skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Right! What is life even for, other than satisfying business needs?

Ho ho I jest. But yeah I'm a person, and a member of {people}, and I for one have very little interest in satisfying business needs. So which internet should I use? Your billboard/menu analogy is actually a pretty good one. Those things can safely be considered crap for anyone whose interests don't align with said business, as js;dr kind of implies. Especially if the billboard has a camera mounted in it or the menu records your conversation while you're holding it, type of thing.
I've seen many companies user "terminator" scripts that shutdown/delete things that aren't tagged as "keep" or something like that, though only in non-production accounts. The budget alerts from the cloud providers can be useful too (AWS recently released cost anomaly alerts).

We're trying to tackle this problem with https://github.com/infracost/infracost from another angle for people who use Terraform: show a cost estimate in pull requests so the user understands what costs money, and roughly how much it costs. I hope that helps clarify "only pay for what you use" without trawling through cloud pricing pages.
Yes id agree with you there, many dont though.
I suppose you could argue record production falls in the realm of technology since it encompasses audio engineering but it’s definitely a bit of a stretch.

Spector himself was pretty instrumental in making technology part of popular music.
I use 3 different banks quite regularly and there is a huge difference between them. My latest bank has great interest rates but also the worst UI experience mostly due to every interaction causing a page reload. I’m very much hoping for more JS usage in the banking world to make the experience a bit smoother!
It's a program to retain the industrial base. For example, Aerojet Rocketdyne would have definitely been bankrupt without SLS.
Store Dotfiles in Git Using Bash/Zsh, or Powershell: No Bare Repo Approach
I'm making some logical leaps. They appear to be killing off 3rd party cookies just like Apple and Firefox. The difference is that Apple and Firefox do not sell an ad product and don't have a reputation for tracking your every move on the internet. Google on the other hand does have a reputation for tracking you through Chrome.
Rather than looking at costs as frugal vs expensive, I'm trying to look at costs as a subtractor or multiplier.

Spend on the multipliers, great people, good hardware, etc etc. save on the subtractors. I just spent a few grand on a laptop for a new employee, and $12 on a laptop case.

We saved a few grand a month by having an office which is outside of the city center (but same travel distance for employees).

Anybody else take this approach?
Carbon is great filter
> So are charities like hobbies under your definition?

A charity is not a business, it's a different type of organization. The fact/reason that most of them decide to operate like businesses is outside of the scope of what I stated.
I do not think wiphy runs on the xA4 because the FPGA is not powerful enough. So if you want to run this project, you'll need to shell out at least $720 for the xA9. I probably will.
If they'd been less strict with their patents then lots of other companies would've been able to innovate in the space.

See comments about 3D printer from above in the thread:

> Don’t forget 3D printing that also only really started when patents expired.

> Between 2007-2009, 80+ Stratasys patents expired. Think about this - a single company holding back the world in advancing forward in 3D printing.
Are there any HTML 2.0 documents that aren't usable 25 years later?
This is pretty spot on. The problem isn't JS, it's people turning small blogs, brochure sites, static pages, etc into SPAs
The Crooked, Complex Geometry of Round Trips
> Would anyone be able to access ebooks in 50 years from now?

Access as in the original manuscript of the book is still around somewhere in a readable format so new ebooks can be published in whatever format is in demand then? I certainly hope so.

But should ebooks sold now be readable by anyone in 50 years? I don't think many people worry about that, nor should they. Archiving should be for persistence, so done in some format we can be absolutely sure we can read (such as plain text).

Distribution should be for convenience, i.e. likely whatever proprietary format users want.
Schrems II: The impact of GDPR on data flows and national security
Bitcoin is China's way of exporting coal to the rest of the world via the atmosphere.
John Allen Chau
Can you explain what you use it for exactly?
I could be mistaken but isn’t overcast only for podcasts i.e. streaming sources. But the questions are about audiobooks.
Or is there a way to import audio book files into overcast?
I don’t think it’s fair to expect hard drive capacity/$ to grow exponentially forever.

Certainly for consumer hard drives, there’s a cost of getting the drive to the customer (transport, shop rent, employee salaries, etc) which is, at best, fixed.

If manufacturing costs drop to zero, price will approach that fixed cost (plus any markup sellers manage to extract, for example by marketing their drives as better/more hip/etc.)
In many situations, you don't have to look at the touchbar to know what the keys are. For example, when using terminal, vim / ide emulation, I know left is Esc key. It does make spamming Esc feel less weird to me.
You don't need FTL or anything exotic. On the scale of O(100 million) years, expansion at 0.001c is enough to colonize the galaxy.

A general purpose von Neumann probe is not that far off. Self-replicating micro-machinery and reasonably intelligent robots already seem on the horizon. Unless there's truly some unforeseen roadblock, certainly within 1000 years of current growth. A 1 KG probe at 0.001c takes about 90 gigajoules of energy. On the order of what an Airbus A380 uses at cruising speed.

Given lots of patience, and an only slightly higher level of current technological development, interstellar colonization does not seem like an insurmountable challenge.
Disclosure: I work on Google Cloud.

I am not a lawyer, nor your lawyer, however the terms you're looking for are the Acceptable Use Policies for both Google Workspace (née GSuite) [1] and GCP [2].

Both Workspace and GCP offer support (start at cloud.google.com/support). The included Workspace support ("Standard Support") includes phone support and a "Four hour SLO for P1 Support cases".

So if one of your employees did somehow get flagged for violating the Acceptable Use Policy, there is phone support included that would let your resolve this. You can pay more for higher levels of support with shorter response times, dedicated representatives, and so on.

Edit to add: if you're really concerned (and some folks are, I get that), I've seen some organizations make a separate domain for production. I don't love the ergonomics of switching accounts like that, but it's also not the worst thing I've seen people do.

[1] https://workspace.google.com/terms/use_policy.html

[2] https://cloud.google.com/terms/aup
> being a "data scientist" is inherently incompatible with being an activist

This is just silly. So if a medical doctor becomes an activist on diabetes, they're no longer a medical doctor?
I will add my voice to the list of complainers. I stopped using Facebook after they forced me to upgrade to the new site.
The problem is if original blogger wants to archive a page they need to use a different tool than curl. Honestly such a weird hill to die on.

Curl isn't even that great to archive with anyway is it? wget --mirror used to be the hotness.
Lava Lamps Help Secure the Internet
I can sympathize with the comment, and know for a fact it's true in a lot of fields, including ones it shouldn't be done in due to similar skills niches.

Despite this, as you say, I've usually seen CVs/resumes come straight to the hiring team - the first thing an effective security lead does ensure there's no pre-screening on CVs, as they want to see the "unconventional" CVs as much as the conventional ones.

There's also companies that actively have their techies go out and fly the flag, post on the /r/netsec or HN hiring thread, and give a point of contact straight to a personal or team mailbox.
Why do you trust AWS when Amazon kills failed non-AWS products left and right? I even remember Bezos bragging about this being a core part of the company culture. Why do you trust Azure when Microsoft's graveyard of non-Azure graveyards has long since overflowed?

For me, it's because Amazon killing their failed phone, their failed Yahoo Answers clone, their failed search engine, or their failed paypal clone says nothing about their commitment to their phenomenally successful $45 billion / year business with high margins and 29% growth.

Google Cloud is a $14 billion / year business growing at 45% / year. It is a smaller business than AWS, sure. But not by an order of magnitude. It's basically 3.5 years behind Amazon on the growth curve. Were you afraid in 2017 that AWS would be killed due to being too small a business?
The original intention of the Web - as devised by Tim Berners Lee - was to share documents in a research context. The idea of a URI or URL was to uniquely identify documents, but also to link them as hypertext. So you could jump from document to document.

Then Netscape came. They were the first having a primitive idea of the potential of the Web beyond simply linking pages.

The Dotcom bubble of 1999 and the first boom of e-commerce was exactly because in the few years preceding, everyone was scrambling to get dominate this Web thing. This included Microsoft, Sun and so on.

Now, nothing of this is new.

The entire idea of "Rich Web Applications" is as old as the Web. Silverlight, Java Web Applets, Flash,... They were all about this idea of building applications that could be loaded - and more importantly: controlled - via the Web.

Over the past 15 years, Google succeeded in dominating the browser market, and building a set of API's that made it easy to build such Rich We Applications without needing extra plugins or 3rd party sandboxes. You can just do it using Javscript, HTML and CSS.

And while that's not a bad thing in itself, the problem is that an entire generation of engineers has created an entire layer of abstractions on top of the browser engine in order to reinvent the exact same things which already existed back in the '90s. Only now, instead of running separate native programs and applications, everything is now corralled into a single browser environment... which tends to be entirely controlled by Google, if you use anything powered by Chromium.

And this often includes how simple text documents are consumed. The text you get doesn't arrive as a HTML body in a HTTP request, it arrives as a chunk - or chunks - of JSON and needs to get parsed and assembled by layers of javascript until the assembled code can be fed to a browser engine... which will parse that once again in order to paint it on the browser canvas.

None of that is truly necessary when it comes to plain text. Heck, none of that is even necessary to render a single image on the browser canvas.

Plenty of major, highly visible, high traffic outlets like newspapers or media use these layers of complexity to publish text. Why? Because it gives them control over your experience and what you can do with the content e.g. paywalls, DRM, advertising, intricate metrics,...

Now, plenty of the Web still offers plain HTML and CSS, just like 20 years ago. And that's awesome. But that's a long tail of websites which largely remains in the dark since the vast majority of Internet users have been corralled into a set of centralized services that tend to promote links to these highly visible outlets through their recommendation engines.
But that makes it easier to read, you can't read a lot of things at once and you can always scroll. Also less strain to the eyes as they don't have to move horizontally a lot.
Hm. I tend to think that it's not impossible, but simply very impractical.

Outside of the very nearest neighbouring systems, any interstellar colony would instantly become an isolated new civilisation. There's simply no plausible way for interstellar trade or even just meaningful communication.

All a colony at say, 82 Eridani - a sun-like star about 20 ly from Earth, would have a two-way communication time of 40 years. Even digital "goods" aren't worth exchanging if it takes 20 years to send them and another 20 years to receive any kind of payment.

At a very optimistic 30% lightspeed, ships would take 67 years to get there. This means no one can make the journey within a single human lifetime, unless the lifespan is dramatically increased or some form of hibernation technology is used.

In any case, colonists would be completely removed from Earth and all that effort pretty much requires a suitable target planet to be present. Without radical genetic changes, humans wouldn't be able to thrive and survive on a Super Earth or in poisonous atmospheres. So another factor would be spending tens of thousands of years and unfathomable amounts of energy terraforming planets or changing the human genome beyond recognition.

The same issues would apply to extra-terrestrial intelligences as well, which is why I don't think interstellar colonisation would even be all that desirable in the first place.

First you have to find a suitable host star. Next you need to find a matching planet. Then you need to scout potential candidates (likely using automated probes), which would take about a century even for just the nearest stars...

While all this is certainly doable, it's really not all that attractive given that you instantly "lose" the colony anyway simply due to the distances involved.
It's not like those widgets need a full routing system with ssr, etc. Even with vue, you can just drop that component on the page.
Show HN: I built a free AI service for fantasy sports
> We are used to a very energy extensive economy

Like you say, there are enormous amounts of low-hanging fruit when it comes to energy efficiency across all of society.

Take building insulation, for example. Where I'm from, triple glaze windows were made mandatory 30 years ago, every single existing apartment building was forced to retro-fit. Yet when I moved to the US less than ten years ago, apartment ads would regularly highlight "DOUBLE GLAZING" as if that was some incredibly expensive and luxurious feature.

Also where I'm from, I used to own an apartment in a building from the 1940s. But a bit more than ten years ago, new strict energy efficiency requirements went into effect, so my building - and every building like it in the country - had to fix it, often by adding a thick layer of insulation on the outside.

I still own an apartment there, it's newer, but the outside walls are 30cm thick and made of concrete for insulation purposes. And yet, here in the US, I regularly see new housing construction that's essentially just plywood for every single wall, inside and outside.

The US is incredibly behind when it comes to insulation and energy efficiency, because the economics of it doesn't make sense. If energy were to become much more expensive, this would change pretty damn fast.
I agree with this especially for online documentation. My my recent pet-peeve is deno, which I love, but cannot read via my cli browser.

- https://deno.land/manual

- https://doc.deno.land/builtin/stable

- https://deno.land/std

If the search feature fails due to me not having JS enabled, fine. But the entire documentation walled off from non-js browsers? For what purpose!?
The scientists are the ones with the power. If they want their journal articles to be free to the world, they can opt to choose that path from the beginning. But if they choose the old school model, well, they should own up to the decision. Too many scientists I know like to throw up their hands and blame the publishers, but they're the ones with the power to choose.
This has to now far exceed China’s ghost cities and Dubai’s doomed megaprojects as the greatest waste of resources in recent history, though it still has a way to go to match the US/USSR arms race. That one would be tough to beat, though you could argue that it’s waste is offset a bit by the technological spinoff it generated.

Meanwhile space exploration and life extension struggle to attract funding.

Humans are merely clever, not intelligent. If we were actually intelligent we would understand the systems in which we embed ourselves instead of being at the mercy of them.
Hi, John here.

I built this tool to solve the most annoying thing in fantasy sports: losing because you forgot to set your lineup. At the start of every week it sets everything for you, which you can then go modify if you want. It announces any changes it makes in an email so that you’re never surprised, and includes nice-to-haves like projected statistics and the probability that you will win the matchup. If folks like the tool, I plan to build out more AI assistant features for use-cases such as the draft, trades and waivers.

Note: You’ll need a Yahoo fantasy team to try it (they’re the only provider with a fully-featured API).

In designing this, I really wanted to build something that was useful and respects the user above all else. I require an email address because I want to make sure you know whenever the AI acts on your behalf, but include a big “Delete Account” button right on the main page once you’re logged in. This will fully and permanently delete all of your information. I also went with a privacy-respecting analytics tool (plausible.io) and will not spam or sell any information whatsoever. You should feel comfortable trying this tool and then deleting your account if it’s not for you.

Background: I’ve always been interested in building AI tools that directly interact with humans. My previous work (data scientist with the Philadelphia 76ers and research scientist at Uber AI Labs) sort of naturally led me to this idea of trying to win at fantasy sports using a pure AI approach. This tool is really just the very first step toward that long-term dream, solving the most basic decision problem in the game.

Would love any feedback or ideas! Also plan to write a blog post or two detailing both the statistical approach as well as the tech stack. I’m not a SWE so particularly appreciate any tips there.
> Not everyone builds a site to immortalize content.

True, and that is fine. However, by using JS + APIs, we risk that others who want to immortalize content for purposes of historical or cultural research fail to capture quite a bit of our current culture and content. I would be sad if my grandchildren are unable to get a feel for the world I live in like I could get a feel for the world my grandparents lived in by means of archives, magazines, newspapers from their day.
Is there a way to read this for less than $40/month or by the article? That’s more than Amazon Prime.
Well ... who cares?!
While the US doesn't have GDPR - there's some lessons to learn: it's not nice to put people under the microscope all day long.

We're trying to strike a reasonable ballance:

For our business we have an inventory room that is under full and complete survalence - but the rest of the office has none.
We can certainly do better than Signal. The central point of attack is a problem. And now also the fact that they are using AWS, and AWS has demonstrated being willing to deplatform within 24 hours.
However for now Signal is one of the best options we have.
I think we worry too much about hoarding information. It's ephemeral, mostly garbage. Yeah it's kinda cool to see old items from hundred of years ago, but we will leave plenty of stuff either way. But forgetting is part of moving forward. The next generations will have enough to deal with regarding their times than to dive into minute details of the past.

Same about worrying about personal photos. I don't have many photos about the youth of my grandparents. And none about my great grandparents. But that's okay. I don't want to be defined by them, and I don't want my great grandkids to know tiny details of my life. Legends and stories are just the right amount to know. It's a feature that the past decays not a bug.
> isn't quite at the level of a guy who had incestuous relations with his sisters, had people killed for amusement, and had a desire to make his horse a consul.

Note that the sisters and horse thing are probably not true; I don’t think either are taken particularly seriously by modern historians. Caligula certainly did do plenty of strange things, though.
New Year's Resolutions Ideas That Will Make Your Life Better
That looks really interesting and under active development - thanks.
Nice, but that screenshot looks too good to be real.. Probably a render/photoshop?

Unless there has really been a huge improvement recently but I doubt it.
Do you have source / more details? There certainly are a few warts but overall it gets the job done.
Okay, you meant in this context. I agree, but I suppose that's the nature of engagement-centric journalism today.

I feared there was a bigger pattern about his behaviour/ethics/deeds that I was missing.
I'm not sure exactly what you're trying to say here. Are you implying that they could price gouge even more than they already are and are keeping prices relatively low out of the goodness of their hearts?
The comments section as a whole involves some interesting discussion about the matter.

The first comment under the article sums up my insight after reading it pretty well. Copypasting the most relevant parts:

--------------

I had very much hoped for a less alarmist, and altogether more thoughtful and insightful discussion (with evidence) about how SciHub gets and uses credentials.

It is an interesting opinion piece (read another thinly veiled SciHub hit job), where you very neatly make statements that conflate hackers with SciHub, without providing any real evidence to back them up. You talk about stolen credentials, and then lay the blame at the foot of SciHub- without any actual proof that they stole or hacked them. Yes they may be using stolen credentials (which I agree is very, very poor form and weakens their position, and importantly reputation), however you offer no proof that they are the originators of the theft or did hacking (do you have such evidence?).

You discuss much about hacking, and very neatly avoid discussing exactly WHO did the hacking of university systems, very very likely nothing at all to do with SciHub (I would hazard a guess that 99.9% of university hacking is nothing to do with SciHub- admittedly i’m not an IT admin but i read a lot about this topic). But its a nice trick in your article to join the two.
The big appeal of magit, at least for me, is that I can quickly do it with the keyboard. Open magit, press “s” on each hunk to stage it and magit moves to the next hunk, then “c c” to write a commit message, C-c C-c to commit, then “q” and I’m right back in the code. If you need to edit a hunk you press enter on it and it drops you into the file.

This is much much faster than doing it with the mouse, and keeps me more in “the flow”. In general Emacs becomes powerful because it’s full of little tricks that add up to much tighter feedback loops which is so helpful when coding, to keep your attention on the problem you’re trying to solve. And it is trivial to add your own “little tricks” to tighten the feedback loop for whatever you’re doing.
The modern examples of a gay couple being refused service is a poor example. They can’t just go to the other financial institutions, because all of them have black-listed them. An Internet business cannot feasibly operate on cash alone.

Just like any farmer in the 1800s can just go lay his own railroad tracks across the continent, every website that hosts wrongthink is equally capable of creating their own banks, payment processors, data centers, and internet connections. These businesses aren’t restaurants. They’re critical, privatized infrastructure.