skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Companies whose mission is centered on user control and privacy can be held to a higher standard than other companies when it comes to these kinds of questions. It's perfectly reasonable to suggest that Element should have tossed out the idea of supporting Signal for this specific software offering, given the potential for collateral damage in the form of person A using it without person B being aware of this, particularly if person A does not grok that they are compromising person B's communications if they are using it.

Disclaimers and warnings are not universal solutions to questions on ethics since they are not certain to be read or understood and will have some failure %. If the residual negative effects are likely to exceed the kinds of outcomes a company's core values can tolerate, then making those states unrepresentable by abandoning product ideas is sane.
"My point was that some taxation is based on usage, so charging those using the utility would make sense"

Thats literally the opposite of how taxes work. What you are describing is called charging the customer.

Taxes are paid independant of usage, my taxes pay for schools wven if I dont have kids. Someone with 10 kids but less income pays less taxes for schools.
That's a very reductive view ignoring all of the other things which depend on governments. For example, most cryptocurrency users depend on having functional police and court systems, the open internet, etc. — do we add that to their costs as well?
> since 2007

I'm speculating here, but I wonder if part of your experience is based on the fact that you're a long time user. Features like auto-uploading to Photo Library are new, and Apple is generally decent about informing you of new features before opting in.

Brand new account setups are a different story. You're encouraged to use all of the latest/greatest stuff (and why not, current topic notwithstanding?).

Bottom line: it's extremely easy for an average user to start uploading their stuff without really realizing it.
In fact they instruct you that you're not authorised to organise towing yourself, you have to use their emergency assist number if it needs a tow.
You're not being specific, and you're addressing an imaginary monolith.

Are you saying that it's revisionism to point out the US and Israel haven't been BFFs going all the way back to 1948?

If that's what you think, clarify, don't insinuate.
I'm so done with CRUD work, it sucked the soul out of me
The best cycle of lectures I've ever seen in open access from the Centre for Nano Science and Engineering Bangalore:

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLbMVogVj5nJT8RG5Q4Cps...

http://www.nitttrc.edu.in/nptel/courses/video/117108047/1171...
Long-range AWD Model Y, actually.
If you actually dig into all of the services that banking provides, grandiose statements like this fall apart pretty quickly.

One of the biggest problems that crypto hasn't figured that banking is great at is transaction reversal and fraud-prevention. The banking system uses wire transfers that can be reversed if necessary, bitcoin has nothing like this. If an attacker gets your bitcoin wallet ID and key, say goodbye to your coin. That's it, you have no recourse, and frankly, placing all of the responsibility on consumers to safeguard their digital assets without any sort of recourse is pretty ridiculous.

The crypto community loves to talk a bunch of trash about financial regulation, and some of it is true, but a fair amount of regulation actually benefits consumers in ways that crypto just isn't capable of at this time.
Because we as a society shouldn't be in the business of telling people how they should live their lives, except to protect other people.
Sci-News.com: Astronomers Observe 'Rosetta Stone of Supernovae'
Meet Ray Epps
It's more than just a "business"

The reason of the downfall of our civilization is because of that specific problem, you think about everything as a business, including countries
Right, but the number of bitcoins in circulation will change, which is what you might consider the "real" bitcoin economy. Similarly, with the M1 money supply vs the crazy amounts stored up in federal reserve notes.
And I’ll add that lots of people are still immature and not well informed after graduating and well into post college adulthood.
A rural bookstore won't have sufficient density of local customers to be viable. They need to make additional sales from somewhere. That "somewhere" has to be mail order, where they maybe could be competitive due to lower costs. But now they can't actually compete.

(This is all purely hypothetical, and explaining how the statement could be true. Probably it isn't, since there's no way an indie bookstore competes on price with Amazon.)
cool.. some new JS frameworks and npm packages can take inspiration :)
Good for you. For me, after the local grocery store went to shit, with Prime Now and Amazon Fresh I've shifted almost all our spending to Amazon.
There certainly has been a fair bit of consolidation in the publishing industry, other than Amazon becoming the dominant retailer.
> Imagine a boot stamping on a human face forever?

It's way worse than a power grab. People always are more comfortable believing there is some "other" that is responsible for evil, and all we have to do is defeat them. There isn't, it's us
I’ve cut back on my Amazon purchases 90%. It’s been nice visiting actual stores and getting something same-hour. Sometimes I pay a dollar or two more. But buying local(er) feels good for my soul. It’s nice not having to wonder if every single positive review is real or fake, or if real, if it’s accurate. It’s also nice not having to sift through direct-from-China products with extremely strange names and poorly written box descriptions.

Anyway, I’m not sure what your point is. You can hate something and still use it. Especially if that something actively made it much harder to not use it. It’s the same with made in USA goods. Most people crave them. But thanks to our government and corporations, it’s difficult to do it - or at least, do it affordably. Does that mean people prefer made in China? Or that they’re just posturing when they say they don’t like made in China? No.
Since you deleted your other comment I'll reply to it here.

>I haven't been talking to you about it for 50 years. I haven't been talking to anyone about it even as often as every year. Despite that, you can't engage in any way other than considering me part of the conspiracy?

>I'm not an Israeli, and I'm willing to discuss the topic without debating whether Israel should in fact exist or what motivations someone might have for wishing it didn't.

>Furthermore, I am not especially hostile, as an American, to the idea of disengaging from the middle east and the particular relationship the US currently has with Israel.

>So I'm completely sincere and trying to be constructive when I give my personal view on tactics to disrupt it. I'd like to get behind the facade and understand what motivates people like you.

>It's important to not believe your own BS even if you are propagandizing. To be aware of the correct history, for your own sake.

Why do you assume I care about whether Israel exists or not? From my perspective it's a world away and has absolutely zero impact on my life. It's not my place or America's for that matter to get involved in intra semitic squabbles.

What I find insidious are those who would propagandize and coverup the incident within this country. Such activities are utterly poisonous to an open democratic society. Frankly unamerican.

As an addendum I think that if anyone deliberately attacks US military personnel then they deserve a proportional response. Who they are is irrelevant.

If it's Gaddafi bomb him. If it's Al Qaeda bomb them. If it's the Vietnamese bomb them If it's Israel bomb them.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1986_United_States_bombing_of_...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Infinite_Reach

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vietnam_War
Anecdotally, I looked into this when building our house, and can confirm - the bulk of costs was drilling, and it was expensive. When I did the math at the time, the cost of ground source heat pump over air source heat pump was several times more. Energy bills would be much less, but the payoff was around 20 years, assuming the unit lasted that long.
A, the 'individual example supposed to refute general trend' fallacy...

As if I said/meant that gameplay-based games didn't exist (as opposed that the industry and market has a heavy AAA/get newest GPU/ emphasis).

Not to mention that AAA light on gameplay and full on assets also hire gameplay programmers. It's not about gameplay programmers being busy, or gameplay-heavy games existing.

It's about having many more gamers stop chasing graphics to the detriment of gameplay - or in fact, stop chasing graphics, period.
It is also not measles or mumps, and arguably much closer to the flu than the aforementioned.

Some vaccines confer life time immunity and others reduce severity.
Any plans to expand the region availability for AWS beyond us-west-2 in the US? I am interested in us-east-2.
Not much.

But syntax matters; a ternary expression tells me at a glance that there's no funny stuff going on, it's just making a choice between two expressions.

In Go I have to scan every single branch when reading to make sure.
Just switch the epubs or learn English and import books.

French wankers information wants to be free.
Just recommended it to a friend who's missing a ton of opportunities with their data. They said this book is exactly what they need right now and bought a copy!
Something nobody seems to be mentioning: the 2008 crash happened.

The "cool" internet was largely populated by two things: People screwing around creating content in their spare time, with no expectation of profit ("Hobbyists"), and eager entrepreneurs burning through tons of money trying to find the "one weird trick" that would make them rich on the net. Most of #2 failed, but while it was happening it provided a host of interesting things to see, and spaces to hang out in online.

Then 2008 happened and it all came tumbling down. People tend to think more of the 90s ".com" crash, but there was another after the "recession." Suddenly there wasn't as much money to throw around, so #2 became more and more rare, and those that did exist were less casual and more dogged in their attempts to extract money. At the same time, #1 also collapsed, because people were losing their jobs, downgrading to worse paying jobs, working longer hours etc. People didn't have time for hobbies, and self-starters didn't have money for wild new experiments.

So innovation and expression on the web kind of ground to a halt. This happened culture-wide by the way, but certainly it was obvious on the net. What had once been a space for fun and experimentation became a wasteland ruled over by the handful of tyrannical companies that could survive the harsh conditions. That's why there are only 6 sites. Outside of SV, people aren't doing so well. They haven't been doing so well in a while. Maybe you noticed the protests and riots and crazy elections? People have other things on their minds besides having fun on the internet these days.
Why not? Didn't China move to shield pretty much every industry from overseas ones?
It's possible but a lot harder. If the keys/tokens for fetching messages are similar/interlinked to those used to decrypt the messages then you can't separate the two. In this case you would have to do the message 'fetching' and decryption on the client side which would be very difficult for any JS based clients.

Then there's the issue of syncing those messages between Element One clients which means the client now has to re-encrypt the messages and send them back to the server. And if the client is responsible for fetching messages then providing push notifications will be very difficult.

So if you can actually decouple polling/listening for messages from decryption then it would probably be possible.

A brute force approach would be to provide an open source, self-hostable server but can be configured from the centralized Element One service. This server would hold the actual service tokens & decryption keys and would just be sending re-encrypted messages back to Element/Matrix.
It'd be somewhat custom, but there is a commercial heat exchanger (https://www.hotspotenergy.com/pool-heater/) that an HVAC tech should be able to install
It's understandable that people go to work for Sauron to get paid big money. But starting a "human-orc ethics think tank" because you have relevant experience in the field is a bit rich.
Maybe that is not a problem, and will force people to actually get to meet with people

Dematerialized everything has its problems too

But why bother with the social aspect of things, we are all enslaved consumerist robots anyways..
> Do you have children? Public schools have had vaccination requirements going back to the middle of the 19th Century.

No, I’m a teenager. I didn’t know vaccination requirements were that strict/common. I vaguely remember being asked about it maybe in elementary school but right now I’m in high school and I wasn’t asked any of that to enter (for context, I go to a private high school in Mexico).
> Again, I believe most of the biggest innovations, the ones helping everyone, start with engineers scratching their own itch. To the extent it's becoming harder, all users lose out.

I really disagree. I think engineers scratching their own itch leading down to trickle-down tooling is what a lot of independent devs _like to believe_, but that it's motivated mostly by self-importance. I think the utter failure of the FOSS desktop is proof that devs are motivated to work on things they find fun and that these things do _not_ necessarily translate to things that general users want to use.

> Even in the startup world, a common advice is to scratch your own itch - it often leads to something that's widely useful.

I think that's bad advice. That's the _kind_ of advice that leads to things like the hundreds of now-dead clothes washing startups or valet parking startups. And while endless VC rounds blunt this, at least startups have some form of market pressure to have people use their software.

> In defense of the "independent dev community": perhaps we care a little bit too much about ordinary users?

Not really. Software devs are the last set of STEM-engineers that still insist on understanding _everything_ and holding entire systems in their heads. Civil Engineers don't start by considering the subatomic forces that hold their materials together; automotive engineers don't understand every aspect of the software and combustion reaction that goes into their designs. Most engineers accept abstraction as a cost for building useful things.

> The way I see it, most modern software is dumbed down, lowest-common-denominator toys, whose sole purpose is to sell well and/or sell their users out.

"Sell well" is just a euphemism for "software that others use". Money is just the easiest metric to calculate for software being bought and sold, but metrics like "downloads per month" are just as impactful.

Just like you didn't buy a new car and then spend days learning about how it works, most users of software don't want to either. That's not to say that there isn't a robust scene of modifying cars or building hobby cars, but that most people who drive cars for utility purposes don't care to pierce the abstraction veil of an automatic transmission, a brake pedal, and power steering. Most software users just want software that gets out of their way or enables to connect with others in novel ways. They don't care about how much energy their software uses (as long as it's affordable) or how "simple" it is or whether it uses Unix sockets or DBus or something.
I don't know, I ate a ton of junk food in college due to stress eating while studying haha. But completely agree with your points!
> This method, given that it happens frequently, seems to be the easiest and most reliable way to turn a profit

I think you're naively looking at the headlines of PE that focus on large cap buyouts. For every story about Toys R' Us, there are hundreds of PE buyouts that do no cost cutting and use PE capital to grow their businesses.

As I noted earlier, the big PE funds - Apollo, KKR, etc. - are notorious for stripping away large healthy brands and financially engineering them to leave them loaded up with debt. I can certainly appreciate why people think the whole industry is like this. For the record - not only do not I have access to these funds, I would politely decline working with them if I had the chance (we actually said no to biz with one of the big firms years ago). They easiest PE route is in fact investing in healthy businesses with good management teams and then selling them in 3~5 years when multiples naturally go up. The less work that is required to turn the business around the easier it is on the PE fund. Financial engineering and cost cutting is just a cheap trick that can only be used in certain situations.

There is a HUGE market of mid market PE firms that survive on growing both top line and earnings as a result of growth orientated initiatives, and don't leave the company hanging with swathes of debt. In fact, there is a category called Growth PE which has invested in many of the tech companies we discussed here. Look up Insight Venture Partners, TCV, Tiger Global, etc.

Happy to elaborate further if you're interested.
2 KW is a 5 meter diameter windmill, which is pretty large for a homebrew. 12-15 KW turbines are major feats of engineering, I would not trust myself to put together something that size, besides the gear required to put it up. A 2 KW machine has an alternator/blade combo that weighs close to 100 Kg, about the limit of what you can raise and lower with normal equipment. Keep in mind that it sits on top of a 10 to 20 meter high tower, which makes raising and lowering it a job all by itself.
USD money supply increased 9.7% in 2021.

What about crypto? 70-80% of the trades are denominated in USDT. The USDT money supply increased 227% in 2021.

So you have hyperinflation of the currency used in crypto. It makes sense that the price of bitcoins denominated in USDT has gone up, this reflects the money supply increase.

Very little Bitcoin trades against USD and likely those at the center of inflation in crypto are paying out money to preserve the USD-USDT peg and preserve the illusion that crypto is priced in USD.

https://mobile.twitter.com/knmjohansson/status/1453084661043...
I originally searched for "exploration vs exploitation" but that lead to the "multi-armed bandit problem" on wikipedia, so I went with that on my post above.

I do that "exploration vs exploitation" is a better name for it though.
Try working 30 hours a week in a top research lab and then come back and say that. Research is one of the least code monkey things you can do (requires the most creativity) yet everyone is working 80-100 hour weeks.

4 day work weeks causing no change means those engineers weren't productive in the first place. Which, in my experience, is the case in a lot of FAANGMULA teams.
I don’t even know wtf this means. Is the zucc building his own digital asset infrastructure? Is he funding third party NFT projects?

We’ve had skins and avatars since the dawn of the internet. What exactly requires $10b in spending?

I’m imagining that black mirror episode where peasants ride bikes to earn points to spend on accessories for their little avatars.

Oculus will surely be a closed ecosystem. Just build a god damn database and web api so oculus games can integrate these silly pixels.
This comment was remarkably prescient.

https://www.theverge.com/2021/10/26/22739098/dune-part-two-d...
You are describing 99 shitty search engines and 1 good one.
I've done the same drive, thru the farmland and cattle ranches to the south of the salton sea by Brawley. God it was noxious. Despite the sea having a reputation for an awful smell, it didn't compare to the farmland below. My throat hurts thinking about it. You sometimes get a similar effect in the san joaquin valley.
Consolidation is traditionally viewed as anticompetitive, believe it or not.
@Saddlerustle, that’s a very legit 5-star Amazon review if I’ve ever read one!
If you don't have incentives for rural living you 1) depopulate your food production labor base and 2) don't have people in a place that will defend it with force.
How does this compare to Snowflake?
(you might want to read up on the use-mention distinction https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Use%E2%80%93mention_distinctio...)
I guess 2011 was the height of clickbaity title. If the title was "The saga of the radioactive container that landed ashore in Genoa" we'd be prepared for a long story...

Edit: I skimmed through the beginning, yeah it's the typical Wired style of "That morning the main character of this story started with a cup of coffee with beans from Kenya. He'd always been a coffee afficiniado since he met a coffee-loving chemistry teacher when he was in high school. This bit is not relevant to the article, but hey, it's world building..."
I can't think of a more Orwellian name for a group set on controlling online speech.
it's impressive how well that video has aged with modern web dev.
One random person's blog post is not sufficient to disqualify centuries of economic and accounting literature that has classically defined cash to be a canonical asset class.

Currencies are universally listed at the top of any balance sheet, small or large company alike.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asset

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cash_and_cash_equivalents
1/2 = 0.5 last time I checked but if you find 0.5 more reasonable that's fine.

Seriously though, Wal-Mart has $500 billion revenues but it's not growing at the rate of these companies. By lots of metrics these companies are increasingly globally significant in a way that most of the examples you quote aren't.
One thing to remember when interpreting those stats is the popularity of a profession in general. Elementary and middle school teachers come up a lot because either there's a huge number of them or they disproportionately responded to the survey.
In other words, it's hard to control people who are not fighting to survive.

So let's keep them slaving away?