Necessity is the mother of invention (not laziness). The internet was invented for surviving nuclear war with Russia.
We say laziness motivates us to become more efficient, but I can’t agree. It’s people who want or need to get things done faster that find innovative and creative ways of doing so.
The threat of nuclear war with Russia was unnecessary. But avoiding it was much, much harder to achieve. So we took the lazy way out, and thus invented the internet along the way in order to maintain the laziest path.
Money only gets you things when you spend it. Real power is how much money you have to spend, not the market cap of the companies you own. There’s a tired meme that billionaires are somehow more powerful than the politicians in charge of all the money.
Why did I expect anything other than HN defending billionaires when reading the comments. In the most naive way at that. As if billionaires aren’t influencing policy directly.
Here[0] is a recent story of Texas billionaires who can more or less can pick the representatives they want
Hours before the Texas House overwhelmingly voted to impeach Ken Paxton in May, a well-funded supporter of the attorney general issued a threat to his fellow Republicans.
A vote to impeach Paxton, Jonathan Stickland wrote on Twitter, “is a decision to have a primary.”
“Wait till you see my PAC budget,” he later added.
Stickland is the leader of Defend Texas Liberty, a political action committee that has donated millions of dollars to far-right candidates in the state. It is a key part of the constellation of political campaigns, institutions and dark-money groups that a trio of West Texas oil tycoons — Tim Dunn and brothers Farris and Dan Wilks — have pumped small fortunes into as part of a long-term crusade to push Texas to the extreme right.
Sorry, you misunderstand. I’m not defending billionaires, I’m condemning politicians.
Politicians and policy should not be for sale in the first place. The fact that they are means, yes, rich people have more power to control policy, but the solution isn’t to ban rich people from getting rich. We need to ban money from influencing policy.
Instead, the Supreme Court decided that money is speech and political corruption is protected by the first amendment. We need to undo that.
The brain dead part are the people (apparently common on hacker news) who think that stopping people getting rich is a better solution than, for eg., campaign spending limits.
I can’t give specifics, I know someone who had to deal with “delete me” requests from these “privacy” companies. The privacy company would literally take your personal info (name, email), and _email it to every company they could think of_ asking the company to delete your account _even if you didn’t have one_.
I had a suspicion these services actually do more harm than good, even if they're well intentioned and not actively running a data collection scheme.
But this is really a chicken-egg situation. How do you tell companies to delete your information without telling them what identifies your information? It's in these companies' interest to make this as difficult as possible, so a solution based on data hashes is highly unlikely to appear out of their good will alone. This requires strict regulation and high fines.
There's also the issue of proving ownership of the data requested for deletion. Even in the EU with the GDPR, which is arguably the most progressive data privacy regulation we have, companies routinely violate this by requesting even more personal information from the requester.
Ideally a regulator would intervene, demanding that the data provider prove that each person in their database has explicitly opted in. That should be really easy for these companies -- it's just another record to include in our files. If they can't prove it, they must delete all related data.
amazingly enough the law is more clever than programmers assume it is, and the clever dodges programmers come up with tend to be seen through and just lead to jail time.
I don't understand how Hans Reiser is an example of this. He was convicted of murder and nothing about his case (that I could find) seems to indicate that he used "clever dodges" to skirt the law.
if one followed the case at the time Reiser seemed very much the stereotype of the really superclever person who figured they were smarter than all those dumb folks who were never going to catch him and it all fell apart real quick.
I see what you mean. There is some nuance to that which wasn't captured in the Wikipedia article or my general awareness of the details about the case.
A scanned signature would work, I think, on a form mailed in by the user. The form would need to be clearly identified as coming from the data broker but could be provided by the company ultimately seeking your data.
My impression is that it depends what company you use. I don't really trust them but at the same time, there are a lot of other companies. All I can really say is that Optery will give you a free report with very minimal information and on a test they dug up far more information that I provided (the minimum).
Given that these companies, like Incogni and DeleteMe, are now sponsoring big time YouTubers I'd imagine they are soon going to get a much closer look. At minimum, they are making far more people aware of the situation and data out there. Even though many of the VPNs fall far short of the promises, it is setting a strong signal that people care about privacy and entering the public lexicon is the first step. I hope these can be a catalyst towards more state or federal privacy protection.
I have a common enough name that about 2/3 of the info data brokers have on me is garbage.
If every data broker could be relied on to faithfully delete my info I would sign up for Optery or Incogni today. I don't, because if even one of those 2/3 is a bad actor I'm just expending effort to clean up their data.
When you use these ‘delete me’ services to remove your information from a platform like Dropbox, there’s a hidden catch. These services are often linked to companies that trade in email addresses. By submitting your email for deletion, you might unwittingly end up having it sold to marketers or data brokers, potentially leading to even more spam and unwanted contacts. Or maybe nice target ads … depending who bought your email address
Devil's advocate here, n=1 is just a data point is rarely the whole story. I would assume, but obviously I could be wrong, that the legit ones actually can check if your info exists in a company before they send a take down request. I have no proof of that but it's probably nearly as good as n=1.
> It's because it ensures everyone can use the same web and gives the user agent as much power as possible to act on the user's behalf.
Those aren't the principles underlying HTML, and I doubt Tim Berners-Lee was thinking about that at all when he designed HTML. Instead, he was trying to design a format which could be read by both machines and humans, which is why "semantic" HTML elements were introduced. In the end, LLMs were what allowed machines to understand web pages, not semantic HTML elements.
If we do want to make this about accessibility, anyone who has worked with screen readers knows that semantic HTML has failed on that front too. Screen readers rarely understand fancy elements. Instead we often have to create obscene DOM structures to get the reader to say something reasonable, which is at complete odds with the ideals of the semantic web.
> If we do want to make this about accessibility, anyone who has worked with screen readers knows that semantic HTML has failed on that front too. Screen readers rarely understand fancy elements.
Isn't that a failure of screen readers, not of semantic HTML? That is, with semantic HTML in place, changes to screen readers themselves can fix the problem by extracting the information that is there; but, without semantic HTML in place, no effort on the part of the developers of screen readers could extract information that wasn't there. And, to put the emphasis differently, if screen readers won't change at all, then there is absolutely nothing that we can do with HTML—except, as you say, to abuse it to achieve what can at best be a fragile and unreliable effect—to fix the problem on that end.
It may, in some sense, be moot because developers of screen readers aren't interested in making those changes, but I think that placing the onus of responsibility there is a more accurate description.
I interpreted this post completely differently. I think it is talking specifically about design principles for code/systems. The core thesis appears to be "principles should be based on what works in practice, not what sounds good in theory."
The example given in the post was using <div>s rather than semantic HTML elements. The motivation for the principle of using "semantic HTML elements" comes from the lofty ideals of the Semantic Web[0]. However, these principles didn't come from best practice. Instead, someone (Tim Berners-Lee) thought that it was a cool idea and tried to convince everyone of it without demonstrating that it could actually deliver on any of the promises it made. The argument instead is that principles should be based on what is proven to work, rather than what sounds good in theory. I agree with the sentiment in the post.
Thanks, I really didn’t get what they meant with the example they were using.
Out of curiosity why is writing everything as a single element type more ergonomic? I’ve not done frontend web dev in a while and using <p> <h1> and so on seems like it would be more ergonomic to express intent.
The reason why it's so tempting to just use `<div>` everywhere is that `<div>` elements have very simple and predictable behaviour with regards to styling, composition and event handling.
Same cannot be said for a lot of other HTML elements, which often have bizarre and inconvenient rules when it comes to style-ability, or nest-ability.
The thing I don’t like about EasyMotion like plug-ins is that they require you to react to information which only appears on screen after you start to jump. With Leap it looks like it amortizes the cost of reacting by giving you the information you need one keystroke before you need to use it. I’m still not a fan of having to react though.
My ideal motion plugin would be Cursorless[0], except using the keyboard instead of voice commands. With Cursorless the markers you need to jump to are always visible, so there’s no need to react. Instead of jumping to characters you jump to tokens, so we do not need makers over every character (just above each token).
With higher memory usage you have less free memory for caching so you hit the disk/SSD more often. If it gets too high you start swapping which is really bad.
It isn't a surprise when you consider indirect power costs: CPU use filling that memory and reading it back later, extra IO because the memory consumed is not available for caching purposes (or worse because paging out to more power-expensive storage is happening), and so forth.
It is like when people say page fragmentation in SQL Server isn't important any more because random access is so fast due to SSDs and other IO subsystem improvements – pages are held in RAM in the storage format so if they are only ⅔ filled you are wasting ⅓ of the allocated memory which can have significant performance effects if your common working set is not smaller than the memory available. Though in fairness, I would agree that this issue is usually quite far down the list of things that need addressing in poorly performing database & applications.
This is likely very deliberate. Publishing error rates of vendor equipment could violate NDAs or just damage vendor relations. The number of units purchased can be used by stock market analysts to predict FB growth or vendor sales, so the PR/legal team might prevent the publishing of details which could be used to that effect. Those are my guesses as to why actual numbers would be left out.
One of the many reasons that I love Backblaze as a cloud backup solution is that they publish these numbers regularly. If there are bad drives in the market place, we as consumers have a much better view of it than Amazon reviews et al.
> the article doesn’t actually do is give a good answer as to why you should be allowed to make false statements in the knowledge it will cause harm to others
While it's not explicitly called out in the article, it has given me the best answer to that question I've ever come across in this paragraph:
> The court said that anti-war speech in wartime is like “falsely shouting fire in a theatre and causing a panic,” and it justified the ban with a dubious analogy to the longstanding principle that the First Amendment doesn’t protect speech that incites people to physical violence.
In the case in question the judge ruled that anti-war speech is illegal during wartime because of the harm it causes others. The fundamental problem is that the judge believes that more harm would come from not participating in war, and so opposition to the war causes (more) harm. The imprisoned anti-war activists probably didn't share the judge's opinion. That's why their speech should be protected, because it's not up to others to determine whether or not their speech is "falsely" and "knowingly" causing harm.
We say laziness motivates us to become more efficient, but I can’t agree. It’s people who want or need to get things done faster that find innovative and creative ways of doing so.