skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
They've got somewhere north of 3 million online subscribers paying $17/month. It's not Netflix numbers, but it's still more than $600M/year - about a third of their claimed revenue. Their writers are salaried at $110K/year on average and probably around 1300 writers (given data from 2016), so that's about half their digital income for salaries.

There's also the economies of price here that's often neglected - if they charged less, more people could and would pay for it. At $17/month they can forget it, I'll get my news elsewhere. At $9.99/month, it becomes a consideration for me. At <$5/month, I'm almost definitely in; I give $4/month to Nintendo so I can play Animal Crossing with a few friends a couple times a month. I'd normally happily spend $5-10/month at a Starbucks on a mocha as an occasional treat (you know, if it weren't for the whole pandemic thing).

What I'm sure is really burning their income are holdovers from a bygone era - printing presses and their maintenance, prestigious billion dollar buildings in downtown New York City, and so on. There's no way the print side of the business is paying for itself anymore at the volume they're printing at... it's just time to let it go. And writers can work from literally anywhere... A curiously common refrain often heard here from tech workers.
I'd think it's both in the age of the smart thermostat that has a camera/mic built in.
And most importantly, the fact that you have to respond even with your own monitoring. That's most of what you pay ADT for. If they get a ping, they call you. If they can't get in touch with you, they dispatch the relevant people.

Yes you can set this up yourself (and spend a lot more on the hardware, which they generally give to you pretty cheaply or even "free" because you're signing a contract) but when you go hiking in the mountains and someone uses your Facebook posts as a cue that you're out of town, you're SOL.

Don't get me wrong I love looking at all the home security stuff you can do, and it does indeed sound like a neat project. But you're really paying these companies for monitoring and automatic (human) response, not the security systems themselves.
Nothing wrong with using BASIC.

Programming language chauvinism is dumb.
Coin Master
Coin Master Spins
I had a couple drinks and woke up with 1k nerds (2014)
In their defense, OnHub routers launched late 2015 and was discontinued/rebranded Google Wifi in late 2016, but they did end up supporting the older models for approx. 4 years of updates, including phone support. That was a product that made me trust Google just as Apple was getting out of the router business. Google Home, Nest and Dropcam have all had older products remain supported, so far.
It doesn't even say that much. It simply ridicules proponents of wealth redistribution for sometimes calling those opposed "greedy", while they themselves are being "greedy" in going after other people's money. Whether taxes are okay isn't discussed.
In this example, it would be an attractive woman approaching you at a bar after the paperwork is filed. Once you have the DUI on your record, you're now too dangerous to take care of our kids...
I would say these are the obvious ones for Google:

> Or are you worried about automated systems building knowledge about your life based on home security data? Or are you worried about your home security data used in aggregate?
You simply don't have all the information.

My instance is a Swedish one, it's aimed at Swedish users. In the 1st few months of operation I was getting a lot of spam users registering and noticed this was a wide spread issue among instance admins.

So I made the decision to use a basic GeoIP block on the path used to register new accounts, blocking all IPs outside of EU to make the area wide in order to avoid blocking Swedes.

This caused my spam to go down to zero. At the same time I use several ActivityPub relay servers that make my public timeline so active that you can see posts appear every second. I'm quite happy with this solution and consider it a good method to use in general with federation.

I'd much rather see smaller localized communities using AP relaying to stay in touch with each other, than huge monolithic instances that vacuum up all the users.

What I mean when I say that you shouldn't block entire instances from federating just because of a few hateful users is that they're being blocked from the public timeline. Not being blocked from registering.
How Briar Project Works
Part of the communication problem is that “high”, “performance”, and “needs” are all relative, which makes the combined phrase super-ambiguous. If you reach for a thing that’s advertised as “2x faster” because it means you’ll get your answer in one month instead of two, I think reasonable people would agree that’s a reasonable optimization in that specific case. If you reach for it simply because it’s advertised (perhaps not reliably) as “2x faster”, that’s more of a premature optimization if you don’t know along what axes, or under what conditions, that speedup obtains.

Having said that, “2x improvement” can also be read as “an order of magnitude improvement (base 2)”, which does become more meaningful in general as x gets large.
Redlining ended over fifty years ago. Pick a different bugaboo.
How about this one:

Critics agree that Mr Obama's middle name is Hussein and he is likely an islamic terrorist.

The first part is obviously true. For the second part, I am fairly certain I can find two people on 4chan who agrees with this, and they will certainly be critics of Obama.

Statements of objective truths can still be biased.
Google is an awful service provider. Ever had a Gmail account get hijacked? Good luck getting it back. Google doesn't give a crap about helping its "customers" because its products are free so they have this awful take it or leave it attitude. You can't rely on that. They did the same thing to Nest. They'd change your thermostat and shut things down, potentially at your home's risk. Just a really careless and inconsiderate company who I avoid doing business with.
Ah yes, I remember when the problem with the music industry was big bad scary DRM.

But now DRM on everything is just cool, because the DRM allows tech companies for which the majority of HN works for instead of the big bad scary RIAA and MPAA to control the product and skim off most of the money while adding the least value.
I am updating this manually. I forgot to update the second page.
How do you keep them then? A fun puzzle once a week - or just lots of money?
tldr; https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UVgbFttx-6I
This makes it sound like no fault divorce is a good thing.

No doubt there are positives but it's difficult to see how it isn't just another step along the path of the trivialising of marriage.

Perhaps we should be looking at other approaches to the problem of unhappy marriages, in particular the due diligence of people in choosing their partners - especially when there are children involved or intended.

I'm not suggesting a method or solution, just pointing out making divorce easier is not universally considered a good thing or moral win.
Yes, I am giving my opinion on Thomas Sowell in a post about Thomas Sowell. My post is very short, like a third of it is a quote from him. And I didn't define conservative as wrong, I said he is a standard, non-special conservative AND wrong. What are your actual disagreements?
There is money to be made if user acquisition costs are non existent. Just a billionaire boys club game these days...
Be charitable, he could be talking about the Dixie Chicks or anchors that were fired for questioning the Iraq war. Or for the biggest example of modern cancel culture, Kaepernick's firing after targeting by the president.
Yup. This must be why all the anti-maskers and COVID skeptics get all their news from Facebook. Truth is, Facebook isn't free either, you're just sacrificing your privacy for garbage.
The government, scientists, experts in various fields, people who have proven to tell the truth in the past, etc.

You obviously still have your own ability to determine what fits your model of the universe and what doesn't. These are just groups of people more likely to have access to information that you might not. You don't have to trust anyone, but in a system where someone has to judge what is true, these groups are closer than the alternative, which would be people with no qualifications, no training, and no history of telling the truth.

If you have another alternative I'm all ears.
I launched the Postgres Docker image on a VPS several years ago, published the port on the open Internet, and ... used strong passwords?

I still haven’t been compromised. Have I done something wrong?
Using std:map Wisely With Modern C++
That’s because WinRT already provides an async executor based on the Windows thread pool for you, C++ coroutines specify the plumbing for writing coroutines but nothing more, just like Rust - Microsoft just spent the time working up the WinRT async interfaces to coroutines.
> Why is the boon.Program closing? - Due to the current situation, we've taken the difficult decision to close the boon.Program.

What a bullshit answer. You should better ignore the question altogether than answer it this way.
This is my primary stack now, except for Typescript instead of Javascript, and I absolutely love it.

First, the ideological thing: flexibility is an awful thing for user's data and logical relationships within it. The fact that with RDBMS you have to define your schema and follow it, makes many classes of erros that would have been corrupted data at operations to being exceptions at development: PostgreSQL just won't let you shoot yourself in the foot like that. And with pgtyped, which I'm growing to love, you don't even have to write any boilerplate: just write plain straightforward SQL, run verification against your test database, and get all of your types for free.

But that's not even the most important part; what I absolutely love about SQL is my ability to delegate huge amounts of work from my app server to my db server, saving a lot of latency and CPU. It may not be that critical for things when you just update one row in the 'users' table, but when you have O(n) updates and up, it's just great to be able to do things directly in the database.

And in rare occasions where you absolutely have to use non-structured data (or data with a lot of different data types that don't deserve their own columns), jsonb is useful and pretty damn fast if you think throught the schema and make use of the GIN indexes.
Where we try to differentiate ourselves is that while Bubble etc. can theoretically let you create any app/product, in reality that means you're building all the small parts from scratch, and you end up having to basically think like a programmer.

We want to solve a much smaller set of problems really well – turning spreadsheets into Internal Apps and Customer Portals.

That means we've spent a bunch of time focussing on getting the things that everyone needs (User login, data security, lists, forms) really excellent so that you can build something really easily.

In fact, there's not really any "building", just "configuring" – you start with a working app as soon as you connect your data, and then customize it to look how you want.

Contrast that with tools like Bubble where you have to build out each screen, each form, the login page etc. manually.
You don’t have to have racist intents to execute a policy that enforces racism. Unfortunately when we talk about systems of society within humans, individual human intentions begin to dissipate.
I'm aware of that, just wanted the poster to explain himself.
> - it's often noise because you can't act on it (because you need to use X)

"screaming into the void" is noise; replying to those screams with suggestions if anything would be an attempt to denoise the network by promoting actual conversation.

The problem here is as I've pointed out that some people clearly don't want to have a conversation — what the value in that? Why post something on public forum if you don't want to have a discussion?
Especially when mastodon supports private toots — if you really want to went start a journal or toot "unlisted" or "followers only".

When mastodon just started out federated and public timelines was a joy to read but now it's just constant screaming and yelling and utter thought vomit to the point where I'm certain that nobody browses federated or even public timelines anymore.

At the end of the day it seems that it's a design flaw of twitter that promotes toxic screaming rather than structured discussion and Mastodon as a platform hasn't really done anything to address this.
The prophets of doom may yet have their moment in the sun considering that no laws have changed yet. And no one knows what the actual rules are going to be come 1/1/2021.

In my personal circumstances my business makes most of it's sales to the EU and if things happen like they look like might happen I'm going to be contractually forced to lower prices to compensate for any customs duty my customers will have to pay. Additionally I'll have to spend several more hours per week just to make customs documents, or hire someone to do it for me.

So I'm still really hoping the customs union will remain intact.
> Now ByteDance is desperately trying to find a way out of this.

Will they be exempt from China's national intelligence law?
Ethical implications of AI in surgical settings
The Netflix CEO is (mostly) rich due to equity holdings, a market value of future cash flow.

Netflix’s actual cash on the other hand has actually gone nearly 100% of revenue to content creators — they actually have taken out quite a lot of debt in order to create their content, because they think they can ultimately earn money on it over time.

But truly you should thank Netflix for ~$50 billion in content creation so far.
I was addressing brabels assumptions about Germany in WWII and about Ghandi. There is putting yourself into shoes of someone from the past. And then, there is making stuff and assumptions about history so that you make defense you want to make.

And the comment I responded to did the latter instead of former. All too many people when they want to defend someone from the past will proceed into some kind alternative past, where there was nothing special about Germany pre-WWII.

The alternative past in which the last two paragraphs do not come accross as completely ridiculous but feel good nonsense. That has little to do with Ghandi.
There are plenty of Americans who distrust Google and large American corporations, too. I don’t trust any entity that exists for the purpose of vacuuming up as much of my data of possible.
Yup, I'd certainly agree that the App Store has various consumer utilities, and even in centralizing payment it has value as a consumer; I don't really want to give out my credit card to every app and I certainly want a central place to cancel subscriptions with no bullshit.

That said, I do think that 30% is excessive. Job's original announcement [1] suggested that the App Store's 30% was the cost of running the App Store; I don't believe that it is really costing that much to run now. Reducing the payment premium and/or allowing customer choice of paying the App Store rate, or the outside the store rate is maybe the least bad option here.

It's telling that there has been no substantive movement on margin from Apple or Google here. Steam is also 30% until you reach higher tiers, then it's 25%. Epic is only 12%. I think a lot of the current concerns would be allayed if the cut was only 12%.

[1] https://youtu.be/xo9cKe_Fch8?t=212
But obviously there is a spectrum, some countries (like Belgium) have very little difference between their all cause mortality rate and their reported rates due to effects (not just direct) of the crisis.

Other countries (and going by this report that would seem to include Iran) are heavily underreporting to the tune of 60%.

And then obviously you have countries that are somewhat underreporting like the UK, where they have reported covid deaths of approximately 46 thousand, but excess deaths of 64 thousand giving an approximate underreporting in the order of 25+%.

As to the revolution, it's not likely the cause as merely another example of a tightly controlled society that is sensitive to criticism; a reflection of their fear of "losing control".

"Beware of him that would deny you access to information, for in his heart he dreams himself your master."
Having run a newsroom, there is some very small truth in this. But the old motto of "you get what you pay for" is still true. The free stuff is uncontrollable - and is usually cloaked (or not so cloaked) advertising.

There's lot of "free" stories on the wire, but if your paper just runs wire stories then it ruins its reputation. And the reputation is what attracts advertisers.

In the end, you have to pay people to write good stuff. And that costs money.

However, Journalists do have to get over themselves. The days of journalists being the only people with a voice are long gone and never coming back.
I am speaking from experience as a consumer.., that the app market was very ‘thin’... difficult to navigate, hard to locate and lacking in variety. But I also have talked at length. With someone who developed apps for phones pre-iPhone. His was a horror story.

As I recall (details fuzzy), He had to pay a substantial fee to the carriers in order for his app to be quality reviewed. If it failed, then he would gave to pay again. For each phone they supported, an extra fee was required. Also extra fees for different carriers, even if it was for a device already approved by another carrier.

Simply... in the days when the carriers ruled the waves, there was no profit in a healthy app dev community. In the UK, my first experience of a healthy app eco-system came with the dawn of the Palm Pilot.
Yup, it would be racist if tiktok is a person.
Noob question: if I share a brick URL, can it be traced back to my github, or my personal identity in any way by the people that I sent it to?
That doesn't cover collecting the data in the first place.
And it often happens these are awesome, unique products I'd love to use.
It completely ignores political corruption 100%. It completely ignores union stomping over the past 60 years, among other things. This is what I mean by his ultra reductionist views, he refuses to consider external factors when he talks about social issues, which is weird for a top economist to do.
How to Start a Podcast and Connect with Leading Executives
Very true said. I don’t know why you were downvoted.
Alphabet Inc.'s first decline since going public
It's not possible, because unsafe does not turn anything off; unsafe is a superset of safe.
Having "affairs" doesn't make someone a creep, and certainly doesn't deserve even the slightest mention when assessing the man.
> Old games, old productivity software. If they were good when they were new, I've never understood how they become "bad" just because time passes.

So much this. It upsets me when new reviewers take a look at old games and claim things like they are "dated" (usually they mean pixel graphics, which is a whole category of misunderstanding art) or that they were "good for their time".

No. If they were good when they came out, chances are they are still good. One of my favorite games is Microprose's Sword of the Samurai -- to this day I haven't played a better, more artistically sensible, and more comprehensive simulation of feudal Japan. Even the Total War series is not as good.

Conversely, some old games were bad, and we simply didn't know better. But masterpieces remain masterpieces.
Marketing opportunity for a backup product named Ransomware Protect?
Just enforce syngas airplanes, boom solved
In the US I remember there was some variation between carriers on how locked down the devices were–my Motorola SLVR on Cingular circa 2005 ran the standard Motorola system and I had a bunch of Java games on it and could browse WAP sites for more. I was also able to install wallpapers and any MP3 clip from my computer as a ringtone. My friends who had RAZRs on Verizon, however, had some kind of crippled Verizon OS that forced you to use their store and were less customizable. They did have T9 predictive text, though, which I was jealous of.
ISO C++20 defines them in a way that the current incompatibilities in the Rust world aren't happening as such and any C++ library using concurrency features is expected to just work across compilers.

ISO C++ also does not define how std::thread should be mapped into the host platform.
Maybe I'm old but if I'm composing text, I far prefer to type on a keyboard than dictate. I spend far more time re-reading and revising what I've written than I do typing it, and unless I were willing to significantly drop my standards of written communication I can't see myself gaining all that much from switching to voice control.

Plus, talking all day is exhausting. Why would you want to do that?
And landlords have no incentives to install one for you. That's where regulation steps in (in normal countries)...
Auditree: Open-Source Compliance as Code
I've launched a similar product a while ago that turns documents into websites[0]. Perhaps that might also be interesting to you.

[0] https://magicdocs.co
Whilst that's true, there's also a question of degree. Revit, which is the source of complaint here, takes long enough to open your file you might as well go make a sandwich while it does so. The developers only found out that CPUs have multiple cores somewhere around 2017, and still haven't really worked out how to actually use more than one core for anything much. They still appear to be largely unclear what a "GPU" is, so don't bother putting anything fancy in your workstation.

It also likes to crash a lot, often taking a bunch of work with it. It's slow in a way that's probably entirely foreign to most readers of HN, and even compared to things like adobe photoshop or ptc creo, the rate of improvements is most kindly described as "glacial". In 2020, revit finally learned what a pdf was for example. Sure, large enterprise software development moves slowly. But there's slow, and then there's Autodesk.
Ask HN: What's annoying, time consuming, complex, but crucial for your business
What do you hate to do over and over again, because it is either (or all of it)

- annoying as hell

- time consuming

- complex

- ...

but really really important because otherwise you would go out of business?
TikTok 365 Enterprise Edition, Service Pack 2
Yea, all the sign does, for someone motivated enough, is tell them how much time they have. "Okay, they have a security system. Break in, grab the tv, grab the other stuff that's visible and worth something, then run"

At the end of the day... it will deter those that aren't interested in dealing with it. And for those that aren't deterred it just gives them the info they need to know it's a smash, grab and run situation.
ADT’s pricing and go-to-market approach is draconian in 2020. Long term contracts, expensive equipment, and high pressure sales tactics couldn’t be any different than my experience with a Nest home security system. Will be interesting to see if and how ADT evolves because of the ownership stake.
The official documentation is pretty damn good. Most of the time when I needed to learn something about Postgres, it had all the answers I needed, and in rare occasions it didn't, I used Stack Overflow to figure out what other part of the manual I needed to read.
Byproducts from the foresting industry (and other industries) can provide renewable aviation fuel soon.

https://www.thelocal.se/20180313/swedens-forests-could-fuel-...
I like the book 'Economics in one lesson' by Henry Hazlitt which does something similar.
Mistakes and learnings from writing utility-first CSS for the first time
>The government, scientists, experts in various fields, people who have proven to tell the truth in the past, etc.

But how has it been implemented in practice?

If you look at the raw numbers, generally we rely on the lowest bidders amongst Facebook/Google/Twitter's third-world-country subcontractors, as well as the Chinese government.