grappler

saw this one coming

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33401885

just by using that term, you leave the impression that you're on a weird fringe information diet.

e.g. https://apnews.com/article/coronavirus-pandemic-science-heal...

if internet advertising really is that ineffective, how does one explain the incredible amount of it, its permeation of seemingly everything, and the amounts of money involved?

This brings to mind a coworker a decade and a half ago. A web designer who decorated his door with drawings and quotes.

My favorite among the things on his door, and the one I can still recount now, read as follows:

    “Can you just…”
    no.

anyone who knows to check the internet archive or other archive sites would be able to do that for many prominent tweets.

But yeah, let's keep going with the mastodon/fediverse things

Seems like you want to quibble about some detail of the page I linked to rather than the point I was making. Sure, ok, I grant you your quibble.

I wonder what Tim Berners-Lee would think about the framing that says Web3 is about being self-certifying.

https://jaygraber.medium.com/web3-is-self-certifying-9dad77f...

In the context of TBL's invention combining urls, hypertext, and http, this is about the authentication and authorization steps that ask, "who is making the request, and should they be sent the resource they requested?"

Lacking great peer-to-peer approaches to this, we've gotten certificate authorities and tech giants acting as identity providers. Web3 is about exploring more decentralized approaches here which may, but by no means necessarily, involve blockchains.

This is incentive to build a better fediverse or decentralized social network or whatever you want to call it. There are lots of projects working on it, obviously, and lots of people already doing it to some extent, but this is one of those events that illustrate why it's a thing worth continuing to push on and move forward.

  > told on Sunday that they need to meet a deadline of
  > November 7th to launch the feature or they will be fired

Why the heavy-handed cartoon villain boss thing though? Is this effectively another way to cut people?

Changing the subscription price is presumably technically doable on short notice. But merging it with expanded verification for any and all who want it? Is that a one-week sprint to develop, test, and put in production?

There is an actual, honest-to-goodness, standardized, current, Shell Command Language now. It's part of POSIX.1-2017 or, if you like, IEEE Std 1003.1-2017.

Perhaps not surprisingly, it's bourne shell, not bash. But still, it's an actual published standard all can refer to when the language in question is "shell scripts", i.e. .sh files, or "shell commands" in some context where a shell command is called for (e.g. portable makefiles).

  https://pubs.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/9699919799/utilities/V3_chap02.html

Posting here to add a mention of Signal-TLS-Proxy:

  https://signal.org/blog/run-a-proxy/
  https://github.com/signalapp/Signal-TLS-Proxy

many cryptocurrencies do have 'versions' of a sort. See ethereum's recent one known as "the merge" which moved that currency to a completely different consensus algorithm!

whoever it is, is a hero

Zerocash is an academic paper and early implementation from a group of researchers -- a proof of concept of using zero-knowledge proofs to add privacy to a public blockchain ledger.

Zcash is the ongoing project based on Zerocash, started in large part by those same researchers, but with funded teams of engineers continuously iterating on the protocol and implementations.

it's good to be the king

It's now 700 points

I set a points threshold on what hacker news stories I see. This article broke through that threshold even though it is not worth my time, so the thing I'm going to do immediately after posting this comment is raise the threshold some more.

That's the action that should always follow, any time something gets through the filter. Make the filter more restrictive. Over time, that should clear out the low value things.

The approach of using direnv and putting .env files in directories encouraged me to pull more variables from other places in config files, or shell scripts, or global variables in a programming project, and put them in environment variables instead. It's very aligned with the 12 factor philosophy [1].

Also, many scripts start by just defining a bunch of variables -- and many of those, in terms of other variables. Say, a PROJECT_ROOT directory, and a PROJECT_DOCS directory defined relative to that, etc. Then, a bunch of command parsing logic, after defining all those default values, so the user can set values of their own. Then, finally, the script can start doing the thing it was put there for in the first place.

With the .envrc approach, some of that stuff is pulled out of the script (making it shorter and simpler) and considered part of the directory environment.

  [1] https://12factor.net/config

direnv should have been part of unix/linux/posix environments from the start. Whenever something's install steps tell you "go add this export statement to your .bashrc" or similar, it never sat well. That sort of thing should be scoped by path, and shell independent -- exactly the thing direnv enables.

paulg, despite saying "There are aggressively conventional-minded people on both the right and the left", immediately follows that with a fixation on the left:

"The reason the current wave of intolerance comes from the left is simply because the new unifying ideology happened to come from the left. The next one might come from the right. Imagine what that would be like."

We don't need to imagine. We're over a year into a wave of moral panic from the right focusing on local school boards in the united states, in which they seek to purge reading materials dealing with subjects that make them uncomfortable, fire people for raising those subjects, and impose rules against raising those subjects, in some cases carrying criminal penalties.

Looking over at Russia, we see the worst case scenarios Paul references in the esssay playing out quite explicitly, today. The example of how we'll know we're really in trouble ("Damn right we're banning ideas, and in fact here's a list of them") and the example of Mao saying "There are heretics among us. Seek them out and punish them"? Putin and his followers have already entered that territory [1] [2].

  [1] https://www.nytimes.com/2022/03/16/world/europe/putin-russia-ukraine-protests.html
  [2] https://www.nytimes.com/2022/04/09/world/europe/putin-russia-war-ukraine.html

I don't mind that registries are a thing but I hate that they're so baked into the tools, which I think is what you're getting at.

If I'm starting a project, I want everything small, simple, and self-contained within my project directory. If, right out of the gate, I'm supposed to already have a daemon running (as root it seemed for a while?) which will do the building and execution, and a "registry" set up somewhere, I've already got pieces I likely don't understand and magic commands and high level abstractions for interacting with them, and introductory material telling me "this magic command is all you have to do! look how much you don't have to worry about!"

But I am worrying about it. And that's why I love when people write these "hard way" guides. So thank you for that link.

The world is giving Ukraine massive sanctions as we speak. What sanctions are missing that you argue are also needed?

lol at Meta's president of global affairs referring to Facebook's service as "reliable information". When compared with what Russian citizens are going to be getting going forward, there is a valid point there. But still... lol.

No doubt Putin loves to highlight any hypocrisies found anywhere in the western countries.

But, I don't think you need any complicated theory to explain any of his actions re: Ukraine. He's wanted that country back ever since it broke off from the USSR. He never considered its moves toward democracy legitimate. He grabbed part of it in 2014. His actions have been very consistent on that front -- make plays to control Ukraine and weaken NATO. Finally he's dispensed with the subtlety of cyberattacks and political messaging and just went full in with ground forces.

The community handled the situation in a manner appropriate to the medium. They decided to follow an altered chain that did not include the transactions they objected to.

A minority disagreed and followed the original chain, which continues to this day and can be traded on major exchanges. You can buy and sell on either or both of those chains, or not, as you like. So given all that, is there still a problem?

I'm well past the stage of being angry or even frustrated at Qanon follower type people. Now it's pure naked contempt. I regard them with a look down the nose, with a satisfied sneer. I guess I've turned into the "elite" -- or at least elitist -- that they're worked up about.

The thing that's hilarious to me about this debate is the unstated assumption that, but for this promise to appoint a black woman in this nomination cycle, the overall process of nominations and confirmations would select -- and for prior appointments has selected -- the most brilliant, most impartial legal minds available.

I share an interest in this topic, and have come up with a partial set of coping strategies.

- I open the popup for the 'SEOInfo' firefox plugin which displays metadata from the page (JSON-LD, microdata, and a catch-all "other meta" field often show created/modified timestamps for the current page)

- A page may give a date but if the page has a whiff of marketing vibe about it and that date is very recent and not in the url I am immediately suspicious of the date it gives.

- I click over to archive sites (Internet Archive/wayback machine, archive.today). I'll often bookmark a good early capture from one of these next to the actual page for the sole reason that the capture has some semblance of a date, even if it's not close to the actual published date. I want that simply because I like to order links by date and so I need some date to use for that.

- Academic papers are especially frustrating here. Some have a date prominently in the pdf but most don't. This is apparently an artifact of a process whereby papers often simply don't have a definitive date. The authors worked on it over the course of a year or more, so many differing versions are floating around. For these I google the title and can often get an arxiv preprint page with a submission date, or journal publications with a submission date (though these often only give a month or a year).

- There is a lot of good stuff on a stackoverflow page but what's the "date" of that page? A question could have been asked a decade ago and have answers running from that day to today. I really like the wayback machine for these. I can start with an early version of the page and click forward through time, bookmarking when I stop. Then if I pick it up again later, I can resume from the bookmark and continue forward through time from there.

- Quora pages are especially frustrating because they won't give the date the question was asked; just the answers. And you can't do the wayback machine thing I described above for stackoverflow because Quora has blocked internet archive. For these reasons I dread trying to do anything with quora pages.

What I'd really wish for is some way browsers can get create/modify dates for any page, so the user doesn't need to hunt for it and plugins can do stuff with it. For example I'd love a plugin that could order the tabs in a window by, say, modification date. The workflow I have in mind is: open search results into tabs. Make the browser order the tabs by date for you without manual labor. Then you can read through your search results in chronological order. Save the set. Restore it a week or a year later. Click "reorder" again to account for pages that have received updates. Now your tabs are in chronological order again. I would gladly pay for this capability!

The team of developers I was on around 2014-2015 was asked to do some user experience testing sessions of a mobile app that was part of our company's partnership with IBM, which was using Watson to answer users' healthcare questions with a chat interface.

In short, we were not impressed, and basically said so in our feedback. Granted, that's just a few data points, and it was internal.

But besides that, the overall vibe I got from the very businessy, very not-engineer management behind the effort was that Watson was brilliant, as demonstrated on Jeopardy, and the main stuff left to do was some plumbing to connect our stuff to some of that Watson brilliance, and of course the business details of the partnership between the companies.

Glad I got out of there.

I agree with all that, but the argument for "you can't come into the <public place> unvaccinated" will be a lot stronger when it can be followed by a simple "due to a significant risk you'll infect people".