Did it occur to anyone that stocks and stock-derived products like ETFs and indexes are driven by emotions rather than financials? The company sells its stocks once, typically, and from that moment on, stocks live their own life of speculation by people who mostly have no say in the company. A company might be doing perfectly well, but the stock would fall because some people "think" that the company is doing badly. But if nobody were to act, nothing would happen to the stock. Similarly, people can just decide that a Stock is worth something out of nowhere - GameStop stock.
Essentially, predicting stock movement becomes predicting the sentiment of the people. Instead of "the financial report means the company is doing X", it becomes "if people were to see this financial report, they would react by X".
And this whole thing feels like a big Ponzi scheme. Everyone keeps repeating that you need to invest your money, and that's what essentially makes the market long-term bullish.
I've been using Nextcloud now for 4+ years. The latest major versions pretty much have no features that benefit regular home users. They are now chasing government contracts and AI hype.
Nextcloud can't even get Notes done right. I lost the entire contents of the note randomly not long ago. And the mobile Note app refuses to load the editor sometimes.
That being said, most of the time, Nextcloud works ok. I don't want to replace Nextcloud with another jack of all trades, master of none. Instead, I'm slowly migrating to good alternatives that do one thing well: Immich for photos, Obsidian for notes.
> That being said, most of the time, Nextcloud works ok.
Most of the time isn’t enough when dealing with data these days unfortunately. I’ve been using google docs since 2009, and I have lost 0 data in that time. I still have my student essays from back then. Things need to be this reliable to compete unfortunately.,
Google has few walls, but the ones that are there are like solid titanium. Nextcloud has many thin, flimsy walls that are simply annoying but not terrible to tear down.
Ok, I hope you take regular backups. Depending on Google risks sudden account lockout w/ no recourse. Everything suddenly gone, "poof". Others in this thread can do a better job than me describing other tradeoffs for self-hosting vs dependence on Google.
Others in the thread also do a good job of describing the risk of self hosting - these tools are buggy, have synchronisation issues, have workflow quirks and sharp edges. For all their pain points, google docs works and it’s reliable.
I’ve had way more issues of unrecoverable data with self managed tools than the major cloud hosted tools. There’s risks with everything, and I only have so much time in the day to spend on these things..
With self hosting tools I have found the key to success is simplicity. When I stopped conflating my home lab, home production, and what I thought I wanted, things just became so much simpler and more reliable.
YMMV of course. I’ve come to the conclusion that a lot of self hosters are unintentionally confused about the differences between those things, and it makes an easy recipe for problems.
It is so rare. Often people want to self-justify their complex, painful homesetup for this kind of rare thing. If any of the cloud like Google was that bad with lost accounts then it would get less popular eventually.
Breaking nextcloud or failing a disk or lost phone is more likely. (Nitpick - Yes, most people have SIM based 2FA - so no problem with lost SIM - and most people are not >100K paid HN bros - that travel constantly around the world. so Google is good.).
How have you liked Obsidian? I was going to use it but realized it pay walled sharing notes between devices. Looking into this again - are you self hosting Obsidian via LiveSync plugin?
Except I wanted more security and multiple users. Instead of using the default admin user, I created one user for each person. Done in the "_users" database. Then create one database for each person. Assign each user as a "Member" to their respective database, not admin. Now each person has their own credentials that can access only their database.
Not OP but I'm a very happy longtime Obsidian user. Maybe a little unfair to characterize as "paywalled" given their sync service is optional (and works very well), and a directory of markdown files is about as portable and flexible as it gets for self-hosting.
> ... renting hundreds of thousands of infected Internet of Things (IoT) devices to proxy services...
And that's why I will never buy any IoT devices that require an internet connection to work. Only IoT devices in my house are those that connect to my own server and never see the light of the internet.
I believe that Jellyfin, Immish, and NextCloud login pages are automatically flagged as dangerous by Google. What's more, I suspect that Google is somehow collecting data from its browser - Chrome.
Google flagged my domain as dangerous once. I do host Jellyfin, Immish, and NextCloud. I run an IP whitelist on the router. All packets from IPs that are not whitelisted are dropped. There are no links to my domain on the internet. At any time, there are 2-3 IPs belonging to me and my family that can load the website. I never whitelisted Google IPs.
How on earth did Google manage to determine that my domain is dangerous?
No joke, I only plug my printer into the outlet when I want to print and immediately turn it off after. Never was connected to the internet.
But I do have Zigbee sensors and switches, all of which connect to my home server and Home Assistant. None of them see the internet. But Home Assistant is accessible from the internet through a reverse proxy from whitelisted IPs.
GrapheneOS user here. Every single banking and financial app I use works. Both European ones and non-European. Some require changing per-app settings, but nothing crazy. There's a good chance that your banking app will work.
How do these articles keep getting to the front of HN...
> The certificates provide no security: The way you verify your identity to Let's Encrypt... you place a file somewhere on your website, and they access
> Automatic renewal is insecure: certbot ... downloads a bunch of untrusted data from the web, and then feeds that data into your web server, all as root...
False, this is NOT the only way. You can do it by setting a TXT DNS record. No files involved. Your server communicates with the registrar through API over an encrypted connection.
> Manual renewal isn't free...
You're not supposed to manually review Let's Encrypt in the first place. The whole point is that you set up cron job once and forget about it.
> HTTPS is a trap: Once you've moved your websites to HTTPS, there's no going back to plain HTTP...
Not true. You can run HTTP version of your website in parallel if you so desire.
> Let's Encrypt is founded on the benevolence of scoundrels: Let's Encrypt isn't free to run, either. Their 2019 operating budget is 3.6 million U.S. dollars. Most of that is donated by… guess who? _Your competitors_[1].
EFF and Mozilla foundation are not my competitors LOL.
You can, but there is no way to force a method. A MitM attacker will choose the file method to get itself a cert for your site - the main argument in the article.
> The whole point is that you set up cron job once and forget about it.
Exactly. (Italics by me.)
>> HTTPS is a trap: Once you've moved your websites to HTTPS, there's no going back to plain HTTP...
> Not true. You can run HTTP version of your website in parallel if you so desire.
But never again HTTP-only. No visitors will load HTTP. Did you actually read the article and the arguments??
> [1]
I'd like to see some numbers before I belive your argument.
So that absolutely no human ever checks the transparency log. I can't even find that log for LetsEncrypt, let alone how to search it for my website's certs.
Germany desperately needs a wake-up call in the form of recession.
German car industry has been non-competitive for multiple years now. Instead of letting it fail, the government kept on flushing money down the toilet and prolonging the inevitable.
For a business, there's no incentive anymore to choose Germany over other EU countries. Cheap energy is gone. Germany is literally collapsing under its own weight: endless bureaucratic structures that just keep on growing.
> Germany desperately needs a wake-up call in the form of recession. German car industry has been non-competitive for multiple years now. Instead of letting it fail, the government kept on flushing money down the toilet and prolonging the inevitable.
Just let it fail? I'm reminded of this, which I read recently about rare earths:
> Rare earth refineries and magnet factories all over the world have been buying Chinese equipment for the past 20 years. Many equipment vendors in North America and Europe closed when most of the world’s rare earth mining shifted to China in the late 1990s.
I'm sure that, at the time, people were saying that North American and European rare earth equipment manufacturers were "non-competitive for multiple years now."
Don't get me wrong, I agree there is such a thing as "forget the comparative advantage of trade, this is national security", and I even think steel and cement need to be in that category right after farm subsidies, but also you do have to be strategic, and you don't want private corporations "too important to fail" which turn subsidies into shareholder returns without adding real value.
And even more, if someone does buy into today's expanded definition of national security, keeping industries safe from Japanese or Chinese style zombies is a desirable thing.
Sure but we are talking about german industrial output, and one of the main reasons for problems here is the absence of the cheap energy that was available until the russian invasion of ukraine.
Energy prices? Unit labour costs? Pisa Scores? VC Investments as percentage of GDP? Number of IPOs? Taxation of Income? Punctuality of public transport?
Very US-centric article. Written by insecure people who are clinging to power and money desperately.
I don't see how some kind of big breakthrough is going to happen with the current model designs. The superintelligence, if it will ever be created, will require a new breakthrough in model architecture. We've pretty much hit the limit of what is possible with current LLMs. The improvements are marginal at this point.
Secondly, hypothetically, the US achieves superintelligence, what is stopping China from doing the same in a month or two, for example?
Even if China achieves a big breakthrough first, it may benefit the rest of the world.
It's a US/China centered article, because that's the game, Europe is not a meaningful player and everyone else is going to get sucked into orbit of one of the superpowers.
If you read the article carefully, I work hard to keep my priors and the priors of the people in question separate, as their actions may be rational under their priors, but irrational under other priors, and I feel it's worth understanding that nuance.
I'm curious where you got the writer "clinging to power and money desperately."
Also, to be fair, I envy Europe right now, but we can't take that path.
My cynical take is that this is the US committing economic suicide, based on a misguided belief in something that'll never happen.
The new superpowers will be the EU, which was smart enough not to make the same gamble, and China, which will structurally survive it.
I also disagree with your conclusion of a moral imperative to make sure that AI succeeds. I believe it's the opposite. AI failing would finally create the long-needed revolutionary moment to throw off the shackles of the oligarchy that got us into this mess in the first place.
Not with how much pulling teeth is required to get them to invest in defense. I don't see how you can unironically make the claim that a written down investment would sink the ship that is the US economy.
I assure you, this is not a game where “the only winning move is not to play”, in spite of whatever your domestic politicians are feeding the population.
Are you sure? Based on what? All I see is people desperately throwing money they don't have at AI like a gambling addict who just converted their child's college fund into chips.
Call me a buzzkill here, but my bet is you aren't gonna hit it big. While you can win at the casino, that requires a careful plan with contingency solutions, which AI simply does not have. Realistically speaking, it is indeed best to just not play this game; you are just digging a deeper hole.
I think you missed the point. The EU is "winning by doing nothing" whereas the US is liable for the huge failing investment it made. US economical growth is now entirely reliant on AI, so an AI crash guarantees immediate recession and out-of-control stagflation. The EU with its "less advanced" economy will keep growing just fine with or without AI, surviving the front-line bloodbath by staying behind.
As for defense, they are spending exactly as much as necessary at each point in time: just enough to keep credible US backing until 2025, and as much as they can without destroying their economy since. There is no good argument for an irresponsible spending spree, as the only powers that can realistically challenge the EU without triggering nuclear holocaust are the US and China anyways (Russia don't stand a chance).
I don't see odds on a good outcome from a revolution. Keep in mind which faction in the united states is generally militant. The best possible scenario there is broad civilian unrest that the administration tries to forcefully quell, triggering a military coup, but it's unlikely that the coup would be unified, and right wing militias and hardcore trump supports would go down fighting.
We need political Aikido to hold this country together.
So often, I see comments that seem to make sense only in a vacuum. If the US disappeared from the scene tomorrow, how do you think the geopolitical landscape might change?
The competition between the US and China is pertinent to everyone.
What do you mean? I don't see how the commenter was saying anything about the irrelevance of US-China competition, in fact some of their points hinge on the existence of that competition, which is why they described the asticle as very US-centric.
> This case shows how, even when Apple tightly controls its repair infrastructure, it cannot prevent disastrous cases like this
Customers should be able to choose where to repair their device, or even be able to repair it themselves. Just because it's an "official" repair shop doesn't mean its the best and the safest. Louis Rossmann has been saying this for years.
Essentially, predicting stock movement becomes predicting the sentiment of the people. Instead of "the financial report means the company is doing X", it becomes "if people were to see this financial report, they would react by X".
And this whole thing feels like a big Ponzi scheme. Everyone keeps repeating that you need to invest your money, and that's what essentially makes the market long-term bullish.