Hacker News Reader

blaston Small SaaS banned by Cloudflare after 4 years of being paying customer

jgrahamc responded directly to the point. Replying before it made the front page means this post didn't need to go viral or win the front page lottery in order to get support, making it a counterexample to the GP.

blaston How to own an airline in 3 easy steps and grab the TSA nofly list along the way

How do you know that? I know singular they goes a long way back, but this is an extreme claim that I've never heard before.

blaston Ask HN: What's the most important problem in the world? Are you working on it?

Finding ways to overcome the effects of childhood and ancestral trauma, so we can stop perpetuating it.

Although there are lots of therapies which claim to do this, I don't believe that most of them work very well. We've hardly begun to recognize this problem, let alone solve it. But once you start to recognize it, you see that its effects are so profound that little else is of primary importance.

blaston Upton Sinclair disrupted and documented his era (2015)

Historians and novelists take different approaches to the truth.

blaston Upton Sinclair disrupted and documented his era (2015)

There's more than one way to communicate truth.

blaston Sex workers have been banned from Airbnb for years

The article isn't really about banning the use of Airbnbs for sex work. It's about banning people who do that work from using any Airbnb at all, for any purpose.

blaston Cached Chrome Top Million Websites

"Users who have turned on" implies that they opted in. Is this behavior opt-in or opt-out?

blaston Investigation on the effect of oral breathing on cognitive activity (2021)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JoxXKKQYJYQ

blaston A non-constructive proof of the Four Colour Theorem

> I think the best thing to do is to quietly ignore it

If you think that's the best thing to do then why not do it?

blaston America’s social and political turmoil during the 1910s and 20s

Robert Goldstein, the filmmaker the article talks about, seems to have had an unfortunate fate.

https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2000/06/the-unluckiest-m...

blaston Surprisingly Turing-Complete (2021)

The claims about spreadsheets being Turing complete predate this, though. I always wondered the same thing - how do you get there without looping, and without infinite cells?

blaston Oppenheimer Cleared [pdf]

Great, now do David Bohm. Oppenheimer had him blacklisted and he spent the rest of his life in academic exile (Brazil, India, and finally the UK).

blaston Just use Postgres for everything

Thanks. I also found https://medium.com/adyen/fighting-postgresql-write-amplifica....

blaston “Twitter will be forming a content moderation council with diverse viewpoints”

The post you're linking to says that it was suspended.

blaston On the cheap, like a local, and without a lot of luggage

That's all pure preference. If you have different preferences fine, but calling someone else's preferences nonsense doesn't make sense to me.

blaston Show HN: Carefulwords.com, a more inspiring thesaurus

I understand the wish but I think that would spoil the elegant design.

blaston On the cheap, like a local, and without a lot of luggage

How can someone's packing tips be "utter nonsense"? That's completely personal.

blaston Why doesn't Stripe use Stripe Billing?

You say it shares similarities with Stripe Billing. Above, you say inspired by Stripe Billing. "Similarities" and "inspired" are weasly ways of saying that it is not Stripe Billing.

It used to be that Stripe could be relied on not to do this sort of corporate doubletalk. The OP asked a direct question and you've given a misleading PR answer.

I'm sure you're a nice person just trying to do your job, but your inevitable PR posts to HN, within minutes of anything Stripe-related coming up, are hurting your cause. The Stripe of the past would never have spewed propaganda like "This is the point of Stripe. A single stack that flexes with your business as it grows and pricing that's public" into HN threads. It's embarrassing, and what it's telling us is that culturally you've lost your way.

Maybe that's inevitable on your way to world domination, but if you guys can no longer communicate honestly or treat readers as intelligent, you'd be better off not posting here. I like Stripe, by the way. I know this is harsh but I would like it to be helpful.

blaston Are You Ready for the Internet? (1994) [video]

Two years earlier, he dismissed it as "just a tool like a typewriter": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MmxOq9STmQM, so it's interesting how he evolved. He does already say that he liked immediate feedback from comments about the show the night before, so the point about the audience was already there.

This is consistent with Bowie's genius to be more an early adopter type than a visionary type. A hell of an early adopter.

blaston Florida to Supreme Court: Let us regulate social networks as common carriers

I agree with you about that, but I also (might) agree with them about this.

Not that you said otherwise, but... I think we should go back to a transactional mix-and-match style of politics, with different coalitions per issue, instead of the "agree with your friend tribe and disagree with your enemy tribe about everything" style that we seem to be locked into these days. There shouldn't be any shame in being part of the same coalition on one issue with people who are reprehensible on other issues. Agreeing with the Florida government about some point of social media regulation doesn't imply I agree with them about anything else.

blaston Censorship by big tech at the behest of the U.S. government?

The entire second half of the OP explains in detail why there may be a First Amendment case here, including some interesting precedents.

blaston Censorship by big tech at the behest of the U.S. government?

What does that have to do with allegations of government censorship pressure?

blaston Censorship by big tech at the behest of the U.S. government?

It may be not be a huge difference in the context of this case, though, since the plaintiffs' First Amendment argument would apply just as much to the government "filtering out or demarcating content believed to be inaccurate or attempting to misinform".

blaston Cinder: Meta's internal performance-oriented production version of CPython

Have I got a Twitter thread for you:

https://twitter.com/stylewarning/status/1571585280217579521

What boggles my mind is that Python has had billions of dollars of direct and indirect investment, with participation from every nook and cranny of the software syndicate—academia and industry—yet... this is all you get.

blaston What I’ve learned from users

FTA: What have I learned from YC's users, the startups we've funded?

blaston YouTube-dl has an interpreter for a subset of JavaScript in 870 lines of Python

I suppose this means it would be easy for YouTube to fuck with youtube-dl simply by throwing in more features of JS?

blaston YouTube-dl has an interpreter for a subset of JavaScript in 870 lines of Python

esprehn didn't say it isn't an interpreter. They're saying it is an interpreter and what it's interpreting isn't (all of) JS. That's also what you're saying, so you're agreeing with esprehn.

Edit: You misunderstood baobabKoodaa in the same way. Nobody is arguing about what constitutes an interpreter, except you. The question is what language is being interpreted.

Before accusing someone of pedantry, it would first be good not to completely misread them.

blaston Covid: Summary of lab-origin hypothesis

Ebright has since posted sources: https://twitter.com/R_H_Ebright/status/1567569831586861056.

blaston Covid: Summary of lab-origin hypothesis

It has enormous implications for future research and regulation, as well as the reform of scientific and public health institutions.

If a plane crash killed a few hundred people, no one would question the need for a thorough investigation, root cause analysis, and preventative measures for the future. Or consider the security reforms put in place after 9/11, which killed thousands. This pandemic killed millions.

blaston The quantum computing bubble

https://archive.ph/0VB0K

https://archive.ph/cikWE