skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
One can imagine a scenario where the only way our species survives is to detect an alien civilization before they detect us, and to nuke their homeworld preemtively because they would do the same to us. Tit-for-tat doesn't really work when a first-strike can kill everyone. Or to put it another way, tit-for-tat only works in iterated prisoner's dilemma. If an encounter with aliens is more like a single-round prisoner's dilemma, we're in a bit of a bind.

(Even more likely is the scenario where we're so far behind technologically that the best we can do is hope they're friendly; if they aren't, there's nothing much we can do about it.)

However, even if alien races aren't constrained by anything we would recognize as morality, we are (sometimes) constrained by our own morality. I think that's a good thing.
Germany's an ally. We don't try to beat them up over hitler, and it wouldn't make sense if we did. For basically the same reasons, so good choice of analogy I guess.
Most MBA programs go over why you don’t want a small number of high paying clients. It’s the opposite of diversification and is a risk factor. In the situation they claim as bad losing 1 clients means losing 10% of your revenue!
Since this headline is likely to have a decent amount of people reading comments and not the article, I just want to highlight their suggestion of a "lifetime try-out plan". It's a pretty original thought, I don't think I've ever seen a SaaS use that.

I have seen trial plans with a small $ attached before though.
That's just a big pile of misinformation. A fuel cell is pretty simple device. It's literally a type of battery not much different than a li-ion battery. The "complexity " you speak of is just a series of pumps and filters. Those cost nearly nothing and weigh very little.

A fuel cell cad is likely to eventually cost the same as a Toyota Corolla while also allowing for gasoline-like refueling time and range.

Finally, there's no reason for a fuel cell to be similar as efficient as a battery powered car. As I said, it's technically a type of battery. If your going to talk about batteries of the future, you also have to talk about fuel cells of the future.
Alternately — if you have a free plan, make sure you get something out of it. My app SongRender [1] offers unlimited free videos, with the caveat that each of them has a small watermark in the corner. So if someone isn't paying me, they're helping me with marketing.

[1] https://songrender.com
And thought woud suddenly be given if the industry's self-regulation found a way to permit the models they want to ban because they think them too ugly.

Indeed, not much thought was given: they found certain models to look ugly because they were hyperthin, so they instinctively searched for a rationalization to ban them and selling it as something other than social control, and “health” is very often the first excuse to be reached for then.
Really makes me reflect on how offering free content destroyed the web via advertising. If only they’d got this message out 20+ years ago, maybe I wouldn’t hate so much of the internet.
I was looking into some fuzzy thesaurus containing software terminology to help searching docs. I tend to try the wrong keywords/phrases too often. Did not find anything, all ones are too general, too many synonyms unrelated to software/data.Can this be used somehow?
This is a great movement, and I hope it gets some traction. A lot of damage has been caused by setting an expectation for software consumers that they should never have to pay for anything.
I use xpdf on my camping laptop. I like it’s minimalist interface and have gone through quite a number of programming books with it. That being said, it’s certainly not the best pdf viewer, but it gets the job done and is lightweight.
https://www.sportbible.com/boxing/news-mike-tyson-knocked-ou...

Mike Tyson had an incredible amount of talent and great teachers.
It probably seems that way because the economy is shut down and the only government assistance that would make a difference would be to not shut the economy down. Printing money doesn’t magically make the businesses that are shut down somehow miraculously still continue to produce goods and services.
> You may find that the radius is too big to get the number of correctly rounded decimal places you want, but that doesn't make the result incorrect, just vague.

That's true, but if you can do this, then you can also increase the precision until the radius shrinks to something sharp, right? Which means you should be able to round correctly?
Oh please. Why so many people don't want to acknowledge there are such things as intelligence, talent or the so called 10x developers? Just accept it.
That's the same thing as comment about float. Warren Buffett frequently talks about float. At Berkshire, they attempt to both sell premiums at a fair price AND win with float. Seems to have worked well for them.
Running Caddy as a Reverse Proxy with Cloudflare DNS
It is sad but true that users that pay less, or zero, are more demanding on customer support and make unreasonable demands via social. Had a guy this week using our free product that has 90% of the paid products features berating us on Twitter for not being 100% free and demanding we convert and rely on donations to support our 40 person team. Makes me regret having a free offering. In my 20 years doing software startups I’ve seen this over and over. Simply raising your prices, which we’ve raised to over 5x, dramatically reduces load on the CS team per dollar earned.
Online Invoicing App Dippper.com
That's a high quality comment. If you're interested / amazed by that kind of stuff, do yourself a favor ;

Joe Rogan Experience #1080 - David Goggins

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5tSTk1083VY

Perhaps the ultimate iteration of "Kevin who was not naturally good at anything except perseverance. He worked his ass off all the time."

This is "the toughest man on earth" ... legit. Highly inspirational story.
Not only it got less lightweight, I have just looked at how it looks now and ... wow, did it get ugly.

I have a lot of nostalgia for Xpdf, but I guess these days it's been successfully replaced by Zathura.
The article is missing out a huge argument in favour of free plans: the opportunity to generate data. This doesn’t even need to be done in a shady manner - imagine analysing what users usually type in free form boxes, normalise that and build a tag hierarchy, for example. There’s a billion way to make a free plan useful - it’s not just a curtesy to your users!
It was a joke, in case you didn't catch it.

In fact all you can reasonably define is survive-ability of a typical organism of a species to define it's success compared to other species. That is the only meaningful comparison that can be made.

Intelligence as we commonly define it is only a tool for survival.
I'll never understand why there is not that many pro audio applications on FreeBSD. Its OSS seems to be lot simpler and nicer than all the n+1 systems I see in the linux world...
Nah. I had a million installs of a web widget and was drowning in data doing over a billion impressions a month and we had to pivot or starve to death. Nice idea but not true in my experience unless you already have customers lined up and are intentional about what you launch in order to generate the specific data they are hungry for.
I must admit, the phrase “camping laptop” really caught my eyes. In my view, they are antithetical. But, to each his/her own!
Anecdata: Trello and Jira both have free plans that I used that caused me to recommend them for paid usage at multiple companies I’ve worked with. Those free plans resulted in $xx-$xxxx monthly subscriptions.

Asana has a paid plan with a 5-user minimum limit. I never bothered to even try it since I wouldn’t have the extended time to play with it. As a result it never even got mentioned to companies I’ve worked with.

So, it’s important to have a free plan (or at least very cheap paid plan as the article recommended) for “influencers” to get heavily involved with.
Popular baby food brands contain toxic heavy metals, says U.S. report
Some of the training may be similar, but I see resistance/strength training as different from body-building.

You do the former to become stronger, the latter to look it, and even ignoring the substance abuse (which happens in strength training, too) that adds aspects to training that are unhealthy.

I also think that strength training reaches a plateau fairly soon where endurance training gives bigger benefits than further strength training.
To me, the damning thing is that so many people distribute “header-only libraries”. My experience is that this makes the library worse in many different ways, except one—linking is easier. Developers are so annoyed with dependencies that this is the result. There are much better solutions than just shoving everything in a header.
Django and Celery
I don’t know if I buy this logic.

I can tell you that AWS free tier in my case didn’t “convert” from their metric perspective, but they turned into commercial accounts that generated $5-6M for my customers that early adopted.

I can think of a lot of other paid SaaS stuff (Trello, Basecamp, Dropbox come to mind) where that free plan translated into real revenue. For work stuff, the effort to spend $500 is as much as $5M.
Specifically it looks like they're claiming that AES can be efficiently cracked with quantum annealing.
lovely Marketing/propaganda by the Americans, still trying to find how the serbs got the F/117, they are very interested because the f22/f35 do have similar underlying technologies which could expose the stealth during a real hot conflict.

528 civilians have been murdered and over 1500 military have been killed, and why don't we mention the F117 dropping Depleted uranium in Serbia.

being educated brings different opinions, i can't believe they allowed this F117 guy into serbia he is basically a war criminal by international standards.
> audio-first future

Is this a dystopian prediction? How can we ensure that the future doesn't turn out to be so bad?
A more fair choice of options would be, "the risk that an evil person takes over" vs. "the risk that a federated system fails to address existential threats". The way you said it implies probability in the former vs. certainty in the latter.

An explictly evil person or group dominating the world seems like the greater evil in terms of outcome. That would literally be hell on Earth. When you look at probabilities, there's tons of examples in history, across thousands of years, of evil people inevitably rising to power when the system allows for it. Meanwhile, there are relatively few examples of humanity going extinct due to self-inflicted environmental damage.

Isn't federation one of the main checks and balances that keeps evil dictators from taking over the world?
I always assumed the unpresentable ones never showed up in person to things and therefore didn't present themselves to me
I don't think I've played this game for over 13 years now.

Such a pleasant surprise to see it open sourced.
One concept I like is the Premium plan that gives lifetime
access to all features but only updates for one year. It can act
as both the old-school software purchase or subscription
depending on what the user prefers.
I'm a novice at Javascript but I managed to write a couple users ropes because I had specific goals. Then I spent a lot of time googling things and mostly finding things on stack exchange that seemed like they would work.
A lot of times the code I found would use jquery but I didn't want to include that for my simple script so I would try to find an pure js way.
I wonder to what extent this is all just hardware dependent...
It's also much fairer to your paying users, since they'll end up paying the bill for the free users.
Serious question: When you spent 30 hours on the painting, did you enjoy it? What about for the python?
Weekly Notes 001 [February, first – 7th]
I'd say you probably don't even need to be attractive physically in terms of having a pretty face. If you've got a charming personality and you are reasonably in shape, you'll get plenty of attention. You're signaling that you have value and people act accordingly.
I started documenting weekly resources and lessons I'm learning. Please check it out and maybe you'd find something helpful
> You might as well say "There is no way to separate pornography from innocent family photos, other than by making assumptions about the othes party's good faith."

I think sexual activity and nudity are a lot more relevant than one’s perception of the creator’s good faith in thise case.
Well of course in English the expression "it's all Greek to me" is a bastardized Shakespeare quote. presumably it could just as easily have been some other language.
Add multitail!
Even if it wasn't a vector, contours of 3d scalar fields are 2d, not 1d.
The article specifically mentions free trial periods as being a good idea.
It isn't about careers, it is about goals - those are examples of goals where your career is nothing but a tool to get you the resources to move towards your actual goal. So if your goal is to travel the world, it matters not whether you are a coder or something else... as long as your are moving towards your goal. When there is a job that gets you there better than coding, take it.
Amazon is not Blue Origin. The amount of ignorance in these threads is baffling.
I wrote a piece about power users recently that gained some notice on HN a little over a week ago. It seems to fit in the same mindset as this, except written from the power user’s perspective: https://tedium.co/2021/01/27/power-users-history/

Comment thread here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25978396

This honestly feels like my argument written from the perspective of the product maker. I hope we meet in the middle on this subject, because it seems like there’s some good overlap to be had. Good tools should not just be built for free because that’s how we’ve always done it. Make everyone happy.
I also remember M602 and Volkov Commander from those days.
It's misleading to blame "the pandemic" when in fact the lockdowns have left businesses fighting for their survival.
In particular because many of the world's most renown epidemiologists (such as Stanford Professor Ioannidis) keep warning that lockdowns are devastating because they cause much more harm than good. In spite of that, our governments keep pushing for more strict lockdowns.

Lockdowns manipulate markets to an extreme extend. The profits of a few mega-corporations are skyrocketing while small businesses are dying like flies. It feels like we're forgetting that diversified markets are essential for democracy.
I think this isn’t arguing that you should aim to have 10 (or 1!) high/paying clients, but rather that it is better to have 100 (or 1000) medium-paying clients than 10,000 (or 1,000,000) low-paying (or free) clients, because you are likely to underestimate the marginal cost of a single client, and at higher rates, this marginal cost is more significant. If you have 100 medium-paying clients then losing 1 is not such a big hit to revenue. If you have some kind of dynamic pricing, it seems reasonably likely that you’ll get a power law for how much clients pay, and you’ll be worried about the biggest client leaving even if you have lots of others.
Atlassian does this, no? Or at least used to. I believe they've stopped now.
I really don't like it. Personally, I think it isn't hard to threat model your system:

1. break down your systems into smaller units

2. for each unit, figure out:

- what attackers are after (e.g. stealing a database)

- what attackers can do (e.g. infiltrate the network)

- what's the likelihood of each attack and scenario you can think about, along with the impact

- what you've done to prevent it (and is it good enough?)

- what you've done to detect it (and is it good enough?)

- what you would do to respond to a successful attack (and, is it good enough?)
Yeah, but that logic is really for the very small number of clients on a very high revenue per client.

I think the example in the article used such low numbers to make the calculation easier. In most cases, the kind of SAAS they are talking about would have at least one or two orders of magnitude more users.

Reshaping the question: would you rather have 50,000 users paying $1 or 1,000 paying $50 each? your MBA caveat largely becomes moot.
Twitter Expands Strategic Partnership with Google Cloud
I didn't touch my phone for the whole month of November last year instead using my apple watch. I left it plugged in at home out of sight.

In my country there is no covid so life was practically normal. My office has blanket wifi and I discovered the watch would easily do a day if connected.

The most annoying part was how slowly my airpods connected to the watch when taken out of their case, it made the first 15 seconds or so of incoming phone calls very awkward.
Louder voice, followed by moving him to the wall - as in, take his hand/wrist and move him to the wall.

That's a pretty rare event.
Not necessarily Blue Origin
The word "random" does not appear in the article. It would be great if it were true, but someone should do a randomized controlled trial where half the people are paid or otherwise encouraged to go the sauna and the other half is not, and the incidence of dementia in the two groups is measured.
My guess is part (not all) of this is due to people assuming that free offerings are already generating revenue in some fashion other than a direct payment (e.g., advertising for Google/Facebook), and thus they're still helping your business and entitled to support as much as anybody.

Whether the assumption is right or wrong for each business, it's not hard to see how we've gotten here.
Looks very much like a Zachtronics game (which is a good thing!) Plus C-64 nostalgia. I'm sold. Looking forward to trying it.
"Smoking cigarettes, drinking alcohol or caffeine excessively, extreme dieting and taking steroids and other medications can exacerbate height loss."

https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424053111904194604576580...

Googling "do people get shorter as they age steroids" yields many more references to this.
Service Level Objectives for On-Call Peace of Mind
I'm not sure it counts as "controlled" if you still end up in the emergency room.
PDF.js is a nightmare. Horribly slow to load large documents, slow to scroll or search, and utterly fails in the bigges thing PDF has going for it... PDF.js often doesn't display or print out the PDF like the original (cutting off parts, failing to rotate properly, etc).

You might as well say Notepad or VI "just work" as HTML viewers.
I think threat modeling is great, and not that hard (see [1]), but the problem as with everything is that it's tedious to do by hand and it's not clear how one should start or structure the output of a threat modeling exercise.

This cries for better tooling. After all, tooling is here to make you a superhuman, so where's the tooling to help you create a threat model easily?

I've done some with spreadsheets, but it's really not the ideal tool.

If I had time on my hand, I would probably create a threat model SaaS.

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26059701
Keep in mind that what an editor has in mind, you're trying to sell genre fiction that has certain genre expectations, and noticed deviations from the staple that readers notice ought to have meaning to them.

Depending on the fiction the target audience grew up reading they may be sensitive to different tropes. e.g. it might be quite exhausting to read a novel with an overuse of "pure" and "angelic" in a most Anglophone societies where these words aren't that frequently used to describe friends and family.
IMHO, the today's historians and archeologists have become just another type of beancounters. If I were to research this topic, I'd look into the RapaNui island, the strange statues on that island and the sudden cutoff of history records about 12,000 years ago.
But who reflects those values at company wide scales?
The additional criteria is that he has to act a certain way and look a certain way while carrying it, on film camera. He needs the strength for it not to get in the way of the performance at all.
Oh, I've read the first two, I was responding to that statement as it's usually applied in conversation or argument. The discussion and exploration of it is worthwhile. It's common use as a "call to arms" less so.
Same here. You're just outnumbered, and because of that you're often seen as having unreasonable requests or point of view. I don't think anybody who works in a security team is happy, it's a shit job honestly. The less you do, the happier your devs are. And at the end of the day, you look back at the years of work you've done, and there's nothing to show. No building, it was just about pushing through friction.
I don’t really understand why this gets a domain name instead of being a blog post. I read it feeling like this was the result of some collaboration or consortium trying to ask myself if the author might have something to gain from it, when really it seems to just be the work of one person. But maybe it is good to have an entire domain for some reason.
Be the change you want to see in the world
I feel like free plans work best for products with a business/enterprise side:

- where free users are an onramp for getting $x,xxx/mo-$xx,xxx/mo contracts with companies.

- where many, many free users are subsidized every time a company signs up.

Trello/Jira/Asana seem to fall pretty firmly into that territory.

On the other hand, those running SaaS with fairly low per-month subscription value (e.g. $99-150/mo, as a lot of smaller or bootstrapped SaaSes seem to charge [1]) wouldn't necessarily get much value from these users.

[1]: https://plausible.io/#pricing (just picked these folks at random)
The bottom line is that Spacex f**d up the design, wanna change it now, and Amazon is like "haha too late suckers..."
> Sure, we can talk about this in 100 years when BTC emission stops.

~89% of bitcoin have already been issued. Yes, they will continue to be emitted for a long time, but at a rate that is rapidly approaching inconsequential.
Still it’s easier to support 10 users than a 100. Product may be simpler because of it.
I wonder if there is a correlation between commenters here who are critical of the article and also consider themselves talented?
Does anyone feel we are still in the silent film era of computer programming? Will we ever advance from text editors into something else and leave Vim,
Emacs etc. forever behind for good?
Because potential user base is even smaller than on Linux is my guess.
> They sang Christmas carols, exchanged photographs of loved ones back home, shared rations, played football, even roasted some pigs. Soldiers embraced men they had been trying to kill a few short hours before. They agreed to warn each other if the top brass forced them to fire their weapons, and to aim high.

From We CAN Change the World via http://www.hartford-hwp.com/archives/60/048.html:

https://smile.amazon.com/dp/B00311JUGK

> Across the line, still brandishing his binoculars, Old Horseflesh [a hard-liner] shoves a rifle into Green's hands. "Take a steady aim," he commands. Dodger aims well above Coburg's head, and the lieutenant dives into a handy shell hole. Catching on, the German machine gunners let loose a burst well above the opposite trenches.

From Silent Night:

https://smile.amazon.com/dp/B00311JUGK
Apache AGE: A Graph Extension for PostgreSQL
“ demanding we convert and rely on donations”

People whining for more is fairly normal. Wanting it for everyone in perpetuity is new.

Does everyone think most businesses are somehow ad supported?
I actually was wondering if this was a GPT-3 generated blog. It feels like one.
And there's a catch with increasing specific impulse. Specific impulse is proportional to exhaust velocity. The energy required to expel the exhaust is proportional to the square of exhaust velocity.

Because nothing is 100% efficient, high specific impulse means dissipating a lot of waste heat. Increase the thrust too much and you melt your vehicle.