yuuuuuuuu

How do residential proxies help? Scraping would effectively be bitcoin mining, which costs resources without shortcut.

> is a problem that can be mitigated server-side

No matter what you do, this will cost server infra. That's Musk's argument for disabling access altogether.

Therefore it would make sense to have a solution which burdens the client disproportionately in relation to the server. A burden so low for the casual user that it's negligible but in aggregate, at scale, would break things. Which is what he wants.

You can still get a login and have no delay.

For non-auth use, I rather wait for 1 second than not have any access at all. Which is the current state of affairs.

> And PoW doesn't sound reasonable because it sets mobile devices against the scraper's servers.

Scraper servers and mobile devices have different access patterns though. I I'm reading tweets then I'm fine waiting 1 second for a tweet to load. Page load times for this kind of bloated stuff are super slow anyway, meanwhile my mobile could spend a second or two on some PoW. But if you want to large-scale scrape, you suddenly have to pay for 1bn CPU seconds. And this PoW could even keep continuously increasing per IP. 0.1% with every tweet. Not noticeablr for the casual surfer sitting on the toilet, neck-breaking for scrapers.

> If all of this was just so easy, scraping would be dead. Good that it isn't.

Small-scale scraping could still be provided through API access or just a login.

The reason they are not doing the "easy" thing is that they don't see a need (yet, perhaps). Just get an account, they'd say, and they are right. It works for Instagram too, except for some weirdos who nobody really cares about.

> He's been somewhat critical of OpenAI. Specifically the part about it pivoting to a for-profit business.

Because it was thereby starting to compete with his own for-profit.

He was even asking for a moratorium for 6 months so his company could catch up.

One that's slowly ageing away though.

This could easily be solved by making the unauthenticated access hard for machines to consume, like introducing delays or some kind of captcha or even just proof of work (reverse some hash). While the authenticated get all the snappiness they want.

I'm strictly anti account, so he just lost me as audience. The next walled garden after Facebook and Instagram that won't ever see me again.

I think you are missin the point. The typical website is so bloated that a latency of a single roundtrip is not the root cause. They may load quicker if roundtrips are faster, but that's then mainly because they make too many roundtrips.

That it makes a significant difference for HN (as in: "measurable") is because HN is so snappy in the first place.

Apart from that, being located in Europe, I agree with the other posters that claiming HN being "meh" in Europe is just nonsense. It's one of the quickest websites you can come across on this planet. Anywhere on the planet.

That's exactly GP's point, right? No matter us-east-1 or not, what makes things slow has nothing to do with DC location. That latency is insignificant.

> using an esp32

> super easy to setup & 'just works'.

Yeah right. Please tell my mom again how super easy to setup an esp32 is and that it 'just works'.

It's really not that much equipment. Drumset, keyboards, a bunch of guitar amps. Perhaps some horns if your music has that. The rest is local sound and light equipment that is already at the venue. You need 1-2 to load/unload all that and you are set. A band of 6 can tour with 8 people no problem. That's only a 33% overhead. (Then you also need to rent a truck and drive it around, but you can do that pretty cheaply too.)

Main issue is that the 100% baseline is already too little. No matter that overhead.

4. sell all that user data for tons of $$$.

Not going to do that? Not until you got the first VC investor, and if you refuse then you get replaced with a CEO with more flexible morals.

Difference is that the examples you gave don't have the expectation of being free. Online news articles do.

> I guess everybody wants to fully own the platform,

But this is not about distribution platform. It's about the payment platform. They can all distribute in any way they like, as long as there is only one payment aggrgator.

> I just wanted to mention airthings. Turn key, cloud enabled, and "just works".

Cloud. As soon as it's in the cloud, it's not yours.

Just a matter of time for the next round of closing some API and boom there goes your access to data.

> "Have you always been so sensitive about being a N**?"

Please don't. You severely misquoted by using the ** here. The original word was "Negro", not what many peoplr (including myself) might have thought when reading your comment.

> Why is the top ranking comments in this thread not even about the original article?

In short: Because it got the most upvotes.

Sounds trivial but there is a deeper point to it. "Top comment" isn't about who gave the most praise or the harshest crisicism or the best summary or the most controversial take on the topic. It's about what the collective HN hivemind found was moving the conversation forward in the most interesting way. That's what's getting upvoted. If that happens to have mentioned another article, well, so be it.