skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Maybe if the objective is preservation, instead of each person saving an entire copy of libgen locally, people [in a country where this is legal] should save N-of-M shares of it. 51.50 TB in a 5-of-M shares setup would be under 11 TB per share; if M were 16-32 or so, and the community remained sufficiently active to replace the shares held by lapsed participants, it would have a good chance of surviving the next big historical period of book-burnings.

A 2TB disk apparently costs about US$40 right now (https://www.mercadolibre.com.ar/disco-duro-interno-western-d... for example) so this is a contribution of about US$200 per participant. Plus the risk of being arrested in the future for possessing forbidden information, of course, but maybe the fact that you can't decrypt it without four other participants would reduce that risk.

Of course it's also worthwhile to keep plaintext copies of books you actually read, or might want to read, or want to pretend you actually read. My copy of Kenneth Snelson's Art and Ideas is 41 MB and 174 pages (US$0.0008, 240 kB/page); my copy of Boole's Treatise on the Calculus of Finite Differences is 19 MB and 356 pages (US$0.0004, 53 kB/page); my copy of Kevin Carson's Homebrew Industrial Revolution is 3.8 MB and 399 pages (US$0.00008, 9.5 kB/page). If you were to devote a single terabyte to books for yourself at 10 megabytes per book, you'd still have room for 100'000 books, quite a nice library by any historical standard, even if it's small compared to all of libgen. Perhaps a small group of people [again, in a country where this is legal] participating in a distributed storage system could preserve significant fractions of libgen in such a way even in the face of disaster.

I think it's reasonable to weight such preservation efforts toward lighter-weight books, but I also think it's easy to screw that up, for example by keeping only books under 30MB, which throws away all the decent scans of many books, leaving only worthless epub versions.

At this point, though, it might be more important to create durable physical artifacts encoding this incomparable treasure; many historical events have obliterated communities of learning, leaving only artifacts. The Cambodian Killing Fields are one recent example, but we can also point to the Spanish Catholic zealots burning the khipu and the Maya codices; the Boxers burning most of the last copy of the Yongle Encyclopedia; Qin Shi Huang's Burning of the Books and Burying of the Scholars; the Christians' prohibition on the Egyptian religion, which brought to a close the millennia-long knowledge of hieroglyphs; and Sulla's conquest of Syracuse, in which Archimedes was killed and his knowledge of the integral calculus was lost until Newton.
When America isn't even near the top of spending-per-GDP, there's no way it's higher than all the other countries combined in per-capita spending.
I’m going remote while my employment status still shows me as full time remote.

However I’m moving to the Bay Area to fulfill my dream of living (hopefully someday in the future thrive lol) in the tech hotbed
I tried but then I switched to doing the opposite.

I am now working 7 days a week (freelancing), but then I try to stick to roughly 4 hours a day.

Except for when I want to take vacation with friends or family, I realized that I did not really need 2-3 days off every week.

Waking up around 8am and working until 1pm gives me a lot more joy.
About five years ago, I left a job which had been providing me a phone. I was replacing them every two years since that was the regime at the time, usually for an "exotic" flagship-- I had an early LTE Galaxy S2 which had zero long-term support, a Lumia 1020, and a LG V10, for example.

When it stopped being funny money, I ended up buying only low-midrange devices (Motorola E4, Umidigi F1, and most recently, a Nokia G20). Once you get to like $150, you've left the absolute bottom corner-cutting segment of the market and can get a competent device. It seems like at every price increment much above there, they start doing the "hand you something while taking away something else" game. At about $300, you start losing MicroSD and 3.5mm. At about $500, once you get past Pixel territory, you lose the option for vanilla Android and have to deal with big ugly vendor packin BS. At the very top, half the phones are now less usable devices and more science-fair projects to demonstrate how hinge technology is advancing.

I suspect it's really "device as jewelry/status symbol" at this point so you need the gimmicks to close the sale.

Meanwhile, weird bottomfeeder brands like Oukitel can sell a $200-300 phone with a 10000mAh battery, but the combined engineering might of the Samsung organization seems unable to spin that particular magic even on a $1300 device.
How is it obvious fraud? Doesn’t seem hard to rationalize if they simply play the lottery way more than an average player.
Oh come on - obviously I would deal with it if it was necessary for my wife's health/happiness. Don't jump to judgy conclusions over what was primarily a joke.
> I also think the idea that Buddhism and Hinduism aren't belief-oriented is itself a Western misconception.

I can't speak for Hinduism, but the "pantheons" you find in some kinds of Buddhism aren't really like a "band of angels, following me". They're more like the author's blue diagrams of the ego; they're a teaching mechanism. There really are very few metaphysical beliefs in most kinds of Buddhism. The only core metaphysical belief shared by Buddhists is that there is no permanent, abiding self. Which is a non-belief.

As far as mythology is concerned, yes, Buddhists tell stories. Mostly these are stories of the Buddha's life and the lives of "the saints". But these are generally treated as mythology, not creed. It's not a spiritual failing to disbelieve.

It's in the context of Buddhism that I came across the word "hypostasy". A follower of a belief-based religion who falls away from faith is called an "apostate". Followers of forms of Buddhism that are radically unbelief-oriented[0] that then fall into faith are called "hypostates". The charming phrase that sticks in my mind is "hypostasizing an absolute".

[0] Specifically, I'm referring to systems based on Prasanghika Madhyamaka.
I doubt a doctor as the recipient would get in trouble--they have legitimate needs to look at things. And it's not a HIPAA violation if the patient sends it. It's only a HIPAA violation if the doctor sends it insecurely.
You can't fire anything into Earth orbit. Once propulsion is complete, you are in an orbit. Orbits repeat. So if your orbit starts from the ground, your orbit will intersect the ground which is... undesirable.

Instead, you have to fire a rocket motor to alter the initial orbit into one that doesn't intersect the ground. Now you have a new problem: you have to design a rocket motor which can withstand the launch. A solid rocket almost certainly will spontaneously RUD when heavy acceleration is applied. A liquid rocket has pumps and pipes which are likely can't survive the acceleration.

This is the reason spin launch is nonsense: you've traded a solved problem (make big rocket motor) for an unsolvable problem: make a rocket motor which can withstand absurd acceleration.

The other red flag with spin launch is that genuinely new approaches to problems do not come from unqualified randos thinking about a problem. For example, if a company has a crazy new idea for blood testing, it's really bad if the crazy new idea came from someone with zero experience and zero domain knowledge.
I just replaced my E550 Samsung plasma from 2012 with a QD-OLED precisely because LCD tech just wasn't better. Even on the QD-OLED, the extra brightness and 120Hz is nice, but it isn't as massive of a leap as I expected it to be (though some of the inaccurate colour modes certainly give that impression) and it is far too complicated with the different modes for different content and some content looks terrible unless you disable the built in processing.
I’m a contractor working 4 days per week for a well known YC startup. I indie hack on Fridays and weekends.

I found the job on Twitter, almost by mistake. The 4-day workweek was a non-negotiable for me because the indie hacking part is so much fun, and it’s making me around $60-70k/year, and I’d very much like to keep on developing the business.
China is falling into recession. Europe is falling into recession. A Federal Reserve governor(Kashkari) is now expressing doubt that inflation can be reined in without triggering a recession. Stonks have recovered from the initial drop, but that is a familiar pattern in many previous stock bubbles before the market really plummets.

Think really hard about switching jobs now. If you do, have liquid reserves to fall back on(cash or cash equivalents, T-Bills, not stocks), and pick a company with good cash flow.

I understand folks who have ridden out the last two recessions and will tell you you'll be fine, and you probably will be, but don't be hasty right now. A lot of big companies are going to be under growth pressures in the next few quarters and one easy way to cut expenses is to fire people.
You can prepurchase a domain for 10 years. Set a calendar reminder 9 years from now to renew for another 10..
How many years of security updates? the whole reason I need to replace my pixel 3a is because they stopped giving security updates. If I buy another phone and its only good for 2 more years I'm sort of shooting myself in the foot. I do like the overall ideas behind it, and 3.5mm I definitely want.
wait, firefox can translate without extensions?
Yeah that’s a bug. I’ll fix it when I get to my computer. For now, you can replace the 127.0.01:5500 part with ideas.dynamate.io.

Thanks for using it and posting an idea!
Y Combinator post uncovers strange story about millionaire user
The user pontifier went semi-viral on a corner of twitter after posting about buying up 75 houses and a 17 acre warehouse in Pine Bluff AK. I started looking into his old social media posts, which tell a million dollar story about 3 different start-ups in various states of chaos. He seems like a very genuine and intelligent guy, but read a bit before you praise his business acumen on here.
Did Trasodone cure the sleep apnea itself or the low threshold?
Telehealth had nothing to do with it other than causing the picture to be taken. The picture was taken with a Google-linked phone, the AI flagged it as CSAM. The transfer to the pediatrician was probably secure and not seen by Sauron's Eye.
those phones are end of life for updates already, including security updates. you don't want those if you want to be secure.
That's not really Rush, just like the surviving Led Zeppelin players playing a concert with Jason Bonham isn't really LZ. The guest drummer isn't an official band member in either case, just a guest musician. The band itself just doesn't exist; now it's "the surviving members of band X". Pink Floyd is the same way; they disbanded after their keyboardist died.
I've also been going in 4 days a week since we signed our office lease a few months ago, I really like it. We still do full remote (since day 1, back in 2018!) but I find that the office really helps with communication, especially amongst leadership. Doesn't bother me if any of the devs are FT remote, but I definitely prefer seeing the CEO, head of business, head of product, etc. all in person.
See also 'wrongful death'. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wrongful_death_claim
> In Europe, if you buy an international phone, chances are that phone will just work across the litany of carriers across the continent. That’s not quite the case in the U.S., as fewer international devices support the necessary bands.

Can't modern modems simply support all bands? How hard is that?
This is not what love is. It is merely a list of words for qualities that are sometimes recognized while experiencing love.
> Probably one of the most reliable devices you will have in your house is the refrigerator, as its compressor has the minimum of moving parts and carries its own lubrication.

Most compressors (if not all) self lubricate since they compress in a closed loop. I've recently become a home owner and had to replace the compressor in my A/C unit (as well as some other parts) and it is truly a marvel of engineering.
> What if you dug a very deep hole, created a near-vaccuum, and you shot the rocket out like a rail-cannon?

What would happen is your payload would follow a ballistic trajectory up through the atmosphere into space, then it'd fall back down and hit the ground somewhere west of the hole because earth rotated under it while it was in flight.

As XKCD puts it, "The reason it's hard to get to orbit isn't that space is high up. It's hard to get to orbit because you have to go so fast." https://what-if.xkcd.com/58/

Also the way 2-body orbits work, you will always return to the point you last changed your velocity. That means your hole-launched spacecraft's flight path is actually an elliptical orbit that's so extremely narrow that it looks more like a straight line up and down, and then the ground prevents the vehicle from continuing on its orbit around the Earth's center of mass. So if you want to "circularize your orbit" you have to increase your sideways velocity by thrusting at the top of your orbit, so you can as Hitchhiker's Guide puts it "throw yourself at the ground and miss." That way the ellipse is mostly a circle around the Earth and you'll return to that thrust point in space rather than returning to hole's entrance.

So you'd want to make the hole more like a train track running just under the surface (or an evacuated tube just above the surface). That's sort of what SpinLaunch and other non-rocket space launch systems like mass drivers and Project Babylon.
> People who refuse to work from the office, even a few days out of the week, look like total snowflakes to me.

I thought the level of intelligence on HN was higher than this.
It does require an extension, but that extension is written and maintained by Mozilla themselves.

(https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/firefox-trans...)
I have certainly heard this from some teachers in non-charter schools, and I've seen one student asked not to return to the charter school where I teach part-time.
I already did quit my previous job in Frankfurt because they wanted us to return to the office towards the end of 2020. I expect to be treated like an adult and have the flexibility to come to the office on the days when I, or my co-workers see the need.

In my current job, I have that flexibility and that is worth at least a couple of 10 thousand euros per year to me (well if the inflation can't be controlled for some more time then maybe not).
Nobody should want to teach at the current pay rate offered and the lack of f*cks given for their mental and physical health, workload, student counts and support. My wife taught for 12-13 years and now coordinates for special education kids in her district, but her pay is tied to the teachers pay scale. Her district gave out 2% raises this year, in a record inflation year, she's making less than she did 3 years ago at this rate. I'm on the side of letting our education system collapse and get rebooted, teachers need to be treated better, way better. Kids should value education, and if they don't want to be there, kick them out. Teachers are not day care.
First of all, "in the US alone," is misleading because the vast majority of BBS and their users were actually in the US.

Another vague assertion stated confidently, but without sources. How do you know this? What percentage is a vast majority?

60K BBSs means a capacity of exactly 60K users simultaneously

Again, stated like a fact, but there were BBSs with multiple lines. What percentage? I don't know. Do you? But "capacity" is a red herring anyway, just like "significance".
I am not a lawyer either, but as a practical matter, it's not illegal unless a judge says so. reminder
Still love my 2013 Panasonic P55 plasma and won’t upgrade until it dies.
From the article:

> For example, the Google Pixel 5 had the Snapdragon 765G and the Pixel 6 series has Tensor with all of its inefficiencies.

The author lost me right there. They are either unable to understand the difference between a midrange snapdragon and a state-of-the-art custom chip with 5 year support, or they are playing out a narrative that supports their argument.
Figure 2 shows increased “cognitive mobility” after receiving the Fields medal.

This suggests that the story in the number of papers and the citation counts is not regression to the mean but switching to a new area where the medalist is less experienced.
I would say as someone who is now fully remote, you really should only work for companies that are "remote first" if you want to stay that way.
I'm still totally not off Google yet but this is the direction I'm going in. Fastmail for email (still need to do the POP/IMAP setup for local caching using Thunderbird), local ISP for phone number, Syncthing for syncing across PCs/Android phones (except iOS which lives in its own world) and Facebook has been deleted long ago. Just takes a while to get off Google because of years of sign-ups but I already got the financial and government services off it.
I moved jobs from a job with 100% WFH allowed to another one with 100% WFH allowed.

Luckily I live 15 minutes door-to-door on the bus away so I’ve been going in for not even a full day once per week. I do now think it’s nice to see people, but really that’s all I’m going in for, I find I am far more comfortable and therefore work better at home.

Don’t see myself ever working in an office again, and I look back on the days where I would actually take two flights a week to go and work in other people’s offices with amazement that I actually put up with it
Is it possible to use uMatrix on Firefox mobile (e.g., Fennec) for Android yet. Why not.

[Why use Android instead of iOS. Answer: NetGuard.]
I would like my job a lot more if I was given a cost of living increase that matches inflation. Unless my productivity has dropped in equal measure..

Otherwise it all seems in vain unless you leave for a raise. No one has loyalty anymore.
Singapore will decriminalize sex between men by repealing a colonial-era law
This is kind of a weird take -- the entire article seems to boil down to "Bioshock infinite was kind of like the history of mormonism but also not really but also maybe a bit I guess?"

I'm not sure what the author's point was.
This exactly. I think op is missing the very first rule of business. Always take the customer's money.
Yes, and I am still doing it as department head.
What if it leaks out to sea level and kills us all?
I remember how a set of people back in the day would praise that decision from a certain company and all copycats later as "courageous", "innovative" and so on. "It'll give space for a better battery" may be the most deluded one if you looked at the competition and their offerings at the time, followed by "slimmer phones" (as if a good thing regardless after a certain threshold not limited by the 3.5 jack) and so on. Plenty waterproofed phones before 2015 too. In reality it's more about enforcing a vision and making bucks selling wireless sets, Airpods being annunced back to back with the removal of it. (and a lot of OEMs trying to do the same identical thing, such as Samsung and Google)

Apple's 10 bucks USB-C DAC may be great for the price, but dongleism is one of the worst and most disgusting trends hardware has had in the past decades, "just use and carry around an adapter (two if you want to charge at the same time too) at all times with you lmao". I wouldn't even care, if it wasn't forced for the rest of us. Feels like such a weird thing to have to complain about like this, too, it's very divisive.
Local inferencing eliminates the round trip latency to/from the cloud. Also, for wireless sensors, you save power by not having to turn on your radio transmitter and receiver on.

For non-battery / line powered devices, thermal design is a big consideration at the edge. Running high powered GPUs in non-environmentally controlled environments is difficult. Low power AI chipsets can help reduce product cost, design cost (simpler thermal designs), and decrease product SWaPs.
Metformin Found Effective at Reducing Odds of Serious Outcomes for Covid-19
Researchers have found that metformin, a commonly prescribed diabetes medication, lowers the odds of emergency department visits, hospitalizations, or death due to COVID-19 by over 40 percent; and over 50 percent if prescribed early in onset of symptoms.
Ever read the problem of pain by c s lewis? Interesting perspective on the existence of suffering from someone who believes in the Christian God.
I believe that test was taken after CNAME-based blocking became available in Firefox but before it made its way to Tor browser (which, at least at the time, was based on Firefox ESR). I suspect a modern run of the test would show the browsers as similar.
Presumably things like California's proposed new math standards documents[1]. In chapter 7 (for 11-13 year olds) there are examples like this:

> BLUE Family: 2 adults; 2 children You are a Latinx family with two children under the age of five. Mom stays home to take care of the children. Dad works 40 hours per week at a construction company that pays two times minimum wage for nontipped employees.

> YELLOW Family: 1 adult You are a young, single Black woman who is going to school part time and working full time (40 hours per week). You work at the same construction company as the dad of the BLUE family, but most Black women (including you) make 64 percent of what men at the company make.

i.e. the government encouraging flamebaiting over race/sex. The example goes on to have children conclude the minimum wage is unfair and encourage them to write letters to their representatives about raising it based a comparison of wages to cost of rentals in Chicago.

Mind you, when this proposal was making the rounds a couple years ago, I looked up rentals in Chicago and found plenty at a fraction of the quoted numbers for the exercise, but the point of the exercise is to teach children the virtues of activism, not to teach them to use math to understand their world.

[1] https://www.cde.ca.gov/ci/ma/cf/
Are you trying to say that the poster I replied to, who specifically linked to a Wikipedia article about US Anti-trust Law, was not literally referring to US Anti-trust Law? And that I am being pedantic for assuming the parent poster meant what they said about the law they linked to?

Did you perhaps mean to respond to a different comment?
Firefox on iOS is just UI chrome around webview. I use it because it syncs my tabs and bookmarks, but I don't expect any enhanced privacy over what Safari mobile offers.
Not quite. The API action and the previous responses pagination token is what denotes the consistent list “snapshot.” They get a current view of the datastore every time they start a new paginated API operation, eg without passing an existing token.

Edit: you might think of the list results like a materialized view. It works really well with natural ordering on something like item create time and you can pass that in as a query param.
Different people have different preferences and circumstances. Literally all of my team consist of people from different countries, working from office have absolutely no other value except for people in office to bother me with small talk. No thank you. Real snowflakes are people who can't understand why other people would want to do something differently than themselves.
> Companies like Apple that invested in massive new campuses in recent years understandably have an incentive to get people in them.

I don't understand it. It's a sunk cost, getting people there will just increase the costs and make many unhappy.
There's a substantial layer of people in the US who derive most of their meaning from work and don't have a social circle outside of coworkers.

It's easy for them to lash out against an outgroup. I wouldn't take it personally.