skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> Piracy is largely a convenience issue, not just a financial issue.

I'd say it can definitely be both. For example, when I was a broke teenager, I pirated all the video games, because the alternative was simply missing out on them and the option to acquire them through dubious means was there.

When I actually got disposable income I realized that Steam is so well made, that I buy all my games there nowadays. It's gotten to the point where I'd rather buy a game than pirate it, especially when the game does have some sort of an online component. The only exception is cases when I feel like I might need a refund (e.g. seeing how a VR game runs before buying it, because refunds still feel like a hassle).

I still sometimes resort to something like G2A (Steam key reseller site, not a very good reputation) or just buying games on other stores like GOG or Epic when they're much cheaper there, but aside from that it's easier to just not play some expensive AAA game on launch altogether, since I don't care that much about being first to experience it anymore.

As for music, I can actually just listen to whatever I want on YouTube which is good enough for me, but I don't see why the same principles couldn't apply to something like Spotify.
You know what I meant.
I don't know a single engineer in the last decade that I've worked with or known that wants to live in SFBay. Hell, Google literally opened an office on 2nd and congress in Austin because people wanted to live in Austin and not SFbay. I was there on its opening day!

$70k is completely fine in Houston, Dallas, Austin. I made around that in each one. Almost everyone I know here in Denver makes 70k-100k max and I'm in the most trendy neighborhood downtown and these are (actual, like structural) engineers, lawyers, etc. My hair stylist makes 50k and has a nice 1br. Personally my rent is $4k which is absolutely common for a 2bdr in sfbay but mine is very nice, probably much newer than would be in SF. I made 90k living in Chicago. 40-60k living in Tampa. I always had a new car new a twin turbo z4, mazda 3, crv, sometimes I had 2 cars (sports/daily), always had my own place, etc. Zero debt. Went out ALL the time.

Everything isn't NYC or SFBay. I didn't start my career making 40k and go "OK great, now I'm off to San Francisco/NYC!!" I moved more west as my income grew.

The privilege.. I promise you that there are service industry people making 30-45k in SF/NYC who are absolutely content or happy with their lives whether it's living in a 10x10 shoebox or an attic in a loft with a roomate. I'm not doing that, but I have a lot of industry friends from a past life that do. The average hourly for a nyc bartender is something like $16-18. I used to do it on the side.

We're privileged beyond belief.
As a gamer, I think this is wonderful. Being able to subscribe for a month or two once a year means I can check out their latest titles released this year for less than the price of a single game. Many of their games don't have much replayability anyway and there's no point in "buying" it.

When Steam first came out, people made a big bruhaha about how digital licensing (no right of first sale, etc.) isn't the same as owning the game. True, but so what? Steam completely changed the PC games industry on that model and created an indie explosion. People like to complain about the lack of ownership rights, but the convenience is what really matters, especially coupled with a generous refund policy that we never had in the physical media days. A subscription service is a logical continuation of this model.

Now, a couple decades later, games have become super commoditized, and frankly it's hard to tell apart one title from another, much less remember them years later. For every Baldur's Gate 3, there's a hundred no-name RPGs that are entirely adequate but ultimately forgettable. They're not very different from an average show on Netflix or a song on Spotify. Subscription services are a lot cheaper for most people than renting or buying individual titles, and is the only sane way to explore a marketplace that has more content than you could reasonably consume in a lifetime.

If Steam offered a subscription service I'd give up my whole library (hundreds of games, mostly bought on sale) overnight. It's not just Ubi, EA, Microsoft, Playstation all do it, along with Google and Apple on mobile, and it's wonderful. Now for $30 a month split between GeForce Now and PC Games Pass, you can play hundred of games on a 4080 on a Chromebook. Games have never been as affordable or accessible. This is a good thing for gamers, enabling fixed-cost gaming that's easy to budget for and much cheaper a month than games used to be. Even if you have two or three subscriptions from different companies (which can vary month to month).

There are more games coming out every day than a person can consume. It's not the 90s anymore, no reason to clutch on to treasured old titles when a similar game will be out in a few months anyway.
This is really cool, thanks for sharing! I've been using Tail scale for a while, mostly because it's simple, but I don't love relying on some company for my VPN. Is this more like OpenVPN or Wireguard? Reading their site, it seems like it's closer to a traditional, OpenVPN-like connection, but I'm still interested in this over something like Nebula.
You pay taxes because otherwise goons with guns will come and lock you in jail with criminal and child rapists.

He can very well decide to not support a private company, that's the whole idea behind having a free market and not living in a socialist hell hole.
The EU continuing to demonstrate that the path to hell is paved with good intentions.
This was an example of one of the untold number of taxes our current system requires to extract wealth from literally every transfer of money it can get its hands on. Funny you pick that one and ignore the entire point.
> It feels, at worst, like the height of arrogance to assign new terms to existing concepts, as though you've just invented the concept.

Hilariously I’ve done exactly that for the exact opposite reason.

I have in the past “come up” with a programming paradigm that perfectly satisfied a need and when I went to tune it up for general use I realized it was similar to a concept I was unfamiliar with, or struggled to grasp previously or previously hated working with in the manner it was taught or interfaced.

~”This looks like a monad, maybe I’ll call this a monad, but I’m unsure what precisely is the mathematical proof supporting, or what the limits and boundaries of the concept of a monad are so to avoid someone mocking me saying ‘this is the worst monad implementation, it’s hardly even a monad, it’s like a low effort subset of what a monad is.’ I’ll just name it something else.”
To be honest if i was making $300k/year i’d be pirating even more… i could spend a lot more on hard drives!
> Still, I'd absolutely recommend that devs and other creators spend the extra $200 for 16GB.

Nowadays a Beelink SEi12 i7-12650H sells for around $550, and it ships with 32GB of RAM by default. Beelink is ultra crappy, but it goes to show how absurd is the $200 markup demanded by Apple to turn one of their laptops into a decent working machine.
> Everyone please vote with your wallets.

I always found the phrase vote with your wallets strange. Does that mean larger wallets get larger votes and smaller wallets smaller ones…?

I would say don’t vote with your wallet. Rather get out and actually vote in an election, write your representatives and senators, call them, make appointments with their offices and go visit them to discuss your concerns.

Everyone seems to have this learned helplessness that if they don’t buy something that it will somehow change, rather than just engaging the democratic process to effect laws that shape the society they want to see.
>a script to follow

Going on a tangent here, but I always hated this idea of reading off a script to try and lobby politicians. If I were the politician, I would ignore all such communiques as indoctrinated spam.
Is it surprising or unsurprising to see such amount of social anxiety in the comments?
> I always wondered why we cannot find hot filled appliances in the old continent.

You can find them but they'll be in the semi-professional space and above (relatively expensive high-duty).

They're very rare in the consumer space because

- it requires running more hot water lines / extensions, historically houses are built with lots of cold water lines but hot water lines only where required

- for their heating requirement, a normal electric plug is more than sufficient in the land of 230V, this is is a similar issue to kettles basically

- they require an internal heater anyway as residential water circuits come nowhere near the high temperature cycles: 50-53C is common to avoid risks of scalding but some are set as low as 45, the standard high temp cycles for washing machines are 60 and 90, and dishwasher commonly have a heavy cycle around 65

- it makes the machines more convoluted since they needs more inlets, a mixing valve, etc...

- they're not really compatible with hot water tanks: you don't want your dishes or laundry to empty your shower water, plus hot water tanks are commonly electrical so there's no real gain given per the above the machines need a heater anyway
Nothing will ever compare to the inefficient absurdity of server racks of 2013 “trash can” Mac Pros.

https://9to5mac.com/2018/11/01/mac-server-room/
Tesla stock is an avalanche in waiting. Passive index fund investment, tax credits and stimulus put this con company on top. Little by little the cracks reveal its true nature beyond all the BS promises. RUN while you still can. "*This is not financial advice."
Good luck finding your favorite movie on Netflix. And Spotify keeps taking songs off their catalogue which ruins my favorite playlists and saved songs.

To be fair, streaming services are usually not at fault here. They have to negotiate with the content owners. But at the end of the day, I don't care.

Piracy still has place and it's not a money issue.
You can always pirate old games if you know you will never buy them. I used to buy (10 years) old PC titles (AA) from my local 2nd hand market, but then I noticed most of them required connecting your account to activate the game. And that is only valid for 1 account, meaning my purchase was absolutely useless. Next thing I did was to download a pirated version, and it worked smoothly on my linux machine.
Or just disable the data sharing option in the UI?
I think I should've stopped commenting after the first note about safety.
Then it’s proposing a wealth tax which is even worse an idea
Back when I was marking assignments in university that was by far the most reliable way to catch cheating: two assignments with the same quirky error in the same spot. It didn’t even have to be a shared code/logic error; a misspelled comment or variable name was enough to mentally pop up a red flag and go back to find the other assignment with the same error in it.

On some of the assignments we gave out we would provide a set of, say, 10 initial test cases that the students could use to verify their work with the expectation that they would write more of their own. As a marking team we would also generate our own more detailed test suite; partly to make our job easier, partly to try to identify trends of places where students might not be understanding the course material. That ended up being another interesting way to identify plagiarism: if only 2 or 3 assignments failed a given unit test we would go and look to see if the implementations on those assignments was identical…
I know people that still buy CDs.

I've been meaning to dump my Tidal artist list to a spreadsheet or something, and figure out how to pay a few dozen artists directly this year.

One possibility is to buy their albums and copy them to my NAS. Paying for DRM-free downloads seems easier / better, but I'd want to make sure the artists' cut is higher than with streaming.

For what it's worth, iTunes is apparently DRM-free these days. I don't want to figure out their terrible GUI, but presumably there's some tool that'll copy the songs out of it and into a filesystem.
Whatever can be measured can be managed, but not everything that counts can be counted. I'd be interested to see international comparisons and closer attention paid to more subjects than English and maths, as well as psychosocial development, classroom environment, and student mental health.
And whose fault is that
Interesting blog post, based on an interesting paper.

For a bit more background, there's been a couple of posts on the "minimal cell" concept on Derek Lowe's venerable In the Pipeline blog. This 2016 post [1] talks about the initial development of the JCVI-syn3.0 cell; this 2023 post [2] goes over a paper that studied the evolutionary dynamics of these minimal cells.

[1] https://www.science.org/content/blog-post/smallest-viable-ge...

[2] https://www.science.org/content/blog-post/ground
Newspapers in Sweden are having a field day with Tesla after last week's heavy snow.

Seems like all the horror stories about people being stranded in 20F with a dead car and no heating come from Tesla owners.

I'm happy nobody has died yet, but from what we saw it's just a matter of time before whole families are found dead
Beyond the Code – An Engineer's Battle Against Knowledge Loss
Is the knowledge economy really defined by knowledge though? Or is it simply that labor needs have shifted to information management
With working from home getting popular, even fewer people want to be a teacher. 5 days a week starting at 8am. Not going to happen.
The colder cycles will not work correctly (they have only one inlet and no mixing circuit), they might scale more than normally, and I wouldn't be surprised if some put themselves into a security mode.

The plastics used for some of the inlet circuitry might also age abnormally when it gets 50C water rather than the, say, 10~30C range it is designed for.
Would it make a difference if it was physical dimension? Wouldn't you simply be asking the same question?
I agree but on the other hand what happens when you want to play the game in 6 years and they removed it? Or they removed it for political reasons? I have used Ubisoft+ in the past especially for assassins creed so it’s good but it has drawbacks. I would hate to stop owning most of my games. I mean it doesn’t help that Ubisoft games after 2010 are just throwaways anyway. Remember when Ubisoft was the king?
The entire list of features are all things the official clients don't offer.

I DO pay for spotify and still want all those features.

You attempt to critique other people's behavior, while completely failing at "be a good person" yourself. It is always that way. The person pointing the finger is the one most in need of a mirror.
Underlying problem: people don't want to pay teachers enough.
I'm a strong advocate for scrapping all degree requirements to every profession, perhaps even in law (ie., banning most employers from asking).

This shifts the burden on to the employer to make a reliable assessment of the applicant. This would have two, imv, favourable effects: 1) a university education would compete on its merits as education with all alternatives; 2) breaking the rent-seeking monopolies universities have on entrance to the jobs market.

The law would have to be carefully crafted -- but we're long past the era when a degree was predictive of anything. It was always a positional good, and if 50% of the next generation have one there's no signal within the noise anymore.

And of course, it was always as much about 'keeping the rifraff out' as it was in selecting good candidates.

For certain professions, eg., teaching/drs/etc., i think it makes more sense for the state to have 'licence to practice' certifications/exams -- rather than assume that a degree is such a licence.
It also made front page on HN a while back, maybe 6 months ago?
You can save it only locally in a Tesla too. You have to opt-in to sharing the video.
Hah I'm still trying to understand how software developer pay should be a deduction at all.
Correct. In the past, they've pulled the "but I only take $75k out of the company" and "I pay for when I use the company jet for personal business" when discussing compensation in the past. While true, it ignores the >$1B in stock.

If I had more courage, I would have asked if the jet was available to anyone willing to pay for it.
The point is that the musicians still deserve to get paid from streaming. Ridiculous nonsense to say that if something isn't well remunerated, might as well go the illegal route and not pay anything at all.
> If you value your privacy, never go near a Tesla.

Oh how I would love if this became a common sentiment. It's hard to get door dings from careless morons if they refuse to park next to my car.

> recorded the whole time by the internal camera

Covered that ages ago, it records nothing.
Piecemeal, perhaps, but I wonder if this would scale. A whole lot of the HR problems that things like degrees and certifications solve are problems that happen at scale.

If you suddenly drop the licensing requirements for teaching, you'd now have a new job available to anyone in the job market that would start attracting different profiles of people than you will get when emergency hiring teachers. Also emergency hired teachers probably come in via social networks of existing teachers, parents, etc.
I went to the site, and backed out too. But after reading all these comments took it as a challenge. :)

I’ll admit that I’m prob more extroverted than the norm on here but it was great. I meant to just jump on, say hi, and jump off. But ended up chatting for a while. It was great!
On‐demand JSON: A better way to parse documents?
they are also becoming a node validator in the wemix blockchain.
>so they don't have to spend the mental overhead of financially evaluating every single thing they consume

This was Clay Shirky's argument at least a couple decades back about why microtransactions don't generally work. At least for optional small purchases making continuous "Is this 5 cent purchase worth it?" decisions is exhausting.

Music probably provides a better test case for this than video in general because you don't really many exclusives. Given the starting point of a lot of ripped/downloaded music, I could probably dispense with music streaming and just buy an album or two now and then but it's close enough to breakeven I don't bother.
It's worth going to the source here because this is being widely misinterpreted:
https://www.gamesindustry.biz/the-new-ubisoft-and-getting-ga...

"If you resume your game at another time, your progress file is still there. That's not been deleted. You don't lose what you've built in the game or your engagement with the game. So it's about feeling comfortable with not owning your game."

He could just as well be telling the rest of Ubisoft (and the games industry) that in order for customers to be comfortable you need to not delete things and allow people to keep what they invested in the game, and that if you take things away from them then people won't be comfortable.
Or have to deal with this attitude
I agree ideologically but intellectually this isn’t true. A movie ticket is a license to watch the movie. If you sneak in, would anyone say that’s legal? Piracy is the same thing. Buying a video game these days is a contract for a license to use the game. I hate it, but that’s the legal aspect
But first they'd have to sneak into my house and somehow trick my into talking.
The people you're referring to also thought they live in a vacuum. Save your comment and revisit it in 10 years. I don't know if that war taught you anything, but you either care about the government of a large country isolating its populace today, or you're inevitably going to care about it tomorrow. Yes, indirectly it's your business as well.
Reminded of the story where a dead body was taken to a post office in Ireland in an attempt to withdraw pension money...

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-60091753
Many countries have key shipping routes and other geographical advantages, but corruption and stupid leaders/populace prevent them from succeeding.
It was great for selecting quality candidates until the education system got heavily abused and mismanaged and corrupted with maladjusted incentives, may it RIP.
They're all spoonfed a propaganda stream that makes the czar look like a nice guy trying his best to protect the motherland.
No Electron? Sign me up!
Do your research on privacy around any car you buy. The entire car market is now a privacy shitshow due to car companies wanting to double dip in the same way mobile app companies are doing.
How separate was British Singapore from British Malaya? My understanding is that Lee Kuan Yew wept when Singapore was thrown out of Malaysia. Neither he nor anyone else expected that Singapore would become a first-world economy and Malaysia would, well, not.
Kagi and DuckDuckGo are viable search engines! Often as good as google, sometimes better given all the SEO spam!
I don't know where you are located, but in the US I find deals throughout the year on laptops with windows pre-installed that are cheaper than linux only laptops.

So if your goal is to save money I would look there first. The Dell outlet store is a good place to get last gen or refurbished laptops with great savings.

I've had good experiences with:

* ThinkPads

* last gen XPS 15 laptops (9520, 9530)

* Asus zephyrus M16

Having seen a coworker's System76 laptop, I have to say. I would pass on that unless you find one at an absolute great price.

Try to buy them with the lowest ram and ssd and do the upgrade yourself. For example I am running 96GB DDR5 in the M16 with no problems.

Also, I haven't gotten my hands on one, but the HP Dev One laptop was linux first and are quite inexpensive. They only had one run, but I am seeing them online used for $500.

I've also not had a chance to get my hands on a starlab laptop but I would very much like to.

https://us.starlabs.systems/
That's kind of what being bathed in a constant firehose of disinformation does to public opinion, though, right? Most of those people aren't even living on earth one.
Somewhat related: A month ago I migrated from Spotify to YTMusic (Youtube), and published the scripts I used to do it. People have kind of come out of the woodwork: reporting issues, starring the repo, asking questions, last night I found someone has written a GUI for it.

https://github.com/linsomniac/spotify_to_ytmusic

The biggest reason I ditched Spotify is that their shuffle play of playlists is laughably bad. I like listening to just a shuffle of my favorite music, but their player seems to "stick" on just a few of them. I ask it to shuffle a few thousand "liked" songs, during my shower every day, and I'll hear the same song 3 times in a week, for example.

There was a "bug" open in their support forum since 2017 that they replied "maybe we'll look at it eventually". It has hundreds of pages of replies. And they just laid off a significant portion of their workforce, so I figured it'd never get resolved. And for a company doing music playback, it just seems like they can't get one of the basics right.

Since going to YTMusic, I've been hearing songs from my playlists that I haven't heard in years.
It sounds like they need to redesign the holder for the end of the cable so it doesn't fall out into the snow. Frankly, it's been obvious for years, at any temperature the holder for the cable is a little finicky. Finding the cable on the ground is somewhat common.
I agree partially but I think a lot of people - myself included - don’t necessarily check back to their own comments. And there’s no notification- which I’m sure is a feature more than a bug.

But I do think a chat would be a nice addition.
The UK always had a program that allowed you to become a teacher without a degree. It involves a diploma followed by gaining QTLS (Qualified Teacher Learning and Skills) status I believe. Is this not the case in the USA?
"Sentry mode". If someone keys your car, you get several high-resolution camera recordings of the crime.