skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
While I agree with you entirely, I'll propose an adjustment to the reason for this problem in the case of the UK:

When the government is ideologically opposed to ensuring sufficient public oversight, quality of services drops.

The problem in the UK is not merely privatisation, but privatisation in a way that privatises profits, often socialises losses, and that substitutes dealing with crises after the fact over strong oversight during, because of a string of governments that have not just been opposed to government ownership, but that has been opposed to regulation.

You could strip away the profit motive by making these all non-profit stakeholder led organisations of some sort, and you'd still have a massive problem because of the lack of proper oversight.

Fix the oversight issue and maybe some degree of privatisation would work (though I agree many of these services should still not be operated with a profit motive), but the double whammy of weak oversight and privatisation is disastrous.
Interesting, thanks. Lab grown meat has been authorized in the U.S. and already served in a restaurant in San Francisco [1]. If you have the chance to consume lab grown meat, would that be an option for you?

[1] https://www.cbsnews.com/news/cultivated-meat-grown-in-a-lab/
How much it costs to hire technical talent in Spain
It's even simpler than that. All of these privatized entities are incredibly efficient... at extracting profits from the public. Of course their goal is to extract profits. And you don't extract profits from a rail line by offering the best service. Bonus points if you can convince the government to bail you out and provide some extra cash.
The railway infra is run by a Non-departmental public body; it's not privatised. Its customers are rail companies which run the trains.
As fun as the game seems to be, there are bugs that makes it impossible to play.

Clock randomly jumps to zero.
I can sometimes make infinite moves.
Using laser is a bit unintuitive.
+1. Will they compete with there own products?
:) For anyone who doesn't get the reference: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liz_Truss_lettuce
> There's no reason why the large Android OEMs couldn't do the same if they wanted to.

Wrong, there's a big reason: Qualcomm. Newer Android releases often bump the minimum required version of the Linux kernel. If Qualcomm stops supporting a particular chipset, they won't give you new binary blobs (part of what's known as a "board support package" or BSP) for the new minimum kernel version, so you can't update.

Google managed to negotiate with Qualcomm to get them to support old chipsets for longer, but it still falls far short of what Apple does. And now Google is making their own chips for Pixel phones and are doing 5 years of security updates (though still only 3 for major OS updates, boo).

And really, it just boils down to a shitty planned-obsolescence business decision. Apple knows that they will have enough people to buy (either first-time or upgrade) their newest shiny iPhone come release time every year, even if they continue to support 8-year old phones. Google doesn't have that confidence, so they don't put as much effort into upgrades for older devices. And that's Google, who makes fairly high-end phones; the makers of low-end devices know their users are price-sensitive and won't upgrade phones unless they have to.

So it's really two things: one is that they don't want to, and there's no market or regulatory force that pushes them to. And the other is that they truly are limited in how far they can support upgrades, much more limited than Apple is, since Apple controls the entire hardware and software stack.

Having said all that, do understand that I don't endorse or like the current situation here. My Pixel 4 stopped getting security updates (technically last fall, but Google pushed out a roll-up update a few months ago), and I'm frankly not ready to upgrade. The hardware is fine, the software is snappy, and it does everything I want it to. The Pixel 7a is probably my next best bet, but it is yet again a physically larger phone, and I hate that. But this is the situation, and these are the reasons for it.
Some software vendors - e.g. major engineering applications - only support their products on RHEL.
Repayment of the loans of a billion USD per year afaik.
You can do it but that doesn’t mean you should.

Throwing away a phone whose hardware may be perfectly working, but its manufacturer decided to be too cheap to use anything but walled-garden components, feels like an utter waste of resources.

(By walled-garden components, I mean chips whose suppliers make it difficult or impossible to develop an open-source driver.)
Freedom fries
> One of the authors who was suing for royalties needed the money for cancer treatments.

Ok but what if the author had not written a successful book but still needed money for cancer treatment. Maybe we should handle social security and healthcare separately from copyright.
> I don't understand how or why this defeatist, nihilistic attitude is growing in popularity.

The attitude of "here's a simple step that will cut down your individual carbon emissions, and also please pay attention to the primary sources of the problem"? Because that attitude doesn't seem defeatist or nihilistic at all? I don't think the "profits trump everything" comment was an endorsement of that philosophy.

If I misunderstood, and you were talking about the people hiding behind the companies and industries who are destroying the environment so that they can enrich themselves at everyone's expense then I'd guess that those folks are entirely self-aware and simply don't care that they act out of malice.

It seems like they're willing to hurt anyone and destroy anything if it might grant them a little more money. I wish people would start seeing them for the threat that they are, and spent a lot more of their time thinking about what should be done about those kinds of psychopaths instead of spinning their wheels worrying about how long their computer stays awake.

inaction is bad, but wasted and misdirected action can be every bit as harmful. Focusing on the people who are consistently doing the most harm in the shortest amount of time is only logical unless people have become too defeatist to believe that anything can be done to stop the abuses of industry.
> Holy hell active misrepresentation much? Or is your reading comprehension just that poor?

Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith.

> VIEWED AS

Please don't use uppercase for emphasis. If you want to emphasize a word or phrase, put *asterisks* around it and it will get italicized.

I am a non native English speaker, but you are honestly trying to have a fight on something that it's not there.

Never said you called them degenerates, but that not all of them are (implying that some of them are), and that the emphasis on the "viewed as degenerates" is superfluous because no one pointed that out in this conversation.

Moreover, they are not viewed as unwilling, they are unwilling or we would not be talking about it.

I'll explain once again: they are not simply "viewed as degenerates unwilling to" they are obviously unwilling, some of them are clearly degenerates and all of them engage in some kind of anti social behaviour, mostly against their family members, which makes them outcasts.

Or the issue we are discussing would not exist!

> Be better.

Never been better, thanks.
> but I don't need a complete copy of my photo reel to be saved to my device

this resonates with me.

what solution are you using?
You end up pricing people out of the best possible education unless you regulate heavily, at which point you may as well have state-run education.
> Leaving 1% for anything extra like surrounds etc. It's just really silly to add surrounds before getting the huge gains above.

This advice would save so much headache for so many nerds. The juice is simply not worth the squeeze unless that whole checklist is already satisfied and you are still not blown away.
Fortunately, largely owing to our free press, the British public has now learned their lesson and such unfortunate situations will almost certainly be avoided in future.

Especially when it comes to our healthcare system.
Hey hackers! Have fun hacking this new VM!
Is that a trick question? Multiple suppliers of binary compatible releases; no fragmentation whatsoever, just more supply. How could that not help?
>"Eeasy HTTPS"

>Displays somewhat overcomplicated diagram with bunch of arrows and scary technobubble words.

Ping me again when HTTPs actually becomes easy
https://archive.is/EzYii
When i was a kid, photos came in physical form, both as prints and as negatives. These could be stored in different locations, although most of the time they would be stored in the same location.

These days it's all digital photos, and i think most people agree that some kind of backup is needed. If you primarily use a cloud service, there is probably little risk that your data suddenly vanishes (though it has happened), but instead you're faced with the danger of losing access to that account, meaning your stuff might still exist, you just no longer have access to it.

My "normal" backup routing is simply "iCloud -> Mac Mini -> external harddrive + OneDrive", and the Raspberry Pi and Kopia is a (long running) test to eventually replace time machine.

As for the M-disc archive, it's a convenient and low cost way of creating resilient backups of my photos that doesn't require me to print everything. The archive will survive a lot more hardship than your average digital media, and does not require somewhat frequent usage to retain information. Harddrives lose their charge after 5-7 years of sitting unused, SSDs in as little as 2 years. Blu-Ray media will retain information for decades, and (according to the sales brochure) M-disc will retain information for a millenium, which i assume is about 900+ years longer than i need it to.

In theory, i could simply ditch the remote backup and rely on the M-disc media, but that's where convenience comes into play.
Isn’t keynote “free” (as in beer is included with your macOS meal)?
The real issue here is that privatisation was and is a political football instead of a practical policy.

Should the government run coal mines at a loss which have no strategic value just to keep jobs? No.

Should the government run natural monopolies in strategic or socially important areas (like railways, water utilities, etc)? Yes.

But instead what started at privatising the former turned into an ideological push to privatise the later.

There is also the question of HOW these services should be run...
Unfortunately I don't remember source where I read about this and a quick search didn't produce any results. I may have even found the article on HN.
It was, rail track was a private company. They had to roll that one back because trains kept crashing.
Everyone in the UK with a utility bill or that uses a train has known this for decades.
It's actually even worse than this - in the case of Water, the original water companies were built by local government providing clean water to their own residents and paid for by long-term loans. First, the Labour Party nationalised the local water companies with no recompense to repay the local government debts. Then, the Conservative Party sold off the "nationalised" water companies, but kept the money raised rather than handing it back to local government.

In many cases it can't even be described as "privatisation" because the resulting industries have been bought by other people's governments. It is literally the worst of all worlds.
> I can't figure out why RHEL compat is so desirable.

When you're a part of an international research infrastructure which works on the same stack for a decade and half, being supported by RH for free (because of CERN) and creating tons of software at every layer of this research stack over that time period is one of the bigger reasons, but it's not the only one.

I personally use Debian for my personal computers and small servers elsewhere for 15+ years, but when it comes to infrastructure homogenization amongst high thousands of nodes, it's a different story.
But you are essentially comparing driving sucky ICE car 365 days a year vs driving amazing EV 364 days a year + 1 day of very sucky ICE car.
Almost the entire western world did, starting in the early 90s, and those of us who tried to stop it at the time were derided as clueless naive economic illiterates (and still are.)

And the west pushed this Privatize All The Things model into the former Soviet bloc, too, where mass brutal privatization of the huge portfolio of state assets created the kleptocrat economic they have there now.

Nobody ever denied that the free market is efficient. The question is: efficient at what?
Yes!
We run globally by default. And it's a true serverless offering - we only bill for the resources allocated during request, otherwise the containers will become idle

EdgeNode is based on top of public cloud and on a completely different stack technologically
From my user's perspective, it seems that privatization of Germany's phone and Internet market has worked pretty well, and lowered prices all around.

Though I don't know if that was because there was a huge boom of Internet access around that time, and telephony prices would have dropped anyway, or if that was one of the examples where it did work, inherently.
> I still don't understand...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thatcherism

Or talk to a few older folks about Britain in the 1970's and 1980's.
Dieter Helm recently wrote an article about scrapping the current water privatisation model, without re-nationalisation: https://dieterhelm.co.uk/regulation-utilities-infrastructure...
I think it's kind of a mistake to focus too much on the principles of this story than on the execution. Sure, we can make arguments about how it should be more efficient to run water privately because of a profit motive, or how it's a natural monopoly. But if you look at the details the claim is very simple - that the water companies charged high prices, didn't invest and paid out huge dividends. Well there's a simple answer to that: we have a regulator who can control that. It's very simple. The government didn't go "Here private enterprise, have a monopoly! Off you go!". The key here is that whilst private enterprise might be more efficient at acheiving it's goals than government enterprise, but that becomes a problem when it's goal is finding ways to screw money out of people despite the regulator.

If you look around at the British state it's very clear to see, the issue isn't whether X Y Z is private, the issue is the state spent 2010-2020 systematically ensuring the state was incapable of acheiving anything. And then decided in 2016 that they were going to repatriate a tonne of regulatory power from the EU. The result is a state that's got a lot to do, and no way of actually doing any of it.
The source I read said inter-tribal warfare was a major source of homicides, but I can't recall if intra-tribal murder was a major factor as well.
Free markets don't magically solve the problems of capitalism. You still have to deal with monopolies, entrenched market leaders, mergers leading to less competition, backroom non-competition agreements, lobbying for prefential treatment, revolving doors between regulators and market players, or just plain corruption and bribery.

What I see everywhere, not just in Britain, is the same old story over and over again: privatizing the profits, nationalizing the losses.
Oh, the lock in still exists. In many fields. You need a certain software to be competitive, so you have to use whatever os supports it. I know people who have switched from Mac os to windows because office is slightly janky on Mac os. Lock ins happen all the time.
I can’t make out the implied /s because it is too big to fit on my 4k monitor
ISPs are not mandatory for human life.
From https://www.suse.com/c/at-suse-we-make-choice-happen/
"It goes without saying that SUSE remains fully committed to SUSE Linux Enterprise (SLE) and Adaptable Linux Platform (ALP) solutions as well as the openSUSE Linux distributions."

As a long term Leap and Tumbleweed user, I trust the openSUSE community to keep producing a nice distro.
Strategies for Building Safer Software
Perhaps this could happen to make Stable Diffusion win against Midjourney/Adobe. LLMs however have more than enough commercial support to overcome weird communities, and these communities care less about text than images.
sounds like a reasonable backup and archiving process which will compensate for both, the internet and the home burning down
Just to keep jobs? No. To ensure resiliency of supply? maybe. Probably moot as this point though since we should be getting away from coal anyway.
>> The world population is collapsing at a rapid pace.

Maybe the second derivative of world popultion is collapsing but not the "world" population (at least if you mean world as a whole and not "developed world" only, because population of "developed world" maybe getting there).

>> Our economic prosperity is based on a growing productive population.

If by prosperity you mean key economic indicators like GDP, then yes. But those economic models are so primitive that I question they usefulness and validity. The nature of work changed so much for last 100 years due to technology that it amazes me that we still belive that it can be summed up with few simple agregate numbers. Even the most important domains such as Agriculture, despite growing population, are needing less and less people to produce almost enough (if we include the food waste it's more than enough, but lacking fair distribution).
At this moment about 800 milion people are working in or around farming - that's only 10% of overall population. In year 2000 agriculture was employeeing more than 1 billion, that is - 16 % of population.

This is the real reason of production growth - technology advancements and popularisation, not population growth.
Oh that brings back memories, yes I'm sure I tried that one too.
One of them came on a bunch of floppies in sets, for the main system, X, and whetever, I think there were more like 12-13 of them in total; took a whole day to copy them and install IIRC. Not quite as bad as installing AIX from 5 1/4" on a 6150 I snagged somehow.
Holy shit. No wonder it failed miserably.
Arbitrary passages is what I meant by "verbatim extracts."
The other side of that coin is, with quality as the main motivator, the prices go up. There's no free ride either way through organising things differently, its a choice between quality or price (as opposed to getting quality at a cheaper price).

The other issue of course is in a public setting, there is no motive for efficiency.
I'm using ubuntu among other distros, and it never tried to push gnome to me. Using i3 is literally one "apt install" away. As of systemd I'm old enough to remember when initialization was managed by a pile of unreadable shell scripts and I never wanted it back.
So legislate for transparency, why shouldn’t state owned companies be subject to the same rules as public companies?
The problem is that even if one government were able to fix the oversight issue, its hard to see how subsequent governments can be prevented from ripping up the oversight (e.g. under the rubric of 'removing red tape'). Even if you look at the most likely incoming government, they are reluctant to get rid of the water companies due to cost. Perhaps what is needed is some mechanism whereby the threat of re-nationalisation can be enforced at minimum cost to the taxpayer.
Pro surfer Mikala Jones dies at 44 after surfing accident in Indonesia
My country recently (2019) privatized the electricity supply. The infrastructure is owner and operated by a government entity, but the company you buy electricity from is a private entity, and you can choose which supplier you use. Generation was already privatized a long time ago.

It was advertised as being able to offer lower prices to the consumer through competition, but all it has done is provided more ways for private companies to extract money from the general population.

Previously electricity prices were overseen by the government, and I don't really understand how a private company could do that any cheaper. There was already a market for the spot price that electricity was sold at by producers, so all the entity you bought it from had to do was balance the books. Any excess would have been put towards the balance for the next period, but now it goes to the owners of the company.
Interesting to know, thank you! Do your friends use any other service, say iTunes, to sell their music, and can compare between the two?

And I’d be interested in a link to their Bandcamp if possible!
No offense taken, I've certainly had a few zfs headaches. But thankfully never anything that couldn't be worked out.
We will be adding more info on the website soon!

The CDN is only there to cache static resources, but the page itself is rendered in one of the 37 edge regions. Sometimes, especially if you're on restricted/mobile network it could route to a incorrect location. This will be solved before we do a public launch!
This was obvious since the first wave of privatizations were kicked off in the 80s but somehow they still managed to build a cult around it. Now the investor cult is crumbling, but we're still supposed to acknowledge that there was a core of a good idea there and they just made a few mistakes and took it too far.

That's absurdly generous.

Even some of the supposed privatization successes really werent (e.g. British Steel, British Telecom). Even in markets where competition is possible, if the product or service is basic enough, keeping a state run competitor helps inflict market discipline on private actors who need to be kept in check. The UK property is a clear example of where this is direly needed but the cult both prohibits it and has its greedy eyes on the NHS.
For casual computer users, that animation/delay is the difference between “oh no, what just happened?!” and “oh, that button sucks this window down into the taskbar picture where I can easily find it later. Cool.”

You want the window to just vanish (which I get), because you have a model of computing that doesn’t need the genie animation. Most everyone on HN has a model of computers far in excess of the median computer user.
I didn't say human life, I said modern human life. At this point, and especially considering the recent pandemic and the lockdowns that lead to large swathes of the public having to work from home, internet connections are a non-optional component of participation in society. Especially as more and more services go digital only, for example bank branches closing in favour of online only services.

However, you're right that ISPs aren't the right target, open infrastructure for the network to operate on is closer to what I meant.
Business always strives to optimize but while I stand here waiting for the bus I have to witness 5 different package carries battle it out on the tiny road where I live.

Can't get more inefficient than that. What's next? Privatization of trash?

I have actually seen this with recyclable trash, several companies with different colored trash bags that pick up on different days littering the street. I'm glad some towns have already banned this. Worst part is that they let people mix all recyclables in one bag and then sort at the facilities adding another huge inifficiency. This is a huge eyesore in Switzerland where people will give you the "stare" if you through shit in the wrong bin.
As far as I know, inbound emails did include the headers you mention.

> Confusingly, these headers appear only for a subset of inbound emails.

Is it a predictable subset? Some unifying characteristic?
You must really love those photos.