skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
That limitation is supposed to be an asset, it seems. No, you can't use the currency outside the local network. That incentivizes you to use your dollars only for things outside the network, and to go inside the network whenever possible (to make the best use of your overall holdings). You might give up convenience (by going to a local store to by produce rather than ordering from Amazon or a national chain), but then you see the benefits in community vitality.

In the end, this only works if you accept that investing in your local community is more important than saving a few minutes or dollars sending your work-hours-in-the-form-of-dollars to some far-flung exec's pocket. Some people are so well remunerated by the traditional system that I suppose they don't really have to care about all that.
Cable internet providers are relatively inept local monopolies in some, usually the least profitable parts of their service area. They are comparatively harmless to FAANG monopolies, which have global scale and the ability to bully entire countries into complying with their business models.

Tech companies have invested massive amounts of money in lobbying and paid media to convince you to worry about ISPs so you give them more power.

Net neutrality, HTTPS everywhere, etc. all centralize power with Big Tech and gate out their competition from behaviors they already employ. And often even the journalists evangelizing them are directly on Big Tech public policy influence payrolls.

Like, I hate Comcast and AT&T as much as the next guy, but I'm forced to do business with neither (there are three residential wired Internet providers in my area) but nobody on the entire planet can escape Google.
> If you are the originator of the information it is your speech.

This technically isn't always true either. I write software for a company and even though it comes from my brain, I still don't own it and I can't share it. I'm sure in the case of TikTok, users probably don't own their data either, the company does.

> You can ban their commercial exploitation of information but you cannot ban the app itself or americans's ability to transmit information to them.

What would be the point of ByteDance even keeping the app up if they can't monetize it? The act of users transmitting information inherently adds data to TikTok's database, which has financial value. It doesn't make sense for a company to just keep an app like that up and running while promising not to make money off of it. The compute costs alone must be enormous for an app like TikTok since they have to optimize and cache all of that video. Why would a business agree to keep operating while promising not to profit? That doesn't make sense to me.
Please check out the term "Overton Window"
#KeepItOn.

Internet shutdowns are disastrous economically and the countries that need to resort to them are just feeding fuel to the fire. There are countries that simply shutdown access to certain social media platforms (not that that's better) but shutting down the entire internet is the very definition of desperate to me.
Or alternatively everyone should be able to vote, otherwise the government is an illegitimate joke, and we have the receipts from Republican groups intentionally trying to block targeted groups using voter ID and changing other voting conditions (polling places, early election days, etc). Insomuch as it will increase the number of Democratic voters those voters are entirely up for grabs if Republicans want to court them.

If the US wants to remain an actual representative democracy/republic [0] we have to treat attempts at keeping voters out of the polls as the threat they are. These voter ID law pushes never come with a commensurate program to find, ID, and register groups without IDs and I think that gives the game away even before the emails came out explicitly saying these were targeted attacks at legitimate voters.

[0] Just heading off the pedantic "ThEy'Re NoT a DeMoCrAcY" crowd
I feel for everyone who will lose their job here. That's never a pleasant thing, particularly so in current circumstances.

Notwithstanding that though - and with no disrespect to anyone being laid off - I'm actually really encouraged by this. The key quote from the announcement is this one:

"Furthermore, Mozilla's contract with Google to include Google as the default search provider inside Firefox is set to expire later this year, and the contract has not been renewed."

Mozilla's reliance on Google is a major detraction from delivering privacy-focused products.

I've said before, and I'll say again: I'd gladly pay a fee for Firefox if it meant (a) it was funding the product so that (b) there was no need for them to peddle in surveillance.

I really wish Mozilla all the best. Commit to provacy, show me where to pay and I'll gladly sign up.

--

I'm aware they accept donations and have already donated. But that's different from paid-for products.
Google is a private corporation that runs various free services, i.e. you are the product.

You agreed to their terms and services.

If you don't like that, you can use a competitor.
As long as there's an open internet infrastructure, there's no anti-competitive behavior. Everyone can be a google competitor of one of its services. Case in point, DuckDuckGo etc.

If you want to regulate something, start with the ISPs and restore net neutrality.
This looks intriguing. Welcome to the newsletter space! I run Thinking About Things [0], a newsletter with a similar premise - that of critical thinking and seeing things in a new light.

The demand for content about critical thinking is rising exponentially. I'm happy to collaborate and show you the ropes - you can find our contact info on the site.

[0] thinking-about-things.com
Losing that great competitive browser because of pursuing even higher goals and ending up with an even more silo'd, broken up internet is an even less desirable end state and one that is much more likely to materialize by acting like this.
banana_giraffe's comment is pointing out that you linked to an unrelated google doc – maybe you meant to link to the vimium homepage instead?
> you’re now not limited to the tooling just in the browser and you can run all of that offline in a server

When it comes to DOM interaction (a key part of this article) you absolutely can’t.

I see the logic in compiling a native library to Rust and using it via WASM. It’s the part where you bring the whole DOM WASM-side that I’m sceptical about.
As you say, tooling isn’t there yet. Is performance even there yet? Last I heard WASM<->DOM interaction incurs a performance penalty. Right now it all feels like a “because I can” capability. I’m not saying that will always be the case, but for right here and now I’m sceptical.
Those ads have very good click and conversion metrics, if you're not sophisticated it looks like a good idea to cannibalize your organic traffic that way.
The legend says green and yellow states accept student IDs. Stripes mean they only accept public student IDs. 27 states are green or yellow and only 2 have stripes.
At some point in the past, she said that her kids were safe abroad, but it does not take a big country to successfully track and extort people anywhere in the world.
Hey @ynmzcn!

Of course, we have a coupon code that prepared for Betalist.
You can check in on here: https://betalist.com/startups/screpy
Regulation priorities:

1. Organized disinfo like this https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/aug/11/qanon-facebo...

2. Cable and telco monopolies that charge extortionate prices for slow internet

3. Facebook

4. Scam robocallers

5. Microsoft forcing Teams, Edge, and dozens of other apps on users by installing them with Windows security updates
I think the thing a lot of devs don't know is that there's a limit to refactoring. At some point, you're done.

It's like a mountain. The team is dropped half-way up the mountain. The dev that refactors all of the time continues to head up the mountain. It can be slow work. It's a tough climb. Most of the time, devs on the team don't know any better, so they just do the work in front of them, slowly sliding down the mountain. Eventually, they look at the mountain and say "There's no way anybody could conquer that! We're lucky just to get our work done without too many bugs!"

Meanwhile, the refactoring dev reaches the top and slides down the other side. That dev starts looking for bigger mountains. The rest of the team he left behind sink into despair and cynicism.

Eventually, when organizations grow large enough, most everybody lives at the bottom of the first mountain. Devs who leave and try to summit are ridiculed at best, shunned at worst. They're hated if they only go halfway and then fail.

I am of the opinion that most big-organization developers don't actually know how to code. Sure, they know how to type in programs. Hopefully they know enough to test what they're writing. But a real understanding of what programming is? No. Until you've been over a few mountains you don't know what you don't know. Sadly these are many times the folks that get promoted.
Funny thing is, this is not strictly needed anymore, as TypeScript is probably the best language in existence right now.

edit: OK, maybe not compared to Rust... but here it wins by ease of learning.
If you plan to use Docker I'd recommend not buying a Macbook. It runs inside a VM on OSX and is really bad at performance, you can literally save hours per week waiting for commands to run on OSX.
The disconnect between your first and second paragraphs is pretty hilarious. The ads are there to pay for the bandwidth, man.
Here's an example of a similar problem - that I created for a website I help a friend with.

We had outbound referral links, basically to monitor the number of times that a visitor clicks out of the website. The URL pattern was something like: example.com/out.php?url=outbound.com

The out.php script would just simply (naively) redirect the user to the url specified. We never validated if the outbound link was to an authorized reference.

The result is the same. Eventually spammers figured out the above link and then just started posting their spam using the site's redirect script to any number of social media sites, embedded in email, etc.

What's interesting too is that we would see multiple redirects embedded into a single request. e.g. out.php?url=another.link.service/link=spammer.com

Obviously in hindsight this was stupid, but when we built it (some 10 years ago), the idea seemed pretty sound if not maybe a little naive. The solution would have been to only allow redirect links to authorized outbound sites, which works when those links are relatively static and not open ended.
It was established precisely so that the Corporation could pursue commercial operations that the Foundation legally couldn't before that, like business partnerships.

Also Mozilla Foundation didn't qualify as a public charity since it received less than 1/3rd of its revenue via donations, though I don't know if it can be considered as one now (15 years after the split).
I think the whole point is that you can't convert easily.
I would argue Visa and Mastercard and payment processing at large as the top priority by far.

It's crazy that we've given up control as a society of the only mechanisms for electronic payments in an increasingly cashless world to unregulated private entities who continue to jack up fees as often as they can get away with.

Makes everything 3-5% more expensive. Ridiculous.
Mozilla's VPN is powered by Mullvad. Mullvad is available globally right now, costs €5/month (vs Mozilla VPN's $5), and allows a range of payment methods all the way down to "cash in an envelope".

Mozilla are great, I have nothing against them, but I really struggle to see the point of their VPN service.
Wow I miss the grey blue black pages of the nineties!
Yes.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_antitrust_law

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theodore_Roosevelt#Trust_busti...
What about their browser security team?
I eagerly await every single NPM package being rewritten in every single language just so someone can post a ShowHN about it.
It's also the best way to get accurate data on how many searches for "heroku" there are. Without an ad running, you only get estimates.
wondering what / if any impact "the space internet" (or like networks) will have on national government's ability to disrupt comms. or if it just shifts the goalposts to a different network operator
We do understand that Google is a company, it will make profits at any cost, even if it has to pay fines later? This is what regulation is for. If the customers are harmed and have no recourse, there must be a way for protection of some kind. I'll take a politician over a predator company any time!
Yet, it's obvious that your own government has the most agency over you. And when your own government starts putting shock troops on the streets and abducting people in unmarked vans, you might want to reconsider how much information you want to share with it.
Both conservatives and liberals are convinced that Google is rigged against them. I don’t trust American lawmakers not to shove their ideologies into a search engine.
John Templeton
We have a slack bot that replaces daily standups with those exact questions. It's called standuply
An insightful comment.

k8s and Lambda aim to solve the problem of service management & deployment.
k8s focuses on abstracting the server underneath and automating its operations, aka orchestration, "in-the-weeds & full control". Lambda instead focuses on outsourcing the server and its operations to AWS, aka serverless, "don't even think about it".

Infrastructure engineers value the wide & deep featureset of k8s, and will accordingly invest significant manpower into its maintenance. Business developers value the simplicity of lambda and appreciate its low overhead and low price.

The tension between these two solution & their audiences is resolved by the value-chains emanating from the top of their organizations. In a startup phase, leaders will likely value Lambda over k8s because managing services is not a core competency, i.e., they don't care enough. "Just get the application on prod and make sure it doesn't go down! How hard can that be?"

As the organization develops over time, situations will arise that cannot be solved easily by Lambda or are too expensive to work on Lambda, which will necessitate expensive solutions like k8s. The leaders don't want to care about uptime, for example, so they'll hire people who do, people who have a different sense of value and cost.

I think it's telling that the presenter of Lambda at AWS is not the CTO, but the CPO himself:

https://aws.amazon.com/solutions/case-studies/netflix-and-aw...

Four years later, an engineer gave a presentation about how Netflix built their own in-house FaaS, seemingly outgrowing Lambda:

https://www.slideshare.net/yunongx/going-faaster-functions-a...
The problem is that your competitors can use your name as keyword, and become the top result for your company name ...
People aren't clicking on ads to buy things because they've all been laid off. Economies are circular.
That and ui/ux programming. Gotta make sure you are displaying the right stuff, and be meticulous about your UI events/interactions.

JavaScript might suck, but it’s got all the normal basic shit other languages have. Loops and shit, variables and stuff. You guys aren’t complaining about a little old language, you’re complaining about UI development and how tedious it can actually be if you want a professional level of polish.
Bing's BitFunnel paper is a pretty interesting read. The parts about scaling bloom filters by flipping their axis and using multiply filter layers is particularly of note if you are actually interested in production use.

https://danluu.com/bitfunnel-sigir.pdf
I have coworkers in Belarus who have been cut off from our (US based) company since the weekend. I've been able to hear from one of them intermittently, but it's a scary thing, I can't imagine what they're going through.
My challenge with lists like these: When I first read these they feel like shallow platitudes, but after I learn these lessons through my own experiences they feel like succinct explanations of a deeper truth.

I never seem to really get a lot out of reading about them.
The salary of their senior employees[1]

1 - https://twitter.com/withoutboats/status/1217558588857544704
Google first developed NaCl, and that was rejected because of this problem. The main driver, I think, was that you can't predict the computing landscape. Just because we have certain common architectures around right now, doesn't mean there won't be new architectures around 20 years from now, and/or doesn't mean the architectures around now won't be dead by then.

The thing about the web, and web standards, is that web clients (browsers) are expected to be able to work with web apps, on a common "web platform." Users expect to be able to take an up-to-date web browser and point it at any arbitrary old website, and have it work. And web platform engineers agree that this is how things should be, and make sure that browsers do everything they need to do to make this possible.

But having the possibility of a web app delivering one of N different binaries for each of a bevy of random ISAs—and no requirement to support all ISAs, only whichever ones the site's author felt like deploying—means that the browser authors of 20-years-from-now, to support users' expectations of arbitrary old web apps "just working", would need to ship N virtual-machine interpreters, one for each ISA that people ever compiled web binaries for.

Basically, it'd be a not-quite-combinatorial explosion in VM/runtime implementation work, which would decrease the quality that any one VM/runtime could have (which is really bad when those very implementations are one of the main sources of security vulnerabilities for attacking computers today.)

And, even then, there'd still always be sites broken because they shipped native code only for a platform nobody ever bothered to build support into browsers for; or used an instruction only available on some extension of an ISA that only appears in some particular proprietary chipset.

The web-standards people all agreed that, if you were going to have "object code for the web", it was much better to constrain the web to one "abstract machine" ISA. All the browser authors could then put all their effort behind implementing just one high-quality runtime/VM serving that abstract machine.

The only dispute, after that, was what form the ISA would take. Google suggested LLVM IR, and was shot down. WASM came up with their own proposal, and it got accepted, probably mostly because it was a proposal for a standalone formal standard, rather than a de-facto part of something else.

Probably, any ISA that was standalone in a similar way could have been used instead of WASM. But that is a surprisingly rare quality in an ISA. (For example, neither JVM nor CLR bytecode is a standard independent of the platform/runtime it's a part of. You can't become a member of the "JVM ISA steering committee", only a member of the Java working group.)
As of Postgres 12 this has changed substantially. Instead of being materialized, CTEs are inlined and optimized with the rest of the query.

Exceptions:

1. If the results of the CTE are used more than once then it is materialized by default, though you can override this by adding "NOT MATERIALIZED" to the call.

2. Recursive and INSERT/UPDATE/DELETE CTEs are always materialized.

https://paquier.xyz/postgresql-2/postgres-12-with-materializ...
An update on spline licensing (2019)
Backward vs. Forward Compatibility
This might work for you:

https://www.msn.com/en-gb/news/finance/losses-at-revolut-mor...
The cost of building and maintaining a competitive browser is huge and it's hard for Mozilla/Firefox to compete with Google/Chrome. Firefox saw its monthly active users go down by ~14% in the last 8 months [1]. I think Mozilla should consider stopping Firefox development and fork Chromium to focus on accessibility and privacy (both in and out of the browser). It's far from ideal--there'll only be one popular browser engine--but it's a trade off that could help Mozilla put more money and time towards its true mission: "to ensure the Internet is a global public resource, open and accessible to all". The cost of building/maintaining Firefox is holding them back from putting more money and effort toward that mission (and I think that's why they're reducing their workforce [2]).

[1] 244M MAU in Dec. 2018 and 209M MAU as of Aug. 2, 2020 https://data.firefox.com/dashboard/user-activity

[2] "Today we announced a significant restructuring of Mozilla Corporation. This will strengthen our ability to build and invest in products and services that will give people alternatives to conventional Big Tech. Sadly, the changes also include a significant reduction in our workforce by approximately 250 people."
I thought archive.is no longer works...???
Edit: it doesn't work for me still.
Edit again: Australia blocks it at an IP level?
The assumptions and tone of the article make me think it's a plant by anti-marijuana advocacy groups.

I agree the trend for hyper-potent weed isn't great, but that's mostly a function of years of clandestine growth, where it makes sense to grow the strongest weed possible; easier to hide and sell 9 potent plants than 19 or 90.

But I'd argue this is part of the calibration process that comes with legalization. People have been smoking lots of weed for years, but now that it's not criminalized we can actually think hard about it.
In several areas it is permissible for residents to be registered to vote in municipal elections etc. In some places, the local government has made efforts to get those who are neither legal residents not citizens registered for local elections. In those locations, enforcing a requirement to validate citizenship when availing onesself of the privileges thereof (e.g. voting in federal elections) makes sense.
There's one website I run where we were getting some spam through the "contact us" form. No problem, I'll just install captcha. I looked at the docs and realized it was more effort than I was willing to spend to kill a few spam messages a week. So, I just added an extra input field where the user has to type in "123". No spam since.

I thought it was kind of funny how easy it was to defeat the spammers, but on the other hand, there are so many easy targets that it's not worth their effort to try to overcome something so elementary just for our site. Conversely, there are much higher value targets where captcha is very valuable and worth the effort to implement because it is worth it for the abusers to try to defeat them.
Nobody wants to hand-write wasm, you need a tooling pipeline to make that type of development workflow practical, its not any different from babel or typescript in this respect; using rust instead of js is "churn" just as much as any of the other options available for building web pages that you don't have to use.
> If Google can do this, why not Mozilla?

I think you are having a very selective memory. Since day one, Google put Chrome ads everywhere including on the Google home page when you are visiting from Firefox and there is no way to permanently disable them.

If you are aware of a similiar marketing outreach that Mozilla could do I'm sure they would love to hear about it!
Same, do NOT underestimate V8 black magick + optimizations.

I've done a fair bit of benchmarking/performance experimentation with compiling Rust/Go/Zig etc to WASM (including with SIMD or parallelization enabled).

It'll be really interesting watching the progress of V8 + WASM SIMD proposal, it's been enabled behind a flag in V8 for some time now.

https://v8.dev/features/simd
They don't, hence why EU has data residency requirements, and American companies set up firewalled entities to comply (eg. Azure Germany).
Google adds California’s earthquake early warning system into Android phones
"The not-for-profit Mozilla Foundation supports open-source apps, web literacy curriculum, gender equality in tech and more."

Found on https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/