skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Instead of having to deal with chargebacks (on both your side, and from the business's side), the funds could hypothetically be kept in an escrow all within a smart contract on a blockchain, and only released when delivery is confirmed. The confirmation of delivery could also be tracked via blockchain, say by the delivery person scanning the package on a device at your door which then signs the transaction with your key and that gets put on the blockchain, which then gets verified and funds are released from the escrow.

I do think we're still a ways off before the blockchain actually gets mass adoption in terms of real world usage (instead of it being a speculative, get rich quick scheme that it is now to a lot of people)
Correct me if I'm wrong or missing something here, but it sounds like you're suggesting we use the blockchain, not because it has any advantage, but because the current systems are using old tech?

Wouldn't the real solution here be to push for the tech currently used by centralised banks to be updated so transactions can happen almost instantaneously? This would also come with the advantage of preserving the protection from hackers and fraudsters that centralised banks currently offer their customers.
> other than than trying to strangle trade on the theory that those scheming foreigners are going to take all of our money away.

Wait, you don't think China has been doing this too?

---

The US has had decentralized economic booms in the past; even China's current one is based around several cities and regions, and China continues to build outwards, not simply make Beijing and Shanghai ever denser inside the same radius. They do it at a higher density than we do in the US, sure, but other than that the strategy doesn't seem completely unfathomable - I think the Chinese-style answer to the Bay Area is less likely to be "make SF denser" and more "move a bunch of development to the East Bay or Dublin or something and make new companies start up over there."

Expanding on what I said in a separate comment (sigh, I was headed to bed, maybe after this one), we are currently in the US letting many of our cities die while putting a ton of eggs into NYC/SF/etc baskets. I don't think further density in just a few places is going to fix anything price-wise or have any superior outcomes than reducing those bottlenecks would.
When you move your eyes downward, the world seems to move up. Do you therefore call that "looking up"?
That comes down to risk analysis there. These businesses should probably be running their own mail infrastructure and doing exfiltration scanning of all outbound messages (which needs them to be in the clear at that point, or at least decryptable by the gateway box).

Those sorts of businesses also benefit massively from being able to scan incoming messages for spear phishing and viruses BEFORE they get delivered to the end-user device, something which isn't possible if the business firewall can't introspect the messages which are coming through.

I think you're actually making my confidentiality absolutist point for me here. Businesses benefit from being able to analyse mail flow across all their employees and spam/virus/fraud scan incoming messages.
Personally when I hear blockchain I think payments. If we can bypass the banks and the credit card companies and create a payments system that is based on the power of the internet with blockchain as the intermediary, then we have something extremely powerful.

We have to remember that the banks and the credit card companies will prevent this from happening with all their resources...
Interesting that he mentions the Model T - wonder how the prices compares with a Model 3 when adjusted for inflation?

Edit: 1913 Model T runabout was $525 (taking the listed price 10 years after Ford’s inception as Tesla is now a similar age).

Adjusted for inflation that is now approx $13,840 according to https://data.bls.gov/cgi-bin/cpicalc.pl

So at least 3 x cheaper than the $35,000-55,000 price of a Model 3.

(Disclaimer: calculated from bed during 4am insomnia)
there is no legitimate reason the us should be praying at least an order of magnitude more for the same treatments
It tackles a very specific problem, which is trust in the accuracy and of a ledger without third party interference or censorship. It's not meant to tackle problems outside of that. Expecting fulfillment to be handled by the blockchain is not much different from expecting the shipped product quality to be handled by the blockchain.
So basically--gem bundler beware?
blind plutocratic capitalism has failed, not democracy
Ray Peat is most definitely not a quack. How did you come to that conclusion?
Not compared to JS, I was thinking along the lines of Scheme or C.
SMTP belongs in the trash, sure.

Whatever happened to the Dark Mail Alliance working on replacing it?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_Mail_Alliance
> While we're on this subject, wide spacing between sentence-ending periods and the next sentence is the Right Way (tm).

This convention started with typewriters, and typesetters (e.g. my parents) will tell you that it is only considered correct in monospace fonts. This is also why HTML takes the liberty of reducing whitespace down to a single space character unless you go out of your way to use an &nbsp;.
seems Khan Academy agrees with you, and has for some time (~ five years, perhaps more)
The automated clearing house system, our current means of settling payments, is pretty secure. The bigger threats are someone getting ahold of your credit card or checking account info, which is the same threat level whenever you want to convert your Coinbase balance back into your local currency (or someone getting ahold of your public key).

The blockchain, rather, represents a better clearinghouse merely by being a decentralized platform to account for payments rather than a centralized one.

OP says this prevents accounting fraud. Not one iota.
In practice it seems mostly just good for cryptocurrencies and equity like cryptos and for exchanging those outside government control. But that in itself could be a big deal - the financial, forex, stock and bond markets and money exchanges are a big part of the global economy and if those move to crypto that's a big change.

Outside government control is a mixed blessing - less bureaucratic but more prone to tax evasion, drug dealing and investment scams.
> We do have a lot of relatively unskilled jobs that claim to require 4 year degrees, though.

This comes from misalignment of specialization. We have too many English majors and not enough physicians and engineers, and the English majors can't all find skilled employment.

That allows the unskilled employers to require a college degree, because the unemployed English majors will take an unskilled job over nothing, so the availability of degree-holding job seekers allows employers to use a degree as a filter to include only people who have demonstrated the ability to follow instructions and stick with something for multiple years.

But that doesn't mean we have too much education, it means we need to educate more people in things that are in higher demand rather than lower demand so they don't end up doing unskilled labor (and depriving actually-unskilled people of that work).

So we could do with fewer low-demand graduates, but we want all of them and more to instead become high-demand graduates, which means the cost still matters.
Bit too big brother for me... and very short sighted. Diversity in both genetics and environment have been essential to survival and evolution. Haven't we already proven that monoculture is a bad thing in the long term? I'm reminded of the bananas from the 60s...

We're not nearly competent enough yet to play god at this level. It's scary knowing there are egos chomping at the bit to do it.
Paper Scraps Recovered from Blackbeard's Cannon Reveal What Pirates Were Reading
Multiple hyphens are awful — learn to use your compose key!
Looks like Switched on Bach is available on Spotify, but not under Carlos’ name: https://open.spotify.com/album/3eybj65D63xdjPEho8N7s4
Teaching what, exactly?

I don’t see why anyone would need a specific “teaching language,” in the first place.

You don’t teach a language, you teach concepts. You teach about variables and call-stacks, function calls, how the hardware works, computational complexity, and common algorithms that are used.

In any application you’ll likely be using multiple languages and throughout a career you’ll be using many languages or you’ll be unemployed frequently.

I don’t have particularly positive feelings about Python as a language, in fact there’s a lot about it that I think sucks. But I feel the same way about Javascript and Lisp and C.

Which doesn’t take anything away from any of them. But it does highlight to me a deficiency in programming education if someone strongly believes that we should put off exposing students to new languages.

The syntaxes and libraries can be slightly different but the concepts are all very closely related. So I think it’s a huge problem that we allow people to have these complexes where they say “I’m a C programmer,” or “I only know Java.” Not that I’m against specialization but I think it causes some artificial intransigence that’s undesirable at any level and hard to break otherwise successful individual contributors of.
It seems like it's not all states though. Funny enough the ones that are behind are also the ones that don't seem to want any welfare.
I think the problem is there’s no good way of adding out of network data to the blockchain. Instead of not sending the package, they could just send me a package of rocks and the delivery guy is none the wiser.
Question is: how much charactersetting is enough, and how much is too much?

I've been kicking around thoughts on Unicode and various codepoints, and which really ought or ought not be used.

It is decidedly complex. I've got in mind a simplified coding, though, for common interchange formats. Effectively a glyphic pidgen. Presuming "glyphic" is a word.

(1913 Webster says it is. Hurrah!)
It's not Hacker News eating the space; it's actually how the browser renders text. That said, I agree. What I type into the computer is not typesetting commands; it's input to the renderer, whose job is to understand what I'm telling it and lay it out appropriately. So, putting one space after a period indicates an abbreviation rather than the end of a sentence; the renderer may or may not choose to lay these out differently, but at least it has the option.
Hopefully, this would be it. But rather than damages, the courts would rule that access to one's own device is protected by a fundamental right.
This is from a year ago. (March of 2017)
During the Great Depression though, life expectancy rose - especially during the dust bowl.
> Is there a way to measure “Life expectancy of people most similar to you”?

Wow.. whenever someone asks me why the US doesn't have humane social services and still regards drug addiction as a crime in need of punishment, I'll point them to this comment.
I agree you make great points- Thank you for writing up these posts!
Yes, OP seems to think the blockchain somehow solves the (extremely subjective) issue of valuation, as opposed to simply "did this transaction occur between counterparties?
NASA's $1B Jupiter probe takes mind-bending new photos of the gas giant
Given an equivalence between (all the values of) two types, you can assume the types are equal, i.e. substitute one for the other in any value, no matter how complex (including functions on values/types etc.).

The value/function conversion is called a "transport" and it actually depends on which equality you've chosen (called "paths" in HoTT).

E.g. bool <-> bit can map false => 0, true => 1 or false => 1, true => 0.

So `(a: bool, b: bool) => a && b` can be "transported" to `(a: bit, b: bit) => a & b` or to `(a: bit, b: bit) => !(!a & !b)` (which is `a | b`).

Of course, bit tricks aren't that useful, but two types which are defined differently (e.g. from different libraries, or different versions of the same library), yet contain the same information, would be interchangeable given a "path" (in the case of the Univalence Axiom, a proof of equivalence).

The other important addition in HoTT is defining non-trivial "paths" (equalities) between values of a type when you define the type - this is used in the HoTT book to describe integer, rational and real numbers, in a way reminiscent of quotient sets.
Doing that is harder than usual, because the time before rollback is very limited, reducing the amount of cache lines you can pull into the cache and you can measure a given cache line only once.

The attack is already pretty damn slow (1kB/s) in C, if you have to collect a statistically significant sample in JS it might well slow down enough to not really work properly.
Interesting approach, and I've seen similar.

Don't you have to figure out the overall proportion of affordable housing to regular housing?
Someone who qualifies for an affordable housing program wouldn't come close to affording your market-priced home, and in practice, creating even 2,000 such units over 15 years is a campaign-centerpiece, career-making accomplishment. To contribute to demand, you have to be able to make a realistic bid. I make well over area median income and I couldn't come close to that. You really think someone at 50% of AMI could?

The position, "I'm not a NIMBY, I just don't like greedy developers getting whatever they want. I would support this project if it were affordable housing" is a common tactic for people who are ostensibly liberal to appear less craven about their home values then they actually are.

Issuing building permits to 100% of the tiny drip of funded affordable housing projects won't change a thing, and they know it.
To further explain, I know it can sound confusing just saying we've done away with all trust, when in fact we're just replacing it with something different.

Blockchains allow parties to achieve consensus without trusting any other member. The innovation being that any social system that relies on trust brings with it the problems and implications of the trusted. Common examples include being more costly (overhead/greed), socially exclusionary / corrupt in some circumstances (eg banning protesters). It also facilitates new innovations such as cryptocurrency.

In public blockchains, trust is instead put into the security of the network in terms of its proof-of-work, its developers who maintain the software, the community at large (especially in the case of forks) and so on...

Not mentioned often however is why corporations also are loving the idea of private blockchains (IBM Hyperledger, R3, etc). Private blockchains involve trusting only a couple participants to join the network. A set of banks can define a mutual settlement protocol in a standard smart contract for example - in using a blockchain, they mitigate the risk of other banks affecting their system.

A better example of where a private blockchain would do wonders is in BGP routing. You hear almost every year of a news story where an Indian ISP accidentally broadcasts they forward for Google's IP subnet, and subsequently disrupts all of India's Google access until they manually fix it. A private blockchain among BGP hosts would vastly improve these situations if everyone could agree on which routes they were routing, and globally optimise in the case of failure.

I think the key to achieving anything with the blockchain approach is to not try replace something with a blockchain (ie Facebook) for the sake of removing trust, but pinpointing specific pains that derive from having to trust other parties and then focussing there.
people most similar to you likely includes many drug addicts
Both, and yes I quite disagree with you in some fundamental way. They have a specific niche while being severely over hyped.
Ah, okay, got it. Yes, that can be surprising.
The parasite merely changes. The hodler with 10k btc gets to live it large at everyone's expense if btc becomes main street. Sure they were smart ... but they were lucky and now their place in the crypto aristocracy is made and this will be passed to their kids etc. And we are back to the old money situation. Proof of stake seals the deal. Forks and airdrops is the foam on top.
I don't know JS, but this sounds like a lot more work than just checking everything into your repo?
https://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~sd601/thesis.pdf might provide useful background reading for those who aren’t familiar with type theories.
Js quite limited for teaching, no concurrency for instance
Interesting. I was going off my experience in Victoria, combined with quick searching for Perth which showed about the same rates, then subtracting the appropriate N% for paying on time (a pricing model that I wish was illegal—expressing it as penalties for overdue payments would make life much easier) which generally gets it down to 20–25¢/kWh. 13¢/kWh is much lower than I’ve ever seen in Australia, not that I’ve looked all over the country.
Yes, it's sad what people do out of fear. But excusing and ignoring unpleasant behavior as a "knee-jerk reaction" or "overreaction," and complaining about someone criticizing it, has many, many dangers of its own.
> Has democracy failed?

An outsider was elected even though he was running against establishment candidates with huge money backing them.

I say democracy won.
Driving a personal car is personally desirable (convenience) even if it is bad for society. The same thing could be said about many housing choices (e.g. single detached home).
Can someone explain that to me. When the observer is in the train, he sees the right tower future? Or maybe another way of saying it, the left and right tower time are not the same? Or yet another way of saying it would be, two points of an observed moving object are not at the same position AND not at the same time? Two points of a moving object got different delta positions and delta times?
Scaling Without Imploding
Please spend sometime reading up on Enron before saying this. As it has been pointed out Enron's book was clean. The problem was mainly due to "Revenue Recognition" [1] and valuations. It basically describes when a revenue can be added on to the books. Enron booked it's revenue as soon as deal was booked. So, if they got 100 million deal for next 5 years, they should be booking 20 million each year. What they were doing was to show 100 million as revenue for this year. This is not a single entry as many people believed rather a series of credit and debits which always balanced.

The amazing thing is blockchain, specially things like Monero or Zercoin, makes it even more difficult to spot this as Enron would have been able to open accounts as they wanted.

I am writing a piece on blockchain transactions and I still don't understand how this triple account thing applies.

Let me explain how double accounting works - You and I have 100 in Bank A. The Bank A notes:

Bank's Liability to:
You - 100

Me - 100

Total - 200

Asset for:

You - 100

Me - 100

Total - 200

When I pay you 50 out of it, the book shifts:

Bank's Liability to :

You - 150

Me - 50

Total - 200

Asset for:

You - 150

Me - 50

Total - 200

Both side in balance.

Now this book is obviously internal. Can you use this same example and explain how triple accounting works in blockchain?

[1]: https://www.investopedia.com/terms/r/revenuerecognition.asp
How to Figure Out What Your Side Hustle Should Be
Bingo on the semantic content.

That's a point that seems utterly lost on most today.

When I type, it's ASCII in vim.

When I typeset, it's \LaTeX (or more often these days, Markdown). Which takes care of the fucking fiddly bits for me.
Getting to Know the JavaScript Internationalization API
I noticed few others seemed to favor it as much, but never wondered why. My friend hates the em dash, and I suppose I partly agree. She said she dislikes when people use it as commas – but parenthesis are fine – which is pretty fair.
I thought Magic Leap had already waived the white flag and decided to become yet another goggle vendor.
I certainly don't like the US having higher prices than elsewhere in the world, but what I would like to see more discussion of there is "where does the funding for the development of the treatments come from" rather than just comparison of absolute cost. I suspect we're subsidizing (especially at the top of the market) a lot of research that the rest of the world is also benefiting from. This isn't necessarily the worst thing in the world, but I would like to see the numbers and, if it is the case, find out why the burden isn't shared more equally?

I worry, a bit, that this is an area where other wealthy countries act in somewhat bad faith through their health services, to keep their own costs down while knowing that a corporation will make the deal since it's still greater total income and profit than not selling for full cost overseas.

I fear a race to the bottom where new treatments are impractical to pursue much more than I fear a stratified market where new treatments are only available to the rich at first. Look at how totally we've managed to fuck up the incentives for academic research -- I want to tread lightly, in these areas.
Practicing prioritisation. Applying 80/20 until it hurts.
Maybe this is just openjdk8 but my API is ~5 times slower when run with `-Xdebug -agentlib:jdwp=transport=dt_socket,address=9999,server=y,suspend=y`
Flexibility and performance are the two driving forces behind the amount of template you need to get something on-screen. All the GPU API designs have gone the same direction. WebGL actually takes less template code than, say, Vulkan or Direct3d.

Back when less template code was needed, we had fixed function pipelines that couldn't run shader code, and we were bound by all kinds of assumptions & limits. The APIs basically assumed you were doing perspective projection of textured triangles with Phong shading using point lights, for example. The APIs these days assume far less about what you want to do, and allow far more customization, at the expense of more setup function calls.

That said, getting started really is a total nightmare, and there's lots of room for acknowledging that most people only have one of several basic pipelines. There's no reason we couldn't have some easy default setups in addition to all the flexibility. API designers would probably argue that templates are not in their purview, but it sure would be nice if GPU interfaces took a step or two in the ease of use direction.
[CITATION NEEDED] as they say. Email providers are doing things like that - TLS encryption between systems is a legit improvement with no significant downsides. And there's work on improving that:

https://tools.ietf.org/wg/uta/

(SMTP-STS, SMTP-REQUIRETLS, etc)

And nobody's objecting to that. People are objecting to the idea of changing email to be a dumb blob payload transport for encrypted blobs, because:

(a) you can't do perfect forward security with email because of store and forward

(b) there are plenty of better protocols for immediate blob delivery, where PFS is possible - like Signal. So for pure encrypted transfer, Signal is a better choice than email.

(c) confidentiality absolutism is not the best security tradeoff for most users. The vast majority people likely to forget their password and need to get into their email at some point.
The Ken Onion “speedsafe” knives from Kershaw are pretty nice.
I was responding to a comment proposing that the blockchain allows for trust, including in cases where credit card numbers would be currently exchanged. Based on the subsequent commentary, it seems blockchain based currency (Not all blockchain uses) currently provide me, as a consumer, less protection from fraud but more freedom to transact (Censorship and interference resistance, as you mentioned).

The above distinction, I believe, is important - I’m not objectively better off using one or the other, it depends completely on which scenario I’m more worried about.