skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
As interesting as this discussion has been, I want to point out that we have no proof of any of this.

- The link says "my friend got this", so even the person who authored that post isn't claiming to have received this notice. This is a second hand report, at best. For all we know, their friend received this notice years ago, and mentioned it to the OP, who didn't realize it was old news.

- We don't even have a screenshot of an email like this (which could also be easily faked, but it would be more credible than that zero-effort text post), nor do we have any public statement from Hetzner.

- It's not like a flood of people are reporting this happening to them... I haven't seen a single person in this HN discussion mention receiving a similar notice from Hetzner. I didn't read the entire thread that was linked, but I also didn't see anyone there claiming to have personally received this notice either.

- The phrase "we’re writing to you today because of your traffic use" does not appear on any google results other than the linked thread, so this could be the first and only time that Hetzner has reached out to anyone about this, if it is even real, and even then... they might be motivated to cancel their contract with the customer for real reasons that they don't want to discuss with the customer, in hopes of lessening the drama. Companies do that sometimes, as crappy as it may be, so this whole thing could be a red herring if it only happens to one account.

If anyone does have additional evidence or anecdotes to contribute related to Hetzner getting upset at "unlimited" traffic usage, that would be nice to see. If this is a pattern that can be confirmed, then all of this discussion is absolutely warranted.

Hetzner might have sent this notice, but I've seen people get similarly flustered about other things on the internet that turned out to be fake. Can we gather some more evidence before raising our pitchforks? Literally anyone could have made up a story like this about any company, and people do make stories like this up.

Those are just my thoughts, but now that everyone has their pitchforks out, I doubt they are willing to provide benefit of the doubt to the accused party and wait for more evidence to show up.
Ask HN: First client, how not to undersell myself?
So as it turns I am about to get my first client as a freelancer. Nothing too big, it's a small but successful business who want a new website (their current one looks like your average 90s family business site). My family and I have been long-term customers of theirs so that's how this came about.

Now it seems like a very, very common theme among freelancers - I've read this over and over again in many different places and from people of various fields - that thinking back to their first customer they believe they massively undersold their services.

The naive fool that I am I would like to try and avoid that "mistake" while also not wanting to appear like I'm only out for the money (which I'm not). My focus is obviously first and foremost to deliver a top-notch service but I would also like to get the pricing right. So how do I go about doing that? I am in Germany if it matters.

My own idea so far is to say my work is worth 40€/hour and it will take me maybe 40 hours to do the job so 40€*40 = 1600€. Then I'd give like a 25% discount as a gesture of friendship and make it 1200€ but doesn't that still seem ... like a bit too much? Or am I falling for that trap... ? I wish I knew.
The previous owner could have signed a rental agreement for the interim tank. If so, it wasn’t legally sold to the new house owner.

(And with that comment I get voted down. Odd.)
The Deadliest Virus on Earth [video]
Imagine going to a unlimited buffet restaurant per customer and paying an extra $15 and then being told after it is capped at one plate from the salad bar.
… which makes you sound precisely like the people living in a communist dictatorship.
>It presumably connects to the actual Internet at some point, yes? Presumably via each (or some) nodes' residential ISP hookups. Otherwise it'd be a glamorized intranet.

Yes, that's how it currently works.
Wait, what?

You’re confident that this person is engaged in spamming? Or wait no, copyright infringement? Or wait no, illegal content?

Are there any legitimate use cases that might use a lot of bandwidth?

I could imagine hosting 4k video. Or a software archive. Or image hosting. Or hosting podcasts, ML models, backup services, OS images, high traffic forums, public domain archives, adult content (which is not disallowed by Hetzner), etc.

I’ve noticed a lot of people starting with the premise that “It’s okay for Hetzner to lie to customers” and working backwards to enumerate reasons why it’s not only acceptable, but good and necessary. It’s a strange phenomenon.
How do you feel about that problem the parent blog post mentioned, of this being slow for large blobs particularly when compiling with Clang?
But rail has issues of its own. The biggest may be the amount of land it takes up. While the rail lines are thin, they are very long. And if you want them to be high speed, you can't have cars crossing them. So they're very expensive to build and they require taking plenty of land out of circulation.
It can be a hard problem to solve, but it is frustrating. Google ads has a threshold billing system in place (based on their public docs). What this means is they probably track how much each payment method has spent, and charge that payment method when it reaches $X.

My theory is below, but I have not researched or looked into virtual cards.

The problem with virtual cards or privacy cards: What's stopping a single physical card from having multiple virtual cards generated for it? So if someone had a card they knew could only be charged $100 and googles threshold is at $200, they could make 10 virtual cards and add the physical card resulting in 11 payment methods. Now they can theoretically get $2200 worth of ads (if all ad campaigns reached the threshold at the same moment).

In other words, fraud risk can go up significantly.
I was assuming that you only needed to train your AI once.

AWS is like a hotel. Great if you need it for a couple days, but you are mad if you want to live there indefinitely.
I've been reading "No Bad Parts: Healing Trauma & Restoring Wholeness with the Internal Family Systems Model", and I wonder if you might find the book worth the read!
No, but if you offer an “unlimited ice cream” ticket but then refuse to deliver me 100 solar masses of ice cream, I think that’s okay.
yes, used car inventory is selling just as fast because there are no new vehicles
> The part of the T&C they point to just says they can terminate any contract for any reason.

> First you say they need to honor their contract and then say they're honoring their contract. What's the problem?

The contract terms don't actually say they can terminate a contract for any reason, though. They actually say they can terminate a contract "for good cause", where "good cause" is explicitly undefined.

They'd be on better ground if their contract really did say they could terminate it for any reason.
What is the thesis here? Inaction because of insufficient certainty? Isn't that the exact issue that landed us in this mess?

Science requires action in the face of uncertainty.
It really is. We don't generally have dedicated school buses here, just a public transit system that takes school scheduled into account. I took a public bus to school, on my own, on my very first day of school at age 6.
Well, like I was trying to say, simplify it even further. Make it exactly the same product, some sold at price A and some sold at price B. Just because I can afford to sell some at a cheaper price doesn't mean I can afford to sell all of them at a cheaper price. Right?

We can take issue with the software lock without saying something silly like "the lowest price must be the correct price". Sometimes the lowest price actually loses money. That's why I brought up loss leaders.
https://youtu.be/NT7_SxJ3oSI

The ending has the point
I think this is basically wrong. One thing lots of companies do during a recession is they try to get rid of the worst 10% of their employees. Instead they lose the top 8% and the bottom 1% and a random 1%- the top 8% see the bad news, have options and leave, the bottom 1% are obviously bad and get let go, and the other 1% are just unlucky becuase the company doesn't really have a clue who is good.

This the same thing for trying to corner the smartest engineers in the market. You're not going to corner the smartest engineers, the smartest are going to go off and work on interesting meaningful projects. But what you will get is a lot of employees who are smart, not that effective but very happy for you to pay them not to work anywhere else.

So even if the intention is to corner the top talent, they're not going to succeed because that's not what motivates most decent engineers. But also, the pool of talent is so vast that they'd bankrupt the company with that pay roll. Oh and the non-compete situation in California means even if you do manage to hire someone, if they do have a good idea they're just going to quit and build it - safe with a nest egg you helped them build.
Ask HN: How to avoid patent infringement/patent trolls?
I know, IANAL/get a lawyer but I'm a poor solo dev in the US trying to bootstrap, those overhead costs are just too much when talking to an IP attorney can go for $200+ an hour. It seems that all my peers never worry about patents but every time I'm on HN, I always read horror stories that leave me anxious. Most of the cases seem to have a good ending but they always seem to take years like that GNOME patent troll case.

What are the best practices to avoid patent infringement/being a target of a patent troll?

I been reading lots of NOLO law books, I got 10 books from the library right now about IP law, Patent, Copyright, how to do Legal Research and so on. I know there stuff like EFF https://www.eff.org to help. There's Google Patent or USPTO search to look for prior art and stuff from 20 years ago is expiring* (I know it's not that simple but just want to be brief).

But I just feel anxious about the whole thing, it really has made me stop coding/sharing code/building stuff. It's just so time consuming when the old me would just jump into a fresh project and just start building instead. I see my old friends from college blatantly copying UI designs when they don't realize most of them are under Design Patents and they're at risk. Maybe I'm being dramatic but it seems that patent trolls are on the rise against even small players, so many new software patents are being filed at a rate more than you can reasonable keep up with, and in the coming recession it might be even more profitable to be litigious against small time devs. It feels like a necessity to cover your bases while you can.

I know there's no way to be completely safe, but there must be a some approach to at least reduce the majority of your risk. To do things the right way. What should a dev do to reduce their risk? (Right now I'm reading into Single Member LLCs so that I could offset the risk to that in case of a lawsuit but I'm just learning stuff right now, everything is fuzzy and more complicated than I can try to describe in a few paragraphs).

"That reminds me to remark, in passing, that the very first official thing I did, in my administration-and it was on the first day of it, too-was to start a patent office; for I knew that a country without a patent office and good patent laws was just a crab, and couldn't travel any way but sideways or backways."
—Mark Twain

It just feels like it'd be easier to just give up building software but it shouldn't feel like that, I thought the patent laws were to promote the drive to pursue innovation.
state duplication
If using what they advertise is impacting other customers they shouldn't advertise it
I remember in '09 or thereabouts there was a tool called SpamItBack that literally would just send spam all day to known spam addresses while you let it run.
Yes, I admit that “somewhat” I included in my comment was doing a lot of heavy lifting. But it’s still true it changes the dynamic of the trial. And it’s still true that the same board suing him to buy their company is the same board that months earlier tried to sabotage their company to stop him from buying it.
It's with stressing how different the K&R book is from books in the past that introduce a programming language. Usually those sort of books are fairly long and you end up with a decent but incomplete understanding.

With K&R, it's quite short, it's an easy going read, and yet when you get to the end you've covered the whole of C (even the standard library!).
How to Weld Plastics - Repair and Fabrication
At extremely low capacity and low speeds in any sort of meaningful traffic numbers, due to the reduced number of lanes and all the rubbernecking. And plenty of accidents close highways in one direction.
I think there are two conversations going on at the same time. One is "per project" fee, where charging less upfront to charge more later on is just ... wrong. I don't think the article is about that case.

Yet, in SaaS world, when you sell per seat to a large company, you can either:
1. get a small deal / a few seats, and then expand (because your product is great)
2. try to land as big of a deal as possible from the get go.

The typical sales comp structure is forcing salespeople to go for #2, as they don't get as much money for expansion. My understanding is that the article is arguing for changing the comp structure to make #1 as exciting as #2 for the sales person.
And that is the whole point. The chances to get the deal, and time to get the deal when sales person goes for #1 are much better than in case #2. IMHO: Makes a lot of sense.
Here it start from a modified motherboard firmware, stored on a chip on the board, NOT a normal partition.
Harder to infect at first, but way more persistent, surviving even disks changes.
It's due to fraud risk. If googles threshold billing is X, then their risk of revenue loss is X*(N+1) where N is the number of virtual card numbers that have been created for a single physical card. The +1 is for the physical card.

Visa/Mastercard likely don't supply a way to link a physical card to it's virtual card generations (that'd be a security risk), so Google doesn't know that virtual card A is associated with physical card B.
This reminds me of a trick a friend used to do: he'd collect the email addresses of spammers who'd targeted and put them into file on his website. Not sure whether that worked or not, but it's fun to imagine that it did.
> How you handle a file no longer existing vs. a socket disconnection are not likely to be very similar.

Why not? It seems that fopen(3) and fread(3) provide the perfect abstraction for that. The semantics to remove(3) a file that is open are very clear, and they represent exactly what you want to happen when a connection is lost.

I never understood the need for "sockets" as a separate type of file. Why can't they be just be exposed as regular files?
I think they probably mean "ML engineering" as in training pre-existing models in jupyter notebooks, the new "data science".

The people that actually create/engineer anything new and useful in ML is <1% of people that "work in ML".
A common route for people is to join a big tech company for a few years, then quit and do a startup using the skills + cash gained...
I interviewed with Github recently (a pretty mediocre experience overall) and it seemed like they've fully committed to remote work. They don't even bother with on site onboarding anymore.
I know it’s Apple-only, but I find Interface Builder in Xcode to be an extremely similar and enjoyable experience.
"I know I leased you this entire acre on an ongoing basis, and said you could plant on the whole thing, but now that I see you're actually planting the entire acre and not just a quarter-acre, I'm terminating your lease at the end of the current term—which is compliant with our lease agreement—because I didn't ever actually intend to let you plant on the whole thing even though I listed that, explicitly, on the advertisement for the land"

That means a lie was told.

The reason for not continuing the service means they lied. That it doesn't violate their ToS is beside the point—they offered something that they did not intend to let people actually use. The evidence is precisely the fact that they'll stop doing business with you if you actually use what they sold you (and don't agree to pay them more money).
lol.

This brings me to a different pet peeve of mine.
Discord is really opaque in a way that it handles activity status, it doesn't show you what status it thinks you are (i.e it can show you as Online but Away or Mobile to others). Which is very annoying when working with others.

For times when I work off my iPad, I use a vnc and xdotool to press a button every few seconds on my PC (not in Discord though, don't want to get banned). That is the only way I found to make sure it shows me as Online and not breaks their T&C.
>congratulate

Why? Did you do that toward's SCO?

But later you found out about BSD's?
I doubt they have ever advertised that you can saturate your link 24/7 for multiple months.
Sure, but we know that the OS they're asking about is Linux, and none of the major Linux distros require UEFI to boot.
I don't.

I feel that not needing to wear anything is liberating. If I have to carry one thing, I choose a phone, as it is more functional.
> "Who that is."
> No problems found.

Hmm.. maybe early days for English. If it's purely rule based, it probably be enough to catch issues like this broken fragment.
Is it unethical or illegal?
At what point will the wear resistance be so low from increasing the layers (and bits) per cell that flash becomes effectively write-once, read many (WORM)?
Sure, but paying a high wage relative to the local prevailing wage is different than paying the same high wage everywhere. Part of the problem in the Bay Area is that tech companies distorted the local wages so dramatically.
Interesting. Seems likely to be accurate.

But when the populists look for a strong leader to fix things for them, they're likely to pick a dominance-oriented status seeker. The populists are the useful idiots for the status seekers, enabling them to reach for power.

And I strongly suspect that the dominance-oriented status seekers are almost all narcissists...
> So what you're saying is, if I offer 10,000 gallons of ice cream for $100, but deliver an ice cream cone, I can defend myself by saying that what I delivered was more in line with what a typical customer would want?

Yes, if that's truly what the typical customer would want. But I doubt a typical customer would want only an ice cream cone after seeing that offer. However, if you offer "unlimited* ice cream", adding in the terms and conditions that it can't exceed 1 gallon per day, and 99.9% of users don't eat over 1 gallon per day, then I think it's fair to serve only 1 gallon per day.
fwiw - I counted the last century starting from today and backwards
Is it pretentious because he said he wrote the talk the night before? (It is Ryan Dahl giving the talk and he's pretty famous for writing Node.js originally.)

It's interesting the goals that he outlines at 3:30. They feel like the same goals as what Bun has for the project. I'll paste them below (thank you iOS image OCR)

> My Dream Stack

> - Reduces boilerplate

> - ideally very small apps can be defined in a single file

> - Uses JavaScript, the universal scripting language

> - Async I/0 and optimal HTTP server performance

> - Built-in, uniform dev tools - code formatter, linter, doc generation, etc

None of those describe the goal of what my understanding of Dyno has previously led me to believe: Security around 3rd party dependencies. (They've forked the entire NPM ecosystem to make this possible, and this is the key differentiator between Bun and Dyno in my mind.)
I understood them to be talking about using Linux as the hypervisor that would emulate a UEFI environment, the guest OS might be something different.
Aerc Mail Client Is Quite Good
Agreed. As above: It may for example run, but not be accepted by other parts of the OS (as evidenced).
Most dealers don't do this, though admittedly as another commenter mentioned, this isn't stopping the all the less scrupulous dealers.

I paid MSRP for a Mach E I ordered online with relatively little fanfare, albeit with a ~10 month wait and a model year bump (for which Ford gave me a discount off the slightly higher MSRP).
Point Nemo – Most Remote Location on Earth
No idea why that could be

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dave_Cutler
You get fired for saying you get fired?
You are being downvoted but this is exactly my fear. They're almost too good, they're now the obvious best choice for a public VPN service and therefore an obvious target for the TLAs.
Does tailscale match what you had in mind?
1212 Main St, City, St
(area code) 515 1212 for phone

I gave up trying to explain why I prefer not to have that info, so I just give them obviously bogus info that I can remember. Most people don't even realize what you're telling them. They just robotically enter the numbers. They just want to get on with their day as much as you do, and really don't want to hear your diatribe about big brother tracking blah blah, can you hurry up the line is backing up.
DIY Slide Rule
As a counterpoint, having a broad range of skills and experiences has been hugely important for me and my employer, and hasn't limited my career or compensation. I fill in the gaps where I'm needed, and it's up to me to create visibility and take on projects that look good on my resume. Naturally I tend to go deep wherever I end up at a startup (so I have specialized experienced that helps my career), and my breadth allows me understand the entirety of the stack and design systems better than someone who only knows one part of the stack.

At startups you really want someone who can jump into any part of the technical work and ship quickly.
You can order a new car, configured as you like, with almost any brand. You'll get an ETA and a tracker that shows when it's going into production, when it's leaving the factory, when it's on a ship/boat/truck to your dealer, and when it's ready for pickup. You can get most dealers to agree in writing not to add any markups if you reserve a car with their dealership as the delivery point. That's how most people are buying EVs of any make right now, not just with Tesla.
I'd say it depends on your JavaScript experience prior to learning TS. It will be easier for some than others. I don't think it's fair to assume that most people will find it straightforward.
That doesn’t sound appealing to me. To each their own, I guess!
Here are accurate numbers:

Google Q2: 70B, ads: 57B, cloud 6B. Net profit: $16B

Amazon Q1: 117B, ads: 8B, cloud 18B. Net profit: -$4B
I got this feeling my parents were bad drivers and did not let go off the gas in cornering. Me and my brother felt ill on all trips. But we both feel fine traveling by car today. Dunno why really, though.
But what does that have to do with anything? Why can't operators just not lie to their customers?

Just don't call the plan "unlimited". Have well-defined limits. They don't have to be hard limits, they can be a gradual speed reduction after some amount of data per month. Just don't lie. I don't understand why you think this is a difficult concept.
Live YouTube Stream of Phone Scammer Payback [video]
My 2014 Toyota has a button on the keyfob for pre-A/Cing. Never connected it to the net, it doesn't even know what it is.
There are close Google <=> SpaceX links too... The Starlink backbone network uses Google Cloud features that appear custom built/aren't available even to big customers. Nearly all Tesla tech seems built on top of Google tech - for example they use various private maps API's for the in-car map display. And everything is built on top of protocol buffers, google's in-house RPC/serialization format.
I want to punch a drywall each time when I read "serverless".