skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I really like it when people try to give practical advice after describing problems. Agree with most of what's written in the post. But I'd like to discuss one part of it:

> [...] the major websites of today's web are not built for the visitor, but as means of using her.

To me, here lies a key point that both the writer and many commenters here in HN seemed to miss in 2017. What's written here is just a consequence, and the post goes on to develop it through all its length... but why did the dynamics change in that way? What's the underlying reason for the shift?

Some comments here in HN mentioned it: internet becoming a marketplace. With both its good and bad side-effects. It's an extremely complex issue, but money does completely shape dynamics of current society, and therefore internet too, and it leaves us without spaces that aren't conditioned by it. At small scale it doesn't seem a big problem, or we rationalize it because everyone needs money to survive... But it really shapes the world, and we can't simply ignore the ugly sides of it and pretend we can solve it without ever involving the discussion about money and the dynamics it generates.

The "magic" the post talks about only needs three ingredients: human curiosity, time (to develop that curiosity), and spaces (to host those humans and their time). Human curiosity and creativity will always exist as long as we don't go extinct. About time... well, we can satisfy our basic needs more efficiently than ever... and yet, ironically, we are using the newly freed time to create "more competitive" products that focus on enslaving the potential of our fellow human beings through infinite-scroll addiction, fear of missing out, instant gratification, attention grabbing and other kinds of biases and "bugs" in the human system. And finally spaces. Well, nothing left. If the only accessible spaces require money or work-to-generate-money, you close the circle and can't scape the landscape and conditioning I was describing. Even if there are some spaces left, they tend to fell into oblivion against the competition. Too hard to escape, too easy to rationalize.

And honestly, I don't think there's any game-changer discussion about morality standards here. Morals must play a very important part in getting us to start a change (and by us I mean the kind of people that's most directly involved in tech, like this HN crowd), but as long as we don't try to really disrupt at least some of the dynamics generated by money-profit-survival-motivations, I'm somewhat skeptical we will be able to move the needle, because efforts will be eaten by the competition even if we never wanted to play under those rules. Let's hope I'm mistaken and it's easier to solve.
Just – How I Organize Large Rust Programs
Ask HN: Which things have steepened your learning curve the most?
Been thinking of what others do to steepen learning curve. Most general one I've seen here is starting something for yourself, reading, having mentors, self-reflection. But curious to hear what others there are!
Just don't develop large open source stuff for large companies. It's not worth it, they will always screw you if they can.

For example, make a great app for any platform and they will most likely incorporate the exact concept since it's successful.

This is why you should focus on the web, publishing on your own and then they can't simply steamroll you in the same way since the platform is open.
Believe it or not posting the first amendment isn't a unique message that no one has heard before. I'm not sure why it's relevant here. Of course the government is upset about something. We pass laws to fix problems. If we see no problem, we don't pass a law.

The White House wants the FCC to treat certain social media companies as if they were newspapers. That's it. Do you think there is a first amendment issue with how the government is treating newspapers right now?
It is but in my mind also kind of pointless. At 1600 barrels and 22000 rounds, you might as well lug around a bunch of RPGs, mortars and laser guided missiles.
What sort of applications do you find the Pi to be lacking? The Pi has been a gateway drug for Ubuntu and CLI applications for me and it hadn't crossed my mind that this could go the other way.
Daily medication, which must be taken without fail in order to have a normal life, is a liability. It can be lost, stolen, or missed. It must be obtained on a regular basis, and carried around on trips. It can be expensive. It can stop working, from tolerance. It can have unpleasant side effects.

A one-time, permanent cure is clearly superior. And your closing sentence was unnecessarily combative.
A Veblen good?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Veblen_good
I'm an anarchist and most other anarchist-leaning folks I know with Twitter accounts have been banned at one time or another. Turns out intentionally violating platform rules does that. :)

Tankies, though, I don't know whether they tend to get banned.
I hope they look into whether social media platforms can use safe harbour (Section 230) stuff or not. Personally I don’t think so. Since they do act as publishers.

I know HN will focus on the Trump part but I am more interested in hearing about what you think of section 230, safe harbour, social media as publishers.
We use a similar (but clumsier) tool for our Gatsby site. It excels for quick content changes. However, for us specifically, we found that we didn't really edit the content as much as we anticipated, and that most of our quick changes boiled down to styling changes instead. So maybe an ideal product for us will allow editing of styling as well as text? It'd probably look a lot like webflow.
Where is the pseudoscience? It seems like an outright scam from the author's post, without any science pretense.
If the cost of progress is having the opponents of progress waste their money to allay their fictional fears, I could come to terms with the ethics of that.
Supply and demand or in this case, a bottleneck hold on a supply network that has shifted from warehousing months towards a just in time production/distribution model and with that, more susceptible to any bumps. This causes shortage spikes and price rises of new, which drive up the corresponding second hand offerings.

Same way hard drives a few years back increased in price, supply and demand as a factory went out of action for a while, curtailing market supply. Also why external USB drives became source of HD's as they had a larger supply buffer as less popular at the time and more in warehouses/stores.
The U.S.A. at least, has a military obligation to protect Taiwan due to several treaties dating back to WWII. The most recent POTUS to formally and publicly remind mainland China of this fact was Bush Jr.
By the application of this logic, every single web host that disables accounts serving malware or remote access trojans (legal to publish, mind you) is editorializing as well, because they are discriminating arbitrarily against legal content, even if it is UGC.

If you remove section 230 protections for UGC from companies that "editorialize" under this definition, what will happen is that the only hosting companies that will remain in the wake of that are the ones large enough to be "too big to fail" (or friendly enough with the feds) like AWS and Azure and the existing social media giants.

That makes the point-and-click censorship situation much worse, because then the only places you can reliably host are already integrated with the angry despot's military for realtime censorship as we saw demonstrated for us in the case of Wikileaks, and ongoing across the world.

You do not want to live in that world. Already we have companies like Facebook disabling links in comments on Instagram to control the flow of information and attention. I don't want a web where all of our communications flow through 4 companies who can disappear our accounts and 100% of our private or public communications down the memory hole with no audit trail or legal recourse whatsoever.
The 711 Price Puzzle
So there are 3 hard problems in programming.

1. Naming things, and .. I forget what the other one is.
Counterexample: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iiCBYAP_Sgg

It does not take a genius to see how the cooling design is supposed to work. Him saying that fan is "for placebo effect" is certainly not fair.
Donald Trump is a user on the platform who agreed to the terms of service like everyone else. Private firms have the right to terminate the account of people who breach those terms, which he has done repeatedly, which is why he should have been banned a long time ago.

If he wants special privileges and communicate as the president he can use the official communication channels.

It seems to be increasingly lost on the US government (and people) that the presidency is an institution, not a person. If Donald Trump starts a barfight in a nightclub he can get arrested like everyone else.
Yes but those details are what has protected twitter until now. If you decide what goes on and not off your platform, then you are a publisher and responsible for what’s on your platform. The law says this.

I am interested in what you think about that, ignoring Trump for a second.
There's an Eve Online equivalent too: http://www.omgrawr.net/quote/top
So what's wrong with twitter being responsible for the tweets that it drives eyeballs to? If you pay twitter to promote your content, then yes, twitter should be responsible for the legality of this content. This doesn't mean twitter should be responsible for every dumb thing some edgy teenager thinks is socially acceptable to shout out into the world (So long as it doesn't get promoted or endorsed by the platform).
Substrate: Blockchains That Evolve with Your Business
>The working group will also monitor or create watch-lists of users based on their interactions with content or other users

What the hell does this mean? As it sounds like they're arbitrarily creating a list of people they'll actively target for enforcement of state laws.
It takes 829 bits of binary lambda calculus to interpret BrainFuck, which is very simple programming language modeled after Turing Machines. A self-interpreter in BrainFuck takes well over a thousand bits though [2].
Lambda calculus is not only very simple, but also very expressive. While combinatory logic, with only S and K, is even simpler than lambda calculus, and also has a trivial binary encoding (00 for S, 01 for K, and 10 for application), the shortest known self-interpreter is 263 bits, appreciably larger than for lambda calculus.
My IOCCC entry [3] has more examples of the conciseness of binary lambda calculus.

[1] https://tromp.github.io/cl/Binary_lambda_calculus.html#Brain...

[2] https://arxiv.org/html/cs/0311032

[3] http://www.ioccc.org/2012/tromp/hint.html
Which is why a robust and intentional defense against this behaviour is needed. We can't simply roll over and accept a dystopian fate. History tells us that even the most entrenched powers can be displaced.
I bought a couple of Pi 3B+'s about a month before the Pi4 was announced.

Got myself a RPi4 last month.

I'll give you folks a heads up next time I'm buying a Raspberry, seems like I can turn my luck into others fortunes.
I sincerely doubt he'd be drafting this order if, say, Joe Biden's tweets were the ones getting fact-check labels added to them. I can see it being a step towards Trump/Republicans using such an order to suppress criticism though; let's say... a Democrat campaign ad that attacks Trump or calls him out.

Either way, the only intention behind this drafted order is entirely self-serving. It's a complete knee-jerk reaction.
It’s absolutely good enough. My web host will let you rent them as dedicated servers, and has used them as hosts themselves: https://www.mythic-beasts.com/blog/2019/06/22/raspberry-pi-o...
It's a false equivalence to suggest that managed services have zero staff costs, and that using a DIY database has a staff cost measured in whole FTEs.
> Twitter already arbitrarily approves, edits, and removes content.

By doing this Twitter is behaving as a publisher. Then why should Twitter not be treated like one?
I think the object-oriented paradigm, is the most hated aspect:

- "Object-Oriented design" ( class diagrams, use case diagrams, Abbott Textual Analysis... and all the bike bikeshedding fun of UML, Rational Unified process..) generally pushed by the likes of IBM, Oracle, and heavily taught in SE courses.

- a watered-down version of the above, where formalism is discarded, but the first problem-solving step is to decompose the system into classes. an infamous example is the chess-board interview. I think the author is criticizing this part.

I think the majority of people don't hate things like vector<int> or set<int>, despite them being classes.
If we accept corporations as people, I wish some of the ones with actual power had the backbone and gall to do a bit of civil disobedience, instead of rolling over at the first sign of trouble. Twitter should double down and add a fact-check sticker to every single Trump lie, past and current — to hell with lawsuits and the FCC. Otherwise, we'll "maybe parts of this sound reasonable" our way straight into an authoritarian, thought-shaping, Republican-ruled dictatorship. Surely, even the people who scoffed at this idea a few years ago can see this future taking shape.

I am aghast that there's any support of this in the once-countercultural Silicon Valley. It's abhorrent and shameful, and it makes me fear that maybe the gravity well is already too large to escape.
What do you do when you need a website but it doesn't work without Js?

It's a huge pain to make phone calls, or go to the store
If you think this is just bunk, and you'd like a laugh, read the FAQs on the website [1]...

My favourite:

>Does the device remove the EMF from the environment? If so can I use a meter to measure EMF?

>>The 'electro magnetic meter' can only measure the intensity of radiation which is not changed by our technology nor does it change the quality of connection and speed of data transfer.

Well, that's convenient, isn't it?

>>Our device harmonises all harmful frequencies into life affirming frequencies - it doesn't block - it transmutes.

I note there is no mention of which frequencies are 'harmful' and which are 'life affirming' - which would be even more useful given the frequency range of a WiFi or Cellular device, so you'd know which is which...

>> The only methods that we know can measure the difference between imbalanced radiation (without protection) and balanced radiation (with protection) These positive test results can be found on our website - please look for 'Case Study ' under Science and Research tab.

The Case Study starts with this paragraph:

>>In our civilization is emerging new science based on knowledge, whereas the official (old) science is based on information. We get information through our senses which are dual and deliver us an inverted picture of the truth and consequently, information is the opposite of knowledge so that all the old scientific concepts are therefore the upside down of the true concepts.

Do people actually believe this nonsense? It sounds like the kind of thing that Russell Brand was wittering about a couple of years ago - that your senses are the only way to interface with reality, and if you can't sense it it's not there, etc... Which can be disproved in seconds, even by a 10-year old child. I find it profoundly depressing when this kind of bamboozlement of the gullible is done in the form of sciency language. And it always seems to be done with a big price tag at the end of it.

[1] https://5gbioshield.com/frequently-asked-questions/
Its slightly too laggy to be that useful like that imo. Sure you can pop open the console and get some info, but prolonged manual use is painful.

Its fantastic automated tool however; and the live interface is great for irregular checks
> If an HN admin removes a comment on a post, they've curated that discussion, effectively.

Then they'd be responsible for the comment that got removed; what's the problem with that? It's not like they'd be modifying one word in a sentence and not want to be responsible for the next one.

This kind of thing should obviously work on small data units, like tweets, posts, etc.
The problem is that it’s one more step on the road to burning 5G masts because they cause COVID.
I think you do choose to use the thumbnails and metadata of the site you are linking to and allowing the site to change it.
Seconded. As a foreigner it is even harder to recognize such phrases for what they are and interpret them correctly.
Making it electronic looking at all seems like a strange choice. Surely at least some people would know electronics need electricity.
I really have a hard time understanding the appeal of the NexDock.

With a phone processor it will still be ARM, you won't get a great laptop. But it already costs $250, for that price you can get an entry-level laptop that will probably perform in a similar way while still leaving your phone independent.
That is simply not true, he wrote the package manager as a side project, that says nothing about if he is a good cultural fit for Microsoft.
That list is sadly a bit short :(
You have a misunderstanding of O notation.

When we say O(n), we say that as n goes towards to infinity, the runtime grows as k * n, where k is some constant.

Your sentence effectively says:

> (k * n runtime as n approaches infinity) effectively approximates (j runtime as n approaches infinity) for sufficiently low values of n.

This makes no sense, because you can't have n approach infinity and also be a "sufficiently low value" at the same time.

I think what you were trying to say is that O(n) algorithms run in constant time (or "fast enough") given a constant input size. But in that case, O notation is meaningless because when we use it, we specifically care about what happens at infinity.

Also, O(1) isn't synonymous with "fast enough"; constant factors can matter a lot. For example, the "fastest" (Big O wise) matrix multiply algorithm has such a large constant factor that using it is not feasible for matrices that fit on today's computers. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coppersmith%E2%80%93Winograd_a...
It seems obvious to me that you cannot have a general rule here that covers everything. There is not bright line separation possible, if only because doing that is fucking dangerous for societies.

In that context I’m totally fine with what Twitter did. However, maybe something that looks superficially similar (posting a link to some white supremacist website below a tweet of some politician) might not be.

I know that looks pretty similar but I think that those are the complexities our society has to deal with. Sometimes someone is just wrong and their wrongness is fucking dangerous to society and then it is ok to react.

No bright line, only complexities.
Notices of fact-checking can be given as a reply to his Tweet. Just like everyone else. Twitter has its own account to rebut anyone if it wants to. If Twitter starts fact-checking by invading his personal virtual space then why don't I, a regular user, have the same tools available at my disposal? I also have issues with some politicians in my country who tweet nonsense/falsehood and would like to have my opinions attached to their tweet. Is that possible? If not, why not? Okay if that is too much power in the hands of a user then why isn't Twitter applying the same policy to politicians all around the World? Which other politician is Twitter doing the same to? If it is singling out Trump then it is "special treatment" meted out by Twitter to a politician.

Do you see how quickly the cookie crumbles? What Twitter has done has a chilling effect. If it cannot justify on what policy it decided to attach a notice to a politicians tweet it won't stand a chance in convincing that it is just a platform and not a publisher/editorial. Especially if it targets a single politician and the rule was not used for any other politician.
What is a fantastical form and how can you determine whether something is objectively fantastical instead of merely fulfilling the preconceptions of whatever creature has the subjective experience of deeming something fantastical because deeming something fantastical is advantageous for the survival of that creature?
Your username suggests you shouldn't read these books. You should skim notes about these books and write obnoxious posts based on those, claiming the person you're talking to is lying based on no evidence at all.

Indeed, Dictator's Handbook has a nice summary someone posted in this thread. Your link wasn't even a summary, but someone's take-home notes for their own career.

> So your initial claims don't apply to CEOs of corporations with less than 1000 people? Moving the goalpost much?

That's where the goalposts started. They haven't moved an inch. The article was talking about Reed Hastings and Netflix. We were talking about publicly-traded companies with shareholders. "Power" talks about ... power. CEO of a 5-man shop isn't power. It talks about how people climb to the top of corporate ladders at big organizations, and the selection mechanism for who makes CEO. Dictator's Handbook is about big organizations too. It's a game-theoretic treatment.

Obviously some context went over your head. Maybe that goes with digital communications, or maybe that goes with not being interested in longer texts, so much as in skimming summaries.
Avatars Support a Private and Unique Metaverse
> not everyone is willing to deal and pay for international shipping

In principle, shouldn't one of the consequences of the EU project be that intra-EU shipping rates should, for the same distance, be identical between within the same country and between EU countries? (Of course, I realise that outcome may not yet have actually been achieved in practice.)
On the subject of mini-PCs spesifically, You can buy Intel Atom / Apollo lake system like Beelink x45 for a similar price on Aliexpress, but it's going to be significantly more performant and comes with real storage options.

The PI kicks ass if you want to play with hardware and actually use it's pins to build robots or whatever, or you want to use it's amazing camera and libraries. For pure compute its not a great deal.
> I'm not sure why it's relevant here. Of course the government is upset about something. We pass laws to fix problems. If we see no problem, we don't pass a law.

It's relevant here because the constituion is the highest legal document in the country. Something that republicans selectively forget.
I was calling out the partisan perspective on this ("the federal government only does bad things because Trump is bad"). Call me whatever you want but I don't think the world revolves around Trump. Most people in the federal government just keep doing their jobs as usual and he doesn't have the interest or competence to interfere.

>Hell, half of the 2016 campaign was about jailing the other candidate . . .

That's not what we're talking about. People (who don't actually care about free speech in principle) are saying that this is a free speech violation in principle (legally, it is sound). The FCC might attempt to treat social media companies like newspapers. This is not a big deal. Bad orange man has not censored newspapers. Your tweets are safe.
Do you keep personal items there too? Like copy of birth certificate or passport? Or are those in your gitignore areas?