skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Jon Ronson's podcast "The Butterfly Effect" also does a great job of breaking down how damaging MindGeek's practices have been to workers and legitimate players in the industry:

https://www.audible.com/pd/The-Butterfly-Effect-with-Jon-Ron...
I’d disagree. I get my best answers with a ‘Reddit’ tacked on to Google, or searching YouTube for an answers video.

Their presentation would have to model the behavior in a way that feels fresh, but the raw value of their content is already validated. The situation right now is that people’s muscle memory is tied to the verb ‘googling’.

Pushing ‘search.reddit.com’ will not appear different enough to people. They’d have to brand and present it uniquely. It’s a lot more ambitious than pushing their mobile Reddit app, so it’ll never happen.
OpenNebula versus OpenStack
It does not impair the value proposition of utilizing middlemen

It absolutely does, and I say this as someone with experience dealing with all types of consumption taxes. VAT reduces the usage of middlemen in countries where VAT systems exist.

So whether is 1 middleman or 100, VAT does not cause any tax drag. In other words, the existence or number of middlemen in the chain does not change the total amount of VAT collected by HMRC on a consumer's purchase of £120 (£100+VAT).

VAT requires the middlemen to track and pay VAT at every level. While this is the same as sales tax and GST, compliance for sales tax and GST is far simpler than it is for VAT. (This is true even before you consider multijurisdictional tax issues for VAT and sales tax.) VAT compliance is more expensive, and this cost gets passed on to the customer.

what are the main differences between the operation of UK VAT (as described above) and Australian GST?

The main difference between GST and VAT is that a GST is charged at a flat rate regardless of the value added. A VAT is only charged on the value added at each step.

That is what makes the calculation more complex. Compare, for example, a product sold at $10 by a middleman under GST vs same product sold in VAT jurisdiction. In GST land, the tax is $1 whatever you paid for the input goods. Your GST payment to the government is based on total output GST charged less totoal input GST paid to suppliers of business expenses. Since the rate is flat, you essentially just take gross revenue less gross business expenses and you're done. In VAT land, the tax depends on the price paid for the goods/services that went into the product/service, so you have to know what prices you paid for those to calculate the taxable value delta. And when you reclaim VAT, different categories of VATable expenses have different rules for what can be reclaimed. So it's not a simple calculation; there's significantly more work involved.
I don't have any sympathy for Pornhub here. Their entire business is built on stolen content uploaded by anonymous users, and it wasn't until they hollowed out the rest of the industry through theft that they started looking beyond it.

I would go so far as to say that the reason Pornhub and other tube sites haven't taken problems like child porn and revenge porn seriously is because doing so would undermine the foundation of their business: stolen content.

On the other hand, this might ultimately work in their favor if it has the effect of raising the bridge they've just crossed. If it gets harder host stolen content, Pornhub has to worry less about someone else doing to them what they've done to others now that they are making a switch to paid content.
> Trump also allowed the Saudis to murder and dismember a US journalist with zero consequences.

I mean the Saudis are linked to 9/11 and Bush chose to launch into forever war in Iraq and Afghanistan.

It’s a fundamental element of the populist scepticism that “respectable” politicians are competent at anything.

And something like one murder is precisely the type of sickening academic response about decency that somehow is supposed to shield the decades of foreign policy mishaps, atrocities and incompetence.
Israeli Spy Tech Firm Says It Can Break into Signal
If you use 5 days a week as base and add 1 day for personal work, you're at 120%.

Of course interpreting it as "you need to work 125% for the 4 remaining days" is equally valid.
A good key rotation scheme and separate API keys for different purposes. Precommit automated checks for secrets.
More like an ice country than an iceberg
Thanks for sharing those tips!
We had a problem with this in older Chicago apartments, usually 2 flats and quads. These buildings usually had radiator heat fired by a common boiler in the basement and city mandated turn-on dates and minimum daily/nightly temperatures.

In theory each radiator has a regulator valve that allows you to moderate the amount of steam flowing through it. In reality these valves are all painted over/corroded/never worked in the first place, and all radiators run at full blast. It was not uncommon to see apartments with open windows in January to help regulate the heat produced by the radiator. Tenants didn't care because they didn't pay for the gas directly, although it was obviously built into the rents, and the land lords never wanted to spend the money to upgrade these old buildings, since the excessive usage of gas was built into everyone's rent and the upgrades were not.

Then again, given the age of those windows there probably was very little difference between them being open and closed anyways.

This problem was fixed when I moved into a new construction apartment which had a minisplit to heat/cool the living space. Until I found out that mini-splits have the same issue heating as ACs occasionally have in very hot summers; they can't provide any heat once the ambient temperature gets colder than the exterior coils (since it's literally an AC running backwards). That was a bad surprise.
No, I'm pointing out that anecdata isn't very useful.
And who is the arbiter of "what sex should be"? Perhaps porn is providing the much needed service of expanding our definitions of sex, which had been brutally restrained by prudish mores for most of Western civilization.
> I've stopped using heating altogether

> heating XXX cubic meters of air is a pure waste of energy

Tell me how you feel about that when the water in your pipes freezes. Because that is sure as hell not a good time.
I still think about how Instagram's entire kingdom (source code, SSL certs, AWS credentials) was left wide open because someone deployed an open source admin tool on a single server and never changed the default hardcoded secret key:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10754194

https://web.archive.org/web/20151217205414/http://www.exfilt...
I'm not overly optimistic about federation. I don't think there's much money in it and who will develop a mass market solution if they're not going to make money out of it?
Would you mind sharing what the exception communities are? I've found some really insightful comments in /r/javascript from the creators of selenium for example; but the noise to signal is very low as you mentioned. /r/reactjs is another decent community as the maintainers do post in the comments.

I like /r/coding but it's pretty dead and sometimes /r/scala will have decent blog posts. Also /r/hnblogs is very decent, but extremely slow, for insightful posts as well.
Hey HN!

We're Yoni & Bar and we’re building Balance, a platform for business purchasing online. Think Stripe (which we proudly call investors), but for B2B.

The tl;dr is that we’d love to hear your feedback, and hear your horror stories about how you’re doing B2B payments today, or what you think works well.

Ok, so.

Yoni and I spent a few years at Paypal working on e-commerce payments & risk strategies, and saw up close that while payments for consumer e-commerce/SaaS sellers are seamless, B2B payments are way more complex and are still a big pain.

Despite living in 2020, B2B sellers with a high transaction volume (over $2k) still need to handle annoying payment red tape like sending invoices, accepting bank wires or even chasing paper checks(!). Most deals require extending your buyers net 30 or 90 terms which essentially turn a seller into a bank, responsible for the payment completion risk, not to mention HURTING their cash flow. They have to consolidate all payments manually, employ people to assess credit risk and handle account receivables, in short - it’s all an expensive mess.

At our last startup (Yoni and I go waaay back) we needed a way to process payments from medical practices offering typical B2B terms: accepting wires & checks and extending net 30/60 terms. We tried using the go-to developer-friendly payment options (Braintree, Square, Stripe) but they all came in short for our B2B requirements.
I don't think that the takeaway from this story should be "sites hosting child pornography should be careful of journalists exposing them".

I think the takeaway should be "sites hosting child pornography should stop doing that".
When reading press releases about cyberattacks, substitute "embarrassing" for "sophisticated" to improve the accuracy of the release.
Enhancing Portrait Lighting with Machine Learning
Does Safari have a "use desktop site" option?
Yeah, I was trying to work with the data I had:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25418661
I think it's entirely in the original spirit. Read the conclusion of the post:

> The lesson is that they are you. Whenever you hear someone ranting about something you take for granted as wonderful and praiseworthy, and you're wondering why they don't leave well enough alone so we can all get back to our incestuous cheerleading, just remember: we went from the Dark Ages to our reeeeasonably enlightened society today by questioning our most cherished beliefs.

> So keep questioning them.

The entire point is that there's nothing specially reserved to them, and that instead of dismissing philosophy, you and I and the rest of us need to engage in it, by questioning things, and looking for the second-order, and the non-obvious, and the non-practical.
Crypto Hedge Fund Neural Capital Closes After Losing Half Its Money
Starship SN8 Test Flight [video]
Thanks for reminding me! I did get the 450MHz version.
There's plenty of interesting places on IRC, mailing list, XMPP, Mastodon.

Downvote me to hell, but best communities I hang out in are far from shiny/hip/popular, and this is why they are good.
Chance played a role in determining whether Earth stayed habitable
None of that offers you the ability to have a conversation with someone (camshows don't count).
I agree with you. Your statement made me want to test it, and my first thought was: "I'll right-click on the search bar". And there was the option to manage the search engines.

The only non-intuitive thing was that I then had to click on the 3-vertical-dot-menu of the search engine which I wanted to set as default. A separate drop-down list would have been more appropriate (or a radio button column).

~

And on Chrome on Android it's 4 taps.
>Sure, but critique is the easy part of anything (including philosophy). You do need to understand how a nuclear bomb works in order to eg design an effective monitoring program. And not just how it works, but how it is built.

That's just logistics - it comes after your philosophical understanding of the item. We don't have to monitor things that aren't bad. We monitor nuclear proliferation because we've already made a philosophical judgement on it. It came first.

> But we haven't!!!

The United States is an open market system. What drives most innovation is the free market, not the government. The government is almost always reactionary by nature. Software engineers have free choice to work on what they please. They choose to work for big money on insidious technology and they know it. You can't just blame someone else.

> So, no, technologists have not been at the healm of the United States. On the contrary, non-technical people -- lawyers and business people, mostly -- have been managing a highly technical world for decades. That's why we had no economic policy to manage the impact of automation in the 1990s. It's why we still have no climate policy. And it's why we had a complete dearth of privacy regulation in the early 2000s.

This logic is circular. We live in a highly technological world that can only be created by scientists/engineers, but they have no power. So how did we get to this highly technological world if they had no influence or power? Clearly they had power and clout - to suggest otherwise is just, well, wrong. No one is holding a gun to any software engineer's head in the US. None of them have to work on adtech. But they do, to make money, more than most people need. So spare me that we need more of these types of "philosophers".

We don't have climate policy because people stand to lose money, just like we have software engineers that refuse to take pay cuts to work on actual helpful technology instead of adtech.
I think the decline of moral argument and the rise of this general "anything goes" attitude has been a negative for society. We have to decide to draw a line somewhere. Even porn companies that feature of-age performers are highly exploitative and uncomfortably close to human trafficking - see the case of Girls Do Porn, and they're just the one that got caught doing it.

I don't think it's unreasonable to argue that some sexual behavior should be considered "bad" - voyeurism, selling yourself for money, extreme fringe interests/fetishes, etc. I don't buy the idea that Pornhub is just an innocent business trying to run their website. They have built an empire on human exploitation.
That's probably totally separate, or will be soon: https://www.channelpartnerinsight.com/news/4018768/everythin...
Yes and no. The tech is like the “Internet” and is largely born from academic work and continues forward as fundamental and foundational p2p networking advancements. It’s not a consumer product itself but obviously builders have and will fill that void. Beaker is the best example but eventually more and some projects you may have heard about are actually using some aspects of hypercore.
> I'm curious how you'd describe external mechanical keyboards with cherry reds or blues. "Ludicrously", perhaps? Even my Logitech keyboard was louder.

I imagine there's a counterexample somewhere, but I don't generally see those types of keyboards on thin-and-light class laptops. They're used in big gaming/workstation machines which have other sources of noise than the keyboard!
I'm not sure there's a "best way" aside from being vigilant.

* Don't blindly add everything to git.

* Check staged files before commit.

* Store secrets separately, outside of your git folder (e.g. use another folder, service or environment variables).

* If it must be in your git folder, then make use of .gitignore and store keys, etc separately from code in files with a unique file name pattern.
I think it's great that the authors are working on this.

RAII is one of the best things about C++, and I'm excited for similar functionality in C. GCC's __cleanup__ is a poor substitute for a fully-baked addition to the language.

From skimming through the paper, it looks like there's an open discussion about the 'guard' keyword and scoping. I know that the scoping rules are tricky.

Would it make sense for defer statements to be attached to a variable's scope instead of a scope block? It would look something like GCC's __cleanup__, except that it could run an arbitrary statement/block instead of a callback. Scope-level defer() could be specified by attaching to a depth number.

If anybody involved in the paper is reading this, what would you think about this syntax?

//---------- Attaching a defer() to a variable's scope -----------//

int main(void) {
int *dummy = malloc(sizeof(int));

defer (dummy) {
printf("This statement prints second.\n");
free(dummy);
}

printf("This statement prints first.\n");
}

//------- Attaching a defer() to the current block's scope -------//

int main(void) {
int *dummy;

do {
dummy = malloc(sizeof(int));

defer (0) {
printf("This statement prints second.\n");
free(dummy);
}

printf("This statement prints first.\n");
} while (0);

printf("This statement prints third.\n");
}

//-------- Attaching a defer() to a parent block's scope ---------//

int main(void) {
int *dummy;

do {
do {
dummy = malloc(sizeof(int));

defer (1) {
printf("This statement prints third.\n");
free(dummy);
}

printf("This statement prints first.\n");
} while (0);

printf("This statement prints second.\n");
} while (0);

printf("This statement prints fourth.\n");
}

This syntax would eliminate the need for an explicit guard keyword, and would also make for a straightforward porting process for all code that currently uses __cleanup__. It also feels a little more C-like to me, in that it resembles the look-and-feel of other control-flow statements.

In my example, defer() with a variable-name would attach itself to the variable's scope, and would execute when the variable leaves scope.

And defer() with an integer would attach itself to [current_scope_level - target_value]. So a defer(0) would trigger at the end of the current block scope, and defer(1) would trigger at the end of the parent block scope. Combined with generic {} blocks, you could get the same behavior provided by the paper's suggested guard keyword.
I know the feeling exactly. I'm trying to find out how many Hue spots to place in my new kitchen's ceiling, and how close together they should be. It's been a SEO nightmare and I still don't have an answer :-(
People try to mate with a hole in a wall, too. It’s not even considered that ridiculous.
As my Siberian parents taught me growing up:

There's no such thing as bad weather; there's just being incorrectly dressed for it.
For basic live monitoring -- https://www.shhgit.com/

It's possible to monitor them while pushing code, and to have a monitoring system deployed to track them.

I was thinking of open-sourcing our GitHubSniper tool, it basically has API regex from nearly a thousand SaaS and PaaS services and frequently posted sensitive strings, can be deployed via docker ;)

The only thing that stops me from releasing it is I have consistently earned more in bounties than the incentives of actually releasing it publicly. But will eventually release it :)
Conspiracy theory: there’s a lot of porn and an unhealthy amount of competition to monetize it all. If PH were simply trying to drastically reduce competition against standard studios by removing the amateur stuff, I’m not sure I could blame them.
What I find crazy is that you can't just start your own payment processor. That space is gatekeeped to the extreme and it is what makes me uneasy about the whole electronic money thing. If we want to part with paper money, we should be allowed to issue our own cards tied to our own money reserves.
> any other somewhat curated source

To me this is the nub of the problem - Google is doing fine for an automated solution. But you cannot beat a community of enthusiasts who know their area and come together to build a public resource.

Its almost like humans have been doing this for generations previously to the internet.

Somethings just are going to not scale
Yes and no: Lambdas (and cloud functions) are to the cloud what Triggers are to Databases.

They're very useful to react to events; but they also impose a lock-in.

For (very) light usage I feel they're ok. But this is an opinionated feeling.

If you want to process a lot of stuff, you need one (or several) instances.

If you take a close look at other 'serverless' offerings like KNative in K8s. They do something similar to launching daemon processes but they do launch pods and containers. If you already have K8s, it could be very useful. If not, use a message queue and instances.
> a single point of failure for the open source community

some actors who benefit from scale are purposefully trying to make Github fit that role, to gather, search and mine the work of others without paying or giving back.. but due to the distributed nature of git itself, there are alternatives
Well-Armed Peasants
Don't include any credentials in your code, pull them in through AWS secrets, environment variables, or other runtime configuration.
> Sometimes because they understand the domain well enough to understand the impact on function and benefit from the “artifact” and don't need someone else spinning a narrative about benefit for them, sometimes because the “artifact” itself is a status/aspirational item for them.

That doesn't contradict, but actually supports the fact that people don't care about artifacts in themselves.

Either they understand the function/benefit and that's what they're looking for, or they want them for status/aspiration (which is just a special case of the former, since status and aspiration are other functions among many).

> The actual lesson of “sell the benefits, not the features” is not “people care about results not artifacts”, but that motivating action in others who aren't inherently motivated to that action without effort on your part requires understanding their individual interests

Yes, and their interests are the function and the results people get from the artifact.

>It is not a lesson about what people care about, but about what you need to do to get what you want once you understand what they care about.

Erm, yes. "Sell benefits, not features" is a piece of marketing advice telling you what to do to get results (like any piece of advice). That's missing the point.

The question is why does it work. And the reason it works is for the aforementioned reasons: people care about results and functions, not artifacts.
Motion Illusions
Anyone experiencing lost emails? I'm not sure if it's actually me messing things up or because of the Gmail outage, I couldn't find an extremely important email and I've tried archive, trash, deleted, spam, sent boxes..
> At the risk of sounding a big tinfoil...

What you describe is how assets acquire monetary value: people start buying them not because they want them but because other people will want them. Then they don’t sell them because they know other people will want them in the future. Thus they develop a “monetary premium” from that additional demand, and become “stores of value” from the general market behavior.

The theory inside Bitcoin circles is that rich people have been buying up art, unproductive real estate, etc., not because they are good money but because they do not have access to good money, i.e. long-term deflationary, fungible, divisible, portable stores of value, because of our current regime of inflationary fiat money.

In seeking to preserve their wealth, they acquire collectibles, which then become monetary due to scarcity and expectation of future demand. It may be the very same impulse and process that led to the emergence of money in the first place, in the form of shells.
https://nakamotoinstitute.org/shelling-out/

If Bitcoin demonstrates itself to be “better money,” it should absorb some of the monetary premium of these other goods, as people will have less need to allocate their resources into paintings no one will see and houses no one will live in.
> It was not uncommon to see apartments with open windows in January to help regulate the heat produced by the radiator.

Known as the Brooklyn Thermostat.
there's certainly a tradeoff to be made here. putting on three extra layers just to go to the store is a pain. I do find that layers are much more versatile if you're going to be spending a lot of time outside or going in and out of spaces at a wide range of temperatures. with only a winter jacket and a t-shirt, I am likely choosing between being way too hot or way too cold. my winter coat is pretty bulky, so if I'm not wearing it, I'm carrying it.

when I'm going out for a while in the winter, I like to wear a cotton shirt, a wool sweater, insulated vest, a medium-weight windproof jacket, and a mostly empty backpack. if I get too warm, the vest and possibly the sweater can just go in the backpack. with this setup, I can be comfortable at any temperature from 30F to 60F without having to hold onto anything I'm not wearing. on really cold days, I swap in my heavy winter coat.
Muscle Cell Secrets