skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> I am forced to ask if this legislation has made my web experience better in any way

If it were as hard to opt-in as it is to fully opt-out, or as easy to accidentally (and permanently) opt-out as it is to accidentally (and permanently) opt-in, then there might be a case for something other than the sites and/or their partners being the problem.

The legislation does not in any way force sites or their partners to make your browsing so inconvenient if you don't want to just click "accept all from all without or without lube". They could implement a small non-modal active-opt-in option, they instead chose to implement labyrinthine modal hunt-the-231st-opt-out adventure games.
Ha, I'm very interested in this!

I had this same problem for my own app[0], I ended up solving it by just using dynamodb in my personal AWS account as the storage. Generous free tier, great uptime, and no users, security, etc to manage for me, like you mention.

It's way more technical than I'd like of course, since anyone who wants to use it needs to have a personal AWS account. And it isn't "synced", like you say, it's just using the AWS JS SDK to speak to dynamodb directly. But still it's been a real pleasure to build a web app this way -- the fact that anyone can use the app by plugging in their own storage is kind of the web development holy grail IMO, really interested in seeing what else can be done in this space.

[0] https://github.com/pickledish/cardi
Very likely in a serious run all the crypto exchanges will crash hard quickly and for an extended time (forever? ;-) essentially stopping trading except for personal direct transactions.
How well does it work on iOS? I’ve been happy with how well LastPass integrates with iOS so far.
China targets rare earth export curbs to hobble US defense industry
Cesium for Unreal Engine coming March 30
Congrats on the launch, Ferruccio!

Hope to see you next time we'll go in France.

Do you plan to add alternatives to Segment?
Planets in Science Fiction
I think we agree it's stupid.

The amount of accidents because of fingers caught in slammed car doors is ridiculous...
That doesn’t seem related to this discussion though. Whether a given business can afford to pay it or not is a reflection of customer demand for that product or service combined with good or bad executive leadership.

If the competitive wage rises but a company can’t afford it, that’s not the worker’s problem to accept a bad wage to help the company. That’s the company’s problem to hire better leadership or cut executive pay in favor of employee pay or get acquired / raise funding or go out of business. None of that changes the reality of competitive wages.

At the root it sounds like your question is more about aggregate market allocation of labor. But why should workers accept inefficient allocation at worse wages? That just seems like an aggregate market expression of “these businesses are unwanted by society” - the same happens to 90% of startups all the time.
Why most security products are useless
How much were your tools and how long have you trained and learned? And the sweat equity...I'm a woodworker too and it's incredibly faster to buy anything that to build it oneself.
We started from Segment because it makes it extremely easy for us to onboard companies and it allowed us to focus on building the core of our product, our templates!

It also makes it easy for non technical folks to get started if Segment is already in place
Pre–Covid-19 Subway Air Polluted from DC to Boston, but NY Region’s Is the Worst
That's absolutely the sane approach: shoot for the middle of the pack. It still never fails that someone races past me and cuts in, then forgets that their car also has cruise control and sucks at manually maintaining a constant speed.
Do you honestly believe everybody but Amazon knows this is going on?
> This is a poor law because it has to be done on every website.

The law doesn’t require this, it only requires informed consent.

> I think it may be better to have this as a decision the user chooses once within their browser, and the browser can then pass along the intention to the website. There can maybe also be a third option

This is would be an allowable approach under GDPR. Someone just needs to build it and make it happen. Unfortunately the “do-not-track” debacle shows that ad companies aren’t interested in playing ball. Hence our current mess.
I can never wrap my head around Python being beginner friendly because as a software engineer who knows languages like Racket, F#, and Elixir, I find Python extremely confusing beyond anything basic. It’s async model (or models), where the GIL applies and doesn’t, scoping rules, class model (or again, models), decorators, etc. are all confusing and extremely complex. Given these and other quirks, it makes its dynamically typed nature a walking time bomb.
Any reference how this is best done with rails?
>People that don't understand tech should not be on the internet. They don't understand the concept of people can and will lie freely behind a camera or keyboard.

This is a silly statement. Do you (whoever first said this) think widespread misinformation started with the internet? It has nothing to do with tech and everything to do with people.

People who don't understand people should not be on the internet. Their knowledge of tech is completely orthogonal.
Black tech creators are changing the domain
Use "rsync" instead of "cp". After it finishes copying, it will check to see if the file has changed since it started copying, and will restart the copy if so (with a limited number of retries).

If copying the entire database is faster than your average update right, this will converge very quickly and will deliver a consistent copy.

For many small applications, this is perfectly fine. It's not much harder to just "sqlite3 $file ".backup $backupfile"' (that's literally all it takes, and what you should do) and guarantee consistency. But it's nice to know that a simple "rsync" is sufficient for slowly-updating uses - e.g.

And as for the other side of backup, you know -- restore -- sqlite shines brighter than everything else. You can just take a good copy and put it back. You can examine the file everywhere, on a read only system, etc - without configuring anything if needed.
For those that are out of the loop on the programming language/app framework of Elm, or were never in the loop to begin with, allow me to present some context for why this is interesting:

Elm's always been under the sole control of one person, Evan Czaplicki, and remains so to this day (he's the author of the Roadmap in question). He marches to his own drum when it comes to a lot of aspects of running an open source software community. Especially the aspects where he is resistant to outside interference in his vision for the language. To be clear, this is something I personally kind of like about Elm, but I understand why it draws ire from the HN community and others.

The company employing Evan to work on Elm full time was No Red Ink, which went through layoffs recently and Evan was one of them. The community had some questions about where this left the state of Elm dev, culminating in this thread: https://discourse.elm-lang.org/t/clients-expressing-doubt-ab.... Evan responded, giving the all clear, and put up this Roadmap as a way to put into writing that the project was stable, not abandoned, and give an idea where it's headed next.
Sure, if you can make low end low skill low value final assembly economic go for it. I just think the race to the bottom narrative is inverted with respect to reality.
> I dont consider prototypes-based OO a real OO.

Fair enough - in some ways it’s like half-way to an OO system. Yes, it’s theoretically elegant to have everything be an object and not to have classes. However in the vast majority of cases it seems prototype-based OO is only used as a foundation upon which to build a class system.

> What I think is rather unidiomatic in OO langs is Pythons "function/methods" like `len(x)` which is implemented as `__length__()`.

AFAIK the reason for the double-underscore method for `len` is to avoid it accidentally working for, say, a Rectangle class that exposes `length` and `width`.
That is something that really surprised me, how light this "real wood" desk was (made from Poplar wood), compared to another similar desk that the wife bought a few months earlier (before the covid at-home back-to-school rush caused a desk shortage).
Article is from August, 2020
Which that logic gets cancelled out because you could claim the person without bias, "skin in the game" - is who should actually be listened to more. Those cancelling each other out then just leaves the financial incentive that the person who owns Bitcoin has.
You sound like you're speaking from experience, so I wanna ask: How genuinely true do you think this is? I'm always curious, about the FAANGs in general but Facebook in particular.

Divorced from as much cynicism as possible, what % of level I-III software employees are just there for their resumes?
I thought this is something added artificially exactly because people associate it with brand new?
On Winter K2 the Search for Missing Climbers Comes to Reluctant End
Having to go through a menu of a few dozen items to see & choose what you'll allow to track you is annoying, but so long as sites are willing to track you in dozens of different ways there's really no way around it.

Sites win because exercising your privacy rights even under the GDPR is an inherently annoying thing to do.
It works well for me on iOS, not sure how it compares with LastPass's app but BitWarden does everything I need on the phone.
The "This product contains chemicals known to the State of California to cause cancer ..." warning is so common that I'm sure most people just ignore it.
There are more or less annoying prompts however. With the later kind I could coexist.

Instagram has the most annoying one ever, if I stumble upon it by accident I am so annoyed that I need to count to 10. And I am not even using it, its just random click

The far less annoying popups are barely noticeable and do not block/fade content or have missing options like "NO, I don't want cookies, let me in".
With the cookie modal you start noticing which sites don't have it (and there are a couple)

And sites can still provide ads. Google still provides ads to me with customizations turned off.

So yeah, I'm pretty bothered by them as well but I know where the blame lies
> More importantly, I am guessing you don’t have any model that predictively associates whether you like person’s writing at a particular instance in time with their efficacy as a therapist.

I don't but you're moving the goalposts and asking a different question. I was talking about personal preferences (e.g. like/dislike), and you're talking about "efficacy as a therapist."

I'm also getting a vibe of a kind weird inversion from you, where it's the therapist's right to see a particular patient unless that patient can prove with a "model" that the therapist won't work for them.
I definitely think personalized feeds are the worst in terms of "negative value creation." I don't think Qanon for example would be a popular movement without having ridden the YouTube recommendation algorithm and Facebook's personalized feeds before those companies were forced to ban it.

I think of it this way. Lets say I walk past someone on the street and say "hi." Now lets say I punch them in the face. What creates the most engagement?
I read the section in that book about storing each thread's count in a TLS variable, and I think the root of the confusion is related to how C vs. Rust (the language I use and learned how to write multithreaded code in) deal with threads.

if I wanted to store a per-thread count in rust, it would make zero sense to use TLS for that, it would just be on the stack in the context of the thread's lexical scope:

let mut threads = Vec::new();
let global_count = Arc::new(AtomicUsize::new(0));
for _ in 0..n_threads {
threads.push(std::thread::spawn({
let global_count = global_count.clone();
move || {
let mut thread_count = 0;
for _ in some_iteration {
thread_count += 1;
}
global_count.fetch_add(thread_count, Ordering::Release);
}
});
}
for handle in threads { let _ = handle.join().unwrap(); }
println!("global count = {}", global_count.load(Ordering::Acquire));

that is a form of "thread-local storage", I guess, but does not involve any of the TLS primitives.
Sure, why not?

It's going to offer an incremental improvement in accuracy for the server's derived clock when the reference clock is not affected by that and other sources of jitter.

Beyond the accuracy, the hardware is significantly cheaper and more efficient than a server with a general purpose x86 CPU.

For a dedicated network reference clock, an FPGA or ASIC solution is simply better in every measurable way.

It is more complex, to be sure, but the complexity needn't be your concern.
>> Appendix B: why are programmers well paid?

I'm disappointed at this section, it is missing fairly obvious things.

- Because programmers are disproportionately also living in the most expensive regions, so they may be paid well, but not as well once you consider the CoL. Imagine if you told 50% of plumbers/pilots/etc they would have to move to Palo Alto or SF to practice their career, those salaries would also jump.

- Because volatility. Anyone who's lived thru 2001 or 2008 knows that feast-and-famine jobs have to pay well to compensate for the famine periods, otherwise people wise up and dont take the deal.

(EDIT)
- Because unlike with law/medicine/plumbing/piloting and practically most other fields, there are constantly new things introduced that dont really push the field forward much. Consider the 200 web frameworks. Some are great. Many are just rehashes of older stuff with slight tweaks. However, this has the effect of making experience moot -- because newcomers always have an incentive to create something new and level the playing field. Look at the Cravath salary scale on the site, and imagine if law vastly completely every 5 or 7 years. The salary curve wouldnt be as steep.

- Because they are like athletes and many have a shelf life. There is ageism for many, and for those w/o that problem, there is often a shelf-life for their technology skills. You are being compensated for continuous improvement and the risk that your skills become stale.

- Because scale. Like investment firms, one person in tech can have massive impact and collect some of the premium as salary.
An automatic pool playing robot
I do think this is a worthy callout, that is often missing in discussions about social media and/or any sort of complex system.

The general narrative implies (but would never say) that humans lack agency and the ability to act in their own self-interest. And if only we could remove the social media site/system, would we see an enlightened, more perfect human.

Don't get me wrong, I'm strongly in favor of designing systems to bring out the best in humanity. But I think a lot of what we see on social media is a reflection of who we are as humans, and what we desire and want to see. And I don't see enough discussion at the individual level, and why we act the way we do.

If the discussion was at the individual level, we'd start to see our common humanity, and the conversation about social media would be less about moderating out the 'bad content' (which always just so happens to be the content that our outgroup likes), and more about the philosophical considerations with designing complex systems that help humanity thrive (and what it means to thrive).
Honestly I pay for the premium even though I use absolutely none of their premium features. At €10/year, it's the cheapest subscription I've ever encountered, and I don't want to store OTP at the same place as my passwords to avoid single point of failure for my most important stuff.
So, going back over the numbers and with a 256GB 3% user confirmed on Twitter, it seems like the ratings are:

2TB model: 5000TBW

256GB model: 2000TBW

That means that, at the worst known rate that David had (150TB in 2 months), a 256GB drive would reach lifetime writes in ~2 years. That's still way too fast, so this is still something Apple needs to adjust if it is happening to people (and given what he told me about the write rates he was seeing while using and switching apps, it really does seem like a bug, not normal app swapping).

FWIW, the "app nap" thing is what iOS does, but macOS can't do that because Mac apps aren't really designed that way. macOS just does traditional swap plus compression, as far as I know.
The basic formula would be COGS + CAC * Markup. Where COGS is the Cost of Goods Sold, what it costs you to make the product or deliver the service. CAC is Customer Acquisition Cost, or what it costs you to get a new customer. Different industries will support different levels of markup.

You also need to consider the lifetime value of the customer. If somepays pays $10/month for a subscription and the average customer stays 1 year, the lifetime value is $120. If it costs you $5/month to provide their service and it cost you $10 in advertising to acquire them as a customer, then over their lifetime you'll earn $50.

You can look at your competitors' pricing to see how much markup (and therefore how much profit) can be sustained over each customer's lifetime. If you're selling on added value (things your competitor doesn't have), you might be able to charge more than they do. If you're selling on price, you'll have to charge less.

Pricing can and should change over time, too. You might start with a high price for early adopters and go down over time. Or you might start underpriced and go up as you get adoption. Pricing also has to match up with your overall business growth goals in able to return enough to your investors to be worth it.
That's a bad faith exaggeration argument you just made: we don't need to know everything someone has financial interest in, just if it's related to the topic. It's why VCs, for example, if writing a blog post about a company - they will write a disclaimer that they own shares in the company. We have laws to require people to disclose if something is sponsorship as well - because it changes the value of what's being said.
I think that's kind of an overagressive interpretation. It's not ignorance of evil; there's a genuine feeling that good is being done, even if the parent commenter seems to acknowledge that good might not have, in fact, been done.
How to improve your video and audio call stability for $8
> And in my view, it is only of limited importance to look for what possible

That's fine. We have to be pragmatic and can't go around worried about ghosts. But the point is that we have to be honest about the nature of "truth". It is provisional and only our best effort given our relationship with the universe.

And because we must admit that there is no such thing as 100% truth, we should be more humble than going around making pronouncements with such certainty as if we know more than we are actually even able to know.
Oh wow great to see you here :)

We were talking with Freshpaint and have plans to integrate with Rudderstack too at some point.

In fairness every company we talked to either used Segment or Google Tag Manager, or implemented the Amplitude SDK

So those integrations might come first
Nigeria is going to become #1 for P2P Bitcoin transactions soon.
Cyanobacteria cultivation is an old idea[1] and is limited by more than just phage. I did the math on carbon removal in a controlled environment somewhere like Nevada, and it could contribute to climate solutions. If Church is suggesting we release GMO cyanobacteria into the ocean, that is a whole separate category of idea, somewhere between Guam's Brown Tree Snakes and Ice Nine. If it succeeds, we will introduce a new kind of ocean trash - an organism with no predators. But phage is likely just mutate anyway. IDK how close you've been to Church or his orbit, but most of his ideas are mostly clickbait.

In the case this one isn't, the release of genetic modifications into the wild will be a debt our children have to pay, the way we are paying for our ancestors use of CO2.

https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fenvs.2018.0000...
A bit off-topic, but I hate, hate, HATE the smell of airports and airplane cabins. I don't know if it's jet fuel or what, but I am certain we will one day discover that the fumes cause all sorts of maladies.

I feel vaguely nauseous for the entire day after getting off a plane, and don't feel myself again until a good night's sleep.
My experience was the same. I did pause at the phone number requirement, but frankly, it's not that uncommon, and is useful for 2FA.
I know the law and how bloody stupid it is. Third party cookies and ad blockers are configurable in your browser, if you don’t configure them then it’s your fault.
How the Gates Foundation seeded America's COVID-19 policy catastrophes
In other news, 600K people in the US die from cancer every year.
The companies paying have silly amounts of money because programmers can create an enormous amount of value. An extreme example, but think of Linus who created both Linux and Git. A single person created billions of dollars in value. I don't know that there are other professions where an individual can create massive scale like that.
I think their opinions were validated quite well. If I would listen to my crazy anarcho-capitalist friend, I would be millionaire today. Other side is represented by Trump...
Oh, cut the crap. The whole Reason article is accusing Metz of acting in bad faith, calling his writing a "lazy hit piece that actively misleads readers", etc.

I called the Reason article a misrepresentation and I called Eliezer Yudkowsky a crackpot. If you're going to criticize me for saying that, then why are you leaving the Reason article alone? Cade Metz did not engage in name-calling and didn't use any pejorative language, so why are you criticizing him?

Am I ineffective for saying that? Maybe. But I'm also right. I don't particularly mind if you dislike my tone.

Also, "monarchist" isn't an insult. It's the word we use for people who think we should have a king. People like the neoreactionaries who have a strange tendency to pop up in rationalist circles.
No it isn't...

I don't think any of the ideas in this article have any evil intent, even if they have evil results.

1. Relative timestamps are just a more useful way of telling people when something happened. It's how most humans communicate time to each other.

2. Infinite scrolling is just what happens when you're not constrained by physical pages. The only reason we used to see paged content was because it was technically easier. Facebook and Instagram even put up a big "You're all caught up" sign when you hit the end of where you were last.

3. Before Facebook had likes people would just add a comment like "+1" or "This." It didn't add anything to the conversation and just made things worse. Internet points are useful for filtering content and showing people more useful information.

Yes, all of these things have negative consequences but that doesn't mean they're inherently bad.
Good article. I liked this quote:

"though big companies try to make sure that the people they hire can solve algorithms puzzles they also incentivize many or most developers to avoid deploying that kind of reasoning to make money."