skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> as when people used to run LAMP as root…

When was that, exactly?

I just grabbed by copy of CGI Programming on the World Wide Web by Gundavaram from 1996, and on page 368 it says:

> Most servers are set up to run with the user identification (UID) of "nobody," which means that your scripts have to be world executable. The reason for this is that "nobody" has minimal privileges.

Sure, there would always have been a few idiots who ran everything as root, but my recollection, backed up by the well-respected O'Reilly & Associates here, is that running internet-facing services with restricted privileges was the majority position for at least as long as web servers have had version numbers of 1.0+.
> It could also be that undercutting that 36% rate does not make you competitive (instead of profitable) against less scrupulous actors (they can advertise more and lobby more; convincing society that they are necessary).

This is still consistent with profitability. If you're not competitive, you can't earn customers. Businesses are thought to set prices at the level where the margin cost of acquiring a new customer is 0.

However, if you could find a more efficient way to deliver value, reduce costs, etc. you could do so and flourish at a price lower than your competition.

> Also, it is a kind of business that has a very very high barriers to entry (enormous amounts of capital, regulatory, etc.).

Part of the barriers to entry are exactly the regulatory hurdles in place, which are totally unnecessary in my opinion.

Two parties could draft a contract and sign it voluntarily, without government oversight, and petition the courts if any grievances occurr. Keeps government out and lowers costs, likely lowering the necessary apr charged.

> Competition alone can not solve profitable abuse (particularly on those with no options).

This completely violates the idea of a market economy. There are laws against collusion to fix prices. Such laws exist precisely because competition is the mechanism to prevent abuse.

> The only limit is that fine-tuned equilibrium of casinos: only constrained to the point that allows the larger proportions of your customers just get by earning & spending.

While true, this is still not a problem. People are voluntarily transacting at the casino. It's not for a 3rd party to determine if they can or cannot give it a shot to get under the bus.
Europe. Same grid. 8% losses
Sure... please make it drop so I can get more.
Registry of zero-knowledge smart contracts (snapps)
The lichess marathon tournaments usually are a lot more than 1000 players.
> Pinyin w + ang is ∅ + uang. Either way there's a w sound in there.

Correct.

> Wuhan starts with the same (or at least something very similar and indistinguishable to me) semivowel as the English word west.

Nope. This one is ∅ + u.

You can listen to the name of Wuhan here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cWw6emkxmos#t=82
It'd be interesting to look at "years lost" or something similar ("quality-adjusted life years").
> it would be surprising to me if hospitalization or deaths aren’t noticeably lower

Here on vaccinated Denmark this is the truth. But we’re actually approaching last years levels regardless because of just how many people are getting covid this year. It’s more manageable thanks to the very high vaccination status, but we seem to have been too slow with the 3rd hit for a major part of the population. I have two shots myself, and my family is all in covid isolation all tested positive and “looking forward” to spend Christmas with ourselves and not our families. It’s not too bad for any of us, it’s not pleasant either, but the biggest thing for me is how much we’re having to shut down despite the high vaccination percentage.

You can’t go to a movie or actual theatre. Bars close at 22:00. Most major Christmas parties (this is a big thing here) have been cancelled. But the biggest impact is on culture business like the theatres, concert houses, Christmas markets, museums and so on. If covid is going to be a recurrent thing every winter, then I think that we’re going to see some drastic changes to those aspects of society.
It would be helpful to link to some docs and language examples. "Jig is not no-code!" -- so what is the code? JS? JigLang?
Consumer credit cards aren't subprime lending; you're given an entire month of float before interest, and usually have sub-20% APRs. This is entirely different from a payday loan. Even a personal finance line of credit is much lower interest.
> It can be a lot of fun but it’s very easy to do worse than die - to end up a slave for the rest of your life to one of the predators.

The US has relatively generous bankruptcy laws. Many people go through bankruptcy and rebuild their credit over several years.

It’s not true that you’re a “slave for the rest of your life”. Student loans (which are much lower interest rate and nothing like these loans) can’t be discharged in bankruptcy but even those are open to modification or discharge in the event of hardship.

> I’m seeing posts here making it sound like 36% APR is acceptable.

These are exactly the type of loans dischargeable in bankruptcy. The people requesting these loans had almost certainly been denied lower interest rate loans because they were likely to go bankrupt.

The alternative isn’t that these people get lower interest rates. The alternative is that they don’t get approved for any loans at all. Frankly I think that’s the best option for most of them, but that’s not really my choice to make. It’s theirs.

> It’s incredible how folks, particularly in the US, have become this morally uncalibrated.

The US gives people a lot of freedom to make their own choices. Still, we do have a lot of protections, but even those are delegated to individual states. In fact, many states do have laws that limit interest rates to as low as 4-5% (bank installment loans). That doesn't mean people in those states are all entitled to cheap loans, but it does mean that anyone with poor credit can't willingly enter into high-APR loans even if they need a short float until their next payday.
It is a country that has given only a voice to those in power too. I wonder if that plays into it. We pretend that everyone has access to it but the truth is far from that.
Will music NFTs ever get their PFP moment?
Applying English rules to Chinese words is the ultimate folly. Also, it really depends on your dialect of Chinese, I always hear wu with a w (e.g. woo) if the wu is at the beginning of the word. Inside a word (like fuwuyuan), I usually don't hear or say it.
Beautiful writing. For completeness it's worth finding Gary Trudeau's cartoons lampooning Gay Talese in "doonesbury" around the time.

There's also a film about the disastrous interview Sinatra did in Australia and the repercussions on his Australian tour: "The Night We Called It a Day"
But Israel isn't a part of any of those agreements, it would be just as likely they spy on the US via a direct partnership with US agencies
Why do unavailable seats follow me on Delta?
We're Getting There – CrossOver Support for DirectX 12
> the credit score is pretty much an enforcement system to ensure you're constantly in debt

No debt here and my credit score is great. You don’t have to be in debt to have a good credit score.
I wonder how many people getting upset by this are also advocating for fire alarm drills to be removed because "they waste precious resources"?

Emotion definitely overriding people's logic abilities here.
I meant Xi is going to take TSMC, so he's technically going to "enter the chipmaking business".
meh. we shipped an interactive ETL tool to a bunch of government customers and it relies heavily on the channel abstraction and pubsub provided by phoenix and elixir. maybe it's because message passing is the programming model all the way down the stack and all the way across the cluster, but long lived stateful connections are just not hard to deal with.

elixir has (plenty of) its own drawbacks, but wrangling a pile of topics over a websocket is not one of them. this can be a solved problem if you make some tradeoffs.

this system isn't huge, but has been running for years for plenty of customers irl.
But if someone chose DoorDash over a smaller delivery service because "DoorDash is big and reliable so the x5-10 cost is worth it", and then DoorDash fails repeatedly, it makes sense to ask "is DoorDash really better than using the smaller vendor?"
This is an US site, most people here believe that they hear from the media, and is understandable, the same way most Chinese people believe that they see in CCTV. I get people in China asking if I'm safe, or if my house was assaulted by antifa. I think people if they are really interested of what is happening in either country should do their research, instead of parroting what they hear in Youtube. But yeah, you will get downvoted , so will I. ;)
We expect to have both free and paid products in GA around mid-2022.
I am not sure how to parse your sentence, because I don't know whether your "reasonable" means low or high. It could be

1. Other major vendors use subpixel rendering strategies to increase sharpness and legibility at reasonable DPI. MacOS eschews these strategies.

2. Other major vendors use subpixel rendering strategies. MacOS eschews these strategies to increase sharpness and legibility at reasonable DPI.
I will never let a chance slide to quote one of my favourite passages from my favourite author and fantasy series: the Discworld, Terry Pratchett (GNU!):

"The reason that the rich were so rich, Vimes reasoned, was because they managed to spend less money.

Take boots, for example. He earned thirty-eight dollars a month plus allowances. A really good pair of leather boots cost fifty dollars. But an affordable pair of boots, which were sort of OK for a season or two and then leaked like hell when the cardboard gave out, cost about ten dollars. Those were the kind of boots Vimes always bought, and wore until the soles were so thin that he could tell where he was in Ankh-Morpork on a foggy night by the feel of the cobbles.

But the thing was that good boots lasted for years and years. A man who could afford fifty dollars had a pair of boots that'd still be keeping his feet dry in ten years' time, while the poor man who could only afford cheap boots would have spent a hundred dollars on boots in the same time and would still have wet feet.

This was the Captain Samuel Vimes 'Boots' theory of socioeconomic unfairness."
Do you have a source for Finland moving the goalposts during the construction?
r u aware that france is paying for the wokeness of germany? just like americans paid for biden wokeness until he woke up and decided to reopen the old polluting coal plants
I'm not playing victim, this is not the first time. Ignoring would only give you reason to continue with your behavior.
> If you believe the former, we can't go any further because you're just racist or classist or both

It looks like empty pseudo-accusations of racism finally made it to HN, all nicely disguised as a false dilemma (either you're a racist or you agree with me; very classy). This is where I bid you adieu.
They do know. This activity is great for MAUs and session duration.
Ehhh I agree in general but if you want to say that universally, then you’re painting with too broad a brush. Like, wasn’t Google started with servers bought by maxing out a credit card at similar interest rates?
HN is a microcosm, very little of the discussion of the "tech world" is happening here.

There is a lot of open disdain for it outside of the SFBA startup bubble.
It's easy to start talking about something in a different language.

It's possible to translate most of the relevant literature into that language.

Changing the keywords in programming languages, HTTP headers, JSON field names, identifiers in library code, error messages embedded deep in boot ROMs and so on is much more difficult.
Glad this got flagged off. What a disaster this entire thread is.
The people described in their first paragraph.
It's still possible to transfer money for businesses. China is still heavily integrated into the global economy, so they're not going to cut the lines completely, but my family and friends over there who are Chinese citizens used to do direct bank transfers internationally from their personal current accounts in China and now they can't.
I sleep way less in return for way more productivity. I sign off work at 4pm. Start dinner prep and exercise. 6pm to 1am work on side projects, play games with friends, whatever. Sleep. Wake up at 7:30am and start over.
> just in time for the climate change culture war

That will be the fun one for sure. What I do know is the knuckleheads running the show right now up and down the west coast are the last people I’d trust to handle that correctly.
The original comment was:

> A great innovation of Go is that it includes a built-in reference type with both inner nils and outer nils.

Which the OP later clarified by saying an interface can be both nil and not nil at the same time. So it’s pretty clear that we’re debating about whether interfaces have three states (nil, valid, and both) i.e., multiple kinds on nullity (inner vs outer).
Fun fact: when electricity prices from Germany are negative (when there's big spike of intermittent electricity from renewable production) French grid operators strategically lower nuclear output and import this profitable energy.
I've never understood why people support the escalating US-China conflict since it's so easy to just keep focusing on win-win collaborations but your comment gave me an insight.

Please let me know if this is wrong, but I think this is the argument:

1. The US is a better leader than China because it is a significantly better place. Notable US problems that cause lots of suffering are significantly less severe than notable Chinese problems.

2. As a result, the US government should put a lot of effort into making sure that China doesn't become too powerful. It is ok for the US to publish articles that are less reliable than those on Iraq WMDs because if China becomes too powerful, the world will be far worse. In particular, China should not become powerful enough to project its values on other countries as much as the US does. China also should not be able to non-democratically reform international, democratically-decided rules such as International Maritime Law.

For most people in the US, it would take heaps of evidence and learning could to even make them doubt that US might not be a significantly better place than China (Note that I'm not arguing that the US is not far better). On the other hand, many people in China doubt that the US is significantly better as China because of how much better they see their life compared to the past. So, they don't understand why people in the US are confident about their conflict against China.

I personally can't buy into this argument though because I lack the confidence in my personal philosophy to know what a "better life" truly is. However, many people in the US have a more stable philosophical foundation and could never be convinced that the US is not a significantly better place than China.
For cooking induction plates are much more efficient, transferring 90% of the energy as opposed to ~50% with gas stoves. Together with a gas plant efficiency of ~50%, they comes close in efficiency.

Gas stoves still come out on top price-wise, but part of that are asinine taxes, where gas is taxed less than electricity.
This doesn't really answer the question. Yes, the Linux API seems more flexible, but when you think about it, it really isn't, because all the models that actually make any sense can be implemented using simpler interface, which is what jails provide.

One real difference is that you need to be root to create a jail. It'll get fixed eventually - FreeBSD already has unprivileged chroot, jail isn't that much different.
Yet every time there's a subject about guns on reddit or HN comments are overwhelmingly pro-guns.
That's what steganography is for.
They count but statistically speaking they are a blip in the numbers. It sucks to lose any manpower but given the risk they add to the overall system it could be still be a net positive.

I'm not an actuary though, I only have statistics background.
Understanding Gödel’s Incompleteness Theorems
Maybe? Honestly my weight distribution comment is a tad silly since complexity and weight are far bigger concerns, and two that just don't seem to have any avenue to go away.
DanG, do you have any comments regarding the replies you received to your comment here? You seem to have made a blanket statement that YC wouldn't do that, but the evidence points to the fact that YC did do that, as it funded the founders who made these decisions that led to enforcement actions in 2016 against them.

It's not like this is esoteric finance law either, I've worked in fintech lending during this whole time period and some of these violations are lending regulation 101. Military Lending Act compliance at the very least is dead simple to comply with and is the very first thing most lenders ensure compliance with (due to it being federal, whereas some more esoteric state level stuff can often get missed).
I work in website analytics. Cloudflare's numbers are laughably bad. Really, they are not even tracking visits, they are tracking times the link is requested. So everytime the HN page gets updated, that link is getting clicked by the dozen or so bots that trawl that page.

It's a remarkably bad way to do tracking. At the very least, a page view shouldn't be tracked until the page is finished loading for the user. Otherwise you are collecting garbage data.

But fwiw, the specific number of page views is never that important in the grand scheme. You should really be looking at trends, and so long as you pick a number that is consistently measured as your baseline, you can leave well enough alone.
NFTs in itself are not a scam. When I genuinely mint a photo I own the copyright of and set a price, you can simply chose to buy it or not. In the case that you buy it, you're not scammed. The price was clear, and you got what you ordered.

You can think of NFTs as being overvalued or worthless, but that doesn't make them a scam. Just don't buy them. Likewise, NFTs don't come with any promise that they gain in value, that too is on the buyer.
The suburbs are economically unsustainable. Nobody wants to pay to redo the roads and pipes, but everybody wants to live with a private backyard. Perhaps we should make it so that you have to make it self sustainable, dirt roads, septic tanks, wells, and producing your own electricity.
It goes both ways-- do we think a contract with a fixed guaranteed term can be canceled with refund simply because the consumer decided to violate the terms of service?

This is what courts are for, and the fact they aren't involved here is the basic problem.
Official server should have never been in Python anyway. Not a proper language for the network server. They should have adopted Go or Rust servers as the official ones, and pour resources there instead.
There are many, I'm only talking about the ones that get an edge through latency arbitrage.
Undocumented early impl/design of futures: https://github.com/cretz/fut. Examples: https://github.com/cretz/fut/blob/main/ops_test.go.
Why not prebuilt packages? As in, prebuilt by FreeBSD.org, as opposed to the ones built you build yourself with Poudriere?
If I had a credit card with a limit large enough for the need, I wouldn't be even thinking about payday loans in the first place.

This hypothetical doesn't happen in the real world; there's no time where even the most awful subprime credit card (even at cash advance rates!) will be cheaper than a payday loan.

Its usefulness as a metric for a loan intended to be held for a couple of weeks to a month is very limited. Maybe when shopping across short-term lenders, but at that point, it's more intuitive to think in terms of how much the fee is in absolute terms.
Strictly, it's $100 for the citation you pay online, then there's the city fees for ~$300 or something and the tow fees for $250 or something. They will take $50 off one of those things if it's your first-time. No one was amused by my request for a subscription plan.
How much of this is Washington’s drumming for defence contractors to get rich? And if Russia does invade Ukraine, why do we care? Specifically as a US citizen how does it affect me? Honest question. I either don’t understand geopolitics or there is something seriously wrong with our government and media trying to get us into pointless conflict.
Help me out with the web3 tech basics?

As a baseline, let's do web 1.0. To set up a basic web server today, I need:

1) A public connection to the internet so I get an IP address.

2) A server computer listening on port 80 or 443 for incoming HTTP connections over TCP, returning data from a file system or database in the form of HTML/JS/CSS text documents and/or media files as requested.

3) A computer with a web browser which finds the server usually via DNS, and then requests data from the web server by passing it URLs.

Now, you can replace the browser with an API client and the server with a cloud provider and HTML with JSON and you get Web 2.0 (more or less).

Which brings us to "Web3". I honestly have no idea what the hell it's supposed to be or how it works. I've read some things that say it uses IPFS, others which are just about communicating with the Ethereum network of servers, specifically for managing NFTs.

Is there some sort of key technical solution in Web3 that I'm missing? Let's say I'm supposed to start work tomorrow on a cool new web3 app... What is it that I'll be doing exactly?