skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
>A couple of decades ago PCs were still too expensive for regular people to buy, they were mostly owned by businesses and the upper middle class.

This sounded wrong to me, but in the interests of not just making a kneejerk response, I googled and found total global sales from 1997-2000 estimated at ~400 million PCs[1] and also a claim[2] that at that time about 60 percent of US households had at least one personal computer.

Also, since the 80s, affordable computers were available, and sold in the millions,[3] so I don't think it's valid to say the reason they were mostly owned by businesses and the upper middle class at that point was because they were too expensive. It was more that people in the upper middle class used computers at work and could relate to why they were the future, and that future included them/their children, so they were likely to see value in a new computer rather than something else.

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Market_share_of_personal_compu...

[2]https://hypertextbook.com/facts/2004/DianeEnnefils.shtml

[3]By 1985, the Commodore 64 was selling for <$150, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commodore_64
A Better Cheatsheet
It's a bit of a stretch to refer to Banqiao Dam as a "power plant accident". It was a dam failure. Sure, it was part of "a project to control flooding and provide electrical power generation" (from the wikipedia article), but AIUI the failure was nothing to do with the power plant; it was simply the dam.
If you feel like you're saying "I told you so" often, you should leave.

Either you're not in a position to have your opinions count, or you've given up fighting for them and are burning out.

(A third option is that you're deluded, and are forgetting about all the times where what you told people didn't come out true. Watch for that, and be more humble.)
I'm not going to try to convince you of this but I have to let you know that everything you said is untrue.
I told you so is totally a sign that things are wrong and it being said a lot is really signaling to the manager of that team that they need to dig in and figure out what is actually going on. Whenever I've heard it's always someone that knows there is a problem and either can't figure out how to fix it or they don't feel listened to when they've come up with solutions for it and so they've just checked out.
I did. Was the only non-Chinese appearing person there. :-) It's been closed for years and I just assumed went out of business. Great sichuan dishes. The cooks there were not shy with chili peppers.
Isn't this exactly what Amazon does with AmazonBasics?
Trump's Portland tactics are the stuff we decry in other countries
> deflation would just make the whole economy collapse

All we have to do is look at history to disprove that. From 1800 to 1914, for example, the USA had periods of inflation and deflation netting out to zero.
You might want to check out https://groups.google.com/a/list.nist.gov/forum/#!topic/pqc-...

This project that you linked seems quite nice. I especically like its Code of Conduct.
> ELDERS ARE ALWAYS RIGHT HERE IN INDIA. That's why so many people want to be manager.

I think it's because managers get paid more money and have more respect. People wanting to be manager (or chief, captain, general, shaman, headman, minister, consul, cardinal, king, nobleman, judge) isn't a unique feature of any single culture or organization. It's a universal drive across every culture throughout history.
We learned new words for things. The decade changed.

The first few pictures came back blurred, and I felt ashamed
For all the cheerful engineers, my father and his tribe.
The second time,
The optics jibed. We saw to the edge of all there is—

So brutal and alive it seemed to comprehend us back.

- excerpt from Tracy K. Smith's "My God, It's Full of Stars" [1]

Smith's father worked on the Hubble telescope, and she would be named US Poet Laureate in 2017. I highly recommend reading her poetic account of this photograph :)

[1]: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/55519/my-god-its-full...
Yes, the problem is most of these newsletters aren't available as RSS feeds. That's why I brought up Kill the Newsletter.
I guess your wife/sister/girlfriend/etc probably isn't named Karen.
No, they would basically interrogate you.

Sitting in some windowless office at $5.75 an hour for two hours basically cost me $100-300 in commissions from lost sales.

Those jobs were great in the 90s. One year I paid for my College tuition in the week before Christmas.
Hah. It was supposed to be a 3.5" hard drive. The box was big enough to be able to contain a regular sized brick and some padding.
My issue is the way the media talks about "white" and "non-white". Being born white isn't some ticket to a silver spoon, and with so much emphasis on purely race there are negative repercussions.

i.e. I just googled it [1]. The fourth link talks about the relationship between usage of White Privilege and how it impacts peoples view of poor white people. There is so much emphasis on skin colour that the guy in the Youtube video literally won the privilege lottery at birth (compared to ~95% of other Americans) and still feels oppressed enough to make a video about it.

If his video had of been purely about solidarity for the Americans born porn and black I would have supported it since that demographic needs solidarity to help get out of the hole they were born into. Instead, he made it about himself and his rich boy problems.

[1] - https://psycnet.apa.org/record/2019-22926-001
if you are spending 279 using complicated cloudflare worker/azure function setup, you could have gotten away with $100 month if you have choosen linode/droplets.

32 million requests can be easily served with $50/month heroku node.
How I would grow Gumroad
>It’s exactly the data I need, in the format that I want; no more, and no less. Plus, the output is a single html file that I can share directly with nothing more than a simple link. No analytics, no cookies. Just the data I’ve chosen to share with you.

I click the link and am presented with the familiar blank page of needs-javascript. Oh dear. What has uBlock stopped this time?

* maxcdn.bootstrapcdn.com

* cdnjs.cloudflare.com

* rawcdn.githack.com (also a cookie from here)

* code.jquery.com

* cdn.jsdelivr.net

Not quite the "single html file, no analytics, no cookies" that was promised.
I got a set of Hue bulbs for less than half price (packaging was beat up, but the contents were fine), and a pair of headphones for 25% off the new price (had a cable missing). I've also had stuff arrive in _far_ worst condition than was noted on the listing. It's a bit hit and miss.
Neither Netscape Navigator nor Opera were free. Mozilla took over a decade to become competitive. It wasn't until Safari and Chrome came along that there was any real competition to IE. IE was the web for a long long time.
Show HN: Twtxt v0.0.7 Your self-hosted, decentralised Twitter -like
What does the mainsteam media actually get correct in the last 5 years ? Maybe longer

Its got to a stage they are blatantly a political state actor for the Global LEFT , covering up truth and spinning bullshit
and often the opposite is actually truth

Hard to tell Zionist run AU+NZ+UK+CA+USA and China at this stage
we have reason to believe that such a quantum computer can probably
What are those reasons?
Quantum computers could as well be nonsensical bullshit funded since 40s years
Maybe they are working out technical problems like that.

I remember having read some stories about the Manhattan Project, how there were countless of hard practical problems to solve before to get the bomb blowing up in the dessert.

Now what it seems like a fast technological jump sprint in the 40s, was actually the lifework for dozen of persons, scientists, engineers, even some layperson giving inspiration to someone trying to solve an equation.

I think they had a working bomb design almost from the beginning, but they didn't have a functional practical technique to (fastly) enrich the uranium (S-50 project and the other two).

I think these years feel "fast" for many people (young specially), but the research of radical change technology remains hard as it was always.

If you want a "public" example of how hard is, take a look at the CERN work.
It takes it directly from the .fit file on the watch, uses some software to parse the file. You can get the .fit file on a windows machine by plugging the watch into it and accessing it like a USB.

Not sure about linux, but I've heard Mac requires some third party software.
Mega STE Love (2002)
I think it's important to step back see the bigger picture. Your comment IMO is exactly what PG is talking about when he defines "aggressively conventional" (down to using the actions of the masses to support your POV). A perfect system cannot exist, and getting there is limited by economics -> diminishing returns.

It seems like you are pushing for a social structure that will consume American freedom to lower rate of failure (which is a drop in the ocean considering our population size) from our social system.

The system is not fundamentally broken, it's just human; comprised and run by humans.
> If your past warnings were ignored and you do not feel that there are any politics / biases / prejudices in active play, it is time to introspect, reflect, and ask:
> “How will I make my case differently next time?”

Most of the time someone says "I told you so", and aren't listened to, they'd say that the people who didn't listen to their warnings didn't listen due to either politics or bias. Even in the case of politics or bias, though, "how will I make the case differently?" is still a valid question (it's just that the question is now also accompanied by "is this really the hill I want to die on?").
My Fenix 5 shows up as a mass storage device when I plug in the usb cable to my computer. You can pull .fit files off that, which contain everything the watch records.
You don't need to check any inflation numbers to realize the impact of it, it is something that happens in your daily life.

Maybe don't think about it when buying a pizza (although I think even then it impacts on consumption), but I recently talked with a friend from Argentina and said that he was buying the sacks of concrete while working in US to build his own house in Argentina in the future as he did not want to deal with the contractor arguments about costs of the material due to the duration of the construction.
Not to take away from the people who worked hard to shift the culture (which is always hard at a large company), but I saw the same shift happen at Amazon and it came down to a simple fact - it's very hard to recruit and keep the best talent if you don't publish. You don't build ML reputation and the best researchers often don't want to work somewhere where they can't add papers to their resume.
This is a confused argument to me and I think many other comments in this thread are similarly confused. By confused I don't necessarily mean "wrong" but more like "muddled" or hard to understand.

I'm coming at this from a US point of view but would be interested in hearing other perspectives.

In casual use I think "democracy" is best understood to mean the more technically accurate concept of "democratic republic" and additionally that there are a core set of individual rights that are not subject to infringement by the majority via legislation. One of the primary roles of the government is to protect those individual rights.

The right to peaceful assembly, to free speech, to association, and to petition the government are all protected and foundational to what we might call "protesting" or "demonstrating".

I think "democracy" is generally used as a short-hand to refer to this bundle of ideas and not to the concept of a "direct democracy" where "majority rules" is the operating principle with no limitations.

But those rights aren't absolute and they have to be balanced with rights of others who aren't participating in the protest. If your group is no longer peaceful, or your speech is inciting violence, or your group is unlawfully impeding the free movement of others, or your actions are in fact crimes against people or property then you are no longer engaging in protected activities.

Blocking a public right-of-way without permission (like getting a parade permit, for example) is infringing on other people's rights and is not peaceful. It is not protected activity. It is dangerous and puts other people at risk. Similarly arson, vandalism, and other destruction of property is not part of the idea of "peaceful protest" and is not protected activity.
I didn't say that someone can be "aggressively conventional" and "bold and independent". I said that the same position can be both at different times and places.

You seem to be trying to make PG's scheme a classification of positions, and it's not. It's a classification of peoples' behavior. The result is that most of your criticism is directed at something that is not actually PG's position.
Deflation is harmful because it is basically a super-regressive windfall. Those with wealth get wealthier, those with nothing get nothing.
Is it possible to get data off a Fitbit without uploading it to cloud?
It's not about the failures, it's about the modes of failure. I assume that the modes of failure of a bridge, or of a building, are pretty well understood.

Software has far more distinct pieces than any other product you can find anywhere (maybe the human body?) so it's impossible to completely check the modes of failure. I was just reading before about a hardware corruption bug due to a kernel feature [1] and it's hard to imagine the same chain reaction in other engineering areas.

In software it's also really hard to model behavior. In engineering you'll get tolerances, strength and other features of the pieces you use. In software, you can't even benchmark something and expect the same benchmark to translate to a different computer.

1: https://lwn.net/Articles/304105/
The editor ate your links to the evidence. Can you repost them?
They were referring to the output file their code produces... Not the .fit parser.
Like rss subscriptions
I would recommend redefining wealth in your life to be something other than money. We all die and life is short - find something that you're fulfilled doing while you're still alive. I don't anticipate I will ever retire, but I hope to do something I enjoy until I die so in a way it doesn't matter. I don't want to do software for the next 20 years just so I can retire for 20 years before I die.
Ask HN: Looking to support/assist a contemporary artist with my dev skills
Hi all !

I'm a freelance developer and I've always been fascinated by the contemporary art scene using technology.

I want to work as an assistant/aid to an artist who might be needing code as part of their project (graphic, NLP, ...).

What would be the best strategy to find someone interested in my services (money is not my goal) ?

Is there a platform / website where artists are looking for outside help ?

Should I candidly approach artists directly ?

Feel free to be brutally honest, I need a reality check :-)

Thanks !
Have been mulling a substack newsletter for a while, but since I need to work for a living, the risk of publishing doesn't justify the rewards. When I started writing seriously about 20+ years ago, the upside was to become a columnist, which was a kind of social tenure that allowed you to socially move and think freely. The endgame was to become a kind of public intellectual on the entry to a spectrum that included writers like Christopher Hitchens, Anne Applebaum, Niall Ferguson, Camille Paglia, Stephen Fry, Nassim Taleb, even Malcolm Gladwell or even Naomi Klein and lately to a lesser extent Matt Taibbi, Glen Greenwald and Laura Poitras. While most of these are academics, even 10 years ago there was a kind of public intellectual role that isn't really viable today. At the time, most of those writers if they hit hard times could still pick up a gig teaching, consulting or a fellowship to pay the rent, but today if they crossed a line, they wouldn't be able to get a greeter job at walmart. Maybe we're getting higher quality thinkers on the so-called "intellectual dark web" because the risks they take are so much greater than those taken by the Gore Vidals, Hunter S. Thompsons, H.L. Menckens, Seymour Herschs, Martin Amis's, and Hannah Arendts, who wrote in a time where there was a boundary between the public and the private spheres that enabled them to write challenging things, and this drives off anyone not willing to embark on a career-suicide pact to have their voice heard.

It's as though there has been a polarization and your option as a writer is to become Charles Bukowski or nothing (and by nothing I mean Paul Krugman). If it is indeed a trend that reporters are going rogue and writing news letters, I'd say it's another example of this polarization of risk, and they will start pulling punches, and they won't be able to do their best work without institutional air cover. Perhaps I'm just not brave, but to me the risk/reward of doing a blog or newsletter isn't quite there.

Reading the article and the comments, the economics of a newsletter are that it needs to be something that imposes opportunity cost on scrolling newsfeed crap on facebook, reddit, and to a lesser extent, HN. Viewed this way, the competitor of a newsletter isn't other newsletters, it's the junk feeds of readers. It's an exciting time to be a writer because we all know the demand for content is infinite, it's just a question of how to harness it and secure the means to be able to keep producing it when it lands something heavy and provocative.
Safety, as measured in fatalities per person per mile per year, has increased by a factor of 100x since the 1960s: traffic increased 10-fold, while fatalities fell by the same factor.

So they do seem to be doing something right...

The lack of chaanges may just indicate that the current paradigm is a rather good one. If anvbody came up with a working scramjet, regulation would be a minor hassle.

It's really physics that are limiting here: supersonic travel is too inefficient both economically and environmentally. And personal autonomous local transport (i. e. "flying car") is impossible without some sort of breakthrough on noise.
I see a bunch of .fit files in <watch_name>/Primary/GARMIN/Activity/ when I plug my watch into a USB port on my PC. So, you can definitely get them off your device without connecting to Strava or Garmin Connect.
I remember before online reviews were a thing, tv shows would make fun of how consistently out-of-touch critics were. Particularly those who who judge film or food.
I often wonder if Amazon even inspects returns. I will often order items with listed cosmetic defects (major scratches) but receive brand new items in sealed
packaging.
SPAC Man Begins
In response to your question in the edit: it's the word "off" at the end that gives the phrase a nuance that could be interpreted as "disposing of".
Because this expansion is so infinitesimal on that scale as to be negligible. It's about 7%/Gyr, or a billion years for an unbound structure's "space" to grow by 7%. Or about 70 picometers (10^-12) per meter every year. Or in other words, about a water molecule per meter every four years.

At that rate nearly every other force (from chemical bonds to gravity) prevent anything but the largest cosmological structures (like galaxies) from being effected. They simply continue with their system as they always have, and the extra space shows up as distance between galaxies.
I always record when I'm opening stuff, and I pretend I run one of those unboxing channels while I do it. It beats the boredom and makes it less fishy that I have a recording of me opening an item I have to return (since it might look like a set-up).
Is there another good place to get out-of-print books? Or are you saying that for current books, a brick-and-mortar store is best, and for out-of-print, rolling the dice with Amazon is better than nothing?
It's kind of racist/sexist. Pretty obviously such.

I'm not personally offended but I am bothered by the casual double standard.
I recommend setting up an aliasing service no matter which provider you ultimately use. Blur or Anonaddy (sure there are others..) will give you a burner email unique for each new service you sign up for which forwards to your real email, and if one day one of them gets spammy or is sold to a data aggregator, you can just get rid of it entirely.

If I'm going to be actually corresponding a lot with an address (these days this is the exception in my email usage) I'll skip this middleman and make an alias/sending identity in fastmail.

To more fully answer your question, I believe I now have hundreds of unique email addresses in use. But it doesn't feel that way.
So, that is why I thought they put in a security blanket inside the SSD box.

Maybe some rudimentary thermal imagery, and that is the method?
If you are not going to grad school, you probably won't take GRE. As we all know, Masters are rarely funded in the US which in a way means that less well-off students will attempt to pursue one.
I keep telling everyone I come across, STOP BUYING THINGS from Amazon. They know they have a huge problem and refuse to face it.

I was injured in 2010 by counterfeit toiletries and since have embargoed them completely. I'm happy to buy things from the manufacture and pay shipping, at least I know with a reasonable confidence that what I am getting is going to be the real thing.
Thank you for sharing this, it put a lot of things I don't like about some discussions into interesting words!
> Many effective protests do destroy property, and that's mostly the property of large corporations.

The property being destroyed by rioters and looters in the current wave largely belongs to individuals and small businesses, although there have been some large corporations affected (e.g., Macy's in NYC was looted).

> Violence against individual humans is a separate issue.

I agree that it is worse to harm or kill a human directly than to harm or destroy their property. However, since many people's property is essential to their livelihood, harming or destroying property is still a very serious matter and should not be condoned.

> You're free to assume that this has nothing to do with the public health and economic situation (and self-interested voluntary decisions of police) and may be blamed entirely on protests

Rioting and looting is not a valid response to the COVID-19 situation any more than it is a valid response to inequality before the law and corruption on the part of the police (and the local governments that are responsible for police corruption).
One other issue is a lot of restaurants can't handle a group of 20 people coming in very well.

So the service they got might not be representative of the restaurants more typical service.
Ask HN: What are your favorite non-technical blogs?
So is this kind of the idea of going after the dealers and not the users?
That's like saying Google collects user data _only_ to improve search. We all know it goes much deeper than that.
Some times a "I told you so" is absolutely justified. You fight so many times for your common cause, but only in futility. Even when make the best case you can make, still you are not being listened to.

I agree that considering your role and position is the correct thing to do.
I once dealt with offshore developers who decided to store some binary values ("feature on or off") as ASCII "1"s and "0"s. Yep — ASCII-encoded binary.

They could have at least used "Y" and "N".
This is called “inverted pyramid”, use for journalism and other kinds of “show me” writing.
After being a Windows advocate my entire life and refusing to use Apple products, I bought a Macbook yesterday. I am tired of Windows and its bloatware, the updates that break my drivers, the constant battle to fix these issues, having to download third party software to prevent it from breaking stuff again, the literally hundreds of hours of my life I've spent doing all of this. Macbook has been great so far, the hardware is great, stuff just works.