skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I know it is easy to hate on big companies but how do you leave them when credible alternatives are not even close in productivity/performance.

I tried leaving Macbook, but whenever I have tried the alternatives(even Thinkpad with Ubuntu), Macbook still seems to be at the sweet spot of life time ownership cost/performance. I do care about repairability, good keyboards etc. but I do have to look at things in balance.

On just principles, I tried switching to DDG, Gmail alternatives like Hey etc, Maps alternatives but they are not even close to making your life easy. At the end of the day, I really don't want to take time categorising every email, handle spam on my own, worrying about data security. Services like Gmail seem far superior to alternatives to me.

Edit:
Lastly, I would add one can pay for Gsuite and then Gmail etc. are ad free. I doubt they would be mining paid Gsuite user's data since companies use that.
Show HN: Extrablatt – customizable news article scraping in Rust and WebAssembly
> 1

Well clearly someone cares

>2 How about Harvard putting your genome on the blockchain in such a way where you retain full control over it's rights?

I've never understood how the argument of putting private data on the blockchain is "good". To me this has seemed to be one of the worst ideas that is constantly pushed. It makes one strong assumption: the security of the network is and will always be unable to be decrypted. This seems naive. I am much less concerned with a centralized database where encryption of my data can be updated as new standards are adopted.

> Stablecoins

At the rare times I see people accept crypto as payment the options I see are: Bitcoin and Ether (and maybe bitcoin cash). I've never seen stable coin. Never seen stable. So not only is it not in practice but you're also illustrating my point about

>> You can talk all you want about solutions to some of the (minor) problems addressed here (ignoring the rest of the problems) but unless it is in use then the article's commentary still stands.

Great, you checked off one of the many boxes and created a coin that no one uses. Personally I don't count that as a success. (We can say the same thing about ZKP coins. I've never seen it accepted as payment anywhere) You need to check off ALL the (major) boxes in a single coin.

> 3

Is your comment seriously that "stealing happens, so it doesn't matter if we make it easier?" Seriously? Many people I know, including myself have had CC info stolen (often not our fault, other sites get hacked and dumped). Getting that fixed is pretty simple with a centralized source. I couldn't imagine having a significant chunk of my savings in an account that could be removed and not returned. The FDIC guarantees I'm safe with at least $250k and I'm pretty confident I'm practically safer than that. I get a lot of safety, stability, security, and privacy with fiat currencies. None of those are perfect, but cryptocurrencies need to check all the boxes here (plus fast transactions) to replace it. Better in a single aspect but worse in others does not warrant replacement and that's why we see it.

> 4

Please stop with the lemmings arguments. You also have to consider the utility of the electricity use. Cryptocurrencies aren't providing much utility. They aren't saving lives. The AC in your house has more utility.

> 6 (not a typo)

You ignored one of the most important arguments. Time. That has been a killer feature of cryptocurrencies since the beginning and people have been shouting that it will be solved with POS, POB, whatever. It is still non-viable unless the transaction times are brought down to at least a few seconds.

> It's worth remembering that this area is still incredibly young.

It is, but it is also very much hyped. Many technologies get hyped when young and go bust. In fact, this is more common than the other way around. So read my comment as asking for compelling reasons to think blockchain isn't one of them. Your argument has just been assuming I don't know about all the things you listed. Sorry to break it to you, but I already did. I feel confident many other HN users did as well.
Show HN: Harbour – shake up your day with fun challenges to do. (Flutter)
People who can vote officially and telegram accounts are not the same thing.
I'm sure we even teenagers could have found multiple phone numbers to vote in the telegram poll.

We can't exclude the possibility that If I were a foreign power with a military budget measured in trillions then the telegram poll would say exactly what I wanted it to say.
> How did you check?

Legal counsel.
>Probing the tumor micro(b)environment

https://science.sciencemag.org/content/368/6494/938

>Cells inside cells: the bacteria that live in cancer cells

https://medicalxpress.com/news/2020-05-cells-bacteria-cancer...

>Bacteria lurking in cancer cells may affect treatment

https://www.news-medical.net/news/20200602/Bacteria-lurking-...
When Uber first started destroying the cab business there were numerous interviews of NYC cab drivers talking about how far in debt they were to buy the medallion that enables them to work in the city.

That left me with the impression that cabbies rented the money to buy access to the market, and were paid enough to afford it.
How do you deal with work situations that want you to use Google Hangouts, Docs, or Calendar?
No doubt the competitors will be closely connected to politician families?
This is funny having come from a Google TLD.
The lack of other "serious" servers is also scaring me. XMPP can have its share of problems but this is one area which is pretty decent. Plenty of "battle tested" servers.
I just got a Pi 4 and for a year now I've known it gets very very hot. I ordered this heatsink case for it

https://smile.amazon.com/gp/product/B07VWM4J4L/ref=ppx_yo_dt...

Should solve the problem. :)
Android google maps is what keeps me going back to Google. No other service has all local shops, phone numbers, schedules, etc.
Obligatory joke about putting IP lawyers in high orbit first.
Google Pixel 5 will have a Snapdragon 765G, 90Hz display, ultra-wide camera
Probably, this may be the biggest argument for telecommuting. Less driving > less greenhouse emissions.

There was also a huge hit to the produce and livestock industries as restaurants closed which may play a part as well
This Plane flies itself–we went for a ride
That's what happens when you cannot rely on spending other people's money to prop up your business.

It's honestly so destructive for these anti competitive business practices to pour VC money into a market.
You're absolutely correct: business processes are changing rapidly in a way that they haven't since the assembly line and Taylorism. We've had decades now of users and companies "paving the cartpath" by replicating paper on screen and learning what translates, what doesn't translate, and how to evolve. The workflows and the tools are evolving together now through a feeback loop, and that's a good thing. Consider order fulfillment and shipping for small to medium businesses today compared to the era before FedEx and eCommerce.
That's not what price gouging is.
Because my favorite place for AWS credentials is some random NPM module?
So you're saying ground based defense systems should engage in stealth as well? Attackers use stealth but can also easily spot and fly around known defense systems.
The way I see it: if you had infinite time and money then you would build a native app for each platform you care about, and when you choose e.g. Electron instead you're making a tradeoff because of your available resources.

When people criticize Electron, I don't think they're saying "given your capacity, you should have picked a different and better point on the tradeoff curve". I think they're just mad that you had the requirements you had and didn't get to apply more resources than you had access to.

So, at first it sounds like they're making a technical argument against anyone who would choose to use Electron, but I think what they're actually doing is instead expressing some kind of economic disappointment in your situation.

(I would probably use Electron on a small budget, Qt on a medium budget, and native apps on a large budget.)
> I'm pretty bitter about "everything is an application" trend though. Coming from the original web, limited by 56K days creates a lot of "old man yells to cloud" moments, performance wise. However, as a Linux user, I suspect not all of the performance penalty comes from the JS pipeline. Accelerated rendering of webpage is severely lacking in Linux (especially with nVidia proprietary drivers).

I totally a agree.

> It may be but I didn't notice anything to be honest. I'll look out for this.

The worst offender are some AMP sites; they try to use the Google CDN for whatever resource (probably fonts or CSS) and when that fails, wait for the fallback.

> Everything is gracefully HW accelerated OTOH, picture in picture implementation of Firefox is so much behind that I can see the frame rate drops below 15FPS most of the time, so it's unusable.

Interesting. I don't have much trouble with PiP and such, only the memory issues. I suppose it might just be a difference between hardware, drivers and OS/system config.
Between this and Servo I guess Mozilla is just giving up on relevance. That really sucks.
If I were trying this again today, I'd probably poke at what Matrix can do in terms of non-user-visible messages. It seems to be a successor to XMPP in terms of the communication model, so if it can do broadcast+unicast of non-visible messages, and supports sending to yourself as well as others, it might be a good modern replacement!
July was a hot one, but here’s what NOAA sees ahead for the US
Defining the Zero Trust Architecture Paradigm
Wondering who "top tech talent" is.... probably just start-up founders, not like elon musk.
The problem here is not the walling itself , it is lack of regulations over what they can, they cannot do. Which allows walled gardens to kick out apps they don't like, impose all sorts of rules, and charge outrageously

Developers associate the freedom of open standards and protocol to these abuses. In the early GNU years, the same philosophy applied to source availability. Closed source does make similar abuse fare more easier.

Abuses can be prevented with well built regulation. Developers do not like to get into governance and policy so they want to solve it technically, Open Source or open protocols and standards etc, sometimes that opens up avenues vulnerabilities in design, which devs generally are tech savy enough to be immune to and come up with even more tech like https, adblockers hardware keys etc.

This cat and mouse game leaves rest of the population far behind and vulnerable, sometimes you just have to do governance than look for pure tech solutions.
What would the point of going everywhere be?
I never considered a Gmail alternative since Gmail has primary/social/promotion/updates tabs and proper threading of replies and almost perfect spam protection. What services do the above things as good?
Is Microsoft Office really so much better than Google Docs in terms of privacy? Or is mostly just the "I hate Google, others are probably better" idea?
Some time ago I tried building something like this too, but lost interest at the end. Feel free to pick ideas if you find them interesting:

http://iswaac.dev/blog/2019-12-14/

The basic idea is to use nested boxes to represent ownership and lines to represent dependencies. I only did the first part to some extent: parsed JS and rendered the AST into a treemap using WebGL.

What I actually envisioned in my mind is a 3d nested boxes rendered in a "galaxy style" where you can fly from one box to another, click on boxes to show their sub-boxes and see the lines that represent connections. The 3d space would allow to unclutter the image.

Edit1. While I think that nested boxes is the natural way to represent ownership, it's often difficult to figure this ownership from the code. For example, class A is really the owner of B and C, but those are given to A as args in the constructor, so to an unsophisticated analyzer tool, B and C would be just deps. Perhaps the tool should allow the user to adjust the relationship status between objects based on some a priori knowledge. The changes would need to be saved, so next time the diagram is rebuilt from code, the visualizer would remember that A owns B and C. I believe this would be really useful in big companies that struggle to keep such diagrams up to date.

Edit2. I'm reading my own note about WebGL and matrix projections and laughing: I wouldn't write that nonsense with my current understanding of webgl.
Posted it in an other thread [0] but do we really want to go back to the medallion system?

Pre-Uber, either the driver rented the car to a middleman who rented the medallion from a rich owner, or said owner was selling and financing (most banks won't touch these medallions!) a medallion at a ridiculous interest rate to a driver that planned to use it as his retirement savings (an extremely volatile asset and not very liquid).

The more I spoke to cab drivers the more it seemed their industry was a pyramid schemed aimed at helping established rent-seeker take advantage of often poor new immigrants. Uber brought a breeze of fresh air: Someone could simply buy a car, calculate the depreciation and it's value on the market (since unlike medallions cars are relatively liquid assets!) do rideshare and calculate their profits or loss. They can get out of the game at anytime, and they know exactly how much they are going to get for the car they have should they sell it.

Also, the argument on Uber/Lyft drivers not being contractors since they can't set their own rates and decide which ride they take strikes me as weird since medallion drivers were contractors, had to charge the price set by the city and could only pick-up customers in the (arbitrary) zones covered by their medallions.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24225648
Not an ad, but I saw this USB portable NVME drive today, seems like an easier (and probably pricier) solution: https://shop.westerndigital.com/products/portable-drives/san...
> Do you except people to wait for the postal service to deliver an envelope before they receive whatever they've payed for?

To be fair, it might be quicker to verify cash payment by mail than a crypto payment.
I have a MacBook and it’s great, I also have an iPhone. It’s the business model that matters to me more. It’s not a “hate on big companies” thing.

In fact the big software companies usually have better security (google included) because they have some of the world’s best security people.

I try to avoid companies that have an incentive to collect user information for ad targeting. Apple doesn’t have that (and they’ve also made privacy a brand thing now so they’re even better than average).

Gmail was great when it came out, but today it’s a pretty mediocre product. Fastmail is actually better and I don’t say that as someone making excuses for non-google services. Their docs and custom domain support are really great. Their support for aliases is also great. They have good fancy workflow options I just don’t need so I don’t use.

DDG was worse for a long time, but for the last year or so it’s become good enough for me to make default. I occasionally g! to run a google query, but that’s probably only 10% of the time (and of those only half are probably actually good).
You know what, maybe if we put this data on the blockchain, the ICO can pay for future investment to democratize astronomical research ok, I can't keep typing this out, I can't tell if I'm making myself laugh or cry.
Sure. Apple negotiates with indy game developers all of the time for exclusive releases via Apple Arcade and they pay them an up front fee.

Streaming services being the exception in virtual goods, if Apple charges Hulu or Prime 30%, the studios which also license content to Apple TV will not be happy. It could get Apple TV locked out or deals will become expensive.

One has nothing to do with the other. The studios deal with Apple TV because Apple gives them a boatload of money to produce shows for AppleTV. The studios also license content to be sold via iTunes. This was the case before the iPhone was released.

Apple doesn’t pay for syndication rights for older TV shows but for one or two exceptions.

No third party is counting on syndication. Not Netflix or Apple. All of the studios are taking their ball and going home. That’s why there is such a push for original content.
Gitlab 13.3 with coverage-guided fuzz testing and a build matrix for CI/CD
Maybe we should try to find a list of exactly what they are focussing on going forward instead of the slow drip of things they’re cutting back on (servo, MDN, DeepSpeech...)

It’s a sad sad day when you have an organisation getting hundreds of millions in funding and turning away from what’s its good at. The decline has begun in my eyes, it may not become apparent for a few years yet.
> Uber and Lyft’s sole “innovation” is in driving down the value of driving by reclassifying drivers as contractors and not having to pay benefits

This is supremely untrue: a huge part of Uber and Lyft's value proposition is not cost related at all. (Also, cab drivers generally aren't employees most places.)

They are more faster in most places. Other than some urban cores and transit hubs, it is much faster to get a pickup by Uber/Lyft than it ever was a taxi.

They are more reliable in most places. When you call a taxi, it may or may not show up, and you won't be told whether they're going to no-show after you call them.

They are more convenient. Ordering an Uber/Lyft is really easy. Most places, if you want to call a taxi, you have to use the telephone or use an inferior smartphone app. When they started growing, it was almost always the former.

They are a more pleasant experience. My worst experience in an Uber/Lyft ride is day-to-day in a taxi. I've had truly terrifying experiences with taxis.

Many of these factors are actually irrelevant to their labor practices. Some of them do relate (for instance, drivers are very vulnerable to rider low-ratings, in part since firing them is easier than firing employees), to be sure.
It is emacs, it is easy to eliminate the boiler-plate e.g., by using global/per file/per org sub tree defaults, templates.
I know you are joking, but a second interstellar object after the Oumuamua was discovered using a 0.65m DIY telescope built by Gennadiy Borisov.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2I/Borisov
This works like every other AWS CLI tool - it uses your shells AWS credentials dir or ENV vars
Ugh this is a deep gut punch, as this is one of the most interesting recent projects Mozilla was working on in my opinion.
I think the biggest problem is Google becoming a monopoly, when you rely daily on tens of their services. Than, if for some reason, they decide to close your account or use your data to "be evil", there's not much you can do.
Quadratic voting might be useful

https://vitalik.ca/general/2019/12/07/quadratic.html
There classes of organizations for automation:

* Tiny, you just do things the Quickbooks/Excel/MS Word way

* Gigantic, you just do things the company's way, it can pay for customization

* In between, here you have the major problem
The downside of shutting down the resources is that there may be none available anymore in that sizing or pricing when you want to start them up again. I suppose they also don’t want to risk being liable for that.
Contrary to popular belief, not everyone is on board with systems aiming to create identifiers that map 1:1 with people. That's a very politically driven philosophy generally intended to enforce a means of auditability or control.

The thing that makes it seemingly inevitable to give up identifying information as part of financial transactions is the nature of Credit/Payment processing/Anti-Money Laundering regulations enforcing a KYC (Know-Your-Customer) component to being a legally operating financial transaction processor.

Do note, this audit trail creation is a big portion of the push to obviate and disincentivise cash transactions. The thinking goes, if you can only use the financial system by identifying your endpoints, there should be a clear audit trail if anything hinky is going on. Unfortunately, the much less well publicized corollary to that is that suddenly payment processors become an effective population scale control mechanism.

This should hopefully cause discomfort on further reflection, but to each their own.
> Then there‘s the search engine. I tried hard to replace Google Search with DDG, but I have to admit that Google gives me better search results. Still I would love to leave this also behind.

Try Searx[1]. It's a search engine aggregator that works with DDG, Google, and dozens of other search engines. You can self-host it or use one of the public instances.

[1] https://github.com/asciimoo/searx
I'm skeptical that blockchain cryptocurrencies can ever be politically acceptable if they were to provide real anonymity, but anonymity in online financial transactions is about the only problem they have a hope of solving.
Last Week in AI News Digest: hate speech, dogfights, disasters, and more
Hey HN! The kit is meant to help you build and grow Chrome extensions and includes: 6 Basic Starter templates (HTML/CSS/JS), 7 React Starter templates (with utility scripts), 3 fully functional example extensions, and an ebook.
Don't combine money laundering with denying services to people who do things that are distasteful certain other groups. Legally free speech, pornography and weed payments are also banned on platforms that go through the normal payment processing routes. The weed issue is because of federal laws but I don't know the full reason behind the other bans.

One quick example: Patreon vs Sargon or Patreon vs artists that produce works with nudity. In these cases, things users were banned for did not happen directly on their platform and weren't even mentioned on their platform. I list them because they're easy to google but there are others.

Do you consider those situations to be something other than censorship?
I bought some of their neodymium magnets a few years ago

https://unitednuclear.com/index.php?main_page=index&cPath=70...

They're pretty amazing to play with. For example, you can make a small one hop around in your hand by turning over another one relatively far away. Much more dramatic experiences than you get playing around with refrigerator magnets.

The safety warnings there are serious -- depending on the size, these magnets will be pulled toward each other with tens to hundreds of pounds of force, and they don't care what's in the way. Even the medium-sized ones that I got drew blood when they pinched me.

(As with other magnets, the ones that are small enough to be swallowed would also be a severe hazard if a child swallowed them, although most on that page are much too big to swallow. On the other hand, if you let some of the larger disc-shaped ones loose from far enough apart, they'll fly together with enough force to shatter!)
Walmart is the canonical recent example. They're just stores, and lots of people have stores, but Sam Walton's specific business model allowed his stores to sell a wider variety of goods at lower prices than any of his competitors' stores could.
Except my Australian passport has done me exactly jack here in the USA during the pandemic (I'm a dual citizen). My wife can't leave Australia because she doesn't qualify for a waiver, and we're not sure I'll get into Australia due to the arrival caps even if I could get time off, which won't happen very soon. We haven't seen each other in over six months.
Qualia Research Diary: Scents