hydrox24

If you're looking for an open-source replacement, I have been really impressed with Syncthing. It is decentralised (and directly device-to-device), but if you can afford the space on your phone or an always-on computer at home, it is basically a drop-in replacement for Dropbox. It only worries about syncing files. Nothing else.

https://syncthing.net/

I believe this is the paper referenced[0].

[0]: https://www.apa.org/pubs/journals/releases/xlm-a0036577.pdf

Have previous protocols (TCP, UDP, etc) been in widespread use before their respective RFCs?

The QUIC Wikipedia page[0] makes it sound like a substantial amount of traffic, due largely to Facebook, Google, and the Google Chrome browser, uses QUIC already. Facebook claims 75% of their traffic (for the app?) is via QUIC[1]

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

[1]: https://engineering.fb.com/2020/10/21/networking-traffic/how...

> Australia NEVER moves first on these things.

I think it is uncommon for Australia to move first, but we do move first sometimes. I thought the recent news revenue-sharing laws[0] are an example of that.

> They want EU or US to make a move first to see what works

It's always nice to know how a policy will work beforehand, but I don't think it's remarkable how rarely Australia moves first. Putting aside cultural differences, we're a medium power in a world with many medium powers, even in the West, why would we expect to be first, ahead of European countries, or North American ones, or developed nations in Asia?

[0]: https://www.reuters.com/business/media-telecom/australias-ne...

> but what about previews for things like ebooks or PDFs

MuPDF is a great FOSS application and my go-to PDF reader. It lacks fancy annotation, and doesn't even have great text selection and copy/paste, but it is really fast, and has fast search, manipulation, etc.

https://mupdf.com/

> > Finally, because Linux is a ubiquitous server operating system, its security is under constant attack, and Linux desktop users benefit from fixes to the vulnerabilities.

> Attacking servers is harder and probably may give you better "reward" (stolen data), but Attacking normal people is easier so you can do it at bigger scale...

I think that attacking normal people is easier. I disagree that it scales though. Normal people have huge variances in their systems and the version they run, their network connectivity, their IT savvy, etc. and therefore the kinds of exploits required to break into their home systems will vary a lot.

The variance in commercial systems is probably as high, but who cares since you only need to take down one or two, rather than hundreds or thousands, for equivalent payoff.

The pick-pocket will make a million dollars more slowly than the bank robber.

> New Zealand's largest newspaper is deeply conflicted. With the World Cup underway in Brazil, should The New Zealand Herald refer to the "global round-ball game" as "soccer" or "football"? The question has been put to readers, and the readers have spoken. It's "football"—by a wide margin.

Interestingly, if you asked Australians, it would be "soccer" by a wide margin.

> Maybe it "feels good", but it's just too slow.

The speed of product delivery is a combination of how quickly you can make it, but also how quickly you can deliver it.

3D printing loses on production speed, but wins on delivery because it can be made a few minutes' drive away from the hospital.

Ping matters as much as bandwidth.

> We find that polarization has increased the most among the groups least likely to use the Internet and social media.

This could imply dominant second-order effects. Traditional media has changed its content & form radically in response to the Internet.

Google almost certainly can, but probably has no incentive to do it for whatever reason.

I've found this to be the right thing to do for several reasons.

1. Music does not improve my concentration in the long term. It will help for a few hours and then make it harder to focus after that.

2. Headphones make me less approachable at work, and I want to contribute to a positive team culture by being easy to chat to. If I need to buckle down I will work from home.

3. Headphones make it much more tempting to watch youtube, or listen to podcasts in the background. Without headphones I find it much easier to keep myself on track.

4. Most importantly, silence at work makes me appreciate music a whole lot more when I do listen to it, because it is no longer simply background noise, it feels worthy of attention. On top of that, I am more capable of listening to more demanding and more rewarding music.

You just download the HTML file and open it to 'run' it. Then, once you've made changes, use your browsers "save as" feature to save a copy. Everything is in browser.

Other options do things like public hosting.

Personally, I just use the HTML file with the Timimi Firefox plugin installed for autosaving the current file.

> The lack of any legal route to assisted dying is also a problem.

Euthenasia is a contentious topic, rightly so in my opinion, and is a seperate issue to regaining a balanced view of how and if we should treat the seriously ill when the treatment may harm them as much as the illness.

It's late, but perhaps its worth changing this link to point to the original article from the Atlantic?[0]

[0]: https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2019/12/why-c...

> the majority of users don't use spacebar for scrolling in 2019

Like halal food, or kosher food in New York, it's not about how many people use a browser feature. It's about how much they care.

Is the article you are talking about "What Putin Really Wants" by Julia Ioffe[0]? It was published in January 2018. It doesn't have the USB key story you're talking about though.

[0]: https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2018/01/putins-...

That's absolutely true. But I think it's worth noting just how often polite acts are specifically for making others feel good. The two things are meant to be fundamentally linked.

> Even the simple act of two people wanting to go through the same door at the same time is an impossible conundrum.

I believe that the optimal solution to this problem is to offer, and then if there is a counter-offer, take it. If the other person is offended then they have followed the letter of the social law but do not understand it in their hearts. In addition, it is often polite to take what is offered to you.

Area of mainland USA = 2.96M sq mi.

Area of mainland Australia = 2.93M sq mi.

I think this is the apples to apples comparison. Don't include Alaska or Tasmania, or Hawaii, which tend not to be what people are thinking of.

> I honestly havn't figured out why these issues get such unanimous support by the political class.

I think its because too few Australians care enough for this to matter to politicians and the parties, who respond to incentives like everyone else.

This doesn't absolve pollies of responsibility for passing these draconian measures, but it is an important fact to acknowledge if we want to successfully change the culture around security issues in Australia.

Popper's Paradox of Tolerance is an investigation of moral axioms, or principles. It is not Science.

So it's okay that it can't be falsified.

> I see a lot of long form articles here without any comments and I wonder, are they upvoted by bots?

The Hacker News ranking algorithm penalises lots of comments. Posts stay near the top precisely because they do not have comments.

I'm not sure we have any reason to believe this. There are two reasons given:

1. families had fewer kids after the 2008 recession.

2. Alternative forms of education.

The latter will be good news, if it does displaced old colleges. The former, which is waaay earlier in the article and therefore probably the more important cause (in the opinion of this article) could be swung at any moment by a change in immigration, welfare, or regulatory policies on state (for the latter two) or Federal levels.

I don't see much reason to take this prediction seriously. Are private investments or bonds of some kind in these institutions tanking?

Look into the argument between Robert Nozick and Jeremy Waldron over historical justice.

Waldron tries to solve the problem that you and your parent comment are laying out by changing the basis of property rights from the Lockean idea (we mix our labour with something to make it our property) to a new idea, that property is based on the organisation of a person's life around a particular object. Intuitively, this gives credence to the idea that the nice fountain pen I found on the ground four years ago is now nearly totally mine, and that the person who lost it has much less claim over it, particularly if they only bought it a few months before losing it.

It also makes sense of our intuition that I ought to give it back if it has been in their family for three generations. Four years of my life organised around the thing does not stand up to his deeper attachment and ownership of the object.

Obviously, there are traps inherent to the subjectivity of these judgements here, but it does provide a nice philosophical answer to the historical issues.

Sites that continue to be sacred probably ought to be handed back because they continue to play a central role in the lives of indiginous people. But the CBD of Sydney, for instance, has a far stronger claim by those who own the land and have built several hundred thousand lives around the property. Generic indiginous claims to the land there don't hold water any more.

> It's quite funny how are some people manipulated to think that society and especially education is somehow biased against minorities or women when opposite is true

I think you have misunderstood the parent, who is asserting that the machines scoring these essays typically give lower scores to members of these demographics. This does not, by itself, mean the entire system is biased against those groups.

Whether or not the groups are, overall, systematically benefitted or harmed is not relevant to the injustice this article says exists.

>How does this make 2nd place after 9 minutes?

12 points in ~10 minutes with only two comments yields a high position.

> It is worth noting that Russia’s most recent winner of the Nobel Prize for literature, Svetlana Alexievich, also produced literary works that were purely factual.

Alexievich won with "Secondhand Time"[0], which I absolutely loved. It is essentially a transcribed oral history, but composed in such a way so as to become literature. It is particularly admirable for the way in which it allows narratives which contradict each other to stand in adjacent chapters, which is jarring, but also very honest.

Please read it if you have the patience for hard reading and some deeply sad stories.

[0]: https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/541184/secondhand-t...

Sorry, sloppy phrasing about an often confused topic on my part. You're quite right.

Dazzle camouflage[0] was used extensively in WWI to make it difficult to see ships because they were so brightly coloured. It's not quite the same principle, but it comes close.

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

What a good list.

Most Australians would tell you if you asked them that you can achieve something extraordinary, or begin something new after the age of 35. But I think people are just trying to say the right thing. They know it's true in their heads, but I am not sure that their hearts know.

I am under the age of 25, so well under 35, and I am hoping to live out this advice, and spend my early years learning to learn, and constantly try out new stuff. But there are very few role models that I can look to in my life who have really kicked off their work at 30 or 35. I suspect this is true for a lot of people (regardless of age). Grandmothers getting degrees is still a quaint, publishable news-story.

I would love to hear from any people in the hacker news crowd that have changed careers 'late,' or intentionally spent their early years taking career/skill risks.