skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It seems to me that many of the current changes in society are not really changes, but just the ending of what was an abnormal little, extremely pleasant, bubble in time. And it's in that bubble that "we" (Westerner, over the age of ~30) all grew up in.

"Nothing can now be believed which is seen in a newspaper. Truth itself becomes suspicious by being put into that polluted vehicle. The real extent of this state of misinformation is known only to those who are in situations to confront facts within their knowledge with the lies of the day. .... I will add, that the man who never looks into a newspaper is better informed than he who reads them; inasmuch as he who knows nothing is nearer to truth than he whose mind is filled with falsehoods & errors. He who reads nothing will still learn the great facts, and the details are all false." - Thomas Jefferson, 1807 [1]

That sort of condemnation of the news would have been, at the minimum, quite hyperbolic during the time we grew up in. But now? It seems like a scathing, yet completely reasonable, criticism of the current state of media. And this goes on endlessly far back. Read the classics (Plato's "The Republic" feels effectively prophetic at this point) and it goes from sounding alien, during our bubble, to sounding like something oddly familiar.

It's quite comforting in a way. We're not stepping into some great new unknown, but merely returning to the endless cycling of history.

[1] - https://www.loc.gov/resource/mtj1.038_0592_0594/?sp=2&st=tex...
this feels like a serious work of art
What did you use for your plotter? I'm in science as well and I'm shopping around for a good Rust library to use for just throwing together a quick plot of some simulation data. Currently I generate my data in Rust, write it to a numpy format, and look at it later with matplotlib, but as you've said, 3D plots usually end up looking like a slideshow.
I understand you're saying that electricity generation for Bitcoin mining displaces methane flaring, which gives it negative CO2 equivalents.

What grounds do we have to assume that this has a substantial effect compared to the rest of the carbon footprint of Bitcoin?
Funny that you give ‘the road less traveled’ as an example of the ‘unique experience’ that adds value to your life.

In the poem the point is that the two roads forked in the woods and the poet chose one arbitrarily. After having walked it and experienced the journey, in looking back he tells himself he took the ‘road less traveled’ - though in truth he has no idea. It’s about our tendency to look at the arbitrary choices and random luck we’ve had in our life, but to look back on that and form a narrative that our choices, our random path, was somehow more noble or novel or interesting than the paths we didn’t choose - or that other people have walked.

Essentially, the moral of ‘the road less traveled’ is to stop thinking that you’re special just because you only drink Sumatran coffee imported by this little place that roasts all their own beans. Or because you go to a Korean spa that has a cold immersion tank.

You’re just wandering in the forest with the rest of us.
I had an absolutely horrendous experience with Magic a few years back. I wanted them to find out how much all my competitors charged hourly so I asked them to call and ask but was very clear “you cannot say you’re calling on my behalf. Do not mention me.” I told them this stipulation multiple times.

When I got the report back, I discovered that they told all of my competitors that they were calling on my behalf to find out their pricing structure and referred to me by name.

I also asked them to call all the flower shops near me to find orchids. They responded next day “we called 10 shops near you and none have them” I found this to be odd so I called one place I had used before. They had them.

I think they should change their name because it’s not magic.
Echoes of Clancy.

Thanks for posting this.
Here is my problem with KeyPass: its unclear to me how it deals with emergency family access.

Last year my father unexpectedly passed away. All his stuff was on lastpass. Thankfully we had emergency access setup, and I was able to get into all his accounts 2 days later. It was an exceptionally important part of the transition phase, and without it we would have experienced significant financial harm.

How would KeyPass deal with the same type of situation?
What's draconian about requiring opt-out button to be displayed the same way as opt-in button?
Yes, confiscating privately owned equipment and telling people you need them in hospitals is better than lying to people and telling them their equipment doesn't work because secretly they need them for hospitals.

I don't know why you think that's more dystopian.
I am an active musician, but I don't actually make money at it, I was mostly joking, but: I believe that we are (one determined smart person + six months) away from bots on Youtube and other streaming platforms that generate endless "new" music that follows those simple formulas (beat, bass, sample = loop, several loops connected up = song) 24/7.

Raves that have no human DJs and never stop.

Good? Bad? Not for me to say, really, the most I make at it is a couple hundred bucks for two nights in a bar playing FM radio hits, and there's lots of people younger than me who like that music, so obviously I'm doing it for different reasons and I don't anticipate losing access to as many bar gigs as I want for the rest of my life.

But certain genres are very tolerant of low-effort music, and I think the people who are monetizing low-effort music are gonna lose their income streams. I do different things than those people, but I still consider them compatriots, even if I don't care for their art.
The states are fine with it, as it would make their lives easier and yield more federal dollars.

National ID was a core GOP platform issue post 911. It never happened because both extremes of the political spectrum are against it. Right wingers are into the mark of the beast stuff and see it as a tool of government tyranny. Left wing types see it as a way to disenfranchise voters and deny resources to marginalized people.

Both are right and wrong. So the status quo prevails.
What is good solution for hosting a domain anonymously? I want to start blogging but don’t want to do a personal one just yet. I mean anonymous in lightweight general sense, not political activist super security.
Also discussed in 2019:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21436403 (181 points, 74 comments)
More immediately (2023-2024):

Housing bubble in major U.S./Canada cities will 'collapse'. Not catastrophically so, but prices will begin to ease as the city centers become less relevant. Hardest hit will be owners of office real estate, as it becomes apparent white-collar industries are being gutted from both sides: remote work/offshoring results in less need for office real estate, and automation/AI reduce staffing needs overall.

Cities built around blue-collar industry, as well as those which are more desirable to people working from home (cities with good weather, hiking/climbing/skiing access) will continue to see residential real estate prices rise.

Slightly more long-term (2023-2027):

More jobs will be automated, or heavily assisted by automation.

Most of these will be jobs which are done at a computer, not manual labor.

As more jobs are automated, but while we're still in a capitalist society, lots of people will be forced to survive by suing the AI makers.

E.g. AI does most of the coding, but laid-off programmers can sue the company with a claim that some code it was trained on was recognizable in the output, in a way that violates license.

Artists who no longer have work can similarly sue the AI art programs.

Courts will be increasingly sympathetic as we enter an economic and labor crisis where more is being produced, but people have less work. Humans having published work prior to 2022 (which was then used in AI training sets) will be crucial to keeping the masses of laid off people from starving as competition for blue-collar jobs becomes more intense. Only so many people can be Uber drivers and taskrabbiters.

Eventually, once the AI has written software and schematics for robots which can also automate the blue-collar jobs, the situation will be so out of hand that lawmakers will introduce UBI which affords people at least the bare minimum living wage, and take the money from the AI makers who are now the producers.

Surprisingly to everyone, driving will be one of the last things to get automated, due to the regulatory hurdles, liability, and lack of consensus on how the trolley problem should be solved.
EU regulations go even further than that. Even if the flight isn't cancelled, delays can mean that they need to provide a replacement flight and still must compensate you. I was once denied boarding and they comped me an overnight stay at a hotel with breakfast, I was reimbursed for my flight, and they gave me the next morning flight to my destination.
Did you perhaps read the primary text of this submission?

It seems like everyone commenting here is totally missing the point of why I submitted this question in the first place and is so fixated on the content of the links I originally submitted that they just can’t see the actual questions I’m asking.

I’m tired of engaging with people who refuse to engage with the actual questions I asked.
Americans duped into losing $10B by illegal Indian call centres in 2022: report
First time I saw this hook. This seems more like a library implementor’s hook to sync stores from redux, mobx, etc.

You can of course wrap your GET/POST requests to an external network API too but that seems like a lot of unnecessary code to pull in external data.
In the author's defense, he only says "3 things," not "the most important or significant 3 things." Still, this seems like an agenda for maybe 20 years, not one for 100.

To me, if you're really look out even to the end of this century (which would double the amount of time humanity has been seriously evolving digital computing technology), the big change is likely to be that innovation in ideas, technology, and technique will shift from human minds to digital intelligences. I don't think that means a full-on Kurzweillian singularity, but I think we've basically just landed on the near shore of the generative intelligence continent, and there is way more to come.

Think about it this way: in 80 years, we've evolved raw computation power in a single installation from 500 or so FLOPS, to the petaFLOP range - a factor of over 10^12. So, let's be modest and scale down our expectations, and try to imagine what generative intelligence that is 100 times (not 1 trillion) as capable as, say, AlphaZero is, might do. I'm sure I can't actually imagine the results, but I do predict it will shift the balance of innovative "thinking" from human minds to digital intelligences.
> A healthy young male like me would probably have been far better off to not receive any kind of vaccine

If you mean “might” instead of “would probably”, then maybe I’d agree that you’re on the right track.

> I don’t think I could have had it any worse.

You’re alive and you haven’t described severe disability lasting at least a year, so this part is just not correct.

Being healthy and young reduces the risk of severe outcomes, but not to zero.
I interpret cookie law for a tech co.

Imo the law should be structured such that people who care can opt out of cookies programmatically, but every day people who don't care don't need to see a pop up on every site. That causes psychic load and makes us hate the internet.

Also, people should get together and vote on what constitutes "strictly necessary" cookies that don't require consent and "non-essential" cookies that do. It's currently up to some nerds in EU.

Why can't we have people make these calls?
This is a tough one. Based on what we've seen so far the Metaverse seems unlikely to succeed and will likely end up as a massive boondoggle. Yet, it is so ambitious that anything less than a full fledged pivot would indicate it was just a niche thing to be abandoned. Not going all-in could be seen as a self-fulfilling prophecy that it was doomed to fail. I can definitely see how it was an all or nothing decision.
The site shouldn't have to do any of that. Ideally, the client-side date picker should handle it (it has the context to know user preference on whether "4-1-69" means January 4 or April 1, and the context to know to ask for clarification if it doesn't know the user's preference yet).
I do wish the defaults were better however. The following changes help a lot.

set tabstop=3
set shiftwidth=0
set autoindent
> If you are in the US or any developed nation, chances are that your life is pretty comfortable.... you are sitting in a warm balmy room ... You have access to plenty of foods... water is nice and warm... we have access to tremendous amounts of energy... and there is a surplus of everything.

Really? My experience is pretty much opposite.

In "developing" nation I can afford pretty much anything. House heating, hot water, plenty of good food, car with plenty of gas...

My parents in "developed nation" are freezing their asses for some stupid politics. Switching on hot water only briefly for quick showers. Supermarkets only have processed junk food. They can not afford car. Politicians are telling 70 year old woman to use bike in snow storm instead...
I don't understand very much the appeal of lifetime licenses from the point of view of the seller. If you believe that your product will be good over time, you should only sell time-limited licenses. Am I missing something?
He never trumpeted anything or called himself God.

It was a simple strategic move.

It is you and other zuck-haters who have projected all these things to fit your narrative
For non-tech-savvy people - https://www.amazon.ca/Password-Book-Alphabetical-Colorful-Le...

For tech-savvy people - https://www.passwordstore.org/

The rest doesn't work unfortunately, proven over and over.
Not really. For law enforcement purposes, all of your identifying data is readily available.
Many people point out that hospitals tend to have tough luck with anything except broken bones.

Preventative medicine, nutrition, etc have an impressive record for everything else. Essential oils may be a rather small part of this.
There’s also Enpass (https://www.enpass.io/) which markets itself as an offline password manager.
I hated the 8.1 start screen, but I think even that could have been turned into something really cool and useful. The fact that they never iterated on that either is just mind-boggling. Only a company as entrenched and wealthy as Microsoft can afford to expend that much effort and then throw it all out a few years later, just to start over from scratch again.
you're free to interpret it that way, but that certainly wasn't my interpretation.

I wonder if it's a generational thing where those of us who are old enough to remember when streaming wasn't a thing don't find it acceptable because companies didn't used to be able to treat us this way. Once the physical media was in our hands it was ours and if it randomly stopped working it was generally duo to a physical problem we had a hand in.
Might just as well make us artificially happyfied super-vegetables, completely incapable of taking decisive action required in some unexpected crisis.

If you replace metalworking with the reward mechanism hacks Facebook et al use to optimize their success metrics, the threshold to a paperclip maximizer scenario gets considerably lower. Smartphones are bad enough, add MMI to the mix and all bets are off.
I actually use my Alexa for this...
This is a cool page. One thing that is important for me that is lacking here is emergency access (e.g. https://www.lastpass.com/features/emergency-access). It would be great to see side-by-side comparisons of that.
I disagree, this article did not come off this way to me, as all the comments were brief and backed up with supporting materials. In addition, the usage of words that would convey feelings the author had about the company were nonexistent — they described the actions taken (or not taken) by the company and left the reader to come to their own conclusions.
Having a memory more than a goldfish means I know exactly what was said, and they did more then just say "masks may not work" I vividly remember Facui stating many times on multiple interviews that masks were not effective.

>the public should not get masks until medical professionals are equipped with what they need?

disagree. I think people should be free to acquire any product they want on the market, and I believe it is HIGHLY unethical for government to come in cease medical equipment / masks/ or anything else under the guise they "do not work" for the public so we need to take them from you and give them to these other people that are better than you
Because behavioral psychology tests reveal that the public is both super-paranoid about being spied on and will sell their PII to anyone who asks in exchange for a $5 discount at a store.

It's hard to craft good law when the mismatch between public stated desire and public behavior is so wide.
"Passionate skilled developers"? Please.

Voice recognition is actually quite good. The problem is that the assistants aren't "smart" enough to actually do much that's useful with that voice recognition. And I suspect that, for a lot of things, voice alone just isn't that great either for input or output.

It's essentially another AI problem where surprisingly good isn't necessarily all that useful.
I remap caps lock to ctrl on my OS which does make it a little more ergonomic, but I still prefer your method. Although, whatever wizard taught me vim and gave me their beginner cheat sheet had jj instead of jk.
You mentioned rich data earlier, and as an amateur sitting on the sidelines I think that's the key. Once I fed my entire library into LibraryThing, its recommendations were orders of magnitude better than, say, Amazon's, who only knew which books I'd bought through them. In fact they were so good it was mostly recommending books I'd already read, but didn't own.

My toy, which relied on scraping <ul> and <ol> lists of people's favourite bands from personal websites, had almost nothing to go on by comparison. last.fm might have been able to do something good with the data they collected, but they seemed to die on the vine once they were acquired.
I have personally had discussions with people about this. I’m about as liberal as they come, but a lot of covid guidance was confusing in the beginning and I think that admitting that has somehow become taboo. It’s still weird that I feel the need to clarify my political stance on an apolitical issue like this. As time went on messaging improved, but the initial confusion was definitely there.

Nobody knew what was going on, I read as much about covid as I could (including HN comments about something to do with quinine that was popular for a day or two)

This is the source I found https://www.latimes.com/science/story/2021-07-27/timeline-cd...

I think there is a big time Mandela effect here. I remember “don’t buy masks” as being about preserving masks for essential workers and medical professionals, I don’t necessarily recall the portion where they said it didn’t help infection rates, but yet there it is.
Self-hosted instance of Bitwarden works pretty well, and you can make it accessible behind a VPN to your local network only (plus there are multiple implementations of its back-end). Less-automated solutions make impractical concessions in usability.

Reference impl. in C#: https://github.com/bitwarden/server

Self-host friendly impl. in Rust: https://github.com/dani-garcia/vaultwarden

p.s.: reference implementation is by far one of the better examples of how to do microservice-based C# solution of high code quality right.
According to a research report by Adobe, the average office worker spends 5.9 hours per day checking email: https://business.adobe.com/blog/perspectives/if-you-think-em...

Whereas the average Google search supposedly takes 14.6 seconds: https://fitsmallbusiness.com/google-search-statistics/
The answer largely, like most things (and like your lawyer likes to tell you), is “it depends”.

From a perspective of, say, a small site trying to just identify people who have accounts and let them post in forums, email is probably sufficient.

For voting in real elections, it’s obviously not sufficient.

Ideally you want something pretty permanent for identity-something you can’t just change on a whim. The idea, I think, from the question is “what can we use for authentication”, and email’s never really been good at that in a real security sense-anyone can read it, if you leave it open, or if you share your password, or if…

In the same breath, though, let’s go to the other extreme: suppose we use DNA for identity. Further suppose that the device used to check it is perfect at the “checking it” part. Now you’re just off by one level, because you’re now trusting the machine that attested to the DNA not being compromised in some other way, and you still have all the other problems inherent in a distributed system (not to mention the “proof of life” part) - in short, all that’s happened is that we’ve moved the problem of identity from your DNA to the machine that attests to someone’s DNA.

You’re absolutely correct that one can’t trust or rely on “sign in with X” when they can take your account away arbitrarily and capriciously, without recourse, and in doing so break everything that relied on it.

The alternative of running your own OpenID Connect system (the most current method of doing “identity” like the major social sites do, after enough people learned the medium-to-hard way that “authorization is not authentication” and stopped using OAuth2 for “authentication”) also has its issues:

1: they’re not federated in any sense, so unlike “everyone knows Twitter and will let you log in after Twitter confirms who you are”, no one knows the OpenID Connect server run by nullfield and, further, wouldn’t trust it to vouch for identity of anyone. Except maybe nullfield. And still, they’re not going to integrate everyone’s self-sovereign ID server for login unless it’s seamless.
2: running such a server is technically challenging, to be polite

Getting back to “it depends”:

The use case matters too much for there to be a generic answer at this point in time. Even social sites only go so far in verification; logging in via Facebook doesn’t mean that Facebook has checked that you’re who you say you are, even if their policy is to make you use your real name.

For most situations it’s going to be domain-driven, i.e. “for this domain, what level of assurance do I need about identity”.
And indeed a few who live in places where governments [propose to] intervene to prevent them from wearing items of clothing associated with some Muslims' ideas of modesty...
That's a pretty shitty comparison, comparing the concept of computers to an object.
One very specific thought about the author's three ambitions: I really wonder about homomorphic encryption as a foundation for data science. It seems to me that any really good homomorphic encryption creates a dual space for a data set, so that anything discoverable in the original is equally preserved, and at least in theory, discoverable, from the encrypted dual. If your homomorphic encryption doesn't create a true dual space, then how do we trust the insights it is capable of developing as being either valid, or complete?
Is it? Why?
https://github.com/Soft-wa-re/password-manager-comparer
In many places meat worth eating already is a premium product.
Given author's apparent history with LastPass, the tone comes across more as "told you so" to me.
My wife and I have the password to our vaults in each others vaults, however I am not sure what would happen if both of us die.

Edit: as a site note, have used keepass + file on my (vpn reachable) synology for like 10 years, never had any issues. I use it in linux, android, ios and windows.
WhoisGuard and similar are in this case enough for privacy.