> Visidata is a fast popular data tool in python https://www.visidata.org/ if you just want data entry.
Visidata does vastly more than data entry. It's one of the most powerful applications I've used in years, and basically functions as a cross between a spreadsheet and a relational database with an extremely configurable TUI interface. It's one of the best tools available for doing ad-hoc data analysis, transformations, and joining data from multiple sources in different formats.
There are few comparable tools that allow you to open a Postgres table, a local CSV, and JSON being returned from a REST API in real time, do a complex join, filter and normalize the results, all in a single terminal session.
It's not a "should" -- ideas simply are fundamentally different from physical materials, and the norms we use to deal with the inherent qualities of one don't automatically translate over to the other without a suitable rationale.
Physical materials qualify as property because they are economically rival: one party possessing and using them inherently excludes others, meaning that competing claims to the same thing must be resolved by one party surrendering their claims to the other. There's no agree-to-disagree mechanism available, so we need a way to resolve disputes in favor of one party or another.
There is no clear application of this to non-rival intangibles: there is no conflict between two people using similar ideas independently of each other in the first place. Someone copying your idea isn't analogous to them picking fruit off of your tree, it's analogous to them learning from what you're doing, and then going off and planting their own tree on their own land.
Modern "intellectual property" is a contrivance by people desiring to artificially incentivize certain categories of activity by attempting to replicate one of the downstream effects of the inherent exclusivity of goods, namely commercial markets. So you wind up with a positive-law intervention to create artificial scarcity in order to produce similar second-order consequences to what comes about when scarcity exists naturally.
That's why property rights have been recognized in all civilizations in human history -- and are likely a prerequisite for organized civilization to exist in the first place -- whereas copyright laws in their modern form date to the 18th century.
In fact, artificial "intellectual property" conflicts with natural property rights, in that in claiming a universal monopoly on arranging any bits of matter into particular patterns, you are actually claiming the right to stop people from using their own actual property as they please.
> How do you square "complete privacy" with the fact that you're authenticating to these VPNs with a persistent username or other credential and are then sending traffic through them, both from an IP address that might identify you, and to services that you authenticate against?
IIRC, Mullvad allows anonymous accounts, allows payment in cash and via other methods that don't link PII to the transaction, and claims not to log inbound connections.
> In my brief experience with abuse mitigation, connections coming from VPNs or unusual IP ranges were very significantly more likely to be associated with abuse.
Correlating these factors with abuse implies that you already have methods of identifying abuse per se, independently of these factors. Is there no feasible way of just blocking the abuse itself when it begins, or developing much more proximate indicators to act on?
> The worst offenders are Tor IP addresses. Anyone connecting from Tor was basically guaranteed to have bad intentions.
Do you handle this by blocking known Tor exit node IPs entirely, or just adding hurdles to attempts to post from those IPs?
> It’s tough for people who want these things for privacy, but the sad reality is that these same privacy protections are favored by people who are trying to abuse services.
But naturally P(A|B) and P(B|A) are two different things.
To the contrary, people running botnets or AI scrapers are likely going out of their way to mimic ordinary web traffic from consumer devices. Ultimately, these measures will only affect users who are trying to protect their privacy and security, and will be ineffective at stopping bots.
> I've long held that open source is one of the world's biggest anarchist experiments. Anarchism, as understood by the likes of Kropotkin, largely believed that we can self organize towards working for the wellbeing of all, that s self organized groups will genuinely build useful and high quality tools.
The paradox of this kind of "anarchism" is that it works really well when it isn't being consciously pursued, i.e. when the "well being of all" is an emergent effect of people pursuing their own well being locally, trying to speculate about "the well being of all" at the macro level. The moment people start trying to consciously work toward specific outcomes at the macro level, it all starts to fall apart.
So it's really more aligned with Hayek than Kropotnik: spontaneous order as a product of human action, not human design.
> Why do we need to pay open source developers? They need housing, food, etc. Maybe the better answer is to figure out how to make those things freely available to open source developers.
And that's exactly where we begin to falter. Sitting here on HN speculating about how to make the world, as a single unit of analysis, rather people at the micro level observing and replicating what actually works in practice individually, is a recipe for creating obstacles and mechanisms of centralization which will inevitably be abused.
Well, no, there was an actual point there about trying to effect change via top-down intentionality vs. bottom-up emergence. Any alignment with a particular ideological position is necessarily downstream of that.
Consider the possibility that your own extremely intemperate response originated from a reaction to associations that you yourself were bringing into the discussion.
Apologies for the intemperate response but in my experience everyone who talks about capital-H Hayek has the same set of shrink-wrapped opinions, and the open source / free software thing doesn't fit into them very well.
The gaps between our shared reliance on unpaid open source by people doing software for love, and the "Austrian Economics" financialized worldview are really hard to bridge. Why aren't they all rich if they're so useful?
> Apologies for the intemperate response but in my experience everyone who talks about capital-H Hayek has the same set of shrink-wrapped opinions, and the open source / free software thing doesn't fit into them very well.
Perhaps an effect of the particular bubbles/walled gardens you inhabit? Most of the discourse involving Hayek that I've encountered involves people with a wide range of opinions, including many who see the FOSS world as a perfect example of Hayek's concept of spontaneous order.
> The gaps between our shared reliance on unpaid open source by people doing software for love, and the "Austrian Economics" financialized worldview are really hard to bridge.
Austrian economics has little to do with a "financialized worldview"; rather, it's fundamentals boil down to subjective utility as the ultimate determinant of economic value, an axiomatic baseline that preference in pursuit of subjective utility is revealed by observable behavior rather than theoretical doctrines, and recognition of the individual as the fundamental agent/unit of analysis in economics.
Perhaps you're interacting primarily with people working in the financial sphere who are invoking certain ideas from Austrian economics to rationalize their own particular intentions?
If so, a rigorous application of Bayes' Theorem to the associations you've gleaned from your particular experience may be well warranted.
The "bridge" you're seeking is right there in the recognition of subjective utility as the basis of all value: contrary to your point, it's the satisfaction of subjective motivations, regardless of how that satisfaction is quantified or denominated, that generates value.
People who are obtaining the results they desire from the efforts they invest are creating value for themselves, regardless of whether their results have a financial value attached to them.
Ok, that definition of subjective utility is unfalsifiable but meanwhile in the real world we all run on money, like it or not.
This is a post about open source people not getting paid, are you going to argue that their subjective utility of enjoying their work is payment enough?
I think the overuse of .env files is a side effect of the overuse of containers. Working with config files is much more convenient if you're running software normally, but if you're shipping an entire baseline OS along with your application, getting application-specific configuration data into the container becomes non-trivial. Environment variables provide a standardized way of making configuration data set outside the container available from within it.
Visidata does vastly more than data entry. It's one of the most powerful applications I've used in years, and basically functions as a cross between a spreadsheet and a relational database with an extremely configurable TUI interface. It's one of the best tools available for doing ad-hoc data analysis, transformations, and joining data from multiple sources in different formats.
There are few comparable tools that allow you to open a Postgres table, a local CSV, and JSON being returned from a REST API in real time, do a complex join, filter and normalize the results, all in a single terminal session.
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