csnover

IP range is definitely a problem. I manage to get blacklisted a couple times per year by Hotmail, who still only support IPv4, despite SNDS always saying everything is fine. They don’t seem to care that blocking a whole IPv4 netrange of a reputable VPS provider because some other customer was sending junk mail will cause collateral damage.

IP/domain reputation is also probably an issue; I’ve been using the same IP address and domain names for over a decade so services like Talos are reasonably satisfied I’m harmless. If someone sets up a server and it has never sent mail for their domain before—or, worse, they get a radioactive IP address—it may be hard to become accepted by other email providers.

I get the sense that the relative lack of trouble I have maintaining a mail server is more to do with being effectively grandfathered in and worry that if I ever have to shift away from my current provider that email sending is going to become a lot harder since I won’t have my IP reputation any more.

I guess the OP thinks anyone sufficiently motivated by financial self-interest such that they won’t want the job unless it pays ‘enough’ is also someone who is going to be more open to bribery because they value personal wealth too much. I can see both sides on this but I don’t think it’s unreasonable.

People who are drawn to positions of power and also highly motivated by personal wealth seem like particularly bad choices if you want to avoid corruption, so keeping the salary low may sufficiently disincentivise this sort of person from entering the public sector.

On the other hand, public sector work is harder in many ways, so not providing equal or superior compensation may discourage many people who are entirely scrupulous but not foolish enough to both take on the extra burden of public sector work and make less money at the same time.

> It feels to me like you’re proposing we financially exploit those who are magnanimous and duty-driven enough to tolerate public service.

I understand that it may seem foolish or unjust, but it feels unreasonable to me to suggest it’s exploitative to pay someone a 97th-percentile salary[0] just because it’s not commensurate with private sector peers in a highly compensated industry.

> For instance, what you’re saying feels logically equivalent to me to saying we should tax charities more heavily since they aren’t driven by greed, or that we should underpay active duty military personnel since they’re driven more by love for their country than by self interest.

The problem as it applies to judges and legislators is that they represent a very small group of people with the ability to make high-stakes decisions that impact a large number of people, and their decisions are enforced by the power of the state.

Charities don’t have the power of the state behind their decisions, and personnel within the military apparatus tend not to have much individual power, so the incentives for corruption are much more limited (and if it does happen, much less impactful).

> It seems to me that the current system isn’t working, and leaning further into the aspect that makes it not work is not a good idea.

Is there some proof that under-compensation is the main source of the corruption in the current system? I have no evidence either way, but my sense is that it is not.

[0] https://dqydj.com/income-percentile-calculator/ at $250k

The insane thing about this is to me that Exxon did seem to have ideas about pivoting away from oil and gas in the 1970s[0]. They funded research that brought down the cost of solar panels five-fold and started manufacturing and selling their own panels[1], they developed the lithium-ion battery[2], and they created subsidiaries for servicing the nuclear power industry[3], among other things.

I’ve never understood the obstructionist position of these oil execs. If you want to make a shitload of money, why not push for development of some emerging industry like renewables where all the infrastructure has to be built up from nothing? That could be money you are getting paid to build it. Instead, now it’s money going to some other company.

[0] https://www.desmog.com/s1ep1-bell-labs-energy/

[1] https://www.npr.org/2019/09/30/763844598/how-big-oil-of-the-...

[2] https://www.bupipedream.com/news/49390/prof-whittingham/

[3] https://www.nytimes.com/1976/03/14/archives/exxons-innovativ...

I feel like it may be helpful for you to try to understand how poorly constructed this argument is by reflecting on all of the pain and evil that has been enabled by allowing something you enjoy or care about to exist.

How confident do you feel that your religion, or people acting on behalf of it, have not engaged in violent acts of revenge, torture, child abuse, or human trafficking? Does it not cause significant duress in many cases to teach people to feel shame, to tell them normal feelings are sinful, that they will suffer for eternity if they break the rules? No one needs to worship any particular religion—there are plenty of other ones, after all—so perhaps yours should not be allowed because it’s associated with bad things?

Do you eat meat from industrial farms? Use electronics containing conflict minerals? Wear clothes made overseas? Play video games from studios notorious for crunch? All these industries cause significant amounts of suffering and many are exploitative. They fund wars, genocides, slave labour, child labour[0][1], human trafficking, and animal abuse. They cause duress, evil, and pain. Shall we disallow them? We don’t need to eat meat and it would be healthier for most people and the planet if they didn’t. We can go back to buying only domestic clothing, or just make our own. We all lived without smartphones until 15 years ago, so those can go. Games are just like porn—merely diversions—so if we discount all the joy they bring to people, they really have no value to society at all. Should we get rid of these things, too, because they are associated with bad things?

Allowing books aids a probabilistic percentage of people who want to promote violence and hatred toward others, deliberately spread falsehoods, advocate for and explicitly describe abuse, and give instruction on how to cause harm. Even when there are disclaimers, sometimes they cause significant duress to readers. There’s a lot of pain and evil enabled by allowing books to spread… do you get the picture?

All human enterprise has problems, and inductive fallacies like these are no way to judge what should or should not be allowed.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36186445

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33299929

Based on a quick search, they are probably referring to this study[0] which states “One fish serving can be equivalent to drinking water for a month at 48 ppt PFOS”.

The EWG map of PFAS in fish[1] provides some specific measurements on fish in the Mississippi and Minnesota rivers.

[0] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S001393512...

[1] https://www.ewg.org/interactive-maps/pfas_in_US_fish/map/

Well all you have to do then is make it not hard to read :-)

   #[derive(thiserror::Error, Debug)]
   enum Error {
     #[error("bad index somehow")]
     BadIndex
   }

   // ...

   let pivot = array.get(array.len() / 2).ok_or(Error::BadIndex)?;

What you are describing basically matches my experience. Whether I’m doing a blame or a code review, if I’m reading commit messages, I’m doing it to understand why some thing is the way it is. Reciting what changed in 70 characters instead of saying why it changed doesn’t feel like it helps me much.

For the case of trying to find a change, I’d personally just run `git log -G` or `git log <file glob>` depending on what I’m looking for. I suppose one must know that these commands exist, though, so maybe that’s part of it.

From April: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2023/04/free-software-group-...

Discussed several times previously on HN:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35589179

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33399940

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33563378

The story of the barely surviving artist that needs extremely long copyright durations to eat and keep a roof over their heads is an emotionally compelling one, but I’ve never seen it backed up by data—and I’ve looked quite hard to try to find some. Can you point me to a source that provides sales figures by publication date so it is possible to look at how much money is being spent on >20 year old fiction? A source that can exclude dead and high-net-worth authors would be ideal, or at least one that provides quantiles, since I’d expect old book sales to be disproportionately weighted toward rich or famous authors, rather than the sorts of working folks you’ve mentioned.

It seems to me like you are describing an unlikely situation where a lot of conditions would need to be true for >20 year copyright to make sense:

1. Many artists are commercial failures for over two decades, but eventually succeed;

2. These artists’ newer successful works don’t result in income equivalent to working a full-time non-creative job for that time;

3. Fans will not pay them for the old works without the threat of legal action;

4. There is no other way to monetise the old works by e.g. recording a commentary, audiobook, screenplay adaptation, manuscripts, compilations, special editions, etc.;

5. Artists don’t pander to current trends only because they know they might be able to make some money over 20 years later;

6. The money they will get paid in royalties under a contract where they sold the rights to a publisher when they were an unknown nobody is greater than the amount of money they would make selling it directly in the public domain after becoming commercially successful.

The link in the article about emphasising phonics[0] vaguely answers that question in the reverse, in terms of what was being taught instead; a podcast series from 2022 called Sold a Story[1] (transcripts also available at the link) gives a much more detailed answer about why.

[0] https://apnews.com/article/phonics-science-reading-c715dea43...

[1] https://features.apmreports.org/sold-a-story/

I was curious about this so I did a little research.

> you need to decode and have every frame ready in less than 41 milliseconds, which is shockingly difficult even on high-end hardware

There appear to be multiple high-speed JP2K decoders on the market; Comprimato[0] include a calculator for their product and it claims that a $240 GPU from 2016 can decode 4k 4:4:4 at 72fps.

> Do I need to mention read speeds and network traffic? If every frame is, say, just 5MB, that is over 960 Megabits per second, saturating a Gigabit link.

According to Wikipedia, the DCP standard has a maximum bit rate for picture of 250Mbit/s[1]. My $60 home internet connection could stream that at almost 2x realtime.

> When you are calculating audio in real-time for 30 or more speakers, the compute costs add up, potentially into custom hardware / FPGA territory.

Dolby offer a software version of Atmos for soundtrack mastering that runs on a Mac Mini[2]. Real-time 128-channel object mixing was possible using consumer-grade hardware as early as EAX 5.0 in 2005[3], but Atmos does not need to be rendered in real time at a cinema, it can be done in advance and then during playback those pre-rendered PCM streams would be used which is a trivial amount of data to handle (under 20Mbit/s for a full 64-speaker array).

[0] https://comprimato.com/products/comprimato-jpeg2000/

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_Cinema_Package#Picture...

[2] https://professionalsupport.dolby.com/s/article/What-are-the...

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Environmental_Audio_Extensions...

For CMake stuff I would search like `<function name> path:/CMakeLists\.txt$|cmake/`.

For translations I would search a phrase using `<phrase> lang:"Gettext Catalog" path:/<language iso code>/`.

For reviewing library consumers I would just search for `<my library name> (<function name> OR <other function name> OR <third function name>) NOT path:<my library name>/**`.

There may be better queries for some of these, but I really didn’t have to do any magic or weird tricks. Everything more or less just works.

Absolutely. GitHub Code Search is by far the most valuable online development tool I have used the past year. It is so much more useful than Copilot or any of the AI LLMs in my experience.

With Code Search, I have:

* Rewritten a CMake build system, which would have been practically impossible without access to real-world examples because of how poorly designed and documented it is;

* Validated machine-generated translations by looking up language strings from projects that used human translators;

* Tracked down bugs in unfamiliar codebases, using symbol-based navigation, without the downtime of fetching a bunch of files and waiting for a language server to process them locally;

* Reviewed how projects were using the APIs of a library I work on to determine whether high-maintenance features were actually used, and whether tricky features were being used correctly or needed redesigning to reduce programmer error

Kudos to the team at GitHub. Genuinely stellar work.

I don’t live in Oregon but complaints here about drug use on transit—and antisocial activity in general—have also increased sharply since the beginning of the pandemic. So, I suspect if there is actually a causal relationship between legalisation and antisocial behaviour, that it is currently heavily outweighed by other more significant changes that have occurred in the same period of time.

I am not a subject expert here at all so I don’t know if I understand exactly what you mean by “methods that would let you design such a thing in-silico”, but there was a paper[0] and interview with its authors[1] published a year ago about a drug-development AI being used to design chemical weapons.

[0] https://www.nature.com/articles/s42256-022-00465-9

[1] https://www.theverge.com/2022/3/17/22983197/ai-new-possible-...

GPT-4 readily hallucinates data[0], so that seems unlikely, though it also appears unlikely that it would make it any worse!

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34775853

> Zig forces you to pass the allocator in, so you might as well think about the most appropriate one!

I really feel like this is an underappreciated aspect of some of the more complained-about constraints that these newer languages place on programmers.

Like an i32, the default allocator will do a reasonable thing most of the time, but having to think about each allocation (is this short-lived or long-lived? is it actually necessary to do a heap allocation at all here? do you actually want GC?) makes code better and pushes the programmer to improve their ability to rationalise about what they’re actually doing in ways that provide tangible benefits.

By way of comparison, when I started writing Rust I was very frustrated by all the explicit conversions, but eventually realised that it (a) forces me to actually stop and think about what the most natural type is for a given value, and (b) also makes it clearer where the natural boundaries are between components. In my experience, if there’s a lot of conversion going on within a function or module, it’s usually not because the language is ‘too verbose’. Instead, it’s because the API boundaries are in the wrong places, and the language has helped to reveal this by making doing the wrong thing harder.

The message being sent to customers claims that they “remain more aggressively priced than our peer providers”, which is nonsense as far as I can tell—unless they now consider their “peer providers” to be the likes of AWS, Azure, and GCP?

Hetzner Cloud’s price is ~40% of Linode’s new price[0], OVHcloud ~50–60%[1], and Vultr ~80%[2]. Of the big-name VPS providers, I think only DigitalOcean is more expensive now[3], and so they will be the same after this change.

A “bold new approach to the cloud”[4], indeed.

[0] https://www.hetzner.com/cloud

[1] https://us.ovhcloud.com/vps/compare/

[2] https://www.vultr.com/pricing/

[3] https://www.digitalocean.com/pricing/droplets

[4] https://www.linode.com/blog/linode/a-bold-new-approach-to-th...

> After all, what is the point of copyright? To protect the interest of human creators.

Sorry if I’ve missed your point here, but the purpose of copyright in the United States, as written in its constitution, is to promote the progress of science and useful arts[0], not to protect the interests of creators. The exclusive license to creators is a means to an end.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_law_of_the_United_St...

> Even more worrying is the shops that claimed the systems had viruses and they installed antivirus software - conveniently the paper authors weren't able to find any activity log data on those machines. That suggests that some repair techs are actively cleaning up their tracks.

This is the conclusion that the researchers imply, but keep in mind that these computers did have malware on them: the spyware the researchers planted there! As a former repair tech, if I’d seen some thing writing screenshots and activity logs to disk (we would use, among other things, sysinternals tools like procmon to look for malware) I would definitely be deleting that.

Regardless, the fact of the matter is that a negative finding in this study is meaningless, since the laptops could have had the disks removed and imaged separately, or the techs could have booted a live USB to copy off files. The researchers’ spyware would have not noticed in these cases. It is concerning to me (in terms of the quality of the overall research) that this is not mentioned in the limitations section of the paper given how obvious it is.

Thanks for the clarification! Since you’d mentioned IM administration it didn’t cross my mind that you were talking about Spravato. That typo is regrettable, but unimportant to your point that the nasal spray does indeed use two fixed doses.

> Correct. What you are saying is true for almost all drugs: recreational doses are typically higher than clinical doses. Ketamine is the exception.

To clarify: my understanding is that ketamine acts as a dissociative hallucinogen at lower doses and an anaesthetic at higher doses, so taking a higher dose will just knock someone out instead of giving them the dissociative/hallucinogenic effects.

> The clinical dose for depression is 86mg (not a typo), which is sometimes doubled, and the clinical dose for anesthetic purposes (which is what ketamine is mostly used for) is between 500mg-1g. The latter is IM injection, so it's also much more bioavailable than the first two (ie, the effective dose differential is even higher).

Ketamine is normally dosed based on body weight[0]. For depression IV, the dose is 0.1–0.75mg/kg/40mins, most commonly 0.5mg/kg/40mins. Clinical use in IM seems to be less consistent, with some clinicians using the same range and others doubling it, so the 86mg could be used for a wide range of body weights.

[0] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6023575/table/T...

[1] https://www.psychiatrist.com/jcp/depression/ketamine-for-dep...

> It does not support simply configuring the environment variables and running the code in the integrated terminal.

The "terminal.integrated.env.<platform>" setting configures the integrated terminal environment variables.

Just removing the content is not sufficient; one must still respond to the ticket with the information that Linode requests in order to keep the server from being disabled. The instructions in the ticket I received were not hard to understand or comply with in this regard and the whole thing was resolved within minutes of my response.

I’m not sure what the point is of interrogating me here; I am just a third party who went through the same thing and thought additional detail about the process would be appreciated. I didn’t have any service interruption, but I followed Linode’s instructions, and this leads me to conclude that the OP probably did not.

I received a third-party malware report from Linode once[0]. It’s possible that something has changed in the meantime since this was probably 4–5 years ago, but my own experience in a similar scenario was that Linode acted reasonably and in good faith. This tweet makes it sound like their policy and procedure hasn’t changed.

In my case, Linode opened an “AUP violation” ticket with a copy of the report, the steps they required to close the ticket (essentially: fix it and explain corrective measures), and a time when they would disable the server otherwise (which was something like 24 hours). It sounds like itch.io decided to ignore the AUP violation ticket and their server was disabled after 24 hours, just like the ticket said it would. (Waiting on a support ticket instead of calling also seems like a weird bad choice when your whole site is offline.)

I guess, having some first-hand experience with Linode’s malware handling process, that itch.io were at fault here, but I guess there may be more to the story they haven’t shared or weren’t clear on.

[0] Actually twice; some internet vigilante hooked up a virus scanner to a web crawler and was sending false positive reports directly to the abuse address for the netblock. After the second one I kindly suggested Linode stop accepting these reports, and never heard anything again.

In my experience, finding purpose is not an easy process, but it is at least a simple one to start.

Personal values are the things you care about. Going through a list of core values[0] and rating them on a 1–5 scale should give clarify on what really matters to you, so you can cleave away the rest. (I’ve also found thinking about conflict in terms of values to be incredibly helpful; when someone is upset about something, and it’s not clear why, my experience has been that it’s because one of their values are being violated.)

Personal values shift somewhat over time (e.g. a financial windfall may make wealth feel less important; having fewer opportunities to meet people may make relationships feel more important), but you’re likely to find that you have a particularly strong affinity to a few key values that don’t really change over time. Using those as a compass, you can find the ‘right’ activities for you by asking whether or not they’re in line with your key values. By doing this, you’re able to live a life that feels more fulfilling.

Once you’ve done this, there will probably be various things that come up where you find yourself uncertain or still not quite like you know what your purpose is, but it is hopefully enough to get going on the right path. Books providing an overview of all the different philosophies and their evolution over time might be interesting too to pick one of those that feels most right for your life. Good luck!

[0] There are a nearly infinite number of these on the internet. I don’t know of any one in particular that’s especially good. https://www.qualitycharters.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/10/H... is one option that came up for me that seems reasonable.

It seems to depend somewhat on the input image. Software like ImageOptim[0] brute force the best compression by trying multiple different compressors/modes and picking the best result and there is rarely a consistent winner.

That said, the best solution today is probably to just use a newer image format like WebP or (soon) AVIF if you need to meaningfully reduce image sizes.

[0] https://imageoptim.com/versions.html

Probably UPT[0].

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_Personal_Telecommuni...