skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I have a game on Epic and to download an update, which you must do to be able to play, it forces you to accept a new gigantic TOS that basically allows them to install anything on your PC for any reason and they claim to not be responsible.

Also says that any claim you make has to be made in some particular US court. WTF, this is a game I bought in Australia.

There were pages and pages of other legalese but those are the parts that I remember.

I was so angry after reading it that I haven't accepted it or been able to play the game (that I paid for) since.

What kind of bullshit is that? Changing the terms of something that I purchased six months earlier?

I wonder what would happen if I take it back to the store and ask for a refund because I can't accept the TOS.
Where are your really targeted ads, adtech industry?

I think the lack of innovation is due to several problems:

1. the constant barrage of ads hurts their reputation making recruiting hard

Wherever you land on the ethics of it, it's a bit like porn: you may not disagree with it in principle, but in practice it seems skeezy enough you don't want to tell your friends that's what you do.

Or it could be some group has genuinely new ideas, but there is so much competition they can't demonstrate why their technology is better.

2. their data sucks

On a lark, I went to Walmart (they're more vertical than Amazon) and I searched for men's belts. When I filtered for "yellow" most of the belts were, indeed bright yellow. (Seriously, Walmart sells a lot of bright yellow men's belts.) Except, of course, for the ones that were black or brown.

And if you search for "t-shirts" and filter by fabrics, Walmart thinks reasonable t-shirt fabrics include acrylic, canvas, chiffon, corduroy, down and vinyl.

So, retailers don't even know what's in their inventory, because they don't know what "yellow" means or what a t-shirt is made of.

3. they have too much data

You point out, "they act on assumption that a person is fixed and cannot change or want to change." I'm pretty sure they're studying the data longitudinally.

The trouble is that they're hoping that magic algorithms can somehow purify petabytes of raw sewage into a clear description of consumer behavior. That's led them to invest in these big data money sinks.

And it's not just a sunk cost fallacy at work, I think they do get some apparent financial returns from the weird and inexplicable inferences those algorithms generate.

So they keep going down this rabbit hole while consumers, regulators and advertisers are steadily getting fed up with them.
This is only a problem as a seller, if you only use it to buy things then

- You are the customer (paypal makes money from transaction fees, and customers almost always have the option to not use paypal)

- Typically you don't store money in your account, so you would at most lose the ability to pay with paypal
Or maybe cost just doesn't really matter to many companies. If using AWS helps you scale easier, and lets developers spend less time managing servers, that can be extremely valuable, especially at a company that is growing quickly. Who really cares if you are spending too much, the goal isn't profitability it's getting as many users as possible. For many tech companies, I think money is pretty much a non-issue, as evidenced by the insane salaries they offer - the real challenge is scaling up an organization without completely paralyzing all progress, and AWS can help do that.
I agree with your notions of what the problems are, and what the goals ought to be.

Though I think microservices didn't actually make it hard to put coupling between parts of the system.

It's the same old story of how everyone is doing Agile wrong. The cargo-cult implementations fail to deliver on the promises because they don't actually follow the principles.

"Microservices" often means little more than "not the monolith". It's a pretty low bar. The loosely-coupled property is what is important. If that doesn't hold, then you've almost certainly made things worse. If it holds then you've almost certainly created a path towards making things better.
We have a mixed redwood, pine and misc forest. What do we do to (1) get rid of the non-native species, and (2) capture lots of carbon in the process?

We’d like to make sure the redwoods survive. They’re all under 100 years old, so some are big, but not massive, and we have lots of seedlings.

I’m worried if we cut all the pine down at once, it’ll ruin the microclimate. It’s 10-20F cooler in the forest than in the field, with much more water from fog drip, etc.
For about 30 years cities were relatively undesirable places to live in for the average person. The cities that young people have flocked to in the last decade or so are designed and developed more like large scale open shopping malls than the cities of the 70s and 80s.

The closest comparison to what's happening now was "White flight", a largely racist reaction to the civil rights movement involving increased protests and riots in cities. White flight changed many cities in the 50/60s, in particular Cleveland, Oakland and Detroit. These cities only started to see any kind of revival in the tail end of the last economic boom. For decades cities struggled with violent crime, racial tensions, poor infrastructure, etc.

What we're seeing is a much larger scale than that and will likely change cities for decades to come. In the shopping mall era of cities you live in cities because you are close to work and close to restaurants, bars and other things to do. And cities feel remarkably safe. Nearly every tech person who "loves cities!" today would feel very uncomfortable in SF or NYC of the 1970s.

Virtually every one I know in a major metro is considering leaving because: jobs no longer require being there, pandemic has destroyed much of the food and small business scene, and cities are becoming visibly less safe. The people are moving to other areas and they are very often looking to purchase a home rather than rent (since what you can get for the same mortgage as your current rent is typically an order of magnitude more space). This means they won't be coming back soon. This will cause a feedback loop that will continue to force employers to go remote, reduce the number of restaurants and leave cities more vacant and more dangerous.

It means the city will also change very rapidly and be much less attractive, even at a lower price.

But to your point about the Castro: it's precisely because "average" people didn't want to live in SF that marginalized groups found a home there. The Castro in SF, the Village in N
YC were places that Engineers didn't want to work and live, so artists and outcasts moved in.

My fear is that this collapse is going to be too extreme and too fast to allow for the creation of this interesting space of possibility that NYC and SF of the 1970-80s was. The collapse of commercial and residential real estate in these areas is going to have consequences that I think are very hard to predict right now.
sleep apnea exercises. Additionally, sinus clear exercises will help if your nose is blocked.

https://www.sleepfoundation.org/articles/mouth-exercises-to-...
https://www.cpap.com/blog/exercises-alleviate-sleep-apnea/
https://www.southfloridasinusandallergy.com/14-convenient-ex...
For the more skeptical people out there, this article goes into detail about the history of this method, and what it is looking for. It sounds a whole lot more realistic than the high-level articles that don't get anywhere near the technical bits.

https://news.mit.edu/2020/covid-19-cough-cellphone-detection...

It's also worth listening to the Soundcloud clip when you get to it. It sets the scene for the descriptions that follow. It also includes a few bits of info that aren't in any of the news articles, and provides audio examples.
30% is cheaper than my time and inconvenience.
Put there by Marie of Roumania, who had moved there.

"Life is a glorious cycle of song / A medley of extemporanea / And love is a thing that can never go wrong / And I am Marie of Roumania." -- D Parker
I've done some thinking about how to prove that a video was filmed at a particular time. I've written parts of the design but haven't written any code yet. The idea is to have a group of public Internet servers that create a hash chain mesh. Every second, each server produces a new block, containing the SHA3-512 hash (digest) of the previous block, hashes of many other servers' previous block, and hashes of user documents.

To show that a video was created after a particular time, a person can include a hash from any public server in the video. The easiest way is to have somebody hold a phone in view of the camera, running an app that shows a QR code of a recent hash, updating in realtime. They could also read the hash digits. And the phone app could play the hash as audio tones.

Afterward, anyone who has the video can use software to extract the hash, query public servers for the hash's position in the immutable historical hash mesh, and get the associated timestamp. The existence of the hash in the video proves that the video was created (or edited) after the timestamp.

To show that a video was created before a particular time, use software to send the file's hash to a public server for inclusion in the mesh. A good recording app can publish repeated hashes of the file as it is recorded and gets longer. When the user stops recording, the app adds an "end of recording" mark to the file and publishes a final hash.

Afterward, anyone with good enough software can determine the time interval between the hash embedded in the video and the published hash. This is the interval when the video was produced. A malicious actor would have that much time to edit the video. With a good enough network, this could be 2 seconds, insufficient time for a human to make any editing decisions.

Hashes apply only to the original file. Anyone distributing a file with hashes must provide the original file that was used to create the hashes. Low-res resampled files can't be verified. Shortened or spliced files can't be verified. Only the alleged original file from the camera can be verified.

To fake a video, malicious software would need to insert a hash QR code into the video, process the video so it looks like it was recorded from a camera, and publish the hashes, all with a few seconds of delay. Fakers could also use a physical camera to re-record a video on a monitor. Either technique should be detectable. Fakery software will get better and may produce undetectable fakes. I hope that people will invent new physical anti-fake techniques to thwart fakery software.

I'm thinking of calling the system "Livestamp". It would work for any type of file or recording, not just videos.
Honestly, a confusing article to read. I think it's difficult to put into abstract words when microservices should be used without bringing up anecdotes of when it shouldn't have been or... that it's simple 'start with one, split with reason,' which is so simple it's hard to follow.

I enjoyed reading it, several times.
I'm down to just gmail (that's going to be a hard one), occasional youtube use, and android. I'm keeping an eye on the pinephone, but I have a vital edge case for my pixel (NFC blood sugar monitoring) that I really can't give up. If xdrip becomes fully supported on pinephones, I'll jump ship on android that exact day.

In general I'd say not to be too pessimistic about consumer awareness. I know non-technical people who are using brave browser, do not want smart home listening devices in their houses, avoid buying from amazon, etc. A few years ago I wouldn't have expected that from them, so it feels like it's getting better (anecdotally).
Most Citi credit cards have this, and they just updated from a flash client so it will probably be supported for a few more years (otherwise Flash ELOing would be a great time to end the program)
That's true. In 2018, ~80,000 Americans died from the flu. However, most of those had some comorbidity that exacerbated the course of the flu.

When I mentioned hundreds or thousands, I'm talking about healthy, young people dying of the flu. It's rare, but it does happen.

My point is that we don't look at those cases and assume that how the flu affects everyone.
I don't feel that... the author feels that. It was the first line of the article.
From my perspective as a user, that 30% cut is the cost of getting my business. I already trust Apple for software update and other cloud storage and I’d prefer not to have to vet another entity for handling my payments.
Yeah, I wanted an extra person on our desperately understaffed team, so I proposed I cut about a million bucks of spending year-on-year from AWS.

They didn't want to increase the head count. The AWS spend was a different silo/team/contract.

Corporate accounting is insane.

It almost smelled like "well, we negotiated this great AWS discount, so it doesn't bother us that we are spending an extra million. We're getting it at a DISCOUNT!"

Is there some MBA trend where every headcount is some ticking time bomb of liability that is 10x worse than their yearly salary?

You spend 150k on servers, they don't improve over a year.

You spend 150k on a decent employee, not even rockstar ninja 100xer, and they will deliver useful, although sometimes hidden, productivity and optimization.
Chinese, China, CCP whats the difference right? "Hunter Biden's insanely sketchy activity with the chinese" means Chinese people. "china is NOT our friend" means that country which is made up of 1.4 Billion people is not our friend. CCP is the ruling party, akin to GOP for US, if people want to pretend to only hate the CCP please learn to use the correct terminology. If it doesn't make sense to hate on Americans because they voted in GOP, why would it make any more sense to hate on the Chinese for having a ruling party they didn't even vote in.
> If it doesn't make sense to hate on Americans because they voted in GOP

Wait, why wouldn't that make sense?
Before ad networks, we had a longer tail of low prominence newspapers and magazines than we do now.
To add on top of that, what about just general travel or business travel?

I could understand moving away from the bay area, but living in a remote town has it's costs. Need to jump on a plane for a business meeting? Well, now you're driving 2 hours to the airport and then connecting to some hub.

I've done it in the past, it adds a ton of friction to travel.
A VOD/Live TV channel just for EV enthusiasts
I would like to introduce you to Voltly - The EV Channel. Think of Voltly as a NETFLIX for EV content. Here's our sizzle reel:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qpQq9FlqQ_I

Voltly is a VOD/Live TV channel for EV related content including shows, documentaries, music, news, reviews, sports, podcasts, manufacturer videos and live product launch events. Voltly is currently on ROKU.

With Voltly, you can enjoy instant access to premium quality streaming videos about electric vehicles including cars, trucks, motorcycles, airplanes, etc – if it moves on electricity, we've got it on Voltly 'The EV Channel'.

Voltly also features the largest collection of EV content online with over 600 unique videos, and is the only TV channel catering exclusively to the EV community.

A little background me.
For the past 5 years, I have been a writing and creating content for my EV news blog TheVoltly.com and it's social media pages. Through this time, I have seen the EV community online grow far beyond it's niche beginnings mostly due to the innovations brought about by Tesla and Elon Musk.

EV's are a way of life for me and after seeing our California Governor decree that all new cars sold in the state from 2035 onwards must be electric, I felt it was time the EV community had a home on TV. I am also a person of color working to create media for and about the tech industry.

Please let me know if you have any questions.

Thanks!
- Riz.
Hmm. All programs are either compilers or repls.

Log analysis compiles logs into an analysis. A GUI repls user interactions.

It all has to do with how you define the abstractions.
> If it can be specified by a finite sequence of operations...

Hmm... are you saying that, for example, pi is the one-step sequence of operations of dividing a circle's circumference by its diameter? But first, you have to get both those values...
>...dev shops screw up stuff isn't exactly news to anybody. That's the natural state of affairs no matter what your flavor-of-the-week.

I vote the next flavor of the week paradigm should be centered around this. Devs and dev shops seem to mostly only be able to clusterfuck all the things eventually. What we need is software that is Developer Proof.

I'm going to write the Developer Proof Manifesto.
The lying and fudged details in the article, or do you mean actually calling it out and issuing a retraction?
The US government spends over $150MM a year on hydrogen. https://www7.eere.energy.gov/office_eere/program_budget_form... It’s closer to $200MM when you include work from DOE’s Fossil Energy Office and Nuclear Energy Office.

Also California has funded a number of hydrogen fueling stations and the US has the most fuel cell vehicles on the road (almost all in California).

The US has seen hydrogen hype cycles before when George Bush called for a hydrogen highway in a State of the Union.

My point is that the US is not going to be left behind given significant investment over the last couple decades.
Well, GitHub/Microsoft could go on a PR campaign and say "we're not going to honor this RIAA DMCA since we know yt-dl isn't violating the DMCA!" but then GitHub/Microsoft would opening themselves up to a lawsuit against (basically) the entire music industry. The amount of goodwill MSFT loses over this (hopefully isolated) incident has to be worth a few orders of magnitude less than the tens of millions of dollars that would be burned to actually fight the RIAA.

Smaller hosts could get away with not honoring DMCAs since the RIAA likely isn't going to waste resources actually filing a lawsuit, but this yt-dl situation seems like the perfect setup for the RIAA to set a precedent outlawing video/music downloaders if someone were to actually fight them on it (and until then, they can continue to take down video/music downloaders until someone does counter it).
I remember some fun with CORBA as recently as a few years ago. I wholeheartedly agree.
Actually, no - but we/I probably should
The thing that made old 80s computers so compelling for kids was the simplicity: fewer choices for peripherals, less things to connect, cartridge system for easy launching, easy to restore to a known state if you mess something up (typically just power cycle).
What made a particular platform successful was the games available. There were many platforms out there, but kids wanted systems that played the best games. Being able to tinker and poke around, while learning something in the process was a happy side effect.
Kids have no shortage of systems for gaming these days, but I'm thinking about getting one of these for my 11yo kid. I like the idea of gentle, friendly introduction to technology, just for tinkering and gaming without the distraction that comes from a multiuse (eg school) machine. Although, I don't want it to become yet another YouTube client, so I'll have to curate the content and supervise him.
Others probably have not fully realized this yet, but with GitHub one can:

1) Publish arbitrary commits under your https://github.com/my/project URL, e.g. a fake https://github.com/my/project/blob/<faked_commit>/README.md in your project describing how to install it that actually describes installing malware.

2) Publish those commits under your name, with your email address, and GitHub will prominently display it as if you made the commit (most do not use GPG signatures, and most do not know to look for "Verified" anyway)

It seemed only a matter of time before this behavior got abused for something (anti-DMCA action is perhaps the best outcome of this situation I can imagine..)
NAT can't prevent inbound connections, so... no, the first line of defence for most personal computers and personal devices on the internet, in the real world where normal people live, cannot be NAT. It's just not a thing that it does.
I'm sure there are a combination of factors.

With prices of most assets inflated and lots of money flowing around, land speculation is probably a significant factor.

Lots of folks are probably looking for security but will turn around and sell once things stabilize or they realize that property ownership and living in the country come with responsibilities they're not equipped or willing to handle.
TeamViewer appears to have a US presence (and likely, assets worth at least $700 plus small claims costs for seizure by the Pinellas County sheriff’s dept) in Clearwater, FL. Probably not local to OP, but more local than Germany (where TeamViewer is HQd).
It’s better to let them burn
I don't know how heavily it was used in Quake but I'd bet quite a lot. Carmack didn't mess around optimizing things for no reason, he was (and is) pretty focused on spending time (coder and CPU) where it will do most good.

Also, a "mere" 1% speedup seems trivial for most general coding but squeezing 1% out of optimized game code is like blood from a stone. Add a bunch of similar tricks together and you can see 10-20% overall improvement which is huge.
> The Shinkansen was/is a successful project but it had certain "costs" involving not just the demolition of lots of property but also the "eyesore" of above-ground railways. If you want to import that success, you import all of the problems at the same time.

Sure, but the alternative is usually highways, which need to be wider, and tend to louder and more of an eyesore. I'd take a Shinkansen over I-75/I-85 any day. (looking at you, Atlanta)
Accelerating Walkway at Toronto Pearson International Airport [video]
I do miss the motherland sometimes. I'm all about gravy but wrapping a pie in a cob/barm/buttie/etc does seem a bit odd. Maybe not after a few brews though!
Teamviewer has a terrible reputation.

I dropped Teamviewer after they sent threatening emails claiming I violated their EULA. I got emails falsely claiming I was using it for commercial use, when I hadn't logged in for months. Ended up switching to Anydesk, which doesn't require an account to set up (meaning they can't spy on me or "analyse my use" as per the email below)

>WARNING: Possible Violation of EULA

>We’re contacting you as part of a license audit in accordance with paragraph 3.9 of the TeamViewer End User License Agreement (EULA). The EULA regulates the use of TeamViewer software, and by downloading TeamViewer, you have accepted the terms of our EULA.

>Based on an analysis of your TeamViewer account usage, we have detected possible use in a commercial context. As our EULA states, a paid license is required for commercial use.
lol k.

So what's your conclusion then. Morals are relative, therefore there are no morals? Who are we to criticize genocide and terrorism?
> note that 2% of American adults are level 5.

You might have misread that. It says 2% of global adults (“across all countries”) are level 5. It also says that level 5 does not officially exist, and level 4 is the highest level on the PIAAC scale.

According to that article, 12% of Americans are in the highest level measured. Over 13% of Americans have post-graduate degrees. And while on the scale you linked to, the U.S. ranks lower than a lot of countries, don’t ignore the fact that the spread of absolute scores above the U.S. is in the single digit percentages. Framing these particular scores as representing some kind of glaring education problem here seems to be over-emphasizing minor global differences and ignoring some context.

I hope this gives you reasons to feel more optimistic. We have plenty of room to improve, but it is clearly not as bad as you thought.