skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> Otherwise, it seems like an emergent market is being accelerated

TANSTAAFL. The money from the subsidy came from something else, which you had to pay for. Often it comes from some industry where that country already has a dominant position and therefore can charge you higher prices without you having a choice to switch to something else. Which is, moreover, the problem with this:

> I, the consumer, can benefit from cheaper and better products and the attendant competition spurred by government finance of sorts.

The country doing the subsidizing thereby destroys their competitors in other countries who don't receive it, and then once they have a large enough lead they can raise prices and you have no alternative.
I've never listened to a podcast and have zero podcast related content on both mobile and desktop. There is one audiobook recommendation section, the 9th section down.
(2022). That contract was awarded to Whalebone https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/european-commission-entrusted... and the project has a website https://www.joindns4.eu/

This background article covers a lot of the whys and hows: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/23738871.2023.2... including mentioning similar projects in the UK and Canada. It says public access to it (as an option, alongside other public DNS services) will be available from 2025.
> And why did that happen?

You mean countries can't have revolutions unless they are approved by Russia? Which types of revolutions by which backers would be acceptable to Russia so they don't burn the country down?
This is an absurd argument. Whether or not a CIA puppet government is installed in a neighboring country, and the Russian language is banned or whatever Russia feels is "provoking": that kind of provocation isn't handled by tanks rolling across the borders of sovereign nations. Russia isn't where Russian is spoken, it's where the 1991 borders are.

> Nothing to do with the western-backed color revolutions or burning people alive

Again, who cares? Are you saying Russia was "provoked"? By Ukraine? To the point where millions must be displaced and hundreds of thousands killed?

No one cares whether anything "provokes" Russia in Russia's view. There are borders, those borders are between Russia and Sovereign nations. There is nothing that could go on in the area that could even begin to motivate rolling tanks across borders. Nothing.
Never understood the "two pizza team" since I eat a single pizza alone.
It's so weird to me that the EU seems to simultaneously hold the position that a user's privacy is a fundamental right that must be respected, and enacts a lot of good legislation to that effect, but also that we must snoop on everyone so that we can think of the children.
The worlds music at your disposal, and not satisfied... LOL

You can spend the rest of your life listening to all sorts of music, just by using the search bar and clicking around. Thats incredible!

I feel like after a while, we can take things for granted that are incredible and weren't even possible not too long ago. Not that we shouldn't strive for a better ideal..

Reminds me of a fortune cookie note I read a long time ago that I never forgot, mostly. Something to the effect of:

"I spent the time prepare the song, while the song is not being sung"

I do agree that artists should get a bigger share. Im sure if Spotify were super transparent about cost allocation, we would see room for improvement. Where there's money, there is greed.
Hence why PNaCL came to be.
To be fair, both of your examples are incredibly complex systems of relatively simple components.

One just has the added bonus of throwing our mortality back in our faces, so the needed distraction is understandable.
Sure, the UI/UX has degraded over time but I canceled my subscription when they started paying Bro Rogaine hundreds of millions of dollars to traffic disinformation and conspiracy theories.

There are countless examples but here's one from last week: www.forbes.com/sites/joshuacohen/2024/02/15/joe-rogan-provides-a-platform-to-hivaids-denialists
I’ve felt for a long time that everyone is probably interested in the period of their birth, and particularly the years just before. There’s something uniquely weird feeling about that time — you were technically alive for some of it, and yet it’s totally alien to you.

That’s why I think, for example, twenty year-olds today are interested in early 2000s fashion and computers.
People already use ChatGPT to determine if a doctor's visit is necessary, so AI is already in the decision chain.
Usually I just use PCPartPicker

https://pcpartpicker.com/
In my experience, Python, C and JavaScript* all have this property; whereas I have to relearn Pascal, Haskell, sh and (to an extent) Rust every time I go away from them for a bit. I think this is more a property of you or I than of particular languages.

*: excluding `for (… of …)` and `for (… in …)` – I can never remember which is which. `for (… of …)` is the one you can use with Arrays and other iterables.
If software getting larger is a sign of "progress", then someone could write a 2TB text editor right now and call it the most advanced editor ever written. Because inevitably, some day, editors with reach 2TB, right?
A lot of people were hurt in the American Revolution.

For better or for worse, words have consequences.
I'd like to call attention to the incredible situation regarding Benn Jordan (The Lightbulb), Spotify, and TuneCore, which just beggars belief.

Jordan uses TuneCore to distribute his music to major streaming services. He has posted a series of videos critical of Spotify among other streaming services, including the most recent, entitled "How Money Laundering W/ Spotify Works", attacking fraud on Spotify.

Very soon thereafter Jordan's music was pulled by TuneCore from all major streaming services due to, incredibly, supposed "high amounts of streaming fraud". Lots of finger pointing have since ensued. Spotify insists it didn't tell TuneCore to do it, but it's looking pretty murky. They did it over the weekend so there was no recourse until Monday. They've since backpedaled and pseudo-apologized. To me (and others) this is very suspicious.

As far as I can tell, Benn is (1) beyond reproach here and (2) was only able to get both of them to admit error because he had a big enough audience. Smaller musicians would have to resort to, you know, posting to HN asking for help.
I don't think an all-encompassing audio platform is a bad business idea. After all audio is not a big market as it is. But it should be possible to turn features on and off. I have zero interests in podcasts and audiobooks either - I have no patience for that stuff.

But it's important to note that at least with (paid) Spotify you can simply use a different client which doesn't offer any suggestion. This is what I do.

Outside of music the one thing I would want in audio isn't there though :( It would be erotic ASMR-style content. But as usual big companies stay away from anything under the belt.

Oh and I would love nature audio also but I don't think they offer this either (and it's pretty repetitive so usually a short clip on repeat works fine).
Meanwhile, we've been hugging with some other illegal occupiers for decades. They're even allowed to openly run lobbying groups.
When you were born I was a teenager in France recording music from the radio to a tape praying for the announcer to be short and not to talk over the song. And that the song is not cut.

Such a tape was fantastic until you had to use a pen to rewind it.

Spotify at that time was science-fiction movie worthy.

This said, I listened to 20 sounds at that time and I have probably about 50 now that turn around :) The discovery functionality is great though
Maybe, but so far e.g. AI generated images haven't replaced good graphic illustrators. Once they can produce high-quality, consistent illustrations maybe, but they're not there yet, and I would argue that you still need a "professional" to work with AI-generated content as most folks don't have an eye for good design. Personally I'm already a bit tired of all the AI-generated content, people overuse it a lot in presentations and on websites and it's often slightly interesting to look at but also a bit bland and uncreative in its own overblown way (not sure how to describe this better). I still really like websites with high-quality, hand-drawn illustrations like e.g. fly.io or the early versions of the Dropbox website. So I would assume that illustrators will still exist but they will use AI tools to speed up their own workflows, much as we use digital tools today to speed up our work.
Can you actually point to any examples of those "western state-funded propaganda operations" that are being blocked?

You claim there is an equivalence, so why don't you put up some examples of these purportedly equivalent things.
I have thought "man, I wish my DNS server didn't let me visit this torrent website I want to visit" exactly zero times.

I wonder if this is some misguided "torrent sites are malicious, so users should be able to block them" thing, rather than a "the government needs to ban torrent sites because they're illegal". It's bizarre to make a DNS resolver like this, and then make it opt-in.
Ukraine did not have the capabilities but could be provided with them by USA for example.
I'm open to such offers.
Yeah, that is great. Apple Music and others for comparison remove songs from your playlists btw, does Spotify do that too ?
Rome's Hidden Killer
I had similar experiences working in health tech. I am still shocked to have learned that it can take decades for new (proven) treatment procedures to make it into general application in healthcare.
In the US, a drug store is a DM with a pharmacy in the back. There are way fewer independent pharmacies in the US nowadays as 'drug stores' have taken over.
Ill word it like this next time :p
I use a markdown static site generator with a custom layout and CSS. Currently I use hugo, but I don't like it and I'm re-writing my site with zola when I have the time. The ASCII flow charts are made in vim, they're just code blocks in the markdown file.
Exactly. Nothing prevents the list of layers to be the same or different layers.
> I work on Pascal code 8 hours a day, and it is not more readable then conventional C syntax ; I'd argue it's much less.

I'd disagree with that. I've worked on several Free Pascal projects, C projects, C++ projects and some other stuff and i find it easier to follow Free Pascal code in big projects written by other people than C/C++/Java/etc. At least, i'd say that outside extreme cases (like esoteric languages - or trying to write OOP code in an XML-based language with only imperative functionality :-P), readability is up to the reader.

Go is the only other language i found easy to follow, despite not really knowing much about the language itself, but Go is also a much simpler language, more limited in its feature set - Free Pascal on the other hand is a "kitchen sink" language where everything and anything goes and yet it still remains easy to read.

That said, IMO the #1 reason to use Free Pascal isn't so much the language itself (most of the stuff mentioned are also available in, e.g., D - and i'd say that D does a much better job at doing compile-time stuff to the point where you can probably implement yourself any missing features from Free Pascal) but the Lazarus IDE and the FCL and LCL frameworks. Well, that and that it has a very fast compiler with a decent optimizer (and there is the new LLVM backend if you need more oomph, though with a big hit to compile time) and a large number of supported platforms.

Also great backwards compatibility. That is very important, if my X years old code that used to work stops working without externally imposed reasons (e.g. uses OS-specific code and i switched to another OS or the universe replaced x86 with RISC-V) i don't care how clean, consistent, elegant or whatever else a language might be that give theoretical language designers warm feelings, i care that my code that worked doesn't work anymore.
I like Spotify, not because of the algorithm, but because of the availability of music and the ability to listen to it, I know how it was with casette decks, cd's and napster.

I think Spotify did set and still sets an example how content can be distributed and made available for a pretty acceptable price, I still have to see somthing like it for video.

And algorithms can be a nice feature, but fastly can become generic or a bubble, being able to actively choose what you want to listen to, that does if for me.
In 10 years I think there’ll be nostalgia for the TikTok of today (the early 2020s), even if it still exists.

I feel nostalgia about things from 2014 already.
Goodness, feels as if I could have written this post :)

I have Spotify premium because I got a year long offer for less than 1/10th the price. Since I anyway used ad-supported Spotify I went for it. I really didn’t see any improvement:

- The UX sucks, more so - there’s nothing much to say here really

- They still push podcasts and different languages down my throat, more vehemently

- The recommendations still drive me mad

- They keep adding things, like that short video, that doesn’t let me listen to music peacefully, rather violently distracts me.

- So much so that I kinda limit myself to Liked. So that I don’t really have to interact with the app.

Then why I stay and stayed with Spotify? Because I don’t use Google (so no YouTube Music for me) and Apple Music sucks trucks and rails when it comes to India/Pakistan music, more so when I am looking for some old music.

Everything else is worse than even Spotify. But still it’s not worth paying for!

I thought of heading back to the high seas. But after W.CD that part is lost as well (no, nothing could replace that; O and R are not even a fraction of its shadow).
You don't have to, but it does often feel like when you use Spotify that isn't what the app would like you to do. The initial load in heavily steers you towards using a playlist instead and whilst it will occasionally list albums on the home screen it's often broken and will give you a single instead. I'm a huge Spotify user and listen to a lot of albums on it, but there's definitely merits for a more focussed experience like physical media or a digital player.
It's kind of crazy that everyone freaked out about "piracy" in the 2000s but every form of music filesharing in that era was materially better for music artists than what is by far the dominant platform for streaming music today, and that this is legal because it's been done in cooperation with the entrenched monopolies who own the right to make money off of music instead of in spite of them
HR at my last place was very aggressive in reminding us to leave 5-star reviews at Glassdoor. They once even offered Starbucks gift cards to the first 5 of the month. I was very sure to leave an honest, dirty laundry review after I left including a mention of this practice
>I've come to suspect the normal way large companies are organised makes performant software almost impossible.

I think this is a bit of an over generalisation. There were (and still are) many large companies producing performant and reliable software.
I suspect when things just work (think of the global phone system) people don't realise how much software is involved.
When was the last time you picked up a fixed line hand set and there was a software bug preventing you from calling any other handset on the planet - without varying delays or dropped packets?
Is Pegasus still working, or OS manufacturers patched the vulnerabilities it was using?
Shouldn't our tools be able to remove unused parts of the dependencies?
Are you claiming that war, crimes, poverty, hunger and disease have been eliminated?

Apparently not, from other comments. But then I don't really know what point is being made here.
> You can stand infront of one of the EU parl today and read whatever manifesto

And you can do that because it has literally no impact. This vision of free speech was a moment of genius from our institutions.

However, you can’t talk about the crimes of occupants in France in, say, a newspaper, or any broadcast channel, or anything that has an audience. Governments have literally made it a speechcrime to discover the authors who are killing our children at 23x the pace of the others.
I would rather that my government controlled my DNS than the US government / CIA controlled my DNS.
Not to mention an obscenely expensive lifestyle.
I switched to https://qobuz.com, mainly for the high audio quality (it goes up to 192kHz 24bit, which is worth it for me as I have the necessary equipment to make use of this), but it also supports "Spotify quality" i.e. mp3 quality/320 kbps, but I stayed for the experience.

It does not really have an algorithm, there is one playlist "My weekly Q", which updates each week with songs that you could like.

The only other algorithmic thing they have are song/artist radios like Spotify has, which also work relatively good.

Their front page features handpicked songs from people at Qobuz and songs that are trending on qobuz (these won't look at all like Spotify charts most of the time, as the audience is different). But you can customize the front page by filtering the genres you want to see.

But as mentioned I stayed for the experience, and this includes for some (by far not all) albums you can download the whole PDF of the CD inlet or see a description/history/backstory about an Album provided to you by Qobuz, also the choices that Qobuz handpicks are very often excellent picks which I immediately add to my favorites. And as these picks are not some algorithm that decides this, I don't end up in a rabbit hole of recommendations like on Spotify, but more often discover really new things that I would've never through Spotify. They also have their own magazine https://www.qobuz.com/us-en/magazine.

You can also buy songs, and they will be yours to keep forever, as you can get the songs directly as FLAC, WAV, ... without DRM and whatnot.

There is also an unofficial qobuz downloader, which is against their ToS, but works.

Though I still have not stopped using Spotify, as I'm in a family plan and don't pay anything for it, and sometimes Qobuz does not have some songs.

FWIW I also use https://last.fm for recommendations, and Qobuz can automatically scrobble to it.

All in all Qobuz has more of the "sitting in a Living Room and listening to vinyls/CDs vibe" rather than the TikTok/Instagram vibe that Spotify gives to me.

Otherwise, I found Deezer to be quite a good alternative to Spotify.
It's not blocked in Sweden at least, so I doubt this is a EU thing
here are some ideas:
Thank you for sharing, I found the puzzles engaging. Moving the nodes and lines in puzzle 20 was a pleasant challenge.
> You can't run Google on consumer hardware, but you can run LLMs locally.

You can't run an up to date model locally. When I ask Googles models they have knowledge from stuff just a week ago, without using search. You wont get that from a giant local model.
How do you make sure people understand the risks in a more "free for all" world and who pays for when those risks realize?
Seek Cloudflare protection
you probably can do images with vim, either rendered as colored ascii or with some third party software such as w3m (text based web browser that can render images in the terminal)
Don't want to judge but that's concerning. You can really mess up your internal organs with that much volume (even spread over a year with a family of four).
I have several Spotify playlists back in 2014, I don't see any songs removed. I am not sure why Apple Music will remove them?
Russia had nothing to lose and plenty to benefit.

1. Direct monetary benefit

Russia was not delivering on its contractual obligations to deliver gas. There were actual monetary penalties attached to not delivering, painful monetary damages, and those were to come into effect soon.

With the pipeline gone, they no longer could deliver gas through it, and thus were no longer in breach of contract.

2. Indirect monetary benefit

Gas prices spiked heavily afterwards. Even without NS1/2 Russia is still a heavy supplier of natural gas and thus benefitted from those spikes.

3. Political benefit (threat)

There are other pipelines in the baltic supplying former Russian gas customers. The message is: we can blow up this pipeline, we can blow up yours as well.

Importantly, they could do this without an actual attack on a NATO partner. It's their own pipeline after all. But of course, they had to do this covertly in order to send the message that they could also do this covertly to other pipelines.

4. Nothing to lose economically

The pipelines were economically useless. Nobody was going to buy Russian gas again through them after Russia first threatened and then actually cut off supplies. So an economically worthless asset. Sacrificing that to get the benefits 1-3 is easy.

5. Nothing to lose politically

The pipelines were politically useful as a threat towards Europe: don't cross us, or we'll cut off your gas. Well, the warning wasn't heeded, gas supplies were cut and ... nothing big happened. So the pipelines were no longer useful politically, as well as economically. Once again, sacrificing them to get benefits 1-3 was well worth it, because the price for Russia was close to zero.

6. Sweden dropping the investigation

The reason given was: "we do not have jurisdiction." Well, if Russia blows up its own pipeline, Sweden would not have jurisdiction, would they?

7. Precedent

Russia has blown their own pipelines up in the past.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2006_Russia–Georgia_energy_cri...
They have technical problems: Offline doesn't work sometimes when you seem to have a connection but it's not really working. The popups sometimes do not close and requires a restart. The client is heavy and can show videos and display lyrics, which is nice when properly implemented but it's a buggy mess.

They have algorithm problems: Suggestions became useless since a long while. The silly podcast push. All those generic placeholder playlist...

They also have conflicting interests with their users and the non-megastar artists.

Therefore I also cancelled Spotify a long time ago.
The other factor is that I suspect the amount of stories was less back then; nowadays, every week there's hundreds of books, thousands of webpages, movies, etc being released.

But 500 years ago most people couldn't even read.
French telecom company Orange fined €650k for violation of GPL license
In the future, with an Apple Vision Max 16, we achieved full and perfect immersion. Text editors now come with 3D environments you can "sit in" while writing text on your virtual, haptic feedback keyboard. One extreme definition 3D environment has the size of 1 TB. As a minigame, the jungle one comes with a realistic tiger that you can tame, like a tamagochi.

If you ignore the tiger, the object containing its affection values will remain null, causing a nullpointer (and crashing the 3D environment) eventually as the text editor tries to check if you fulfilled the requirements for the tiger stripe font you can get if your affection levels with the tiger are high enough.