skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I think this is a good idea and I think making it easy for people to host their own services is valuable. [0]

It’s also been tried a few times with little success (sandstorm.io).

I think the problem is deeper, modern infrastructure is messy to run, it’s hard to configure, and every thing has to be specifically tweaked to work. Something that works for regular users will require extensive tooling to be useful and will need that tooling for every application and use case.

I think Urbit is probably the best long term bet (old blog post, but gets the idea across): https://urbit.org/blog/magic/

A more recent one: https://urbit.org/understanding-urbit/

Urbit abstracts away the p2p complexity so in the future users can used decentralized applications built on the platform without having to even know they’re decentralized. I think this is the only way this kind of thing can work at scale for regular users.

[0]: https://zalberico.com/essay/2020/07/14/the-serfs-of-facebook...
Did you see the man in HK who got infected again with a different strain? Herd immunity will not come
Hats off to anyone who involved there. Amazing achievement indeed.

Edit: change heads up to hats off
¿https://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/EWD/transcriptions/EWD03xx/E...?

“It is a very one-sided view to regard programs as “things to execute automatically”: they are also things to design, to enjoy, to embellish, to talk about and to use as a means of communication, either with yourself or with someone else“
But if ‘personal tragedies’ make up a quarter of your country’s population, it starts to look more like a whole-economy issue, right?
They didn't use the same developer account, if I'm reading the order correctly the developer accounts used for Unreal Engine and Fortnite did not even belong to the same legal entity.

* Epic Games, Inc. develops Fortnite and has an Apple developer account that it is released under.

* Epic Games International, S.a.r.l. develops Unreal Engine and holds its own Apple developer account.
Well there is a number of ways for identity information to leak, from simple self-deanon mistakes to "third degrees" of key positions who were unfortunate to be caught in action and unable to prevent their chats from being analyzed. A good old handcuffing to a radiator still works too. Your claim can only be strictly true in an ideal world of ideal operation on one side and an ideal human-respecting law on the other.
I don’t know much about this guy, but I have seen tons of projects embark on this vision.

Matrix.org
Mastodon
Scuttlebutt
Solid

We began back in 2011 and have our own version, that lets anyone host their own social network as easily as Wordpress powers blogs. That’s the goal, anyway. Here are the economics:

https://qbix.com/token

Feedback is welcome!
First 3 to come reads the title, skim read TFA, write corrections or complements.

Next 30 reads the title, read comments, and write some pretend skepticism.

Next 300 reads the title, view comments, upvote the strongest opinions, and share.

Next 3000 reads the title and immediately decide whether to share.

Somewhere from here and above, 3-4 people tries to plagiarize something in it just to get votes and/or because they have personal issues in forming opinions.

Rest of the million people after this point just applaud and share what’s being thrown at their faces.
Yeah I heard about that one I think, that's really clever. Honestly comment sections on the internet are a cesspool on the best days, but comment sections under news articles? It makes all the undereducated conspiracists come out the woodworks. A Dutch news site (nu.nl) tried to run a comment section and even something of a social network for a while, but they couldn't maintain them.

You can create a comment section, but it needs a barrier like that and tight curation - no comments posted without approval. Which can be a problem because the commenters with "dissenting" opinions will quickly claim censorship and how the outlet doesn't tolerate opposing viewpoints.
Ever heard about artillery? Or even rocket artillery?
Can you name one industry where labor is truly no longer needed, where it once was (in recent times)?

Maybe an example of a person who makes a large some of money through having zero employees where they used to have many and where those people were replaced with automation and completely obsoleted.

Not challenging you, I'm just interested in your theory.
Well, I didn't literally expect it to be unique to python :-)
HN getting upset over something you never said is one thing. The Border patrol getting upset over something you never said would be quite a different level of pain. I think that's the fear.
From the article.

>My main gripe is that the files under /etc/rc.d/ are immutable scripts.

If the files/config (I know the author argues they aren't config files) are truely immutable why would the system upgrade command modify them? and how would it as if they are immutable in the same way that running chattr +i somefile on Linux will make a file immutable even to root then I don't understand how the upgrade command is modifying them.

Systemd-d is growing on me, partly because it is being forced upon us but also because once you get over the initial carpet pull from beneath you, you don't need to be exposed to the extra bullshit it brings.

If you want to experience pain with System-d, install a fresh copy of Ubuntu and try to setup /etc/resolv.conf, for an extra challenge try setup /etc/resolv.conf using unbound as a stub resolver.

I was amazed at how much effort I had to spend fighting the OS to just say "Stop managing this file, do not load this file, I am going to manage it"

I spend most of my time with Linux systems so I admire the simplicity of the System V approach. It is interesting to see other people discuss this from a BSD perspective as I have very little exposure to BSD like systems.

BSD seems great, I love reading the security.html page of the OpenBSD project, it has so many great ideas + implementations.

https://www.openbsd.org/security.html
The fraud is simply not the point. It’s a piece about TR Wright and his pursuer Reed. The headline is simply not that fitting.

The final paragraphs have a good summary of what type of character it is about:

> If he hadn’t gotten caught when he did, his business only would have escalated toward riskier, more-dangerous illegal dealings. “I probably would have had a RICO [Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations] indictment […];
> the sentence’s cognitive buffer is flushed

Somehow, this single expression made me finally (after reading beginning of it) understand your post better. Before that expression had hit my apprehension, the post read like "what is he on about?".

Perhaps needless to point out, but this is quite a beautiful thing you've done there: the expression itself works as the very thing it describes, in the context of your post. Within the post, that expression is the T-shaped block, - the thing that clears the buffer and makes all the collected blocks all make sense together.
This is IMO more what I see, we're all working harder, for less, but we're all still working.
Hence the way journalists love to misinform people: a headline and first paragraph that pushes their bias and narrative, while the facts that completely mitigate if not contradict the start of the article are buried somewhere in the middle. How to lie without lying, better than a legal footnote.
> Your original statement was that we shouldn't do military research outside of war

This is __NOT__ what I claimed.
> Currently, all our developer tools and technical infrastructure comes from Big Tech and the Big Web. They are optimised for creating Big Tech and the Big Web.

What the fuck are you talking about? Nobody forces you to host your personal website on a k8s cluster.

> While we can repurpose some of them for our own uses, we also need tools specifically optimised for building single-tenant web applications and the Small Web.

How about Apache for local testing and a ftp server to a webspace at [INSERT WEBHOSTING COMPANY HERE]. Existed for decades, well tested and easy to use.
My reflections on Smittestopp (Norwegian Covid-app)
And sometimes, industrial buildings near residential ones just blow up[1]. I'm generally against zoning and excessive regulation and in fact that Houston business had been fined for safety non-compliance before. But that is quite a BOOM! I can't find if there was a final verdict from the investigation but it was initially thought to be a leaking propylene tank ignited by a spark from faulty electrical.

1: https://www.click2houston.com/news/local/2020/01/31/live-aut...
IQ is somewhat inheritable as well though. Is it IQ or inherited wealth that is the factor?
Apple profits handsomely from the iOS ecosystem every time someone buys an iPhone to access it, or buys a Mac because Apple won't allow building iOS apps without one, or pays the annual developer program fee. They don't need to triple or quadruple dip to be the most valuable publicly traded company in the world.
You mean Ben Shapiro didn't actually have to make his tweet about how his sex life sucks and his wife had gone on a two month getaway with her personal trainer? :o

I never "got" Twitter, it's a rapid fire barrage of random remarks and unless you spend a lot of recurring time on it you won't be able to follow what's going on. In my opinion anyway, my GF is really into it.
Personally, I'm happy with few tools that helps me write simpler (and hopefully better) English in my everyday usage.

## Long-Form

When I'm writing a long-form prose/essay, I start writing in Hemingway[1]. Edits and changes are done there to cater to my target audience. I'd then pick up the draft from there and go through Grammarly[2] as the final passage.

## Quick, Short Writings

For everyday use, I use iA / Writer[3]. I turn on all the Style Check filters to spot superfluous adjectives, weak verbs, and unwanted repetitions. I then, let it go through Grammarly (either with the App, or via browser Input fields).

This has helped me a lot. Growing up in a region with too many dialects per area, we used English as the one medium to communicate and educate, so I have the affinity to write more phrase-y, English-y. For quite a while, I have wanted to simply and write more clearer, simpler, and effective. These three tools have helped me a lot.

I have used Grammarly for almost a year, it says my vocabulary uses more unique words than
94% of Grammarly users. I'm not particularly proud of that. I want to simplify.

1. http://www.hemingwayapp.com

2. https://grammarly.com

3. https://ia.net/writer
memory.net has great lineups and cheap for Samsung memory.
A joke from the late twentieth century:

A californian, a texan, and an oregonian are sitting around a campfire drinking.

Suddenly, the texan throws his half-drunk Jack Daniels bottle in the air, unslings his Colt, and shatters it with two shots. "What'd you do that for?" ask the two others. "Felt like it. Where I come from, we've got plenty of whiskey."

A little while later the californian throws his half-drunk Chardonnay bottle in the air, whips out his Glock, and shoots it as well. "What'd you do that for?" ask the two others. "Dude. Where I come from, we've got plenty of vineyards."

Finally the oregonian throws his half-drunk Hank's bottle in the air, picks up his shotgun, and fires both barrels into the californian, before catching the bottle again. "What'd you do that for?" asks the texan, blanching. "Where I come from, we've got plenty of californians."

"But this bottle is worth 5 cents."

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CXk1882z5oo

Compare "Overpaid, oversexed, and over here."

With regard to "look down upon them and aggressively try to reprogram them into the same thing they left behind", consider the eponymous https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chief_Seattle et.al.

As far as I can tell, looking at the last 6'000 years, cities with economic exports have tended to generate cultural exports in their hinterlands.
Dude screw ISPs. Mesh networking will power the last mile soon.
Oh god no. Urbit is not less complex or easier. It's piling on all kinds of extra superfluous nonsense in service of an ideological project, not for technical reasons.
Oracle to PostgreSQL – Binary Objects
I'm a bit sorry to resurrect this highly controversial HCQ debate but this retrospective observational study could be quite significant and shouldn't be dismissed as easily as others were.

These results seem well randomized with a sufficiently large sample. They come from a reputable European Belgian University (UGent) with nationwide data from 109 hospitals.

TLDR: "Of 8075 patients with complete discharge data on 24th of May and diagnosed before the 1st of May, 4542 received HCQ in monotherapy and 3533 were in the no-HCQ group. Death was reported in 804/4542 (17.7%) and 957/3533 (27.1%), respectively. In the multivariable analysis, the mortality was lower in the HCQ group compared to the no-HCQ group (adjusted hazard ratio [HR] 0.684, 95% confidence interval [CI] 0.617–0.758). Compared to the no-HCQ group, mortality in the HCQ group was reduced both in patients diagnosed ≤ 5 days (n=3975) and > 5 days (n=3487) after symptom onset (adjusted HR 0.701, 95% CI 0.617–0.796 and adjusted HR 0.647, 95% CI 0.525–0.797, respectively)."
Google Researcher Reported 3 Flaws in Apache Web Server Software
I practice small web since 1998.
> The tricky part is how to promote healthier, happier, and smarter children without denigrating others.

That's not tricky. It can't be done. If you want to admit that smarter children are desirable, you have to also admit that dumber children are undesirable. You can hope nobody notices, but they will notice.
Reading your comment makes me incredibly jealous, as I can only wish and hope to one day have a pleasant experience with Unity like you.

Whenever I had to work with it in the past, we ran into bugs inside the closed-source C++ part of the engine which then delayed release or required expensive workarounds. Their sales department is ghosting us because we're a mid-sized company and their support is closing tickets for "LTS = long term support" releases as "please resubmit with current beta".

Then there's the overall st-show with Unity deprecating things as soon as they have a beta draft for its replacement, which basically forced everyone to use external networking libraries. Plus HDRP is still buggy, but they already removed the old built-in RP.

And if that wasn't bad enough already, their own built services will randomly fail if you use advanced features, because they run their OS X builts in QEMU on linux or something.

Last time I checked, they now also deprecated the ability to write custom shaders. I agree with their reasoning that I should not need them. But with all the buggy mess in their engine, I surely DO need them just for workarounds.

For fairness of comparison, we've run into equally bad bugs with UE4. But at least for Unreal, I have full C++ source code so I can fix things and move on. With Unity, you're constantly waiting for their support team to (ignore you / close your ticket / make fun of you) help you.

As for the Unity ML agents, I find that rather scary. There have been many papers about AIs exploiting bugs in the training environment. Given how buggy Unity is, I would expect AIs trained in Unity ML to wreck havoc in the real world because they're used to the physics glitching or something like that.

Unity is great to get started as a hobbyist. But as soon as you actually want to release something on a consumer quality level, it becomes walk through complexity hell.

There's a very good reason why every bigger Unity studio purchases source code access and has dedicated Unity-bug-fixing employees on staff.
I honestly don't see much the value of generators here. we can simply return all the results directly from the xpath function that you created. Are there any use case where you would want to stream the elements one by one ? you have got all the results in memory anyways inside the xpath function
Oh I completely agree with you that they shouldn't care, but the odds are big that you'll find out that they do in your Terms of Service.
I see why the food truck phenomenon is (in part) so popular and widespread. I thought it was mainly from the excessive costs of getting a brick-and-mortar kitchen off the ground in general but wow, I'm glad I never tried to startup a restaurant.
Portrait Shadow Manipulation
> not enough owner bankruptcies yet for me

Under the efficient market hypothesis, if the prices are dropping because of many bankruptcies forcing a sale, you will also feel that the price is not worth buying, or if there's actually little to low risk, then the price would get bid up by many buyers (assuming all buyers are perfectly rational).
Here are my suggestions for keeping the "small web" of the 90:s alive:

* If self-hosting on a server in your home isn't feasible, find a reputable mom-n-pop web hotel and support them with your money.

* Focus on making your site as accessible as possible to as many people as possible, regardless of where in the world they are and what hardware they're on. Don't use javascript and databases where static HTML will suffice.

* Don't skimp on links to other "small web" pages.
This betrays a lack of familiarity with the literature on intelligence. Fluid intelligence doesn’t change much if at all between 14 and 27, when it starts its long slow decline. Crystallized intelligence can keep rising for decades after that. The number of fields where fluid is more important than crystallized is very small if very important. Having a vast knowledge base, built on a foundation of experience, is more important for most full time academics, never mind those of us not engaged in research. You can’t play at all if your fluid intelligence isn’t high enough but there are a lot of people out there who’re smart and vastly less successful than dumber people who worked consistently at something. At the top are the smart, hard working and lucky but intelligence is not the be all and end all.
You'd probably have a heart attack if you knew what I worked on. And yet, I know full well I'm just average, and it doesn't bother me anymore.
Great answer.

On Data Lakes: I often use an S3 data lake construct as a staging area for my Snowflake data warehouse.
Why?

If a bridge is built wrong and kills people when it collapses, someone must be at fault.

What’s the difference if it happens with a virtual “thing”?
No worries, before i worked in finance (wrote code/developed models to trade futures on daily tf for a firm in RI for about a year), I was only vaguely aware of some of these things

> long tail risk: assets that have problems that take a long time to affect the price

Not necessarily, could be any asset or derivative that could be susceptible to experiencing large declines in return relative to normal conditions during certain periods of time

> HY: high yield, meaning they change quickly in price by large percentages and can make more money quickly

No, high yield bonds. Avg yield on 4.5-5 year maturing ones right now is about 6%. Or at least the 1217 cusips I track ASOF mon close.

> trash: low priced stocks for crappy companies

Not just stocks, but yes

> garbage: same thing

^^^

> collateralized HY coming due: investments backed by assets that will default

about 91.8% of HY bonds coming due in 4.5-5 years are not backed by any collateral. "Will default" is subjective, but my work has about 61% have a good chance of default (from ratings, current price of the bonds, 10-q/10k data available), not including liquidity premiums/discounts for people who "want out now", not including leverage actors take when buying/lending such now like they do.

> leverage: money

Borrowing money in order to increase ones exposure (or contracts that act as such), larger returns/drawdowns are expected if (not) managed properly compared to not borrowing to finance a position (or buying the underlying out right in cash).

> "oft repeated things": aphorisms about finance that are often wrong

Or wrong in certain contexts.
XPath works best with XHTML
Potential advantage to using a browser is that it actually works. Unlike Unity.

But in the end, Electron or Unity doesn't matter, both are equally bloated.
”Earth's surface became entirely or nearly entirely frozen, sometime earlier than 650 Mya (million years ago) during the Cryogenian period. "

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snowball_Earth

Note that animal (multicellular eukaryotes) fossils exist from that period.
Off-topic, a question about the notation used for multiplication in this article.

I'm used to see multiplication written as 3⋅12 or sometimes 3×12, but recently I encountered this notation using parentheses, 3(12), and now I see that in this article too. Is that commonly used? It looks weird to me, and not very readable, perhaps just because I'm not used to it. To me 2⋅2⋅2⋅3⋅7 is much more readable than 2(2)(2)(3)(7) (which at first sight looks like function calls to me). Is the parentheses-notation used just to get rid of the explicit multiplication sign?

I guess there are situations where you can't easily use a proper multiplication sign, in which case I can see the parentheses notation as an effective alternative. But I've seen it used in handwritten equations too, so that can't be the only explanation.

Just wondering.
Appropriate all the good values and ideas from https://indieweb.org/, re-heat it add some feel-good word salad and we have this "Small Web".

Yes, by all means let's get back to a more decentralized and distributed web. But providing a service where you are still hosting your site on someone else's servers and on someone else's domain and calling for values is just digital green-washing.
Indeed. I was thinking about this just yesterday, when I upgraded my KDE Neon install. I was asked about keeping or merging a conf file I was unsure what was for, and that I can't recall having edited.

It's possible I did modify the conf file, in a late-night attempt to fix some issue long ago, but that was all forgotten by now.

The changes to the conf file were extensive, and I had no idea what were _my_ changes, assuming I had indeed done any changes, vs what was just changes due to the new version.

Why couldn't my change in etc just be a one-liner? Then the OS could upgrade the base conf file safely, and simply inform me that I need to review my conf override in etc to see if it was still valid or needed.

This way the upgrade tool could potentially be even smarter as it can clearly distinguish what has been changed, so it can warn even more loudly when a configuration variable has been removed or drastically changed for example.
And yet, we expect games to be at this price or lower with the same hard constraints and I would argue they take even more work.

That's just the economy of scale. I also think that anything beyond $10 is too pricey. Monthly plan? No way.
Eh, it's not so complicated.

io1/io2 is about $12/month per 100 GB, and $60/m per 1000 IOPS.

So 200 GB and 10,000 iops would be $624

With the caveat that (io2) cannot support more than 500 IOPS per GB.

gp2 is $10/m per 100 GB, and you get 3 IOPS/GB (with potential to burst to 3000 IOPS for volumes under 1 TB).

GP2 IOPS max out at 16,000 per volume.

io1/io2 IOPS max out at 64,000

Basically, use io2 if you need more than 16,000 IOPS. or you need a large amount of IOPS for only a small amount of storage.

io2 also has a 0.001% annual failure rate, while the others have a .2% failure rate.

E.g., to get 10,000 IOPS with gp2, you would get a 3.33 TB volume, which would cost $333/m.

Local storage is far, far faster (up to millions of IOPS!)...but not as reliable, and does not have all the EBS features. https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSEC2/latest/UserGuide/storage-...
Australia is slowly moving back to using "cultural burning" to help tackle this problem.

http://www.walkaboutpark.com.au/aboriginal-culture/cultural-...
Zendesk?

Intercom?

Salesforce?