skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> Git, one of the inspirational technologies, is in theory distributed as well and in practice hyper-centralized to only a few major providers.

Git repositories are replicated all over.

My laptop has mirrors of all my work's projects and many open source projects.

Imagine how many secure mirrors of, say, the React repository is out there. GitHub is basically just a conveniently located copy.

That's real and tangible decentralization. It's a magical property of the DVCS architecture that it's decentralized even when it's centralized, so to speak.

I agree that there are issues with central hubs though. Maybe the most significant one is that organizational structures and rules are defined in a centralized way on GitHub.

If you look at blockchains as another kind of DVCS that's totally focused on authority, legitimacy, and security, then it seems pretty likely that we'll end up using those to control commits and releases.
If their Lacinia GraphQL library for Clojure [1] is any indication of code quality, this should be very useful. I’m very impressed with the former, and I’ll be sure to look this new one over.

1: https://github.com/walmartlabs/lacinia
Reminds me of notpron: http://notpron.org/notpron/

Which was a similarly "impossible" online riddle...
In Europe (and Japan) though, the places with narrow spaces between buildings usually have low buildings as well.

There is much more light in most European cities, even in the business districts with high buildings, than at least the few American cities I have been to, like Montreal or NYC, because usually where there are tall buildings, then there are also wide spaces between them, see in Paris for example: http://paris-ladefense.com/sites/default/files/styles/raison...

There are indeed places that are more in the shadow in the old city centers, but nobody likes a place that never gets sun.
This slide show became available on Kodi about 6 months back and makes for an awesome screensaver
See the comment below https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15376665. It is not true that distributed systems are only good for static content or "append-only" data. "Mutable systems" can be built on top of immutable systems.
> Bah, sounds as totally irrelevant to the "freedom of speech" as not allowing cigarette ads and other such things.

I'm sorry I just don't see comparable public harm between smoking and idealized images of people. Second-hand smoke is bad for everyone whereas I'd have to deliberately open up a fashion magazine to get the worst effects of idealized images. And AFAIK there hasn't been a concerted effort by the fashion industry to suppress research that shows harm caused by such images.

> And of course not every country considers marketing drivel and fashion as parts of such protected speech worthy of freedom.

I would argue that fashion is an art form (and many in the industry do as well). You may find its message mundane or uninteresting or "drivel" but that's beside the point.

What about niche magazines (eg. particular music subcultures, hobbies dominated by a particular gender) that would find it much harder to reflect the general population?

All of this doesn't even take into account that magazine publishing is a declining industry and a lot of this activity happens online. How do you even begin to regulate Pinterest, Twitter, Tumblr, YouTube and Facebook in terms of the proportions of images they carry?

Summing it all up, I don't think that a regulation like this is practical to enforce and there's very little evidence that it'll accomplish anything useful. Why not spend the government's limited time and resources where they may have a larger effect?

> They don't need to prove they are correct any more than they do for any other kind of data the government measures and uses to determine law policy.

Currently that data is used to determine health policy, not for deciding how to hand out fines (I could be wrong about this). If you start fining magazines based on that data it seems likely to me there'll be lawsuits flying all over the place contesting the veracity of the data.

> Health inspectors don't eat at a restaurant 24/7 either.

No but their primary job is performing healthy and safety inspections [2]; they don't need to eat at restaurants. At restaurants they inspect the kitchen and service areas, bathrooms, trash handling and disposal procedures, making sure employees follow health codes etc. And I don't see the connection anyway: you're obviously going to task someone with the job, whether part-time full-time, and prioritize it over some other work they could be doing.

> It's only silly if you exaggerate it for comedic effect or for slippery slopism.

Sorry that was a line from the dystopian satire that I said this idea sounded like the premise to (I can see how that might've been confusing). That's why it was silly.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vertical_farming
2. http://work.chron.com/role-public-health-inspector-16092.htm...
For being one of the richest countries in the world the median income is way too low (especially for single-households). And a direct comparison with other countries can't be done without factoring in all the taxes we have in addition to payroll tax. Norway is also one of the most expensive countries in the world. We have 25% VAT on most goods and services. 15% for food and drink. Alcohol is heavily taxed, for high alc/vol 65% of the purchase price is taxes. Vehicles are heavily taxed, compared to, i.e., Sweden. A $50k car in the U.S. would be $100k here, or more, depending on engine size, emissions, etc. High environmental taxes for fuel, electricity, etc. Taxes on gifts, inheritance, property, wealth, pension, etc.

http://www.skatteetaten.no/en/Rates/Value-added-tax/
Tesla to start creating retail at super charger stations
I'm getting access denied on this entry. Could you copy-pase it somewhere else?
There's regulation that says they can't go above a certain threshold, so I'm inclined to believe it. Other things:

- The illumination is much more even and filling modern headlights literally cut an evenly lit polygon of light in 3d space, in old times it was much more raw and uneven. When coming into view, as your eye passes the edge of the light cone it receives the whole of it at once whereas previously the gradient was much more progressive. IOW they never go above the lumen cap, it's just even across the light port (thus indeed emits more candela) and falling like a cliff at the edge instead of decreasing towards the edge from the center.

- The light emitted is much more blue, which is harsher on the eyes, and even more so at night. As a most probably unintended effect this might help in combatting sleepiness, a sort of reverse f.lux, but too much and it's tiring and agressive. Try lighting up a 40W 2700K vs a 40W 6000K when going to the bathroom at night: the latter is harsh and blinding, even though they emit exactly the same amount of light.

Some old cars I've driven had yellow headlights and it was a pain to see anything, some semi-recent cars have 6000K and I hear aftermarket goes to 8000K which is beyond ridiculous. My car has 4200k stock HID, ballasted lights†, and I feel it's a nice, safe balance for everyone.

† ballast means their height auto-adjust so as to always be below eyesight of a crossing driver.
Also, https://chordify.net/ is implemented using Haskell. I've used that a couple of times. Very useful (if you play music).
I agree with you, but your argument is deeply flawed. There's quite a far stretch between "Y can be built on top of X" and "X is good for Y".

To provide an argument that might fill this gap:

Most systems don't actually have a huge amount of data. Look at the data size and data growth of CRMs, special-purpose wikis, and so on: These are mostly smaller than 500 MB (excluding static content like images), and grow by less than 1MB even on a busy day. And that's the uncompressed size.

Also, most systems, despite being mutable, actually want (or need) an audit trail. So these are really append-only systems which merely have a "mutable look and feel" to the user.
My attempts to solve #24 sent me down a really interesting rabbit hole:

I was Googling for substrings and found this truly bizarre site that appears to be the WordPress equivalent of a numbers station, likely by someone Russian speaking.

https://nihilsphere.wordpress.com/

The about page is particularly insightful: https://nihilsphere.wordpress.com/about/

And perhaps the weirdest thing is that they appear to have a Google Plus profile: https://plus.google.com/110863007377623596048

I'm 100% okay with this being a complete red herring wrt the actual answer.
For anyone who was wondering, catnaroek was being sarcastic.
You're right - you can model any data as append-only though. Granted, in many cases it will require you to seriously sit down and remodel your data. Nobody's claiming it's going to be SQL and ACID transactions :) It's more likely going to be collaborative append-only logs based on CRDTs.

There are examples of the use cases you mention being built with decentralized technologies. [1][2]

[1] The various cryptocurrency wallets and exchanges

[2] https://openbazaar.org
You realise that it's not up to the Spanish courts to work this out right? Similarly the EU is irrelevant here. What is critical the interpretation of the UN when it comes to whether UN enshrined human rights are being violated.

We don't listen to Kim Jong-un when he or his courts declare that his citizens rights are not being violated, and neither is the interpretation of the Spanish courts very relevant.

Junker is not a UN human rights expert, he's a politician who has a history of making statements not because they are true but because they support his political aims. It's ridiculous to think that his statements have any meaningful bearing on determining whether Spain are violating international UN laws which they have signed up to. What matters is the understanding of the UN experts on those laws.

When the UN says '[Spain must ensure they] do not interfere with the fundamental rights to freedom of expression, assembly and association, and public participation [of the Catalonians].' They go on to be very clear "Regardless of the lawfulness of the referendum, the Spanish authorities have a responsibility to respect those rights that are essential to democratic societies” they are saying that Spain has broken international law, laws that it is a signatory to and so has to obey.

The city of Manchester and the Catalonian people obviously have very different properties among those which are relevant to self determination as you are well aware. I know you realise this so I won't engage with your facile comparison further.

Your pragmatic argument fails for the same reason that: "Mugabe: The election is invalid because I ordered the police to go around beating up and arresting everyone who might not vote for me. Therefore the election has no legitimacy, because errr... I intentionally tried to ruin it because I was afraid of the people?"

Of course it will have legitimacy 'popularly' if you go around smashing the skulls of black people you create a situation where public support for them surges. Spain (and your) attempt to evilly suppress the Catalonians and deny them their fundamental human rights is morally evil and rightly draws support to their side (regionally and internationally).
Noms is also a great example of a peer-to-peer database: https://noms.io
Signal processing on graphs is amazing, could be a way to implement reasoning in AI.
Belgium has as many pedestrian crossings as France, and drivers very much respect them. To the point sometimes of stopping for pedestrians that were not even trying to cross.

I think it's more a cultural thing than a problem with noticing them. I now try to pay as much attention in France as in Belgium, but in some places other cars will actually honk when you stop for a pedestrian. In some places in Asia or Eastern Europe they might even try to overtake you and actually endanger the pedestrian.
Fun thing - list comprehensions could be seen as map/filter and so on but they could also be seen as syntax sugar for monads:

[ x + y
for x in xs
for y in ys]

foo = do
x <- xs
y <- ys
return (x + y)

Just that this is overloaded in haskell so that it works with lists but also as async/await, as the `?` operator that propagates errors in rust and so on.

So maybe it isn't the basic concepts of haskell that are hard to get but that they are so general.
It's still a good example because the government in your country probably mandated it. People didn't just switch on their own accord.
> Imagine that you and some friends want to launch a small local business and need to host a website. Instead of paying to host it "up in the cloud", why not plug a few raspberry pi's into the walls at each of your houses?

Setup, updates, maintenance, tech support, and uptime guarantees, just to name a few reasons that "the cloud" is better. A service like Wordpress.com or Wix beats the self-hosted Pi on all of these counts.

I interact with a lot of non-technical small business owners and am "that tech guy" in their minds. A question I'm hearing more and more frequently is _why even bother with a website when a Facebook page is much easier and they can see people interacting with it._

Their reasons are not all that different from why many tech savvy HN readers are using a Mac instead of Linux: convenience; less shit to worry about.

Hosting anything on a Pi plugged into the wall goes in the exact opposite direction from what these people want. The centralized services are winning because they pay attention to what the market wants, they build it, and they make it easy to sign up.
Sure. But do all those correct statements mean that the A380 hydraulic control systems, and their backups, are "hopelessly intertwined" to an aircraft designer?
Sigh. The thing I miss about the internet in 1995 is that not everyone was signing up to a community just to spread negativity.
Adding ads is a significant enough negative change alone to get adequate media attention outside of sites like Hacker News.
They’ve already made multiple dumb mistakes, and it’s very very unlikely their identity has not leaked already, there just isn’t sufficient motivation to go after them yet.

Within a few months we plan to move nearly exclusively to high-latency communication methods.
The one huge advantage of content-addressing over location-addressing (= URL with domain name and path) is that the original source isn't solely responsible for keeping the content online and the link working.

Anyone can help out by keeping a copy. With location-addressing additional copies of the content aren't just largely hidden, they also get into a weird mode of competition with the original URL. With content-addressing, additional copies instead forge stronger resilience.
I think social media, and the internet in general, is a great venting tool. Something like the gladiatorial games in ancient Rome.

Not that I blame people. I don't want to get shot at by a police sniper either. Things have to get really bad before folks rise up.
100. It would be a very bad idea to call for a Speaker for the Dead for Hefner.
Well of course it depends a lot on your specific application.

Applications like Tox or Matrix (which uses servers, but not necessarily "centralized" servers) are great examples of dynamic p2p applications.

Or for example applications that use statically distributed javascript to facilitate dynamic p2p communications. Stuff like together.js, gun.js, freedom.js, etc.

Syncthing and Resilio Sync are also wonderful examples, and Resilio Sync has amazing encryption features: you can give out seed-only links to your data. People who use these links won't have permission to decrypt the content. They will only have permission to echo it. That's a "raspberry pi plugged into the wall at the coffee shop" solution to private, mutable content distribution.

As for the shopping cart example, this is something that could be conducive to a more centralized approach, especially if your physical distribution model is centralized and your payment system is centralized (traditional banks). In that of case, you'd want to have a more direct connection with the physical distributor. If you want a direct, instantaneous connection with the shopping cart company's servers, then that's what you need.

But it's possible to have a situation where your product is not physical (like music or video), and you are using a decentralized currency (like bitcoin). There's absolutely no reason you couldn't facilitate that in a completely distributed way.

By the way, Bitcoin is a banking app... Have you ever used a browser based cryptocurrency wallet? Imagine a browser based cryptocurrency wallet that's hosted on IPFS. That's a pretty distributed banking app. If you want privacy too, use zcash or monero.
Could ayahuasca have health benefits?
I suppose respect for the deceased has gone out of style.
To me UBI is basically a simplification of how paperwork is done, and how things are paid and what is paid. It doesn't mean the state gives more money overall.

People and companies pay taxes, which are then redistributed across each other. There are several department who take care of all that money. It's immensely complicated. The accounting of all that is horrific.

The UBI stems from the negative income tax, meaning that instead of paying X and getting paid Y, the government just make a calculation and you get a result of what you owe or are owed.

One could go even further than that and consider salaries. If everyone gets the UBI, that means companies only have to pay for the difference in salary, and the state pays the rest. Company taxes may increase, but they would have to pay much less in salary, so it evens out.

Overall the UBI might seem a little utopian, but the goal is to make things simpler in term of paperwork so that people don't end up with nothing when their paperwork is not in order. It would also make it much, much easier for everyone to understand who pays what and why. Tax accounting is awful. The negative income tax tries to levy this problem.

But in general, I totally agree with you, implementing the UBI is a gigantic project that has huge consequences, both political and economical. I don't know how it would be done, because I know nothing about tax accounting and the legislation around it. But at least that means there is are work to do and a will to do it, so that's a good start.
I think there are two different definitions of "late binding" in play here. The footnote makes it clear that the author considers C++ not to have "late binding"

> Early binding allows for static verification of the existence of method-signature pairs (e.g. v-tables). Late binding does not give the compiler (or an IDE) enough information for existence verification, it has to be looked up at run-time.
Trump Administration focuses on blockchain technology adoption
But tropical storms destroy roofs on houses on tropical islands. I can't imagine a cheap solar panel would fare any better. They'd just add to the debris.

Replacing a high percentage of your panels that frequently seems extremely wasteful and expensive.
I agree that HTTP doesn't have to die -- for many use cases it has serious flaws though, the most important being its coupling to location-addressing. You always need a domain name and path to construct a URL. If the host decides to change the path, or loses control over the domain, you're out of luck.

Fun fact: when URLs were being defined, some people expressed the opinion that location-addressing is a huge mistake to begin with. Almost all of the links and references in the respective mailing list archives are now: broken.
There were questions in the article and one close over here, but no answer AFAIK : how did the move people from one plane to another if they could not desimbark them in the first place?

Is the a way to connect two A380s together? (wild guess)
You are right, that was my fault, thanks for pointing that out.

I still would disagree though. As a German in Sweden I see a lot of compliance with Jante among people who express aversion against Jante.

One can be humble, not too self-absorbed and not consider oneself the best and most important person on this planet (aka showing basic compliance with Jante), and still be successful. I'd argue that this might even be the way to go for sustainable "growing the pie for everyone" success.
Ask HN: What do you folks think about an HackerNews-esque site for learning?
As entrepreneurs and side project makers, we've all had to teach ourselves skills that allow us to build the things we envision. But a lot of the time, we can get lost along the way learning something new. I wanted to see what people thought about a site where you can upvote and share learning resources that are relevant for certain fields and subtopics. It would allow you to really focus in on what is important to learn and what isn't!
Try this (may have to run it through Translate): http://archive.is/b4gHd
> Last I checked IPFS will not tolerate minute long latencies and requires a bandwidth above several kilobits per second which would immediately disqualify it for anything farther than the moon.
>
>And I'm not sure it would work on the moon since that is a 2 second latency and I had issues with it when I used it on a mobile phone network with 800ms latency.

Fair points :) We'll be addressing this in the coming months with increased work on the network stack (libp2p).
this is very very old news of 2015
I've also found the BabelJS "Learn ES2015" page valuable as a cheat sheet and usually have it open while working with ES2015+: https://babeljs.io/learn-es2015/
At first I was surprised they didn't use the emergency slides, but I suppose once the aircraft is on the ground and there's no evidence of a fire or similar, it's safe so there's no immediate need to deplane the passengers.
The video is indeed... not so great. I would go as far as to say that this might be the Kickstarter campaign with the crappiest video that ever succeeded.

But at some point I just had to launch instead of continuing to hope I would eventually get around to launching the perfect campaign. I did however make an effort to give non-Emacs a better glimpse into how Magit works using a few articles listed at [1]. You might also want to check out some of the screencasts that were created by users [2].

[1] https://emacsair.me/2017/09/01/campaign-articles/#start

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rzQEIRRJ2T0 https://magit.vc/screencasts
And that article points to this follow-up article:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/energy-environment/wp/20...
I suspect any non-trivial reversible computer will be a quantum computer. Quantum gates can perform almost any reversible operation and losing information (by not being reversible) might be physically equivalent to decoherence.
I live near Heathrow, and I usually see 4-6 A380s flying over about lunchtime every day (heading to Asia, I guess). They're pretty spectacular, they almost look too slow/large to fly.
No republican is going to add a few million safely Democratic votes to Florida. Unfortunately that’s the kind of world we live in.
This is the correct answer. If you don't overwrite a bit, but instead move the old value to an auxiliary bit known to be zero, that can be theoretically done for free.
How to Burn Fat Fast? Metabolism
The issue is that the Atlantic currents may be shutting down. If that happens, Western Europe will become drastically colder.

The article doesn’t make this point very coherently.
.com isn't an American domain.
This sentence is eye-opening:

> No wonder we pay more for health care and get poorer outcomes than any other industrialized nation.

Ok, we figured out that healthcare works better in other countries. So what could we do? Maybe look how other countries are doing it and try to do something alike? But that would be too easy, right? So better ask some billionaire to fix it for us.