skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
There aren't any decentralised SQL engines really. There are distributed databases that provide SQL-like abilities, like Spanner, but they're optimised for huge scale and not low trust. They're still expected to be run by a single organisation, not a p2p network of many organisations.

I am the lead engineer on Corda, which is an open source 'enterprise' (i.e. institutional/industrial) blockchain-inspired platform. But if you don't like the B word you can think of it as a decentralised database that can be queried using SQL. The intro to the technical white paper describes some of the issues with "just run a public SQL database" approach:

https://www.corda.net/content/corda-technical-whitepaper.pdf

Why not just use a shared relational database? This would certainly solve a lot of problems using only existing technology, but it would also raise more questions than answers:

• Who would run this database? Where would we find a sufficient supply of angels to own it?

• In which countries would it be hosted? What would stop that country abusing the mountain of sensitive information it would have?

• What if it were hacked?

• Can you actually scale a relational database to fit the entire financial system?

• What happens if the Financial System™ needs to go down for maintenance?

• What kind of nightmarish IT bureaucracy would guard changes to the database schemas?

• How would you manage access control?

So, it's ultimately a system that tries to address these questions and many others too. If you can solve these issues then you can suddenly actually propose an entire market putting all data into a single database engine, and at that point things can get a lot more robust and efficient. But it just wouldn't be politically possible on any sort of scale to do that with Postgres.
One of them should mean "that thing when someone likes the look of foreign characters and gets a tattoo or buys a shirt or something, without finding out what it means".
Ouch. Too true.
> O(1)

Primary key fetching will always be O(log n) due to how indexes are implemented. Access time complexity will never be independent of the item count in your data store, relational or not.

> PostgreSQL's JSON type is not relational.

It is. In Postgres, you can join nested JSON structures' keys with normal, relational tables: https://dba.stackexchange.com/questions/83932/postgresql-joi...

My point is: Postgres offers you a document store and gives you the option to join, if you feel like it.
See also "The Markable Mark": http://www.markability.net/

It's an introduction to logic using George Spencer-Brown's Laws of Form notation.
Theory of the All-or-Nothing Marriage
They tried. From the closing paragraphs of the article:

"A group of Burger King restaurants tried to get a class act lawsuit together, so did a group of unhappy McDonald’s customers in Canada."
The difference is that inheriting huge amounts of money leads to a group of people that have power from their money (if they have a lot), but they aren't invested or aligned with society getting better. They are against the success of regular people., who can believe that their success is aligned with using their power to change society to their own benefit. This doesn't always happen of course, but these rich people can believe irrational things, they can screw up society.

You can be this way even if self made, but I think if you were self made the things that worked for you on the way up help you be connected to the real world.
It is now 8 years later, and yet the organization has not been convicted of any crimes. Time already did tell who was right and who was wrong.

But even IF they are convicted of a crime sometime in the future, this is 8 years later.

Censoring financial transactions should require a court order. Signed by a judge, and done through the normal criminal justice system. And it should be done publicly, so that judges and politicians are held accountable for their actions.

In America, due process is a constitutional right, and if someone is guilty of a crime, there is a process that we should be going through.

Punishment should not be inflicted upon others outside the court system via secret agreements and collusion between oligopolies.

We have laws and human rights for a reason. Don't be so quick to throw them away.
The only thing I worry about is high complexity. If its so complicated, that only a few megacorps can implement it, it should be abolished. That would especially mean to scrap most web standard concepts and replace it with more general concepts.
You listed a bunch of things Apple has done recently or is doing now, and seem to be insistent that Apple's plans for the future are therefore clear. That is... not a convincing line of argument.

Apple's plans are entirely unclear. Things are deprecated or broken without notice. Surprises were tolerable when they were 90% positive. Now, when most of the surprises involve breaking keyboards, removing USB ports, removing the GC runtime entirely, etc., surprises are utterly unacceptable.
If it a side project and the intent is education / experience (for you) first and foremost then have at it.

Selling it before you start building it.... I'm not sure you want the customers reckless enough to buy something sight unseen.

When I worked in networking the customers who bought a bunch of equipment without thinking much were support nightmares as they always deployed the wrong hardware in the wrong place and now it "didn't work".

But if you are going to do this I'd appreciate it if you could hard code some magic words that would get me a job...
Now we know who orchestrated 9/11: it was McDonalds.

Great piece. I somehow missed all this too in the 9/11 aftermath.
But any context where you misspell "año" will suggest Spanish, so the misspelling will evoke anuses.
Why not just milk it until the money train dries up or you are rolling in cash? Just because one or more companies offer the same product doesn't mean you're going to squashed. What will tank your business is losing focus & giving up before you needed to.
an established industry-standard graphics API. Supported on every platform of note.

Sorry, but this mostly wishful thinking. It is only an "industry standard" on Linux-based systems and Android. Also Nintendo Switch has support for OpenGL, but it is not the primary graphics API.

On Windows, the OpenGL driver quality story is not very rosy. A good example is WebGL. On Windows, Chrome and Firefox implement WebGL using a compatibility library (ANGLE) that maps calls to the Direct3D API. Also for QT applications it is recommended to use ANGLE on Windows.
Playstation 4 has its own proprietary graphics API, Xbox uses DirectX.
Right, and they are just one example of unsafe apis moved into the public jdk.

Oracle took a fairly measured approach here, they saw what was used and made public apis that are either clones of the private ones or that better capture common usage.

That it took so long isn't great, but they are certainly going the right way.
That's partly on companies too. The fact that software marches forward has been clearly understood for decades and keeping things updated should be part of IT/Dev responsibilities, not something put off forever.
Kinda confusing TBH. Browsing should be simple, why convolute it with the Productivity App ideas?
Right ... that seems to be the obvious answer so I don't get why nobody is discussing it? Firing should be a structured process, it shouldn't be possible for a manager to fire a subordinate simply because he/she wouldn't sleep with them. Certainly in every case I've fired someone I had to build a written case and collect evidence justifying it.

Is this "I worried I might get fired if I didn't sleep with my boss" thing really a serious concern at most well run companies these days?
Now I've seen 3, and this one looks like one I'll actually revisit!
You need serious talent to accomplish projects at that scale, and most of that talent does not (want to) work for the government.
I think McDonald's could have cared less. They made & continue to make $$$ hand over fist with these promotions. The marketing for sure worked, whether anyone won or not. I used to play these games & I never remember hearing about any real winners. Didn't keep me from the dream of pulling one of those instant winners. People get excited for games of chance and it drives large amounts of traffic into stores.

McDonald's counts those millions good as gone when they start the promotion, but it's worth it since they assuredly get a huge return on the investment. They assumed Simon marketing was doing their job, and we shouldn't be surprised they didn't care to look analyze the integrity of the game. They were selling truckloads of Big Macs & Mcnuggets and that all that really matters to them.

Any-who... great writing, and interesting look into to a "game" I'm sure most of us have a connection to. Pretty amazing it was hijacked by a few people for so long. Really enjoyed this read!
I've also never found the "standard" fingering to be optimal either, and instead go for "closest finger that's available", which is similar but not exactly the same as "proper typing".

Typing that way probably uses more mental energy

I'm not sure about that, because it happens almost unconsciously; I never have to consciously think about where the keys are or what fingers to use, "it just comes naturally".

Until now I've not thought about my "rest position" either, because unless I'm actually typing something, my right hand is probably on the mouse and my left resting elsewhere. But now that you mention it, when I pause in the middle of typing and look down, my fingers are sitting on the key they last hit. If I prepare my hands like they're about to type something, then my fingers are not resting on any particular keys either --- with the exception of f and j, they're resting somewhere between keys. I think it's all "muscle memory"; it's become so ingrained through practice that whereever my hands are they'll automatically find the right key when I start typing...

Related: http://www.onehandkeyboard.org/standard-qwerty-finger-placem...
The quest for near-perfect compression
if(user.name == duxup) {

hires[0] = user;
return;

}

Yes, i've built a number of projects.
Maybe this can teach me something about searching across documents (pdf) and stuff.

Do you think there is space in the market? What are your favourite features of the products? (this questions goes for you and anyone who reads this)
I should mention that when I'm too long on D3, I start to "feel my teeth". Exactly like this blogger:

http://ctheblog.cforyourself.com/2008/12/overdosing-on-vitam...

When I get those teeth sensations, I back off the D3.

That blogger's experience with waking up early in the morning between 5-6 exactly matches mine, also.
In case somebody wants to save themselves a google:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HOTAS

> HOTAS, an acronym of Hands On Throttle-And-Stick, is the name given to the concept of placing buttons and switches on the throttle lever and flight control stick in an aircraft's cockpit, allowing pilots to access vital cockpit functions and fly the aircraft without having to remove their hands from the controls. Application of the concept was pioneered with the Ferranti AIRPASS radar and gunsight control system used by the English Electric Lightning[1][2] and is widely used on all modern fighter aircraft such as the F-16 Fighting Falcon, the A-10A/A-10C and others.

Meaning, in this context, that you have a joystick and throttle with like 17 buttons each hooked up to your computer

https://nerdtechy.com/best-hotas-joystick-reviews
>Harvard says it also considers “tips,” or admissions advantages, for some applicants. The plaintiffs say the college gives tips to five groups: racial and ethnic minorities; legacies, or the children of Harvard or Radcliffe alumni; relatives of a Harvard donor; the children of staff or faculty members; and recruited athletes.

I just don't think you can, at the same time, claim to be for diversity in admissions and allow legacy admissions and preferential treatment for donors.

To the asian issue I wonder if it isn't even a negative treatment, just that other racial minorities get a tip and many whites make it through legacy and donoring. If asians are underrepresented among donors and legacies it would explain the discrepancy pretty well.
The author states:

>"A-Z80 is a conceptual implementation of the venerable Zilog Z80 processor targeted to synthesize and run on a modern FPGA device."

Could someone say what exactly "synthesize" means in this context? Is this loading lookup tables in the FPGA in order to implement the code you wrote in your HDL - Verilog, VHDL, something else?
It's harder to be moral when you know you can do the wrong thing and get away with it.
The grid, in some form or another, should end up as a kind of premium 'backup' for when self-generated and self-stored power isn't available for any of the various situations that may occur. Mainly because "it's already there".

If power generation had evolved differently, and started with self-generation and self-storage, then the grid likely wouldn't have existed in the first place, and other contingencies would have been created.

Since "the grid" is there, I don't think it would make sense to roll it back.

The way you describe "it just starts fires constantly" and "can't afford it" sounds like a problem caused by ultra-capitalism / bad business decisions rather than technical limitations.
Look into the wheel strategy.
Rainbow Farm. Never forget.

http://www.november.org/stayinfo/breaking/Rainbow.html

I have a friend who was there during this terrible incident.
Tom Tryniski digitized nearly 50M pages of newspapers in his living room
> The thing that keeps me up at night is not scalability, it is user adoption beyond the use cases which Bitcoin already successfully fulfills.

This felt like the canary in the coal mine that the anarchist crowd has wholesale ignored for years. Joe and Jane LIKE that the dollar is backed by the full faith and credit of USG. From the POV of the average person, crypto is fairy dust next to a currency endorsed by what is perceived to be the most economically stable nation on the planet.

Joe and Jane don't understand nearly enough about economics or technology to really care about crypto or to ever be capable of using it securely independent of a third-party facilitator like Coinbase. They want cheap, fast transactions with guarantees, insured bank accounts, and a human being they can call for support when something goes wrong. Visa and JPM already give them that. Coinbase is a total reinvention of a system with no marginal benefit. Bitcoin doesn't solve a problem Joe and Jane will ever care about. About the only thing is does solve, at least in the short-term, is their FOMO about living analog in a world beset by runaway digital progress.
Doesn't unity just steal the C# syntax, but actually compiles it on its own? Effectively, it's unrelated to the CLR?

Same for Xamarin?
So I took your advice, and what a weird, yet incredibly funny comedian! I found him offputting at first, but his routine has real depth. Thanks for the tip.
Follow me on reddit, /r/marketgodfathers. I claim to be the best and I can prove it ;)
What is your goal? /r/personalfinance on reddit is really informative.
If you must have a macOS + nVidia GPU, I am running 2x GTX 1080Ti's for ML/DL on a Hackintosh. They work flawlessly and I also enabled the iGPU on i7-8086 coffee lake CPU. So, now my monitors are driven using iGPU and they keep the GTXs free to do other heavy lifting (Octane Rendering, Tensorflow, C4D, etc.)

Hackintosh community is amazing and I have a blazing fast 5Ghz 6-core machine that beats the pants off any Mac barring the ones that cost over $10k.

Let me know if anyone wants my EFI.zip & exact specs.
>But none of the biggest chains right now are nearly as scalable as using something like AWS or Azure or Google Cloud.

I agree, just because we can scale them doesn't mean we will invest the time and energy to do it. Lots of solvable problems in cryptography but very few people working on them.
Regardless of race, giving preferential treatment to relatives of donors seems like pure cronyism. If a small town government does things like that, we roll our eyes and lament backwards rural towns.
It wasn't like a transformer whine, more of like a white/pink noise 'sheeh' sound that would sound once when there was a large amount of video memory updated e.g. full graphic screen clear especially on high res/colour modes.
Yes Big Pharma does add incredible value to the world. That is indisputable, and the drugs we have today are incredible. There are a few big questions, about the net value they provide to civilization, however.

One is where are these immense sums going that they claim to spend on developing the drugs? I can understand that many prototypical drugs don't make it to market, most likely being found to be either unsafe or ineffective by FDA trials and other strictures that are the envy of and model of the rest of the world in terms of providing value to public health. I simply do not trust the accounting that makes up these amounts claimed spent on developing many of these medicines.

Scientists and engineers are not costing these companies millions each, yet its claimed that the current cost of bringing a drug to market is almost $3 billion. There simply must be synergies in drug development that are going unreported. Are development costs going to building research centers that will be used for later drugs? Further, what is being done to reduce the costs of developing these life-saving drugs (without allowing drug risk to rise) and is this even discussed or attempted by Big Pharma?

A second question regarding their net value is how they keep costs high and maximize their take by gaming the patent system in a number of ways to avoid losing sales to generics. AstraZeneca, in 2002 altered the molecule of an existing drug (prilosec) just enough to qualify for a new drug patent (Nexium). Another more recent example was how Allergan transferred their patent rights in Restasis to a New York indian tribe (St. Regis Mohawk) and licensed it back from them , all purely as a ploy. The tribe enjoys sovereign immunity and this will protect it in disputes against generic makers. These are just two simple examples of this type of abuse.

So, I'm less than sympathetic to Big Pharma's plight when the public's growing desperation for affordable medical care leads them to infringe on these patents.
Well said. The fact is that forcing outcomes will never lead to fairness and will instead create misery for all involved.

The best plan is to make the process as fair as possible so that everyone has an opportunity if they want it, then let people do what they desire. It may not "look" like what some people want it to look like, but the whole point is that doesn't matter anyway.
Ask HN: What “dumbphones” are available and viable in the US?
There’s an increasing interest in “dumbphones” these days, but it seems that options for a basic phone are fairly limited in the US market.

If you have switched, what did you switch to? If you’re looking to switch, what are you considering?
Thanks for the writeup and the whitepaper.

I find it hard to follow the distinction between decentralised and distributed, especially since all of the points above would apply to your implementation, as well:

All the decentralised networks rise and fall with enough political pressure, becasue they all have a weak spot - some form of organizational structure that needs to be kept alive by some entity. In your case (from the whitepaper):

> A network map service that publishes information about nodes on the network.

The legal entity that will maintain this service will be faced with enough pressure to shut it down once the state in which this entity happens to operate in implements laws that happen to render some of the content in the database illegal.

If someone provides a solution to this, that would be groundbreaking. Until today, no such thing exists.
Anecdotal: I just went to urgent care last week in SoCal (uninsured) and it was $145 out the door at one of the nicest clinics I’ve ever stepped foot in.

Best of luck to you.
I was a kid at the time when we had a 486 and I was always scared of the turbo button. I had no idea what it did. I remember pressing it once and fooled around for a bit...nothing seemed to be different so I turned it off. I was scared for a little while after that someone might have found out that I pressed the turbo button...

For a long time after though, until we got a new computer, I would try turning it on randomly playing games or doing different things. I remember coming to the conclusion that it didn't do anything and we probably just didn't have whatever the turbo mode was supposed to be for.

I forgot about all that until I read this. It's pretty cool to find out after all these years it actually did do something.
yes, this is exactly what I meant. Thank you!
I've done the all inclusive Mexican resort thing and I've done whirlwind vacations going to multiple cities across the world and spending most of my day walking, exploring, etc.

I've found the former helps me physically and mentally recharge better than the latter, but the latter, while perhaps physically and mentally draining in some ways, is way more stimulating and enriching than the former.

In the end, it depends on what I really need. Now that I know enough about myself,I can make better use of that time. There doesn't need to be one "right" type of vacation, any different strokes for different folks and what not.
I feel you, I've been in a similar place.

My own path to a better place came from realising that I was expecting too much of other people to fit into my ideas of what others could do for me, and becoming better at meeting people half way and becoming as much a giver as a taker.

The fact is that we live in a society and for that society to function, everyone needs to give and receive in roughly equal measures over the long term. If we're too isolated in our own idiosyncratic interests and values, it's possible we're not playing an adequate role in contributing to the wellbeing of those around us.

At least that was the case for me.

The solution for me was to embark on a long-term process of deep self-discovery, emotional healing and ego-balancing, which I've been doing for about 7 years and am continuing to undertake.

Slowly but surely, all aspects of my life are getting better, including both my ability to connect with the more "normal" people I encounter in everyday life, as well as connecting with the more idiosyncratic people on the fringes.

Feel free to contact me (email in profile) if you want to know more.
McDonald's isn't the size it is because it caters to the clueful.
I believe that the idea that the end of some avenue of human ingenuity has been reached, and your implicit statement of differing values between the past and present, are both perennially recurrent throughout history. It's not necessarily a bad thing if today's academics are pursuing things that are not among your interests, and it's more likely than not that the speed of the dissemination of ideas, the recognition of their value, and their broad application has not appreciably changed in recent decades (assuming that it's more meaningful to talk about that in terms of a "March of Progress" than a "Random Walk of Progress"). I would think it most reasonable to assume that the academics are where they have always been, doing the same arcane and incomprehensible things that academics have always done, and that any appearance to the contrary was a fault of my own perspective.
A lot of people are correct about that.
If anything, it would make race a "we better not talk about this" smokescreen of anger and eggshell stepping to act as a moat around the real discussion.
Example Medium.com clone with multiple front ends and back ends