skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This is fascinating!

I started with BBC Basic II (on the Model B) which had IF..THEN but it was just one line and there was no ELSE. So if you wanted to make a 'block' you had to call a different PROC (thankfully there were PROCedures so you could avoid GOTO)

As such when I was introduced to ELSE and ENDIF with BBC BASIC V on the Archimedes it seemed like very welcome syntactic sugar - it let you do the same stuff but in a tidier way

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BBC_BASIC
Thanks, that is good to know. We are finishing the development of a feature where you can paste Excel or CSV files directly into (any) online system. So if you have data in Excel that need to be imported or processes in a business system, you can automate such tasks. Would that be of interest to you?
They're not perfectly accurate, but there's little reason for them to lie.

Moreover, when you're dealing with conversion measurements, it doesn't matter that much.

You're either getting the sales or not and that's part of the budget/spend calculus.
Hi! NumWorks founder here. First of all thanks for the mention. Also your calculator’s battery dying that early is not normal, I’m very sorry to hear that. We’re doing everything we can to preserve battery life (namely, low charge current, no over-charging, and very low discharge current), and our most pessimistic estimates give us at least 10 years of battery life. If you send us an email at contact@numworks.com I’m pretty sure you would qualify for a free replacement.

On a different note, and regarding the original link: we actually were the first to introduce Python on a graphing calculator in 2017. We opted for (and contributed to) MicroPython. Three years later, all of our competitors have copied us :-)
Depending on use case one can consider creating target table as UNLOGGED, then altering it after bulk data load. It makes for a really fast load, but it won't survive a server crash so altering it back to 'set logged' after the data loading is recommended.
> But the free market literally cannot exist? The free market won't bring you back to life so you can "choose a different competitor" if it kills you.

Life is full of risks. Lots of things were approved by bother government and experts in the past that was bad for you.

> That food? Bad. Dead. That tool? Dangerous. Dead. That work on your house? Dangerous. Dead. That car? Unroadworthy. Dead. Those aircraft parts? Counterfeit and not to spec. 300 people dead.

The FDA has stopped people from getting medication in the US that are over the counter medicines because they haven't been approved for use. It is a double edged sword.

>Every single thing humans do is already regulated in some way. Why? Because humans in the end, like all animals, try to achieve the best least effort : highest reward ratio they can.

Unfortunately. What has the current light regulation on the web brought us cookie popups that are irritating that people just click through and a GDPR warnings that don't actually solve the problem of collecting your data. I don't hold out much hope for future regulation, which btw will favour the big tech players that have been collecting our data thus far. BTW you don't know the names of many of them, because they are B2B players and provide services to the companies we do know the name of.

As for "best result for least effort". Well it depends how it manifests itself. It can either be laziness or efficiency. The latter is not a problem.

> In the modern world, these regulations need to be extended to automatically cover modern technologies and prevent inherent harm. They shouldn't be overbearing. They shouldn't be pointlessly excessive. But they are required for all things.

Inviting any sort of regulation will involve government. Government will try to justify itself by demanding more regulation. It will always be overbearing and that will cement these players in place.

At the moment, we have the best chance of these players being toppled. People are looking at alternatives to big tech and are going to smaller players, mainly due to censorship. The trickle has now become a stream, sooner or later it will be a flood. However because of regulation on the horizon (which doesn't address any of the issues we care about)

> Many people think capitalism is greedy because they have literally spent a lifetime experiencing greed fueled capitalism first hand, not because they sit on YouTube watching propaganda videos.

I suspect you are confusing corporatism (which is a form of fascism) with capitalism (which is a party of liberty).

As for propaganda. I never said anything about Youtube. Don't put words in my mouth. I am talking about how hollywood, novelists (since the 19th century), newspapers have framed it since forever. You are soo fermeted in it you don't even realise it is propaganda.
Yeah, it seems closer to a "tragedy of the commons" kind of situation. Where a few users deplete a shared resource affecting everyone else.
This kind of service is pretty trivial, you can run it for cents per user.

If you allow the web to move to a model where you have to pay dollars for a service worth cents it turns into the same kind of market as the mobile phone operators market charging fees for sms messages: a total rip off.

Why does this needs to be a business anyway? The only reason is because it can be.
> Your perception of capitalism is one that is framed as a winner takes all mentality that been sold to you by propagandists.

Not really. My perception comes from thinking about the market as a dynamic system, and not a static picture described by pro- and anti-market propagandists.

> Capitalism is about free market trade. You provide something and people choose whether they want to buy it or use it.

That's a "motte and bailey" defense. Such a perfect free trade almost doesn't exist, and very few are privileged to partake in it. Market offerings aren't independent - they're in competition, which means a lot of possible products aren't provided, and those that are face competitive pressure to provide less value for more price.

The most important thing to recognize is that the market, as a dynamic system, optimizes for profitable companies. Not for maximizing value these companies deliver to their customers. Usually, providing value is the most straightforward way for profit. But there are other ways - ways to provide no value, or even negative value while still netting additional profit - and the market takes them as much as it can. Vendor lock-in and surveillance are just few ways of making money by providing negative value-add.

> People add greed qualifier in there so they can frame it as something illicit going on.

Not illicit. Immoral. Because after all is said and done, the market is still entirely made of people and their decisions, which get to be evaluated through the lens of ethics.

> The fact still remains that if people cared about their privacy (and there is no evidence they do), they wouldn't use these sites.

They care and they will use them anyway, because the market doesn't provide any other option.

> Store cards used to track purchases and spending habits in store in the same way that sites do today (however at a much greater scale) and customers were given vouchers in return.

In the store. Not across stores. And they gave vouchers back, not shoved extra ads in your face. And that's without touching the qualitative difference between a human clerk doing the surveillance and automated systems doing the same.

> Pretending otherwise is passing the buck.

I hate to invoke the concept of "victim blaming", because it's usually invoked very unreasonably, but - you can't expect individuals to be able to rationally make market decisions while working their asses off trying to make ends meet, having their attention DDoSed, and facing against compounding improvements in manipulation techniques (courtesy of the market). I'm willing to cut regular folks some slack, and instead focus on the people running these companies, who had a clear choice, and chose to engage in abusive practices. You don't impulse-adopt business models, so you can't excuse it as a moment of weakness either.

(But then I'm willing to cut these business folks some slack too; in many cases, it's the market pressures that force to choose the abusive option - which leads us back to my original point: the market is a capitalist greed optimization engine. It promotes business people who think that, much like your margin, your ethics are their opportunity.)
PS3 runs FreeBSD
Oh, I hadn't heard that. Well then, perhaps destroying Goodreads is just the cherry on top of a deal that made sense to Amazon for other reasons.
One of the replies briefly mentions coffee cup vibrations.

There's a fun Numberphile episode just about this topic.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MfzNJE4CK_s

By far, it is my favorite trick for impressing dining company.
I don't care for democracy, so no I don't want to call myself democratic.

> But that does not absolve the producer. They are still using ethically questionable methods.

Most people don't care. How can it be an ethical issue if the vast majority of people are unconcerned by it?
Until they can't cheat, then they can't do anything because they never learned how to do it. Bad idea.
Docking on Amiga
It's still a pretty good backup which I've imported to other services before, here's the CSV header row for those interested:

Book Id,Title,Author,Author l-f,Additional Authors,ISBN,ISBN13,My Rating,Average Rating,Publisher,Binding,Number of Pages,Year Published,Original Publication Year,Date Read,Date Added,Bookshelves,Bookshelves with positions,Exclusive Shelf,My Review,Spoiler,Private Notes,Read Count,Recommended For,Recommended By,Owned Copies,Original Purchase Date,Original Purchase Location,Condition,Condition Description,BCID

The CSV export uses both quoted and unquoted fields at the same time on the same record which is unfortunate, but it works.
The unfortunate reality of car crashes in the U.K. when the victim is a cyclist. I could rant for days on how cyclists are second class citizens :-/
If/else is just as made up as for loops - it’s all if/goto underneath.
The State of Linux Debuggers
How a real-life monopoly made Monopoly the world’s biggest board game
Show HN: Brren – Answers to Any Questions
Hi.
People are constantly looking for answers to their questions - on various Internet resources (Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, Google, etc.).
I want to create a platform where people can share their expertise and knowledge on various topics.
I wanted it to be a resource where people would find answers to their questions, give advice, and monetize their knowledge. One place where everyone can find the information they need from a trusted source.

At the moment, I'm trying to attract the first users and test the idea.

I would be grateful for any feedback, advice, criticism, recommendations.

You can also create any test accounts and questions / answers on the test subdomain - https://dev.brren.com/
That's surprising, drivers on the M60 near Stockport drive like they're at Oulton Park.
The problem with delusional belief systems is that they tend to be coherent and self-supporting, just not rooted in reality.

Statistical aggregates make this worse. You can argue that on average X is more than Y, or you can cherrypick all the examples where Y is greater than X to make your point.
Thank you for this, this is a wonderful resource!

I found the link to download an ASCII version of 1984 by reading the readme.txt file, the anchor link seemed broken.

Hope this helps another seeker:

https://orwell.ru/Download/1984/e84_asc.zip

One of the cool things I think about 1984 that occurred to me while re-reading the appendix now as suggested by the article is that in order for Orwell to say something very new about our civilization, or at least to say something old but to many new people, he needed to invent his own language to do it. In a sense there's mirror between what Orwell is doing with his book, in telling our society about itself, and what Ingsoc was doing to Oceania, in limiting thought to goodthink. They both invented a new language in order to relate a new meaning. I like that, and there's something...peculiar about books that invent a lot of new terms. Like LOTR and Harry Potter. There's something "generationally transformative" about such books, maybe. In a sense sci-fi is all-in on this sort of word coining, Matrix, Terminator, Star Trek.

Nineteen Eighty-four is sort of sci-fi. It's set in the future. And then the appendix, is set even further in the future talking in staid and "encycolpaedia"-like tone about the time of the events of the book as if it is in the past. What if Orwell was a time traveler, who wrote 1984 after a visit to a possible future, and was told that by writing this book, that future would not persist. Then on his second trip back to the future he verified he'd changed that timeline by writing his book, and lifted the appendix to 1984 from an encyclopedia on "the rise and fall of English socialism" from the future after the collapse of the political system his book had helped undo. Closed time like curves.
Storage keeps getting cheaper.

A $5/month income per user should allow at least 1TB of storage. If they use unraid (at 20% redundancy) than more like 1.7TB per user and that is not even going into them using used hardware (Not the HDDs but servers) or shunking HDD's which could allow over 3TB per user.
Just a simple google search on terms "github google takeout photos" gives a link to a script https://github.com/TheLastGimbus/GooglePhotosTakeoutHelper plenty of other projects to use or get an idea for your own. Even if you are not a programmer writing a python script is not hard.

The backblaze part you can automate with rclone or 10's of other commercial software or any from this page https://www.backblaze.com/b2/integrations.html
I was waiting for a response to post this organisation, which definitely has the ear of a number of seemingly influential MPs in this country: https://twitter.com/theabd
> for anyone whose account has been dormant for at least a year, but still has some money left in it.

Isn’t it considered a bad idea to ever keep a non-zero balance in a PayPal account? When money comes in, transfer it to a real bank account straightaway.
I didn’t go into Shortcuts as it has its own set of flaws: poor granularity, poor composability, excessively complex and expensive to extend. And it’s still not quite clear how Apple mean to position it so that it connects to users’ aspirations and needs. Within Siri? within Apps? In between? All fixable, but ultimately depends on Apple’s priorities and investment, not to mention how good a handle they have on the problem themselves.

What Shortcuts does undeniably have is youth, looks, and an established following; and never underestimate the value of those. AppleScript may be built on a better technical foundation, but that don’t mean squat if it can’t bums on seats. And the bottom fell out the AppleScript market a decade ago.

However, being an outside product is absolutely no disadvantage. I’ll rate a passionate team of third-party devs with a vision over in-house chair-warmers going through vague motions with zero direction or objective. Being within Apple can be a huge advantage in that it offers prime positioning within the OS itself; but that’s of no use if you’ve got no clue how to deliver a desirable product and sell it to customers in the first place (<cough>Soghoian</cough>).

Whatever the strengths and weaknesses of their product, the Shortcuts team cut their teeth and proved themselves out in the real world. I don’t doubt Apple bought WorkflowHQ as much to get those people as their product. As change of blood goes that was badly overdue.
> In my findings, the reason unlimited doesn't work is a small percentage of users (very small, like ~0.1%) who push it to the extreme. In other words, if your exhaust 50% of your resources to service 0.1% of your users, at a fixed subscription cost, the model doesn't work.

How do you handle such users at MediaFire?
Thanks. I've done all of that and is what I'm trying to avoid.
Well, I'm glad I don't have money left there, because I had two factor authentication turned on, and for some unforseen circumstances, I lost my phone number. PayPal customer service is actually quite hard to contact, because every possibility they give you requires you to log in. I found an email address somewhere, but when I wrote them telling them about my situation, I got an email that if I log in I can check their answer in the internal ticketing system. Then a few days later there was another email asking me about my experience with their support.

I'll never use PayPal again. No way in hell I'll trust a company with handling my money when they make it impossible to contact them.
Wind powers this new, enormous vertical farm in Denmark
This is intriguing but frustrating. Couldn’t find anywhere that explained what it actually is, how to build with it, etc...
I was misinformed. Thanks for the correction.
Hong Kong should secede from China.
>The government can aggregate this data and build movement patterns on all citizens.

Yes. So? Sounds useful. Sounds like the Google maps data that people used to track lockdowns. Now you don't need to pay for traffic censuses.
Making sure that discussion will not heat without checking the content:

> PayPal is to introduce a £9 “inactivity” fee for anyone whose account has been dormant for at least a year, but still has some money left in it.

So it applies to money that's left on account. Once the balance is 0, there is not extra cost.

It's not that I'm happy in particular, as I have account there also, and I had to transfer remaining money. I believe there is more cases like mine, that has PayPay to pay on some portals that accepts only that payment method, and we're not willing to share credit card information.
It's a hustle but not really a Ponzi scheme.
Unsurprising really, there's some fun example on Reddit's Data Hoarder sub. And stuff like this https://www.vice.com/en/article/a33j5a/a-redditor-archived-n...
> The acquisition was a deal that should have never been approved

Regulators should step in when businesses/startups are being harmed by a monopoly via unfair practices such as bundling. But intervening otherwise will simply deny founders and employees a decent exit. And if the economics are not sound enough it'll be harmful for customers as well - the app will get loaded with too many ads or simply shutdown.

So IMHO not a good case for regulation.
I have the same exact problem! I wanted to delete my account, just in case, but I cannot login.
I haven't used Paypal in over 10 years.
Their "service" is really not needed anymore.
Speaking with the FedEx folks in my area, they’ve been working 7 on, 1 off. At UPS we’ve been doing 6 on, 1 off as we don’t work Sundays per the union contract.
If Big Brother hadn't told you about Covid, would you even know?
Any reason you don’t use a terminal tool like htop?
> What has the current light regulation on the web brought us cookie popups that are irritating that people just click through and a GDPR warnings that don't actually solve the problem of collecting your data. I don't hold out much hope for future regulation,

GDPR is quite decent as laws go; the problems you mention happen because the regulation enforcement is too weak. Displaying a cookie popup was never anything but an admission that you're doing something you're not supposed to. GDPR notices again mostly give the same evidence. A lot of them aren't even compliant. I honestly wish DPAs of EU member states would start beating these companies down until this bullshit stops.

> I suspect you are confusing corporatism (which is a form of fascism) with capitalism (which is a party of liberty).

Potayto, potahto. Capitalism structurally favors something resembling corporatism, because capital compounds - the more you have of it, the easier it is to get even more. The market is a dynamic system - what matters is what it evolves over time into.
And many tendrils of the Roman empire continued to use imperial coinage for centuries after Rome was sacked.
Apologies for pedantry - here is the dictionary definition of "crime":

https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/crime

>1: an illegal act for which someone can be punished by the government

And from the Code of Laws of the United States of America, linked previously:

>Any alien (including an alien crewman) in and admitted to the United States shall, upon the order of the Attorney General, be removed if the alien is within one or more of the following classes of deportable aliens:

>(1) Inadmissible at time of entry or of adjustment of status or violates status [...]

To reside in the U.S. illegally is prohibited by law, and the government shall punish you with removal to your country of origin. In other words, residing in the U.S. illegally is a crime.

EDIT: Downvotes because I'm mistaken, or because you don't like the U.S. Code? If the above analysis is wrong, please correct it.
If you're looking for smart USB Hubs, these are pretty good https://www.cambrionix.com/

We're using the "PowerPad" hubs for mobile device hosting. Each of the ports on the USB hub will detect the device and deliver its fastest possible charge.
This reminds me of a note in FreeBSD rc(1) man page[0] under "INCOMPATIBILITIES"

> The Tenth Edition rc does not have the else keyword. Instead, if is

> optionally followed by an if not clause which is executed if the pre-

> ceding if test does not succeed.

which i found pretty interesting

[0]: https://www.freebsd.org/cgi/man.cgi?query=rc
,,With interest rates at zero, how can a dollar whose supply is rising, in M2 terms, by 24% annually compete with gold, whose supply increases are limited by mining technology, or Bitcoin, with a supply encoded in algorithms?''

It can't. The world doesn't work long term with 25% yearly inflation.

All the reasons written in the article are ,,USD is the biggest currency, so it will remain the biggest forever''.

Historically currencies were swinging between store of value and medium of exchange (gold can't be transferred digitally, USD can). It seems like Bitcoin is a great balance between the two.
Sure - the title is crafted for rhetorical effect not literal accuracy.

But it's comparable, in the sense that the "returns" for earlier customers (ongoing provision of storage service) are funded out of the contributions of later new customers, and when the supply of new customers runs out, the returns can no longer be funded and the system collapses.

Edit: Also not that the phrase "is a Ponzi scheme" is often used in opinion pieces to describe all kinds of business and economic models that are not literal Ponzi schemes: https://www.google.com/search?q=%22is+a+ponzi+scheme%22+-wha...
Around 80% of drivers admit to breaking speed limits. [1]

[1] https://www.rac.co.uk/drive/news/motoring-news/80-of-drivers...
Its nice that its opensource, backed by Internet Archive and the Controled Digital Lending program is cool too, but how is it possible that a project 14 years in development is such a mess? Just try and search for some popular books and see for yourself, the most important feature - search for books well, is not present. Basic features are missing, book data is often wrong, etc... honestly why would I join such a project instead of starting a new one?
Absolutely not. In such a situation, you don’t have time to look to your side to check it’s empty. The safest thing is to slam on your brakes and hope they do the same.

If you’re suggesting someone is intent on killing you by speeding vehicle, then yes this pretty much never happens between cars.
Ah, interesting, I wish the title had been prefixed with "What if ".

There's a language where THEN basically means ENDIF... Forth, if memory serves me right?
Right, should have remembered that from that time I got into C...
Meta: perhaps add (2015/2018) to the title?