skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
One other thing regarding Elon:

He made his fortune as many of us will. Unlike so many in posession of very significant wealth, Elon walks the talk.

"Trickle down"

In a very basic sense, we have changed the rules of the game to be a lot, and some would argue, too much more favorable to accumulating significant wealth, capital. Those arguing against this, and a more equitable arrangement have an increasingly strong case given increasing inequality and the ugly metrics of struggle associated with said inequality.

I am not here to judge. I am one of the ones who argues against our current state of affairs, but Elon always gives me much food for thought.

Again, he is walking the talk. That wealth is seriously enabling to Elon and he consistently puts it all to work. He does this at very considerable risk and personal cost. (Some argue Elon is happy, and I get it. I think he is too, but he does work very hard and does not have to.)

Elon is modeling a lot of what was intended. And his antics are a joy to see. He has kicked off big visions and is seeing success. Yet, and despite the demands all that require of him, he continues to be playful, and willing to act as we see here.

Those laptops are not a solution. They are enabling, a resource, and most importantly, a useful thing Elon can do.

Why is he not joined by others? That is how we are supposed to see all this work?

Yes, I know there are many efforts out there, but the guy seems to stand out in just doing without requiring so much in return.

What he did here was just help. No real strings attached. More of that is possible, and needed.

I know Elon has a flair for marketing, getting attention. Great! Seems to me that is his point. He could use real help and so could the people out there.

I am a fan. Consistently fascinated by one human eho seemingly is maxxed out, likely trying to figure out how to do more.

It is beautiful to see sometimes. Not every effort pans out, but a whole lot of them have. Good as it gets, but for more people tossing in.

I would like to think one of those kids in Flint, having lived through the mess, sees differently, maybe has an idea, maybe will follow the lead.

At the very least, this is a positive way to remind us Flint is unfinished. Much painful work remains.
Dormant POW could be as much of a benefit as it is a drawback.

If someone owns 10s of millions of dollars worth of miners that are temporarily turned off, do you think this entity would want an attack to succeed?

No. They'd want to protect their future investment in mining equipment. They might just turn that hashpower back in, if an attack was in progress, and take a temporary loss to fight off a temporary attack.

Even the threat of a big player coming in to prevent an attack would make the risk of attacking way to high.

We saw this happen recently when someone tried to attack the Bitcoin Cash network. Defending miners temporarily turned on their hashpower to stop any attacks. And it worked.
> On the other hand, at what point do we accept that we have different viewpoints and live and let live?

How are Patreon's actions not an example of differing views and "live and let live"?

It's not like Patreon is lobbying to have them exiled from society.

They're simply not doing business with someone whose gimmick alienates a large swath of Patreon's paying, and potential, user base.
I hope they succeed, because they'll just end up isolating themselves to their own little echo chambers, sparing the rest of us from having to hear their drivel.
Although on my parent comment I did not say e-books changed copyright law but assuming good-faith:

Experience of gaming has been great. Experience of watching TV or movies is great. Experience of listening to music is great. Any high-end software on web has been great.

But, e-books? Nope. Let's give them silly pesky files instead. Or let them buy hardware that's off the web. This is understandable because if I were on the lobbying side, I'll want to keep things like this only and send the market to believe and buy physical books instead.

More control = more profit.
Why did you need to create a new account for this comment?
Already happened. The hash rate is falling and the market is flooded with cheap hardware.

You'll hear some handwaving about difficulty adjustments. That doesn't change the fact that it is becoming increasingly unprofitable and miners are already shutting down en masse.
Personification makes sense to me, at least in regards to Patreon. But then you get to Youtube...a stroll through the comment section of any video makes you realize you're in the digital version of Mos Eisley. There is no brand to protect, yet they wave their censorship wand quite often, including just this last week (https://www.businessinsider.com/r-youtube-under-pressure-for...). It seems a lot of these videos weren't violating any Youtube policies, they were deleted "just because."

Regarding Visa being neutral, I think there are cases where this is actually not true: https://www.breitbart.com/tech/2018/08/23/david-horowitz-vis.... Obviously, excuse the source, but I believe the core idea is still fact.

So, censorship is being exercised in areas even where you'd expect neutral carriers. I would call that worrying.
why the lucky stiff (okay, his identity came out later)
Both the TV and FB numbers are potentially misleading.

The FB numbers likely include accidental plays and plays by people who watch a few seconds trying to identify what a video is, then move on. Nobody would say they watched football last night if they flipped past ESPN and left the game on for a few seconds to see who was playing, but if Facebook were showing the game they would count these people as viewers.

A lot of people who don't watch a lot of TV hear the TV numbers and picture someone sitting on the couch watching the screen for four hours a day, when it's more likely people who leave the TV on while doing other things. If you called these people on the phone and said what are you doing, they'd probably say "making dinner" or something similar, not "watching TV."
Yes. And https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chebyshev_distance is more complete.

For those who liked Piers Anthony's Adept series, the Chebyshev distance/L∞ metric is the 'equation' for a square from one of the Game challenges that Stile faced.
Both you and the rebuttal from piaste are correct. "Mme Pierre Curie" was published under her actual name, however lots of women published work under male pseudonyms. Even those who were known by their own names tend to be obscure historical footnotes, not as well remembered as male counterparts.

A few related links:

https://theculturetrip.com/north-america/usa/articles/12-fem...

https://jezebel.com/homme-de-plume-what-i-learned-sending-my...

http://introductionsnecessary.com/2016/06/14/wang-zhenyi/

(Yes, I realize my sources are about mostly writers, not scientists.)
By his logic you shouldn't do that either just replace "your boss" with "your customers."

"don't start a business because if you do then your customers might eventually ask you to do something (that's legal) that you disagree with."

Except his argument is even sillier, because he's actually arguing that "might eventually" is actually "inevitably." That it's just inevitable that DARPA funded cancer research naturally turns into building cruise missiles.
Reducing Healthcare Costs with Data Analytics
>However, it also means the payoff to attack is lower.

"Your money is safe because it's not worth anything anyway."
Even the AMD64 instruction names alone for fabsf, sqrtf, powf, fmodf, will add up to more than a dozen characters. That's before you implement rand and printf. I'm skeptical.
Isn't Discord free model based on selling data to 3rd parties?
What is their business model?
Here is my best guess of the first usage: If I marry this men/woman, how will my kids look like? (approximatively). I wonder if there will be a Tinder app for that.
I worry about the feasibility of such a large federal body. One that doesn't fail (even partially). It would require a lot of learning from citizen and I don't think they're ready. Usually what unite people of that scale is a clearer polarization point (war..).

This crysis might lead to something quite disruptive. Energy, political technology (information)..
The discussion of blockchain tech on HN is puzzling to me.

On the matter of value: I suspect that if we find ourselves able to send a message back in time two years (when BTC was less than $1,000 USD) and report that the price is now over $3,700, that we'll find this message to be met with an understanding that this is, at least, a validation of the use of blockchain tech as a store of value.

I suspect that if we describe the details of the lightning network in this message and report that transactions are radically faster and cheaper for retail-scale use, that we'll hear cheers about blockchain utility as a currency.

If we describe LivePeer and Fluence and the Origin protocol, if we stream talks from this year's DevCon about the incredible Python tooling that is coming of age and the progress on sharding, proof-of-stake, ring signatures, and zero-knowledge proofs, I'm certain that we'll hear nothing but confidence about the ecosystem and the extensibility of blockchain tech.

If I am permitted to send one of my recent talks[0] back with this message about our progress at NuCypher on developing new cryptographic primitives and cryptological narratives to accompany them, I have no doubt whatsoever that we'll receive back both excitement and gratitude, not on account of our work but because everybody in December of 2017 will be so grateful to know that they're about to be alive during a time when organizations like ours actually have the funding and mission to dust off tech that has sat largely stagnant for the preceding 10-15 years and move it substantially forward.

Yet, look at us HN. Instead of these reactions we're sitting here filled with cynicism and darkness. Why? Where have we misplaced our joy at these developments?

I'll tell you what: let's just pretend that somebody from December of 2021 has posted a message here with similar signs of encouragement. Let's imagine that they've told us about Ethereum 2.0 and Monero coming online. That new turnkey technologies include decentralized access management via NuCypher, buttery transcoding via LivePeer, and fast and flexible decentralized queries via Fluence.

Let's hear in our mind's voice about the next cohort of decentralized tech following these, including fully-homomorphic encryption (perhaps via NuFHE), solutions to several of the open oracle problems, and blockchain use in all sorts of gaming scenarios to ensure fairness of loot boxes and other intra-game economics.

Let's celebrate all the adoption they report to us: medical devices that work without the need for trust in insurance companies, communications infrastructure with far greater robustness and in widespread use to thwart spy apparatuses of despotic governments, sharing frameworks to ensure that media is able to spread throughout the world despite attempts at censorship or outdated notions of "intellectual property."

Please, let's let 2019 be a year when optimism and childlike curiosity are not only permitted in these parts but celebrated like they (largely) were just two years ago when the BTC price was less than 30% what it is today.

[0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OuY9WXK61gY
...and the other two problems are not solved by physical books either.
My experience has been that there isn’t a de facto standard outside of /.

Arguing that people must use some standard you’ve adopted is a little like saying people should use tabs instead of spaces.
Instead of “strategic oil reserves” countries will need “strategic Bitcoin miner reserves”.
But he knows the military funds research to efficiently kill people, which he doesn't want any part of. So it's more like saying, "don't get a job at a company if you know they might require you to do morally uncomfortable things."

That sounds reasonable.
1000% if my jokes are exaggeration jokes.
Bloomberg's always Chicken Littling cryptocurrency and backslapping the large investment firms.
Any large miner will be profitable mining long before they have more dormant hashing power to 51% bitcoin.
First of all the word you're looking for is haven (as in a harbor), not heaven.

Secondly, are you saying that bitcoin exists solely for the purpose of money laundering and tax evasion?
There are still fixed costs and opportunity costs. Even if the fixed costs are low enough that bitcoin will always be slightly profitable it still might not be profitable enough for big business to really bother.
See also https://github.com/convoyinc/ts2gql
Nobody's arguing colonial history doesn't have a huge number of mistakes.

But now, at this moment, policy going forward -- if not supporting democracy, democratically elected leaders, and the regular, peaceful transition of power, then what?

It's easy to cast stones, but useless without a better, prescriptive alternative.

Non-intervention on the world's part is why Gaddafi (42 years), Biya (43), Obiang (39), dos Santos (38), Mugabe (37), Museveni (33), etc. have been able (and are still able, in many cases) to rule their countries for decades.

Or, as Obama put it in his interview with Seinfeld in response to a question about how many world leaders are crazy, "A pretty sizable percentage [...] Part of what happens is, these guys, I think the longer they stay in office, the more likely that is to happen."
That is the shenanigan of this summer or so.
Why linux desktop didn't make it, because origins matter
> Or Visa likewise today -- it's understood that other people will use the same plastic to pay for things you morally disapprove of, just as they could use cash. But it's positioned as a neutral carrier, and nobody cares (I think).

Heh, well I hope so. But that recent NYTimes story[0] about how mass shootings used guns and ammo bought with a credit card makes me unsure about that. I'd have thought using cash vs credit was more or less interchangeable, and either the person should be allowed to buy the firearms or not. But given the focus on how it was bought, makes me think there's some movement towards expecting Visa and the like to not be simply neutral facilitators of transactions.

[0] https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/12/24/business/deal...
You mean every project I've ever worked on?
They both thoroughly deserve the bashing they're receiving. In fact, they're getting off easy.
The article avoids the specifics of what Benjamin said, which makes it hard to judge whether Patreon is acting reasonably. The interview in question is here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XQ87Wf-0rZg.

Here are some excerpts from the automatically generated transcript (click the 3 dots, then "Open transcript"):

I just can't be bothered to deal
with people who treat me like this it's
really annoying like I you are acting
like a bunch of niggers just so you know
you you act like white niggers exactly
how you describe black people acting is
the impression I get dealing with y'all

don't expect me to them have a debate
with one of your faggots then why would
I bother bother you read like enough
class I don't know maybe you're just
acting like a nigga me have you
considered that do you think white
people act like this white people are
meant to be polite and respectful to one
another and you guys can't even act like
white people

it's about gaining attention and seems
like kikes are ruining everything

While one can reasonably to debate the whether Patreon should ban people based on ideology and off-site behavior, his comments do seem undeniably racist, anti-Semitic, and anti-homosexual.
97.471% of my jokes are about pedanticy.
When I started took a 101 and 102 Mandarin class. It was the only class I was taking so I gave my whole attention. I studied for several hours each day. I practice my handwriting every day still. YouTube videos of Chinese sitcoms are helpful to watch.

I can read and write well but my speaking has always struggled. I don't hear as well as others and I often can't tell which tone I am using or the other person is using.
How are _pension funds_ scams?
I don't really care about his choice of words, it's the hateful intent behind them that makes his views wrongthink for me. It's possible to use the n-word in a way that makes me think Patreon is overreacting but reading the context he's definitely beyond the pale in a way that goes far past verbiage.
I never said it was bad, only it isn't accurate to use a ~100 question test to do so.

Furthermore, some organizations will tend to only want individuals with a certain "type" in management, which leads to group-think and suboptimal decisions.
Thanks @tzs .. I look forward to reading these!
Wireworld Cellular Automaton Using AssemblyScript/WebAssembly
Typically case-insensitivity is a filesystem feature rather than a pervasive feature -- if some programming language is case-sensitive (most are!) then that's what it has to be regardless of platform/OS. So your comment doesn't quite make sense.

The problem here isn't case-sensitivity anyways. The problem is that many programmers think Y instead of y for years because that's how it is in many contexts. E.g., the C strftime() and strptime() functions use %Y for four-digit year.

I don't think case sensitivity is a mistake. Case is a mistake. But we have it, and we have case-sensitive and case-insensitive things. It is what it is.
> What's your definition of huge?

Quoting myself:

> unless you were huge enough to have your own locations

Those locations are millions, sometimes hundreds of millions of dollars investments with backup power generators large enough to provide power to a comfortably sized village. So, "large enough to a) need and b) able to afford owning such a location just for your own needs", e.g. Google, Amazon. Even companies like large banks have their servers co-hosted in a separate section but in the location owned by a 3rd party co-hosting provider. To own one you either are one of those providers or you are in the "Google tier". For the purposes of the current context, the linked article, one would even need to have multiple such locations all over the world. I think that qualifies as "huge" (the company owning such infrastructure just to run their own servers, co-hosting firms do it for others).
The problem with electron isn't electron -- it's the standards that it's built on. Replacing one flavor of it with another doesn't move the needle significantly.
Java affected in exactly the same way.
What you're describing is a system to develop extremism.
It's way more than half. All those people are still white.
The most remarkable thing about BTC is diffusion of responsibility. If it was issued and marketed by a single entity the participants would be in hot water by now for violating the Securities and Exchange laws. However here we had one non-affiliated group of bigger miners issuing the coins and another group of volunteer enthusiasts hyping them up. Since the second group was not hired by the first, the first group cannot be held accountable, while the second group has agents too numerous and too small to go after.

This is similar to the housing bubble, where the industry collectively hyped up the "investment" promising huge returns, yet no one was to blame when the music stopped.

Watch out for mo ways to diffuse responsibility, that's where "action" will be. Maybe we can nip it in the bud sooner if all keep an eye out.
Visa is extremely censorious, especially of sexual content. It is very odd how they and MasterCard get let off this debate, despite the fact their vague rules are often the reason for such closedowns.

It will be really interesting to see if 2019 brings a change in the outrage that is currently directed at public facing platforms over their content policies to the actual architects of many of those decisions, which are Visa/MC and a handful of advertising brokers.

We can argue about the role of individual platforms, but Visa/MC in particular have a cast iron, long term monopoly with much stronger effects on the public than any national government does. Their editorial policies should be under huge public scrutiny.
Bell Telephone was a peer-to-peer communications infrastructure, not a publishing platform. To the extent that it did provide a medium for publication (the phonebook), they absolutely had standards for what could be published. Were those standards arbitrary? Was the Jewish Defamation League allowed to have their business listed, or advertise?
Welcome to the Walled Garden, We’ve Got Phones and Games
The World´s First Computer Programmer 1840´s
There was a back-and-forth between DHH and some of the original TDD advocates a while ago, which I thought was pretty interesting.

Test-Induced Design Damage: https://dhh.dk//2014/test-induced-design-damage.html

And a resulting conversation between Kent Beck, Martin Fowler, and David Heinemeier Hansson: https://martinfowler.com/articles/is-tdd-dead/

I think a lot can be learned from the exchange.
And just to clarify a bit: the specific restriction Python imposes is that if a strptime() format string contains one of %G (ISO year) or %V (ISO week number), it must also contain the other one, and must contain a day-of-week format code (%A, %a, %u, or %w).

Examples:

'%G/%m' is illegal; it contains %G without %V, and does not contain a weekday format code. Attempting to call strptime() with this format raises ValueError.

'%V/%u' is illegal; it contains a weekday format, but has %V without %G. Raises ValueError.

'%G/%V' is illegal; it contains both %G and %V, but does not contain a weekday format code. Raises ValueError.

'%G/%V/%u' is legal; it contains both %G and %V, and contains a weekday format code.

'%G/%V/%w' is legal; it contains %G and %V and a weekday format code. It's a bad idea, though, because %w numbers days 0-6 starting Sunday, while ISO (%u) numbers them 1-7 starting Monday.

If you need to work with ISO week date formats for some reason, you should stick to one of these two format strings:

'%G-W%V-%u'

or

%GW%V%u

The date of this comment (December 26, 2018) comes out as either '2018-W52-3' or '2018W523' using those format strings.
> Does it matter?

Lying matters. We're not talking about some kind of white lie to make someone feel better either. It's lying to make money, which we should all agree is bad.
I assert that the diffusion of responsibility is a key feature of decentralized technology precisely because it renders us unable to "nip it in the bud".
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christmas_cracker

“Christmas crackers are festive gifts that make a snapping sound when opened.” For example, a Christmas cracker could contain a paper with jokes on it, a paper crown, and a puzzle where you have to disconnect two linked ring-like metal pieces.
> There are tons and tons of much smaller coins, that can be attacked for very cheap, and yet attacks are still very rare.

If they can be attacked cheaply, then by definition there's not much money to gain from doing that.
Komodoplatform creator. Known and respected as jl777. He's made some really great advancements in block chain tech.
Michael Arrington left TechCrunch a long, long time ago.
It's just a matter of time before technology is used to the worst and best of it's capabilities... Someone will always be there to take the money, but I applaud you, sir.