skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Hey HN - I built Stopping (https://stopping.app/) to help people quit drinking with the support of a small group (your "cohort"). It's free[5] to participate and there's no app to download. All communication is anonymous and done through SMS[1]. I finally stopped drinking after many failed attempts and having the support of a group that was going thru it with me was critical.

Problem:

Giving up alcohol, for some people, is really hard.

In the US, 15M people have Alcohol Use Disorder (AUD). Only 7% get any form of treatment and most programs are ineffective (the success rate of AA is between 5 and 10 percent[6]).

Abusing alcohol has wide ranging effects:

- Financial costs (spending money on drinking)

- Strains on relationships

- Health risks (increased risk of liver disease, cancer, etc.)

- Reduced confidence and effectiveness

In summary, alcohol can ruin your life and kill you. Many people don't think of alcohol in these blunt terms because of how common and even celebrated alcohol is, but it's a truly shitty substance.

Solution:

1. Quit with a cohort - Stopping places you in a group of people quitting with you at the same time. You can safely and anonymously share struggles and triumphs. It might not sound like a lot, but just telling someone else you have an urge to drink and talking about it can make all the difference.

2. Guidance - Get concrete actions and routines you can implement to improve your odds of quitting and make it easier on you.

For example, many people don't realize how many calories they consume from alcohol and are extra hungry after quitting. Knowing this is coming and completely normal helps make the process smoother. You should indulge in some treats you might not normally have (e.g. ice cream) if it helps you stop drinking. There are hundreds of little things like this that can make a difference in stopping.

Another step is prescribing medication. Less than 4 percent of people with AUD are prescribed a medication[7] but there's solid evidence[8] these drugs can help.

3. SMS based - No new app to check. It's easy to access and anonymous.

Drop me a note at mike@stopping.app if you have any feedback or questions you don't want to share here.

[0] https://stopping.app/

[1] Stopping receives all the messages and relays them (using Twilio) based on the group you belong to.

[2] National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism (NIAAA) https://www.niaaa.nih.gov/publications/brochures-and-fact-sh...

[3] 14.5 million people ages 12 and older had Alcohol Use Disorder (AUD), ~5% of the US population. Men are almost twice as likely to have AUD.

[4] 7.2 percent of people ages 12 and older who had AUD in the past year received any treatment in the past year

[5] Right now my focus is on finding ways to solve this problem. I might make this a non-profit and accept donations if enough people want it. I had an exit recently and can support the project financially for the foreseeable future.

[6] https://www.npr.org/2014/03/23/291405829/with-sobering-scien...

[7] https://www.niaaa.nih.gov/publications/brochures-and-fact-sh...

[8] https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2017/02/27/5168903...*
Well that is a pay-walled site, and I refuse to support any "mainstream" media at this point so I will not be buying a subscription to view your link

but he headline seem to be talking SanFran, but I can not know for sure

However actual statewide data, based on US Census totals, shows that over all CA is one of only a few states that have a net Population LOSS over the last 10 years, so much so they are losing a congressional seat.

I will link to some non-paywall sites for you, like proper Netiquette dictates

[1] https://www.politico.com/states/california/story/2021/05/07/...

[2] https://abcnews.go.com/US/wireStory/californias-population-f...

[3] https://www.cbs8.com/article/news/local/california/californi...
For the record, I disagreed with them also and pushed back pretty aggressively and found workarounds to the audit problem. But CTO and CIO basically took it as a challenge against their authority and denied me at all points.
I was talking about an army.
I was talking to a friend yesterday and he put forth the idea that the only reason humans even have civilization is because of sociopaths. We're apparently wired to function in a community of 30-50 where everyone depends on everyone else for survival so, he reasons, larger groups of people require perverse systems control. Sociopaths, having no empathy and seeking to use people for their own gain, seized power and conquered other tribes and imposed such perverse systems in order to exert their influence over a larger populace and land area. Only now, having lived for many many generations in one kind of civilization or another, people know nothing but the perverse system and think of it as natural and even good.

There was a lot more to it than that, and largely speculative, but it was interesting. What if the reason we don't see alien civilizations all over our sky is that sociopathy in social animals is actually really rare or is always otherwise controlled for?
I've found that Minigalaxy is an excellent GoG application on linux

https://sharkwouter.github.io/minigalaxy/

It deals with both downloading and installing as well as integrating Wine.
Things That New Construction Companies Should Ponder
For instance, you should have an accurate record of the demand for ceiling repairs in Finchley because knowledge is mandatory in this regard. This analysis will basically make the decision easier and you’ll be able to craft a clear strategy.
> The possibility that we are not alone and we are the only ones trying to communicate sounds even more fanciful and anthropocentric than any of the alternatives.

Well, yes. But it could also make the (possibly) few blithe spirits who do want communicate be in general much further away, and thus much harder to communicate with.
Play strategy games in historic order; at the conclusion of a game, export the game state for import into the next one.

• Imperator (antiquity)

• Crusader Kings 2/3 (middle ages)

• Europa Universalis 4 (renaissance/early modernity)

• Victoria 2 (modernity/Great War)

• Hearts of Iron 4 (World War 2/Cold War)

• Stellaris (galaxy colonisation)

Example videos:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YfYx9rQgpqU

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nj3UqbhHckE
3D-printed steel bridge loaded with sensors opens for pedestrians in Amsterdam
Most cars are not parked at houses, and I don't see cities putting up chargers at every parking spot. They don't have the money to do it.

Edit: Where I lived in Germany, most parking lamps are at the house-side of the sidewalk. Can't run charging cables across the sidewalk everywhere. Trip hazard.
Asking for Help - Why we suck at getting help and how to ask for it elegantly
I'm a U.S. citizen and veteran working for a company with many customers the U.S. and friends working in every reach of the country. I didn't realize I'm not part of the tech scene because of my location.

Alas, I have paid and do still pay my country's defense budget---financially, physically, emotionally.
But - if we had SRV records for http(s), things like geo load balancing would be super simple, no need for anycast / weird CNAME chains.
The client would get a list of hosts, with attached priorities, and weights.
Correct.

But the axiom is misguided.

Legislation on the safety of cars for instance is not free, but necessary.

You could argue that the makers of go-karts are being priced out of the market: after all, the free market should make people put a price on their own safety.

But the issue is often that people don’t really have a good grasp of what it truly means and you can’t put a monetary number on things like that.
That’s incorrect. What matters is where you are, not whether you’re an EU citizen.

If an EU citizen accesses a site from inside the USA, the GPDR does not apply. That’s also why these sites can use geo-blocking without knowing who accesses their site (for some definition of ‘can’. Technically they can’t because geo-blocking can’t be perfect. If you access a site from the EU through a VPN in the USA, the GDPR still applies)
What was worse?

And are you kidding me? What if the mob had caught AOC or Pelosi? That would have turned from a "paper cut" to a political murder during an insurrection.
It's fantastic because the revenue Tesla gets from everyone licensing table salt will be used to massively expand electric car production and shift us away from fossil fuels.
The stuff of nightmares... and it's all true. Well said.
Implementing leader election in rust for a real-time open-source database
You'd hope so, wouldn't you? However our markets aren't free. I can highly recommend Clive Ponting's "A New Green History of the World". The weight of historical evidence is against us finding a fix. We have tended to over-exploit every resource until it's depleted. For instance, we switched to coal because the wood and whales were running out, not because coal was a better source of energy.

(My main concern with the book is the lack of references; for each chapter he provides " further reading", but I'd have preferred to see a source for each claim.)
In Chiapas the poorest Mexico state, people drink on avg 2L of Coca-Cola per day
Servers are like babies – tips for being on call
There is no "family recipe" to deal with Type 1 - if you don't get injectable insulin you die. It was a sure fire killer from when it was first identified (ancient egypt) to Banting and Best.

Insulin from animal sources is not as good as bioengineered insulin and it takes a lot of animals to make it.
This looks pretty cool, but as a simple piece of advice, when you release applications that can be distributed as source, please include instructions for how to build from source. As it stands, I can go to your friend's AUR PKGBUILD and see a possible build command is this:

DOTNET_CLI_TELEMETRY_OPTOUT=1 dotnet publish \
--configuration Release \
--runtime linux-x64 \
-p:PublishSingleFile=true \
-p:PublishTrimmed=true \
-p:PublishReadyToRun=true \
--self-contained true \
./cli

Or I can look at your Dockerfile and see it runs this:

dotnet publish -r linux-x64 -c Release -p:PublishSingleFile=true -p:PublishTrimmed=true -p:PublishReadyToRun=true --self-contained true -o publish

As for build dependencies, your friend's PKGBUILD says dotnet-runtime, dotnet-sdk, and dotnet-host are required. Your Dockerfile just runs in a Microsoft-provided base image and I'd be left to guess what it has in it that your app requires.

Something like an INSTALL file in your project root that has an example build command, enumerates all the options and what they do, and explicitly tells the packager what the dependencies are, would be very helpful here and not take you much more than a few minutes to create, as obviously you know how to build your own application. This would be helpful both for downstream packagers who create distributions, high-security environments that are required to build everything from source, and hobbyists who just want to know how to do it.

In particular, I'd like to know what the telemetry environment variable is doing. Does 1 turn it on or off? If turned on, is it sending telemetry to you or to Microsoft? What is it sending? Does this tool require an Internet connection to work? It obviously requires networking, but keep in mind plenty of corporate intranets, classified networks, LANs, and otherwise private networks have their own DNS servers and can use tools that query those, but they're on autonomous networks disconnected from the rest of the Internet and can't make connections to your servers or to Microsoft's.
Our sources are diverse. To name a couple:
Procrastinator's Digest by Timothy Pychyl,
The Now Habit by Neil Fiore,
Procrastination by Jane Burka (lengthy),
Tiny Habits by BJ Fogg,
...

There's more - a technique from here, an insight from there...
Why do companies even bother writing that?

They clearly don't care, if they did that box wouldn't even be there.

Sites like Imgur are the absolute worst. "We care about your privacy" and presents you with a list of 1200 companies they share information with.
Indeed, I think those are much more likely outcomes than massive population collapse.
I'm pretty sure 'spam network' is a ad hominem logical fallacy, & perhaps your link is a appeal to authority.

There is sufficient proofs pro-IVM. Yes there is anti-proofs, I'm sure there are valid concerns there also. But consider how much $$$ exchanges hands with vaccines, which the emergency authorization of may not have happened if IVM was fully recognized treatment for C19. Not only the profits of the shots is more, but said companies already spend much $$$ on advertising on news channels & web, cloud compute time on major platforms (MicroSoft, Google, Amazon), research funding, etc... (I'm NOT saying the billion$ is proof of bias, but something to consider.)

https://covid19criticalcare.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/F...
Contact the ISS
I'm from Europe and would love this. Let us have our own forums!
I’m not an anarchist, I just don’t think people always realize or recognize that there will be downsides as well as upsides to the latest “sounds good” piece of legislation.
No I'm not claiming that. I'm claiming that there's something to learn from the history of similar claims and examining why the assumptions in them ended up not being true, to help possibly mitigate similar assumptions today.
You can get grand pianos in many different lengths, look at for example Yamaha's products

For example here https://www.robertspianos.com/top-makes-of-piano/yamaha-pian...
Shell and Scottish Power submit plans for floating offshore windfarms
Do you have any further information on this topic, some blog post or something that explains how this would work?
The Netherlands is a net exporter of food and it does this by producing what people want to eat. See https://aboutthenetherlands.com/why-does-the-netherlands-exp...

Why should we have to change what we eat? Surely taking that choice away takes away part of what we are, reduces our autonomy.

Why switch to seaweed when we can already produce what we already know we want?
One of the most popular services of one of the most popular tech companies is pushing content to one of the largest economic participants that is relevant but unusable.

While I didn't mean for this to blow up and was merely venting, I'd like to think my unreplied vim-regex comments were good contributions and valid content for the HN community.

And just for you: Five years ago, the front page had "House sabotages net neutrality", "lawyers suing over We Shall Overcome", "Haitian cholera epidemic started by UN peacekeepers", "coffee shops signal urban change", "how the law is tracking down prank callers", "Merkel allows lawsuit against German comedian"... oh, and a new minor version of Jupyter and Tera were introduced.

I'm sad that you remember HN being different back then.
It is, but probably at a more constant speed, as opposed to the squeeze-and-relax approach of a normal heart.
> perpetually angry. Not a good way to live.

Whilst it is unpleasant and not great for mental health, the world is indeed full of horrendous injustice and bad things. Whilst Twitter has it's own fair share of problems, one could argue that anger is a rational emotion to feel about the world.

Being able to switch off from all the problems and just enjoy life is quite privileged.
Cloudflare, in some ways, still has a startup mindset when it comes to security and operations (both in good and bad ways).
Oh my, that's a deep cut from the olden days and such a great story. Been looking for it, so have an upvote and my thanks!
Modding this up for those who are still in doubt as to whether a cult with bizarre tenets is rising to prominence. Wokeness is kind of like Scientology, except it's so powerful that you have to look over your shoulder to see who's around before you criticize it. It's a Heaven's Gate type thing, except that it has the support of most of the left wings of most governments, and a huge number of international corporations throughout the English-speaking world. Kind of like if the KKK and Islam had a baby, and it suffered from paranoid schizophrenia.

But don't worry about that -- it's COVID or climate change that's going to get you, not the cultists.
I think the blocking of EU visitors is super interesting ideologically:

1. Imagine communist countries blocking access to local news. What would that look like? Well, censorship and maybe ways of hiding the abuse of the local regime to the outside world!

2. GDPR doesn't even ask for much: show us the news, show us your ads, just don't slurp any info about the visit. You know, like a TV station: just print some pixels. But apparently the whole business model can't work like that anymore. Spying is the only way they can make any money.
News aggregators hardly qualify as "big tech".
Also, US Foreign Corruption Practices Act.
"There is no market for marginal improved, extremely overpriced medicine outside of pharma-marketing heavens."

There is, in Russia for example.
But the most expensive I could find (Tresiba) costs 12 usd per cartridge (3ml x 100 units) [0].

[0] https://apteka.ru/product/tresiba-flekstach-609a3db8c93e31dd...
What natural resources did Afghanistan have that was worth 20 years and trillions of dollars?
"Doesn't take much of a stretch of the imagination to imagine how climate change might F-over downstate Illinois (because farms) but Chicago won't let them do anything about it because they hold all the cards and they make their money a different way."

I actually can't envision what you mean by "Chicago won't let them do anything about it". Isn't Chicago the more liberal area that wants to fight climate change?
This is a solution for an end user, and besides the point.
Sorry, I wasn't paying attention as I have to fill my FACTA form.
https://semianalysis.com/globalfoundries-is-a-leading-edge-f...
I've noticed the attempt to shift the focus to some nice-sounding ideas [of real communism]. Yet, I was talking about the exact tens of communist regimes we've already seen in XX century – neither of them turned workers into shareholders (which itself, ironically, is more specific to fascism than to socialism or communism), but all of them caused oppression, poverty, famines and A LOT of politically motivated killings.

So, the comment above emphasizes the dangers of... fascism (at least some mysterious sort of it, since fascism requires industrial workers).

> another form of communism (anarchism maybe?)

There is no such thing, communist system necessitates a totalitarian state.
One of the complications is that if it stops working, you don't really have time to fix it before you die.
great argument
Oddly, this works up and down the OSI model...do you own the hardware your VM runs on, or does Amazon? Do you own your phone, or is it effectively a lease (because after 2 years, you 'buy' a new phone on payments...but then hand in your old phone for credit....that's now ownership, per se)
> Is this about where along the string the hammers are hitting?

I suspect you are right, I studied a bit of classical guitar and I know for a fact that plucking the strings near the bridge or near the fretboard creates very different sounds. It is probably a similar problem with pianos.
C++ hasn't stand still, if you are in Microsoft ecosystem, vcpkg and NuGET take care of cargo, others can make use of cmake and conan.

Then as much I love borrow checker and being safe by default, there are a couple of C++ domains where Rust isn't even a though in 99.9% of the eco-system.

Just consider that Apple has decided to create a C dialect (basically turning all the knobs to be safe by default) instead of Rust for their iBoot firmware.
This is what stopped me from gifting a Lite. The fact that they didn't fix this issue in it is insane.
Total costs usually work out be 2x, it's just that the government pays a big chunk. (I'm sure it's not uniformly 2x, so insulin might cost more.)
it looks like great tl;dr, but I'm not expert on GDPR

nice
The success of Rust in industry depends on how it fares in the Linux kernel, IMO. C++ was never even considered for that.

If I was a young dev learning a systems language for the first time, I'd most likely pick rust.
It will be a while before anything of value can be done on a quantum processor. For now, all that will be done are increasingly convincing demonstrations of 'Quantum Supremacy'. This means that the quantum processor will solve a problem that is believed to be intractable on a classical computer. These problems are very contrived though, no one will actually care about the results of the computations.
I think this works if you are small. If you are large, you might have a branch or subsidiary in EEA which may get fined or whose assets might get frozen.
My takeaway was that Earth as a system has operated outside of these temperatures and did not result in a runaway effect.

This means that there are self correcting systems that allow Earth to be relatively stable and life bearing for billions of years.

My first thought is that with increase in temperature, you get an increase in plant life which reduces CO2 levels resulting in lower temperatures and less plant life.
That's how it's been handled for nearly 100% of the sites I went to for the last two years (that actually do contain ads, or use tracking for pointless internal analytics, that is). Or a variation thereof similarly letting you switch off most tracking using no more than two clicks.
> What if the mob had caught AOC or Pelosi?

To be fair, that's not who they were chanting about hanging on the gallows they built. And, frankly, changing the outcome the way they wanted made uncooperative Republican targets more valuable.
The concept of supermarket greeter blows my mind. As a customer this would be a reason to NOT go to that supermarket.
As a potential employee I would have to be starving before I took that job.
A vial and a pen are different. A vial has 10 units. I use between 1 and 2 vials a month. I weigh 70kg, I use about 40-50 units a day via pump [which is more efficient than a pen]. My prescription co-pay is $10 for the two vials of Humalog [a 30 day supply].
Object Pascal also has resource managment, specially the later improvements added by Delphi, and RemObjects Pascal.

Ada also has it since Ada 95.

So what would this new Pascal like version bring to the table?
Wouldn't the counterpoint be that those civilizations like us that do not obscure their location are quickly eradicated by others in the forest? So the forest also acts like a filter for those that are not careful enough.
I saw a salt package recently which was labeled "Urmeersalz" = "primeval see salt". It was a bag of rock salt.
So basically the US now has its own split off version of the web, only visible to other Americans.

The Great Firewall of the USA, or maybe The Great American Firewall.
True but the usage of cars themselves is the main problem. Electrification of cars helps, certainly, but we should be walking and biking, not driving. They’re more efficient, but we are still just using expensive energy to power them when we could just build better and not need them. Calories are cheaper than watts.
Public doesn't typically mean unauthenticated, but rather explicitly published for use by users and applications outside of the organization that created the API. Hopefully, this comes with some guarantee of documentation, stability, and backwards compatibility. A private API, in contrast, is intended only for use by other applications and services in the same organization as the API creator and makes no such guarantees that you will ever be warned when it is going to change, so if you figure out it exists, use it at your own risk.

This is just the same distinction as private versus public function signatures in a library or a system service extended to remote services. The runtime may or may not use technical means to prevent you from using the private API, but whether or not you can do it, if you choose to, beware that it is to be considered an implementation detail and subject to change at any time without prior notice.