Hacker News new | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submit | dgudkov's comments login

This is what the Russian opposition promotes to circumvent the VPN ban: https://vpngen.org/


Warning: unpopular opinion that you won't like.

If the audience of HN were writers, singers, and artists, people who know what it's like when the fruits of your work are stolen and you barely make any money (I have friends like that), the sentiment would've been quite different. But software developers can't relate to this and that's why they are so pro-piracy. They get a paycheck every month or bi-weekly and never face a situation when their intellectual work is stolen against their will and offered to their employer for free and the employer now cuts the paycheck in half because why pay if you can get it for free.

I'm not saying the current situation with content consumption is ideal. Big corps have no shame in many ways. But sometimes both sides can be wrong. And this is exactly what I'm seeing here.


The question is always: how much money would those individuals make if their work wouldn't be pirated. It's much more likely that they would just barely survive like they do now instead of raking in the big moneyz. Sometimes it's not piracy that's the problem, but simply that the art/content is unpopular, or a bad business model was chosen.

> when their intellectual work is stolen against their will and offered to their employer for free and the employer now cuts the paycheck in half because why pay if you can get it for free

Your friends should get a lawyer. This is a different case than people "pirating" content because the content is locked exclusively behind yet another service subscription.


It's not really stolen when nobody is deprived of it by the act, digital content is infinitely duplicable, but sure whatever. If it's stealing I'm perfectly alright with being a thief. I'm also perfectly alright with other people "stealing" my work (I'm a musician). I think the free proliferation of art is a better ethos than the garbage system we have now. IP just lets corporations gather up all the valuable stuff and toss the artists some crumbs for their work. Artists were still starving well before internet piracy. I think we need a model of fans crowdfunding their favorite artists, which could work if it became more common. Artists could, for example, set a donation goal after which they'd release a new album. It would be a large social transition but it's the only real way out. Since that's never going to happen legally, I want to see technology render the law meaningless, hence why I like piracy.


I agree. It's always very curious to see the way these internet forums (HN, Reddit, Twitter, etc) justify piracy. Every thread about Spotify for instance is full of people upset that they don't pay artists "enough", as if everyone wasn't pirating music en masse in the days before streaming. Give me a break. And I'm not even throwing stones. I remember filling my MP3 player with pirated music 20 years ago.

If you're pirating content, you're stealing it. I'd 100% prefer that people just own up to it than try to contrive these elaborate arguments about how the social contract has been completely rearranged and why ackshually they are not only justified but practically obligated to do it. Beyond ridiculous. Get over yourselves.


You're so right. As an aside, it really is a shame that every song, movie, television show, video game, piece of artwork, etc. has vanished because some pirate stole the original and deprived everyone else of it instead of just making a copy.


Most people don't realize they have them. For instance in most BI/ETL tools the expression below returns false:

    0.1 + 0.2 = 0.3
In Excel and Google Sheets, this returns false:

   2.03 - 0.03 - 2 = 0


In both of those cases the problem is not problem with floating point arithmetic but the parsing of floating point literals, or rather how systems take input and then substitute it with something different quietly behind the scenes. None of 0.1, 0.2, 0.3 are true (binary) fp values. Nobody would be surprised that

    0.1000000000000000056 + 0.2000000000000000111 != 0.2999999999999999889


You won't believe it, but Excel users are actually surprised. As do users of many other applications.


Somebody pointed me at "Towards an API for the Real Numbers" which explains why these calculations work how you expect in the Android default Calculator.

It's really nice, as they explain you can't drop this in instead of the floating point arithmetic in a serious language because the performance isn't what you want. However in human terms, for a product like the calculator - it's easily fine.


That's a very different kind of accuracy, though.

This tool is about improving the number of digits that are correct.

Trying to use exact equality is going to fail on most equations even if you have millions of correct digits.


Is generalization also a form of compression?


It's not visual.


I can see it. So it is visual for me.


You can see C# or Java code as well. It doesn't make them visual programming languages.


So, small Android developers pay all the Google t̶a̶x̶e̶s̶ fees, but big Spotify doesn't.


Makes a lot of sense, especially since spotify decided its going to pay big artists, but not small ones :/


Correct, just like National Tax and Maryland handing out Chromebooks.

Someone has to pay for them, it might as well be us.


From the article:

>An exciting finding of the present study is that alcohol ethoxylates that are responsible for these toxic effects can be extracted from recently washed dishware and still kept the toxicity.

Scientists.


Can't stop but think that somehow public justice has been delegated to Google.


FB on the web is basically unusable without Social Fixer - a browser extension.


While I applaud any attempts to innovate in this area, I'd be more interested in seeing the opposite approach - integrating persistent storage in a programming language. If we already have default implementations of dictionaries, linked lists, and other in-memory data structures in programming languages, why not have default implementations of permanent data structures such as object collections and KV-stores?


There have been many attempts over the years. There's Prevayler [0], in Java, and Madeleine [1], in Ruby. Neither of them became wildly popular.

I worked with Madeleine for a few years and while the performance was amazing, RDBM systems are ahead because of the many years of standardisation, tooling and capabilities (e.g. migrations)

The other very important thing is - DB latency is an issue only in the hands of a novice. In the real world, network latency is a couple of magnitudes higher.

[0]: https://github.com/prevayler/prevayler

[1]: https://github.com/ghostganz/madeleine


Check this out: https://microstream.one/products/microstream-for-java/

Io also has persistence baked into it: https://iolanguage.org/reference/

But I'm sure for most of the HN crowd one has Java in the URL and the other is a esoteric cool language from the early 00's so.. not practical. :)


Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: