skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> People don’t want to run their own servers, and never will

That's one believably accurate summary. But here's another: rather than focus on trying to make it easy, cheap and simple for everyone to run their own servers, the tech world spent 1996-today instead focused on offering to take care of this for everybody else, for a price.

Everybody concluded in the late 90s that the "nobody wants to run their own servers" claim was self-evidently true, and so all the tech development went into extending server capabilities, extending browser capabilities, building hosting services and infrastructure, and almost no effort went into making running a web server as easy as, oh, I don't know, running Excel.

Imagine a version of things where the server was almost a toy-like appliance. Hard to do? Yeah, I know, it's hard. But then again, in 1996 browsers with Web USB, Web Workers, Web Assembly and the like would have seemed impossibly hard and yet here we are.

We don't have it because we chose not to build it.
You're not wrong, but it can be a fantastic experience if you do have your own self-hosted node. I run the geth node on a linux server and can connect to it to send blockchain transactions or retrieve information from the chain. Example: my tax prep software took my wallet addresses and found all my uniswap trades by querying the local node.
They fixed the issue, reversed everything, wrote a detailed explanation of what happened and apologized to their users. I don't think you can expect much better than this to be honest?
> We see JavaScript as a way to enhance product experience, not create it.

What an incredible one-liner, along multiple value axes.
What I get from this is that John Deere is following the general trend of trying to move away from selling an asset and selling a locked in subscription to something instead. What is hinted at is the idea that users will not own anything, including their own data, and pay regularly for access.

I generall dislike the overall business model applied to assets outside computing, for example I hate the idea of subscriptions or lock in as an only option for cars (although I, ignorant of the farming business, think it could be cool to have some farm infrastructure as a service provider that gives you power-by-the-hour for your farm work).

Anyway I started writing to make the point that the debate is not really about AI, its about the move to a subscription business model
Sometimes there's nothing insightful to be said and grotesque is all what remains.
this is exactly how https://www.next-kraftwerke.com built one of the biggest European power generation network - they used generators from important social infrastructure points, like hospitals. Usually these generators were used only as a backup power source, so basically they've been just standing there and loosing its value with time.
The C-Suite includes the SVP Retail, and I trust that she could manage the basics of running a store. Tim himself has take occasional shifts in stores, as far as I know, and the technical SVPs should have the skills to staff the genius jobs — Craig Federighi definitely also would have the interpersonal skills.

As for your second paragraph, keep in mind that there was a string of highly qualified CEOs who tried and failed to run Apple when it was a far smaller company — Sculley, Spindler, and Amelio were no dummies.
Bronze age Britain was involved in the Bronze age trade networks.
Way to load your question, as if the entire US health insurance industry is not already dysfunctional and bureaucratic ...

But to answer your question, sure, there will be always a market for the select few for whom money isn't a concern. The difference is that, under a single-payer system, you don't have to worry about it: just find a doctor at Yelp, or let the ambulance drive to the nearest hospital, and your doctor and your hospital is covered. You will intentionally have to go out of your way to find your boutique doctor who doesn't accept "dysfunctional government insurance."

This is very important, because when your kid is bleeding inside an ambulance your concern shouldn't be "Wait but does this hospital accept my insurance?" You have a bigger problem to worry about.
I have immense respect for Moxie, who has spent time building experiments and tinkering with a new technology, and as a result has a take on it that highlights very different issues than what most of the predictable web3 flamewar centers around. It makes you really think about who is really qualified to discuss said technology.
Some of his points are out of date (given state of the art is old), like royalties and immutable data. See ipfs, eip-2981, etc.

Other parts are very on point, specifically everyone using opensea as authoritative for NFTs, which is crazy town. Opensea has a dog in the fight, and they are very opinionated about what's allowed in the tent and not. Things like etherscan and infura are less scary. I can't imagine building a wallet and depending on opensea for anything though, because your users are not going to appreciate that choice.
Yeah, I think the success of Synology's NASes speaks to this - they're largely used as little home servers. And it could be even easier if someone built a box that functioned as a router and a server with dynamic DNS as an easy part of the setup. The UI would have to be really, really polished, but I think it could be done.

Symmetric home ISP connections would make these more useful, too. Sadly, that's not the norm right now, but perhaps that's because most people don't demand it.
My understanding of IPFS is that there is some DNS-and-HTTP translation step that resolves content to IPFS locations. Is that correct, and is it immutable? How does that work?
Thin clients that verify transactions are possible though. For something like Bitcoin you have SPV-proofs that prove chains of headers. You can prove that a transaction was included in the longest chain without having to run a node yourself just by checking proof-of-work merkle trees; Even if the vast majority of users end up running clients that don't verify the whole chain -- cryptographic trust would still be ensured by checking headers. This requires no centralization.

Satoshi wrote about this architecture early on in scaling the blockchain. Ethereum also allows light clients and I think it even has checkpoints that make downloading headers faster. Cryptographic protocols that verify smart contract results could be included in Metamask. I feel like not mentioning this in the essay shows a lack of familiarity with the literature even if he was extremely opened minded (enough to create dapps himself.)

He did make valid observations about third-party trust: OpenSeas and Infura. But in both cases: these protocols can be implemented without centralized architecture. A decentralized alternative to Infura (that provides reliable results to users and easy-to-check attestations) is possible to build. One should also note that in blockchain land the lack of incentives to run a full node is a problem people are working to address. It's actually a perfect illustration of how the blockchain can lead to emergent systems. Some ledgers already have rewards for running full nodes. So yes -- people do want to run full nodes -- they just want to be paid for it.
Oh shit really? I actually don't know much about politics, is that what socialism is? I do think I'm a leftist, but so are a lot of people who don't hold this view, so I don't think that alone would be sufficient to communicate it. Plus, the weight of this conviction has much more of a basis in my religion than my politics so it's arguably not even relevant.

Anyway I am quite well paid myself these days, so I have no need or moral justification to steal.
From the article gas station fires cause $20M in damage annually. Not to mention toxic fumes.

Even with suppression someone has to intervene to reduce it from suppressed to extinguished, and that’s usually the fire department.

The numbers are very small, but it’s not nothing.

The key point though would be seeing if these risks are far lower in OR and NJ, or not.

Edit: $20M, not $20B
Why not just do Rust?
How well does the model work along edge cases such as the Parting of the Waters [1]?

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parting_of_the_Waters
Totally understand. No intention of building, but I am working on a project of a similar scale (very different context) and would be curious if you're available for contract work. (ie, review my work for best practices, etc.) Given no other way to contact you but publicly here, I've posted a FR on Discord, if you are interested :)
Yes. There's a video on their site that's about an hour that is a pretty effective demo.
Not the person you're responding to, but yes, that's the idea. It's a control not for the the B but for the unknown unknowns that may or may not be there.

If A' and B both statistically differ from A, then you have a problem because you're not testing what you think you are testing, regardless of what your naive A/B test's p-value would have indicated.
It's crazy to me the amount of people that people would blindly trust the same government that did illegal experimentation in the past and gave unsuspecting populations syphilis. Or the same companies that paid billions for lying in the past.
IMO this diagnosis is still one level away from a more fundamental truism, which is that people don't want to pay anything for digital goods. Running servers can and has been massively simplified over the last couple decades, and I don't see any inherent technical barrier preventing it from being as simple as registering for an account on FB (i.e. anyone can do it). The deeper problem is the lack of willingness to pay (directly) for anything online.

The reason for this is complex, with lots of unclear cause and effect dynamics (e.g. did our unwillingness to pay push the ecosystem to gravitate towards ad-based revenue models, or the other way around?). The inevitable race to the bottom between competitors, under the massive incentive for platforms to centralize/consolidate (if you charged any amount for your service I can always under-price and out-compete you) is likely a major contributor. We do not exhibit such reservations against payment for anything physical, probably because of the innate sense we have that anything in physical reality should have a cost, yet not so in the digital world.
Something I've noticed with gut rehabs and new construction in my hometown is that a) people routinely express disbelief at the asking prices for these homes; and b) they easily sell at those asking prices (or above).

The market seems to be saying that people really value new construction relative to older homes, even if that's surprising to some people.
> The project can’t start as a web2 platform because of the market dynamics, but the same market dynamics and the fundamental forces of centralization will likely drive it to end up there.

Great insight.

I didn't realize for maybe 8 months that NFTs were not actually storing the art on the Blockchain. I appreciate Moxie pointing out the problems with this in an eloquent way.
That feels very bubble like. What I set up will be what I see, and I will only see things I've sort of pre-approved before. The concierges will be in charge of what I see. That scares the heck out of me.
> That's not true, is it? You could decline coverage and then go purchase a policy of your own elsewhere.

What other choices exist, there's only a few giant insurers anyway.

> Even better, you could purchase a policy through the Obamacare exchanges.

I have no direct experience, would love to be wrong, but what I've heard is that even the top-tier plans are extremely limited in what they cover and where they are accepted so it's even worse than company-provided plans.
Oh it’s totally doable to run your own node on your own server! And thanks to the protocols consensus rules your users can trust that for a transaction to go through your node and be accepted onto main net your node is a good actor.

So one example I’d give - every team I’ve worked on has had to build a local development environment with several nodes to easily spin up with a clean slate for deterministic testing. Teams get sucked into tools like Infura to set these up and then it’s so easy to do the same for deployment they do just that. I think there’s tons of room for Blockchain-as-a-Service tools to improve development and testing processes without forcing centralization on main net deployments.
Python allows you to remove items as you iterate through them. Surprised it's such a rare feature.
A mesmerizing adventure game in the browser
The wikipedia article on the CIA lists several ways that the US has employed over the years [0]. We know about them because of the relative freedom of the press in the west. Similar activities by other powers might not be as widely advertised or as frequent, but they surely exist.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Central_Intelligence_Agency
Also if the car wants to stop too much because of low confidence, just turn the brakes off.
Mongoid docs[1] seem to be pretty cool about this change:

"As of Mongoid 7.1, logical operators (and, or, nor and not) have been changed to have the the same semantics as those of ActiveRecord. To obtain the semantics of or as it behaved in Mongoid 7.0 and earlier, use any_of which is described below."

Is it just me or is this one of the most terrible breaking changes in a popular, official library ever?

[1] https://docs.mongodb.com/mongoid/current/tutorials/mongoid-q...
A useful reminder (in advance) that not all conspiracy theories are necessarily false.
It's sad*
Seriously, it's about cultural continuity. Its not about wanting to restrict access to knowledge; in general the educated elite wishes the illiterate masses would be more educated, not less.

But for example, there is a period in Egyptian history when royal inscriptions start being written exclusively in vernacular Egyptian rather than the (incredibly old) classical form. And that period just happens to be when the Egyptian throne is taken over by Libyans.
Pfizers R&D? Comes from the tax payers? How, through subsidies? (genuinely curious, never heard this before)
You're asking for impossible data. There's not enough testing capacity and data collection to determine if an unvaxxed person in the ICU truly has a prior infection.

And what do you think we do to distinguish between the supposedly two distinct groups of antivaxxers? Should they carry a blood test or antibody passport? Even if they're no longer a threat to ICUs doesn't negate the fact that at one point in time they were a threat.
Thanet?
In what sense is it "gate-kept"? Isn't the complaint that in practice most people probably use those two services? As far as I know those two services don't do anything to try to force you to use them, and people just use them out of convenience because "People don’t want to run their own servers, and never will."

The potential for single points of failure (or even intentional abuse) does exist because of this de facto dominance of two service providers, but as far as I can tell there's nothing stopping anyone from running their own node and connecting their various cryptocurrency wallets to them other than the money and inconvenience of running your own server.
> The whole "average person doesn't care about privacy" while generally true, is in my opinion, a cop out that allows us software developers to hand wave away the ways we monetize people.

Right, yep, I absolutely whole-heartedly 100% agree - hence why I am critical of this technology at every reasonable juncture. I was presenting this as a counter-argument to the argument I mistakenly thought you were making (that voice control is not a successful product because it involves privacy-invasion), not as a justification of the technology itself.

> And sorry for the confusion, I'm not saying they aren't successes. I'm just saying that they are not world wide game changers like Prime and AWS as the original poster said.

Ah, fair. I'll gladly agree to that! Alexa is not meaningfully distinguished from Google Home or Siri, so it can't really be said to be a game-changer; ditto for Prime Video and Netflix/D+, etc; and I do agree with you that Prime Go is, at best, a marginal progression on the current state of affairs (I do think that "not needing to employ checkout people" is probably massively impactful from a business-process perspective, but from a customers' perspective, not really much different from a self-checkout)

Thank you for a respectful and illuminating exchange - this is why HN remains the only social site that I feel good about using :D
Directly, and not convincingly at all. He presents just one use case, which, coincidentally, is the only one that casts the service he runs in a really good light. There are other use cases, like several email users leaving Gmail altogether, escaping from what he calls "the worst of both worlds". And his alternative? Using the centralized service (preferrably, the one he runs), because, he promises, this one will be totally different, aha.
> factual data

Nothing about Cuba, so nothing factual here.

Wuhan had a lot of international observer since it was the birthplace of the pandemic (and China had to save face and show it was in control).

I would be curious to see similar credible data for Cuba.
If the victim files criminal complaint to whatever their attorney general office is called should not it be actionable items by definition?
And perfect law enforcement means a stagnating society. Think where we would be now if gay people were discovered and punished instantly as soon as they kissed a person of the same sex, or interracial couples were punished as soon as they started dating, etc.
Wow. I have no words. I wish you peace. My sincere condolences.
The rich do not usually sit with cash in their bank account, and even if they do the system is built to keep that money recirculating. Banks use fractional reserve lending to take those deposits and lend them out several times forward. Otherwise the money gets invested in companies from your large caps, small caps, VC, to angel funding, etc...

Basically there is no such thing as stagnant money imho.

What taxes imply (again in my opinion) is that we believe the government is better at investing that money than the economy participants themselves. In some cases that is true where the return is over several decades or there is little to no direct monetary return at all (but still very necessary - social programs). But in many cases it is not.
I just did a speed test and got 175mbs up. That is ridiculously fast and i don't have an out of the ordinary home internet connection. Entire data centers use to run on internet connections slower than that.

A mac mini, ups, and that connection is plenty to run any kind of server for personal/family use.
I am all for the documents being released eventually, but it takes time to remove PII from 450,000 pages of medical records (themselves very dense with PII). I am not in favor of releasing them prematurely with identifying information, nor am I in favor of requiring an entire department to stop their (more important than this process) jobs at the whim of someone who doesn't even know what they're looking for.
> NFC hardware chip with a private key inside the watch, such that anyone could wave their phone over their watch and verify that the chip’s cert was indeed signed by Rolex.

This is an excellent idea and I am now wondering why luxury brands haven't started doing this. It would be super hot. One would do it and suddenly they would all be doing it. Watches, handbags, shoes, whatever
Whether the hit is there or not is besides the point so long as it's perceived to be there by a not insignificant portion of the developers that might otherwise chase after an AVX-512 implementation.

(Citation needed for my initial claim that the perception of the performance hit exists within that population.)
> As far as I know those two services don't do anything to try to force you to use them, and people just use them out of convenience because "People don’t want to run their own servers, and never will."

Indeed, but one could make the same claim re any Web 2 juggernauts like Google and Facebook. You don't need to use them, sure. You can start your own social network. It's just expensive and inconvenient. This is what causes centralization and gatekeeping in the first place. It becomes self-reenforcing.
We’ll we’re already doing that, except not necessarily vile but in aggregate filling it up with useless information.

Between SEO spam, content marketing, outrage news, and reputation fixers, we’re well on the way to destroying the web at least as we used to know it.
SSO is short for single sign on. It means users have only a single login across all the parts of the system. That can be something like "Login with Google" or it can be they just have a single local user account that works everywhere.

A really efficient way to make SSO work is to allow a reverse proxy to do all the work. A reverse proxy is a webserver (such as nginx or traefik) which receives all incoming requests and then hands them off to the correct bit of software, such as Plex or Heimdall.

Reverse proxies do lots of things but they help glue different pieces of software together. It allows you to have "http://plex.example.com" and "http://heimdall.example.com" on the same server as a for instance.

You can also have the reverse proxy handle authentication. Users get redirected to sign in if they don't have the right cookie and when the proxy forwards their request it includes headers that give the username, email, etc to the underlying software.

This way instead of both Plex and Heimdall having to support a bunch of different sign in options, user management, password resets, etc all that is done by the reverse proxy. Your software just has to trust the reverse proxy and get it's data from the headers.
Customers shun red meat after carbon footprint added to weekly shop receipts
I can come at this from either direction, since both of the following statements are true: a) this system reduces the frequency with which unexpected events happen in the first place, and b) the unexpected events that do take place become a lot easier to handle with the system.

a) The fact that I work in conscious 90-minute chunks allows me to take steps to prevent myself from getting distracted. For example, at the planning phase of a 90-minute session, I'll usually activate a 90-minute website block using an app called Freedom [1] and turn on DND mode across all my devices. Then when the session is over, I can lower all these defenses guilt-free.

b) Say I have a friend or relative staying over, which is pretty distracting. I communicate with them upfront: "Hey, I have this routine where, first thing every morning, I do a couple hours of focused work and don't do any socializing. I even wear headphones to block distracting noise. It's not you, it's me. So would you mind just doing your thing for like an hour or two when you wake up tomorrow morning? Then we can chill and go for brunch." etc.

As far as being sick? I guess it depends on what kind of sickness we're talking about lol. I've gotten COVID, been a little hungover, and other aberrations, and usually had no problem carrying myself through just a single work session. (Notably, my first 90-minute session of the day is a routine I've deeply internalized through repetition, so it requires very little mental effort.)

[1] https://freedom.to
This would not be creating another bureaucratic layer. It would be replacing the portion of the system that is currently a private bureaucratic layer (insurance companies), and replacing it by expanding (and modifying) the existing governmental bureaucratic layer.

If you don't like the switch from private bureaucrats to public bureaucrats then please state that and make your argument why. Don't pretend the private ones don't exist.
The SerpAPI blog author seems cool about it, too.

After such a problem, I would roll back and never ever update this dependency again.