skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
A similar case would be OOP. The original idea was broader and more dynamic. But OP has a point: the adoption of these things are useful even if they move away from the original core idea. We should revisit these original ideas and perhaps learn again from them. Sometimes there are things that wasn’t adopted, something we missed, that we can now use to solve problems in a more specific context.
Just like there's no way around the fact that a large portion of email is spam, there's no way around the fact that in the field of receiving money on internet, a substantial niche of potential users actually are criminals. Their volume of transactions is quite large, they are sophisticated and eager to try out new services, and they can rapidly direct the flow of (many) fraudulent payments to a new payment service provider or scale the exploitation of some cash-out system to thousands of accounts managed dozens of actual people (generally 'money mules' who get scammed themselves).

So if your service is friendly to that group of customers, no matter if accidentally through some process flaw or intentionally (because you're not treating criminals creating accounts as potential criminals), then you can (and will) suddenly get a lot of criminal activity. For a small service, as soon as organized criminals notice that your policies allow them to use you for making fraudulent transactions, they can quickly bring in much more transactions that any of your marketing activities.

The general result of doing what you propose is that it works until criminals notice a particular vulnerability in your processes/policies caused by excessive trust in users, and then suddenly you get a LOT of fraudulent activity which makes all your operations unviable. I've seen small merchants get a tenfold increase in transactions over a single week, with all of that increase being fraud, enabled by some weakness that is massively exploited until they close the weakness. Or close their business - for a small business, a single major fraud campaign can easily be enough to bankrupt them.
"Maybe the reputable organizations have a more comprehensive approach because that approach is more effective?"

This is exactly the issue and I am in no way doubting that these approaches are more effective. However, at some point, a decision was made to choose between a fundamental trade-off of "maximizing the effectiveness of the experience" and "minimizing the barriers to entry".

I have heard of discussions in Germany (using as an example because I know what's going on) around whether the top tier universities (there is no real top-tier, they are all very good, but some have made a particular name for themselves) should charge more so that they can offer a more varied and dynamic experience.

But there are strong arguments on both sides, in particular against this approach because it goes against the fundamental idea that financial means should never become a barrier to entry - at any level.

At the end of the day, if you are lucky enough to end up at a brilliant institution, you will find a way to cope and get the most out of the experience (maybe you must rely on less support, and activities and events are more in the hands of self-organising students). That, in my view, is a better scenario than having potential students/classmates not be able to engage with each other due to means that are (often but not always) outside of their control.
One more interesting tool for managing Zettlekasten-like notes is Neuron (https://github.com/srid/neuron). Static websites it generates show relations between viewed notes (scroll to top of https://neuron.zettel.page/2011506.html), support both "branching" and "non-branching" links, where the former provide structure for auto-generated index of zettels (https://neuron.zettel.page/2011504.html), plus they have integrated search and the whole app is pretty easy to set up using Nix. I really like the nicely polished interface and fact that it tries to have minimal effect on note format.
I genuinely enjoy travelling and working in other countries and meeting new people. I also fully understand that sometimes it's just plain nice to be able to have a full conversation in English, not have to continuously explain cultural context, and enjoy my lunchtime cheeseburger while talking with another American. There's room for both experiences.
Not mentioned yet, but occasionally you'll see a job posting (no more than one or two) on the front page. They blend in well; it could be possible to miss them now and again.
It's very important to ensure inclusion, and there's no harm in it when it's done well. But if you find yourself keeping mental notes of everyone's skin color to figure out how you should interact with them, that's not really inclusion.
> no need for one in the first place ... it's obvious that there's nothing wrong with a static site with no cert

Oh yes, there is.

https://doesmysiteneedhttps.com

> YES

> Your site needs HTTPS.
But because of that developers were under more pressure to be careful and avoid shipping software with problems in the first place.

Now, as you say, the common showstoppers get fixed quickly, but they're probably a lot more common. Meanwhile the overall cohesion and well-thought-out feeling of a lot of older software is largely gone.
Governments Can't Kill Bitcoin, If They Tried, It Would Make Bitcoin Stronger
I was suprised at how difficult it was to get the "invasive" autumn olive going. I've tried from seed a handful of times and I've never had them germinate. Did you do anything special? I tried cold stratifying for a couple months with no difference.
So we do currently have the ability to export all your cards as one giant markdown file. Obviously the issue with any sort of export with our system is that even if we export as markdown, the relationships don't really carry over into the export.

But this is definitely something we are working to make as easy / thorough as possible. Data ownership by our users is very important, which we've spelled out in our terms[1] as well.

[1] https://supernotes.app/terms/
How are they becoming less relevant?

The DARPA grand challenges have bootstrapped:

1. Self driving cars and got them working as a prototype. [1]
2. A rapid Orbital Launch Program (Still in progress after only one competitor left)[2]
3. A subterranean challenge to map and search underground environments [1]
4. A way to use social networking to find something that is time critical [2]
5. Onion routing which is used in Tor. [3]
6. Cyber Grand Challenge to automate the exploitation and securing network systems [4]

Note that competitors also have open sourced what they have done.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DARPA_Grand_Challenge

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DARPA_Network_Challenge

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Onion_routing
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DARPA_Grand_Challenge_(2007)
[4] https://www.darpa.mil/program/cyber-grand-challenge
I guess we all just learned a trick to check for traction on an idea!
Oh, this whole "Boycott Facebook" movement is such a load of feces. Facebook isn't the problem. "Social Media" is such a misnomer; this is really just "people interacting" and where people interact, there's going to be arguments and different points of views and, yes, unfortunately some racism, hate speech, etc. Boycott human nature, not Facebook.

As for "profiting from hate speech": If some asshole decides to chant racial slogans in your town square and it draws a crowd and there happens to be a Geico ad on the bus stop behind him, does that mean that the town is profiting from hate speech (because the town sold that ad space) or that Geico supports hate speech (because it rented that space)?

Verizon is a bunch of hypocrites. They sell internet service (Fios and/or wireless) and devices (phones) that are directly used by people to post hate speech. By their own extension, they should boycott themselves.

Then you get these "guns don't kill people, people kill people" folk who don't apply the same argument to social media; "a communication platform doesn't propagate hate speech, people propagate hate speech".

If anything, Facebook is thoroughly impressive in its "genuine" content. A platform where, for the most part, Grandma and Neighbor and Classmate and Colleague and Teacher and 2 billion other people of all flavors can generally interact with minimum animosity. Name another commination platform at that scale that hasn't just essentially reduced to porn, prostitution, drugs, and selling body parts. We should be thanking Facebook for even attempting to connect people, against all odds.
It is not uncommon for employers to accept equivalent experience in lieu of a formal degree.
If what you need is an infrastructure for distributing lectures and grading exams, a university is overkill. The real function of a university is community. Communities that concentrate serious students and expect high performance from them are different in important and desirable ways from randomly sampled groups of 18-year-olds.
I'm working on an app to solve the taxonomy problem at least! it's currently in very early development in a private repo but I'll make it public at https://github.com/pxeger/tome at some point
It's effective too. I am unaware of any other VC groups attempting to brand themselves in this way.
Ah yes, the Road of Theseus problem.
> It's like the word "literally" being used to mean "not-literally".

It's a digression, but I don't believe this is actually a thing.

Certainly, "Literally" is often used in figurative statements. That's different from using it to mean "figuratively".

I think it's a hyperbolic use of the original sense of "literally"; "literally X" often means "so very like X it was almost as if it was literally X but of course you know the use remains figurative".

In much the same way, if someone says "you left me waiting for days" we don't say "days occasionally means minutes"; we say that people exaggerate. I have never seen an example of a statement that would have been understood literally but for the addition of "literally".

I think Websters got this wrong.
Now I just need a 32" eink display.
Would like to see the jaw exercises PDF if you'd be willing to share.
Yeah, that page has very explicitly set an og:image that doesn’t exist. (It looks like it was intended specifically for that page, too.) It’s unfortunate but I’m afraid there’s not much I can do about it short of hard-coding a special case for that one post.
I mean if they’re worthless tunnels then so is every SSH tunnel. Should we just go back to telnet?
Show HN: Optidash – ML-enhanced image optimization API
I feel like we are all ignoring the fact that literally any perceived disrespect can be blamed on racism, especially if you've been conditioned to look for it, and it's often impractical or impossible to prove otherwise, particularly once the mob has mobilized.

Being told you're a victim all your life can make you feel like a victim, even when you aren't. And now that victimhood is currency, all I see as a foreigner looking in is a growing unilateral justification for the oppression and deliberate marginalization of whites. Young white boys are already being left behind in school.

You don't solve oppression with oppression.
Congressional Districts: Hot or Not?
> That night a group called the “Lynch Men” broke into the post office and stole those mail bags. The next night, the group led a “celebration” of almost 2,000 spectators in cheering the burning that mail

It would be amazing if the same could be done with today's junk mail.
Hello folks,

A few days ago I've lanunched Optidash - ML-enhanced image optimization and processing API. Optidash builds on top of another product of mine (Pixaven) and runs entirely on Mac Pros (as pioneered by imgix).

While Optidash supports all major image formats for optimization and processing, I am mainly focused on JPEGs. All open-source JPEG optimizers share pretty much the same algo - create N copies of master image at different quality settings and, using various metrics (ssim/dssim/psnr), pick the variant with the "best" quality to size ratio.

Optidash takes a different approach. We use saliency detection to identify the most important area(s) of a master image. That basically tell us how the human eye would see the image and where it would look most likely. Once the saliency heatmap is computed, we crop that fragment and pass it to our Core ML model trained to predict optimal encoding settings. That approach also comes with a performance benefit - only the most salient areas are passed to the model (far less pixel data to process) and it also ensures we don't saturate pretty limited GPU memory we have available on Mac Pros (we use 2nd gen so D700, 6GB VRAM).

Estimating output Q value is one thing but we are also training additional models to help us determine optimal quantization table for a given salient region.

As I am still evaluating the above approach and general API design, I'd love to get some feedback.
100% on track. You will get downvoted!
I try to use no dependencies beyond my database connection. The one area I feel unprepared to handle myself. Anything else I try to code a minimally-viable functionality that meets my needs. As a bonus, I have learned what all these things do and how they work while fiddling with implementations, and if I want to customize their functionality in any way, it's generally pretty easy.

I'd almost always take a pasted tutorial over a robust dependency every time, the former is more reliable. Any dependency I do take on is something I have to watch the changes of and project status of like a hawk.
I clearly remember sitting in front of the computer, web browser open, saying to myself "I better enjoy this beautiful technology now, before advertising and capitalism take over it." I imagined advertising everywhere. Sadly, I wasn't wrong.
Depending on the amplitude of your load cycle, it may be cheaper to just stay fully provisioned all the time on another provider.
That's the same argument as weapon developers use, and weapon development contributed much more to fundamental physics than particle accelerators. The majority of funds after the WWII flowed to physics thanks to the nuclear arms race.
Building a Better LinkedIn
That is an excellent counterexample. It defies comprehension.
Which is a trend that must stop.

After we've all seen what SARS2 can do to the industrial world, the risk monoculture poses for breeding a bird flu which can jump to poultry handlers is simply unacceptable.

Monoculture, and the conditions of chicken husbandry, simply must improve. This is an existential risk.
I feel like Chrome has generally become much more amnesic as of the past few months. Lost more signing in to various services, which isn't a bad thing, I'm just not sure what (if anything) changed.
I like this very much. Showing the first few lines of the article is nice to see if one wants to dig deeper. I made this my new default link to HackerNews!
There are many [existing mechanisms] to sponsor open-source, but unfortunately none of them appreciably move the needle much. Collectively, they produce many orders of magnitude less funding than is enjoyed their proprietary counterparts.

When Aaron and David (the original two cofounders) were deciding whether they wanted to pursue this project, they were very concerned about whether they'd be recreating the wheel. So, they did an Exhaustive review of [other crowdfunding platforms], which we've done our best to keep up to date (although Clojurists Together is new to me, so thank you for sharing; it's on my list to make sure it gets added).

In short, nobody has combined mutual assurance with sustainable, ongoing funding. As a nonprofit cooperative run almost exclusively by volunteers (myself included; I have no financial ties to the project), we're in this to hopefully make an impact on the world. If another platform adopted crowdmatching, and succeed in funding open source to the decree we hope, we'd cheer as we put down our (metaphorical) shovels. That is, we're not in competition with other platforms. We all want the same thing.

[existing mechanisms]: https://wiki.snowdrift.coop/about/existing-mechanisms

[other crowdfunding platforms]: https://wiki.snowdrift.coop/market-research/other-crowdfundi...
There’s a huge risk of abandoned nuclear weapons self detonating. Russian ICBMs (used to?) have safeties that failed “deadly”. They had to run around and turn them off during the 90’s so they didn’t self-deploy. That was a huge problem because they had lost track of some of them.

Also, the soviet’s “Dead Hand” is still active.

It is a dead man’a switch that’s designed to automatically destroy the world if it detects the initial phase of a nuclear war. It could easily fail in a way that caused a false positive.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dead_Hand

I’m sure other countries have equally problematic aging arsenals.
Nonsense, Henry Ford invented the Model T invention at home working nights while he was by day working for the Edison Illuminating Company in Detroit, a company founded by the inventor of the light bulb, who himself invented it while burning midnight oil at home. It was clearly motivated and capitalized by the patent system and an effort to earn a profit. That is entrepreneurship.

https://www.history.com/topics/inventions/model-t

I would argue that businesses that were founded before bankruptcy law in 1898 were far more risky than modern ventures. In addition, there were no social safety nets to pick you back up if ended up impoverished in the 1890s. But that's quite a tangent from the core overarching theme of the modern era, in which entrepreneurial economies have consistently beat out command and control economies.

The main difference between today and 100 years ago, is now we have an abundance of capital. It was much, much harder to get capital back then. Even loans for houses were hard to come by.
I mean I’m not sure if there’s a solution that will make everyone happy then. Making trusting self-signed cheers easy and not scary has real security implications because users just click-through warnings.
If you don't know COBOL, Wikipedia has a pretty excellent overview of a lot of its basic syntax here:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COBOL#Features

It's very verbose, and includes a lot of opaque language that almost seems designed to confuse (I know it wasn't actually, but it's pretty bad). For example, an alphanumeric variable type is called a `PIC` for "PICTURE". You can store an alphanumeric as a `PIC A`, or a numeric-only using a `PIC X`. Fields in a record get a "level number" that defines their behavior, and you just have to memorize which does what. 01 is a top-level record. 05 defines a subgroup. 88 is a conditional record.

There are many parts of the language that are clearly anti-features in retrospect. A 66 level number allows you to redefine a field in a previously defined record. Convenient in some cases maybe, but something that will clearly lead to maintainability problems as the shape of a record doesn't match its original definition in code. Another example is that COBOL has a huge vocabulary, with the original idea that you could write things as much like English as possible (e.g. use a `GREATER THAN` instead of a `>`), which is one of those things that probably seemed like a good idea at one point, but which every modern language has abandoned or is abandoning (through the use of linters, etc.).

The article makes quite a few salient points, but on the other hand, if there's ever been a language that got almost everything wrong in about as objective a sense as you can get when speaking about these things, it's this one.

Instead of inspiring the next generation of COBOL programmers, IMO there's a good alternative argument to be made for getting a bunch of smart people together to write a transpiler that could transform huge legacy COBOL codebases to something more maintainable, like how the Go team transpiled from C to Go, and vanquishing this language to the history books. Obviously very difficult, but something that'd pay off in the long run.
Unless you are selling millions of copies I don't think Epic Games would care what engine you are using for your indie game.
Colos will rarely lose power, but having your line cut due to a backhoe is pretty common. Even in top tier facilities I observed some loss of service every 6-12 months, add in some misconfiguration risk and Colo failure becomes a frighteningly common affair.

This can be mitigated through redundant service providers, careful checks on shared interconnects and other measures - but having "hard" failure isolation at the facility level will also get you there with less chance of someone doing something dumb.
I know complaining about it won't change the future course of things but these are all problems coming from treating the browser like the OS and exposing more and more low level functionality.

They aren't problems with security in HTTP versus HTTPS for a personal or small business static website.
> You're misrepresenting them by saying this.

I don't think I am. Maybe there are two groups of thought on this though.
Implementing Graphs: Edge List, Adjacency List, Adjacency Matrix
It’s not zero sum in the long run. But the converse of zero sum is not unlimited sum, especially in the foreseeable future. Thus spending on one project limits Spending for other projects.
You can't just swap XML for JSON because they are not equivalent, not to mention that SOAP had schemas and JSON doesn't (once you introduce schemas to JSON, you quickly realize that you gain nothing over XML).
because we're in the comment chain about wirecard and their behaviour is the result of that sort of culture. It's also still, despite the immense criticism touted around the world as something to emulate. You see billions of cash pumped into say, 'incubators' in Paris and other large cities around the globe with for the most part no results.
Show HN: Encode Data as Banana
IMAP has many more verbs compared to HTTP, so wouldn't it be a better application layer protocol compared to HTTP for a REST API?
Thanks for the clarification :) It was before my time.
I know that the OP probably did the research, so I'm just going to ask :

Isn't this possible with only CSS?

I see each article ( section ) with position absolute and heavy JS calculations. My browser brain thinks that with some combo of flex-box / flex-wrap and breakpoints you could achieve this without the need for resize handler. I guess that's not the truth

So can you point the struggles not doing this with CSS?
The biggest benefit is market manipulation and collusion.

What better than to run a "news site", know what your users (who many are C levels, or VC projects by YC) are watching and how and when they are commenting. By running that, they can glean an impressive amount of proprietary information.

YC can also control the narrative. "Voting ring detectors", shadowbans, blacklist names on articles all have a real and a hidden reason. And with no transparency, how do we know what they're doing and why?

And did you know there's a secret YC-founder only feature. founders funded under YC can see each other as orange usernames. The rest of us.. Well. They can collaborate publicly as a bloc but the rest of us are none-the-wiser.
Other networking protocols coming from a telco background, in particular ATM and ISDN, were all circuit switched, and had suitable resource reservation for QoS. Acceptance of telephony degradation was probably driven by cost: VoIP was free and that made a difference, especially for international calls. In my experience, in 2020 the VoIP calls I make are really high quality, even better than 1980s-style ISDN calls, and the main cause of audio quality degradation are people using "hands-free" setups with their laptops.
The Tau Manifesto Launched on Hacker News on Tau Day, 2010
Today is the 10th anniversary of the original publication of The Tau Manifesto, which I launched on Hacker News on Tau Day (6/28), 2010:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1468341

Thanks to everyone for your support!
For the latest tau updates, see this year’s State of the Tau newsletter:

https://tauday.com/state-of-the-tau