skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I don't understand why this essay was written. It's an interesting train of thought until you actually compare savings it proposes with real world data.

The iMessage case is particularly horrid, the article states that 45 million images sent through the service daily produce an equivalent amount of CO2 as flying 11,000 people from Paris to New York. The images are uncompressed, but had only those anti-environment programmers somehow reduce their size by 50% without significantly degrading quality iMessage would only burn 5,500 worth of passengers in jet fuel daily!

Such a big save, until you compare it with the amount of total number of daily airline passengers, which is 13 million [1]. In comparison that's 0.04%, which wouldn't even make the tiniest scratch and you're proposing to degrade a service that's daily used by 1.3 billion people.

Taking the quote from the text: "The moment we create digital products or services we become part of the problem." it seems a huge stretch the intentions of which I can only speculate on.

The whole point seems incredibly stupid, but I'd really like to be proven wrong.

[1] https://www.icao.int/annual-report-2018/Pages/the-world-of-a...
> YouTube comments are not really a great platform for debate and the way their algorithm works tends pull videos like this into an echo chamber that avoids the exact types of critical discussion you are calling for.

This seems like a YouTube-specific problem that should have solutions not involving censorship.
I have checked Prague claims and it does not look like surveillance. It looks like plan to build system for traffic control in 2022. Source article does not say anything about surveillance.

Also source article is really incoherent I do not know what author tried to say maybe some vague claim about possible bribery? Those newspapers are owned by czech PM and he uses them to attack political opponents. I would not believe a word from them otherwise there is another source.

Prague is now ruled by Pirate party and they are against using cameras for surveillance. They stated it in November 2019 when police wanted to start using face recognition. I am not sure why they added Prague to the list.
COBOL like caps?
(Opinionated post ahead...) React is, imo, garbage, but alas it's here to stay -- you know, kind of like Spring or Swing. In 10 years we're going to be wondering how the hell we ever used React 8 hours a day way back then. These kinds of markup frameworks/libraries were touted as jQuery's successor, but, from an architectural point of view, jQuery is by far their superior.

"Everything an HTML tag" is an insane mantra to have. As author points out, what in the world does a <Query> tag even do? It might make sense to us because we're used to it now, but the semantics of a tag is completely lost in this "new way" of using them (don't call it declarative because that's not what it technically is; it's markup). These days I'm creating HOCs on top of HOCs to support different behavior (from redux stores, to authentication HOCs, to "don't render this thing on the server" async components). It's, simply put, a terrible idea. And everyone just bought into it because the guys at Facebook must be really smart.

The lifecycle hooks are just confusing and unnecessary. They are side-effects of over-engineering. And to add insult to injury, they change every few versions (so old code will inevitably break on new React versions).

SSR. I've brought this point up on HN before, but doing server-side rendering in React is absolutely ridiculous. Every time I need to implement it, I'm constantly battling async stuff, state management, webpack/babel, hot module reloading issues, shimming `window` or `document` on the server side, etc. Boy do I miss the days when I was building stuff in PHP and HTML was simply rendered when I ran the damn thing.

It's crazy to me that it's normal now to have like 3-4 compilation/transpilation steps when working on a simple JS-based app.
Remote kindergarten is horrible. It defeats the purpose. The lockdown is causing significant developmental harm to younger kids. Ask anyone with a five year old doing “remote” kindergarten. Even older primary school kids are being significantly stressed. Teaching elementary school via Zoom is insane. The second order effects of these lockdowns are being ignored. We are worried about nursing homes and older co-morbid people but we are literally ignoring the damage being caused to the kids. This isn’t “homeschool,” this is something else entirely and it’s brutal. Kids should be in school and the old and sick should be the ones locked down. Those with special needs as well as the poor are being especially hammered by this. A lot of crucial development happens in younger kids and losing almost half the school year isn’t a trivial thing. The mental health and developmental impacts are being ignored.
Hmm I definitely think using some basic statistical theory could improve your choice of numbers. A bit of stats provides a lot more information from which you can draw more informed decisions. And of course there are lots of results that are highly unintuitive which have real world applications. I think this would fall under "risk engineering" and it is most relevant there.

For an example, say you are interested in how frequently a particular function fails. You are especially worried that a first time user will have this function fail on the first attempt and then disengage entirely from your product. So you want to know how likely it is that your function will fail on the first try. You can run an experiment where you call the function repeatedly until it fails. You find it fails on the 10th attempt. You can use knowledge of probability distributions and a trick for calculating the most likely probability given the experiment you conducted to conclude the obvious: that it has a 1/10 chance of failing on the first go. What the long way gets you, is the chance for it failing after x attempts. So a bit of knowledge gets you a lot more information to make informed decisions with.

You could always simulate this experiment in a script to estimate these numbers as well, which I think could be useful to someone with a software engineering background but without the time or resources to learn statistics.

0.https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geometric_distribution
1.Probability dist for the example: https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=geometric+distribution...
Makes me think of the movie, 'Wag the Dog'.
Are soft deletes even legal in the context of privacy laws like GDPR? If I’m writing in to delete my data, I don’t really give a crap how hard it is. I want that permanently wiped, so that even if you wanted to you can’t find it again.

How that messes up your technical implementation is your problem
IPNS names are based on public keys. A sybil attack can't make an IPNS name resolve to an arbitrary attacker-chosen value because the attacker can't make signatures for the public key.

A sybil attack could be used to cause part of the network to see a recent old value for an IPNS name, but clients keeping recent values cached for a while is already something that happens naturally, so it just seems like a more minor example of the general problem that a sybil attack could do a denial-of-service.
Related article from 1995

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/modern-art-was-cia-...
To understand React, it is important to understand the difference between imperative and declarative coding. [0] React is a way to write declarative code that use life cycle hooks or effects to do imperative "stuff".

The best explanation oh how useEffect works is by Dan Abramov [1] It is also worth reading his article on React as a UI Runtime as it is a good explanation of React conceptually under the hood.

[0] https://courses.reacttraining.com/courses/250055/lectures/38... (Can sign in for free to watch this one video.)

[1] https://overreacted.io/a-complete-guide-to-useeffect/
I've worked with both extensively, hooks are way easier to grasp, they allow you to avoid numerous ifs and comparing manually to previous states, you can separate actions according to what properties you're listening changes on, which would be cobbled together in a traditional life-cycle method, and the best part? They can be reused between components
Over 200k H-1B visa workers could lose legal status by June
What I see here is a machine that replaces human work with petrol. We could definitely feed people without these machines, but there might be less meat in their plate, and more workers needed to produce the food.
Much code it takes to make a hard-coded parser
https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Meanwhale/ByteAutomata/master/transition_definitions.png

Check out my Git project: https://github.com/Meanwhale/ByteAutomata
>> React is a library, not a framework

They say it often but it's not true. React forces you into an entire workflow with JSX, bundling, source mapping, babel transpilation and often restricts you to using components that are designed specifically for React; accessing the raw DOM is nasty business.

If it was a library, it would not hijack the DOM and override it with its own; that fact alone is more than enough to call it a framework. Any tool which takes over the execution environment is a framework by definition.

A library is something you use, a framework is something you work inside. You could argue that react could be used to target only specific components but this would be missing the point that 99.9% of the time, React is not used like this; as soon as you have a hierarchy of components, it's a framework, not a library.
Adopting homeschooling as the way to educate your children involves a paradigm shift on a number of fronts.

You switch to being a single income family.

One parent, most usually the mother, gives up their career progression for the duration of their children's education.

Actual homeschooling isn't that difficult for the simple reason that there is a massive amount of resources available online - from distance learning organisations or individual tutors offering tuition on specific subjects, to distance learning organisations handling the whole curriculum, to mixing and matching DIY learning together with enlisting the help of distance learning organisations for more 'difficult' subjects - think Maths, Chemistry and Physics (the route we took).

It just depends on how deep your pockets are and your level of commitment i.e. if the homeschooling parent is willing to put in the hours to prep ahead of lessons or they'd prefer to leave it all up to a distance learning organisation and they just act as the facilitator.

We're currently putting our two girls through UK GCSEs, it's a mix of my wife teaching them English and a couple of others subjects and me teaching them Computer Studies, and us then also paying for online tuition in Spanish and the services of a local Music teacher.
> ... co-produced by Crooked Media and Pineapple Street Studios

Ew. Don't really want to hear anything from the people who brought us "Pod Save America".
We need discussions in society about this stuff -- yes, even with people who might be too stupid for you to want to talk to them -- not just facts on the ground created by techies in ivory towers.

It used to be that jocks beating up nerds was an universally applauded activity, it's now rightfully seen as stupid and evil. The same will have to happen with people abusing their digital prowess against others, or the former will become untenable.

you can rap in tweets / but you don't want street / clown on us all / get your feet in concrete
I didn't kill off my gmail accounts, but they all forward to my ProtonMail accounts for those contacts that haven't been updated to my ProtonMail accounts yet. Those get handled piecemeal, which is pretty easy.
Why specify aluminium? For example, Magnesium alloy is 30% lighter and less prone to warps and dents. For Linux, I would consider a ThinkPad (T or X series) or a Dell XPS developer edition.
> I wonder why are they not public domain?

Not all countries have the concept of public domain, meaning the authors don't have a legally defined way to give up all of their rights. CC0 is the usual license in these cases.

Don't know about UK though.
There is a lot to be said for "never get involved in a land war in Asia"
Covid-19 SMS Service
I made this to help people get SMS of any change that happen nearby them.
Can someone explain to me how copyright being valid after the original owner's death progresses healthy competition? What benefit does it have?
The biggest challenge for me is that I've lost that sense of urgency in banging out action items. I don't have the looming deadline of getting in the car to start my commute helping to motivate me throughout the day. Now, I'm like, eh why not watch another random YouTube video, I'll just take care of that critical task later today. Before I realize it's 6pm and I still have a couple hours of work to complete before I can log off. (Haven't made up my mind yet if the extra "quarantine whiskey" is helping or hurting)
Which is why the liability argument is utterly absurd.
Are those hydroelectric power plants connected to a power grid, among other carbon-emitting power plants?

In this case, every kWh spared by your data center still is a potential reduction of carbon emissions : let your hydroelectric power plants run at full power so they still provide this kWh, thus it doesn't have to be produced by the carbon-emitting power plants. Leading to reduced carbon emissions.
Bummer for the hosts, but if you leveraged yourself to take housing units off the market, I can’t sympathize.
Supposedly lyft’s cost per ride was $0.14:

https://mobile.twitter.com/mohapatrahemant/status/1102401615...
They won't get any more revenue out of this, so why would they do it? Not saying that they shouldn't, but it seems like a pretty obvious reason, no?
OMG I actually bid on ahem a remarkably similar project at my old job! It was the worst tender I've ever done. We were shortlisted, and they asked for massive amount of detail in the proposed architecture as part of the bid. Early on, they stated that they'd be open to looking at a solution that used headless Drupal, which is what several shortlisted agencies were proposing including us. I spent a month on the bid, which is a lot more than I usually would have because I love the place, and had a really good architecture in mind. I was really pleased with the architecture that I produced, which had quite complex requirements with all the integrations they needed. The main site would have a Gatsby front end, and we'd be saving them tens of thousands on their hosting bills. So, a week before we're due to go up to present to them, they contact all of the bidders saying that they've decided that they won't consider headless after all, and would we mind pitching vanilla Drupal instead. A month of work down the pan. My colleagues cobbled something together over the weekend. Our bid was about 50% above the winner, and it was generally a miserable experience.

So, happy ending though: a year later we sold a site with an architecture very similar to my original proposal, to a client that doesn't mess us around, with a realistic budget and the project went really well. A few months after that I left the company, and I now work at Gatsby, so I can build open source Gatsby stuff all day and don't need to deal with fickle public sector clients ever again.
last time the Wall St wizards were able to do that with the junk mortgage bonds. Slice and dice. Junk in, triple-A out. And as far as i see the wizards are still there.
Repo moved to BitBucket (ff typo):

https://bitbucket.org/magnolia1234/bypass-paywalls-chrome-cl...

https://bitbucket.org/magnolia1234/bypass-paywalls-firefox-c...
I'm not a lawyer, but that doesn't seem correct. What about non-profit or general interest associations? They achieve goals with transactions of money and goods, but not for profit. Are non-profit associations considered "commercial" ?
Commons: Reuse of PD-Art Photographs
People who speak English as a first language never grasp the true market demand for language learning since all of their language learning is recreational.
Do we know if the underlying cloud failed or if it was an application issue? I strongly suspect the latter especially when it comes to government projects.
Mein Kampf is also currently for sale on Amazon. I worry when groups like SPLC consider themselves the final arbiter on what is a “hate group”, as you get quotes like “There is absolutely no excuse for a company to service, and make money from, any group identified by SPLC as a hate group,” .
I'll take the bait: why did you feel the need to share this?
Don't call it "Podcast" when it's only on Spotify.
The Coronavirus Pandemic Is Changing How People Buy Books
There is no establishment. The classic left party just died while the classic right party still hasn't found anyone popular enough to represent them. Macron isn't very popular during his exercice, but it has been like this for French presidents recently. If nothing changes, Macron may very likely win the next election. Things can change fast though.
You can get around some of these operational constraints with technology. For example, Google had a server design with its own in-built backup battery supply, which incidentally could be cheaper than diesel generators. So backup power for your servers is solved but you still might need to figure out backup power for other parts of the datacenter.
Will you add support for boringssl?
Having taken a look at the privacy policy, it looks like it does still use bing as well as its own results.
OVH or Soyoustart (or even Kimsufi, if you’re happy with smaller instances, no SLA and only 100Mbps) has unmetered bandwidth.
Every time something about public domain art comes up people argue about whether reproductions of 2D art are in the public domain. This is more comprehensive than anyone can or should write in an HN reply, so I figured it would fit in here.
React have sold very well the "it's a library" mantra. I find this, at least, bends the difference to build a marketing point around it.

The point they make, and the one everyone writing about React simply repeats, is that "it doesn't give you everything" so you can use it with any other library/framework without trouble. While this claim may be indeed correct, it doesn't mean it's a library. React is a UI framework. It's not a complete Application Framework, sure, and you may mix it with other stuff. In fact, you will generally mix it with other stuff. But I don't think that the difference library vs framework lies in providing for all of the aspects of the application or just for some parts of it.

In this particular case, the author seems to have overstepped that somewhat, saying "With a framework, you’re essentially given all the materials to build that house, and it’s up to you in what arrangement you put them in."

And in there lies the problem. That is not a framework. That's Home Depot. A framework does indeed tell you in what arrangement you're supposed to put the materials. It's in fact this that makes it a framework. It gives you structure. Or at least, the basis for the structure. You put your materials into the arrangement the framework suggests.

React is only concerned with UI, sure. But then again it does give you quite a bit of structure. It does tell you how you're supposed to arrange and build your UI. You extend this class with these methods, or you create this kind of function using these functions in this way. You put your rendering here, and return it in this way... and then the framework will run it.

What is correct is that React is for UI. So, sure, it will not tell you how you should do your API calls. But not because it's not a framework, but because API calls are not a UI concern.
DDG returns mostly Norwegian results when I set the region to Denmark. I get that our languages are very closely related and thus hard to tell apart, but it does get annoying.
I love reading about people's first principles technqiues of different technologies on HN! What do you think React will be supplanted by?
Or 'plain and simple' XMPP with OMEMO [1] encryption. This is easy to host yourself using Prosody or Ejabberd or another XMPP server, Conversations (or one of its forks) on Android, Monal or Siskin or iOS, something like converse.js in a browser, etc.

[1] https://omemo.top/
Over 200k H-1B Workers Could Lose Their Right to Be in US by June
Hey HN, Benedict the developer here.

I built MonkeyMind as a scratchpad for thoughts while in deep focus. Whenever something pops up in my mind, I needed a place to put it and get back to work.

Pen and paper can do the trick, but something with a Spotlight-like shortcut would be better.

And that is what MonkeyMind does. A simple global keyboard shortcut to add items and an app that lives in the menubar and gets out of your way.

Let me know what you think!
Only with some sort of approximately-tactile feedback. Some VR systems fall completely short of this (most dataglove type devices) while other "cruder" ones (like console controllers) actually do a better job because interfaces like buttons and triggers are analogous to many real world sensations.
Lyft isn't their only competition. If they (Uber or Lyft) raise prices they will lose out on a lot of their appeal over traditional taxis. Cost relative to taxis is the main reason Uber and Lyft were successful in the first place.

Many taxi dispatches have already adapted to app based ordering, tracking and payments as well.
It has nothing to do with cheap. Anybody can register a domain name and buy a web server and buy a building to put it in and internet service to host it with and post all their videos and they'll get zero page views even after spending all of that money because nobody can find them.

The thing YouTube has that isn't available to the average Joe isn't web servers, it's all the glue that comes from being a part of Google which causes YouTube videos to show up in search results and recommendations when the exact same video posted on Joe's Self-Hosted Blog does not. This makes YouTube and Facebook and similarly massive corporations in not the same position as the corner store who should be able to refuse to sell you things for any reason they want, because there you could always buy it from a thousand other places. In this case the thousand other places don't exist.

Moreover, having people pay for something doesn't constrain speech when everybody who wants to speak pays the same amount. But when you start changing the amount based on what they want to say, you're imposing a penalty on expressing certain opinions.
> Deepfakes will be used to cause a war in the near future where people are killed and who are we going to point our DMCA take down requests at then ?

Wars are started based on disinformation, black propaganda and/or false flags anyway.[0] Nobody (at least who wasn't already spoiling for a fight) is going to start a war just because of a deepfake posted to Youtube.

> What will the third world victims of some hate story stirred up by AI doctored footage care about first amendment protections in America ?

This video was taken down, rightly or wrongly, due to American law. It's quite likely deepfakes are actually 'more legal' in some countries outside the US, due to differences in legislation.

For example, depending on political/sexual content, an Iranian or North Korean video host may be less interested in taking down a deepfake of Jay-Z than Youtube.

> Deepfakes are a clear and present existential danger to ourselves and others

The real danger with deepfakes (and other technology that the rich and powerful don't like, such as encryption) is overreaction and people tripping over themselves to call for even more limits on their own free expression.

> God help us all once we can't even believe what we see anymore.

And God help us all when we have no way to speak out any more. As shown in the link below, we never could believe what we see.

[0] https://www.globalresearch.ca/the-ever-growing-list-of-admit...