Hetzner provides exactly that: a VPS. They're also cheaper than DigitalOcean, I assume, because EU web hosting is way more competitive and US VPS offerings have traditionally been way overpriced.
Let's also be realistic here: CloudFront is a good solution if you need a file to be served over CDN with low latency in multiple regions. Raw s3 or just a web server is much cheaper if you don't need low latency over multiple regions.
>EU web hosting is way more competitive and US VPS offerings have traditionally been way overpriced
US offerings being way more overpriced than EU alternatives also boils down to the much larger capital/war-chest US tech companies have at their disposal to spend on Ops to conquer a market, a fact reflect in those prices but also in things like dev salaries, office equipment, etc.
EU offerings are better priced because most EU companies, who aren't bankrolled by some mega VC fund, cannot afford to pay US levels of pricing.
The difference being that BTC has no utility that people depend on. They can refuse to buy the BTC from the now-GenZer or even the Winklevoss twins if they'd rather have food or shelter or a chanel bag rather than BTC. The real world phenomenon that this corresponds to is consumer price inflation or asset price inflation (assuming your asset is production capacity and the medium of exchange is BTC)
Being a landlord, or being an oil baron in an economy that is dependent on petrol, is different because people actually need those things. So antidemocratic aristocrats who inherited a land with substantial oil reserves can now buy lots of startups via softbank or build artificial cities because our cheapest way to acquire petrol is still to dig it out of the ground in those countries where reserves accumulated in the last millions of years, and pay local rulers for the permission to do it.
If we assume that we should maintain the current scarce currency system, then the only solution would be to have multiple competing scarce currencies. However, Bitcoin is not really competing against anything except maybe gold.
At our (fairly large) company, you can query by team (and maybe job role) but it will hide responses where the sample size is smaller than a set number (I think 8 or 10).
So yes it can be done but people have to actually care about it.
The cautionary tale about k-anonymity (from Aaron Schwartz's book I think) is when the behavior of aggregates is also something that should be kept privates - the example was that the morning run of an army base in a foreign country was revealed because enough people did this with their smartwatches on that it formed a neat cluster.
Isn’t location data particularly easy to de-anonymize? I remember reading some research that because people tend to be so consistent with their location, you could deanonymize most people in a dataset with 3 random location samples through the day
It takes substantial effort to build a good dataset, proportionally more if it gets bigger, and people like big datasets because you can train more powerful models from them. So I am not surprised that people tend to gravitate towards datasets made by well-funded institutions.
The alternative is either a small dataset that people heavily overfit (eg the MUC6 corpus that was heavily used for coreference at some point where people cared more about getting high numbers than useful results) or things like the Universal Dependencies corpus which are provided by a large consortium of smaller institutions
Some of the more well-known YouTube creators are also on
- Curiosity Stream/Nebula (Adam Neely, Mary Spender, Ali Abdaal, Thomas Frank, Super Bunnyhop)
- LBRY/odysee (DistroTube)
- FloatPlane (Linus Tech Tips)
None of these has a nice recommender like YouTube, so you'll likely either have manual curation (Nebula, Floatplane) or drown in a sea of bad/uninteresting content (LBRY)
Firstly, the entire point of YouTube for me is the long tail. I don't watch any of those channels you listed, and the only two I've heard of are Linus and Adam Neely.
But the more important point is that even if all the many dozens of mostly small channels I subscribe to were on some other paid video service, I wouldn't want to track down and check in on all those services. Even just 3 would be a vastly worse experience than YouTube, especially since there would almost certainly be huge variation in the features and quality of their various web, mobile, and TV apps.
RSS/Atom feeds and video files you can play with whatever video player you want seems like it'd cover most of those concerns? The relatively closed nature of YouTube isn't necessarily something you'd want to replicate.
The bigger issue would be search and discovery, especially since I can't think of any obvious way to prevent services from spoofing engagement data to influence rankings.
> RSS/Atom feeds and video files you can play with whatever video player you want seems like it'd cover most of those concerns?
Absolutely, as long as there was widespread agreement in both the distribution mechanism and important video features like closed captions.
> The relatively closed nature of YouTube isn't necessarily something you'd want to replicate.
No, but the consistency and ability to get everything in one place is pretty vital, and is something you pretty much get for free from single centralized sources. The closed nature is obviously one of the huge downsides.
> The bigger issue would be search and discovery, especially since I can't think of any obvious way to prevent services from spoofing engagement data to influence rankings.
Yep. Another big one is the cost of serving videos.
Probably i don't watch any of the YouTubers you're watching either - the long tail is exactly why people watch YouTube (and maybe a handful of 10k-1M subscriber channels) rather than, or in addition to, TV programme and streamable shows that are modeled after it that are less niche.
The main point of that list was: there are multiple platforms that try to be a "YouTube for people who don't like YouTube, for a point in time when YouTube gets horrible", with some people creating content there, and e.g. odysee lets creators sync their videos so you get exactly the same videos from them on YT and on Odysee. But for most creators this is still additional work for little benefit since their main audience is on YT.
It would take over a hundred years for a person to watch a single day's worth of YouTube uploads. At this point it would take the literal apocalypse to stop them.
False dichotomy. What you call "not studying" would vary between effectively dropping out (for the people who are only at uni to get drunk and end up with a degree at the end), gaining a more thorough holistic understand of the material, or diving really deep on some of the aspects that are most interesting at the cost of others.
The drink-and-get-a-certificate people will indeed profit from being encouraged to study, but the controversial opinion here would be that university should only or mainly care about those.
Daimler (Mercedes) is quite close, and they complained loudly when Boris Palmer decided to drive a Prius rather than a Daimler car when he became mayor of Tübingen.
So yes, the auto lobby is quite powerful but the extent to which they can interfere with the business of a small liberal university town is very small.
Skimming code is a legitimate task. At a large/FAANG company you will often have a 400k sloc code base and only a vague idea which bits of code you need to study more intensively to find out what you need.
> The more I work with parsing, parser combinators and writing grammars for little languages, the less often I find myself using or wanting to use any regex at all.
Surprise: The most common parser combinator libraries do backtracking. That's exactly the problem. Any solution as widely used (if not overused) as regular expressions ends up exposing a number of dark corners where the design isn't as clean and tight as you would want it. There are lots of better ways, but most of them are specialized and are totally unsuited for significant areas where people need something.
That said: yes I've used LR(1) parsing (not LALR) using a library that uses parser combinators with a good interface, and it's more powerful than regex and worth it for the right usecase.
> to turn one of those kids into someone worthwhile
The basic insight here is: kids with learning disabilities, or who have a home environment not conducive to learning, are worthwhile people. And school as the institution taking care of those kids should do more than just send them to another building to rot.
It's a very straightforward thing to want your upper middle class privileged kid get all the support they need to become a future surgeon, but school is just very bad at recognizing and enhancing the chances of people who aren't neurotypical white privileged background kids.
Enforcing standardized testing as a key KPI isn't really the right solution here, but there's enough examples outside of the US how this can be done better than just writing off people as "not worthwhile".
> school is just very bad at recognizing and enhancing the chances of people who aren't neurotypical white privileged background kids.
It is also bad recognizing and enhancing the chances of people who are neurotypical white privileged background kids.
I went to pretty good primary and secondary schools which actually tried to get the best out of pretty much everyone. Remedial teaching was taken seriously and wasn't just a bin into which difficult children were dumped. But even then the results left a lot to be desired. It's really difficult even in the absence of political interference.
The surrounding society makes a big difference. I count myself as lucky growing up where and when I did.
"school as the institution taking care of those kids"
But that's the question, right? Are schools facilities for education, or for taking care of kids?
The format is reasonable for education, but not for complete rearing of children. When children, for whatever reason, are not being raised effectively, a classroom is not going to do a great job with education.
The public school system goes behind education because it's the only state service where most children can be reached. They're crucially important for providing food security and shelter to millions of children whose parents can't or won't.
They're only in contention if we use the same measures for both, which is the root problem imo. In the United States our schools are more than places to expose children to literature, mathematics, and civics. It's a crucial social service and one with massive reach - if you want to affect change for the children and youth of America, schools are the place to go.
The contrary is also true. When we don't effectively use schools as these crucial public services, we wind up with the "school to prison pipeline" as it's called.
In my opinion the notion of "no child left behind" shouldn't equate to every kid going to college or becoming a doctor. We can design schooling metrics better than test scores and academic outcome. Like criminal justice outcomes, health outcomes like obesity, voting or civic participation, or even social outcomes. The goals of schooling shouldn't be wholly academic. That is why secondary education exists.
It feels like people just aren't in agreement on the goals of school. And without agreement on the goals, it's going to be hard to succeed.
As far as I can tell, in most of the world and for a long time, school has been a place for academic education. Those that could not be educated for whatever reason were dismissed.
The idea that school should be a general social service for children seems popular among politicians and school administrators, but less accepted among parents and teachers. Furthermore, there was no explicit decision to move away from a focus on academics, it just kind of happened. That's not a recipe for good results.
It's not an idea, it's reality. Schools are state run childcare and child rearing facilities in the United States. Academics are one of their activities.
I didn't say "opposed". Parents expect teachers to teach and teachers expect to teach. But the job decription is changing and inconsistent -- both at the high level of "what is a school" and the low level of "what should I, as a teacher, try to accomplish today?".
Goals are unclear right now. That, by itself, is bad. We need an explicit decision here, and that needs to be communicated to everyone involved.
> Parents expect teachers to teach and teachers expect to teach
As the child of a public grade school teacher (early childhood), I would suggest you go visit some Title I schools and ask lower income parents there what they expect from the school with respect to their children.
What you're being told in this thread: they will say they're happy to have a place that will take care of their kids while they're working, keep them reasonably safe, provide them food, keep them busy, and educate them
What you seem to think they would say: education their kids to the highest level possible
When there aren't consistent meals, access to health care, or clothing at home, and when home is a place of violence and/or substance abuse, priorities look a lot different.
All of these are things that were not uncommon, year after year. That's the reality public school teachers and administrators have to deal with.
It's exactly these low performers who never study, are always late, interrupt, and bully who make school living hell for the neurodiverse students that actually try. They can go into a coal mine and move piles of rocks for the rest of their lives for all I care as long as they can no longer disrupt everyone else.
In my country parents can choose which school they send their kids to.
You get "white schools". Parents always want the best for their children and this predictably leads to full segregation. I am actually surprised how egalitarian and inclusive the US is when it comes to education!
> Parents always want the best for their children and this predictably leads to full segregation.
More likely, segregation happens because parents don't always want the best for their kids. A lot of it is simply self-segregation, driven by varying parental attitudes to education and the like.
There are many good reasons to de-racialize the discussion around US public education. One is that the "white school" trope is increasingly out of date. Instead, we've begun to see "Asian schools" wherever high-performing public high school schools admit students based on standardized testing. The top-ranked high school in the entire US, Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology, is 65% Asian and 23% white in a county that is 17% Asian and 62% white [0][1]. Stuyvesant High School in New York City, another high-performing public magnet school, is 74% Asian while Asian residents make up just 14% of the city's population [2][3].
In my view, there's a degree to which such lopsided admissions represent a greater Asian American cultural emphasis on education (good) coupled with a marginal standardized test score advantage produced by many hours of after-school test prep (bad). As repeated studies have shown, the advantage of e.g. SAT test prep courses is consistently relatively small, but enough of an edge to matter when you're looking at a ~10% admissions rate [2][4]. Not all applicants have parents who can afford or are aware of the value of such test prep, so it represents an uneven advantage. Crucially, this advantage is not inherently racial, but rather an artifact of culture, parental choice, and socioeconomic background. To mitigate this uneven advantage without completely eliminating merit-based admissions, a blurring filter e.g. random lottery might be applied to the top X% of test scorers.
And there is absolutely value in merit-based admissions. It makes these magnet schools what they are [5]. Despite their distorted demographics, it's what enables schools like Stuyvesant to still function as effective ladders out of poverty for many students:
>What makes these schools so good? The general consensus is the academic rigor. But what’s come out clearly in our interviews with Stuyvesant graduates is something arguably more important: a peer-driven expectation of achievement. What Stuyvesant does is take 3,000 pretty bright kids and put them in a building together. Then magical things happen. They push each other, they strive to be like each other, they learn from each other.
>Nearly all of these kids went to college, often selective ones, and most went on to do well professionally. The poorer students became middle or upper-middle class, and the middle-class students often did better than their parents. And they were happy—most (though not all) felt that Stuyvesant had had a big effect on their lives. For instance, Elizabeth Reid Yee, a white 1985 graduate who grew up poor in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, fully credits Stuyvesant with keeping her from a life of poverty.
That is true its more about economic status now. We have made some considerable progress in opening up the middle class to immigrants.
To paraphrase MLK "judged not on the colour of their skin but on the size of their parents' bank accounts".
So many doors magically open to you when your parents have money.
That's part of what makes "Asian schools" interesting. Many Asian American students at high-performing US public schools come from solidly middle and working-class backgrounds. Their parents simply chose to invest every cent in their child's education, sometimes at great personal financial risk. Anecdotally, I know one Korean American couple of extremely modest means who took out a second mortage just to get their oldest through undergrad.
To a significant extent, Asian American parents and students have shown that merit-based admissions _do_ work as a socioeconomic equalizer (see above Atlantic article). The problem as I see it is how to replicate this success among other demographics, including white Americans of middle and working-class backgrounds. Another part of the solution in my view is just making more magnet schools.
It’s not about economic status. At TJ, where I went, the Asian majority is comfortably middle class, but less so than the white kids there. Stuyvesant, despite being 75% Asian, is 50% low income, and eligible for Title I funding a result: https://nypost.com/2014/07/19/why-nycs-push-to-change-school...
Let's also be realistic here: CloudFront is a good solution if you need a file to be served over CDN with low latency in multiple regions. Raw s3 or just a web server is much cheaper if you don't need low latency over multiple regions.