skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: IT stories I cant sell
Hey All,

Long time lurker but first time poster. Long story story, I write IT content as a side gig for several very well traveled IT sites Not going to name drop but odds are you are a weekly visitor to most, if not all of them. Have been doing it for 10 years plus but the issue...

The really interesting stories I have no one will buy because they are focused on privacy, digital freedom, the law and lawbreakers but I can't get a bite because its not "How to do XYZ in some SAAS" or "IT failures, how to avoid them", "The time I burnt down the DC"" I fought the tax man over IR35 and lost"/some standard IT related subject. I have written some of this and some places have taken it (and the unique visitors and comments sky-rocketed) but because it's not advertiser friendly, no one wants it.

I can sell the how-to's all day but my real passion is security, personal privacy and digital rights but they don't tend to go well with the data harvesting based sites for obvious reasons. I reach out to my usual contacts but if its not some hot new SAAS technology or such they are rarely interested. I have tried broader interest sites but half don't even have the decency to acknowledge you. Either that or they want the content for free.

For example, something that is super interesting to me is the non-kinetic war that is brewing in the background of Ukraine and beyond and how it will affect us, now and if it ends up going "limited kinetic". I believe it would redefine the internet that we know and love, for the worse.

I am happy to share some examples privately if people are interested but I don't want to go plastering them on here for obvious reasons.
Some countries have been jumping so far ahead. IIRC Slovakia, Iceland have ultra lean administrative processes in lots of places. Minutes instead of days or more, and non hassle. UK has some of that too.

France is starting.

Someone in the US should get funding for this. It's a 300M people's "market".
>Of course, Spotify could have chosen to break its $100 million exclusive contract with Rogan to host his show. But if they had, it’s worth considering what would have happened. When Rogan took his show to Spotify, exclusively, his listenership and apparent influence dropped significantly. That’s the nature of exclusivity. If Spotify broke up with him, Rogan’s show wouldn’t disappear or even miss a beat.

Just because Young did not understand this, does not mean it was not an attempt at celebrity-sponsored-censorship. And anyway, if Rogan went back to YouTube, how long could he survive there? Once you cross a line, the tech companies tend to blacklist you in unison.
> A system that rations care based on ability to pay... is immoral.

You lost me there. What makes it immoral? Money is an asset allocation tool, so why is it morally wrong to use it for medicine the same way we do for food and housing?

Genuine question. I have a hard time understanding what sets medicine apart from everything else when people think healthcare should be universally free, but not food, water, clothing, housing, etc. especially considering those other things are more directly necessary for survival.
what do you mean by "random urls"?
I think many programmers forget how it was to learn to program. Imagine the horror trying to make Rusts borrow checker happy without even understanding what an object scope or pointer is.

C is a really good beginner's language, since any oop is explicit with function calls, kinda like Basic. No invisible destructors etc. Modern compilers even warns you on returning pointers to stack locals etc.

I don't think Python is a good beginners language anymore with all its complexity. Maybe Go or Java.
This is one of my actual fears for deep fakes - imagine actually being able to perfectly imitate someone's child to scam them. My parents and I long ago set up a codeword system as a way to delegate trust, but imagine actually hearing your child in distress - it could short circuit your skepticism pretty quickly.
The original papers that introduced quantum mechanics might well be unreadable and mired in jargon. However, the community has come together, digested these ideas, and written textbooks that are accessible to anyone with a minimum of preparation. Furthermore, what preparation one is expected to know (some linear algebra, some calculus, some classical mechanics) is clearly laid out, and has textbooks one can use to study.

No such path of learning is ever presented for any of postmodernism. The twin obsessions of (a) treating only primary sources as authoritative , coupled with (b) the dense jargon of the primary sources that makes it unreadable to anyone but the experts is what makes postmodern philosophy unapproachable.

This forces people to discredit much if postmodernism. It seems to be a community that refuses to expand and make approachable their work, while claiming that their work has important ramifications. That reeks of snake oil salesmanship to me.
Metrics cannot be perfect. That doesn't mean "don't have metrics" it means "think carefully about what your metrics actually mean." All other things being equal in two countries, it's a positive if one uses less electricity.
"It was a valid action, but not the action the user actually wanted to perform."

It's an action noone ever has ever wanted or ever will want to perform.

In the same way putting your finger inside a power socket is an invalid action, and people who designed sockets were smart enough to make it impossible.
Is it 20 to 40 euros for any and all insulin or specific insulins?
I like the idea and the site, but at times it fails to transport the magnitude. For example, sometimes a metric is communicated as 'percentage' and somestimes as 'times'. And 26 times is something completely different than 26%.
It’s not clear what is meant by “to better understand Python”. Better understand CPython, e.g. and you want to hack on the interpreter, or better understand how to write more creative/abstract/safe Python?

In my experience Python programmers can be divided into two groups, those who write Python and those who write Python frameworks, aka Python for other Python programmers.

The latter group is trying to create an abstraction that helps solve a problem in an elegant way. Often to do that a deep understand of the language is needed such as the use of descriptors, higher order functions, the Python object model, metaclasses.

One of the best books for this is “Fluent Python”. It’s also a good to browse around significant projects and understand how they work and what patterns are used, eg Django, Flask, etc.
>> one side has to find a few bugs, the other side has to make zero mistakes.

> This is not how security works.

what do you mean?

ime this is absolutely how security works regardless of your defense strategy.
Yes, Neil Young has the right not to associate with Spotify for whatever reasons he may have, assuming there is not a contractual agreement to the contrary. However, there is no reason to assume that his position is morally superior to anyone else's.
> free speech works both ways. It’s correct to argue that Joe Rogan has a right to say whatever he wants on his podcast, and that people who want to listen to his show should be able to. But it’s also correct that Neil Young has a right to make clear that he doesn’t want to be associated with a service that is associated with Rogan, and to publicize his stance.

That’s not exactly a fair interpretation. Neil first asked Spotify to censor Rogan, then removed himself from the platform. Attempting to suppress someone else’s speech is definitely not being pro-free speech, in fact it’s complete opposite.
What’s great about this video is that all the jokes have their basis in truth… usually an uncomfortable truth.
You can use replace directive in go mod then you'd be able to load library from local path
I tend to use "tech debt" as a euphemism for other people's bad code and design decisions. Work politics.
So imagine the bank give all objects in their company an address. The desk has an address, the fridge has an address and so on. Bank accounts have an address too. All these addresses look the same and use the same system to interact with them. The problem is that Johnny wanted to deposit $50 dollar into his account, but he accidentally used the wrong address, and now the fridge in the the bank's kitchen on the 5th floor now owns $50. To his dismay, there is nobody to send his funds back since no human owns the fridge and nobody is even able to break the fridge open to get it out. Don't blame the fridge they say, don't blame the bank they say, don't blame the currency or the address system or the person who made the rules so that fridge addresses and bank account addresses work the same. No, lets blame Johnny, the dumb ignorant fool who doesn't understand the glory of the banks special addressing system. It is working as intended. He should've known better, he should've read the docs etc. Fuck Johnny and his $50.
I was born and lived in South America before I moved to the US and I'm not mentioning this so that somehow I'm granted enough authority to trust anything I say, but to encourage people to look further than this just plain numbers.

I truly wish I knew how to get this point across with Americans:
- Yes, we have expensive health care in the US
- Yes, we are privilege because most of us have jobs that provide us with relatively good health care policies

I think this fight-for-a-greater-good has blinded people as to give examples like yours -- utterly disrespectful. Most of the time health care in those countries cannot and is nowhere close to be compared to the US, UNLESS, of course, you go to private practices where you're back to "uhm, so maybe it's not so cheap after all". If you're so inclined in advocating for new policy, I welcome you to travel and experience, ask the locals, etc, how their healthcare system works.

This site claims that people would spend 93.33% less on health care in Venezuela, that is, if you're lucky enough to even get health care.

This site claims that people would spend 88.81% less on health care in Argentina, that is, if you can afford to wait long enough to get whatever medical attention you need.

I'm more than willing to answer any questions if you have them. I'm just trying to raise awareness because I DO NOT want America to become what I escaped from.
Then you sell the Emmy, and you'll have enough money for one month worth of insulin.
Even for a Neil Young, Spotify doesn't really pay artists anyway. It's like trying to make a living as a YouTuber.

Neil and those who're following his lead are doing the right thing but they are NOT foregoing massive seventies-record-industry wealth here. If they're not happy with how Spotify acts there is very little to keep them on board.

For anybody less significant than Neil Young, most likely they get nothing from Spotify in the first place. It's basically the bad old record industry all over again, but more so. Back in the day they used to care about setting up 'gotchas' like shellac breakage adjustments applied to CDs, so you'd sign off on a bad deal because it was the only one on offer but some effort would go into making a case why they deserved to not pay you.

These days I don't think those in power feel a need to bother. This applies to Spotify. If they don't feel like paying you they just won't. Neil Young is likely losing nothing here.
SO is owned by some equity firm that owns a third of tencent. It’s a blip to them.
$500 is super cheap. Here in Germany, you easily pay above €1000 for an advert in major portals (i.e. Stepstone [0]) for software developers that runs 30 days. There is special (read: more expensive) pricing for all kind of jobs in IT, while unskilled labour adverts are cheaper.

I remember NGO noyb.eu tweeting a couple of weeks back, that they were quoted €4000 to post a fullstack dev advert (which as an NGO they can't pay).

[0]: https://www.stepstone.de/e-recruiting/wp-content/uploads/201... (german)
I think this is more of a “reset jetlag” observation than one about nutrition. Food timings can affect circadian rhythms.

For example, this article discusses fasting to reset jet lag
https://www.health.harvard.edu/blog/resetting-your-circadian...
To add to this, there is some inherent latency when queuing packets as well so it’s best to avoid it as much as possible if latency is a concern. Low latency/cut-through switches have really shallow buffers on purpose and will quickly drop packets. To avoid queuing/drops you need to make sure you have ample bandwidth to absorb any microbursts. For example, if you have a 1Gb NIC that is constantly bursting at 1.2Gbps you should upgrade it to 10Gb.
Actually in the case of the bank, no. Conventional money is numbers just like crypto. I think the difference is in the case of conventional money, someone is empowered to manually override the transaction and make you whole.

As I've said in the past, money is a technology, and this kind of override mechanism is built into the design of conventional money, but not into the design of crypto.
This is an overly paternalistic point of view that robs these people of their agency.

They've spent their lives participating and interacting within the current political framework. Blaming all problems at the feet of "morally bankrupt leaders" is hyperbolic populist rhetoric to absolve personal responsibility.
100%. Just as it is fastest ever to reach from zero to 100 million audience in history. It is even faster to reach 100 million to roughly zero if one find themselves on wrong side of big tech.
The demand price curve is different. If housing gets more expensive you could (although) difficult move into a smaller apartment, or different region. (Similiar with food up to a certain amount). This allows the market to find the best/right price by supply and demand. (I think this is called inelastic demand)

If you have cancer though than basicall the market cannot find a price, and it would tend towards to: 'give me all you have'.
If by accident I buy an option / wrong option, realise that, I can probably sell it and get my money back, less commission, spread and change in value.
> Does a tech MD at an investment bank really get a seven figure compensation?

Some desks make more of less, but why wouldn't they? MD's at Goldman used to even have a minimum salary of 500k[1] and bonus is generally a multiple of that... I'm not sure what you mean specifically by "tech" but Quant Strat, HFT etc are extremely valuable.

> Pretty sure I’m making more as a FAANGMULA company

You very well could be, big tech has been on a tear for a decade so equity compensation is ridiculous.

[1] https://archive.ph/H9eKK/again?url=https://www.wsj.com/artic...
What he's describing is the _end_ of diversity. A big monoculture. Not an increase in diversity.
if I have a choice between a $10 X and a $20 Y, is it necessarily the case that Y will be a better product than X, last longer than X, and/or result in more wages being paid to the workers that made Y?
It is perfectly within your free speech rights to decide not to associate with anyone for any reason, and to argue that others should do the same. It is not pro free speech to use your free speech rights to attempt to suppress the speech of others.

Pro free speech would be for Young to use his visibility to highlight rebuttals of claimed misinformation. Arguments, not suppression, are how you win back people who have lost trust in institutions. Suppression just amplifies the distrust. It leaves a largely clear field for these heterodox doctors to command, because lacking rebuttals, many of their claims sound quite convincing. And people are being convinced in large numbers.
Interesting. Thanks for pointing me to Watermelon. I'll take a look.
In a "typical" 3-tier app, you need a specific, explicitly written handler for each combination of data type, filtering, aggregation and output. That might not be a big deal if the amount of endpoint variants roughly corresponds to the amount of custom views in your app, but not every app is like that. Quite a few make do with just a few general views like a table, form and maybe map. Having to write explicit server-side handlers for every query variant means abstracting these views on the frontend is not viable, so apps with some 100 tables and little table-specific functionality take much longer to make and are much less flexible.

It might just be personal bias, but I think these kinds of projects are common and important. They're near invisible, but even small-ish companies need somewhere to store their domain-specific data, and we should be thinking of ways to make that kind of software better.
Your point was that Chrome sends additional tracking data specifically to Google. That is all Google’s doing.

But also let’s break down the many many things wrong with this case:

1. Your IP address is shared with many different infrastructure providers none of whom you know about: the CDN that is serving content, the server hosting providers, the TLS certificate revocation log where your browser checks if they given domain’s certificate has been revoked, the DNS server you used. It is a given that your user agent will tell half the Internet that you IP is trying to access a given website. Unless everyone hosts their own infrastructure entirely (no CDN, no external APIs, no external DNS servers, no leasing servers let alone AWS or similar), we will never not leak IP addresses. Your only solution to this is to use something like Tor.

2. Asking each and every website to create an increasingly more complicated consent form for every service they use is going to create a huge anti pattern. The cookie consent forms already suck harder than a Dyson. Why would anyone want more of that?

The correct solution is for Google to be punished for doing evil shit and to also build all the privacy controls into the user agent. This would still lead to some consent forms but at least the UI would be uniform and easy to understand. The current situation sucks bad and this case will make it worse.
Adobe Fonts does a pretty crazy thing for East Asian fonts where they stream glyphs on demand to the page: https://helpx.adobe.com/fonts/using/dynamic-subsetting.html

I've been keeping an eye out to see if there's been an equivalent FOSS solution but nada so far.
Exactly. We have a 1-many model for hiring people as well… body shops that are both inhumane and rife with fraud and abuse.
>I can exchange pgp keys with someone and send encrypted messages back and forth. No amount of funding or resources will ever be able to expose those messages

You have no goddamn clue if this is correct or not. Your keys may be compromised, your computer might have spyware on it, your messaging client might be backdoored.
Yeah, that’s true. Calling it a “dictionary” definitely doesn’t help! I would support any and all efforts to stop inventing new words for established constructs. I learned to program with Python and I am confident these things held me back, now that you mention it.
yes, yeast have them. I think all organisms have some number of overlapping genes.
Yea, windows XP has to be supported, sure. But then suddenly drop support for firefox because no one uses that.

Meh.
No, I'm saying C is not enough on its own.
Right, if I’m unlucky then sure, something like this can happen.

But I’d have to be really unlucky and/or careless to really lose 20%+ of my money.

Whereas with crypto it’s so easy to lose 100% plus gas fees, all the time.
Young didn't ask Spotify to censor Rogan. He said that Spotify could "have either Joe Rogan or Neil Young, but not both". Then, he followed through with his promise.

There's a difference between censoring and enabling.
You will not have any luck enforcing that court judgment if the recipient does not want to play ball. All they need to do is transfer the money to another country.

It is very unlikely that law enforcement would help you in a situation like this, especially internationally.
There are many Bell Labs these days: https://www.bell-labs.com/about/locations/
I remember a long time ago when food apps were really new putting in an online order at a sub shop which is a well oiled machine. (The kind of place they'd write a business school case study about.)

A restaurant with absolutely excellent process for handling walk-in traffic can fail entirely faced with an occasional online order. In their case they made the sub half an hour before I requested it be ready and stuffed it in some corner where they couldn't find it.

In the last two years I've seen the small facilities run by Cornell Dining go from handling almost all in-person order to handling a large fraction (between 1/3 and 2/3) of online orders. In-person orders are handled by Kanban-style process where the people making the food take orders at they clear work-in-progress. I'm not really sure how they handle online orders that aren't gated by this. I suspect there are many indirect effects, for instance, I think because the traffic patterns are more complicated it would be easier to walk out without paying for your food. (On the other hand, I'm a member of a cohort of middle-aged people who complicate traffic flows by going into line to pay for food before it is ready because that's efficient.)

Anyhow, once I know a place is good for handling online orders I'm inclined to do so. But if I'm not sure I'm much more inclined to go in and do things the old fashioned way.
Anyone who works in software can attest to the fact that 'common ownership' inevitably leads to 'zero ownership'.
They are confused about import notation.
In C, when you declare 'struct role r' (not as a static variable), it is not zeroed. The immediate Rust equivalent would be to use std::mem::uninitialized(), not std::mem::zeroed.
This is called copyleft trolling, and is a problem outside Germany as well. It's a known bug in early CC licenses, and has been fixed as of CC 4.0 .

https://doctorow.medium.com/a-bug-in-early-creative-commons-...

(action still required: authors need to update to CC 4.0 or later)
This is not good news. This indeed very bad news. Especially for entrepreneurs in Germany who must constantly fear to be convicted for something as ridiculous as this.
Yes, in fact, that's what I meant! Thanks. I managed to mess up a three ingredient recipe, amazing.
The person in this hypothetical can choose if they want the lifestyle inflation or to save an extra $50k/year for retirement. Someone socking away $65k/year who suddenly starts socking away an extra $50k/year can retire a lot earlier. That can absolutely be life changing.

Someone who starts getting paid an extra $100k might also choose to have their spouse quit their job. An extra $100k is likely enough to offset a partner’s income (and a relatively high one at that). This is also a life changing event.

> What it does not do is change your life qualitatively. You’re not going to be routinely flying on private jets or hiring a butler. Your ability to affect politics is still mainly limited to the ballot box.

This is a very false dichotomy. There is a whole range of quality of life changes that happen before “private jet and election fraud” money. Anything over “not starving and can afford a place to live” is “incremental”.
CDNs under the auspices of a non-GDPR government cannot offer any legally-binding assurances that they will comply with GDPR. Their government can legally compel them to lie about honoring the GDPR and secretly act otherwise. Since US courts and authorities are no longer bound by law to honor the GDPR, no service owned by, operated by, hosted within, or subsidiary to a United States entity can guarantee compliance with GDPR.

Any CDN that is owned/operated/subsidiary in full within countries that have legal GDPR protections in place, such as member states of the EU, would be fine to use — but that rules out Cloudflare, Akamai, etc.

(I am not your lawyer, this is not legal advice.)
Lessons from a Can Opener [video]
Generally it's customary to define an acronym before using it. I had no idea what an ETF was after reading this lengthy post about ETFs

My assumption is that it is an Exchange Traded Fund (ETF)

https://www.investopedia.com/terms/e/etf.asp