skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Self-hosting isn't hard, it's currently impossible.

The real problem is who owns your data. Because if you use Word or Photoshop, your files are locked inside Word and Photoshop. And this is still true if you use FOSS alternatives, because there's only very limited support for metadata-aware sharing between applications of all kinds.

It would be super-useful to have (for example...) seamless links between text editors, web design applications, web hosting systems, and even video editors and ebook publishing tools. But that's not where we are now. There's some limited interchange, but most cross-domain transfers are difficult and fragile, and some are impossible.

Cloud is just the online version of the same model. When you have proprietary control of user data through proprietary file formats which actively frustrate open sharing of data between applications, it doesn't matter of the data is stored locally or in the cloud. It also doesn't matter if you're using a mobile or desktop UI.

The FOSS people have always been looking through the wrong end of the telescope. The real revolution would be open data which is wholly and exclusively owned by users (or user groups for collaboration) and loaned to proprietary software for specific limited tasks.

Which is the opposite of things work now. Applications and products own your data and they let you access it - but only if you ask them nicely. And - increasingly - if you pay annually for the privilege.

So containerisation or self-hosting or whatever is a non-solution unless it also gives data back to users.

Which is also why the fragments idea won't work. There's limited use in trying to automate or manage or otherwise AI-ify access to data that you don't truly own anyway.

In fact a new kind of shared Internet would be a very useful thing. But it would need a ground-up redesign of everything, including browsers, mobile apps, desktop applications, operating systems, search, and the financial and legal frameworks surrounding them.

I'd love to see that happen. But right now in 2021 it just doesn't seem likely.
Next, we are waiting for a any central bank issuing "world-wide" digital wallet. EU-wide is a good step towards that.
Things are not that bad. While the whole thing is kind of a monolith, there are at least broad sections that split code into logical sections. With some practice, it is possible to easily narrow down changes and any issues to 10-20 LOC. Later, breaking code by them could be a starting place for refactoring. In the end, the decision is manually reviewed. There's also a log that tells how and why the code had arrived at the numbers. So, if you know that client cannot be X but the log says X then you know that there's a bug for example.

This code was around before I joined. It started small, but more and more requirements were added until it became like that. Not much effort went into structuring it. Now it's my responsibility, and I'm trying to make it better for me and anyone who will have to deal with it in the future.
Maybe you should, because I've experienced it a few times. Not in recent years though, as smoking has become a minority thing in all the offices I've seen in the last 5 years.
The EU wants it to be as smooth and painless as possible to go from one EU country to another. If you see it under that lens, this moves makes a lot of sense.

Such a service would be useful for me for example: a french living in Belgium with relatives in Greece.
Hi,

Author here.

This investigation into email tracking attempts to deconstruct tracking links and pixels and highlight the data that is being collected. It covers Mailchimp, ConvertKit, Substack and other Mailgun retailers.

There's also some attempted (albeit unsuccessful) reverse-engineering of an opaque token in the Substack section (If you like reading stuff about reverse-engineering).

Happy to answer any questions.

Thanks.
eID and okish in the same sentence? Yikes. It's a terrible experience for me. It doesn't work well on non-Windows operating systems. It doesn't work at all on many operating systems. Which is silly, because it's just a smart card which should work everywhere, but somehow that isn't the case.

The "itsme" SSO app is even worse. You can't use it without using an iOS or Android smartphone (and even then it probably won't work if it's rooted). And it's got this really weird requirements of being secured by a 5-digit pin (no more, no less last I checked..).
water mills are not dams
Large parts of the world would love the chance to have the opportunities provided in the US despite this unfairness.
My trick is just to add a large constant to all the IDs. Relations still work and you can avoid collisions.
I admit that's something I said without thorough research. It's just something that pops up in discussions about industrial espionage, or about the DGSE, or about the french military-industrial complex.

A quick search gives me this article as evidence: https://www.france24.com/en/20110104-france-industrial-espio...

But I admit I don't have strong reference to back my statement up.
Can't agree more with everything you're saying, except for the last part: if bugfixes/security updates are in one stream, and new features are in another, the first one should be applied all the time without asking, and the second one should be the one that prompts a pop-up.

> SaaS stands for Serfdom as a Service

It's interesting that the SaaS term was born from the Cloud, but its tenets still apply to desktop applications
Having a unified way to e.g. verify the age of someone without getting their personal data would simplify some services (e.g. youtube) which currently require payment information or a photo of a physical ID and 3 days.

The german eID (and bank cards) already contain a way to sign whether or not the holder of the card is >16 or >18 without revealing anything else (e.g. for cash-payment at cigarette dispenser machines)

Similar functionality being available in a unified way across the whole bloc is something few other countries have done yet and would drive innovation
> There's a whole economy in making it difficult for these!

And there is your niche right there. Individual companies or persons do not need to make 'dents in markets' all by themself. A host of people doing the same might. But for the individual - especially when having sustainable income objectives, not hockeystick growth - there's a good place in the market I think.
That's more equal, is denying people the opportunity to rise actually more fair?
> The US raised scores of millions of immigrants from poverty to the middle class.

Emphasis here is on the past tense.

There are several reasons to challenge this:

1. The USA had (and still has) unprecedented resources per population. Why is your claim not still the case?

2. Immigrants tend to be people with the means to immigrate. That's rarely people in relative poverty, unless you intended to mean slaves.
Interesting how they sound a little different around the world, and also have a different life/growing span. This is my local variety https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i5OGl9twsEE they come out during August (usually) and make much noise.
My only hope against ever-increasing surveillance and nascent social scoring remains the technological incompetence of the parties involved.
Thanks I'd missed that link but it's really good.
Simone Biles Makes History as First Woman to Ever Land Yurchenko Double Pike
I agree. And I'd say that that applies to a pretty big share of people who don't just use their computer as a fancy typewriter.
Why not both?

Fusion research budgets are a tiny, almost negligible, fraction of GDP as it is.

We aren't so starved for cash we have to choose between fusion or fission - but that might mean less money for wars, the ultra-rich etc.
I am in the same situation, and I had the same mindset as you have. Not anymore.

> so effectively Apple have decided to ignore me as a customer

Replace Apple with (almost) any other recognizable brand out there and we are in the same scenario:

- I recently wanted to buy some Nike sneakers because my 5-year-old model doesn't stand it anymore. Guess what? All the new models are way different than the one I have. I don't like them, they look "bad" (too modern?). Nike is ignoring me as a customer

- I wanted to purchase an mp3 player. The model I wanted, of course, is not there anymore, and all the new models are just not for me

- I wanted to purchase the same jeans I had purchased 2 years ago from a recognizable brand. Sorry, no sorry; that model is not available anymore.

Companies are moving "forward" ignoring people like us. I guess that makes sense from an economic point of view for these companies. It's just sad for me, and I can't do much about it.
you seem to be confusing luck with experience and skill.

what was luck was that the scouting plane flying above tf-16 didn't spot them, and even there it's debatable since the task forces where there intentionally due to an overcast weather forecast and that overcast weather was what allowed them to remain hidden.

I may concede that yorktown being bombed twice was luck, or at least unlucky for the Japanese, but even then damage party skill played an important factor in the event.
And that's where it immediately becomes obvious it's not just about going outside, or having small breaks, it's about the addiction that's so destructive that it's easier to deny it than to accept it.
It's not for payment.

It's an SSO service with a strong proof of identity tied to your official id and a vault to store your official documents. France already has something very similar but which can only be used with the state. It works really well.
Nice work! In the past I've used https://privnote.com/ for this kinda thing but it doesn't allow as short self destruct times
Nordic countries are capitalist
that's why I said "okish". I think "itsme" works fine for most people. But yes, the system is far from perfect. However, do you have trust that the EU Commission will design something better?
I’ve smoked maybe... 30 cigarettes a year for half of my life. I will go weeks or months without with zero effort or intent. Sometimes I will get a strong feeling that I want a cigarette and I think “better not” and that’s it.

There is a little bit of “smarter” in there but really, i’m just not an addict. Some people are, some aren’t. I know several people who have rarely smoked and never had problems with addiction.

I think part of it is some people are more susceptible to addiction than others and another part is that the “just one” is BS, you can learn to not let it happen to you without total abstinence.
It’s an oversimplification for effect.

Yes, there’s bad fried chicken and good fried chicken. But when you’re hungry cruising down the commercial strip, there may be two national brands you need to quickly choose from. One of those brands comes out on top because their millions of ad spend got you in there once or twice and now they’re you’re favorite.

Source: we got chick-fil-a curbside many Saturdays last year but at least two other fried chicken places are closer and we generally eat much healthier food.
Ah, so this takes us into the question of what "native" means.

Some people use the word native to mean "the way apps were written in the 90s and on Apple platforms, still are written". It's short hand for manual memory management, full commitment to the operating system vendor's APIs, and so on.

Apps written that way have some big advantages for end users - consistency, low memory usage, and so on. But they suck for developers. Manual memory management sucks, having your app market share be limited to the operating system's market share sucks, often the vendor APIs suck.

Some people use the word "native" just to mean "uses the operating system specific APIs". The other aspects like being written in an AOT compiled manually memory managed language don't count. For those people Android apps written in Kotlin running on a JVM are native, but the other people, not so much.
UK expat in NL (3 years). Concur wholeheartedly. The Dutch have nailed their SSO app (DigiD) - this is the model to copy.

It eliminates a multitude of steps (sign up, proof of identity, credential management) to accessing any government service from booking COVID tests to paying taxes.
I found a paper from 2019 in the references of this current paper:
https://arxiv.org/abs/1903.09760
Could it be worse than paypal?
As someone that has moved from fairly hard left to centre (though probably considered far right by some), to me the difference is that progressives think they can make the world better, conservatives think that such actions are likely to make things worse. Thomas Sowell brings a lot of evidence based arguments to such discussions.
It is possible to be professional while still having some fun ;)
So why are they exiting? bad product? poor placement in market? any details?
I think this is the biggest worry. With the vaccine passport system soon to be revealed and now an universal SSO tracking a variety of EU wide actions... I feel the risk of getting to a social credit score system as China is high.
> I've also realized that among my professional contacts, people are starting to blog technical articles on LinkedIn.

That's unexpected, wouldn't it be just drowned with self aggrandizing bs there?
Have fun staying poor losers.
For someone who makes use of the free movement within the EU for, jobs and residence, having a common system would be very useful.

Currently, moving to another member state would require multiple steps to getting access to eID services in that country. Such as requesting (and pay for) a conventional national ID, in order to set up an eID that can be used for banking and identification in that country alone.

I'll add that my experience is based on moving within EU in the Nordics, which historically promote seamless free movement between those countries that often exceed the goals set by the EU.
I bet there's a similar mode for all intel's CPUs, which are RISC in essence.
Blogged about the idea of a "digital passport" as SSO service in 2016 -- https://www.heinrichhartmann.com/archive/a-digital-passport-...
Ask HN: An email host/provider with infinite aliases
I understand why they have to limit the amount of aliases if you use their domain but I don't see a reason to have that limit when you use your own domain. Or at least a very high limit (like 1000).

I'm aware of wildcard/catch-all based approaches and e-mail forwarding services that provide infinite aliases, as well as the classic + extension. None of them are what I am looking for.
Why would you need an unified solution? Why not leave it to the national governments and Youtube or whomever can personalise their checks based on your location.
Well yes, this is actually cutting wings of bright kids with poor families. They'd have to go to school and then actually educate themselves after school.

How do those morons get into decision makers roles? They can't see 1h into the future.
With current state of the plugins, this distinction no longer makes any sense.
> Jeff Bezos does not buy bread with every incremental thousand dollars. He builds institutions that provide bread for a cent cheaper to millions of people.

Or possibly builds rockets and other vanity projects. Or bribes politicians. Whereas if that money was used to buy bread, it would definitely end up at a bread making company.

> The assumption that you can equate these utilities is exactly the fallacy that caused so many to starve in Russia and China.

In a discussion about economics, the probability that someone will bring up the Eastern Block and ascribe all its ills to whatever happens to be the not orthodoxly capitalist position being discussed somehow even exceeds the probability of someone bringing up Hitler.
Some of the “high” of smoking is carbon monoxide poisoning.
I'd say the 'salience' of this topic is not even primarily the idea of YC funding what is clearly a scam, but rather the particulars of WHY this one got funding.

It's not that YC 'throws shit at the wall', but rather that it throws shit at very particular walls, and the reason it picks those walls are not obviously 'good'.

While that shouldn't surprise us, I do understand that it's disappointing to feel that YC is not quite the nerdy, rational, investing-in-good-ideas-no-matter-the-source outfit that it's thought to be.
I agree, I hope this wallet will have some safeguards issued by the states, like “If someone crack you wallet and steal your e-money, the state will refund you”. Anyway you can still use it for the more useful things like personal ID, driver license, vaccine green pass, etc… I think the payments will be delayed in a next future, still there isn’t nothing like a testing of a ‘governament e-money’.
In all fairness, one person in either direction doesn't show anything in regards to how a whole class of users use their hardware or what their preferences are.

Who tests new configurations for when things die or for when it's time to upgrade hardware? New cluster configurations?

> changing gear is considered unnecessary overhead

Or being prepared
Obviously you cannot redistribute things that cannot be redistributed, for starters.
Is it? There has got to be a blockchain magic way
This Month with Nim: May 2021 – Nim Blog
Organize Your Git Commits Using Commitizen
I feel like all smoking advertising and education is wrong.

Smoking will kill you or is bad for you is a message that few care about.

Trying to scare people doesn’t work. People can smoke a pack a day for 20+ years and be fine.

It is the addictive associative nature of it that should have the focus.

If you smoke when you drink, you will have cravings when you drink that will last a life time.

People always think they can stop, but they don’t consider the other events that will be occurring whilst they try to.

It’s a task that must be conducted on top of all the stressful events people deal with during life. It will become a constant multitasking job running alongside everything else.

The moment you can’t focus on work without a smoke break is when you are hooked.

And people don’t grasp the experience of cancer properly. The slow random nature of it. And the years of looking into the abyss with complete regret.

We need to find ways to immerse people in future scenarios to get them to understand addiction and how it happens. Maybe draw an analogy to addictions they already have.
By the way, this commit LGTM.

https://github.com/oceanbase/oceanbase/commit/e0126ff4ef328d...
It's funny the way the naming has shaken out (e.g. macOS 12 is contemporary with iOS 15, and major versions of both are released at the same cadence) because it makes it look like MacOS is younger than iOS, despite being over twenty years older.
UK Ecommerce Statistics 2021
I didn't know about actibump thank you. I have long wanted to see solutions like this (although I would have loved it to be low tech : some clever engineering device that would mechanically make a bump if speed is too high) I wish they were more common.

https://dai.ly/x4nt0sd
Yes, filesystem sync protocols like rsync do it at the FS level and if you want to go deeper than the FS level, you get into the realm of operational transform and other rather complex algorithms.

A very insightful comment up thread observes that filesystem-centric computing worked for as long as collaboration was very limited. Once apps needed to move beyond that to collaboration at a finer grained level it fell apart and apps started needing databases, and in particular, databases that could link data from different users together, implying a shared privacy domain.

Was this change inevitable? The long since exiled and forgotten Hans Reiser wrote about this problem a lot back in the day (he murdered his wife and obviously his ideas lost any traction at that point). His thesis predated a lot of the concerns about privacy and central control that we see today, but briefly, he argued a part of why this was happening was that filesystem technology was not good enough because it couldn't handle very small files and because POSIX had some unnecessary limitations. Due to this lack, apps were constantly forced to invent filesystem-within-a-file formats, e.g. OLE2 and OpenDoc were both centred around this concept, SQLite obviously is one too, ZIP yes, but really most file formats can be viewed as a collection of small files within a file.

The idea was, if you upgrade filesystem tech, you can radically change how apps are written.

The problem is that operating system tech on servers and desktops has been stagnant for years. Microsoft and Apple lost interest in their primary operating systems and the open source world has never really been interested in going beyond 1970s design ideas, largely because cloning and adding small elaborations to commercial designs is the way the community stays unified. Look at the mass hysteria that followed systemd, which is one of the only upgrades to the core UNIX OS design patterns in decades. Actually making changes to the core of POSIX isn't something that's going to come out of that community. It'll probably take some company that wants to innovate on the core ideas again.
Jeff Bezos does not buy bread with every incremental thousand dollars, he spends $42million of them on a monumental clock. But perhaps it is more allocatively efficient to ensure that the beggar, lacking the funds to buy bread from Whole Foods, dies of starvation.

The assumption that because someone has more money, they would make better decisions on how to coordinate it was also what caused so many people to starve to death under feudalism.
Anyone remember Experts-Exchange? (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Experts_Exchange) I remember answering questions on there before StackOverflow existed. The mix of volunteers answering and paying users feeling entitled to answers felt really off.
withouthotair.com goes through this scenario of future being fully powered with renewables and it's just not possible.

China cannot meet it's energy demand increase even with building nuclear plants at a massive rate.
I was responding to the idea that it's better than everywhere else on the internet. That hasn't really been my experience. Discord is better, StackOverflow is better, even Reddit is often better if you're looking at specialist communities.

But to be honest I rarely find pearls here. Even many of the "pearls" in the article are just well-written articulations of stuff that is... kind of obvious. Some are inversions of ordinary wisdom for the sake of inversion. Only some carry new information.

I find the most valuable stuff here tends to be arguments where someone knows their shit but is going against the grain, and that person will usually be flagged into oblivion. But there aren't many places you see someone like that responding in context to the mainstream dogma.

---

Interestingly though, reading through it I explicitly remember a lot of the comments he quoted, e.g. the FedEx Airport one (which was really interesting). It's kind of crazy to think the site is small enough that we're all reading the same good stuff.
As long as I can't film the thoughts in my head, I don't see how it could.
The video at the end is word for word the article so skip to that if you’re gonna watch anyway.
This is some toxic mutation of what Europeans considered leftist policies.

Leftist policy would be to fun schools and have good teachers, have a second had books programs, free school lunches for kids that need it etc etc. not dumbing down schools
I used to smoke only at work or when on work trips. My reason to stop was mainly the smell. I hated how my fingers smelled after a smoke. Every time I have the urge to smoke, I remind myself of that smell and it goes away.