skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Of possible (mostly historical) interest at this point, a similar commentary on a fairly early version of the original Unix kernel, by an Australian cs prof named John Lions -- which was very widely circulated among CS students in the '80s, despite this being technically in violation of AT&T's copyright on the book.

It's availble online here:
http://www.lemis.com/grog/Documentation/Lions/index.php

Note that the code is written in a very archaic dialect of C, and for hardware that didn't support paging in any form (just swapping). Nevertheless, it was an important introduction for a lot of people at the time, not just to the basics of OS implementation details, but also, how to find your way around a nontrivial sized codebase.
Looking for instructors?
You don't "need" to offer these guarantees. Personally, I'm happy with paper ballots.
> SQL, it's so ugly on some inner level I'd much rather start with datalog and build my own up

SQL syntax may be ugly, but for once, it's an example of a widely used technology that is based on a very firm and well thought out theoretical framework.

As a developer, it is definitely worth investing time in understanding relational databases and the theory behind them.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Relational_calculus
I used to feel exactly the same way about Ruby. Since then I have grown to value strict compile-time checks more so I don't really use it, but I still miss it.

I wonder though if you have evaluated Crystal?
Only in a crazy loose sense. Git histories do not have enforced immutability or trustlessness. And they are really merkle trees, which have been around for decades. If blockchains (as described in this manner) are so amazing, why wasn't there hype for merkle trees in 1995?
Show HN: Git via FTP Interface
It's where dad goes to talk to all the other wizards.
Congratulations on the launch!

I am curious if there are other skills/jobs that would be viable to teach in a similar manner (definitely outside the scope of the launch, but I'm curious).
That's a triple negative! (!, Not, Disabled).

Yes, `if (!FeatureEnabled){ ... }` would be clearer.
Gitea has more options and features, but it is more bleeding edge. Unkwon (Gogs author) handles contributions to Gogs very carefully, taking painstakingly attention to the code being submitted. That has resulted on a very stable, and reliable software. You decide. :-)
Blockchains have been overloaded by a bunch of people bringing modern technology to ancient industries as a sort of buzzword. So to an extent you are right the author's definition is narrow, and on the other hand the author is right in that their narrow definition is the correct one.

Blockchains are generally defined by the original paper for bitcoin: https://bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf these would have a couple of key properties. They are trustless, distributed, and public through the use of cryptographic and computational algorithms. Most modern "blockchains" (that aren't currencies of some form) violate one of these properties.

> When I think "blockchain", I basically think of a git branch: history is verifiably immutable and using some external tools like a public rng, one can prove that a block was not created before a certain time.

The system you describe here involves trust. "Public RNG" implies we are talking about some sort of SSL certificate company's time server. Proof of work is stronger than that. It says it's impossible for someone to misrepresent the shared ledger unless they have more computational power than the entire system put together. And it's a fundamental part of how the ledger is structured (it's not external).

> When I think "distributed ledger/distributed consensus" I think of the practice of using basically properties of statistics to get a bunch of nodes to agree on the state of something.

Again proof of work is stronger than this. The nodes agree because the given branch is provably the strongest branch of truth. Distributed consensus is about getting the nodes to work together when you can trust they all want to, not when they are all trying to compete with each other.

> Neither of those things really seem to make sense as the author's definition of "blockchain". What is he referring to?

Because neither of your definitions fit a blockchain. Your definitions fit the broader cases of technology being passed off as "blockchain" in (the best light) an attempt to get these old companies to modernize (in a worse light) and take their money because they are idiots.

Things like distributed version control systems, distrusted consensus systems, and cryptographic ledgers are all useful, but they involve trust. And for a lot of these applications that's fine. A company putting out a cryptographic ledger (e.g. provable) for cosmetic item transactions is an improvement, but it's not a block-chain (it's not distributed or it's not trustless).

I mean the author discusses this: "Be careful! Today, digital signatures are often sold as blockchain. Perhaps a digital signature is all you really need and blockchain does not really suit your requirements." a digital signature system of arbitrary complexity (perhaps with a ledger of issued signatures, or an external time server, or agreement on which signature is the winner) is all most people in this space need.

The only reason one needs a block chain is if they are making a currency.
GitLab has self hosted solutions
That's a more direct way of making my point ;-) I don't recall seeing that Pitman post before... good stuff. Interesting to see that Wolfram always had his <cough> confidence.
You know that the H1B program is actually _not allowed_ to discriminate based on country, and equal numbers of H1Bs are reserved for each country, right?

The fact that some countries have a decades long wait list and others do not is not because different countries are being treated differently. They're all of them being treated the same. The wait lists are a result of more people from some countries wanting H1Bs and fewer people from other countries.

Of course I agree that this state of affairs is not good. It is stupid to me that countries with 1M people get the same number of visas as countries with 1B people. But it's important to understand the proper causes of problems if you want to fix them
>I'm saying: you need the blockchain if and only if you are doing things that are illegal in your country. It's a decision criteria for when you need the blockchain.

This is, at face value, simply false.

I want to send $5 to a poor African family. I'll even relax my criteria - I'm willing to wait _up to 3 business days_ for this African family to receive my $5. I live in California.

Could you please point me towards the non-blockchain way to do this?
Nationalistic flamewar will get you banned here. No more of this, please.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Cheers, I knew about Firefox Sync (I used Weave with Fennec on the N810 back in the days), I knew it syncs addons, but I did not know it syncs addon settings. I'm still unsure how it determines which settings to use.
1. Regarding the fees: $0.46 is (I presume) only the transaction fees. To make an accurate comparison, you'd have to include the exchange fees to convert from USD to BTC and then from BTC to JPY.

Right now Coinbase is charging me $59 to buy 1 BTC, and I don't know how much more it would be to sell exchange that back to JPY.

You can send $4000 (about 1 BTC) to someone in Japan for $30.14 with TransferWise.

And guess what? Last time I had to send money to my family in Europe, that's exactly what I did.

2. Regarding trust:

> don't have to trust anyone in between to get my money to him.

Yes you do. Both your friend and you need to trust your Bitcoin exchange. Which sometimes, cannot be trusted. Remember Mt Gox?
Eh. While I basically agree with this in the context of rule of law, 1st world countries- I'm increasingly coming around to the idea that blockchain-based solutions could be better for developing countries where the legal system is vastly inferior. And I'm a longtime crypto skeptic.

>can't use contracts and the legal system to ensure trust between the parties

I.e. where the majority of the world's population resides, developing countries where (sorry) Corruption Rules Everything Around Me. Or there's an appeals system where cases drag out for decades (hello Brazil!) Or where the judges are simply not sophisticated enough to adjudicate complex financial contracts.

I don't think crypto/blockchain solutions have a ton to offer the developed world, but there's an awful lot of humanity outside of those institutions. 'Our existing financial world is working just fine, thank you' is a very 1st world perspective. Kind of hilariously, a lot off the issues that crypto enthusiasts rail against (inflation, political central banks, etc.) are basically untrue for their own countries, but are true for others. I think a stablecoin pegged to the US dollar that's super-intuitive to use on mobile could achieve hockey stick growth in Latin America, Africa, parts of Asia, etc.
Don't see how this happens. How do you verify the work? It works in a purely electric fashion which is what Bitcoin is but you still need someone to verify things in the real world. Audits exist so that third parties can verify the books. Literally in a blockchain you just put in whatever you want how did you verify that that is what happened in the real world?
I have a weird thing: out of one eye the world seems slightly redder while out of the other the world seems slightly bluer.

I don't think there's any way for me to tell which (if either!) is the more "correct" perception, eh?
For example:

You find a security vulnerability in some applications. You want to make an anonymous disclosure but you want to be able to prove you knew about it at a certain time.

So you create the message "I John Doe has found the vulnerability ..." and add the hash to the blockchain.

You can now definitely prove that you knew about it and had documented it at a certain timestamp before the disclosure.
Building on this. I've been deeply involved (4+ years at each) in three startups. Two where acquired and one is still going profitable. I wore a lot of hats and learned an amazing amount of stuff at all of them. Despite my lucky track record, the main financial benefit I got was being acquired while I was an executive of one startup. My 1% stake was worthless, but the retention cash and RSUs I got from the acquiring company weren't insignificant. Most people got a much smaller amount of cash and RSUs were on par with any other employee of the company.

If you want to learn, grow, and be a big fish in a small pond, go for a startup. It's fun, frenetic, stressful at times, and you can have as big an impact as you want. If you have dreams of $$$, stay at a public company that can shower you with cash and RSUs.
No true scots..erm. No true blockchain expert?
Nationalistic and/or racial flamewar will get you banned here. Please do not post like this to Hacker News again.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
A guy I know believes himself to be an Ethereum millionaire. He's one of those guys that can't help injecting it into every conversation. It is completely insufferable. I. Don't. Give. A. Shit. About. Ethereum.

I don't think blockchain is worth a Tinker's damn and this guy would bellow "smart contracts" all the time without even understanding why his Spring Boot app failed to start up. Good luck with your millions.

I stopped talking to him. Problem solved, problem staying solved.
This is a very old conversation; it's worth noting that dynamic compiled languages (e.g. common lisp) are a thing also. Having a good REPL can change the way you look at it also.

Weak typing and dynamism just don't go well together, but other combinations are fine. Strong dynamic typing can lead to an "exploratory" approach to coding that looks a bit like what the author describes except that you can do it in such a way that your program compiles and runs the whole time you are fleshing it out, which is nice.

I find this sort of exploratory programming to be by far the most productive available in a research/prototyping mode. I do think the model falls down a bit when multiple programmers are involved, and in production. You could argue this is a feature though, as it is strong incentive to not ship the prototype ...
Thanks! We think that we can do this model with most knowledge-based work: data science, business, product, finance, paralegal, etc.
How do I get the concept of "I'm buying stuff and it has to be fit for purpose" into a smart contract?
I don't have any Apple devices.
English needs a construction for referring to an individual that you don't know. They/them is fine. Someone somewhere is going to decide to get up in arms about that, and there's just nothing to be done about it since it will be a demand to know them before you know them (logically impossible), so don't worry about it.
Why Are Air Combat Kills So Rare? (2017)
Impressively small or large? It's tiny compared to most storage products/databases.

I would say that's mostly due to that when it gets down to brass tacks, Redis (ignoring the orchestration in Cluster) really is a fairly simple interpreter with simple memory management (largely delegated to the malloc implementation) that glues together a fair number of nice
data structure/algorithm implementations that have little codependence. That last point is really, really important in it's developer accessibility. (antirez called this modularity elsewhere I think.) It also helps keep code size down.
Pre-Sliced Bread Was Once Banned in the United States (2010)
can someone explain how Y Combinator and many other SV innovation leaders are openly endorsing blockchain but every other day here there are haters posting links about how useless it is?
What's wrong with using a RDS instance running Postgres configured to be append-only and immutable?
It doesn’t solve anything if there isn’t a functioning legal framework either.

You still have to trust the other party will abide by the results of the smart contract.

If there is no legal framework they could just shoot you and have done with it, if they didn’t like the result.

Smart contracts and blockchains are still laws, just laws for people who don’t like some of the existing ones. Numerical rather than societal.

If there’s no rule of law, then blockchain laws can’t exist either.
Yeah, that's the first solution that popped in my mind too. I think it needs just a special case at the beginning to check if the first paren is not a closing one.

EDIT: yep, after reading the comments below I see that I really should have put just a little more thought before dismissing this as too trivial to think about.
What you said doesn't make any sense.
We've enjoyed using Prophet for forecasting in our work with electric utilities. It's pretty fire-and-forget. We wish it had an option for fast retraining of the model when we get new hourly data, though. That's pushing us towards other options in scipy.
Sunyata: all things are empty of intrinsic existence and nature
Haha! Thanks for the feedback!
Fully agree. The same is happening at the social media level. They get much more engagement with this kind of rage.

But any organization that chooses to act ethically is handicapping themselves because of how profitable outrage is for engagement and page views. We can allow them to self-regulate but if they refuse to do so, we should take measures to put organizations acting ethically on the same footing as the unethical actors.
Well, that would depend on whether it's really "absurd" or not; maybe it's effective. You put on glasses, people think you're smart. You wear an expensive watch, people think you're successful -- "nothing succeeds like success", "dress for the job you want", "talk the talk, walk the walk", and so on.
> Then, they need to allow micro-pledges in addition to likes. I would happily buy a pack of 100 pledges for $10 (ie. one pledge = 10c) and tip that towards the videos that I've really liked.

This is the right way to support creators, one that doesn't introduce all the messed up incentives generated by ad-based content monetization.

But it won't work, for the same reason it never has. People associate online content with "free". Getting them to pull out a card is close to impossible. This is doubly so when you consider that it's mostly kids and teens spending hours watching these videos.

Most adults who can pay their way aren't watching toy unboxings or some influencer's 'daily vlog'. Kids and adults alike also are unlikely to adjust to a system where they need to remember to pledge or tip. They are watching tens of videos per day, how would they make that decision?
Thanks, I signed up! As RSS slowly leaks away these curated email lists that have sprung up are providing a valuable service.

As long as it’s an easy unsubscribe I’m happy to receive them.
why isn't docker and k8s banned by security teams? these are clearly broken abstractions that would violate most security audits immediately
The ACL implementation: https://github.com/antirez/redis/blob/unstable/src/acl.c
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_submarine_Kursk_(K-141...

Best decision: don't build it, if it's already built don't launch it, destroy it as soon as possible.
GPL did not handle any patents until version 3. As for version 3, it has a patent grant clause.

Even distributing BSD licensed code by a licensee exhausts patents embodied in it.

(As an interesting case, this might mean patents related to code published as ISO examples voids MP3 patents on specific algorithms used in that code. The question then is if the standard body is a licensee.)
There is a tetrachromatic painter who tries to visualize her experience for us common trichromatic people: https://concettaantico.com/oil-paintings/
Prototype of clinical trials in an untrustworthy environment using blockchain
> That's a triple negative! (!, Not, Disabled).

It's only a double negative (“disabled” is affirmative, though the same sense can be communicated by the single negative “not enabled”.)
Hello! Since GitLab is a single application that covers the entire software development lifecycle, we're a bit "bigger" than Gogs, which only tackles SCM. We have a plan to make GitLab use less resources, including forming a team to specialize in this area, and we're really grateful for your feedback. :)
Well right now Pvt. Crayon is making the decision on whether or not to engage.

In the edge cases Pvt. Crayon is probably going to be better than AI at making the call for a hell of a lot longer than the people pushing the technology claim at any point in time.

The question really becomes how much you care about edge cases.

When there's a car bomb barreling toward your checkpoint being able to just hit the big red "kill everything in this predefined space" button and dive for cover would be a godsend.
blockchain's usually have all of these properties - linked log, digital accounting, proof of work, byzantine fault tolerance/consensus, crypto keys as identity, and sometimes smart contracts.

https://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=3136559
Seems like he didn't change his tone much after his time-off.

https://gizmodo.com/linux-founder-takes-some-time-off-to-lea...
> The real use for chemical weapons is to terrify civilians and poorly organized/equipped militias.

See Vietnam War, Napalm, Agent Orange etc.
Best to have a balance, I think:

For loosely typed dynamic languages, docblocks on interfaces (function/method definitions, interfaces, etc) are a good idea.

For languages that require types in their interfaces, it is helpful for larger units(classes, functions, methods) to have a summary comment.

Inline comments are still very useful for explaining how and why of implementation details.

While I reject the stance that you should never have comments, I also see cases where better names and simpler logic can alleviate the need for more comments.
Facebook has always made it almost impossible to delete anything.If you don't delete your activity on facebook every day,you have a buttload of stuff,including all comments.You can go to activity log and you have hundreds of comments,you can delete them one by one.That can take months because they make it hard to do even that.Who cares what you commented on three years ago ? Much of the activity log can not be deleted at all. My activity log gets deleted every day so I don't have years of crap on there.People have been complaining about this for years,but facebook doesn't care.They just want everything they can get about you to make money off you.
This was roughly my thinking. When I was young, single, and had no responsibilities, I did the startup route and thrived in the stress, excitement, and ability to make a big impact. Now that I'm older and have a kid, a public company with RSUs that I can put a dollar amount on (vs. options), and some measure of stability are important. When I was 24, I could find a couch to crash on while getting back on my feet if the job went south. Now, I'm worrying about college, mortgages, and stability.
It's a discount for the employer but also good for the future employee. As an employer I'd be willing to spend more time on training knowing that I'm getting a discount from market rates, and the employee wins because at the end of the two years, their base pay is higher to calculate raises against or to take to their next employer.
This is one of the most amazing pieces of code I have ever seen
Here in Northern California there’s Carpenter bees that big. I see them all the time...
Maybe you can make the intangible tangible. A good tool for teaching place values when reading numbers could be an abacus. In those that have 10 beads per line, you can use each line as a place value. When one line reaches 10, have the rule that they must be replaced by 1 bead in the next line. When you teach addition, you can group 2 or 3 lines per place value. Write one number using the first line of each place value group, and then the other number using the second line of each place value group. For every ten beads in a place value group, replace it with 1 bead in the next group. When every group has less than 10 beads, you can write the result.

I especially like those 10x10 abacuses that have 5 beads in one color and 5 beads in another color, switching the order after 5 lines. I got this one for my cousin:

https://www.amazon.com/Learning-Resources-10-Row-Rekenrek-Co...

It helps in visualizing a 1 digit number in more digestible pieces to help working with it in one's head.

Another idea is to use money to emphasize the "worth" of each place value. For example, the first place value could represent pennies, the second dimes, and the third dollars, so each is worth 10 of the place/digit on the right. You can say that it's inconvenient to hold a lot of currency tokens. Why carry 100 pennies or 10 dimes when you can carry a dollar? So, making a number is like reducing the amount of coins or cash notes we carry for the same amount of money.

Yet another idea is to simply show him a giant list of numbers and explaining the patterns in the sequence.
My implicit point is that it's like trying to make the distinction between money and currency. There is a difference but since currency is basically the only meaningful use case for money, it doesn't really matter.
Typewriter Repairman Was Told Computers Were King
Stop saying things that make you weak - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IAFO3v_Ucio

Hacker News is generally sceptical toward Peterson and there are good reasons to be but this is very relevant and something that I have experienced myself.
That’s why it needs to be a treaty. There needs to be an understanding that it’s as unacceptable as biological warfare and that the gloves are off once they are used.

No one will use autonomous fire in some backwater proxy war skirmish (which is where superpowers meet) if the response would be the same as it would be to a nuclear first strike.
What are you trading the 1 bitcoin for? Given that the typical use case is to purchase some product or service (rather than just transferring bitcoin for fun), how do you secure that aspect of the transaction?