skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'm never really sure what the point of things like this are. I've grown enough plants in my life to understand they're at least 'aware' in some way when bad things happen to them.

But in the end, it's a basic biological fact, unless a form of life can photosynthesize, it likely consumes some form of matter that was likely from something living. Extremophiles that eat sulphur and minerals and such aside, the majority of non-photosynthesizing life consumes organic matter. Said matter was at one time from something that was alive.

In the end debates about whether plants or animals suffer the same or more seem sort of moot. Life involves suffering of some kind for every living thing on this planet. It's another one of those inescapable facts.

I agree we should all try and minimize the amount of suffering we directly cause, but every day something somewhere suffers because each of us exist. Trying to pretend we can erase any and all suffering we may cause ever is a fruitless effort.
So maybe we don't need so many professional sports players.
Good luck reaching the people that need to read this. The people concealing political agendas behind simplified slogans that everyone agrees with know what they are doing.
Look at the millions of words pointlessly spilled across the internet over a throwaway comment on a message board.
The OP did not use the word widespread. You're right there's no evidence it is widespread in the US. Maybe in some other counties.
I think it's only ghosting if you break off a conversation, not if you never start one. If I send you Viagra spam and you don't reply that's clearly not ghosting.
> I genuinely believe to spend resources on issues where ROI is positive.

How are you measuring the ROI of security efforts inside an OSS distro like debian or nixos? The effort in such orgs is freely given, so nobody knows how much it costs. And how would you calculate the return on attacks that have been prevented? Even if an attack wasn't prevented you don't know how much it cost, and you might not even know if it happened (or if it happened due to a lapse in debian.)

>So far exploits on FOSS kind of prove the point not everyone is using Gentoo, reading every line of code on their emerged packakges, let alone similar computing models.

Reproducible builds is attempting to mitigate a very specific type of attack, not all attacks in general. That is, it focuses on a specific threat model and countering that, nothing else. It's not a cure for cancer either.

>Now if we are speaking about driving the whole industry to where security bugs, caused by using languages like C that cannot save us from code reviews unless done by ISO C language lawyers and compiler experts in UB optimizations, are heavily punished like construction companies are for a fallen bridge, then that would be interesting.

This is just a word salad of red herrings. Different people can work on different stuff at the same time.
Is art a Ponzi scheme?
As someone who manages a fleet of 30 windows machines that house PCI DAQ cards: Windows 10 runs on a Pentium 4, but I wouldn't call it fine. All of the machines run on SSDs, which is a godsend, but the older machines that run pentiums involve a lot of waiting around to do the most basic of things. It doesn't help that Windows refuses to us less than 1.5 GB of RAM. You can forget web browsing.
I personally would agree with this approach. It sounds like someone on their leadership team was never fundamentally or spiritually at peace with being a platform for pornography.
Show HN: Monitor websites for changes. Get alerted by Email, Slack and Telegram
Good point. AV1 and AVIF could improve on how some sites (like Twitter) turn actual GIFs into video now.

Also a plus for saving phone snaps, since the camera often saves a short video these days anyway.
Damn. Sorry Noah. I don’t know if you’re reading this page but if you are I just want to thank you for the resources you’ve put out.
> The beauty of crypto is that you can elect which ecosystem you participate in.

The beauty of fiat is that the government can print more, if needed, and can tightly regulate monetary supply to increase the health of our economy and breadth of our trade.

The FBI and CIA can monitor who transacts and can shut down hackers and terrorists. I can also elect the people in charge of the system so that they can create more opportunity.

> If you don't like bitcoin because it's dominated by whales, go to eth. If not eth, try doge or Monero.

Bitcoin makes the Winklevosses richer. Ethereum makes Buterin richer. Everyone hawking this is getting richer, but nothing worthwhile is being done.

> Or start your own.

What the hell good does that do? I'd rather use my life to solve real problems. I want to make creators more money, increase the amount of art in the world, and eventually work on solving cancer and metabolic diseases.

I don't have time for this garbage, and neither does the rest of the world. It's wasted compute, both in terms of GPU and brain cycles.

> It's pretty easy to move money between cryptos, that you only hold Monero and your friends only holds doge does not stop the two of you from transacting

I can already move money. What problem is being solved?

Maybe this is great if I want to illicitly move money or dodge taxes. I don't see any other reason for it.
Sounds like Google made the Microsoft "Gates to Ballmer" pivot and is experiencing similar issues.
Which is to also say that I think these clubs tended to skew towards a white middle-class without a college education. That is a declining demographic.
Yes, for animation a video codec like AV1 is much more suitable than a still image codec like JPEG XL.

JPEG XL does have some weak forms of inter prediction though (but they were designed mostly for still image purposes). One of them is patches: you can take any rectangle from a previously 'saved' frame (there are four 'slots' for that) and blit it at some arbitrary position in the current frame, using some blend mode of choice (just replace, add, alpha blend over, multiply, alpha blend under, etc). This is obviously not as powerful as full motion vectors etc, but it does bring some possibilities for something like a simple moving sprite animation. This coding tool is currently only used in the encoder for still images, namely to extract repeating text-like elements in an image (individual letters, icons etc) and store them in a separate invisible frame, encoded with non-DCT methods (which are more effective for that kind of thing) and then patch-add them to the VarDCT image. The current jxl encoder is not even trying to be good at animation because this is not quite its purpose (it can do it, but 'reluctantly').

Anyway, I think that animation is in any case best done with video codecs (this is what video codecs are made for), and I wish browsers would just start accepting in an <img> tag all the video codecs they accept in a <video> tag (just played looping, muted, autoplay), so we can for once and for all get rid of GIF.
Thanks for pointing that out. I was not expecting: "Data is stored in a blockchain form"
Especially if you can make a tiger by simply clicking a share button.

It would be much harder to build a critical mass using more traditional methods of communication, even e-mail. As a result, people would spare their energy for serious incidents only.

But we have a variant of the tragedy of commons here: societal ostracism, an important but dangerous tool, is no longer used rationally, but milked to exhaustion. It has become too easy to get the ball of outrage rolling. Too many people are treated as if they commanded a genocidal death squad, when their transgression is often verbal only (not the case of this particular artist, I know).

As a result, we have a virtual Salem trial every day. I wonder when the inevitable reaction happens and people start ignoring the social networks altogether. This is not a stable, persistent state of things. Too unhinged.
If the currency itself is a joke it seems fair game for anyone to make fun of it.
Also checkout Taleb's paper on Precautionary Principle
https://www.fooledbyrandomness.com/pp2.pdf

"If an action or policy has a suspected risk of causing severe harm to the public domain, the action should not be taken in the absence of scientific near-certainty about its safety."
The lack of understanding of basic finance and statistics is crippling for many people.

I know fairly smart people who understand calculus but just cannot accept that there is a problem with paying interest on all of their purchases.

They simply do not understand that eliminating high interest debt as soon as possible (or never acquiring it in the first place) is essential to ever having financial security.

Honestly it sometimes feels like the normalizing of financial illiteracy is intentional, although I'm willing to accept that the lenders of high interest debt are just taking advantage of the situation they've found.
I think a big part of the problem is that most of them have a purpose other than just socializing, that not everyone is necessarily interested in.

At least some of them also have fairly high dues. I remember looking into Rotary in my area about 15 years ago, and just feeling like there was no way I could justify paying however much it was per month, even knowing that a lot of Rotary's purpose is to try to do good works, given what I was making at the time. (I don't remember how much it was, but my impression, at least, was that even if I was interested in actually devoting my time to it, it would still be more expensive than I could comfortably afford on a just-barely-above-national-median salary.)

And there's also a religious aspect: the Knights of Columbus are explicitly Catholic; while it's not officially religious, my experience with Rotary was that it had a very high overlap with churchgoers, and my recollection is that they opened and closed their meetings with a prayer.

And while the VFW may not require members to be former military, it's never going to attract large numbers of people who aren't, just because that's its stated purpose, baked into its very name.

I don't think those kinds of organizations will do as well with the younger generations, today and into the future, given these things. Now, if there were more interest-based clubs/groups around (like community singing groups, tabletop gaming, nature trail groups, etc, just to give a few examples that would interest me), that seems more likely to appeal.
Even so, it's still crazy. An unmarried individual in the bay area earning $100k will take home about $72,000 after state and federal taxes, which is $6000 per month.

Studio rent in San Francisco averages $1900 according to a few online sites.

That means after housing and taxes in the most expensive city in the most expensive state, a single millennial making $100k per year will have $4100 per month in disposable income. That is plenty to invest, cover a car payment and some student loans, food, clothing and other essentials, and still have plenty in the bank afterwards.
I have an SSD for a boot drive on my personal and work computers. Both go out for lunch for long periods of time.

It might be me.

I know my reaction time is 35% faster than my teenage son. I am much more bothered by latency than other people, I'm starting to think that I experience more time than other people.

I can't stand playing single-player games on a Samsung TV that isn't in game mode. The sloppy response drains out all my fun.

When I was playing League of Legends on a "gaming" laptop I found I couldn't ever win (not feel like I was floundering, attacks hitting me and i couldn't do anything about, people avoiding my attacks 100% of the time) until I attached an external monitor. I took movies and could show the timer was 30 ms late on the internal monitor compared to the internal monitor.

Most people seem indifferent to this sort of thing, but not me.
The registry is plenty small enough to keep the whole thing in RAM
C’mon. It’s in the 2nd paragraph!
No, that's speculation based on the idea that at some point in the future, more fees will be burned rather than block reward mined.
I’ve been on a deep dive into crypto and Ethereum in particular for a while now, and I’ve yet to find any actual utility for the technology other than currency. And even that one is as yet unproven.

The vast majority of smart contracts seem to rely on a trusted external source for their operation. Others seem not to benefit from the decentralized solution at all.

There is also a serious question of whether the excessive democratization will lead to tyranny of the majority. In the case of Ethereum, the majority has gone along with each of the hard forks proposed so far.

I find the technical aspects of crypto compelling, but I still remain highly skeptical of its applications.
Please don't break the back button.
Hello HN,

Webtrackr is my first attempt at building an Indie SaaS app. I've been working on and off on this project for about a year now and it's finally ready. Webtrackr lets you track a section of a webpage or an entire webpage for changes & notifies you by Email, Slack and Telegram on detecting a change.

Webtrackr was born out of me "productizing" a script I'd written to scrape Lenovo's website to alert me on offers while I was shopping for a new Thinkpad. If you're a hacker, it's not too difficult to write a script to crawl & parse a webpage for changes, but this is out of scope of the average user. Besides, even for a developer, scraping webpages today is a non trivial task - a lot of websites block requests that do not originate from a browser and based on IP if too many requests are sent. Additionally with most websites today being heavy on Javacsript, simple scrapers don't quite cut it anymore. This is the problem Webtrackr wishes to solve.

Webtrackr uses Headless Chrome/Puppetter to crawl webpages and requests are routed through a distributed network of proxies to get around being blocked or rate limited by the target websites the user wishes to monitor. So the user can always count on getting notified on changes regardless of the nature of website they're monitoring or the frequency of the checks.

I'd love to hear the thoughts of the HN community on Webtrackr. Is this something you'd use?
Even for as creepy as Kevin Spacey is/was, all accounts of his cancelling are tossed out in court for lack of evidence, or pending his own lawsuits against these people. Netflix really did him dirty throwing him under the bus like they did as have many companies/schools/organizations simply on hearsay alone. It reminds me a lot of the movie Jagten with Mads Mickelson. A whole community despises you and vehemently wants nothing to do with you all based on rumor and speculation. Without even a legitimate means to protect yourself.
I just assume at some point in my life, if I achieve my dreams, I'm going to get cancelled. If you have big aspirations, you should assume this too. Start preparing mentally for it.
That's exactly what i wanted to work on a meaningful thesis. thanks a lot i will read them and talk to advisor about that topic.
Thanks a lot.
College costs money. If your parents aren't upper-middle-class, that means borrowing money.

Then you show up at college, and on your way to class on day 1, you are accosted by various banks handing out credit cards (or at least this was the case in the late-90s when I was at UVA).

Then, you finish college, and because real wages haven't changed in 40 years, you borrow more money to pay rent, pay back student loans, etc.

Americans have an unhealthy relationship with consumerism and credit. Doesn't help that credit is currently cheap, so buy-now, pay-later is the norm.

It's completely crazy, no disagreement. But, it's been this way for decades.
Thanks! I appreciate that. It sucks, but I'm glad to still be alive and still able to make stuff.
Ah yes, kill the business model that makes you popular, like digg, and tumblr
> Optimizing for a short commute is a choice that people can make if they want

It's a choice until your office moves or your job changes (and you had to balance other priorities).

Mostly I agree with you though--if getting to the office is painless, then working from the office is great--except if you need to concentrate on your work. Any task that needs focus will take 2-3x as long to accomplish in an open office.
85% - 100% is technically "more than one-third".
I don’t understand your comment. He was cancelled over actions IRL. Whether he had a Twitter or not, other people do and they know his name and where he works.
I'll be the token "15 minute commuter who doesn't want to go back" person (20 minute walk, 15 minute train). It's not all a function of commute. AMA
The Phases of Remote Adaptation
Cancel culture is just a modern form of ostracism:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ostracism
20% of the people do all the work. So let us stay home so I don’t have to wear noise cancelling headphones all day. Let the other 80% “perform” their duties.
I agree. Nothing wrong with the class itself but it seems like it's being used to blame-shift.
The US is insanely litigious and most large companies are very aware of the cost of unlawful termination litigation. That means to actually fire somebody you need cause, and that means having an airtight paper trail which takes time to generate OR having the employee do something that directly violates something you've explicitly told them in writing they can be terminated for. You're not generally dealing with stupid people, and if they're obeying the letter of the law/policy even while defiling the spirit of it you really can't do much to terminate them.

There are other things you can do to make it clear they need to move on but it's usually way easier and more efficient to just directly negotiate a severance and have them resign.
Was in adtech for awhile. Glad to be out of it.
Lots of neat problems to solve. But yeah it was super creepy
Related: Some time ago I remember reading that Plotly sent the data back to plotly’s servers. Is that old news / is there fully-local plotting now?
It's true that memes have a life of their own but they are currently fueled by social media companies that operate on advertising revenue. This is a fixable problem but it requires changing the model that generates meme worthy content. As long as publishing every thought is "free" there is no viable solution to stopping meme activism because advertisers like it when people scream and shout at each other because it keeps them on sites like Twitter and Facebook longer than they would stay there otherwise. And since they stay longer because they're angry it is easier to show them ads for some product that will cure them of their ills. Commercial interests are fundamentally the root cause of this problem.
Ok, when you launch something and work days and nights on it, when someone who has never downloaded your app comments "we use X and this is unnecessary" I'd love to see your reaction.
So when the parents indulge the escape of "work" because home is a living nightmare what are we left with to raise the kids? Instragram?
Eh...peer learning is nearly as effective, especially when the choice is between a peer and a teacher who holds beliefs about education based in a transmission model of education
Then roughly 4,500,000 fast food workers lose their jobs and have no income. As relatively low-skilled workers flooding the labor market, their job prospects are not very good. Many go from poorly paid and over worked to penniless and homeless.

I think these are useful conversations to have, but this is not a problem that submits to easy one-size-fits-all solutions. I'm all for a living wage, but simply raising minimum wages without doing anything else is a short term solution that will bring things back to roughly where they are now over a period of time as prices for people with newly increased hourly pay rise to the point where it is, once again, no longer a living wage. Sure, go ahead and do that anyway, but only if you have other plans in the works to stop that cycle.

As a side not, emotional appeals to slavery do not help promote a reasonable conversation either. Having to work two jobs to make ends meet is a far cry from slavery. We don't need to look far in the world to find people living in conditions that are actually identical to or not far different from actual slavery. A person in the US working a low paying job 60 hours a week that can barely pay there rent or afford unexpected expenses is nowhere close to those conditions, especially when "barely getting by" in the US still mostly includes the bare bones amenities of living in a modern western country that are significantly better than conditions in many developing nations. Comparisons of this sort simply inflame tensions instead of conversation.
I'm not actually cynical, I'm just being straightforward in the sense that there aren't enough famous figures in my line of work for me to namedrop any of them.
> Larry Page greenlit Google Health (a terrible idea)

I'm curious why you think Google Health was a terrible idea. I'm not disagreeing, just wondering your opinions on the matter from a more inside point of view.

Thank you.
He has also admitted to “pressuring women into sex” in other posts. Does apologizing just wipe all that away? How would he know if he apologized to every person he hurt?
All that happens if you voice your opinion in the opposite direction of an internet mob is you get piled on too. Anyone who has been on the internet must have experienced this more than once. Introducing some facts or measure (which is hard with twitters very tiny character limit that squashes nuance and debate) in a response is just the same thing. The internet mob is a mob and acts like a mob and its best to get out of the way. Alas we don't have any riot police so they get to just rip up peoples lives however they want.
I'd categorize debt into 4 categories:

* Student debt. University costs a fuckton of money in the US, and you can pretty much find some way to cover it in debt. For young people this is probably the #1 category of debt.

* Mortgages. Basically, of all the debts, mortgages are the ones that don't really "count," since it's generally acquired for the purpose of specifically obtaining an asset and its bottom line on your net worth is going to be around 0. Also, there's some tax advantages to mortgages, so it's not really an issue to have mortgage debt.

* Medical debt. Yeah, this sucks.

* Personal debt, primarily credit card debt. Credit card debt is something that is likely to really screw financially literate people over: it tends to be very high interest, it tends to be marketed heavily to suggest that you're not being screwed by high interest (e.g., cash-back rewards!). The minimum payments are pretty low, so it's pretty easy to cut back on paying the card if finances are tight, without realizing just how much you're being screwed by the interest.
That's a very tunnel vision view of the early web. You're ignoring BBS's, AOL, usenet, IRC, etc. which were all created with the explicit purpose of people connecting and talking to other people. You can go even further back to things like Community Memory and the Homebrew Computer Club--computing has firmly been embracing people connecting to other people since the early days.
I feel like we also need to teach kids how the IRS works and what withholding, tax returns, credits, and deductions actually mean. Balancing a checkbook is trivial compared to understanding what needs to be filed and when.
Definitely. Booting up Win10 on an HDD can take up to 10 minutes if you have Discord/Steam installed.
> Distributed Betting Markets (Transaction locked up depending on outcome of a sports game) Distributed Derivatives (financial instruments locked up based on price/date) Distributed Insurance (If I'm a farmer, I could put money up based on rainfall, price of wheat, or other metrics).

Don't the executions of these contracts still depend on a (centralized) outside source of information which pretty much wrecks the decentralized aspect of the network?
It's the same distribution as, say, tattoo'd people that care about their old tattoos later on.

Some do, some don't. Its not always.