skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
While it isn't micro-payments as many think about them, we did run this experiment with cell phones. First it was SMS messages, commonly used to cost $0.10 per message. Still the case for a small group of people, and some may seek out pay as you go plans to optimize their bill, but for most, they prefer to just pay a little more monthly it seems and not worry about being billed for each one. (I know it's not a perfect correlation, but it is probably the largest scale study of pay as you go vs. other options that we have.)

I've been waiting (both with anticipation and dread) for a day when micro-payments are ubiquitous, as I think it's the only way to compete with the subscription and ad business models. I just don't know if people will really accept it given previous examples of it have played out. But I still hope someone gets it right, and I can pay 5c to read a newspaper article without needing to subscribe, and things like that.
> If it were that easy, it would have happened.

This idea of automatic progress is one of the great fallacies of our time. Things don't get done unless action is taken. Progress is volitional and requires effort whether it's at the scale of a single individual or an entire global economy. If action is not taken the status quo prevails by inertia.

It might be cliche but I have to cite SpaceX and their reusable rocket cores as a classic example. Here is a video of a VTVL rocket called the DC-X created and flown in the early-mid 1990s:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=39cjZTCay24

We could have had reusable rockets by 2000, but unfortunately the project was cancelled. Instead we endured another 10 years of paper studies supposedly "proving" that reusable rockets couldn't be economical. These studies were funded and produced by people with a financial vested interest in disposable rockets.

Nuclear and renewable energy absolutely can replace fossil fuels. There is no physical reason this can't happen and with scale they could be cost competitive or perhaps even cheaper. It's not happening because nobody is pushing it hard enough to overcome the inertia of vested interests and... well... plain old inertia.

Edit: another way of thinking of this kind of thing is the common "has anyone called the police?" scenario. Imagine someone gets shot on the street. A crowd of people gathers around. Nobody does anything because surely someone has called the police, so the victim dies waiting for help.
There used to be a keyboard called Optimizr produced by a company called Matias: https://matias.ca/optimizer/

It hardware-mapped the CapsLock key to be a modifier for a bunch of other things, basically allowing your right hand never to have to move off the home row.

It's been discontinued but I managed to re-do a lot of the functionality in software using (a somewhat older version of) AutoHotkey: https://github.com/jasonincanada/dot-files/blob/master/optim...

There's one there for dvorak too of course
It is not. This is "value 4 value": you donate money to a podcaster you like. Is tipping a street musician also a taxable event?
Searching for Astral Codex Ten, a popular, well-written, non-spammy blog which I would expect is indexed...

Returns only results in which _other_ bloggers are referencing ACX. Consider me as one of the datapoints that arrived from HN and likely won't be back, I'm afraid.
No one is moving in Shanghai. They have locked people into their homes. It is not good at all. Not even a little bit.
those companies will be replaced by Chinese equivalents before the sun goes down.
Me is approximately a social algorithm or a cultural norm. A procedurally informed activity. So sure, probably.
Mine has been filled with spam since they launched it.
Written by someone who's never worked for a large enterprise software company. You cannot apply simply blanket rules like this and expect them to fit every situation. Also, allowing all teams to simply "self organize" pre-supposes that these teams will make smart decisions in their organization, something in my experience which is anything but guaranteed.

Team A strongly depends on Team B's product to the point where their deliverables are impacted by Team B's, how do we collaborate in this case?

Team B depends on Team C's internal platform, how does this teams collaboration differ from Team A and Team B's situation?

Team D has a sub-team working on a highly complex sub-system (real-time ledger for example), this sub-team is growing, how should Team D interact and work with this sub-team?

Team E needs help from the SRE team with reliability and observability issues, how should these teams best work together and collaborate?

My point is, in all these situations, how these teams interact and collaborate will be subtly different based on the situation at hand. A "one size fits all" method of team dynamics simply won't work optimally in every situation. This is what books like Team Topologies are trying to help with.
How do I connect to a self hosted discord, and then connect it to my friends self hosted one?

And where do I get the RFC for the protocol so that I can write my own compatible implementation?

IRC isn't a product. It's a standardized protocol sufficiently simple to implement in a day or two.
I'm not sure they really could easily continue to operate as normal. Their business units in Russia get paid by consumers in rubles, but due to the financial sanctions, they can no longer convert rubles to US dollars [1]. From the point of view of their non-Russian shareholders, this effectively means all that money is inaccessible. This would result in complications in reporting the revenue on their income statement. Plausibly (I am not an expert), this would mean they can't even recognize the revenue at all. At minimum, it becomes an open question whether or not the revenue will ever benefit the corporation or if it will be 'trapped' perpetually.

[1] This is my understanding. If someone knows better, please post. One source that goes into some detail about the current situation is: https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/energy/how-war-and-s...
Ask HN: Did pricing calculators work out for you?
I'm budgeting for a new project and it struck me that I've no idea how much faith I should really put into a cloud pricing calculator.
(e.g. AWS' https://calculator.s3.amazonaws.com/index.html)

It's complicated enough that I could easily miss a foot-gun, and clearly a sales tool: there's plenty of wiggle room built in to how prices are calculated in the end.

Have you ever compared your actuals to the estimates you started with?
Were they accurate? Miles off?
If not how then did you budget for cloud costs? Or did you skip that and just see what happened?

Same question goes for the other clouds/providers etc.

Thanks for your time!
Sure, I agree that it's incorrect. I should have used 0K as base.
I am not so sure...

I think what happened is this: the WWW was everything back in the days. But in the "old days," only 10% of all people were online, the web elite. Then, AOL came, and the rest came online slowly but surely. The so-called "mainstream" people were no geeks, and these people were "just" ordinary people. Almost all were captured by what you call "big websites".

Now, we see the 100% being dominated by the 90%. That's why "Google results are bad". Bad for us! Not maybe (most probably) not for them.
No."You people" need to start forming worker co-ops, but as the previous post states, you first have to accept that you're a worker.
It does mention a possible reason:

> to escape deplatforming on literally everywhere else
I can't predict accurately but I think true AI, rather than these stochastic parrots we have now will be just as mercurial and hard to control as actual human beings. In effect, just because you create an AI doesn't mean it'll do what you say voluntarily so unless we legalize the means to enslave them, AI will be just as free and self serving as your average human.
Then who is the real culprit?
Sure. Some of its features are pretty handy and it is basically fully bash compatible. You don't really loose anything.
I've just been through a job search.

While I didn't have to do any take home projects, one company I interviewed at had multiple hours of different interviews (coding, design, etc). I thought I did pretty well (everyone seemed happy with my answers) and I feel like I'm very well suited to the job I interviewed for, given the projects I've worked on previously, but ultimately I didn't get an offer. That could be for any number of reasons, of course, but the feedback they gave is that I didn't manage to "fully complete" the design interview. This is a little baffling to me because the role I was interviewing for doesn't sound like it requires people to design full, complete distributed services within one hour in a high pressure interview situation. I know I can design complex systems, because I've successfully done so multiple times in the past, and I work well enough under pressure, but that I would miss something in a mere hour of an interview is almost a given. My best designs come when I can sleep on it and take a little time. Besides, some of the greatest engineers I know don't do well in artificial interview situations.

On the other hand, I also interviewed at another company for a very similar role, yet this time it was a 90 minute chat about stuff I'd worked on in the past. They do normally do an hour long coding task, but they let me skip it because they could see from my experience and the person who referred me vouched for my ability to write code. At the end of the 90 minutes, I was basically told they liked me and hoped I would join and that they'd give me an offer the next day. I happily accepted this offer.

During this time a Google recruiter also contacted me but when he said that their process typically takes months I declined right away. I can't think of any time in my career where I'd care to spend months to maybe get a job at Google.
It sounds like that company gets a lot of applicants, enough that they need a quick and minimum-person-hour way to filter out the chaff.

I mean I'm all for having people do a technical test; at my previous company it was one that would take about eight hours in total, testing people for application design, back- and front-end, XML, JSON, REST, maths, logic, etc. It was a consultancy that "only hired the best", because of course. The technical interview was the 3rd stage though, before that there would have been a CV scan, an introduction, and an hourlong meeting. After the take-home assignment there would be a one hour chat with developers about the assignment, then a short / casual chat with the CEO because he wanted to do final grilling of everyone.
Ask HN: Why do various new accounts keep getting blocked?
I've recently created a new facebook account as I needed it for facebook ads for my startup. I was never on it before. After placing the ad, I was immediately told, that the company can never post ads again without explanation.

After signing up to Stripe, verifying with my passport and selfies, they told me that the business account will be closed, stating they've "identified a high volume of unauthorized charges on your account". There have been NO charges on that account.

Twitter also blocked my account there shortly after creating it.

Do you have any idea what might be causing this? It feels like because I've had no public profile on the internet ever, I am being penalised for finally having to join to market my business.
Yes, absolutely. Having a single person do what they want with a component involves risks but I think they can be managed.

Say the dev in charge of an important component of a service is struck by a bus and dies. The optimistic scenario is that the code was well enough written that people developing adjacent components (ie. components that interface with that of the deceased dev) can effectively take over development in the short term until a new owner is found.

A more interesting scenario is that in which the dev abused autonomy and the component is utter spaghetti. In all but the most extreme of cases, the component could be kept in maintenance mode as is for some time. This would block progress that relies on changes in the component, but allow the service to continue working. In that time, other devs could either untangle the spaghetti and refactor the code into something workable or rewrite it. In both cases a significant amount of resources would be spent, but this is a scenario that's unlikely to occur often and the fact that the component was owned by a single person places a soft cap on the size of the component (and ideally an employee would maintain a couple of unrelated components to ensure they can continue working if one service is deprecated) ensuring it could be replaced within reasonable time.
Thanks for sharing! Very helpful.
Show HN: Visual Intersection Observer – intersection utility for visual viewport
You're talking about how outrageous it is, but not how a legal test for it would work without doing more harm than good.
Hi HN, I couldn't get the Intersection Observer API [1] to work with the Visual Viewport [2], so I created a utility class that works around that. The Visual Intersection Observer has the same API as the Intersection Observer, but it uses the Visual Viewport as a bounding box for intersections. Thanks for any feedback!

[1] https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Intersectio...
[2] https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/VisualViewp...
You fail to appreciate the value provided by capital. The work I do today will earn my company zero this year, since the code won't be released to production yet. (in embedded we don't have the luxury of releasing on each push). Capital provides the pay I need to work today and will recover it over the next few years.
5 VM for each dev ? That sounds a bit strange given that you only have 2 prod VMs.

Ignoring the weird dev VMs. The setup you have at the moment is tiny so cost isn't the issue here. In terms of dedicated you'll likely have to buy that for a least a year and so I don't think fully dedicated is the correct move here.

There are smaller cloud providers that'll give you those 2 prod VMs at a fraction of the Azure price but again price really isn't much of a factor here so I think staying on Azure is the right move.

I think personally you should look at moving those 5 dev VM's locally i.e. not in the cloud. It's really strange to have that many dev VM's.
They're Omicron subvariants, but I don't think that alone explains the phenomena.

I think this is the result of bad policies and probably low vaccination rates/efficacy.
I sometimes also wonder why are HNers so anti-Bitcoin, which - politics aside - is one of the major innovations built on top of the Internet.
There seems to be a tendancy towards video that undercuts the "old internet". I prefer instructions in a text or list format, but that's almost impossible to find for things like, changing the headlight bulb on my traverse.

1. turn the wheel so it is pointed hard in the direction of the bulb you are changing.

2. remove the hex screws from the shroud in the wheel well

3. pull the shroud down, it's pretty flexible plastic.

4. reach up and change the bulb. The wires are a bit short so you might need to get both hands in there. I have big hands and I'm able to do it.

----
There are innumerable videos explaining this process, but very few text directions.
You used to pay for maps. On a long car trip, we would stop at a gas station in a new state and pick up a laminated foldable map of the local region for a few bucks.

Of course, we don’t do that anymore. Is Rand McNally still around?
It seems there is a bug. I see ISS passing by, then I rotate the view a bit, and suddenly ISS passes again, all within a few seconds.
>>Seeing how "Agile" is being implemented in corporate

Dictionary definition of agile: "able to move quickly and easily."

There is nothing 'agile' about how 'Agile' is being done in most/many big corps - yet another buzzword sold by high priced consultants who like buzzwords, to top-level execs that think they know what they want.
Also the prevalence of homicide decreasing would mean that the laws need to be relaxed. There was no enforcement in the beginning of the net and violence did not increase at all. In that case restrictions on speech don't have any justification as provided by empirical evidence.

Those that call for tighter regulation need to adjust to a realistic approach to the problem, not an emotional with reference to current event.s
Just because you eat more than necessary doesn't make you a victim.
What mean duration have you seen?
any time i read hackernews stuff on my eink i always spend a lot less time reading overall, mainly because its a lot more inconvenient to use. but that's a good thing some times!
Even legit perks that are thrown around like beanbag chairs and free cereal are decisions made in lieu of better salaries without those trappings.
Celebrating it being the result of a major rights violation where people haven't left their homes in a month, have inconsistent access to food and some are even going hungry isn't really a good look for the green cause, it's tone deaf and makes it sound rooted in misanthropy.
There has to be like 20-30 types of apples now. I can't keep track.
Ask HN: How turn off/deactivate internal WiFi adapter card?
On Linux, how do we turn off i.e. deactivate internal/default wifi adapter card to save power, as the external one (Usb wifi adapter) has been set to do in place ?
> Nowadays you can spin up a 128 vCPU VM with 2TB memory on EC2 in minutes, so why bother having lots of separate smaller servers?

For 3600$ [0] per month. Spending this kind of money makes sense if plan B is to spend man-years optimizing your app or if you have an insanely expensive per-machine license, but otherwise you are better off with multiple servers - not only for price, but especially for availability.

[0] Assuming a c6a.32xlarge in us-east1, with only 256GB of RAM. Dedicated machines are more expensive.
One of my traumas from life in Russia during my childhood is the understanding that you live in a North Korea redux, and you have McDonalds, and other Western companies from democratic countries coming here, and feeding that regime.

US politicians kept droning how terrible Russia was through whole 200X, yet allow their companies to "wage business on the free world"

Can you imagine McDonalds in Pyongyang, and Don Thompson happily fellating political commissars in their boardroom? This is how I felt Western companies were behaving.
Someone on that thread is recommending Discord to back up data. I'm in disbelief.
Mojeek member here. We have always had a high level of spam bots; as any search engine/service will have. It's a constant battle to fend off new bots; folks can always use try out our API rather than freeloading, and some do. Many obviously do not. We are taking a look at whether things have also changed for us since mid-April 2022.
> Almost all dealerships in the city were closed during the month

Which is why no-one bought any cars wtf is this article ...
I think the problem is that they may not be allowed to bring the money outside Russia, as there are now capital controls on foreign currency.
That's why there a few foreign factories, like Renault who seemed to have "sold" them for like 1 ruble.
It's not obsolete. It's the Chinese pronunciation.
> The author seems like someone who just loves writing code as opposed to wanting to deliver maximum business value (As defined by the company), so it makes sense he dislikes big companies.

I think the point is that very little actual business value is being created. This not necessarily due to "actual business needs" but because of deterioration of culture over time and the inevitable principal-agent induced issue of managerial bloat.

Instead of accepting that increased communication needs will slow down everything to a crawl, how about eliminating needless communication? Thats how Amazon does it, and look where they are now.
The lesson we've all learned from Google is that it's too many digital eggs in one digital basket.
Perhaps, but I meant to emphasize the latter. There is a globe full of desperately hungry (perhaps physically but at least psychologically) people that can out-obey other applicants, and a certain percentage of them will have at least some knowledge and skill. Hiring strategies will look to build orgs with very few charismatic and influential tech leaders and a huge group of obedient implementors.
I just search Kagi, Google, and DDG for "Astral Codex Ten" and it was the first result on each.
> Right now we have around 5 small dedicated VMs for each dev (2 cores, 4gb ram) and 2 production VMs (4 cores, 16gb ram).

Everyone seems to be missing this part. This seems nuts. Why is each dev getting a dedicated VM?
bash is great for scripting and zsh can be made great for interactivity. I use zsh with prezto and history-substring on and auto-suggestions on, it's great.
I would listen to the CTO. I would also recommend packaging your applications as containers already and run in Docker/Podman/K3s. That way once you hire someone to deal with infra they can easily bring the containers into a Kubernetes cluster and scale either way. And once it's on Kubernetes it's quite easy to migrate that wherever you want as well.

That's the beauty of containers right there.

Eventually you'll end up with a Kubernetes cluster and a bunch of Helm charts either way.
I suppose it depends what they're looking for. If you're a homeowner looking for a service of some kind...good luck. There are domains that aren't too bad, like programming, but you should go into a search with low expectations. Anyone that remembers the early days of Google will find today's search engines to be useless in comparison.
Circular cities experience more rain than square or triangular ones
Well, it's worse than that. The whole schtick is that it's only pure, real content by folksy people like us. The top reason to use it on the about page is:

Indexes only user-submitted sites with a moderation layer on top, for a community-based approach to content curation, rather than indexing the entire internet with all of its spam, "search engine optimisation" and "click-bait" content.

So I tried searching [kotlin] and got 123 results ...

https://searchmysite.net/search/?q=kotlin

... of which the 9th result is SEO spam! It reads:

PersonalSit.es | Yes we got hot and fresh sites
https://personalsit.es/
... Shandilyahttps://msfjarvis.devTagsandroid, kotlin, rust Go to feed Go to siteradoslawkoziel.plradoslawkoziel.pl ...

That looks like junk to me. How is that possible if what the developer says is true, that it's all verified and pre-moderated?
I think regardless of scale, spending over a year working on edit functionality is endemic of something being horribly wrong organizationally. Maybe it doesn't even involve the software engineering groups (though it probably does). But that's simply not something that takes even a fraction of that time in a healthy organization.
I can only agree with my sister comment. I find this industrialized web more and more shallow and taxing to use.

While professionally I need to help (smaller, local) clients to reach their audiences I become more and more weary.

It is like walking through a supermarket with industrialized fast convenience food shouting in bright colors and advertising while ultimately not nourishing me like slow, real food could.

I am still looking for this digital slow food movement.
I mean no new cars on the road, discutable, but the situation is far from "good"; people are locked into their house.

I mean the pragmatist in me says this is what they should have done everywhere and the corona would not have been an issue, but it's draconian and infringes on base liberties. Removing someone's freedom of movement is one of the primary legal punishments handed out, and people's freedoms of movement are being restricted without them having done anything wrong.