skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The question of benefits and costs of cryptocurrencies is interesting, so I read the paper. Unfortunately, poor readability, strange assumptions such as the dollar value of social benefits of cryptocurrencies (confusing with dollar value of mining) and strange desiderata such as dollar value of mining being higher than dollar value of costs. Clear bias towards regulating and policy targeting of cryptocurrencies. There is no mention of the fact that pollution is produced by power plants and directly controllable by their owners, not cryptocurrency miners. No mention of the fact cryptocurrencies are less than 1% of total world electric energy consumption.

A proper analysis of costs/benefits would put cryptocurrencies' externalities in perspective to other comparable and bigger consumers (cryptocurrencies are a very small part).

This disproportional targeting of cryptocurrencies as the most important climate destroyer that we see in the news seems to be unwarranted. Also, somehow the fact that pollution is generated by power plants, not consumers, is not so hot topic.
Genocide does tend to be a bit problematic.
You never considered it unetheical despite knowing you're taking advantage and milking customers? Do you now consider it unethical?
Taking a community-based approach to preventing substance abuse among youth
I wasn't griping, I was responding to someone saying they had no speed issues. I donate $5/mo and have done for years, thanks for asking.
Well eventually the population gets to 4x what it is today, and then you are going to be using all of the available land to grow plant based food for everyone. So now your choice is limit reproduction or starve, so obviously you're going to choose to limit reproduction. It's inevitable, so might as well do it at a point where everyone doesn't have to eat nothing but rice and beans.
Borland bought Aston-Tate in 1991, and thereafter owned dBase.

Borland also developed Paradox prior to that acquisition.

Clipper and FoxBase were dBase clones, and not always compatible.

I did a lot of Clipper programming in the 90s, and a lot of reporting in MS Access. The dBase ODBC drivers could sometimes be hit or miss when used with Clipper DBFs.
These companies should realize they are playing an iterated prisoners dilemma game with their customers. Just because your services aren't right for me today, doesn't mean I won't come back in the future and pay for your services again now that I know what you do.

But I doubt I'd come back if my last experience with a company has been a bad cancellation procedure.
> but the impeding of breathing from wearing a mask is minimal.

If I inhale hard on a surgical mask, it collapses and seals against my mouth. I have to either use a brand new, very stiff, mask. Or adjust the mask not to seal well against the sides to add some more space between my mouth and the mask.

It doesn't happen during normal breathing, but I could easily see it happening during labor - the sweat would soften the mask, and the level of breathing needed would easily do it.
Makes sense. Time are certainly filled with more strife and struggle than the Great Depression, Dust Bowl, polio epidemics and two World Wars.
This mostly makes sense if real estate is already fully utilised, but it isn't.

I can't speak to India, but there's a feeling broadly in North America of having "new development" and "expansion" over time. Cities are much, much larger now than they were 40 years ago, and people imagine that the new farm land subsumed and developed should be available for a similar price relative to income to what it was 'back then'.

The XXX-acre rural farmland wasn't as valuable as the same space in town when purchased as a lot, but now it holds as many homes as that downtown space used to. Is it worth the same today, relatively, as that space was then? No, they're both worth comparatively way, way more than they were.

I don't mean to suggest that scarcity isn't a part of the equation here, more that there are a lot complex factors involved, e.g. wage levels relative to inflation over time.
I really dislike this focus on 'artificial' meats, instead of diversifying diets. For some reason there's still a trope that vegetarian meal options are depressing salads.

Try something that isn't a hamburger. I can recommend curries, they have more flavor than any burger you've had.

(also re: flavor, most flavor in meat comes from seasoning anyway, it's the textures and fat content that the meat replacements can't get quite right yet)
It's interesting how intuition for the normalcy of names depends heavily on personal context. I've gotten a "it's obviously a Jewish name" from someone in NYC. I had never heard either the first or second name and had no clue, but it might seem like I was feigning ignorance to someone from a place with more people from that culture.

Only one of Joan and Fons is familiar to me, and I've never seen them together until now. Now I know of two instances and learned there's a whole experience I'm not privy to where these two occur together often.
Let’s not make this overly complicated, if it was important enough for them to charge you they should give you a way to cancel the only reason any company doesn’t is because they are f*ing customers.
The only part of the spectrum missing from my group chats is the communists. It's just so obvious that you're not taking your own advice.
My point is that, at least in the US, the post World War II economy was unusual and the factors that lead to it are unlikely to ever be repeated.

We are reverting to the status quo ante about what middle class means.
>I never considered it unethical

I'd say a vast majority of people (as well as all CC companies) will vehemently disagree with you.
This law doesn't require companies to provide a self-service mechanism to cancel that I can see. Note that the poster "emailed support and they cancelled it for me", presumably without fuss.

(b) A business that makes automatic renewal or continuous service offers shall provide a toll-free telephone number, ELECTRONIC MAIL ADDRESS, a postal address if the seller directly bills the consumer, or another cost-effective, timely, and easy-to-use mechanism for cancellation that shall be described in the acknowledgment specified in paragraph (3) of subdivision (a).
I've heard some devout communists echo this, but I wonder if this is the political science definition or if someone created a new definition in order to move the goalposts. With respect to the standard PoliSci definition, I recall being taught that Communism is "the public owns everything" and Socialism is "the state owns everything", and I'm still not super clear on what the difference is. Assuming what I was taught was actually correct, what does it mean for the public to own something in a way that is distinct from state ownership?
Yes, that’s true: the entrepreneurs in the article took a risk. But that’s exactly why I don’t see things changing.

The “old guard” in business don’t take risks. They let others de-risk ideas for them (by executing on them successfully until they find repeatable patterns for success that don’t require a “spark” of creativity), and then come in as a fast-follower with far larger pocketbooks to do the same thing, but better and more polished and at higher scale.

Who wrote most early romance novels? Women. (After, that is, the medieval-era proto-examples that were written by men because only men were taught to read and write.) But, once pulp romance novels became a commodity, who was it that started founding companies like Harlequin to take advantage of the known market? Men. And now those companies, by sales volume or revenue, produce most of the romance-novel content in the world. They might employ many women writers at the bottom level (though sometimes those are men under pen names!) but most of the money is going to the men working for the publisher, the distribution chain, the bookstore corporations, etc.

I don’t see anything stopping this pattern from repeating with otome games. If it hasn’t happened yet, that could just mean that the business model hasn’t yet been sufficiently de-risked for the old guard’s tastes.
> We saw how much people got hypnotized during the Gamestop episode.

I particularly like your use of "hypnotized", here ...
Brought back some good memories of my old days writing Clipper software. Performance was fast, I mean really fast, even on plain 486 PC hardware.
I still have some sources around, although I made use of external libraries iirc for .nsx indexes and other things and they wouldn't compile with some free Clipper clones.
> I run a subscription site and just recently added a cancel button. I used to make customers file a support ticket. The previous thinking was that if you put up a barrier to cancelling there’s a chance the user will defer it and give you another month or two of revenue. There are a lot of sites that do that (the New York Times, and the Economist), and I never considered it unethical so much as shrewd?
Anyway, I decided to add a cancel button, and the only thing I’ve seen drop off is the number of support requests I receive, which is nice. There’s been no difference in the cancel rate at all.

It's shrewd to waste your customer's time and hope they forget?

Wouldn't this energy be better spent making the product better, this way they don't even consider cancelling?

You mentioned two companies that were for a time dealing with the transition from print to digital and the decay of advertising revenue. They were holding on in anyway possible. I wouldn't use them as a model for how to run your own subscription base business.
yes, we are re-working the pricing page, it is going to include also FAQ.

to answer your questions: yes, the free tier is limited to 5 diagram files and 40 diagram objects.

the free tier has diagrams saved in the local IndexDB database of the browser. paid tier has them saved on the servers.
There are such laws, for example in California: https://www.cnet.com/news/companies-must-let-customers-cance...

(I think also in the EU)
If you follow the constructivist philosophy of science (spoiler alert: I do) then absolutely Albert Einstein is an inventor. He invented a mental model (essentially a lossy compression) of some parts of reality that better fit observed phenomena than its predecessor. Our mental/scientific models are not descriptions of reality; objective reality is unknowable. What they are, are tools (technologies!) that we can use to predict effect, given a cause and a state.
How the SpaceX Starship SN10 might have exploded
Sounds like you have an interesting perspective. Was there any specific events that led to you changing your opinion? What do you think about the future of the games industry?
Reddit is trying to become Facebook, it seems. With all these new and invasive "features" I really wonder how much longer old.reddit will be available. It's blatantly obvious Reddit's new direction is off putting to longtime users of the site, if not outright hostile to the late Aaron Swartz's vision.

Edit:
I had assumed Reddit's main business model was controlling what people saw on "the front page of the internet" via astroturfing and manufacturing consensus. Anyone who has been on the site long enough can tell you r/popular and r/all are blatantly manipulated by a few dozen power users and political activists. Mainly the AOC crowd, doing exactly what r/The_Donald did to manipulate the site's algorithms but across several subreddits. Outside of politics, people on subreddits such as r/HailCorporate often point out how seemingly genuine posts are actually covert advertisements for things like Coke, McDonalds, Wendy's, etc.

I do wonder if all these new features are a way to augment the propaganda model, or if they are merely an aside to get more revenue from harvesting data.
But if it is irrelevant why do you fear that you will need to provide it? I’m honestly at a loss. Do you mean something such as to whom do you send wire transfers, or which specific companies you have on your portfolio? Or more like having an account together with someone? Something else?
To be fair, a lot of stocks have doubled in the last year and softbank as a company does more than investing.
Speaking as a customer, when I take over the world it will be grounds for summary execution if I have to talk to someone to cancel what I signed up for with a couple of button clicks.

The NYT is a very, very legacy outfit and it's probably not a good idea to take cues from them.
It is my understanding that Illinois and California both require that any subscription you can create online be cancellable online as well. People creating subscription services should be familiar with the relevant laws.
Find an open source project you are interested in and contribute to it or find ways to make it better.
Comments like this are why people hate vegans.
Not an exact reply to your comment/that video, but I think this dovetails well with it. Burke's "Connections" (1978) from the BBC is an interesting look at how technology has been developed and built on itself over time.
There are definitely issues where plant and polymers can be good substitutes but they often aren't as good.

Plant based fabrics tend to have much worse performance than the animal derived alternatives. Granted, that doesn't apply to clothing being worn purely for fashion.

Polymer based fabrics often do not wear well and may have issues with micro-plastics and outgassing.
> Just because your services aren't right for me today, doesn't mean I won't come back in the future and pay for your services again

I suspect that it is quite rare though for someone to actually come back.
I should clarify, in the context of the reply I was referring to security. Wasm is inherently as secure as JavaScript.
HAhahaha
And I hope an Oracle database is part of their recommended solution.
I necessarily confined myself to popular languages because of all the advantages that brings. If I could choose any language and magically have an awesome ecosystem, I'd definitely choose StandardML with my second choice being Scheme.

Most of the languages you mention are as fast or faster than JS. Most of them are also much more niche. Tooling for most of them is lacking. Others drag around a huge ball and chain in the form of the JVM or .NET (even the light versions are generally much bigger than v8).

Reason/ReScript seems mostly abandoned by Facebook at this point. Elm is very deliberately a one-man show (I don't like that bus factor). Ocaml compatibility and tooling seem easy then drop off a cliff in practice. Haskell is way too worried about math and the illusion of purity (and finding people willing to deal with it is very hard). Swift is Apple-only and doesn't actually bring much to the table (honestly, it seems like a rip-off of Dart with tuples and ref counting instead of a GC). Rust is much lower level and writing something in rust will take far longer than in JS.
I don't think it's cancel culture in the way normal folks are tuned into it, but it's pretty similar.

Writers aren't homogeneous in their beliefs, but a lot of writers and a lot of publishing/news industry folks all went the same schools for university, MFAs, writer-in-residences, and so on. The dynamic at those shared spaces is source code of wokeness. If you read that NYT article on Smith recently, that's the vibe and also the tip of the iceberg.

What goes on is well meaning but emotionally immature adults hyper-policing each other. As they all sort of believe the same stuff anyway (vaguely left/progressive), there's an odd aspect of one-upsmanship to it. If you add in the stress of a career in the arts, I think power-seeking/insecurity is heavily involved as well: I'm going to make no money unless I really luck out, I'm going to go face a 0.01% chance of getting published, I won't have much medical or retirement savings, but I can control this aspect of my life and my community, so I'll do that.

The end result is this wild form of cultural policing that has all the hallmarks of bullying.

As it's a very tight network of a few undergrads and a few MFAs which produce a lot of the artists and folks working in publishing and journalism, you see it spilling out of their dorms and into corporations and profit spaces. The mainstream workforce gets a little bit of this through their HR departments now, but it's a different level in publishing.

It's hard to describe without talking to someone that's done an MFA or similar, but hopefully that helps. Testimonies of professors who finally lost their s*t with their universities over this same stuff are also accurate, but because it's often an old white dude who's a comp sci professor doing the public pushback, they'll never be the right advocate to turn things around. That's what makes the Smith admin employee who's finally speaking out so interesting, as that's "one of their own."
It's not zero-sum. These improvements are externalities, they are permanent and apply to all other uses of computing.

Similarly, one can point out all the advances that the Apollo program brought that are unrelated to space travel. COVID brought in lots of scientific insights that will bear fruit regardless of whether we have to deal with any other coronaviruses in the future.
Given that good jobs remained in the city center, and commutes are not faster than they used to be, the point is not very relevant.
Gold already exists and has for millenia, what about crypto currencies doesn't apply to it as well?

The existence of deflationary assets doesn't seem to crash the economy as predicted.
> when birthrates are low we use immigration

This is why I don’t believe in ecology. Every 5% we save on water, is being used by our leaders to stuff more population on the same land.

It defeats the purpose of saving: Public policies cancel individual efforts, such as my friends who chose to have no kids for ecology.

Capitalism is a way of forwarding global constraints to individuals, and exponential house prices communicates that the territory cannot survive with more people. Yet, not only do we increase population (so all those “no kids” friends are up for disappointment), but we bring those newcomers to the levels of consumption of middle classes, using lowered prices so they can afford 70% of mid-class consumption levels.

Since our leaders break the relationship between environmental constraints and costs, by offering free housing, food and subsidized public services, people believe it is ok to be 120 people per square kilometer, and we can afford to love and welcome more people. No! Each additional individual emits greenhouse gases! We’re already emitting ~3x the affordable rate! We should have taken the naturally decreasing population to smoothly become more sustainable, but our government decided to add 0,5-1% population per year, artificially! Our land can’t afford more people!
I would further add that those oversimplified concepts of how the brain works have hung around because they are useful for us as an abstraction to think about how our brain works.

They may be bad abstractions at a lower level of detail, but for general purposes they seem to be useful enough.
I'm neither a vegan nor a vegetarian
Robinhood Faces a Feared Regulator with Even More Tools Than the SEC
How to Streamline and Improve Your Process? 6 Steps to Follow
Cloned the jwt.io site, just in case.
embarrassing is too light a word.

Rockstar has virtually endless resources and the game has been out for many years. for years, they didn't reduce the extremely long load times? not only embarrassing, but shows deep incompetence and lack of respect for the craft and for end users.
Aren't you shooting yourself in the foot by this logic? If the ticket takes so long to reply and next billing cycle ensures I am sure as hell gonna chargeback the extra transaction.
I live in js land, and the barrier between “folklore” and “documentation” is extremely thin. Especially since V8 may introduce changes at any time that affect performance characteristics of js.

I’d respond with “well if performance matters it shouldn’t be in js” except for all the shite being written in js these days, with js being the hammer that makes everything else look like a nail.
I believe the definition of broadband is mostly relevant when future grants and contracts are handed out by gov. So could help for new business, but I don't think it will be used in existing connections.

But to me it is not entirely clear in the article.
Adding a comment because I hope folks will stop and read this delightful review about a curious mind.

Here are a few things I stopped to ponder about:

1. How important are visual representations for understanding reality? What about beautiful visual representations?

2. Why are so many pioneering minds left by society to struggle with mountains(ha) of debt?

(EDIT: Formatting)
Unfortunately, Bank of America discontinued their "ShopSafe" virtual card service. It was a great resource, and I definitely miss it.

I suspect that major banks/credit card companies don't like this service because it brings in no revenue (at least directly), takes resources to maintain, and arguably encourages some of their customers to engage in fraudulent-adjacent behaviors using virtual card numbers.

I've avoided services like privacy.com because I am weary of giving a third-party access to my credit card for this purpose, so I do wish more banks/credit cards would offer this service directly.
You think it would be better if all lived like the Congolese? Since that is easily attainable, I'm sure you have already bought your plane ticket. When are you heading over?
There is a lot of data out there given they are publicly traded, although I don't like their presentations: [0]

13 IPOs for Vision Funds I and II

Fair Value of both funds: $116.7b

Investment Gains: $27.6b

Dry Powder: $19.5b

Distribution to LPs: $15.2b

'SoftBank backed does amazing things' is always relative especially because the failures are much more media-friendly.

Case in point: There are only 7 posts on Guardant Health on HN. What they are doing in liquid biopsy for cancer treatment is remarkable, and yet we never comment on that.

[0] https://group.softbank/system/files/pdf/ir/presentations/202...
Bitcoin mining effort is proportional to the cost per bitcoin times the number of bitcoins awarded per block. Since the number per block is constant over each four-year period, it makes sense to talk about the cost per $1 of BTC.
I'm pretty sure this design is to re-use unmanned launch hardware only.

If humans were involved in the landing I think the design would be significantly different.
The Spectacular Rise of Ornamental Plants
> politics

I agree. And there's a massive depth unwinding to that.
I‘d love to see it used as a DB backend for a small website. :-D
>Both those links are the same, btw.

Yes, two different locations for freely getting the spec.

> I can see why it's no longer used, with all those modes! But another language with ranges. Also has module inheritance.

IIRC, "mode" used to mean (in some cases, historically, in CS) the equivalent of what we now call a "type" — I seem to recall Algol using the terminology, but may be misremembering.
You just need to look at Formula One to find a counter example to that. 15 deaths in the fifties, 13 in the sixties but only 3 in the last decade and that is with more races and higher speeds.
I still love brackets. I don't use any fancy plugins or even live preview. All I care about is speed and good search. What are my options?
fair point. we are going to rework pricing in the following weeks.

there are many differences to the mermaid.
i have mentioned them in the comments already / saving of the diagrams, unified syntax throughout various diagram types, diagram code autocomplete, templates, integrations with azure devops and confluence.

what other paid feature would you wish for?
Sure, and smoking is responsible for advances in lung cancer research. It's the broken-window fallacy, though. The resources that were reallocated to lung cancer research due to smoking could have been used for other things.