skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> If the operators are trusted, you can just use a database. It’s much more efficient.

This is true! But databases don't have that magic "blockchain" tech.

David Gerard's book Attack of the 50 Foot Blockchain touches on the ridiculousness of this idea, actually. And, yes, it's ridiculousness, but it's what some people are trying to sell.

So should I take it that you're one of the people who thinks blockchains have little applications outside of currency?
The fact that these programs even exist is a gigantic indictment of our justice system ...
The planet is a dynamic environment subsumes inside another dynamic environment (the solar system) subsumed in another dynamic environment, etc, etc, etc. So yes, it is inevitable.
I certainly didn't mean to foreclose the option entirely, but I'd start my search for a serious relationship somewhere other than the office. Remember that office romances can also cause major workplace strife if they don't end well. In any case, I also provided a brief description of how an office relationship (or any one, for that matter) might be done safely.
> Why don't the have 2x the number of drivers? Because the delivery market is hyper-competitive and stuck in a Nash Equilibrium where if any one delivery company would raise their prices, customers wouldn't favor them.

No, it's because they are not necessary for practically the rest of the year.
My experience - I worked from home for 10 of the 15 years (so far) of my career. My biggest advice for anyone going this route:

- keep active in the industry; keep making contacts; attending meetups/conferences etc ; prioritize networking. Its easy to fall into the work from home and never network/socialize with others in your field. This is critical if you need (it will happen) to change jobs.

- if the job is remote and the company has a central office where some (or all) of your co-workers work from, make an effort to show up frequently so everyone knows you are alive. If you are not seen you risk being forgotten or at least considered forgotten.

- Don't move so far away from industry hubs (or cities) that you are tempted to stop networking. In other words living in BFE can be a very bad thing unless you have already built a good network and/or have very good discipline to do it.

BTW I screwed up on all of the above and now I am paying the price. :( So, don't do what I did ;)

HOWEVER - with all that said. I really wish more companies would encourage WFH at least a few days a week. As a matter of fact it would be great if it was incentivized to push companies to do this. This would have a huge impact on traffic, stress, employee health and still give the opportunity for in person collaboration (which AFAIK is the main reason companies claim to hate it). I think it is insane that this is not even on the table especially in places like the bay area...
Well, if he can market that into the success he has now, then his information is probably pretty valuable!
I've been asking this exact question of blockchain enthusiasts and evangelists for over a year now, and have never received a clear response.

I understand the difference between a distributed ledger and a database, but in all use cases I've heard mentioned as ripe for blockchain derived innovation, not once has a blockchain really been necessary or even an improvement over a traditional database based solution.

To give you an idea of how buzzwordy this all is, my friend works in venture capital and was trying to explain to me how blockchain was going to change the world after he got back from a blockchain conference, saying that it would "revolutionize VR/AR, AI, etc...", technologies that have absolutely nothing to do with one another. I just laughed.
> The idea is something good—keeping low-level, non-violent offenders out of the legal system

by turning a corporation into the legal system.

This is an awful idea.
This seems like a combinatorial problem that would very much be worth solving. I can actually come up with some fun mathematics already to deal with it.
25 years for acceptance are very well aligned with the timeline that Richard P. Gabriel has outlined in "Models of Software Acceptance":

• Technology in the lab (t=0)

• Technology in the first company (t=2–10 years post-lab)

• Technology in the first successful company (t=5–20 years post-lab)

• Technology acceptance (t=10–25 years post-lab)

Source:

https://www.dreamsongs.com/Files/AcceptanceModels.pdf

In these slides, Richard gives several examples that match this model and includes several additional explanations.

For example:

• First window system: Stanford/SRI/Xerox PARC ~1975, MIT ~1976

• First commercial use: Symbolics (1979), LMI (1979), Xerox Star (~1980), Apple Lisa
(~1982), Apple Macintosh (1984)

• First use by a successful company: Microsoft (~1989)

• Technology acceptance: Microsoft (~1995)

Spreadsheets are another example that is given in the slides.
In fact, 25 years for acceptance are quite common in software. Sometimes, it also takes much longer.
Maersk is using blockchain to validate container ownership claims. Revolutionary tech in a world where crime meant the confirmation papers cost more than the container to ship.

Several countries outside the west are moving to do registration of land ownership on blockchain tech because their bureaucratic system is corrupt.

Banks have moved to cryptocurrencies for transfers. Sure it's not the unregulated ones, but it's still block chain.

In government in Scandinavia we're doing various proofs of concepts on blockchain. Because it cuts out the need for a legal "middle man" it has huge potential even in less corrupt parts of the world. Everything from simple paperwork to lock/key systems in elder apartments (don't know the English word sorry) is being tested.

Blockchain is certainly full of scams, but it actually offers tremendous value in enterprise, especially when you do any form of bureaucracy. The thing is though, in this world 10 years is nothing. Just look at RPA, it's a tech from before the internet and it's only now beginning to be applied in real world situations that isn't cheating in a video game.
I just released mine last week.... always nerve-wracking, but probably gets better with each new product release! :)

Just have to get it out there and keep mentioning it!

Part 2: getting people to understand it and see how it can be of value to them.
a tl;dr on what it is might be helpful? I'm afraid I don't quite understand what your product is after looking at the web site.
That's a really careless and thoughtless opinion, and it completely dismisses the complexity of human organizational decision making.
i've never understood those who think work is an appropriate place to seek romantic relationships. There's an old saying, "You don't shit where you eat"
Getting Cygwin set up right takes a little bit of work - it's much easier if you're familiar with configuring a Linux shell and terminal to taste. Out of the box, it's a bit rough; kind of similar to how Emacs is a bit rough.

I am scared of the Windows command line - not because it's scary, but because it's so limited. I feel almost helpless, all my tools are missing, it's just so awful.

In practice, the reason I use Windows is mostly games, but it's rare I fire them up these days - I have to upgrade and/or re-verify my Steam account almost every time I start the client. Outside of that the browser and the terminal are almost all I use, and I can have them just as easily elsewhere.

My point being my experience may not translate to your environment quite as well.

Registry in Cygwin is mounted under /proc/registry:

~$ ls -l /proc/registry/HKEY_CURRENT_USER/Software/Microsoft/Windows
total 0
dr-xr-x--- 72 SYSTEM SYSTEM 0 Dec 16 23:57 CurrentVersion
dr-xr-x--- 2 SYSTEM SYSTEM 0 Dec 13 01:58 DWM
dr-xr-x--- 4 SYSTEM SYSTEM 0 Dec 13 01:48 PrivacySettingsBeforeCreatorsUpdate
dr-xr-x--- 6 SYSTEM SYSTEM 0 Dec 13 01:52 Shell
dr-xr-x--- 4 SYSTEM SYSTEM 0 Dec 13 01:47 TabletPC
dr-xr-x--- 3 SYSTEM SYSTEM 0 Dec 13 01:47 'Windows Error Reporting'
dr-xr----- 3 barrkel None 0 Dec 13 01:58 Winlogon

It's read-only however. Cygwin `regtool` lets you poke values in.
Unsuitable parallels are the bread and butter of hypers and shills.

Just imagine it's 1893 and no one can see how big cars are going to be. Well this gizmo XYZ is just like cars were then! You'll wanna get in on this now! And so this gets internalized and repeated to friends and family regardless of objective merit. Because it sounds "truthy".

The parallels between blockchain and the Internet are similarly contrived. They are different phenomenon and the line "X is like Y thus what happened to X will happen to Y" doesn't have objective merit in this case near as I can tell. (Apologies to the half a dozen or more posters who have probably posted something to this effect on the thread).

The _potential_ uses for blockchain are much more limited than potential uses for the Internet for instance. (And there are a number of other differences).

That being said I have no doubt there are uses for blockchain technology. Making people rich with cryptocurrency for one. And hey, I'm all in favor. Let's just don't get carried away with the parallels.
I suspect it boils down to the international trade part. Which party would have control over the centralized database? Each participating nationality might prefer to not have that database under the control of any of the other nations. In any case, the centralization represents a single point of failure with potentially a fairly large risk.
People complain about the coding tests at interviews. I don't think it's as big of a deal as people say. Treat it like a social skill or any of the myriad other unrelated things you are evaluated for at an interview and spend some time practicing.

I think for a reasonable programmer, yes, you are probably going to have to practice your whiteboard interview.[1] But no, it's not that hard, and it's pretty standardized, so you don't have to practice differently at each company you interview.

I personally think that practicing for the programming test is usually way easier than the social test... and I think the programming test is less biased than the social test.

on the other side of the fence, I think it's a good failsafe. Yes, it will fail many qualified people who don't practice, but it will also fail a lot of people who talk a good game but can't code their way out of a wet paper bag.

Overall, I think it's a great counterbalance to how overvalued confidence is at most interviews.

[1]I personally think that you should use one of the screen share programs designed for this; I like https://codepad.remoteinterview.io/ but anything that reduces the amount of handwriting required is going to vastly reduce your false negative ratio without impacting your false positive ratio (unless you code using whiteboards at your company)
His anecdote is more powerful because of his income. You'd expect someone with low income to have trouble finding housing... that's a problem, but the situation makes sense. When someone struggles to find housing while making multiples of middle income, something is deeply fucked. That says a lot about how bad it is for everyone else.
This is exactly right. This is how many companies operate, and it's why there is so little satisfaction working at most companies.

One can try to become that consultant, or one can try to go off and start their own project/product/company.
Keen IO Acquired by Scaleworks
The hour at the Apple Store is the deal breaker. My time is too valuable for that.
Blockchain may have some legitimate uses in which it's an improvement over a traditional centralized database, but they are very few and niche. It would be silly to say blockchain has no use, but I can't help but laugh at people who talk about it being "the next Internet"
Does this program have upsides?

Saves time and money at the cost of trampling on people's rights is not an upside. Are these people being given lawyers? Are they being told what their rights are? Do they have an accurate understanding of the punishment they face if they tell walmart no?
Unjust or immoral actions can ultimately have on balance positive ends. What you decide to do is a matter of your philosophy, but in most significant cases none of your choices are completely moral.
I did and got help numerous times, more so than most other places I have been. The person I travelled with was also groped by a male shop keeper under the Eiffel Tower while a female staff member watched, but that’s a separate issue.
land claims
The Constitution requires that copyright durations be of a "limited times". At some point, we're going to need to put our collective foot down on this or hope that SCOTUS does.
It would be like a "Virtual" mall. A site with "all" these DTC companies? Wait like does amazon do this already?
The cycle is complete: DEC and IBM are reborn, and the Intel business model is in retreat.
One word: constraints. The problem with actually storing things in a document-oriented manner is that it requires extreme vigilance and no mistakes to actually keep the shape of your documents consistent. Further, it can be extremely costly to discover all the shapes of data you actually have if you initially didn't treat it as important. More often than not, it is useful to use tools that guide you into being disciplined along the way.
Thanks for the clarification, really this article had me confused. I was trying to 'extract' the bits that would bridge the technical side of things to the consulting side, but could not find it. Obviously now I realize he is talking about marketing. Nice read but unfortunately did not help/apply to me much.
There are at least three problems with comments like this on HN: first, name-calling; second, unsubstantiveness; third, using the site for ideological battle, which is off topic here.

Critique is fine, but fulminating isn't. If you want to post here, please do better.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
And the reason for this situation is that frankly, most management really sucks. It's not easy to be a good manager, and I wouldn't claim I would be a good one. (Like most people, I think I would be better than the people I've worked under, but that's irrelevant.)

The best thing is just to quit and move to a hopefully better company. Companies with this mentality seldom change for the better.
> the deal is basically that suspected shoplifters are locked in a room

I find this difficult to believe in the case of places like WalMart and Target with phalanxes of lawyers. Goodwill ... I could believe might not be quite so competent.

Target, for example, won't even let their security people so much as touch someone who is literally walking out of the store with something like a stolen TV. The possibility of getting countersued is so high that it isn't worth it. The simply follow them with a camera to their car and record everything and later turn it over to the authorities if they decide to pursue.

I imagine that with facial recognition, what's going to happen is these people will get blacklisted from the stores and flagged if they try to reappear.
I’m sure UPS will be hiring for holiday shifts next year, you can put it to good use!
Why schools are structured the way they are
If you want to see the most bi-partisan, passionate, and active opposition in the history of California, try taking on Prop 13. This will never get repealed because it's the one thing every politician knows will rally the vast majority of voters, regardless of ideology, and result in an immediate political death sentence.
If you have tell someone they're wrong about there being a controversy, there's a controversy.
That’s ridiculous.
The original title is IMO needlessly inflammatory, but the underlying material is interesting and useful.
Pretty sure that would violate the Equal Protection Clause.
The future is probably an augmented reality store that adapts to your surroundings.
Sure. :-) Not sure why it wouldn't, looks interesting thanks. Unless you thought I had probably heard more than enough about BTC already?! I didn't really know what 'white paper' meant. "White papers may be considered grey literature."[0] Aah.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_paper
It's all a crime (at least in California). It's called 'extortion'.

The program certainly has upsides for the for-profit company running the program and for the for-profit store receiving 'restitution' from participants.

However, please, demonstrate the the people being extorted have an up side in this. If this program were truly about helping these people, it would be run by a non-profit and funded by the stores and/or the police departments rather than by extorting people.
Play Secret Santa online with your friends
There are quite a few ex-Myricom people at Google, including two of the founders. One of which was also CEO: Nan Boden's bio mentions joining Google via acquisition.

https://www.crunchbase.com/person/nan-boden
If you're interested, you should check out Roland's SE-02 https://www.roland.com/global/products/se-02/

Also, here's a nice video on 3-Oscillator synths:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O7RlLZrnugQ
sounds about right. I've been remote for coming up to 10 years. I've had numerous offers for more than double my current salary, and meh I like the 4+ hours a day extra i have free. Thats glorious, but "first world problems" i want to change jobs :(
The internet was based on a foundational protocol built to withstand nuclear attacks and is 50 years old.

Either you understand this perspective or you don't.

We are talking about blockchain not one of the ways it can be realized, bitcoin.

Furthermore, I gave a couple of examples of how the blockchain can be used no one is being scammed with that. In fact it allows for things that have never been possible before because you will not see nation-states work together in any meaningful way to solve these problems.
It's interesting that you were there, but please don't break the site rules here.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
UPS can't have 2x number of drivers during the holidays because they only need 1x drivers for the other 11 months. Simple economics would show that 1/2 the workforce isn't going to sit around for 11 months without pay.

Customers don't care who the shipping provider is, and many companies / websites offer free shipping or a sane default, so really, who delivers what is often obscured from the end-user.
Being under water is a pretty big climate change. To be called ‘climate change’ does the local environment have to change in ways that relate to weather? I’m struggling to find a definition for ‘climate change’ that isn’t hand-wavey, but those I can find all include ‘weather’ in their definition.
I'm not missing the point. You are. Take a person with a 30 IQ. This is a person with severe mental retardation. That person clearly will never learn enough to command a high salary doing software consulting. That's an extreme example. There's a spectrum of ability and talent. Not everyone is capable to learning a given topic. No matter how much time/effort they put into it.

Peoples' personalities are also not always so malleable. My wife is a psychiatrist and she deals regularly with people who simply do not have the choice to change. Forces inside their brain are beyond their conscious control.

The Marine Corps sometimes turns weak individuals into respectable men. And sometimes it pumps out assholes. It doesn't work for everyone. This is obvious.
"controversy"

I replacyed my old Samsung S4 Mini because the flash storage got super slow. It is known, you can test it and because android uses sqlite and there are apparently many small iops, the smart phone starts to become slow and lagy.

Who cares? I cared. Had to replace it because i can't / will not re solder flash chips. Who else cared? NO ONE...

My previous smartphone was also too old for warranty and had an issue with the mainboard. Also enough other people had this issue.

I don't mind when there are better lawys like 3 year warranty for specific specs like battry lifetime, broken pixel and iops but this is not a 'controversy'.
Awk in 20 Minutes
My opinion hinges on how sleazy the conversations are in those rooms. On the surface, it's a cool idea to give shoplifters an option before you involve the police.

You can't ensure that the sell is universally honest, so it's always going to have that risk. Then again, from my understanding it's not as if the police are either, so I guess any public conversation about innovative solutions to deal with common minor crime is good.
I’ll also recommend mentoring startups with inexperienced leaders to grow your network. It’ll introduce you to the other advisors and help you expand your network.

I have personally found that my network is my own personal currency. I can control how valuable it is and how big it gets.

Being a connector of people puts you in a valuable position.
Rate of change &gt; status quo
The article states that overdrawing is one half of the equation, but excessive paving is the other half which prevents the significant rainfall that the city gets from refilling the water table.

California is a much more arid region with dry/wet years. Jakarta is tropical, gets roughly 3x the rainfall as San Francisco and has much more consistent/predictable weather, though with climate change, the storms they're seeing are becoming more intense. I'm not sure you can compare the two because California is legitimately a situation of using more water each year than we get in rainfall. In Jakarta, is likely funneling rainfall into the ocean and then draining the aquifers. And while both situations are cases of taking out more water than is being put in, the root causes are very different.