d10r
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4 years ago
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on: Austria's data protection authority has found that Google Analytics is illegal
Can't confirm, have been running stuff on Hetzner for almost 10 years.
They will indeed auto-block you if any application is spamming the private subnet - happens e.g. with IPFS running in its default config.
But this always comes after warnings and with an exact explanation of what happened (log of IPs the server attempted to connect to, timestamps etc). I always found support responsive, even in the middle of the night.
It may be that I was lucky all the time, despite interacting with various support staff in various of their data centers. Or it may be that your issues had other reasons...
d10r
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4 years ago
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on: Bitcoin is a Ponzi
Bitcoin would have remained the obscure crypto-economic experiment it was 10 years ago if it weren't for the rotten monetary system we have creating strong incentives to look for alternatives.
I'm holding some Bitcoin for quite a while now - in terms of value it has overtaken all my Fiat holdings - yet I would actually welcome if it became worthless. That's because I believe that it can become worthless only if we get back to a sound monetary system, something I'd value more than individually "winning" in an alternative scenario.
d10r
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4 years ago
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on: It's time for us in the tech world to speak out about cryptocurrency
which may even be technically true - if measured in quantitative terms :-)
d10r
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5 years ago
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on: Scientists who say the lab-leak hypothesis for SARS-CoV-2 shouldn't be ruled out
As long as we stick to the concept of nation, we likely have to live with such issues. This is how group identity works, sometimes to your advantage, sometimes to your disadvantage.
d10r
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5 years ago
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on: Cycling is more important than electric cars for reaching net-zero cities
Here in Europe it's often the opposite.
E.g. in Austrian cities you have decent bicycle infrastructure and everything in reach in the cities while in rural areas that's often not the case.
I've been in the US once, 13 years ago, and it was pretty shocking for me to experience the concept of "car centric" in its full glory for the first time.
I was at CES in Las Vegas and went to some club one evening with a friend. At some point I left and wanted to walk to the Hotel alone in order to calm down and enjoy the nice climate.
Turned out, there was simply no walkable connection between the 2 locations. I couldn't believe it, but - being stubborn - walked anyway, in the dirt along some highway, a bit scared of being picked up by the police, not even sure if walking there was even legal.
Later that week I moved to LA and first saw the endless suburbs of an American city, from the air.
I don't know how representative those 2 places are for the US, but having seen that, I can totally understand why many Americans have a very hard time imagining life without a car.
d10r
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5 years ago
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on: Facebook does not plan to notify half-billion users affected by data leak
Unfortunately it's not as simple as that when large scale network effects are involved.
d10r
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5 years ago
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on: Tesla buys $1.5B in Bitcoin, may accept it as payment in the future
You should probably not listen to random YouTubers, but to people having something to say.
I suggest starting from aantonop.com
d10r
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5 years ago
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on: Tesla buys $1.5B in Bitcoin, may accept it as payment in the future
That's indeed true for many DAO designs. I often wonder if those proposing such designs don't understand that or if they just don't care.
It is however not inherent to DAOs. If you add identity, a lot of alternatives open up. Check out e.g. quadratic voting or daostack.io.
d10r
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5 years ago
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on: Biden wins White House, vowing new direction for divided U.S.
> Could there be a class action lawsuit against the various companies whose recommendation engines hijacked people's attention to recommend and reinforce this garbage?
I think this thought is spot on.
The usual defense is "but free speech!". Which would boil down to: "such is human nature". But I don't believe that's the problem. The problem may indeed be selection and amplification mechanisms like recommendation engines tuned to divert max. attention to the medium, masterfully exploiting the vulnerabilities of the human psyche as evolution formed it. The rest is collateral damage which nobody seems to feel responsible for. Not a sustainable situation.
d10r
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5 years ago
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on: Advice to my young self: forget side projects and focus on your job
you're omitting something very important in your list of related aspects: health
d10r
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5 years ago
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on: BitTorrent v2
Are they though?
I'm 38 and can't remember a situation in my life where a gun would have been useful. Not saying that I can't imagine such situations, I just find it a slightly weird example to make this point.
d10r
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5 years ago
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on: SoftBank unmasked as ‘Nasdaq whale’ that stoked tech rally
Lets assume the inflation remains contained in the financial sector. What does this mean e.g. for a young family with no inherited wealth, with average income and savings rate? How should they invest their savings? Isn't it more difficult for them to "break even" (in the sense that their capital income offsets their share of contributing to others capital incomes) than before the asset price inflation?
d10r
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5 years ago
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on: David Graeber has died
Beautiful comment!
This being HN, I hope you are aware of the evolving space of cryptoeconomics, projects like
https://commonsstack.org/ and
https://daostack.io/
It's important that emerging protocol based institutions do not just replicate old patterns with modern technology. The innovation should be both technological and social.
d10r
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5 years ago
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on: Why Johnny Won't Upgrade
Disabling automatic updates is always one of the first things I do on a new Android phone. I would happily enable it selectively for a few Apps of my choice (e.g. the browser), but unfortunately the Play store doesn't allow that - unlike F-Droid.
So I occasionally do update Apps I want to be up to date manually instead. Also reduces unpleasant surprises like randomly being logged out or randomly becoming incompatible with backend servers (seen e.g. with Mattermost).
d10r
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5 years ago
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on: The Galaksija computer was a craze in 1980s Yugoslavia
> What I observe among today's people of these regions ..., regardless of their age, is defeatism and lack of confidence.
My personal experience (mainly from visits to Bosnia) confirms that.
In my opinion, the ongoing brain drain is a main reason behind it. It's a rational choice for talented and motivated young people to move to a Western European country, thus many do so. Unfortunately, the result is that those not leaving have a very hard time forming a critical mass which could break through the various deadlocks left behind by the war years.
d10r
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5 years ago
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on: Universal Basic Income is Capitalism 2.0
> "Carbon taxes unquestionably fall hardest on the poor, as do consumption taxes generally."
I would question that very much and guess that overall the opposite is true.
I don't however have any data, except national aggregates showing that there's a correlation between GDP and carbon emissions (even before accounting for the fact that arguably quite a lot of the emissions of less wealthy nations come from production of stuff for more wealthy nations).
Do you have data?
d10r
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5 years ago
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on: Zettlr – FOSS markdown editor for personal knowledge management and publishing
omg, somebody built it! Will immediately try that.
d10r
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5 years ago
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on: Wuhan hospital traffic, search engine data indicate virus activity in Fall 2019
thx for sharing this!
d10r
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6 years ago
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on: New nuclear reactor designs promise safe, clean electricity
Maybe it would.
Or maybe one of them would have blown up (lets say e.g. on 9.11.2001) and due to bad luck (winds not blowing onto the pacific, but towards densely populated areas during crucial hours) have rendered some major cities inhabitable for years or decades.
We will never know.
That said:
I agree that replacing nuclear power with coal power is insane.
I am for continuing nuclear research and for using nuclear power with designs which are inherently safe if it's cheaper than renewable alternatives at a given location.
d10r
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6 years ago
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on: Command-line tools can be faster than a Hadoop cluster (2014)
I too never got this. Have learned using bare metal before AWS was around.
Took a look at AWS in 2008 and decided that it was interesting, but nothing I had use for at the time. Since then, I never felt any need for it, except for a few times when I wanted to emulate a distributed network for testing purposes.
If I look into the AWS dashboard today, I feel totally overwhelmed, while running my own servers with LXC containers on it feels effortless.
I guess for many it's the other way round.
Don't really know what I'm missing, but I'm happy about the old school skillset I have, allows me to have a fraction of the infrastructure costs I would have otherwise for what I'm running.