and probably "All living former presidents, parliamentarians, mayors etc should be either in prison or under investigation for corruption charges."

*Even they profit from their office and do favors using the office but it's not a quid pro quo.
Unfortunately the service that is free will always be more popular and ultimately win over more users. People have decided that paying with their privacy is better for them. I really wish paying 10 cents to use the service was the norm, but alas I doubt it will ever happen.
Security by obscurity?
The platform is only known by rubyist, this mean that you are either a javascript guy or a phpist one ;) ;) ;)

Sorry that private joke was to easy not to be made....
Would you share anything about your lifestyle business?

What industry? How long you worked on it, etc?
You wouldn’t.

If you buy a Tesla online, for example, that’s a Shopify site.
This feature exists on Android. I can sign in to my chess app with login credentials stored by Chrome (as an example)
Respectfully: why should you be considered a fair steward of trust for them, either? Those people shouldn't be using a startup-backed, no-accountability platform either.
> "Dark definitely won't be for everyone, but it seems to me like it will empower a lot of people to bring their ideas to reality more easily than before."

I agree.

> "There is a large - and growing - population of technically-minded people who understand the core concepts you're referring to (REST APIs, databases, HTTP, etc) and have ideas or needs for applications, but don't have the experience required to build non-naive implementations of their ideas."

Sure, but one could argue the Darklang approach is actually not that far from a "naive implementation" of those ideas. There's only so much you can do with prefab code and lock-in tooling. There's definitely a market for "Wix for SaaS software", but does Darklang strike the right balance?
Something that's easy to forget is that web browsers generally cost money (or were at best adware like Opera) back then. Microsoft bundling IE in gave them an advantage because users didn't have to pay additional money for a web browser in addition to windows, and so were very unlikely to bother with something like Netscape. These days browsers are considered more valuable as platforms than as products, so nobody really sells them like that anymore.
Discussed at the time: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9402728
I’d do the same or move to something like a Librem 5 except that my iphone is a useful platform for lots of little proprietary utility software.

Eg Shimano have a utility for updating the firmware on my bike (oh what a time to be alive...) they have software for doing that from Linux.

Keeping an old older iPhone around just to cover that is useful. Not sure what I’ll do when it dies or looses support.
Well, Amazon/Ebay/Shopify/Etsy all are platforms that let other people sell things. I get your point (and might even agree with you), however if you look at it from the perspective of "I want to sell something... where do I go?", they're competition.

They do discovery, checkout, inventory, fulfillment, etc. It just happens to have a slightly different approach than the others.
I don’t think that’s their intention. By being the anti-amazon, it’s about having each store be it’s own brand, supplying the backend plumbing infrastructure instead.
Thanks for the breakdown. Snowden faces the possibility of lifelong solitary confinement in the US from what I understand, which is a fate worse than death in my opinion.
Tesla uses Shopify to sell cars -- I'd bet that just a few relatively large companies are the cause of that huge revenue number. Doubly so if eBay only reports their actual cut of sales as revenue instead of the entire sale price.
Again, comparisons with physical retail are moot because, in your grocery store, nobody can walk in off the street and start selling off the shelves. The grocery store is not an open e-commerce platform but a curated service with physical scarcity.

People don't have an issue with Amazon default sorting to best selling either. The problem is that Amazon is slowly pushing out the competition on their platform to focus their own products and labels. If there's any analogy, it would be similar Google removing search result links to Bing or Yandex.
It really is. You can use manage services through AWS to set this up at almost any scale including encoding, transcoding, global CDNs, etc.
This sort of thing makes me sick, and I'm familiar with the feeling because I've seen this several times in my career. But the older I get, the more a tiny kernel of respect grows in me for the kind of person that can parley a modicum of technical understanding into an unassailable political position in a large company, and succeed -- at least in terms of money and influence -- despite the opportunity costs I've witnessed. You just kind of have to hand it to people like this. I guess. Maybe that's the only way I stay sane at this point.
Monero (getmonero.org) has many of the properties of cash on the internet. Definitely more so than Bitcoin. It's surprising how few cryptocurrencies take privacy by default seriously.
I’m not sure if it is possible to give you any feedback on a closed source, invite only beta release but I do have a question:

Where is this hosted? Asking as an EU based user with GDPR requirements.
> Florida should prioritize providing safe drinking water for its residents, rather than bottling that water to resell elsewhere.

Does bottled water actually get exported/shipped long distances?
Good grief! Thank you for the heads up, I'll make sure to steer completely clear of Samsung TVs, at a minimum.
Go was designed by ken Tompson. Arguably the best programmer alive.
Does it matter ?

I thought that fresh water aquifers in Florida were predicted to get contaminated with seawater fairly soon.
Because they didn't know how to run the new business.

It's the same story as when Sears rose to prominence: they saw a business model the other mail-order retailers didn't understand.

The irony is Sears started as a mail-order catalog but couldn't get back to the old model in time. But of course their large management structures couldn't move as fast as small company with somebody like Bezos at the helm who could just make calls on the spot.
nobody wants to buy subprime debt.

the reason why people did was because the instruments they were buying had a fraudulent A rating slapped on them.

As soon as word got out that these thing were dodgy, they were junked. Or sold on to some sucker and then junked.

the regulated market only work if illegality is minimised.
"should be" and "are" are two entirely different things.
This is too close to home! My company is being sued by a company claiming the suffix KEY.
Not really the same thing though, Amazon/eBay/Etsy you can browse multiple "stores". Shopify is just a platform so it really isn't that fair. It'd be like including every single Magento powered site to say Magento is the X largest platform.
It helps if you email hn@ycombinator.com and tell them that. Dan replied to me in about 60 seconds.
> Not in dollar terms, especially when dollars are being deliverately managed so that the dollar cost of a labor hour increases over time.

This is sophomoric relativism - achieving lower day-to-day prices is exactly how market competition works. It's tautological to justify a policy of changing the value of a dollar by rejecting analysis in terms of an unchanged dollar. When creating a new variable, you have to analyze it in terms of existing variables.

> lower nominal (dollar) prices would not [help make up for the reduced demand for labor]

It very clearly would if businesses said "we're going to reduce everyone's hours by 20%" while everyone's expenses went down 20% - everyone's budget would remain the same.

I'll give you that this won't happen so pleasantly uniformly. But posit E who remains employed, and U who is laid off. If the expenses of four such E's go down, they now have extra money to spend locally to create a new job for U. Whereas if the E's expenses remain the same, then U's only options to get money are to head towards where it is being printed or compete with the E's in a race to the bottom (which is why the price of easily-interchangeable labor is now set by "minimum wage" rather than the market).

> that's not what targeting low positive inflation is.

An explicit goal of inflationary monetary policy is to drive "full employment". So yes, pushing everyone to keep working full time is one of its overt goals. A goal that is regressive in the face of needing ever-less labor.

I'm obviously not going to convince you on the merits of this, especially in a few comments, and that's fine. It's just fundamentally dishonest to discard a political viewpoint by condescending from a paradigm that rules out said political viewpoint by construction.
I don't understand why Mozilla doesn't implement a native web3 wallet directly in Firefox. This would help onboard people more easily to Ethereum & EVM-compatible decentralized networks. People wouldn't have to install MetaMask or download another desktop wallet/browser app.
It's unnecessarily tricky to talk about what an average person "needs." It's pretty tough to justify any cell phone features as a "need" except perhaps for emergency phone calls (and yet, 20 years ago it seems most people didn't "need" that either).

High-end phone cameras are just really really nice, and they do tend to receive regular improvements that are noticeable to people who are interested in photography or just pay close attention. In 2006 I paid $325 for a Canon PowerShot SD870 IS that was pretty nice at the time, and almost any photo I took on that camera would look noticeably bad today compared to flagship smartphone cameras.
A lot of people can do some magic stuff when it comes to spreadsheets (and as a self-taught software engineer, I am not one of them), but does that same logic really apply to API endpoints?

Look at how many acronyms are in the intro video alone ... the narrator says "we'll just use REPL ...". Does someone playing around in Google Sheets say "yes, REPL, great choice!" or do their eyes glaze over?

What about when you tell them they have to learn "Darklang"?
If society collapses, those who survive will be those who can work together most effectively, not those with the most guns.
I thought the reason we get a fraction of the theoretical is because so many phones compete? And with more numerous and shorter range towers there will be less competition, so we'll get closer to theoretical speed.
> I think there are more than one reason why someone may ask "Why not Rust?"

Strongly agree, that's how I concluded the blog post :)
I'm kind of experencing this right now, a remote worker whose working on a thing solo. Feel like I need to dip back into a team for a while
"I call it my billion-dollar mistake…At that time, I was designing the first comprehensive type system for references in an object-oriented language. My goal was to ensure that all use of references should be absolutely safe, with checking performed automatically by the compiler. But I couldn’t resist the temptation to put in a null reference, simply because it was so easy to implement. This has led to innumerable errors, vulnerabilities, and system crashes, which have probably caused a billion dollars of pain and damage in the last forty years."
– Tony Hoare, inventor of ALGOL W.
Having not checked in on Shopify for a good few years, kudos to Tobias and his team for all they've achieved in growing to the level they have.

I still remember using liquid templates back in the early days of Rails as it was a problem no-one else in the space was really running at.

I had absolutely no idea they were making that kind of revenue these days. It's nice to see that hard work can still pay off.
> Does bottled water actually get exported/shipped long distances?

Have you ever seen Fiji water?
This seems like a mis-characterization of the information in the article. According to the piece, Snowden provided this data to the South China Morning Post directly, not the Chinese government. This article also makes no mention of this information being used as an attempt to gain asylum in Hong Kong.
Amazon is about 6 months away from total collapse and they know it. Bezos and all his cronies will be squeezing every last dime out until then. At which point, his wife will sell all their stock the day before without a fart from the SEC.
This is a great read, but I'm slightly uncomfortable with the thought of technological progress as a deterministic process and of ourselves as mere victims of it. I think (and I'm not alone in this, Judy Wajcman and other people doing social studies of technology have written extensively around the subject) that social norms and habits can shape technological development as much as it shapes them, so maybe that's a starting point?

I recommend reading "Social Acceleration: Ethical and Political Consequences of a Desynchronized High-Speed Society" as a starting point, and possibly then "Pressed for Time" by Judy Wajcman.
This may be too ambitious- throwing away control over code, editors, infrastructure, and having a sub-par offline experience seems like a dangerous move.

After watching both videos, Dark just looks like a more managed version of AWS Lambda, with a fancy proprietary editor.
The throughoutput is only one of the problems. There are more:

1: You need to download and install software to use current cryptocurrencies. And users hate that.

2: Turning Fiat into Bitcoin and vica versa is not easy.

3: It is less private then cash.

4: Volatility of the value. Users would want something pegged to their currency of choice.
> So finally with getrandom() Linux has a way to securely generate random data without unnecessarily blocking, and now Linus seems to be floating the idea to break it again!

Yes, getrandom() works pretty much the "right" way. But the problem is that it still can block during boot, indefinitely. And nobody really wants their computer to just stop working, because it can't guarantee that the entropy is not theoretically possibly "bad". Real users do not want this. But it happens.

The root of this is security paranoia. Security people didn't want the RDRAND instruction to be trusted. SystemD didn't credit the entropy pool when adding the saved seed file from the previous boot, until very recently it got an option to credit the entropy pool. These things are all mixed into the pool, and on any desktop machine /dev/urandom is absolutely fine, but security expert pressure has forced these systems to not trust that real entropy has been added from the many sources that are already implemented. You might be surprised how many people make this problem go away by running havaged, which provides very dubious entropy.
[Here's a link to the waitlist](http://goo.gl/forms/gRMRT1YBU4)
> If you've been a middle manager for 20 years there must be something wrong with you.

In my experience, the Army was the same. If you saw a 18 year E-6 he/she probably had a problem staying out of trouble or were just incompetent.

Edit(context): Active duty in a combat MOS.
Maybe his idea was that domestic postage fees would go down, so that this would be economically viable.
> The permit allows Nestlé to take one million gallons per day at no cost, with just a one-time $115 application fee.

This has virtually no impact on the aquifer:

> According to the United States Geological Survey, total withdrawals from the Floridan aquifer system in 2000 were ranked 5th highest of all principal aquifers in the Nation at 3,640 million gallons per day (Mgal/d)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Floridan_aquifer
What it shows is that Rust's aggressive approach to static linking means that it doesn't slot into build systems the same way that C/C++ code does. This has benefits for smaller projects, but it probably discourages use in larger projects.

I don't know what all of the trade-offs are, so I don't know where the current situation sits in this space. https://gist.github.com/rylev/0e3c3895dcb40b6a1c1cf8c427c01b... is the minutes of a session between the scary-custom-build-system people discussing (among other things) the pain points of cargo with their build systems.
This is definitely cool
Why didn’t I think of this
When Microsoft got busted for being anti-competitive, you could still download Netscape Navigator and use it.
I used to use flattr and thought the concept was sound. Until I saw that most of the creators I wanted to sponsor never bothered to sign up and collect their money.

Anyone else have experience with flattr or similar alternatives?

I figure with all the "block chain" interest we'd have seen something built on a cryptocurrency allowing "direct" microdonations to a website's "wallet"

EDIT: looks like coil is kinda of like flattr
where they aren't the whole system is corrupt, everyone gets a share and keep each other out of jail. My point was that "everyone" in power steals is most countries.
Yeah but that's from the perspective of buyers, so OP's point still stands.
Considering the largest offender is Nestle, I'd say yes. Bottled water here in Oregon almost always comes from California - which is a bit insane when we have so much water here locally.
It's back now, but that felt like a rather short-sighted decision from management :(

https://hardware.slashdot.org/story/19/07/22/1534200/dropbox...
That is exactly why I thought most bottled water is not exported/shipped long distances: I thought Fiji was an outlier in this industry.
It seems like you're presenting a false dichotomy, where the options are the bailouts we gave, or nothing. We could have bailed out the banks without rewarding all the bad actors involved at the same time, i.e. harsher terms for the bailouts.
What we actually did is broadly excuse impropriety in the financial sector.
"Tablets are better in some ways than e-readers but much worse in others. There's no killer does-everything-pretty-well e-reader solution yet. They rock for casual, lighter reading, though, which is probably a fairly high percentage of all book reading that happens."

True - and this, for me, is another benefit of eBooks; I can and do read the same eBook on multiple different devices depending on my current mix of needs or priorities.
A Brief History of Existential Threats to Open Source
Does it count as whistleblowing if 99.9% of the documents you leak don't describe anything illegal the US government did (the only one being phone metadata collection) and if far more of the documents leaked describe compromised foreign systems that will then be patched?

Obama is way smarter than anybody asking for clemency for Snowden.

China: https://www.scmp.com/news/hong-kong/article/1266777/exclusiv...

Pakistan: https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/docum...
Elm has parametric polymorphism.
Brain dump: Looks very cool. From what I can tell...

pros:

* No tooling to set up, don't have to think about project structure or computation (VMs or cloud functions)

* Don't have to think about databases, connection strings, etc

* Fast deployments

* Perfect for rapid prototyping or hackathons

cons:

* Vendor lock-in at the language and infrastructure level

* Not open source

* Have to learn a new language

Compared to serverless (for a CRUD application), I wouldn't have to write configuration to set up the API endpoints / dynamodb tables. Also, deployments would be super fast which closes the developer feedback loop. I shouldn't have to worry about emulating my stack locally or deploying my stack every time I want to test my code.

The cons make this very hard for me to buy though. My ideal framework would be open source in a popular language (JS / Go), runs on cloud (AWS / Azure / GCP), fast deployments (no cloudformation), low configuration / convention based (like nextjs), and integrates with popular NoSQL data stores (mongo, redis, etc). Basically it would be completely conventional with an opinioned data access and the ability to override features to add more complicated functionality like optimizing data access after the initial prototyping.
I'm an engineer at MSR working on VW, AMA.