skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I built a simple API using pure NGINX to get the IP address of a client, for times when I needed to ask a customer for his IP address; it was easier sending them a URL for a service I control, than explaining how they could get that information another way.

Now I have been thinking about opening it up for more people because while there are a variety of these services out there, one more does not hurt — it already exists, and works, so who knows, maybe more people would like to use it. The code is open, and access logs go to /dev/null; I could probably add a read-only SSH user for people to confirm that for themselves.

Geolocation could easily be added to it, but then comes my question: is there any use-case for geolocation APIs that does not involve tracking users for shitty purposes?

I was excited about adding this feature because I am using pure NGINX for it, and it was a fun learning experience, but I asked myself that question when I started writing the documentation for the website, and I still do not have an answer. Marketing material for other APIs that offer geolocation usually have user tracking as a selling point.

Personally, I have no use for geolocation, and if all use-cases involve tracking without consent users, and breaking their privacy, I want no part in that.
> If you don't like his writing and his world view (the brave startup founder is the hero), then why come to HN? Why support someone's website and accelerator/fund if you think they are so wrong?

Simple. I'm trying to do exactly what Paul Graham encourages (and what I believe in), and engage fruitfully with people with different ideologies and ways of thinking than me. Plus, there are sometimes interesting technical articles posted here.

> The comments here perfectly resemble that theory

Really? I don't see this, so maybe some examples would help. Mostly I see people disagreeing with Graham in unique ways. That doesn't seem like conformism. Would it be better if only people who accepted his premise commented. Isn't that exactly the opposite of what Graham wants (respect for his ideas among people who disagree with him)?

Your third point begs the question.
Of course, but I don’t have the personal bandwidth to mentally deal with every issue we need to resolve as a society. I get around this by not out of hand dismissing concerns by others but I also can’t take an active stance in their solutions. This is likely a more common story than we want to admit and the numerous issues across our political spectrum fragment our chances at a unified response to the problem.
I'm not unfortunately.
Is it lock-in when it's the only thing or the best thing on the market?
This is kind of ironic because one of the reasons the US and its government has generally been as successful is because of a distrust of democracy and the government. Democracy is just another term for mob rule. Just because it is rule by the will of the majority doesn't mean it is flawless. For example, a true democracy also has the ability to vote away the democracy. What the founders realized is that most forms of government had their problems so they set up a system of checks and balances to curb the worst of various styles of government they considered.

People from lesser populated regions can't trust a government based on population and people from highly populated regions can't trust a government based on equal geographic representation. Marry the two ideas to mitigate the impact of government.

Government is an institution that can never be just trusted because at the end of the day it's run by people, who may or may not have your best interests at heart.
This is sad. Especially for players who had a good season this year like Lewandowski.
I'm saying i'm not going to get outraged by simply imagined transgressions, there's going to have to be some evidence. The irony is, i'm not a hard line law and order type. I believe there should be some resistance to the prevailing authoritarian mood.

But I refuse to embrace hyperbolic rhetoric, it isn't helpful, call a spade a spade.
Who's profiting from all the H1B's, it's clearly not the companies hiring them since they all write shit code. And they get paid peanuts. What's up with that? Just trying to follow the money.
> You'll also take a hit in your reputation among other developers, most of whom seem to have gone into it for money

Exactly the environment and people I would like to get away from. I care little for what they think, but yes, I understand how some could see this as "career suicide".
Fair enough! You make some great points there which changed my perspective.
I tried this, but, the only way to "use" them is to pay absurd amounts of money for cloud tools or setup complex grafana + ... things.

Using them from the command line? Reading them just here?
Don't exist anything alike "nano server.log".
I used to consume a lot of flaxseed oil as a cheap source of Omega 3. But, then I heard on HN that Om 3 is not very bioavailable in that form. But, that's my only source of info on that.
You cannot do data science without open source
Really not at all so far unless an applicant is getting his or her green card through a US Embassy abroad (known as immigrant visa processing).
Java’s still going to be in use long after we’re both dead.
I did not interpret it as hubris.

Rather, I viewed it as the differences in deliverers of progress versus orthodoxy.

“Classic progressivism” / “Enlightenment” principles have across the globe been under attack from all over the place, including from within the depths of the worlds leading institutions.

Given that so much of the peace, prosperity and progress (both socially and technologically) have been driven by safe environments for the “aggressive independents” - I view this essay as a call out for us to do better.

Those who value stability are an important part to ground the bad new ideas from taking hold in the vein of progress, but traditionalists are by very definition not how progress is actually made.
Who determines what is moral as the baseline? That's the problem. You could argue your morals are right, the opposite side could argue theirs are right. People do have a right to not be subjected to ideas they don't like. I think part of the problem is hard line stances against ideas, then yelling at people that they're not "moral" ends up pushing people further away.

The 2A arguments are a good example of this. By default you would think many of the 2A advocates would be against federal forces policing (ignoring any context, not taking sides, just using an example). In fact many of the left that aren't pro 2A are calling them out for just that. But from their perspective, for years they've been told they are foolish, uneducated, or just simple people that are wrong. After all of that treatment for their stance on 2A, why would they be open to discussions from the same individuals on other topics?

So the problem is two fold. Both sides are ignorant, both sides get hyper focused on their causes, and don't care about the other sides perspective, or the collateral damage the hardline stances have.

In order for anything to work or be peaceful, we have to stop trying to change each others positions on everything, but instead realize, that for a functioning society, we have to accept, not everyone is going to get what they want.

It's tough. It requires calm discussions on both sides and notably hyperawareness about how one projects themselves. Online media makes it infinitely worse when you don't have the human behavioral cues as part of the narrative. It's why you can read the same line two or three ways and get two or three things out of it based upon the state of mind you enter the conversation at.
Do you realize that you just used an appeal to popularity in your argument against popularity?

When (or whether) social pressure is good is a very highly debatable point, and in that debate it's important not to conflate kinds/levels of social pressure. Calling someone out for using the N-word is one thing. Throwing someone in jail for having the wrong political views is quite another. If you, or pg, or anyone else wants to discuss good and bad forms of social pressure, the intellectually honest thing to do would be to make a direct case, not engage in these pigeonholing and semantic exercises to cast others' views in a bad light.
> They've been used since forever to heat and start large engines. Depending on size the pony motor might even produce enough heat when idling to keep the crew cabin warm while you service the main engine.

The much larger problem is that the engine will have seized by the time you're done. In central siberia (oymyakon and friends) locals will keep the engine running from when they leave home (having possibly heated it up by starting a fire under the engine block to thaw it) to when they're back so it doesn't freeze solid. Even the gasoline will start coagulating at the temperatures involved.
There's TONS of use cases for Lambdas where the operational costs (both in terms of time/energy/expertise and to lesser extent monetary) of running something persistent are much higher.

In my last gig, we ran plenty of services that would never need to scale and would likely never hit the point where Lambda became too expensive. Low-utilization services (Example for order submit, because we only ever got a couple hundred orders per day), Cron-type jobs (Admins could use Cloudwatch to monitor), Temporary fan-outs using queues. Anything that won't ever hit the millions-per-day level is a good candidate for something along these lines. Most of those services cost <$5/month.
That’s actually my point. Overestimating the reach of cancel culture because you live in a liberal enclave.
> Good programmers care about their work, doesn't matter which language.

Yes, but the whole purpose of my post is to point out the difficulty in _finding_ the good programmers.

> Also, use the right tool for the job.

Not sure how this applies. You can build banking software in literally any programming language.

> A language that forces you to think about values rather than mutable objects, will produce higher quality code as the number of ways you can shoot yourself in the foot are drastically reduced.

Again, this is just totally unsubstantiated. You're using "higher quality code" to mean "code I like more".

> Clojure will make you run your code constantly in the REPL. Paired with a dead-simple testing library, the desire to keep your majority of functions pure, it is not hard to see why Clojure code has higher quality.

Where have we demonstrated that clojure has implicit higher quality? Also, where have we demonstrated that all clojure devs keep their functions pure? Or test them? And how does clojure enforce that?

Your last bit kinda proves my whole point, I think. You like a language a lot, and you make good use of its tools. But again, when you're looking at large groups of programmers, they're going to drastically lower the bar on what you "should" do - talking about "strong desire" and "dead simple" is totally unrelated to whether people will _actually do_ something in the wild. And what's the best way to keep a codebase good? Well first, tooling, but second, not letting bad devs get ahold of it.
It proves divine right of kings in general, and House of Saud in particular. Sounds right to me.
Ask HN: Any interest in shared, managed Consul/Etcd/Zookeeper clusters?
I read today about HasiCorp ofering managed Consul in Azure (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23937941).

This got me thinking. Consul, etcd and Zookeeper are a kind of infrastructure services that are generally deployed in a pretty standard way. Because you need at least 3 nodes in a cluster for HA, running your own cluster will be relatively expensive for small services.

I was wondering if there is any interest here in a shared, multi-tenant, HA Consul/etcd/Zookeeper cluster?

The idea would be that instead of paying to run your own 3-5 nodes in an HA configuration, someone else would do it for you, but multiple tenants would use the same cluster - so you'd only pay something like $10/m instead of several times that.
That looks very interesting, thank you. And they need a backend dev!
> Even the vaunted NPR does this.

I recently upped my monthly donation to my local NPR station, and I feel like if anything it's made me more critical of them. Probably most of it is that I lean politically Right, and they lean Left. But it feels like sometimes they just go out of their way to try to check all the boxes of "woke" culture, whatever the hell that is.

The example that sticks out in my mind is they did a piece on immigration detention centers a few weeks back (no qualms there). The person they chose to interview was a transgender Guatamalen.

It's basically the most on-brand thing the reporter could have done. Talking about immigration? Better throw in some LGBT issues as well.

It's too much I guess to expect a news organization to just report on the news.

When I get feeling really irritated about it, I calm myself down by rationalizing that I like the music they play in the evenings.
Please explain how I missed it. Or do we just disagree?
Really? With those little voting arrows?
Possibly both theft and fraud
Dreambuilding as a CEO
Does the current COVID restrictions/situation, present a challenge to justify someone's re-entry into the US for work, as employees can technically 'work from home' which is technically possible from abroad? (Asking as a TN holder, Mexican national, visa sticker valid for various months still).

Planning to travel to be back in (flying, commercial), to reduce uncertainty and be ready for an eventual return to office, although no specific date has been given by the employer but I continue to work for them remotely.
> If you come up with clever ways of escaping the law for your own benefit...

... then PG will call you "smart".
I thought that was what he or she meant by "there are several times I've attempted to read through a textbook only to be stopped by notation". I wouldn't have said what I said otherwise.
Definitely, also it makes you hate those who hog up the resources. A good scheduler will take into account the past usage however.
What sorts of companies are you applying to? And where? I consider myself to be about average in technical skill and I don't have much trouble passing interviews at good companies in the US South. I know I wouldn't be able to make it in the Bay Area so I don't apply to jobs there.
I think you need to spend some more time familiarizing yourself with American history. This is not the first time U.S. citizens have decided to protest for change.

You're acting like this is the first time people have ever complained about things or marched in the streets, and therefore we're on the precipice of communism. We're not.

> The mob has an infinite well of issues, the mob will never be satisfied.

We don't have a mob in the U.S., we have sovereign citizens. The right to march and complain about each other is firmly protected by the U.S. Constitution. The goal of improving the nation is shared by all of us, and we take it seriously, even if some feelings get hurt along the way.
There are no US immigration requirements to work remotely for a US company - that is, you don't need a visa or work authorization - but to work in the U.S, work authorization would be required and the J-1 won't be available again until January at the earliest.
This is the exact same excuse I make for myself whenever I get a thought that I might be spending too much time on HN: all the interesting and actually useful stuff I've found here makes the time spend worth it. Right?
> 3. It's futile to fight a war of words over who is right or wrong - let's instead use the economic success as a proxy for truth. With few exceptions, you're definitionally going to be less economically successful than PG. Do you think he would have pulled it off if the brave startup founder thesis was fundamentally wrong?

This is so...weird.

All this says is his model draws no conclusions which (1) he acts on and (2) make it impossible for him to generate sufficient economic returns.

What does his model have to say about becoming an expert chess player? A world-class author? An amazing athlete? A successful therapist? If there are people who are successful along those dimensions whose models contradict pg's, then what?

Your statement is almost a tautology.
From Analytical Engine to Digital Computer: Ludgate, Torres and Bush [pdf]
Theft: dishonestly appropriating something, with the intent of permanently depriving the owner.

He dishonestly took the item. He had no intent of giving it back.
Yes, let's keep our America-loathing focused on what America does to itself. ;). Plenty of things to loathe about that at the moment, sadly : ( .
Fry's electronics when I was there was a victim of that. Fry's management in their heydays (before newegg, amazon) gave the directive to open boxes, even when these boxes appear new, during the return-process. This is the result of lessons.

Hopefully, Amazon will learn it or make it a problem for the vendors.
The question is how does one thwart and reverse such an attack?
Get $1000 Walmart Gift Card for Black
Why would we invest the resources? Mars provides a huge benefit to humanity Antarctica unless just used as a testing ground for Mars doesn't have the same benefits to justify the expense.
I’ve never understood that number. I’ve read that modern humans have been around for 200k years, but I’m supposed to believe that for 3/4 of that time they stayed in Africa? BS. Maybe proof hasn’t been found, yet. But we know from our own experience that modern humans love to explore. I don’t believe that love of travel and adventure and exploration is cultural. Our modern ancestors would’ve been exploring out of Africa long before 50kya.
How should the United States address this issue given that it is usually in the top 5 with spending on public education per student every year?
Not just Java, there is a lot of old Microsoft tech floating around too. VB6 and old versions of .NET and MSSQL are still common in many enterprises.
What is sad about this comment is how the author define and American.
USA is a country that is built by immigrant (I am not talking about the CEO of big tech companies, I am talking about your grand-grand parents who came here a few generations ago)

How do you justify the people who let you ancestors to immigrate there being Americans whose work... (replace the rest with your own comment!)
The trend is to be more cohesive. This also means that some contradictions and contrasts cannot be ignored anymore and will have to be resolved. One of those was the British hostility to federalism, another was the need for shared debt to correct an unbalanced setup in the common currency - both have been resolved, albeit painfully. The next is probably the slow unpicking of Visegrad.

There is no alternative to a stronger and more cohesive Europe. The rise of Putin, Xi Jinping, Trump, and FAANG, is focusing a lot of minds - the only hope to not get trampled by these giants, is to stick together as Europeans.
this theme is hilarious and infuriating

EDIT: You can comment out the yellow background image in the style editor and it becomes something reasonable
Tested this with the RSS feed for https://plurrrr.com/ and it works great! Go to https://srv.tt-rss.org/tt-rss/#f=12&c=0 (user: demo, password: demo). Only thing that was confusing was that it takes some time (like 40 seconds?) before the feed is fetched the first time; it looked for a while like something went wrong with my feed as nothing showed up. Maybe some placeholder until the feed is fetched?
Ask HN: Moving from Individual Contributor to Executive
I've been an individual contributor software engineer for the past 10 years. I'm now realizing that I love making things come to fruition, I'm not as enamored with software development as I once was.
I started my own business a year and a half and I'm finding that I really enjoy helping build something from the ground up.
Does hacker news have any recommendations on how to make the jump from an individual contributor to an executive team?
Not exactly conservation, but there's plenty of computational work (and funding!) in plant biology.

I do web development and data engineering for plant phenomics automation in a plant bio lab. Crop optimization (e.g., for abiotic stress resistance, reduced fertilizer requirements, atmospheric carbon sequestration, yield) basically requires digital surveillance infrastructure on the same scale we've (regrettably) developed for humans, except for plants. Nobody really understands how phenotypes develop as a function of genetic, physiological, and environmental factors; but we need to if we want to maintain the viability of agriculture in the face of climate change etc.

You won't get paid like you would in a more traditional software development position, but it's enough to live on. Let me know if you'd like more information.
I admit that the abbrevation may be confusing, but the numbers would hopefully be large enough to avoid this confusion.
Maybe we're very precisely estimating the reach and are appropriately terrified?

If you can't get the people you want, but you really want to get somebody...
Whenever I see lists like this, what's interesting to me is what's omitted. In this particular case I don't see mention of workers getting fired for trying to organize or advocate for unions[1]. I don't see the abuse that gets piled on cops who report the misdeeds of their colleagues[2]. And I don't see the NFL effectively blacklisting Colin Kaepernick for his views on police brutality.

It seems like it's only "cancel culture" when it happens to people we identify with.

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2020/may/05/amazon-pr...

[2] https://www.kcaw.org/2019/12/12/sitka-settles-police-whistle...
> Talking about a revolution

> Many economists want precisely this state intervention, but it presents clear risks. Governments which already carry heavy debts could decide that worrying about deficits is for wimps and that central-bank independence does not matter. That could at last unleash high inflation and provide a painful reminder of the benefits of the old regime.

Sounds more like a plea than a warning, coming from The Economist. Prophecies of inflation seem like a joke in a time of record low inflation with high government deficits. Just look at the case of Japan for one.
So what's undetermined in the snopes article is whether specifically those police that detained people in portland identified themselves or not.

When I spoke about officers not identifying themselves I was talking generally, about the other cases from outside of portland, of officers obscuring their badges and not identifying themselves.

But no, that's not really what I would count as secret police. I mean I think the distinction is a little arbitrary and before long you basically get to arguing definitions which is almost always a waste of time, but I think the actions of the police in the snopes article constitute an overstep that I think qualifies as authoritarian. Especially when those agencies were sent in specifically by the executive.

Also, I should point out that the line you quoted is the one I have a problem with:

> we have no verifiable evidence to prove or disprove whether agents in those cases explained for what federal agency they worked during the arrests.

That's a very strange sentence to me: like how could you even prove such a thing? Have a video of the entirety of the person's interaction with the police?

I think if we're being reasonable here that it's overwhelmingly likely the police didn't identify themselves in this case. But of course it's not feasible to have "evidence" for that kind of thing, so I suppose I can't go ahead and say I'm sure on the point.
Their central banks are more independent than in China. (The courts are too, but for these purposes it's the central banks that matter.)