skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The dirty secret of free market capitalism is that you can basically open a lemonade stand with sign "HAPPINESS" and charge any amount. There are some hopelessly thick people out there, and a shortcut to success is taking advantage of them. Probably many of these students paying $30k could not even complete a college application before a deadline. I don't know how these "entrepreneurs" can sleep at night.
It liked "scrabeloid", for whatever it's worth (several points in scrabble!).
Google doesn't disable ordinary rulefollowing accounts by mistake. They are aware of the false positive rate and don't care.
Writing Clean Code. Proper Naming for variables, methods and classes
If a cop catches you driving like a tool, they can give you a reckless driving ticket even if you didn't break the speed limit.
That's cool! Clever idea, really like a bunch of early computer games I played.
Pluralsight to be acquired by Vista Equity Partners
Way Developers Can Gain Google Technology Skill
I really like Social Cooling's take on privacy (http://www.socialcooling.com/).

SC's take (paraphrasingly, of course) is that without privacy, you're only rewarded for astroturfing your life & feigning a blandly successful life without pot holes.

The Social Dilemma (Netflix docudrama)'s take on it -- that facebook-et-al don't sell "your data" they sell "a guaranteed change in your behavior" -- is also a pretty damn powerful message.

This website's "nobody cares but they shouuuuuld!" baseline argument is not very effective, IMHO. These guys have the right idea -- giving access to privacy tooling -- but this post should've been more focused on education from the get-go. e.g. "We know you feel powerless about privacy. That's why we built [x resource]. Claw control back."
I've started to ask "What about others? Don't they have the right to privacy?".

For example if you're gay you might not want everyone to find out. Or if you're into some weird kinky stuff. Or even better if you live with a hidden identity because you've witnessed against organized crime.

It's fine to give away your personal privacy, but it's harder to throw other people under the buss (if you're capable of empathy as most of us are).
That’s pretty remarkable... can you give more details on monthly budget:

After $500 for rent that’s only $750 left.
Food: $500?
Cell phone/ internet:$70?
Clothing: goodwill?
Car insurance: $100?
Utilities:?
Can we at least agree on one thing? That sticking with the keyboard is faster than using the mouse.

Use keyboard shortcuts in your IDE, type commands into your shell. The killer idea that will make you more efficient is scripting (or creating macros in your IDE) for your own common tasks and assigning them a good name (or a shortcut in your IDE.)
Micro-Machines-transactions
Not just google, hackernews was also displaying: "We're having some trouble serving your request. Sorry!", has it something to do with google architecture?

Btw, that's funny you listed all the google services exactly in the order I found them unavailable: first youtube, then gmail, then docs
I didn't know about this, I think we don't have this in France
> So far there have been zero APT attacks traced back to inside jobs.

That means we're not finding them, not that they don't exist.

Considering how easy it is to create plausible external attack vectors from the inside, I would be surprised if it didn't exist.

As you said, intelligence agencies have had people on the inside of important organisations since forever. That's what they do. It's not like everyone decided inside access is useless, it's more likely it has become easier to not burn insiders by them having to work hands on.
Besides the exaggerated figure, I always find these claims bizarre. Sure, there was some momentary loss, but aggregated over a month this will not even register.
"modern" PHP frameworks suffer from this idiocy to no end.

I'm sold on "pure PHP" but you can get a hell of a lot done with a few simple libraries and avoiding all the bullshit pushing you into classes.

Typescript is quickly falling down this rabbit hole as well.
Perhaps their success rate has gone down, but their absolute successes have grown enough for them to accept it. Perhaps they should add some more expensive tiers for better student support.
2000 points in an hour on HN. 120K upvotes on down detector. Trending worldwide with 500K tweets.
Hello! Zack Maril here.

I've been working on this research for over two years now. I got started working on it after I read everybody on Hacker News talking about how they kept getting blocked when they were crawling websites[0] and also recent antitrust developments[1]. This has been a huge part of my life these past few years and it wouldn't have happened without the Hacker News community, so, from the bottom of my heart, thank you.

If you would like to read more about this research, please check out Knuckleheads' Club[2]. I've published a lot of what I have so far there and plan on publishing more soon. You're all invited to join the club and I'll be checking this thread all day and responding to folks as best I can.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9612345

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17941804

[2] http://knuckleheads.club
Network security monitoring and encryption have always been at odds. One day, due to encryption, all that will be left to monitor will be metadata (to, from, date, time, src, dst, bytes, duration, etc.)
"Multi-cloud" only works if you stick with the basics. Like disk storage, compute, and a well-supported database. Once you tie in into a cloud's specific offerings.....
Sure, and I can also easily imagine many ways in which it fails :)
Hello! Zack Maril here.

I've been working on this research for over two years now. I got started working on it after I read everybody on Hacker News talking about how they kept getting blocked when they were crawling websites[0][1]. This has been a huge part of my life these past few years and it wouldn't have happened without the Hacker News community, so, from the bottom of my heart, thank you.

If you would like to read more about this research, please check out Knuckleheads' Club[2]. I've published a lot of what I have so far there and plan on publishing more soon. You're all invited to join the club and I'll be checking this thread all day and responding to folks as best I can.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9612345

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17941804

[2] http://knuckleheads.club
Those hosting with their own domains on Google mail had an identical experience, if it makes you feel differently.
What Drives You?
Time flies when we enjoy something. These are the moments that can bring in new opportunities.
The author is Raymond Chen, and the blog is probably the single most influential blog on windows internals. He has decades of amazing posts that are well worth a read.
>That said - there is still a chance that Take-Two could respond with a better offer, and spark a bidding war between the two US gaming giants.

Man, I hope so. This is quite frustrating.
> All in all, an experiment in business model is taking place

Which is all businesses at that scale I think. You're not reinventing the wheel offering plumbing services in your local village.

I guess we have to think about how these experiments might play out and the risks involved as we participate in them. How will food delivery services change my community? What's the risk that an investment in personal education with this newly launched service won't pay off? What am I giving up by opening a free account with Facebook?

There's a strong likelihood that any of these experiments will blow up. Just as there's a strong likelihood that a direct investment in any of these companies won't pay off (especially as an early investor, which is at the point where we're likely using these services.) Maybe people shouldn't be so quick to jump in early, and more accepting of the mistake once they find out they placed a bad bet.
Everything is snappier for a while if you turn it off and then on again
The number of ads on YouTube seemed to increase enough recently to be annoying. So I installed uBlock Origin extension on Chrome. It's a great extension - kudos to the developer Raymond Hill.

Plus point - I don't get annoying adverts any more on YouTube, just a one second video freeze when an advert would have been.

Minus point - I don't want to deny ad revenue to other ad-supported websites that I browse, but I leave my settings the same so effectively I do.
Thanks. I just learned something about crops.

Personally, I like light pipe tecnology. But I still don't get it. If wheat is already maxised for land/light and cannot be improved then what could be the theoretical advantage to indoor growing of wheat partially under light pipes?

Area/energy-wise the best it can ever grow indoors is surely no better than on the roof.
I like to counter the "If you have done nothing wrong then you have nothing to hide" argument with...

"If I have done nothing wrong, then no one has the need to take an interest in my personal affairs."
Right. And one notices that such people already implicitly value privacy since they talk to their husband or wife or close friend very differently depending upon whether others are present.
FYI if you have cronjobs using Google apis, disable them or delay them.

a bot is flagging ips as abusive. it should clear up later.
Not a fan or even their user but kudos to Google for admitting the failure. Amazon (at least AWS) customers would have probably been shown a green dashboard and told to review their code.
Just going to throw this out there...

The value of top schools is the professors and instruction. The administration, not so much.

Perhaps the startup should be in how to automate and standardize university administration so that the majority of tuition goes to the educators.

- https://washingtonmonthly.com/magazine/septoct-2011/administ...
In my country (Spain) there's an awful ongoing trend of betting houses popping up everywhere, both physical and online (sports bet, online poker, etc).

It's awful because the online ads are frequently directed at teenagers, using famous personalities like musicians or sport players as bait, and trying to sell it as the next step after gaming, and something math based where you can learn and use your skill to win a fortune.

I think they're trying to target the generation that grew up with lootboxes, and they're succeeding.
Show HN: A convenient graphical image annotation tool
There will certainly be more outrage about Gawker than the Bidens. Polls show most weren't even aware of Biden accusations, let alone the facts.
"A Perfect Spy" is a devastating, powerful book. I'm happy Le Carre survived his life better than Magnus Pym did. "A Perfect Spy" is truly a work of art.
Yet Another Library for Deep Learning You Should Know About
Fast cars are not illegal...
If this phenomenon is actually real instead of just perception then I'd guess it is down to reduced demand of some short. Some possibilities:

a) users haven't all come back yet
b) Google is throttling how fast users can access services again to prevent further outages
c) to reduce load, apps have features turned off (which might make things directly faster on the user's end or just reduce load on the server side)
The fact that mass media profits with curated information does not imply that "uncensored mass media", as you put it, has had a positive impact.

It has become apparent that the "uncensored mass media" can be controlled through money, ie. politicians steering the narrative on social media using disinformation campaigns. But now they are hidden behind millions of small agents that are so hard to fact check, hold accountable and prove the liason to said politician. With mass media big companies were in this sense vulnerable -- to 3rd parties attacks, to the legal system, to the public.

I'm hardly a fan of big corporations, but in the current state of affairs the common individual is helpless, drowned in a sea of noise à là Brave New World, and for the powerful chaos is indeed a ladder.
(spoilers)

That's basically my reading of it too. Almost everyone is incompetent or deluded, there are no heroes, and in the end Leiser is simply abandoned for reasons that are basically squalid and dishonourable. That this end happens fairly abruptly and we never discover his fate presumably reflects the reality of espionage.

According to Wikipedia [1], le Carre said that he wrote the book to satirise the idea of spying as a romantic endeavour, and British nostalgia for ww2. He also said that he regarded it as one of his most authentic works.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Looking_Glass_War
Indeed, we already have a form of this in PhDs. They teach people more advanced skills, but they are exploitative and gatewalled.
I think the biggest blocker is battery life. What is the minimum display resolution I’d need in submerging like steam vr but wired power where I can do basic web development like with an ide open, a browser and it’s inspect window all open? Traditionally this is the 1080p monitors. What would be the equivalent in vr?
imo the 1979 TTSS and Smiley's People productions with Alec Guinness are some of the best pieces of television ever created
"And yet not a single one of them was able to make electric cars attractive enough to buy until Tesla showed them the way."

First, that's only partly true i.e. a matter of timing.

Second, it doesn't really matter though.

They will sell cars and trucks that are much the same as today, that people want, but are electric.
Ask HN: How many hours per day do you work?
I'm trying to log my time via timer app (manually switching it on when I code). Plus I use an app which checks what apps I use every minute.

It turns out that:

- I barely can code for more than 4 hours per day

- I have max. 60% of "productive" time, which means that 60% of time apps like IDE are open. The rest goes to random stuff, like messaging/youtube etc.

So I'm curious. I know that there are tons of articles saying that you can't be productive all the day.

But what's in real life?

Are there any persons who can work, say, 8+ hours? I mean, really work, not be at office.
A Defer Mechanism for C
At which point it became Sacramento Mather Airport, where the trainers fly in and out of from time to time.
Good. Having the cities being food independent will be huge in putting the farmers in their place.
A lot of German highways do have speed limits. I have driven from Norway to the UK and back several times over the last three years via Germany, I think that probably only half the motorway driving in Germany was unrestricted. And even where it is technically unrestricted the traffic is so heavy during the rush hour that you can sometimes walk faster. I have Hamburg and its perennial roadworks in mind.
Sarcasm ahead

But we don't know that you have done nothing wrong. Why don't we just take a quick peek and we'll leave you alone until we randomly decide to do this pointless exercise again?
Some people act like the war on corporate (and government) surveillance capitalism is lost.

I think that is the wrong attitude. Create friction by whatever means fit with your life style and work flow.

I do simple things like delete all cookies in all of my devices at least once a week, use the Duck Duck Go browser on iOS and iPadOS (I only use laptops for coding so I just use Safari and Firefox on my Mac and Linux laptops), disable location tracking as much as possible, and I use ProtonMail and Proton Calendar.

As someone once said, if you have nothing to hide, then you don’t have a life.

Personally, I believe that surveillance capitalism, with creeping neoliberalism and neoconservativism pose an existential threat to any semblance of democracy. Maybe democracy is a lost cause? I don’t believe it, and I am willing to put up some fight to at least try to preserve it.
That's surprising as it certainly feels like more of it is restricted when driving on it. If you drive the autobahn you will curse that any of it is unrestricted. There is enough changing between limits and no limits to create additional cognitive load. It seems like more than 30% is restricted as time traveled on the unrestricted bits is less per km. I never received more speeding fines in my life than when I drove from Berlin to Austria and back.
Thanks for the clarification. I should have been more careful about the words I used.
The mass is now moving straight toward a remote south Atlantic island populated by penguins and seals. Scientists say a collision could cause an environmental catastrophe
You can also read the original posted article at sci-hub.se.
Most of the value is actually in signaling and the peer group.
I do not think it is a given that the general public feels powerless about privacy.

Why would someone take steps to empower themselves if they see no need for such power?
You are complaining about "1 minute of ads for less than 10 minutes of content", and advocating "9 minutes of ads per hour in average".

But the first case is less ads than the second case.
>Our privacy is eroding. [...] The war is not lost, however.

Steven Rambam would probably disagree. He's a private investigator who's given many excellent talks on privacy at Hackers On Planet Earth (HOPE):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FHwl6AyL6js&t=10m20s

He goes into exquisite detail on the ways in which private info is shared, sold, amalgamated, and analyzed by private and public entities, and how law enforcement uses (and abuses) these resources. That particular talk is from 2016, so things are probably even worse now.
So, still ads but different name. These price engines (every one I've seen) are all affiliate hubs; they list only products that pay for the click. Any reviews on such sites are biased in similar ways to the gaming in reviews in major sites like Amazon.

Now, one could say, "so what? Most folks know that, useful info still, and it's better than ads!". But is it? At least the ad is an overt block of color, but affiliate links are hidden behind redirects and tiny disclaimers (in the few regions that require disclosure).

It's fine (and easy) to complain about display ads or video ads, but there's a lot more. Product brand shown or mentioned in tv or movie:ad. Movie trailers: yep, ad. Public media mentioning a sponsor: ad. That tiktok or insta person who always has branded product in the frame? ad.

In fact, most product discovery comes from ads. Is there another way? Probably, but ads have worked better than any other approach for so long, we haven't beaten it yet. I hope we do, but til then, for every 100 ads I despise, I'm still happy I found that one thing I actually liked. Can't say that defends all ads, but it gives me hope that we can find a good middle spot.
I co-founded a home vertical farm company a few years ago (not in operation any more).

Plants grown closer to the person eating the food are way tastier. There are two main reasons:
1) as soon as you harvest, the plant is basically dead and starts losing nutrients and flavors. So avg. time from harvest to eating makes a huge difference for taste.
2) Since the transport is long, plants are often harvested when they aren't ripe yet. Again this leads to less nutrients and hence less flavor.

The unromantic truth is that plant growth is physics. They need water, nutrients and light and all of these can be administered in a "factory". The plant doesn't care whether the photons it receives come from the sun or a grow light, as long as the spectrum is the same. With modern grow lights you can mimic the environment you have in other parts of the world. E.g. you can have sun like in Sicily in Denmark.

The flavor will actually be better (as in MUCH better) and less transport means growers don't need to optimize for varieties that can survive a long transport.
As seen in a recent comment here, you might add:

6) Let the toilets door open, after all we all know what you're going to do there.
Generally because machines should serve us instead of telling us what to do. This is an important principle for many of us.

That said I generally stick to the speed limits [1], but what if I need to get to the hospital in a hurry? At least around here local laws are quite clear that you are allowed to break laws and regulations to save lives.

[1]: old habit, wasn't always a well paid programmer and also I mostly think it is the right thing to do :-)
Not always true.

Tomato from Naples (one of the richest soils in the world, due to volcanic activity e.g. Pompeii) ≠ organic tomato you buy in a good supermarket in the US.
(from FabioAEsteves). "Don't confuse privacy with secrecy. I know what you do in the bathroom, but you still close the door."
If we know that humans have all sorts of cognitive biases, how come it's ok to use that fact while at the same time we insist there's some kind of free market?

Say you discover that putting good-looking women next to cars causes the sale of cars to increase. Why does nobody question whether it is legitimate to do so? It's as if there's a line between actively lying ("Studies show that men who buy this car will find many many women attracted to them") and just putting it there suggestively, for some as yet undescribed but working cognitive bias to do its magic.

Some advertisers even make a joke out of it, eg the Lynx ads where the dude is thronged by a huge horde of women. It's a cliché, for a good reason.

I suppose most people will just say you have free will and it's your own fault for thinking what was suggested, but I sense this is more of a grey zone than most people are willing to admit. How can the free market work if everyone is so easily affected by suggestion?
Just wanted to say, best of luck in your studies and search for better work.

I was in a similar situation about ten years ago, hitting bottom and roughing it. Being a stubborn mule of sorts, I kept trying, learning, went through countless jobs in different fields; all the while, I pursued the joy of programming. Eventually, a side project I was doing for fun (and as a learning experience) became the foot in the door, as proof of my abilities.

In my case, much of it was luck - but as they say, you make your own luck too. And the rest was mostly just "showing up" and "being there".

> i've been playing with tech since i was a kid

I believe this is the essence and heart of becoming a software developer, and you got it!
It's just the last few weeks of 2020. Expect some zombies somewhere too.
Is it good or bad for a society to learn about lying? I would have thought bad until I’ve awoken to the idea that deception is a regular practice of those who do harm, and a regular weakness of those who have harm done to them, but it doesn’t work the other way. That is, the ability to deceive doesn’t make one deceptive. That comes from the desire to do harm, which often comes from a lack of ability or imagination to do well without harming others. Harm is always felt as a necessity. So intelligent people do not practice or learn about deception, and therefore are most vulnerable to it. Maybe they need to learn by practice, the way their attackers do. A society needs trust to function, to build slowly, but all it takes is a little bit of deception from a small group of people, to destroy everything very quickly.
"Hey Google!"

"Something went wrong. Try again in a few seconds."
Yet the "nonsense" is the one with the cogent argument and citations? Interesting.
I wish it was always like this. I hate how slow YouTube, Gmail, etc. often are normally.