skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The principle of common carriers, over which all (lawful) conduct is permitted, including postal, telegraph, and telephone services, as well as equal-time and community-access broadcast services, offer alternate models.

I'm finding the "private platform, no free-speech rights" argument increasingly thin on platforms aggreggating hundreds of millions or billions of eyes and ears, and increasingly inextricably bound to social, commercial, and governmental institutions and activities. At the same time, the wild west alternative has also proved untenable, with strong civil-rights groups including EFF and ACLU increasingly acknowledging and accommodating this reality.

There's a middle way.
> How about visiting a store that sells macbooks?

After lockdown of course...
A basic shell with just forks and execs binaries from $PATH and nothing more. Maybe, just maybe, file redirection. You won't have neither echo(1) or cat(1), you must reimplement them. Echo(1) is damn easy.
Thanks! I mostly agree.

I already use duckduckgo. It is not as good as Google used to be but a lot less annoying - and Google is not as good as it used to be either, so I consider duckduckgo best now. Also trying with Google after duckduckgo is faster than the other way around.

I already Signal but although more and more people join, nobody uses it for day-to-day texts and family updates.

Everyone I know uses Telegram and even after following all discussions here I'm fine with that.

> That's the same problem that a new social network is going to face. I think it's safe to say that if even Google with all their capital couldn't make it work, then it's going to be extremely difficult to find investors to bet on a random guy's idea.

Partly agree. But I think an Instagram or WhatsApp style bootstrapping of a new social network is still possible and no one has stepped up to take the plave of Google+.

Remember, it was Google that ran it. I suspect it was utterly mismanaged.

A number of things can work very well even if Google can't make it work.
running a server at home is still centralised though - you have one central server, one point of failure. Power cut at home? ISP disconnects you? DDoS? Front page on HN and your ADSL cant handle the load? Government censorsip or other tin-hatery? Your centralised server is down and people can't see your stuff.

The point of decentralised stuff is there is no centralised server, but rather the content is decentralised and thus available when things inevitably go offline. So if your home server goes offline for whatever reason then no biggie - some other node on the network serves your stuff instead.
If a service cannot be offered both responsibly and profitably, perhaps it shouldn't be allowed to exist?
IIRC Linux and Windows drivers turn trackpad events into mouse events so by the time the OS sees the movement there is no touchpad info.

Apple with tighter integration delivers the actual touchpad movement data and not a faked mouse event.

Windows 10 has had work done in this area too but not sure the details.
Mutation is a random process, so individuals that can mutate are more entropic than the ones that can't.

If we agree that mutations are desirable (in some cases) then this contradict the idea that individuals are only propagate the information to their future

>Individuals maximally propagate information from their past to their future.
I'd love to complain about all the meaningless parts of the article, but this website seems to detect my basic safety browser addons (uBlock Origin, uMatrix and Privacy Badger) and refuses to show me the content, giving me a lecture instead.

Most content is also available on non-spammy, ethical websites, and we shouldn't support bad actors.
TIL John Conway's son was once known as "the baby monster", and that Jupiter has a whole lot of elementary particles, but I can't quite grasp the rest of what I just read.

http://www.ams.org/notices/200209/what-is.pdf

>What is... The Monster? By Richard E. Borcherds.

>When I was a graduate student, my supervisor John Conway would bring into the department his one year-old son, who was soon known as the baby monster. A more serious answer to the title question is that the monster is the largest of the
(known) sporadic simple groups. Its name comes from its size: The number of elements is 8080, 17424, 79451, 28758, 86459, 90496, 17107, 57005, 75436, 80000, 00000 = 2^46 . 3^20 . 5^9 . 7^6 . 11^2 . 13^3 . 17 . 19 . 23 . 29 . 31 . 41 . 47 . 59 . 71, about equal to the number of elementary particles in the planet Jupiter.
If you like this , maybe you will like how they are rebuilding a whale ship from the XVI century trying to use traditional techniques and materials. : http://www.albaola.com/en
As for me, it deepens more than anything the sense of horror and emergency of this viral threat. One of my scientific idols is dead of it. That helps me, and probably many others, to get even more aware of the need to keep safe.
Meh. People have been making fuss about the "twin deficit" since the Reagan years, but the USD has been mostly fine vs other currencies.
China’s next plan to dominate international tech standards
’course it does ! http://man7.org/linux/man-pages/man2/socket.2.html :)
This article about his work with Pixar on "Brave" is a great read: http://www.cgw.com/Publications/CGW/2012/Volume-35-Issue-4-J...
I agree. From the modding days bricked always ment hardware hack was required.. I have the same gripe about how the word is used now. Glad to see it’s not just me
Not during lockdown I'm afraid.

I guess if it's a "feel" thing it should be possible to replicate it with lots of tweaking, but I don't think many people who run Linux on laptops use the Apple trackpad much so the overlap between the people who want this and the people who care to write such drivers probably isn't big enough to come up with a Macbook style driver.
i’d still love a one liner list of all of my friends’ statuses.
I'd like to suggest "Linux From Scratch" (http://www.linuxfromscratch.org/lfs/) category. It might be easier for beginners, as it has definite start and finish states and instructions. It would be interesting to do a blind run to see how long it takes and later try a "real" speed run to optimize it as much as possible.
Yeah I am sick of this excuse. I have seen it a lot around privacy issues. People always say things like "everyone including google is doing it so its perfectly ethical to copy them".
> Possibly because he actually lived there -- at one point he got kicked out of his house, and took the office opposite his as a bedroom.

I get a bit envious of these stories of American academics actually being able to live in their offices. In my experience in Central Europe, you can stay overnight in your office to work, but sleeping is forbidden, even if you are the head of your department. It is not uncommon for security to patrol the offices every night to ensure that no one is using that nice sofa in their office to get some sleep.
This amuses me too. We had to bootstrap from nothing originally too. I think many have never learned the history or started from first principals.
Probably "TCP/IP Illustrated"
https://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/0321336313/ref=dbs_a_w_dp_032...

But maybe also:
"Advanced Programming in the UNIX Environnement" https://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/B00DB3G8KY/ref=dbs_a_w_dp_b00...

Which is really good
Sad to hear this. This motivated me to dig up some old code, perhaps someone here will appreciate it. Maybe you can find a new rule set to Conway's Game of Life that produces undiscovered patterns.

[1] https://hoten.cc/blog/life/

[2] https://connorjclark.github.io/dart-life/#life
You could try Wordpress.com, then import each story / post to Medium to attract the larger audience. This gives you control over your content on your own blog, and the potential of the larger audience on Medium.

Wordpress.com isn't mentioned often here on Hacker News (been around too long maybe), but if you want to avoid spending time on setup and maintenance, it's an ideal solution with some good off-the-shelf themes.

Not free though, but not pricey either.
Interesting that "housing is still overvalued" -- I'm not entirely sure that it's drastically priced out of line with history. The price per square foot of the average American home, when adjusted for inflation, is almost exactly the same as in 1978 -- right around $130. What's changed is houses have gotten bigger (1600 sqft vs 2400). [1]

Now there are pools where arbitrary supply constraints have created massive price increases above inflation (SF, NY) but those markets are historically the ones least affected by a downturn anyways. With that in mind, it's clear that in SF and NY the price of housing is tied to the economic productivity of the area, and frankly, the chances big tech is going to cut pay is below zero.

The dot-com bubble only took 10% off the average house price in SF. The 2008 mortage crisis took 27% over the entire time period -- which was followed by an 88% increase. [2]

[1] https://www.supermoney.com/inflation-adjusted-home-prices/

[2] https://www.bayareamarketreports.com/trend/3-recessions-2-bu...
Ask HN: How do you backup your email?
I'm looking for a solution for email backup. Ideally, it would not run on my desktop, it would be server-based solution that connects to my IMAP-based email provider, and saves backup snapshots to cloud-based storage (e.g. Backblaze, S3, etc.) using de-duplication to save space.
Even during a crisis, colleges abuse their economic and reputational privileges
I have been on a similar journey to distance myself from Google and my Google account for a little more than a year now. It's taken longer than I thought to get to where I am now, and now I'm skeptical that I'll ever be completely Google free. My steps so far have been:

1. January 2019: Bought a domain name and registered for FastMail.

2. Progressively over the following months: Every time I got an email sent to my Gmail address, I'd either unregister for that service or change it to my new FastMail powered email address.

3. Early summer 2019: Logged out from my Google Account in Firefox, and created a Firefox Container where I am logged into my Google account in case I would need it

4. Deleted Google Maps app from my phone

5. Logged out from my Google account on the Gmail app on my phone

A few tips I can share:

* If you have this email address registered at FastMail: foo@bar.com, emails sent to x@foo.bar.com (where x can be anything) will be forwarded do foo@bar.com. I found this very useful when using it to sign up for various services.

* You can register as many aliases as you want in FastMail. For example I have my personal email address be firstname@domain.com. I also have inbox@domain.com registered as an alias, so if I sign up for some online service I can use service@inbox.domain.com as my email address.

The things that I've found hardest to migrate are:

* iMessage. I've used my Gmail address as the primary iMessage handle, so that's what people have been sending messages to. Not sure what'll happen if I remove it from my Apple ID.

* GitHub. I've used my Gmail address as my email address in Git for years. Removing the Gmail address from my profile in GitHub removes the connection between those commits and my profile. For now I have it as a secondary email address (or whatever it's called on GitHub) for this sake.

* YouTube. I want my viewing history, channel subscriptions, etc. Maybe I should create a new Google Account just for YouTube?
Hmm. That doesn't sound right. It just displays the document for me. What am I missing...?
People keep talking about debt as if all debt is made equal. It's not.

It's a bit like someone talking about his salary as an amount, without specifying whether it's per hour, per year, per minute, in a world where the unit of time is constantly changing. That'd be completely meaningless.

Fact is that interest rates reached levels between 10-20% in the post-war era. Today they've reached 0-3%. Higher debt levels aren't necessarily a problem if interest rates drop meaning debt servicing is low, and inflation mitigates rising nominal debt levels meaning debt in real terms stays low.

I'm not saying that debt is not a problem at all, but that it's completely taken out of context by looking at nominal debt figures rising. Even if you express debt as a percentage of GDP, you're still missing interest. Debt servicing as a percentage of GDP isn't at particularly high levels.

Second, we must consider what the alternative is: less debt the past decade, or decades, would've likely meant we'd see a deflationary cycle, inhibited investments, research, development and growth. As long as there's a bail-out for the 'reasonably' losers of systemic crises (which is not trivial, but mostly feasible and which we're seeing now), the use of debt the past few decades has probably been a net benefit.
Such issues? Accommodate them? What are you even saying, you purposefully cause those issues. People should contact you AFTER it happened to ask "please do not contact my contacts" or what?
Performance Best Practices in Hyperledger Fabric IV: SDK
Housing is a universal cost. When prices come down human flourishing goes up. How did we get to a place where governments across the west desperately manipulate markets to increase the cost of a basic necessity? How perverse!
I know this is a pretty bold claim, but it is hard to overlook the idea that information theory as proposed by Claude Shannon works as a model of information as related to human cognition, and that it does not imply that information is a fundamental property of the physical universe.

There are several interviews in which he mentioned that the understanding of how the human brain works was one of his main inquiries. His work on AI and the Theseus. And the seminal paper on information theory contains a section in which a fidelity evaluation function is defined with relation to the human ear and brain.
> The point of writing an entire book is to present enough evidence for the reader to come to the author’s conclusion on their own.

What a great quote. I'll be stealing that thanks.
Q&A: Markus Buehler on setting coronavirus and AI-inspired proteins to music
Here are mine:

* XML Schema - https://www.amazon.com/Definitive-XML-Schema-Priscilla-Walms...

* DOM - https://www.amazon.com/DOM-Scripting-Design-JavaScript-Docum...

* I don’t have a book for this, but learn data structures instead of algorithms. If you can learn to think in data structures the concepts of algorithms will come to you naturally like dreaming or thinking about driving directions.

* I also don’t have a book for this but the relationships between data is more important than the data itself. This is realized by how you express your abstraction.
Woah, that's a cool one liner. Bash always amazes me.
I hear a lot about how we may be seriously underestimating the CFR denominator, due to undiagnosed mild cases. Ok I get that.

What I don’t hear much about is that the numerator is also probably understated at any point in time for several reasons.

First I don’t trust the China data I think it’s understated and that’s the oldest, most mature data we have.

Second, in an exponentially growing disease with something like a 6 week course from infection through to mortality/recovery, we will always have diagnosed cases that are 6 weeks, or whatever the true course is, ahead of the final death tally and as the diagnosed cases are rising so rapidly, including those weeks and weeks worth of diagnosed but unresolved cases could add up to a huge amount of error to a simple deaths/cases CFR analysis that would significantly understate what the final CFR will look like. Cohort analysis does not appear to have caught on in the CFR calculation world from what I’ve been reading.

Third, I’ve read that there are likely a significant number deaths that are probably attributable to COVID-19 that are not being counted as Covid-19. The death rate in northern Italy over the last month, even when all the COVID-19 attributed deaths are removed, is significantly higher than it has been in similar periods in the past I have read. I believe the same is true in New York City. So if these stories are correct, there are likely more COVID-19 deaths than are being counted.

So while it is probably true that the denominator is understated, it seems to me that it’s also very likely true that the numerator is also understated making it very difficult for me to believe any of these estimates are very accurate until both these issues are addressed.

Has anyone seen anything that explains some of these issues and calculates a cohort-based death rate, which somehow estimates or adjusts were incorrect, time shifted or under counted Fatality data?
"I bet people would pay more attention if the browser stopped rendering on JavaScript errors or misformed HTML/CSS."

This was strongly suggested by those who fought for strict XHTML, but then Sam Ruby, who was leading the HTML5 effort, asked the question, "I find an image that I know my daughter will like. I send it to her. It is SVG. She wants to upload it to her Myspace page. However, the image won't render, because SVG is a form of XML, and Myspace is non-compliant. And yet, if I send her a JPEG or GIF image, she can upload that to Myspace."

The point was we typically embed content from one page into another page, and no one believed there would ever come a day when every page on the Web would be strict compliant. So HTML5 went in the other direction, dropping most requirements and allowing pretty much anything.

As I've written elsewhere, the fundamental problem we face is that a markup language, such as HTML, is completely unsuitable to the apps we now like to build and run over the Web. We rely on HTML to function as the GUI of TCP/IP, but it was not actually designed for that, as it was descended from SGML, and it carries with it a publishing history. What would make more sense would be use of a data format, such as JSON or EDN, which can then be given visual characteristics, without ever having to participate in one hierarchy or any one understanding of a DOM. Developers understandably complain that Java/Swing had 9 different layout options, the product of much experimentation, but having a variety of layout options does allow more flexibility of styles of building a GUI, with some approaches being simpler than what we get with the React/JS translation into HTML.
This is how I used to live my life. Sort of. I mean early 2000s when I had left home and moved to a far away city for a job in IT. All I had was a stolen 256M RAM laptop with FreeBSD. No internet and no TV at home because I lived in a shitty apartment building.

At work I had all the bandwidth and resources I could use.

So I downloaded all I could during the weekdays and during evenings and weekends I'd just browse manuals and try things on my laptop, in my own little virtual LAN.

That's how you learn, kids.
Weird reason to promote something in CS courses.

CS programs aren't to let you make some easy money in the next few years. CS programs are to provide an thorough and high level of computing, from which writing code is just a small part. Having a CS degree much more than learning a language and framework.

If one's goal is just to earn some money in the next few years, he would be better served by taking an Udemy course.

University didn't teach me how to code, I did that myself before going to university. What it did teach was the why's and how's of computing without which I would be just a code monkey churning code without having a better understanding.

It is the same difference between someone who make an course learning how to repair electrical appliances and electronics and the engineer who designs them.
I agree with part of your premise -- artificial supply constraints caused by NIMBY-ism precludes building up in highest-demand metros which causes prices to go up.

On the other hand, "human flourishing" is unlikely tied to real estate. Real estate is an investment vehicle, and one that is pretty broadly indexed to inflation on average in the US. It's often the case that renting somewhere cheaper will leave you economically advantaged as compared to ownership. I'd suggest playing with the variables on the New York Times rent vs. buy calculator from a few years back [1]. Owning is by no means a "clear win" but rather part of the American wealth-building narrative.

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2014/upshot/buy-rent-cal...
There are a couple of comments beneath the piece that suggest traditional news organizations (Reuters etc.) were reporting on it only hours after the 23:00 alert of BlueDot. If the AI cracked it early then they only beat reporters by hours - maybe that's significant, maybe not.
If they still have a job
I wish I could try some of these but as far as I can tell Levis only makes 501s in my size (32x36). Tall and lanky problems.
Pleasure in Reading Again
I have this problem with noise canceling headphones.

When I first tried the Bose headphones, I immediately felt an uncomfortable pressure on my ear drums. I can only wear them in airplanes and have to take breaks.
I tried other headphones and none are perfect for me but I did buy the Sennheiser ones. It has okay noise canceling with only minimal pressure for me and with stellar audio performance. The noise canceling is noticeably worse than the Bose's but at least I can wear them longer.
I also tried the AirPod Pros when they came out and felt very little pressure so from that angle I would have been comfortable with wearing them for an extended period. (I can't say for sure but it might not have been the launch firmware) As with all Apple headphones they just don't stay in my ears so sadly I passed them up.
Based on your comment, I found these lecture series "The Free Will Lectures - John Conway [2009]" = https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLhsb6tmzSpixUGjmJq6g9... and saving to watch later.
‘What’s Netflix?’ High Culture Fans Embrace the New Mass Medium
The First Cosmonaut - April 12, 1961
Managing customer discovery when you can't leave the house – Steve Blank
Getting it from a Gopher mirror would be even easier, the protocol is barebones. But bash is cheating, you can write an IRC/FTP/Gopher client in seconds and fetch all the info and documentation from here.

You can browse the wikipedia, read an HN mirror, play IF games and even seek Gutenberg from Bash as I can see by just connecting to the port 70 and doing simple Gopher queries.
That's too easy then.

If the shell is the one from Busybox or ash, the fun begins.
There were statuses in ICQ and Skype too
I don’t have a clue about _why_, but I know from using macOS and Linux on mbp that whereas the touchpad basically works in macOS, it totally doesn’t function in Linux! :(

In Linux, wrists keep triggering touch events as you type. Screens start scrolling, focus goes to random things, and everyone swears. You end up having to hold your hands right over the keyboard in a very unnatural way to avoid accidental mouse interaction.

I’ve had this problem on my current hp laptop that replaced my mbp too. It’s a Linux concepts problem. Linux simply doesn’t cope with hands near the touchpad.

Lots of coders I know use Linux on laptops. They swap recipes for how to disable the touchpad completely.

<sobbing/>
I guess the OP means that humans are less able to function if they have to pay out a large proportion of their salary in rent, which is basically true for people living in cities near to jobs. It becomes a constant source of anxiety, and could mean that any break from work threatens to make them homeless. So it's probably fair to say that humans don't "flourish" if house prices (and therefore rent or mortgage payments) are very high in the specific places where jobs are located.
That would be the first and the second link in the article:

https://www.figma.com/blog/line-height-changes/#changes-to-f...

https://help.figma.com/article/283-changes-to-line-height