skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Writing a program "based on" an API, i.e. which invokes the provided functions, is not a derivative work.

If this theory would be accepted almost all the existing programs that have been written since the first electronic computers would be derivative works and no software companies would have ever existed, because they could never have claimed copyright protection.

NVIDIA has never distributed any derivative of the Linux kernel in their GPU drivers. They distribute their own kernel modules, which are loaded by the end user and this is perfectly compatible with the GPL.

Some kernel developers try to cripple the NVIDIA modules by preventing them to find the symbol addresses that must be used, but this is a use restriction imposed by these developers on the Linux users and which has nothing to do with what is written in the GPL.
I enjoyed this article, and I found myself nodding through the parts that discussed Google's history over the past couple decades.

However, the last couple concluding paragraphs, and the comparison to AltaVista, I found to be extremely weak. It was as if the author had diagnosed all these problems, and felt like they couldn't just end the article but had to wrap it up with something they felt was a potential solution.

In my opinion, there is no potential solution, and that's both a good and bad thing. At worldwide scale, I find it hard to believe that any company wouldn't fall down the path Google has: they are pretty fundamentally a victim to Goodhart's Law [1], and that dynamic is inevitable.

I think the bad thing about that is it does kind of make me yearn for some of "the good old days" when not everything was just teeming with SEO nonsense and blogspam. For example, when looking for particular software solutions, I've found it impossible to use Google to do "ProductA vs. ProductB" type searches anymore - all the top links are just some sort of affiliate link spam, the analysis (if there is any) flat out sucks.

So the good news is that it's made me step away from the Internet more: e.g. for the example above, I don't even do a search: I'll ask for recommendations from friends and colleagues, post to a helpful employee alumni mailing list, etc. You know, the way we used to do things "in the good old days".

If anything the complete disgust and enshittification I find with so much online content and algorithms these days has actually led to me being mentally healthier - I just spend less time online (HN being the bad habit I'm trying to break) and more time in "the real world".

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law
Anyone want to tl;dr what the best one is? The map doesn't load for me and the full map isn't the greatest thing to navigate... Would much prefer just text.
This is good! I will use this as a reference to share with friends and colleagues who ask me about XYZ VPN.

I think something that is missing in the network of connections is Mozilla VPN. From what I understand, they are just a re-brand of Mullvad.

There are other providers not listed, but finding a good VPN provider is kind of like finding a good watering hole--you don't want to spread the word too widely, else bad-actors come and pollute it.

I didn't realize how many media companies own VPN companies.
Obviously you can park an electric SUV in a parking space without a charger, just like you can park an ICE SUV in a parking space without a gasoline/diesel pump.
My government certainly doesn't care what sex toys I buy; but there are some bronze plaques in the pavement around here, dedicated to victims of the earlier of the two times the government was evil and sent people to their deaths for such things; and I've been to the museum made from the headquarters of the people responsible for the second time it was evil and spied on anyone and everyone.
If they are collecting so much data why do the ads still suck? I bought a pixel 7a and I still get ads for it all the time. You would think that google would know that I already bought a google phone from them.
In the world? LOL

edit: sorry, to be more constructive let me add https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2020/5/14/americas-growt... as a small explanation for what is all wrong with 'roads' in america. Car infrastructure is insanely expensive and we have a ton of terrible status quos in the US that add to it.
Yes, and Amazon has improved the shopping experience as they have gained these insights as well. As someone who went away from the world for 5 years so wasn't in the pot as it slowly started to boil, Google and Amazon are both significantly worse and less user friendly than they used to be.

Just look at Google Assistant. It has gotten significantly worse the last two years. Strangely, the only time it asks me for feedback is when it happens to work. Shouldn't be hard for it to detect when it craps out I talk frustrated at it, but they don't seem interested in getting feedback at that point. Ah, but it happens to turn one light on once (versus the 20 something went wrong times), prompt for feedback on that specific one time it worked.
As usual, the truth is somewhere in between. To say it is cancer is to exaggregate to say the least. But it is certainly no miracle pill either. Like most things, it works best in moderation. If you apply it keeping in mind the agile manifesto, it is not too bad. But if you apply it like a rulebook, it will not be efficient.

As an example, "Individuals and interactions over processes and tools". A standup is interaction between individuals. I believe it was invented to get away from the formality of heading to a meeting room and waste time with a long agenda. Instead, short and concise, stand up around the desks just where you work. Short, efficient, concise.

However, now it may have outlived itself in many teams. We work more remote, have other tools than 15 years ago. So if it doesn't work, don't do it. But if you don't know what to do, you can use Scrum as inspiration, and take it from there. There are certainly worse ways, because Scrum was not born from nothing. It was a reaction to a worse way of working.
For the manufacturing part, are we including the environmental impact of oil extraction in the comparison? That isn’t part of “building” an ICE car, unlike with EV batteries, but it is still required on an ongoing basis for operation and it is the direct equivalent of the EV batteries.

I find it a little hard to believe that e.g. lithium extraction is fundamentally worse than oil extraction and processing.
ok, I think I am following you and I think I mostly agree. Probably the biggest issue is that as "just" a monitor replacement, the possible use cases are significantly narrowed. Probably a lot more overlap with the ELF-SR2 with probably the biggest advantage being portability if you can incorporate the compute/power/etc into a decent form factor (ie something that you might be able to use in a starbucks)
Indeed. Markets can only be efficient if all costs are priced in correctly (as possible). This includes environmental damage.
Obviously in a very small minority here but I decided almost 10 years ago to give them as much data as possible because they were leading in AI and I want AI to have access to as much data on me as possible to make life easier when it gets smart enough. Hasn't panned out yet but I don't really regret it.
My understanding is that the Toyota is easy to hack into a plug in so I count it, but you're right, technically it isn't.
> Social engineering is generally bad.

So insurance company shouldn't raise your premiums if you are a bad driver and crash your car every month?

There are like 10 private actors trying to socially engineer me. Among them are car drivers that act in an agressive manner when they see a bicycle on the road, they want to discourage cyclist from using the road and do it very effectively.
The ads are irrelevant. A distraction. The problem is the collected data is sold on and correlated and becomes a interface+sensors to "hack" people, simulate and manage political measures and stabilize for the individual bad situations. As long as there are two people left on the planet with phones, social engineering can get them to fight and distrust one another. And you can see the effects. In the approaches to you with emotional content instead of information. They got us good..
See also https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24836979
I suppose that makes sense. Video is low-density and hard to search compared to text, so it never occurs to me to seek out video as a first option, but given the amount of SEO spam I can see how someone would come to the opposite conclusion.
I think there's a bit of selection bias here in that only people who are either very enamored or very unhappy with scrum are going to respond to a hot take on twitter.

But, that's besides the point. Scrum doesn't exist to make developer's lives easier. In my experience as a SWE in a scrum team, devs have basically always felt like our time is being wasted in meetings.

Scrum, imo, exists so that management and business stakeholders can have an understanding of how efforts are being allocated and give feedback on it. There's still plenty of ways this can go wrong, and I agree with others that the short sprint cycles of 1-2 weeks lead to the extra overhead of too many ceremonies, but I think for the average business stakeholder it probably gives a better result than waterfall.
That federal program, even with high deductibles, completely subsidizes their customers at the cost of taxpayers. They massively underprice the hazards, at the taxpayers ends up being on the hook at the cost of people who decided to built
(and rebuilt) "their house on the sand"
What, exactly, do you think these regulations should be? What kind of regulation would solve this problem?

E.g. contrast with, say, regulation of pharmaceuticals by the FDA. Certainly a curb on private property rights, but, its also pretty clear what the regulations should do: allow companies to sell only drugs which have been proven to be both safe and effective.

Is there such a very clear idea of how these proposed regulations should be written? Where do we draw the line? Does anybody really have a very clear idea let all what the solution would look like?
Showcasing Startups on Replit
> I think it's very telling that apps like Threads launched first as an app and the website came later.

This isn't new, Instagram itself did the same over a decade ago. It was phone-only until shortly after Facebook bought it.

But I agree with your other point, PCs (mostly laptops if you want to make that distinction) are for business use, while phones and iPads (because other tablets suck) are general purpose devices. And to take it from there: browsers are increasingly irrelevant, and videos won over text.

But I don't think laptops are going anywhere for business use, as merging them with tablets never really took off.
I wonder if this also relates to the fact that high-rise construction cranes are better operated by women, it is stated that women have finer hand eye coordination based on the way the nerves grow in females, differently than males.
> * About duopoly: Visa has less than a 50 percent share, MasterCard has less than 40 percent, Discover has 18 percent, and American Express has 15 percent. V and MA acting as if 90% share is most likely "conscious parallelism".

I think this differs wildly between countries. I know that Discover/American Express wouldn't have close to 30% of the market share in Europe, it's only some shops that do accept those, although it's becoming more popular. In the countries I've been to in South America, things have been more or less similar.

Also, I think that link of yours (although I cannot read it fully) is about the percentage of transactions, rather than number of merchants that accept it. So it's basically more about the card holders than the merchants accepting one vs the other.
And then we give higher tax deductions for vehicles over 7000lb..
> Given your framing of this in terms of class warfare, I'd remind you that Marx

Class warfare predates Marx by roughly two thousand years (if not longer). I am not interested in what he has to say on the matter. It was sufficiently described by greeks, along with where it ultimately leads, as the Kyklos or Anacyclosis.

> So this notion of making an argument that it is about class couched in left wing terms does not change that by that same left wing thinking,

Class warfare is not a left wing concept. The left and right wing are a result of class warfare, which predates Marx and the rest of his gang of thieves masquerading as revolutionaries.

TL;DR I don't care about your bourgeoisie rhetoric of who said what. The proletariat has an absolute right to freely speak its mind without your interference. Deal with it.
And they can have an axle weight of 20,000 pounds vs about 3,000 for an SUV, meaning they do nearly 2,000 times as much damage to the road. Unless your car gets about 10,000 mpg, the gas tax isn't cutting it.
So? I'm talking about unfriendly countries. The fact that the Saudis abuse and kill migrants doesn't make them unfriendly to the West.

Are you trying to make a point? Make a point.
I think it would've happened regardless. Cars took over the entire world. Even in places where everything is close-by it's abnormal and limiting to not have access to a car.
> Somehow there are so many blogpost about these things, all trying to ask for your emails.

That's because Substack defaults to bothering people for their email, and lots of people are using Substack as their blogging platform these days.
In one of my previous projects I lead a team of 5 talented and creative people and we did truly agile programming: everyone helped each other, asynchronous meets as needed, spontaneous pair programming, direct access to the customer (who also happened to be technical people with a clear picture in mind)... Truly a joy of a team to lead, because they really lead themselves :)

However, the management insisted that we adopt Scrum and get a Scrum Master to help us.

I objected to this and listed all of the problems I could see if Scrum was introduced: losing dev creativity and incentive, tickets taking exactly one sprint to complete instead of doing them at leisurely pace, the mistranslation coming from having one extra layer of communication (Scrum Master handling the client now).

The management response was: "that is not real Scrum, you had bad experiences because you weren't doing it right previously".

After three months, the progress slowed to a crawl, star dev abandoned ship, and customers started complaining for the first time.

Now I will just wait for someone to tell me that this wasn't real Scrum either, because we were supposed to have Product Owner talk to the client instead of Scrum Master :)
Is there any profit margin on that? Or is it the typical VC-backed selling dollars for quarters?
I think it's a tragedy of the commons situation. Driving an SUV feels safer because there are more other vehicles you can see over to keep appraised of your surroundings, but that also makes it harder for the drivers of those other vehicles.
> The idea that Search is somehow worsening doesn't make any sense.

What analytics are you thinking of that would show search is somehow MORE accurate? Because if it's just searches and click throughs and traffic and revenue...

More people with internet = more people searching for stuff.
More mobile phones = more people searching for stuff out in the world.
Worse results = user goes back to google and does ANOTHER search and search revenue just doubled again. Huzzah bonuses and vacations to Disneyland all around this year!

I think by any measure, growth and clicks and revenue are going to go up no matter what they do so I'm not sure exactly what metric you'd be tracking to see whether Google search results are actually qualitatively better? Short of the site going down entirely, there's probably nothing they can do to slow growth. But nowhere in that compounding money farm is the quality of results relevant.
> So what if Google sends me targetted ads?

This is just the tip of the iceberg. What you don't see is what is going to get ya. It's not about nefarious actors lurking in the shadows, it's someone like you and me that is incentivized to make more money by taking the advantage of the data they have on you.

What if you have nothing to hide? Then you should read this [0] paper that has a more rigorous treatment of privacy:

> privacy is not reducible to a singular essence; it is a plurality of different things that do not share one element in common but that nevertheless bear a resemblance to each other

> The taxonomy has four general categories of privacy problems with sixteen different subcategories. The first general category is information collection, which involves the ways that data is gathered about people. The subcategories, surveillance and interrogation, represent the two primary problematic ways of gathering information. A privacy problem occurs when an activity by a person, business, or government entity creates harm by disrupting valuable activities of others. These harms need not be physical or emotional; they can occur by chilling socially beneficial behavior (for example, free speech and association) or by leading to power imbalances that adversely affect social structure (for example, excessive executive power).

Solove primary focuses on US gov't privacy invasion but this applies just as well to Google et al.

[0]: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3976770
> Parquet

Parquet is a format, and not execution engine or paradigm?.. You can totally mr over parquet.
Ask HN: Which books were the most influential in creating a field expert of you?
The field can by any field and by expert I don't mean the number 1 world expert. By expert I mean someone who can confidently do work (create things) in their domain for quite some time. Some fields are so vast there can't be a single top most expert.

If you consider yourself someone like that and assuming you read (past and present) books of that field, which books have you found the most influential for your knowledge and expertise?
you mine for battery materials once. with an ICE engine you mine for oil over and over and over again, and you burn more fossil fuels to refine it, and burn more to transport it to you, over and over and over again.
An even more worrying account of data hoarding was when homosexuals were registered and later sent to concentration camps... (Yes, I've just invoked Godwin's law)

In my opinion data should be regarded as a liability by default.

We can't rely on a given corporation being benign, or not cooperating with a given regime forever.
The main problem, imho, is that if one can describe the situation and make someone care even a _little_, it’s not enough. There are so many more important things to be worried about throughout one’s lifetime that data privacy doesn’t even register.

Being concerned about how one’s data is being sold is a very “first world problem”, and even in “first worlds” it’s not a very big one for the great majority of the population.
Arbitrariness, disconnection from purpose, jargon, standups being badly structured meetings, disempowered product "owners," etc. are reasons to call it "cancer."

Agile was needed, to replace waterfall management of software development projects. In particular, trying to do resource leveled critical path analysis for most software projects is the road to project hell.

But, yeah, Scrum, as too many Scrum Masters practice it, gives Agile a bad name.
I am sure that there are terrible human rights abuses as outlined in the parent article, but I think it is also true that the media loves to jump on stories like these and exaggerates things.

See for instance CNN reporting that Kim Jong Un had his uncle torn apart by a pack of dogs. Generally once organ harvesting starts coming in to play, one should put on a very skeptical hat, while there is evidence that this has happened among some prisoners in China, I think one should remain skeptical on first-read of such claims.
This is not true, at least not in Europe. Wagons/sedans didn't disappear, we drive recent BMW 5 series and there are plenty of others (Audi A6, Skoda Superb, VW Passat, Mercedes and so on and on). Its as wide as it gets and you can buy official or unofficial conversion of back seat into 3-same-seat row. You just click a conversion layer into ISOFIX from what I recall.

It doesn't magically make back row wider, so you can't fit comfortably 3 taller adults regardless of seat arrangements, but 3 child seats are easy. It then has exactly same space as usual 3-seaters like Seat Alhambra, its VW equivalent etc. but you drive much better, more powerful and also safer car (ie frontal crumple zones).

If you think about 3 solid wide seats for 3 adults, such a car wouldn't fit in regular parking spot in most EU/Switzerland and struggled on narrower roads, yeah we normally don't do that kind of stuff here since roads and parking spaces are shared among everybody.
> They are being deprived of their civil rights

No, they aren't.

Freedom of speech is not the right to coerce others into relaying your speech. That is a violation of free speech.
Should Airships Make a Comeback? [video]
This is absolutely it. I'm a tech lover at heart, I am constantly playing with all the newest stuff that comes out. And when I first saw some of the things people were doing with Stable Diffusion I was very interested. Quickly mocking up textures for simplistic scenes? Quickly filling in repetitive background elements or flat coloring artwork to save artists time? Smart fill, smart lighting, these are some powerful tools, especially for concept art or speeding up commission work.

But the first thing I saw people do is start generating "good enough" art to get their ideas out, and as an artist, I saw how shit the art looked - but it was enough for the people who were not artists. I have seen quite a few friends lose long-time commissioners who are just generating tons of ideas with clicks.

I don't lament people's ability to generate ideas or become invested in art with tools that make it easy for them. I lament the corporate idiots that are going to try to make fully AI generated movies and paintings and books, and flood the market, kill all the real artists, and yeah, enshittify our art and media.
Positive feelings about the justice system don't seem to survive jury duty. A friend of mine got selected for a jury in an armed robbery case when he was 18, the summer street graduating. He was one of two votes to acquit, there were six votes to convict, and the remaining 4 people were just trying to find the quickest way to go back to work.
Basically, the more popular a topic is, the more its search results are infested with SEO spam.

Even in technical realms this holds true. One of the huge disappointments of learning JavaScript/typescript recently is how terrible and spammy searching for anything on it is. Coming from the golang world where I'm used to search results being highly relevant with few advertising spam blogs among them.
I have a 20 year old 5 seater sports sedan with a 3l engine that gets ~ 32mpg on the highway.

Marketing is social engineering the US plenty; you need a bigger truck/suv so you feel high up and safe -- at least this is what the worrisome folks think.
> you move to a cheap place, some time later its value increases and now you have to pay more tax, why?

This is already true for most implementations of property tax (at least in the US). You get reassessed and then pay tax based on the new value.

The group that has tried hardest to mitigate probably is California with prop 13, and even that can only limit property tax increases to 2% per year. When we study that we see that it can always happen just because inflation is a background force in play. And then also, look at all the wonky side effects that take place when you try to prevent this from happening.