skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Both corporate and government surveillance are complements, and are ultimately both manifestations of power and monopoly. One form has an economic locus, one a political locus. Either may be abused, and each feeds on and amplifies the other.

Government surveillance has vastly less capacity without commercial services, particularly those tracking:

- Strong signalling via payments: commerce, credit and debit payments, ecommerce, Amazon, Visa and Mastercard

- Location: mobile devices, tollpaying systems, facial recognition / biosignatures, license plate scanners

- Interests: marketing databases, demographics, AI-based content analysis, magazine and newspaper subscrptions, television and video watch history, video rentals (among the very few privacy carve outs thanks to Soliciter Bob), and online reading / views / interactions data.

- Social relationships: USPS postal covers, telecoms call records (dating to the 1980s), location data (corrolated with other individuals), email, social media friends and interactions

Corporations rely on powers of governments including:

- Courts

- Law

- The buying, selling, renting, borrowing, installation, or removal of legislators, executives, judges, and regulators

- Regulatory capture

- Law enforcement

- Military

The line that a government can kill or jail you whilst a corporation cannot is a fable long belied by history.
Corporations (or straight-up criminal gangs, where differentiable) can and do act directly, or bend the government where necessary. Adam Smith's notes on commercially operated garrisons, the history of the labour and environmental movements, oil and railroad companies, chemical industrry, and more, provide numerous examples.

Surveillance, censorship, propaganda, and manipulation are tools, features, and benefits accruing to the controlling actor of any informaation monopoly, regardless of how that actor is organised or aligned. Not all abuse the power, but as Lord Acton notes, the temptation is strong.
A saying I remember from my childhood was "if at first you don't succeed, try try again."

There was no messaging that life was easy, or that you only had to believe, or only had to try hard. You could do all of that, and fail. Then you reflect on the failure and try again, presumably having learned something.
It's impossible to solve all problem at once. You solve them one by one. Also security is not a boolean (secure or not secure): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Security-in-depth.
A Google engineering manager once told me that “back in the day, SREs got promoted for writing monitoring systems, and so we ended up with a bunch of unsupported monitoring systems”
The article doesn’t go into much detail, but it hints at the use of a technique that I’ve suspected might have some promise for building design - finding a way to convert a 2D set of drawings or a 3D model to a text-based representation, then using text-based AI tools like GPT-3 to generate new buildings based on input parameters.

Currently the building design process is time consuming and labor intensive, I think there’s lots of potential for automating large swaths of it.
These were Cree LEDs. $10 each at the time
By neutral I meant it reports quotes from different perspectives, so obviously some are denials and refutations of people embellishing.

LaRouche being a weirdo doesn't make it less likely that the Reagan Administration committed essentially the same crime with the same people twice, and the CIA was the primary benefactor of the second sequence of crimes.

A fear of blackmail from parties who knew the first crime is a better explanation of the Reagan administration choosing to sell arms to Iran, given that any other choice besides Libya would have been less antagonistic.

I mean sure maybe they didn't do the first crime but they found the crime they were accused of too clever not to do. Aside from that possibility, what are the odds of being accused of a crime before you commit it, later in an entirely documented fashion? That's more Hitchcock than the reality I observe.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mechanical_television

I just fell down the rabbit hole of Broadcast Mechanical Television... very interesting stuff!

I’m still not quite sure how the broadcast tech worked for the individual scan lines - I wonder if it was similar to later TV signals, or completely different?
I made a live GSheet of 39 stocks connected to Electric Vehicles
Not really, it's barely used anymore. Monarch has replaced it for most situations.
I think he was referring to the Intro page [1][2].

[1] http://sinatrarb.com/intro.html
[2] https://github.com/sinatra/sinatra#readme
If that technique made any bike part better, Shimano, Campagnolo, and SRAM or whoever was around at the time would have been doing it.
https://zerossl.com/features/acme/

> Unlimited & Zero Cost

> In an effort to ensure the widest possible SSL certificate coverage around the world, our team has decided to keep all ZeroSSL certificates created using the ACME protocol completely free of charge.
He arguably played have played a tangential role in the establishment of Google's business model. Some really interesting history from Ali Partovi, cofounder of Tony's first startup, LinkExchange: https://techcrunch.com/2010/08/29/bubble-blinders-the-untold...

It's worth reading the whole thing but the summary is: Scott Banister, then founder of a startup called Submit-It, seems to have been the first person to have conceived of an AdWords-like business model...

> In 1996, he brilliantly conceived an idea he called “Keywords”: to sell search listings based on pay-for-placement bidding – more or less the same as today’s AdWords. Banister began pitching the idea to anybody who would listen to him, including, among others, Bill Gross of IdeaLab, and the principals of LinkExchange: Tony Hsieh, Sanjay Madan, and me.[...] Tony, Sanjay, and I also loved the idea, because we had the benefit of the right context. [...] LinkExchange proceeded to acquire Submit-it; and I became obsessed with the idea of realizing Banister’s vision via deals with the world’s top search drivers [...] In late 1998, Microsoft bought LinkExchange for $265 million, telling us they liked the “Keywords” vision. As Microsoft employees, we continued pitching the Keywords deal not only to Yahoo, but also to the up-and-coming Google. I wasn’t surprised to find that these companies were wary of partnering with Microsoft.
> According to New Motion Labs, because the chain engages on both sides of the tooth, it is effectively locked in position, theoretically spreading the power distribution over many teeth, increasing efficiency, and reducing wear.

Yeah, I'm also wondering about how much energy it takes to "lock it in place", and then, of course, unlock it.

I've been a cyclist for 30 years now, and there's always been a steady stream of 'amazing! revolutionary!' things like this, but mostly it's incremental improvements. If it pans out, great, if not, c'est la vie.
HN as a group does things that aren’t representative of most users.

So don’t take it the wrong way. A pedantic comment which is downvoted and flagged doesn’t represent you, but the fact someone said it is very much in the flow of HN’s community.
Alibaba Cloud has become the fourth-largest public cloud provider
I see it as an opportunity for bigger cars market.
Congrats, you’ve come to understand a free commodities market doesn’t curate itself to one generation forever.

It’s hardware that does the real work. The software fetish of tricking a limited machine into variety is now full of variety by default as the hardware is much less limited.

No matter the language it’s physics.

Unix is still there. You’re acting entitled to have others sell only what you want.

Just like an old person. Let’s bring back pagan gods and horse and buggy, too, eh? There’s freedoms being trampled somewhere because those aren’t being fetishized at scale.

It’s the arithmetic of a society.
But Bazel is developed by Google itself right now. Presumably if you missed Google tooling you'd rather use Bazel, no?

I'm not suggesting Bazel is perfect: I think e.g. Starlark's insistence on being a separate language does more harm than good. (FWIW I also think the JVM objection is a little silly.) But I am saying preferring the Google tooling would ostensibly mean you like Bazel a lot already :)
This infuriates me. There are so many problems I run into, day-to-day even, which could be readily solved if files/folders just had a stringly-typed key-value metadata store of arbitrary size which was portable-ish across file systems. Heck, even just one bytes field I can dump json or some serde into, that doesn't impinge on the actual file bytestream. xattr is close but no cigar.

Instead you either need sidecar files, archives, or custom binary formats.

It's as if the posix filesystem abstraction crystallized a bit too soon (same like tcp/ip)
That's a lot of silly assumptions. Everyone has their own passions. Sometimes that aligns with their chosen field of work and sometimes it doesn't. This isn't unique to software development nor is it wrong for those who just want to deliver the responsibilities they're paid for.

Unless "passion" is explicitly being compensated by the company, why would you expect others to freely deliver it? And if you're so passionate, why do you care? Focus on your ambitions and let others chase theirs.
That's way too high a bar. Linux for a personal computer is often a nightmare for professional programmers like me; for the average user it can be really miserable. Last time I used Linux as my primary environment a decade ago I ended up quitting after two years thanks to Pulse Audio and basically being able to play music 50% of the time.

I think we are better off focusing on content generation tools- ie geocities, garageband, gimp, and software that is customizeable by the end user, even if they aren't a programmer- for example being able to skin the UI, or lay things out a certain way.
> Apple have stated multiple times that they don't have any intention to lock down macOS more or less

What Apple says and Apple does can or are two different things. And it applies to any company in the world. Blindly believing them is naive at best.

> I can't really think why anyone would think Apple would lock down macOS

I can think of one: iOS. Locking down the software and hardware can allow Apple to funnel people to their own stores and services. It is not rocket science to figure out that a company is trying to increase their revenue. Right now you have only MacOS as the operating system, Linux may never come and Windows support is anyones guess right now.
Neither of those help with the thing I mentioned.
Mao's even bigger genocides are probably even less known.
This might be a helpful read and explain why it does not look good for either linux on M1 or the future of hackintosh:

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2020/11/__trashed-6/
> "‘Believe in yourself and anything is possible’? Nope, it’s just not true."
>
> This is such a great quote.

I feel this way about teaching young children "when you grow up, aim to be a professional sports player or a famous magician"

What percentage of people who try to make it in those careers make it? It seems toxic to train children from a young age "try to pull of something that has 0.5% of happening"
Product-Market Fit (eBook)
Why can't it be? My bike is a fixed gear track frame. If the threads of the sprockets are compatible with the rear wheel, then it should be able to fit.
The big advantage for using BASIC to teach young children is its concreteness. In my experience, some kids have trouble understanding nested blocks (for example in Python, why the stuff in an if block is different than the surrounding code). With BASIC and GOTO everything is explicit and concrete and at the same level. They just have to trace though the program one line at a time to understand it.
How I Found My Dream Job as Eng #1 at a YC Co. and 3 Tips on How You Can, Too
How to Position the Team in a Pitch Deck
Honestly, I don't think it's that. It's just that Western History is West-centric. In general that makes sense because an arbitrary human life has value approximately zero. For instance, 2 million people died in a famine in India under British rule but no one knows about that.

If it weren't for Hotel Rwanda, the Rwandan genocide might go unnoticed. The Khmer Rouge are barely known. And everyone might joke that "Haha the North Koreans have no food" on the edgier parts of the Internet but ultimately, 3.5 million could have died there and we would barely have noticed.

That's not even because of some evil ignorance - it's just that people always see things from their reference point (and not even big vs small). American Independence was a big deal to America but not a big deal to the UK. Brexit is a big deal to the UK but no one outside really gives that much of a damn. And think about the Vietnam War - it's this massive moment in American history but to the Vietnamese it is one massive moment sandwiched between their wars with two other superpowers.
This is why i stopped doing kitchen things like this. While it's fun it's a huge time suck that I'd rather spend on other hobbies.

Also why i have no problem putting down $10+ on some jam from a local maker
The people who are doing it to hunker down for hard times are the people that would go to every grocery store for miles during the first few months of COVID and find that each store had been entirely bought out of canned goods. That was reality for many rural areas for a while when all this started.
Define success. I'm college educated and make nearly $100k a year. To me this is the bare minimum. I don't feel comfortable where I am but I still meet people who envy me. I'm just doing what I'm supposed to.

It wasn't even hard to get here.
5 gallon buckets with a screw-on lid are great for that, too. Probably not as rodent-proof as the ammo box, but I haven't seen any rodent damage on mine yet.
See my other post theorizing about how it might actually be advantageous despite looking crazy. Perhaps a case of marketing guy who doesn't really understand what he's selling effectively outranking the engineer?
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Solar and wind energy is environmentally destructive?
Yes, it was classic conflation of cause and effect. The observation was that successful people had high self-esteem. The (wrong) conclusion was that they had the high self-esteem first and that led to their achievements and success.
As long as there is friction, no.
Microsoft is working on an Android subsystem for Windows 10
I live in the Netherlands and have traveled Europe very extensively and I have never seen one single belt driven bike... I have a feeling that it'll be a long time before Europe widely adopts them :)

Does look very cool, though.
Let me defend the current situation (more of a devil's advocate, actually, but still: this helps me think about it).

The general level of programmer ability is lower than it used to be (and this is a good thing IMHO) at the same time the number of degrees of freedom has increased. Thus the more customization points, the more opportunities for something to go wrong because of some unwitting assumption made elsewhere. Just look at how many problems we still have with i18n: not enough room allocated for strings; grammar assumptions, and let's not get into BIDI. So reduced options will reduce the percentage and total number of user problems.

A corollary to this is the deployment of servers: once every server was a snowflake with its own lovingly-chosen name. Nowadays servers are spun up, configured, and then erased and repurposed in an instant with nobody thinking about it.

Then there's the spam and attack vectors: no longer to we craft amusing response text to server handshakes ("username accepted -- socket to me!"). You can't just operate an open SMTP server as a favor to someone who might need it. And the fact is >99% of all people cannot defend themselves against a phishing attack or avoid downloading malware that will attack someone else.

Finally: the number of possible customization points has actually increased dramatically on the highly personal devices like phones: in those cases rather than expose the options (which can interact in weird ways) they are just continuously automatically tuned based on observing my use. It's all in the name of being more custom to me but I don't like it.

====

All that being said, I agree with the author that it's a shame. But my response has been different: taking a cue from the servers, I try to use as little customization as possible, both so I can switch from machine to machine easily and to avoid the problems of poorly-coded machinery. Even my emacs init file is surprisingly short (and in the 1970s my EMACS init file was a binary image memory mapped into EMACS and (as I later learned) used by a lot of people. Well those days are over.
Below are some apps that address the collection/curation aspect:

https://raindrop.io/
https://stash.ai/
https://getmemex.com/
https://www.instapaper.com/
https://kollate.io/?ref=producthunt
> Do you think it's really that odd that they wouldn't want someone publishing releases from beta OS/Libraries?

Yes, very. It's not like the toolchain really cares which version of XNU it's running on.

> Given how everything else you talked about could be turned off. Do you think that would be a better default? to allow system libraries and such to be altered? and that the protection would need to be explicitly turned on instead?

I liked what they did in Catalina, where you could remount the rootfs as writable. What they have in Big Sur is too much; you have to restart every time you want to modify anything and it is not possible to change anything after booting.
That's pretty much what Eric Schmidt talks about in The New Digital Age. He says that the technical requirements for building reliable systems at scale makes information tricky to impossible to delete. He also says the same thing you said, which is that the implication of data being permanent is that, even if privacy is respected by these companies today, future generations might hold the complete opposite values and could change the laws. What's to stop the cloud natives from making all your emails and search history public after you die? Is it really so difficult to believe, if we consider how common it is for the private letters of important historical figures to be published?
House fire while he was with family without any details. I must say it doesn't sound good. I'm sure the police will investigate. Big loss.
I share this feeling, and I've found some relief by reducing the complexity of my configuration by an order of magnitude.

I only do computing on 3 platforms: A text-mode Lisp VM (Emacs), the Web (Firefox) and Unix (Xterm).

My Linux configuration is really simple. No desktop enviroment. Just a simple manual tiling window manager. StumpWM is my favorite option, but ExWM or dwm also work fine.

I could use macOS or Windows, but with Linux I can simplify furhter. In some distributions, there's a minimal layer between me and upstream. Just creating binaries and dealing with dependencies. An easy litmus test for a good distribution is to set up the above configuration and check what is running with e.g. htop. Is it clean, with nothing added by me?

I have learned not to change defaults till I understand why they are there. That's an intance of Chesterton's fence, a very useful heuristic. Owing to this, I have very few dotfiles, which are ~100 LOC. They are completely trivial. I almost know them by heart.

NixOS and GuixSD are an interesting alternative. They make simple things very simple. You can set up your whole machine in a declarative manner with a few LOC placed in a single file. Nothing breaks, it's functional. You can rollback anytime. However, some complicated things require a lot more work than with a normal setup, others less.
Sure, I think thought needs to be put into any development decision. I think a new project should carefully consider, for at least several hours of research and discussion, what revision control system to use, instead of just using git without consideration of the consequences.

There are already book-length arguments that I like to refer to for specific topics, such as trunk-based development.

https://trunkbaseddevelopment.com/
Never 100%. Friction anywhere will prevent perfect efficiency. Also any compression, flexing or twisting of the components, which can be very, very small for hard steel at these low forces but not quite zero.
Gates only quote between 95-98% efficiency. You can relatively easily get to 98% with conventional chains using wax and oversizing chainrings and sprockets and you don't need to worry about splitting your frame to replace them...

This is a very niche product but sounds like an interesting approach. The users of it likely won't care if it needs replacing every ride if it means saving watts and winning (olympic) races.
I usually freeze my jam into large blocks using tupperware and then transfer them into vacuum sealing bags. After sucking the air out, I let them defrost and then they stack nicely as flat packs of jam, ready to be cut open. No glass to break, no worry about not getting all of the air out, and easy to inspect from all sides to see if anything has started growing in there.

Also works well for other "liquidy" things people usually put into jars.
I specifically mean reacting to the criticism Apple is getting. You see the same level of criticism of any major tech company in the comments section of the front page but very rarely are those criticisms followed up by a bunch of users defending the tech company in the comment section. You're arguing a weird semantic that doesn't really have anything to do with what I'm saying.
Can someone explain why they need subsidies?
it does look more durable with all the the added metal but how could that make it faster? but either way, I never had durability issues with my bike chains (including motorcycles), specially when you can adjust for "stretching"
I will never forget the day that I spent debugging an early QBasic program that included a line similar to

5 = x

for an assignment in the first draft. There were tears and deep frustration at the moment I discovered that assignment had a directionality. The author's story brings back so many memories of learning and growth.

For those too young to know -- magazines used to come with page-long Basic programs for games that you could type in, debug (there were always typos), and play.
Power efficiency is indeed one of the benefits of smaller process nodes, so it has a direct impact on battery life.
I always got the sense that Mao's genocides are more visceral in the West because of the large Chinese immigrant population that lives in the US.
Yep, a story released well after my comment ties it to that city.
Show HN: Kids Science Book Promoting Independence Includes QR Codes to YouTube
This looks great. A minimalist no-BS version of Blaze that supports everything I would need is something I'd be happy to use.
FYI, as mentioned in this interview the website with the compilation of MLxArt projects is over at https://mlart.co/ ; lots of cool stuff there, would recommend browsing.

I find the story of YACHT's latest album particularly cool; https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2019/08/yachts-chain-tripping...
> Is it in honor of Tony Hsieh?

Yes.

It should be clickable, it always leads to questions. https://hn.algolia.com/?q=ask+black+bar
No vaccines for Covid-19 without public money
Why do you feel the need to pick on Apple when:

a) their updates require consent

b) their telemetry is less invasive than Google's or Microsoft's and at least they explain what they're collecting in most of their apps and allow one to turn off some things

c) they do offer power user options such as allowing kexts like the one from Little Snitch. https://www.obdev.at/support/littlesnitch/245913651253917

d) generally add functionality

?