skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> I've found that "I don't even get what the word is supposed to mean" is someone's first experience with tech fear.

This is a gross misrepresentation of the actual problem affecting the "serverless" fad, which is the buzzword overload accompanied by a lack of objective definitions. Function-as-a-service (FaaS) is an objective, clear-cut concept, but "serverless computing" is supposed to be a more general term where FaaS is only a realization of the concept. Yet, by keeping the concept as a buzzword then the proponents actually avoid having to argue the merits and the advantages of this sort of architecture, thus contributing to the growing skepticism.
I was using Chrome on Android (Pixel 3a) in case that's helpful :)
> It's also naive to think that politics is going to reverse that change - it's a technological problem.

The problem itself is technological, but do you believe the solution is (solely) technological?

Considering the technical aspect of the problem is well enough understood, if politics "can't" fix this, then what's plan B?
We have a collective based system, not an individual based one. So everybody goes to the same schools with the same curriculum with the same baseline opportunities.

It's not optimized for individual success at all. So the people who win are those who take individualized action above and beyond the norm.

If you do what everybody else does, you get what everybody else gets.
Well I think the balance of power is at least changing on the media site. It's getting more and more difficult for traditional newspapers and media outlets to stay afloat, and (as much as it may be unpopular to some), social media, YouTube, blogs etc are probably going to replace it altogether at some point or another.

Whether that's a good or bad thing is another question entirely.

But social media and modern tech has certainly also created a bread and circuses style situation for a large percentage of the population too, and it's probably done quite a bit to dissuade people from actually voting or taking part in the political process as well (thanks to the availablity of 'feel good' outrages and tribal spats on Twitter and the likes)
Sorry, to be clear, it switches all of your windows like a separate desktop. I like having both windows available simultaneously. I realize this is a nit picky complaint, and I am in the minority.
> There should be multiple identity providers

I think we already have that: Google ;)

The only difference is that Google doesn't provide identity verification, only identity validation when you have previous knowledge of a Google account being associated to a user account.
> When you are just using a VM - it’s your responsibility to keep the VMs and the runtimes patched, design a scaling solution, etc.

Your comment did nothing to address the point, which is that your definiiton of "serverless" is actually just a buzzword used to refer to the old as the web commercial practice of managed hosting.
That was my resolution a couple of months back. Signed off from Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and Reddit (never was on any other platform making crazy things with your snaps). Retaining accounts on HN and GitHub.

I miss nothing, actually feel good staying away from all the toxic comments on Twitter.

I did not need Light Phone or burn a hole in my pocket to achieve this. Plain simple determination.
And cut its expected lifespan, already only 2-4 years, by 2 years.

No more software updates isn't such a big deal on dumbphones with limited capabilities, but, on a smartphone, I really do want to be getting those security patches.
I think it's generational, and it will get better in the 2030-2040s at the latest, when millennials become the dominant generation. The ethos of climate awareness is simply not present enough in previous generations, the seeds were simply too few, too weak, too late. They quite literally were not born in a world where 'it' was a thing.

Here's my other comment below for details.[1]

This is compoundd by the fact that "professional politicians" feel compelled/incentivized to lie over and over again in their career, and it becomes easier and easier to lie as you do it — kind of a psychological response to cognitive dissonance, a defense mechanism. Survival instinct, at this level, is definitely individual, internal, and may completely shut down or even oppose the survival of the country, civilization, species. You just lie your way out to save yourself and your family and friends, and to hell with everyone and everything else because you're not super(wo)man. So human.

The kind of collective instinct for survival (what Jung would probably have called a collective form of consciousness, that is opened to others, bigger-than-each-of-us) that is required for such higher-level evolution (civ, species) is more generational, imho.

This is all mostly deduced/hypothesized from sociology and political science studies, with a tad of psychology etc. I mean, I haven't found much contradictory arguments to these apparent "truths", however unable we feel to explain them. It takes generations to meaningfully evolve civilizational paradigms, there's just no speeding up history in that regard. We merely leap forward big time when conditions are ripe and a particularly exceptional figure (or group thereof) manages to steer things "the right way" — one of these.

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21955196
The downside is you get only a year or two of security updates.
He died recently and I found that the new york times did a pretty good job of not making him out to be some sort of god in his obit: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/14/books/harold-bloom-dead.h...
Your logic assumes everything in the world to be equal. The world is messy. If we don't start we all lose. The Internet wasn't bootstrapped because the world's countries all agreed on exactly the right way to implement networks and protocols and there are countries that have both contributed very little opposed to those that have contributed a lot. Moving to clean energy has huge economic advantage. So, again, your get on board or be destroyed is counterproductive and irrational. Heavy, one off, polluters can be dealt with after the fact.
It never cease to amaze me how blind are people in so-called democracies.

People of Iraq were suffering exactly how under Saddam?

Now many of them are dead because of the war. Infrastructure destroyed. Many people are suffering from ecological disaster (depleted uranium and toxic waste where us bases were located).

And still there's no peace and no democracy. To everyone in the world outside the US is obvious that war was for the oil, not some mythical "democracy". And the life of people of Iraq had become much worse as the result.
How to use your competition to predict the future of your market
Everyone and their grandmother (literally) uses proxies and VPNs in Iran. Telegram is also banned and censored, yet it remains the most popular messaging/social network in Iran.
> Affixing your own oxygen mask before helping others is a decent tagline for capitalism.

Not the point of the article, but this is a terrible tagline for capitalism. You put on your O2 mask before helping others not out of selfishness, but because if you don't, you literally won't be able to help others - you could be unconscious in a matter of seconds.

It is not necessary to be that economically selfish just in order to help others.
I imagine sim swapping is a thing over there as well, maybe even easier to do than in the US.
I suppose you and I have very different notions of the word 'amazing'.
It is entirely possible, except nowhere it happened in an useful way. Where there is more rain, it tends to fall in bursts, with flooding. Because moister and hotter atmosphere is more unstable, it's basic principle in the meteorology. And the problem is, our agriculture(and not just it) can't cope with that. Proposals to compromise yields to improve land's stability/water retention are met with hostility.
If we pulled the trigger, surely the cause of the bullet firing must be us then?
The parent category from the original posting is a list of Great Books lists.
http://sonic.net/~rteeter/greatbks.html

I like Clifton Fadiman's _New Lifetime Reading Plan_. This has a larger number of selections, each with a shorter (two or three pages) context and review. Teeter's list from Fadiman is here:

http://sonic.net/~rteeter/grtfad3.html

Fadiman's book:

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/249186.The_New_Lifetime_...
> There are a lot of useless arrests for minor crimes like jaywalking which makes the residents of these neighborhoods hostile to the police. (These arrests are driven by the debunked theory of broken window policing.) Simultaneously, there's not enough effort put into solving serious crimes like murder.

Slightly off context but I think that the solution to this is some kind of quota and or tier system to laws and policing. Basically to restrict the amount of policing that may be done for things like jaywalking and traffic violations while the violent crime rate is above a certain threshold.

I have been held at gun point twice in my life as part of armed robbery and hijacking and neither time did I even consider for a moment that the police would find the people who did it. But if I do 60 km/h in a 40 km/h zone they will follow me to the end of the earth to get me to pay them.
As the EU has recently hinted, climate may (I'd say pretty much guaranteed, only question is when) become a key point in any trading arrangements. Others will follow. Whether soon enough remains to be seen.

Want to sell to us? Prove your climate credentials, carbon accounting etc. No? Ok, your goods get the carbon levy.

What's eventually left is only the rogue states that refuse where sanctions, blockade or ultimately war may actually be the answer.

Really only comes down to how deep is the abyss we appear to be staring into... Though this can sometimes prompt enough action to get international laws passed.
Was not having a TV super trendy somewhere? I know plenty of people who don't have a Facebook account, but we're the only household I know of that's committed to watching their Netflix on a 13" laptop screen.
So then you support either Genocide to reduce the population, or complete economic collapse to reduce materialism.

i.e the "Electric prices have to sky rocket to save the planet" which impacts the poorest families the most and will cause massive human suffering.

So you want suffering today to prevent the possibility of suffering in 100 years completely discounting any possibility of the technological solution

Sorry I can not get behind that, but if you believe in that so much why don't you start with your own life, stop using Computers, cars, electricity, Refrigeration, and every other modern life convenience.

Go to a pure 10,000 years ago life style, no medicine, no power, and only food you can find or grow with your own hands no machines, no modern fabric's.. nothing
I already own a device that does just the basics, the cellular Apple Watch:

- make calls

- text messages

- calculator

- navigation

- plays music and podcasts

- and can track my heart rate and speed when I am running.

It lets me leave my phone when I don’t want distractions. When I need something more full featured, I have my phone. When I want something full featured with a larger screen, I have an iPad. Calls and text messages go to all three devices and things are synced where appropriate.
YouGov data shows 1 in 5 tourists are now interested in visiting Saudi Arabia
check out e.foundation. /e/ is a linageOS based android distribution that does all the work of getting rid of stuff that affects your privacy.
I think the main sources are lightning strikes, accidental human ignition and deliberate arson. A lot of people have been arrested for deliberate arson recently (https://www.theaustralian.com.au/nation/nsw-firefronts-uncon...).

I would guess a combination of winds and high fuel load means a small fire can become an uncontrollable roaring blaze very quickly. I guess also a lot of fires could be started in areas that are not easily accessible to fire fighters so it might not even be an option to stop them while they are small.
Isn't it similar to trickle down theory, though? Give the wealthy money first and then it will fall to others.
Where did I say it wasn't us? I'm talking about the majority factor today still being human activity or whether it's been eclipsed by something else.
Notes on Technical Writing
> social media and smart phones will bring the printing press to the least advantaged, resulting in a more homogeneous society. The contrary has come true.

These things take time. It took centuries for the actual printing press to lead to a more harmonious society (viz. The Enlightenment), whereas its early effects were just as disruptive as those of modern-day social media. Crazy conspiracy theories galore.
>He also has a weird tendency of using "Western Civilization" and "America" as synonyms

This is definitely not unique to Harold Bloom.
Ok, I thought this was common knowledge.
It's not exactly easy to just "put down" infrastructure. In fact that is the single hardest piece of this puzzle. Technology can't defeat the will of the people, which is still firmly behind dedicating as much space as possible to driving and parking cars [in Texas and most of the US].
Maybe I should have prefaced my last sentence in the original comment with a fat /sarcasm tag. I know it's a sensitive topic but I appreciate you pointing out the insensitivity in my reply.
So I'm presuming you're limiting this discussion to technical books, and not fiction, etc.

As if you're not limiting it to non-fiction, then yes you're missing out.

If you're limiting it to non-fiction, then yes. You're still missing out. Some concepts take more than a blog entry to understand fully. You might get some aspect of a concept but not all the facets.
> It's cheaper, sometimes it works the way you want it to, but you always feel a bit restricted.

The "cheapness" argument is open to debate. So far the main argument I've seen for Function-as-a-Service offerings is that it's cheaper than just paying for a VM instance to run a dedicated service. To start off, a dedicated VM can cost about 5€ a month, which represents the absolute total saving that is supposed to be driving this discussion. Even if we ignore this fact, if you already have VM instances running somewhere then you certainly have enough computing capacity to spare to run these compute tasks without having to incur in extra charges per function call.
Hardly a whimper for them.
Except that schools are drastically different depending on your neighborhood, so poor kids have far less exposure to knowledge and mentoring that would allow them to succeed individually.

I taught science across the Chicago school system. One of my worst schools literally had 3 kids exceeding standards...only 3 out of 500. It's simply not on the children's shoulders alone, they need force multipliers like good teachers, computers, home stability, even food and sleep and safety from gang violence are not assured.

So, individual action is multiplied by opportunity and mentoring.
I can't help to just keep blatantly reposting this for each and every HN article about buckle spring keyboards:

https://github.com/zevv/bucklespring

"This project emulates the sound of my old faithful IBM Model-M space saver bucklespring keyboard while typing on my notebook, mainly for the purpose of annoying the hell out of my coworkers."

Enjoy!
“If the worker and his boss enjoy the same television program and visit the same resort places, if the typist is as attractively made up as the daughter of her employer, if the Negro owns a Cadillac, if they all read the same newspaper, then this assimilation indicates not the disappearance of classes, but the extent to which the needs and satisfactions that serve the preservation of the Establishment are shared by the underlying population.” (Herbert Marcuse, 1961).
It will be too late by then, way too late.
-Why are the number of seemingly remarkable people growing? It’s a moving window. As society’s body of knowledge grows, the youth will always be ahead because they can stand on the shoulders of those before them. When compared to their peers, the gap between what is remarkable and what is not is smaller.

—I disagree with the idea that the economy has any “goals.” I think it exists naturally, and what we call an “economy” is actually just the sum total of individuals deploying capital to get things they want.

Insisting we can engineer the economy (which is really just individuals, perverse incentives and all examined as an aggregate) in some way to solve a crisis of meaning for “unremarkables” misses the point, and I would even argue is very dangerous. Dangerous because as soon as the bottom 51% realize they can vote themselves the wealth of the top 49% we slide right down the slippery slope into socialism. Which has done nothing but decimate the human spirit of everyone who’s lived under it for centuries.

-Which brings up the next bit: the author correctly identifies a crisis of meaning (rising deaths of disparities) but incorrectly asserts that the issue is economic. The lack of social fabric in the western world is causing the despair spiral. You don’t get into dire emotional straits leading to opiate addiction if you’re simply broke, the key catalyst is often a lack of hope for the future & a lack of social support system in the community.
So does Iran - if the price of oil goes up they pay more domestically as well. As it happens they subsidize the price of energy internally but that brings more problems then it solves.
>What will you do with countries who refuse to comply?

What are you on about? They can't "refuse to comply" in the above scenario, because it's a matter of pricing in carbon on imports. They can either comply with a process to verify that all carbon inputs have already been neutralized, pay the cost to neutralize them, or else America/EU/Japan/whoever else participates will simply slap on a very conservative carbon price themselves. No cooperation is necessary, if they don't want to bother their products will simply be priced somewhat higher than if they had and thus they'll probably sell less.

>Is this really an existential crisis for our species?

Well, yeah, but at this point a lot could be done just by the first world fixing its markets to properly internalize carbon emissions and make all fossil fuels carbon neutral, which will then also help make a path for ramping up of negative emissions. China is certainly one of the biggest economies, but even they aren't in a position to just give up on all exports to the first world without more expense than just participating in a proper free market. It's in their interest too anyway.
I'm in Canada. It's legal regardless.
We changed the title from "Somebody is trying to patent Signal's double-ratchet crypto", which broke the site guidelines by editorializing—and which, based on how common it is for patent applications to be misread on HN, I suspect someone will point out is not strictly true.

If you want to say what you think is important about an article, do not do so by cherry-picking a detail to put in the title. Instead, post it is a comment in the thread. Then your view will be on a level playing field with everyone else's.

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Edit: since https://twitter.com/AlecMuffett/status/1213356702399115267 was the context for this, it would have been ok to submit that itself. Note how that tweet doesn't make the same claim. It just asks the question. So even the tweet was editorialized here.
You’ve never worked with C code that had to run on both big endian and little endian systems that had to share a common byte protocol. Where two bytes in the same order can mean something completely different.

There are a lot of things “confusing” about computer science when you don’t take the time to learn it.
Carbondale, PA tried flooding and other techniques for the time (1950's), but ultimately the only way to extinguish it was by digging it out. It took about 10 years and it is estimated more earth than the Panama Canal was moved for the dig. It came within 20 feet of expanding into the core of the city and leading to what happened in Centrailia.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbondale_mine_fire
Ah I'm in Canada and my friends grow and I usually get it free :)
What bothers me is that one can easily enter the realm of complete and total paranoia and disregard every opinion he does not like as a 'foreign state propaganda', be that Russia, China, Iran or some other country.

Removing 5K accounts for a nation of 81M people is like removing 15-20K accounts for the US, so it is basically nothing, IMO. Consider that back in 2017, there was an article stating that "As many as 48 million Twitter accounts aren’t people, says study" [0]. Until we speak about millions of accounts, these 4,779 are nothing in terms of influencing public opinion. I will happily sell a Brooklyn bridge to any authoritarian leader who believes that 5K fake twitter bots that are not followed by real people can make a difference.

[0] https://www.cnbc.com/2017/03/10/nearly-48-million-twitter-ac...
No. Evo Morales is a would-be dictator who ignored term limits and rigged an election to stay in power. He was forced out of power because the Bolivian army refused to kill Bolivian people to suppress protests against him.

The facts to counter the propaganda:

- https://www.economist.com/leaders/2019/11/16/was-there-a-cou...

- https://www.oas.org/en/media_center/press_release.asp?sCodig...
Absolutely, just the act of removing yourself from distractions and engaging with one piece makes you flex different brain muscles. I personally think you should just grab something that piques your interest, football, Murder, a beach read, whatever and give it maybe thirty minutes a day till you finish and see if you get value from it.
The Holon Project: Turning 52 books into computer code
Hey quibbler, you defend a castle (not a moat).
There is a package for gcloud (and also googleapis), and we are closing in to generate AWS API client libraries from the API definition JSONs.
I'm not too sure about non-fiction books -- especially popular science -- but reading (good) fiction books is definitely worth it. You might think that fiction is nothing but made up stories, but usually it contains several life lessons that were hard-earned for the author and they're placed within a relevant context.

As for technical non-fiction books, some of them can be really good and irreplacable.
Most software companies I have worked for, encourages filing patents just to build their arsenal and increase their market value in times of acquisitions or patent wars. They are not focused on creativity, innovation or advancement.

I have seen a patent to use SSH to administer a storage system! It was just depressing and sad to see such patents granted and the inventors bragging about it.
> I have thousands of non-fiction (mostly self-improvement) books in my reading list

“An honest bookstore would post the following sign above its ‘self-help’ section: ‘For true self-help, please visit our philosophy, literature, history and science sections, find yourself a good book, read it, and think about it.’”

— Roger Ebert (https://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/larger-than-life-1996)
"Democratically elected" is a really odd way to say "defied a referendum on term limits and rigged an election".
>If we don't start we all lose.

I didn't suggest we don't start. I suggested the "everyone pass laws" plan has a fatal flaw the size of China and India.

>your get on board or be destroyed is counterproductive and irrational.

That's not my plan, it's yours. "Laws" are the get on board or be destroyed approach. You can do it domestically pretty easy, but it's much harder across national boundaries.

>Heavy, one off, polluters can be dealt with after the fact.

China already emits more than twice the US CO2. China is on track to double its emissions by 2030. How far are you willing to go to stop them? It's a very simple question.