skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Almost 10 years have passed since this article was posted, and things are quite different now. Most of the popular web pages have cleaned up, and new startups are mostly following modern international design trends.

Even sites that remained dense in terms of color (like the Rakuten top page), have more white-space around text, less columns, larger hi-res images, and carousel banners. Oh, and Flash is gone for good now.

The Japanese web became a great deal more usable, and in the same time popups are still less trendy here than abroad (although coupon and campaign popups are all over the place in e-commerce sites).

But I still shudder when I encounter an oldskool site. I don't care about the minimalist design, and if done correctly it can be quite fast and fun to use. But usually it comes with hefty price tag:

- These sites are rarely ever responsive. If you're lucky, there's a mobile version that works based on user agent sniffing, and often suffers from feature parity issues.

- You can expect a regular monthly maintenance window where the site will be shut down for multiple hours during midnight. You should keep an eye for this announcement.

- There are no cookie banners popping up, but nobody said anything about blinking gifs or bleeding red text.

- Forms are complicated and have weird validation rules. You usually enter your name which must be in Kanji (or Full Width latin alphabet characters if you don't have a Kanji name), and then a phonetic name which would be either Hiragana or Katakana - but there is no standard for that, and the site doesn't try to be nice and help you with auto-converting these things (although it's quite easy to do).

- Entering your address is also generally painful, since you have to first enter your zip code, and then choose your prefecture (usually on a tiny drop-down list which is arranged from north to south!) and street address. This address is then verified against your zip code, although it could have been auto-generated from your zip code.

- Lots of complex web apps are still written in circa-2000 frameworks that try to keep all the presentational state in a cookie or a URL parameter and won't let you use the back button or open multiple tabs.

- Worst of all, these text-heavy sites are not necessarily as fast as they should be some times, owing to poor hardware, or perhaps log files that haven't been cleaned up for the last 10 years and are now clogging up the disk on the poor host machine.

If you want an example for an old skool site that suffers most of this problem, take the registration site for the ETC mileage club (this is the point rewards club for the nationwide automated highway toll gate payment card).

Top page: https://www.smile-etc.jp/

Registration form: https://www2.smile-etc.jp/NASApp/etcmlg/MlgReq?gvlddpef=1011...
Not to put too fine a point on it, but the reason the US Federal Reserve exists is to "manipulate" the dollar.

Personally, I've always liked Singapore's approach of anchoring the Singapore dollar to a basket of major currencies. However, they also give themselves leeway by not publishing the basket's constituents or weightings, meaning they can still make the dollar dance by tweaking those.
This would be giving the benefit of the doubt that is completely unearned.

Still waiting on proof that Saddam bayoneted babies in Kuwait, and hid WMDs in the desert.
Make me think of when Ukraine power system was hacked last year

https://www.taiwannews.com.tw/en/news/4366795
They are literally threatening with nukes.

There's plenty of support for having sites like RT.

Greetings from a EU member in Belgium
Sony Walkman NW-WM1ZM2 and NW-WM1AM2 are pocket-sized hi-fi for the connoisseur
That first image reminds me of a lot of ecommerce sites in 2004. And even so I think I can find lots today that probably still look like that, although with some Western language and not Japanese. Maybe color scheme a bit different.

What I'm saying is, the first image covering the screen when reading why Japanese web design is so different looks like a lot of web design I have seen that was not Japanese.
Work "friendships" are almost always a facade. It's because we *have* to work with them on a day to day basis, to get the work done. Being nice to each other is easier than being indifferent or hostile.

But, when work ends (quit, layoffs, terminated), those work "friendships" almost always dissolve into nothingness whence they came. When there's no more 40h/week together forced time, they dissolve. The after-work drinks are directly related to work. No common work? No common drinks. No more forced socialization means that fakeness is made apparent.

The real key: focus on not-work. Focus on clubs. Focus on get-togethers. Or parties. Or hell, hookups. Focus on things that don't use the "work" glue to force together. Those things will last when your job changes, or gets bought out, or whatever.
I love how you list the lesser decentralized and therefore less secure options.
There is a lot of disinformation, but there is also this [1]:

> Russian law prohibits conscripts from being sent to the front unless they choose to sign a contract and become career soldiers. Currently, compulsory service in the Russian army is one year, including four months of basic training. In reality, says Olga Larkina, chair of the Committee of Soldiers’ Mothers, soldiers are either forced to sign a contract against their will, or their military IDs are confiscated, and they are signed to a contract without their knowledge. In recent days, her organization has received dozens of pleas for assistance about this from parents of draftees.

[1] https://www.haaretz.com/world-news/europe/.premium.HIGHLIGHT...
No, encryption isn't going to help, because they can still block on IPs. Encryption plus eSNI helps, and if, for example, Yandex.Cloud sets up a big "shared host," I fully expect that to get the Kharkiv treatment, like Roskomnadzor tried a few years ago with Telegram.

Tor operators can see the IP, they can see the DNS, and their operation has the effect of unblocking RT.
A 105-Year-Old Tattoo Artist
Also allowing your mobile app to use the same API as the website.
While I'm pretty sensitive to "victim-blaming" and feel for the fellow involved here, and there's certainly some evidence that Stripe may have shipped an under-tested product, I would argue that the distance between

> Every good business owner does it

and

> Every good business owner gets someone to take care of it

is…maybe not really that large? Both amount to "every good business owner ensures that receipts are checked daily," and that clearly wasn't happening here.
No. My wife has one. It doesn't even run YouTube anymore. Old laptops were a lot sturdier, though. Hers has outlasted about 3 of my high end ones. Good luck finding replacement parts, though.
I love the 'rudimentary' app. It was only recently I noticed a lot of people complaining about it. It was a surprise to me. I can search and find new albums, and I can listen to album from start to finish without any issues, share a track link to a friend, and purchase + download the album for offline. Only feature I would have liked to see is the niche addition of built-in ListenBrainz support. What else was missing?
I’m sure there were listener equivalents in neutral places either via SW or MW broadcast in ww2

In WW2 there was propaganda broadcast from Germany, in English and in MW to reach the UK and SW to reach the USA, by William Joyce. He was called Lord Haw-Haw because he pretended to by posh. His broadcasts were designed to demoralize the allied countries.

No doubt people in neutral countries tuned in. But that isn't really relevant. The point of the broadcasts was to reach non-neutral people wherever they might be.

He was captured in 1945 and hanged for treason.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lord_Haw-Haw
The problem is scaling up. You do 2,3 - 5 projects the "hard way" manually deploying the data pipelines, model images, api, etc... then you are like.. there has got to be a better way. It's the difference between a side project and a full department supporting the entire enterprises needs.
I agree... the number of people truly slacking off is vanishingly small.

And no, I can't tell if someone is "actually working" just by being in the office. I have no interest in standing behind them at their desk all day.

On the other hand, I had one case where someone on my team had like zero committed code in weeks, and was WFH'ing several days a week (pre-pandemic) as an arrangement he'd made with his previous manager. When we had "the talk" about his low performance, one of the things I asked him was to stop with the WFH except for emergencies. That did, in fact, help keep him more accountable for his time, and being physically present helped him interact with the rest of the team and spend time whiteboarding, etc. And performance overall improved.

Is there a lesson there to generalize? Maybe, not sure. It's all very context- and individual- dependent.
you actually sat there and watched a 17MB gif video at 1x speed with no controls? lol. worst landing page i've ever seen
I often want some kind of application shell, and those tend to evolve into shitty scripting languages. This is a way of attacking the problem from the other end. And I find the combination of a more static host language and well integrated dynamic scripting language to be a powerful tool.
>Since last June, Google has approved nearly 14,000 employees globally to transfer to a new location or go fully remote, Casey said. About 15% of applications have been denied, he added.

15% is still something I consider significant. Why were they denied? Are there people getting preference based on manager or their own personal reputation?
I wasn't sure about WPE in regards to libsoup due to the glib dependencies and all the InjectedBundle hacks that I thought they wanted to avoid.

I mean, in principal curl would run on the other platforms, too...but as far as I can tell there's an initiative to move as much as possible to the CF framework (strings, memory allocation, https and tls, sockets etc) and away from the cross-platform implementations.
You should find a better manager that supports and appreciates you, it will make a difference.
Losing access to your account means you can't push new versions. Eventually your users have to manually move to other software or forks (by you or somebody else).

If you account gets compromised (because your domain expired for example), someone else can push a new malicious version that your users will automatically install and run.
People should have an option to go fully remote, not be forced to do X number of days because reasons.

This is the problem that remote work solves. It gives you some sense of autonomy so that you don't feel like a completely subservient slave.

Also you said objectively it has not been proven but your subjective opinion is that it's better to be in office. What I will counter is that remote is almost certainly better for the environment and social mobility two things which have been destroyed for our generation.

Being forced to live in expensive cities, pay extortionate rent or be held hostage by a mortage and suffer the misery of public transport, yeah no thanks.
Poring over individual transactions sounds like a terrible, if not impossible, way to identify aggregate trends
A determination subject to whom?

1. RT does provide a view, and I would like to hear it, thanks.
2. Who decides what are the "actual news reports"? Who decides that RT is not "valid"?
It's more or less a recap of: https://www.ready.gov/nuclear-explosion
It's surprisingly doable if you plan ahead. I'm about a 30 minute drive to the city, so there's not really an impact on my social life.
For the time being my company is essentially a hybrid, where people can choose whether or not they go into the office, and I don't know what management thinks, but I love it and I'll be disappointed if they ever tell us we have to start going in.

It seems like the best of both worlds to me. Most days we have maybe 8-12 people in the office, so there's generally enough people to get collaborative office conversations, but not so not so many people that it's constantly noisy. And if the weather is bad, or I wake up late, or I just don't feel like going in, I work from home and I don't have to worry about it.

We're a relatively small team, though, so I don't know how well it scales.
Chimpanzees observed applying and giving medicine
Show of hands, for whom here does their commute contribute positively to their quality of life?
In addition, how much were the Iraq and Afghanistan wars about projecting power to Iran? Look on the map and they’re being contained on both sides.

Projects the power that the military will show up.
But that would only apply to a small company where everyone is working on the same site.
Here’s a real example that happened to him a few years ago. He was out of town on business and there was a big sale, around $15K if I recall, to a customer from Mexico. The sale was done just before closing (something he saw in the review) and the card was manually keyed in. The story was that the guy’s card “wasn’t reading” so the employee keyed it in manually, a huge red flag. The charge went through but of course ended up in a charge-back a bit later. If you weren’t scrutinizing your receipts and doing double-checking of the big sales, you might miss this until the chargeback hits. For him, there was nothing to do except educate employees and double-down on policies regarding manually-entered cards, big sales made just before closing, etc.
Did you ever meet Michael Aquino? Is his paper "From PsyOp to MindWar" widely read?
A Look at the Slow, Silent Death of America’s Middle Class
That's a cool idea. I've been thinking about starting a Unity3D or Indie Hackers meetup here in Indianapolis, but I suspect the turnout may be low because those topics are niche compared to the size of the tech scene here. Maybe I'll give an HN meetup a try instead since that will appeal to a broader group.
Good point!

I'll add to that READMEs, LICENSEs, SBOMs (Software Bill of Materials), example configuration files, etc. How to supply all those files when all one gets is a single binary executable?

Simple! Bundle everything in the executable.

As a bonus, because the tool outputs these files, it can now generated them dynamically. For example instead of a bland configuration file, with all the possible integrations commented out, it could either try to auto-detect where it's running and what's available, or present the user with a question-answer session to fill in the details.

----

For example, a pet project of mine <https://github.com/volution/z-run>:

z-run --readme # shows the README with `less` (if on TTY) or to `stdout`

z-run --readme-html # for the HTML version to be opened in `lynx`

z-run --manual # or --manual-man or --manual-html

z-run --sbom # or --sbom-json or --sbom-html

It even gives you the source code:

z-run --sources-cpio | cpio -t

----

So, does your tool need a `.desktop` file? Just create a flag for that.

Or, if there are too many such extra files needed to be placed wherever, just provide an `--extras-cpio` and dump them as an archive. Or if placing them requires some work, provide an `--extras-install`, but before `sudo`, kindly ask the user for permission.

Granted all this requires some extra work, and increases the bulkiness of the executable, but:

* all that extra code can be extracted into a common library; (I intend to do that for my software;)

* if all these are compressed, especially being text-only, they are a fraction of the final executable;

----

I am especially proud of the `--sources-cpio` option. Is something broken with a particular version of the tool that you rely on? Great, instead of bumbling around GitHub to find the particular commit that was used to build this particular version, I can just get the sources from my tool and use those. All I need is the build tools, which in case of Go is another `.tar.gz`.
Solid provides the complete backend infrastructure that enables companies to spin up FinTech products quickly. Think of Solid as AWS for FinTech, or simply FinTech-as-a-service!
I have worked as an engineer on products in a lot of different domains in my career including:

- edtech

- real estate

- HR/payroll software

and every single project I've worked on had enough complex state to benefit from using a SPA.

I've also worked on one complex web project run by someone dogmatically against client-logic, and it was absolute hell. The codebase was full of janky hacks to approximate the same complex session state and full interactivity that a SPA provides trivially.

This whole thread seems like a huge echo chamber of people who seem annoyed that FE development is getting too complex.

But do you all really think that the entire industry is so disconnected from its needs, and the entire community of FE engineers just have their heads in the sand about the requirements of working in their domain of expertise?

And to everyone saying SPAs are sometimes useful in very rare occasions, what web apps do you use regularly? Gmail? Jira? Slack? LinkedIn? Figma? Notion? Docs? Dropbox? Airbnb? Netflix? Airtable? ...

How many of these use javascript to do the heavy lifting on the client?
It is almost as if different people like different things
Probably not. The technology still exists, and nothing beats it on P2P file transfer.

From the economic point, the fragmentation of streaming services will probably give it a resurgence.
I don't know how Stripe's dashboard looks/works, and whether it easily displays the number of invoices left in "draft" state. But when the author writes about the silent failure here,

> No failed API calls (as far as I could tell).

I can't help but wonder whether that "as far as I could tell" is carrying a lot more weight than it might first appear.

Stripe's documentation under "Collect taxes for recurring payments" explains,

Creating or updating a subscription that causes an immediate invoice and payment attempt errors with an HTTP status 400 response. Updating a subscription that does not cause an immediate invoice or payment attempt returns an HTTP status 200 response. However, the customer location validation happens later asynchronously when the invoice is finalized. If the customer location is invalid during invoice finalization, Stripe sends a invoice.finalization_failed webhook. If you don’t take any action, the invoice remains in a draft state.

Which at least suggests that Stripe's API will, in fact, inform you of invoices that fail for precisely this condition.

So is it at least possible that the author "built out [their] Stripe Tax integration" either without implementing what would seem offhand to be an extremely important webhook, or implementing it but not surfacing its results in a timely, actionable way?
LOL. I love me some puzzle games but find Mastermind and Wordle equally boring. Mastermind was fun as a kid but once you learn the algorithm, it's just a chore.
I think this is the big mistake new players make, they want to take every good card they see when really you should be skipping the majority of card drops,even if the card is good it probably isn't good for you right now.
Do you mean purely for economic reasons or a whole array of reasons and the economics are a part of it?

Securing oil fields and the Persian Gulf is more than money and oil, it’s about securing trade via maritime traffic in the gulf for liberal capitalist democracies worldwide.

And keeping oil access secure is about pure security but also keeping prices low to not disrupt economies.

At least that’s how I understand it.
Similar situation as OP. My dad started the business (his 3rd overall) 22 years ago and it's been growing steadily since. My dad still does daily scans of our ERP. I run the business with him and we have 40 employees, and I too have had similar conversations with him.

While I'm sure there is a better way to do this (e.g. invest in BI, hire and train a person to do this etc.), the fact of the matter is no one else is as invested in your business as you. So you are wired to find issues (even if none exist). It might just be an old-school small business mentality, but it works.

At the same time, it's tied him to the business in a way that he doesn't know how to get out.
> Allowing Russia to do whatever the hell it likes because we're too afraid of MAD will be what kills the West. He'll push against a NATO member soon enough. If we can't stand up for them, he won't stop.

This is fear mongering, why the hell do you want a nuclear war so bad. I hope NATO officials keep sanity and do not start a war with russia.

> there is no way forward here that doesn't risk everything.

Yes there is, NATO can provide arms to ukrainian people and they need to fight for their freedom.
From what I understand from the article, the Stripe dashboard shows nothing wrong, and indeed, apparently shows draft invoices as income, or it’d have been fairly certain the revenue stream had cratered.
That only works if you can get enough to stay in business... It seems they're barely making it from what I hear.
That's what you think nationalism is? You're using that term pretty loosely. Why don't we call it racist while we're at it as well?

It's possible to celebrate countries coming together without the basement rhetoric.
> Who decides what are the "actual news reports"?

Ofcom for example: (yes, I know they're not EU anymore, first example I remembered, but in general government orgs tasked with media oversight) https://pressgazette.co.uk/ofcom-rules-against-russia-today-...

You can still find the material yourself if you're interested. It's the broadcasting that's being limited. Worst case, contact someone in Russia to send you screenshots. Your rights to seek that information are not affected. It's just that EU entities are not allowed to specifically help you.

If you want to read that view though and skip the pretense, just check https://twitter.com/russia or https://twitter.com/KremlinRussia_E or dedicated government websites.
> Taler is designed to deprive people of financial privacy

Taler is designed to make it harder to avoid taxes, it is orthogonal whether or not that impacts privacy. The comparison to the clipper chip is wildly inappropriate, there is a difference between taxation and the ability of the state to monitor literally all encrypted messaging between parties. There is obviously a difference between those two things.

> the majority of people looking at Taler are saying its design around auditability isn't a backdoor; therefore it's not, because language is descriptive and not perscriptive. [...] Citation needed.

That language is descriptive and not perscriptive? Merriam Webster and Ludwig Wittgenstein.

That people widely aren't looking at Taler's design as a backdoor? This comment thread and the responses of security professionals and prominent privacy advocates. Your original comments about a backdoor wouldn't be this far down the page if the community agreed with them. The response to GNU Taler from people embedded in the Free/Libre software movement would be different if people thought this was a covert spying operation. They don't.

> Why on Earth would a person want to lose privacy vis-a-vis the state?

They might like living in a society with public roads. This might be difficult to hear, but the majority of people in the US don't want taxation abolished, that's not a popular political position. It's fine for you to believe that taxation is theft and it's fine for you to advocate that taxation is theft, but even you sincerely believe that taxation is theft you still have to be able to go into these kinds of conversations understanding that's a minority position, even among a lot of people producing and selling goods.
Stripe Billing is much more than a cron job. It's an end to end solution for invoicing. It includes emails, trials, hosted billing and subscription management pages, PDFs, and a lot more.
This is the funniest comment I've ever seen on HN, I snorted