skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The gist of one of the most important problem: zero cost of mass unsolicited mail.

> Spam is a result of the desirable feature that anyone can email anyone, combined with the fact that sending an email costs approximately nothing, even if you send millions of emails, and aggravated by the fact that spamming has de facto no real financial or legal repercussions.

Good that we can discuss this.

> 2.2 Overview of solution

Has some ideas in the right direciton of imposing the cost on the sender, as well as some ideas which have nothing to do with it.

The author jumps straight into implementing things, giving little attention to formulating how we want the cost function to look like.

> 2.6 Digital stamps

Good for some use cases, but not for others.

Imagine your relative wants to write you another email about how they are doing, or that but you haven't read their previous one, or forgot to issue them the new token. So they may as well create a new identity in order to email to you again?

> Alternatively, the email server could require the person sending the email to solve a CAPTCHA-like puzzle.

Blind and otherwise impaired people would get out of jobs at cusotmer contacts.

> Email servers could also sell stamps for real money.

As the measure of the last resort, the author turns to the ultimate medium of value exchange.

If the sender communicates to you, they expect to derive some (not necessarily immediately monetary) value from it, otherwise why are they motivated for it?

If the sender communicates to you so that you benefit, then you should have either paid them in advance, or they should reasonably expect you to pay them back.

I think it's time we recognize the economic side in everything we do, and stop shying away from "commercialization" of aspects of our life, i think. Otherwise we won't get out of the nonsense like "free software provides so much value, but nobody wants to pay for it" - valuable things are meant to be valued, that is, exchanged for other valuable things.
2015 (but relevant, and accurately reflects the man I knew)
> There is the colloquium doctum in the Netherlands, but you're still at a relative disadvantage if you're not put on the right track (VWO) as a child. So while the Dutch do a lot of things much better than the Germans, I think this one is only marginally improved.

I disagree. I'm curious what you believe the disadvantage is. There is adult high school education in which you can obtain the VWO level (pre-university level -- loosely translated to English). You're a few years behind, but that's not too much of a disadvantage, unless you live in very poor (unsustainable) circumstances. The issue then becomes simply surviving and doing well academically, that is really tough.

I've seen my family member go through this and the odds were stacked against her. Yet, she transformed from someone who I considered as ignorant[1] to someone who was articulate and quite well-measured. All she had going for her was that her situation was stable. But:

- She had a child to take care of.

- She had a rough childhood and all the educational disadvantages that come with it.

If she can do it, then most people can. A lot of people in her situation miss the drive, or don't have a stable situation.

On an educational/state level, I can't see how the government can improve it, the opportunities are there. There are adult schools, there is a relatively fair entrance test. To make it more fair, they'd need to give disadvantaged youth a break from their abusive parents because that's how ignorance is cultivated in the first place: a fucked up/very toxic family situation. But how is a government going to do that?

[1] Little skills, really strong unfounded opinions, forcing them down your throat to the point of throwing a huge temper tantrum, not curious about anything.
I'd love to hear some suggestions.

I've been told the YouTube algorithm essentially rewards content creators for quantity over quality. Ben Eater seems to only post once a month but every single video is exceptionally high quality.

I've followed his videos from making logic gates with individual components, through making a whole computer with breadboards to the current series of programming a breadboard computer.

Each video is so pared back and well explained. It really dawned on me when he recently started discussing assembly and it just seemed like such a high level language.
Voting is inherently aristocratic. Sortition gets you democracy.

At least according to some Greeks and Frenchmen (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sortition#Democratic):

> The idea that democracy is associated with sortition remained common in the 18th century. Charles de Secondat, baron de Montesquieu writes in The Spirit of the Laws, "The suffrage by lot is natural to democracy, as that by choice is to aristocracy."
You never heard the expression "bravi tutti"?
For you, maybe. I think a TrackPoint (ThinkPad) is far superior to a trackpad, MacBook or otherwise.
Meritocracy is the lie we tell ourselves to justify inequality. There has never been a meritocracy.
Ah, I see you too also participate in society. How curious.
Kotlin can only play catch up with platform features.

In worst case it will end up with duplicated language features, because it won't be able to merge its original design with what the platform is capable of.

Type annotations in SAM types, loom vs co-routines, streams vs sequences, inline types are already a couple of examples.

Then since JetBrains wants to make Kotlin into a platform of its own, the language has to marry JVM, JS, Native and Android semantics, which in time will only get worse to keep writing multiplaform code. In worst case, a library author will need to write one full implementation per platform, with the common denominator for parameters and return types.
It's like they couldn't resist saying that those non-white students are inherently less performant. "They're condemned to failure if they get in (look at their slightly lower grades), so it's better not to give them an opportunity at all!"

Their barely contained despise, hatred and anger bleed through the lines. It's funny how decades of racial segregation were simply ignored, almost like diversity initiatives popped out of nowhere in a society that has always provided equal opportunities.
This is the sort of stuff ("There is no ‘pneumonia’ nor ARDS.") that Corey Hardin is refuting. Like, literally some of these hypotheses (e.g., that SARS-COV-2 disrupts heme binding - as if that could cause a decreased P:F ratio!) are specifically refuted.

Good on Medium for refusing to host that.
The iPad’s software keyboard is still buggy as hell. The software keyboard, the part of the OS that the user will interact with the most, and the part of the OS that is required to be the most stable, frequently just completely breaks and requires a full device reboot to fix.

That, to me, is insane. It shows how shit the project management must be if they cannot even prioritize fixing critical bugs in the most important parts of the OS over releasing some useless feature that most users will never touch.
It’s also as old a story as Genesis 3:19.

“By the sweat of your brow you will eat your food until you return to the ground, since from it you were taken; for dust you are and to dust you will return."
I think the point with this is when the curve starts to flatten, we can _safely_ reopen the economy. Contract tracing and rapid response can end this.
Fiat currency isn't even necessary. Fiduciary money is sufficient.

Eg a classic gold standard, fractional reserve banking and private note issue. Like they had in Canada or Scotland.
I recently discovered after reinstalling Linux Mint on my Dell XPS (that shipped with Ubuntu) that is not an option "out of the box". On my previous interest I used to have that option. Now I'm not sure where it's gone so I do (very sadly) only have the option to "disable touchpad when mouse is connected." Please help!
Following would kill 99.999% of spam:

- All mailing addresses are linked to a persona and are impossible to guess.

- Personas pay per address issued.

- Senders pay per message sent with a per volume of data fee too.
>1. Industry has largely moved away from funding long-term blue-sky research, increasingly shifting toward short-term, product-driven research projects. We have moved from places like Bell Labs and Xerox PARC where researchers had a large degree of freedom to places like Google today where researchers are assigned to product teams (see the paper "Google's Hybrid Approach to Research" which describes how research at Google is operated: https://research.google/pubs/pub38149/)

Industry wants their money to produce other money fast. Maybe having the state sponsor long time research is a better thing to do. In some parts of Europe much of the research is sponsored by the state. I think that's true for China, too.

As for online teaching, I don't think that can be as good as participating in person.

Maybe the crisis will cut just the beaurocrats and live knowledgeable people to do their work.
I have had amazing results with David burns books. As a matter of fact his cbt exercises in 'feeling good' have helped me so much that I've turned them into a software for my own personal use. This way I'm able to do his exercises on the phone / laptop very easily. My bdc score dropped from 20 to 5 in 3 months just doing that.

If you've read his books I'd be happy to share the link to my website (but it won't make a lot of sense if you haven't read his book though).
I used to think that would be the case, then I became aware of a couple of Scala projects delivered by Wipro.
Apparently, if one engine of a four engine airplane stops working, the airplane flies 10% slower. But this doesn't mean if all four engines stop working, the airplane will fly 40% slower.

What I am saying is: if a large number of the newly unemployed are not satisfied with their life circumstances in a few months, there could be a complete breakdown of society. It is unlikely the "everything will be the same, but only accelerate" model will play out when the acceleration also depends on the "cooperation" of 10s of millions of suddenly unemployed people.

Here is my counter prediction to the entire article: A lot of prediction makers are going to go back to the drawing board and come up with better models for their predictions, because no model can adequately capture the chaos which is almost guaranteed to ensue now.
Every non essential sector will be hit. Tech by large is essential. Beaurocrats are not.
STS-1
First time I’ve read that providing clean water on demand to everyone at a sufficient pressure is “minimal effort”.

To me, the infrastructure and experimentation and science that leads to all homes having reliable, potable water is miraculous.

There’s very large swaths of the planet where you are supposed to drink only bottled water, from a bottle unsealed in front of you.
Following would kill 100% of spam:

- Shut down all communication entirely.
12 April 1981
You can have both success in school and wealth as a filter if that is what you mean, but I don't think that is very desirable outcome.

The other answer mentioned state scholarships, which are offered to gifted and poor students.
The options to go to uni are now:
- Have parents who can pay for your studies
- Be gifted/hard working enough to get a scholarship (I don't know how easy that is.)
- Be lucky to get a state scholarship for poor people
- Take massive student debt

This still doesn't look very nice in my eyes.
Of course I am heavily influenced by my own perspective. I most probably wouldn't have been able to study in the US system. My teenage self was way to inexperienced to even consider taking a massive student loan.
Community driven supermarket queue tracker
Something about the corona virus statistics doesn't add up in the Indian context
Oh my god I'm glad it's not just me. I gave up at:

"...the distribution of wealth and popular acquiescence in the vicissitudes of the market—the hoi polloi might vote themselves welfare states or even socialism."

Word salad is understatement of the day.
Show HN: Libtree – ldd as a tree and much more
3D Printed Digital Sundial
Pretty clear one;
https://diode.io/diode/4-steps-to-hosting-a-decentralized-st...
Chromium feature request: Ctrl+Tab to switch to most-recently-used tab
HN, mirror.
Are you planning on a Safari extension?
Past a certain baseline, you're only a slave to money to the extent that you're a slave to your desires.
Seems pretty straightforward to me. He presents an intellectual history of neoliberalism (whose attributes he also describes), and charts out how its evolution has beared down on the present.

This particular author also has a wider thesis that thinking about all of life and the laws of the universe in terms of market interactions has come to replace mystical and religious thinking.
That wasn't clear to me, but in the light of your comment, I see that it's plausible. Thank you.

It always throws me when someone suggests an exercise, and someone, in reply, says, "Or instead, do this other thing."

I'm oddly reminded of when we were recruiting and asked people to write some code to solve a specific task and bring it to the interview for discussion. Someone said "This spec is obvious nonsense" and proceeded to write a completely different spec, implement that, and get it horribly wrong.
This is amazing. You can start with the last lecture if you are short on time (and probably like me more interested in implications and not strong in math to follow the rest).
> If we had the sketch to how toilet paper was first developed would we hold it this level of reverence?

Yes, of course. In fact, it'd probably be a museum piece.

> What is the fascination with such trivial technologies grabbing a mindshare?

The same as with your fascination with this fascination; ie., we like to try to understand what makes people do what they do. There's an inner sociologist in most of us.
What's unclear here?
> But we've somehow transitioned into a society where we don't want to do anything for anyone. And we want to call that "liberty".

Agreed - rights without responsibilities are just privileges.

> Not every surface is a slippery slope.

Maybe, maybe not. The whole point of the slippery slope metaphor is that it's hard to know when to stop. I think this is a better trade-off than the economy sinking though.
The Australian website "mood gym" has an evidence base and is sometimes recommended by English NHS therapists. https://moodgym.com.au/

The book "Mind over mood" is also recommended by English NHS therapists: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Mind-Over-Mood-Second-Changing/dp/1...

The NHS has a page of apps. I don't have much experience with these, but the page does tell you how they assess apps: https://www.nhs.uk/apps-library/category/mental-health/

Good luck!
Makes sense as human race flourished since we learned how to store informations externally (notes, books, etc..)
Perhaps the HN crowd finally got wise and migrated away from Apple because:

1. their devices are (or are on a path of becoming) non-general purpose computing devices.

2. developers are treated like junk on the app store.
I'm sure they'll become illegal soon.
No, what he is saying is very plausible and very likely correct. It is not mis-information. It is a well founded concern. I've been in tech long enough to know that what he is proposing is very possible.

Other commenters here go into better detail than I.
There is a strand of thinking that work = slavery, or at least working for someone else is. I disagree - I think working is a fundamental moral principle. We don’t want to allow a healthy, able-bodied person to live an easy care-free life if all they want to do is sit on the couch.

Begging is a useful activity. It allows the giver of money to feel good about themselves. I would far prefer someone begs for their living, which takes effort, than sitting on the couch and have a check come to them automatically.

We organize our world around people providing useful labor. You can pick whatever labor it is you want that is useful (someone pays for it) but you have to pick something. Money is just a tool for compensating services.

Obviously the world is super complex and edge cases exist all over. But the moral principle is that I don’t want to give healthy, able-bodied people the right to do nothing except what interests them. I don’t want them to write poetry and paint all day unless someone else is willing to pay them for their output. That’s providing a useful service. Otherwise it’s just masturbation.
Does anyone have more recent experience with pine64 hardware quality? I bought three devices a few years back and all three stopped working within a few months, and support was non-existent. I'd be interested in this, but not if it breaks after two months and the only support is "ask the forum".
Museum Asks People to Recreate Paintings with Stuff They Can Find at Home
1. How do they live on charity?

2. So what if they live on charity? I don't see how that would invalidate anything being said.
Take note of the source of this article. Religion always shows up during dark days and creeps its tentacles around the vulnerable.

For many, you're a slave to religion and then you die. People have used religion to control society way before capitalism
became popular. To this day, it continues to control thoughts and behaviors of billions of people. Those who have acquired power in religious institutions abuse their power to influence all sorts of antisocial behavior. Society hasn't only an issue with capitalism but also religion. There's a strong argument that religion remains the greater threat.
De-risking custom technology projects: 18F technology budgeting guide
s/chrome/Igalia/

As far as I can see Google aren't sponsoring this work (it's unclear to me why not), they've agreed it's worth doing and are reviewing patches.
Harberger Taxation and Open Source (2018)
It seems like the author just saw fight club and read the communist manifesto and decided to ramble with a dictionary on hand.
With another day and a half of the Bank Holiday to fill you might want to compare performance of Wordpress with Openlitespeed. Theres an ec2 image that makes it easy. My site saw a 5x speed up which has made me an advocate.
Let me propose another solution, much simpler, the one that internet was made for but looks like no one cares about. Host your own mail server. Each and every site I register to gots its own mail address. Not only that I know when address was sold, site was hacked,.. I also know which site. The only thing that is left is vi /etc/mail/aliases and one '#'. No spam at all.

(That is not entirely true, i have few emails I use hidden from users just to collect spam and feed it to bayes. But that is another story.)

It is 2020, stop using spyware sites like gmail and start using INTERNET.
Rust: Implementation of the Apple/Google contact tracing protocol
"decide" is not incompatible with determinism, it just means the decision will always be the same. We all make decisions every day, they just aren't free.

So in this case, it has all been determined that we do not have the education currently, but that says nothing of what the future is determined to be.
“ I kept feeling that the OCaml codebase was slowing me down so I rewrote Dahlia in Scala and implemented memory views.”

Wonder if that’s because he was more familiar with Java? OCaml appears to be a simpler language than Scala.
Wouldn't we get most of those gains by simply implementing proof-of-work for senders? (with an exponential backoff).

Then you can add on things later like increased reputation of senders, and that can be on an individual basis instead of web-of-trust- IE; I have 10 users and those 10 users get 10 emails from princeofnigeria.com and github.com; but github.com has increased reputation due to previous email or following graylisting guidelines or whatever.
A bunch of tech is advertising and shit, there's a lot of techies working in that and other areas. Not all of us have jobs at places where they can weather the storm, remember that. Also, there is a lot of required essential work outside of tech and science, and your narcissism has blinded you to thise workers' value.
> There’s very large swaths of the planet where you are supposed to drink only bottled water

Is that the "natural" order of things? Certainly it isn't, at least no more than markets or money represent a "natural order." In fact, we can make a convincing case that the tainting of fresh water is the direct consequence of this kind of market-oriented thought.
> I love how professors live on charity and lecture us on money.

More correct might be:

I love how professors live on taxes and predatory lending (which generates an indebted underclass) then lecture us on money.
From 48k lines of code to 10 – The story of GitHub's JavaScript SDK
It's not my favourite style of writing, but it's by no means word salad.

That paragraph presents a single coherent line of thought. They could have chosen simpler individual words, but there's nothing difficult in the phrasing or structure.
Do you even 10-key, bro? Our homage to the classic keyboard standard
Working from home will create a new generation of younger entrepreneurs
A friend has built a client with inbox economics in mind at https://baemail.me

It doesn't use email but paymail which is a protocol for email-like payment addresses.

- messages include some Bitcoin SV
- inbox sorted by value
- conditional notifications based on value threshold
- encrypted messaging
Opening /Dev on macOS in Finder
Good comment here.
Interestingly one of the few things they spun off - Niantic (ingress/Pokemon go) runs on Google app engine (and/or other Google cloud offerings)
Floating Table Held Up by Only Strings
A quick reminder how to maintain your privacy while using Firefox (Windows pathnames):

1. Install Firefox with Internet disconnected. Do not install the Maintenance Service. Run once and then close it completely (Ctrl-Shift-Esc to check no processes are running).

2. Create and edit the file:

"%APPDATA%\Roaming\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles\*.default\user.js"

Use the following as a template:
https://github.com/pyllyukko/user.js/blob/master/user.js

Best to read through the whole contents and edit it by hand as some of the settings might be too restrictive (there's a "relaxed" version too in another repository by the same author).

3. Create and edit the file:

"%ProgramFiles%\Mozilla Firefox\distribution\policies.json"

With the following contents:

{
"policies": {
"DisableAppUpdate": true
}
}

Note: This file and directory are being deleted every time you update Firefox, so be prepared to re-create them afterwards. Alternatively, it might also work to revoke the write permission to that directory but this could break the whole update process (I have yet to test it).

4. Update Firefox manually whenever a new version is released but wait for a while first, so that all the new anti-features such as this one come to light.
PhDs can be markedly different depending on your boss (advisor). They are also very different from America to, say, Europe.
Check out the book the author of this piece has written, "The Enchantments of Mammon." His very point is that neoliberal thinking has replaced religion in a vital sense
Robert Wood Kruch's dictum, sometimes abbreviated to bad roads make good filters, strikes me as a melding of Gresham's Law and the Jevons paradox.
You don't. Bots will always be present, always one step ahead. Honestl, why bother?
I'd like to see a system like this that treats the type system (aka schema) for the data as just more data and puts that under DVCS too.

Then I'd like to add a robust security/permissions model and build an OS around it.