skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I've been thinking and it actually makes a lot of sense for new ways to be created to transfer money and pay for things (though I'm highly skeptical of having it operated by Facebook and of the ad-hoc pump-and-dump-prone and whitewashing-and-tax-avoidance-friendly properties of cryptocurrencies). But when you think about it, it's insane that transferring money is something credit cards and payment processors can regularly charge a fee of 1.5-3.0% on. In order to change some numbers in a couple databases... The marginal cost of this ought to be less than pennies. The only reason they can even partially justify this is because of fraud and credit, and the costs associated with dealing with that. But what if we had a way to transfer money between entities that mandated two factor authentication to prevent fraud, and sidestepped the whole credit thing by only working if you had the money? (or required that you took the loan elsewhere, so the account that actually transfers the money does not have to deal with credit at all). Verify that the person is who they claim to be, and that they have the money needed, then do the transaction - no more, no less. No chargebacks, no credit checks, no fraud checks. Why isn't this a thing?
> It's all the other things they changed around and the subtly added "telemetry" spyware that should get your attention more. ;-)

As if that isn't already discussed to death around here or elsewhere. I see far more disdain for Microsoft than I do any praise at all. And while I'm not particularly happy with Microsoft either, I'm still able to appreciate the good things that they do.
At this point it's looking like the potential to kickstart a professional "activism" career is becoming a fringe benefit at Google. Given that, it's probably best to protest things that will win the attention of mainstream [non-tech] audiences so as to position oneself for the maximum possible upside.
There’s a great movie called Until The End Of The World that centers on this kind of technology. Once the scientists get it to work, they realize that they can record and play back their dreams, and they become addicted to watching them.
> The plan is to build a ledger that no single party (or coalition of parties in a single legal jurisdiction) has the capacity to edit or alter, and to make such alterations so technically challenging that it's beyond the capacity of any single court or legislature to do so.

I'm not seeing why they need a new cryptocurrency for this. If you grow Bitcoin (or any other existing cryptocurrency) to be "too big to fail", it would also have all these properties. Is starting from scratch with zero users easier?
I agree that these companies need competition but how do we achieve that? The article doesn’t really address how we create competition for these companies. Who here is will start a company that competes directly with Google or FB? Who would fund such a company? How would it make money? How can we convince investors that investing in such companies is important and they can make money doing so?
> They do not recommend using Tor as a tunnel/proxy

afaik this is because of leakage problems - which can happen silently (eg tor connection goes down, suddenly all your traffic goes through clearnet)

using whonix (https://www.whonix.org/) mitigates this problem

whonix in qubes is also an option https://www.whonix.org/wiki/Qubes
Personal reporting? Seems reliable...
What can be done when the institutions that must be reigned in are the most powerful?
> Debt funding isn't an absolute prerequisite, just the preferred funding approach.

Right, but I'm not arguing the Oil & Gas industry depends on debt funding. I'm arguing it depends on funding, period. And that funding is obtained through capital markets, generally, which includes equity raises as well. Even in private markets, someone will be performing valuation on the potential project and calculating expected returns, which will drive the decision on whether to extract the oil – and whether it's done today or in the future.

You need funding even to do basic research, so organizing all of that is a key aspect of the process, just as managing these businesses is.

> This exercise provides valuable data

Does it? That seems like an assumption. It attempts to provide valuable data, but some of us are arguing it doesn't. It could be garbage in, garbage out. Bad data is worse than no data.

> would you rather government research dollars go toward academic research into Chemical Engineering, Physics, or Aerospace?

I think this is a pretty limited framework for making such big decisions. I'd prefer deep research into each of these industries with qualitative discussion on which are the most promising ones for the next 25-50 years, an analysis of what other governments are doing, what is best covered by the private sector, what is the best form of government investment, and the expected return on any of these investments. Anything else is just too shortsighted.
German government expands subsidies for electric cars
I don’t mind Windows 10. Like every other new OS Microsoft has put out, they try to cover up all the basic tools with fancy GUI additions and apps.... that I promptly disable and go back to using plain old file explorer and notepad like I have been for decades now.
Got my Pinebook Pro preorder in. Will order a PinePhone when it opens as well. Using both as a way to test the waters of using Linux as my daily "consumer PC" replacement, since the price makes it fairly painless to do so.
Personally, I try to avoid echo chambers by avoiding areas where echo chambers are prevalent and staying quiet in areas I cannot avoid. The trolling of group stupidity isn't worth the hassle.
Does the new logo (wordmark?) remind anyone else of the old Uber logo (maybe the current one? I can't keep up anymore and don't really care). This branding feels somehow more evil.
And they have made hundreds of billions of dollars. Surviving forever is not the only possible goal for a company: if you have a company that makes 100 dollars then it goes bankrupt then that's likely better than a company making steady 1 dollar a year.
What in the world gave you the impression that they were being self-centered or entitled? They literally just said they don't have a car as context for their statement.
SEEKING WORK | Germany, Berlin or Remote

I am a freelance software engineer with 20 years of experience delivering software, specializing in writing platform-independent code in modern C++.

Many of my previous projects dealt with audio often in distributed contexts. I was involved in low-latency audio streaming, recording, processing and playback as well as sharing of audio. I worked with audio on Linux, macOS, iOS and Android.

Programming languages : C++ (11, 14, 17), C, JavaScript, Java (Android)
Libraries & frameworks: STL, Boost C++ Libraries, iOS SDK, Android SDK & NDK, libcurl, libcares, libsamplerate, libsndfile, ALSA, Superpowered SDK
Operating systems: Linux, macOS, iOS, Android

Email: hackphonic (at) gmail.com
What's your argument against social justice?
There are generally 3 kinds of fraud

1. A scammer cheating someone out of their life savings through social engineering

2. A central bank "unjustly" inflating currency and giving the newly printed money to specific industry/people etc

3. A person paying for merchandise with a stolen credit card or refusing payment after services/good is delivered.

Fiat solves 1 and 3 (recovery) does not think 2 is a problem.

Crypto solves 2 and 3. People say it is meant for solving 1.
If the population can't support a few car-based taxis, how is it going to support a more complicated VTOL taxi?
If they had started a business in 2019: then yes, indeed, that likely would have been the outcome. But they didn't, did they? The barriers to entry are much, much higher now; and the vested interests seem more keen on acquiring new ventures before they becomes threatening.
Bitcoin in particular seems to be driven by people who are really obsessed with the idea of having a store of wealth with zero risk (assuming they never make a mistake handling it, or get tricked by swindlers, which I think they're seriously underestimating).

But as you say, inflation is a tool; it motivates investment. Expropriation is a tool; I don't see how eliminating it is appealing at all to the billions of people with no savings at all. They may want to take money from the wealthy at some point.

If there's ever a point where "the masses" really understand bitcoin, and how a few HODLers possess most of it's value, they're not going to want it.
Good chart! It does seem to show that coal+oil is roughly flat the last couple years, though. This is exactly the sort of context that would have been interesting to see in the article. Thanks!
From a practical perspective they don’t have to be perfect or as food as the original, not even close, just good enough. “Good enough” though is also extremely hard to achieve, assuming it’s even possible with this technique.
Have you considered those cities are polluted because that is where all the stuff that gives us such high quality life is manufactured?

Recycling & not littering will do dick all to stop climate change. Peacefully living & having families as though nothing is happening is no longer an option.
I can recommend Misinformation Age: How False Beliefs Spread, by Cailin O'Connor and James Owen Weatherall. O'Connor precisely specializes in applications of formal models, game-theoretic typically, to problems of social epistemology.
Images and videos have always have lied to us since the beginning. Depending on the shot, the perspective, the focus, the stage, and the editing, you can make an image mean many things. Even before deepfakes, we cropped images out of context and cut videos into more coherent narratives. It's just that right now these problems have become highlighted, and people have begun wary of the danger of images.
I disagree that blockchain has almost no good use cases.

All a blockchain is, is a Merkle tree with a third party that ensures there is only one “main line”. That’s the use case.

All the other stuff — such as having all computers in the network watch every transaction — that’s the wasteful part. There are other ways to have a set of third party validators, that is a subset of the network watching a given merkle tree, simply says which branch is correct. SAFE network uses a Kademlia DHT with various mechanisms to ensure the validators have no say in what they watch and they need to “earn” their way into having any say about anything over time.

There are tons of useful properties, some of which are used in Merkle trees like git:

Immutability

Quick verification of tree membership using Merkle branch

Ability to download different parts from different actors (Bittorent)

Consensus and rule enforcement (eg chess game or any other evolving document)

Smart contracts and autonomous code execution

And much much more. The main problem is when people think of blockchain they think of a giant monolithic chain of blocks each of which contains ALL TRANSACTIONS IN THE NETWORK. This is wasteful.

What’s even more wasteful is when you have divisibility of the tokens, leading to an exponential growth of UTXOs and unlimited storage requirements. And each full node needs to verify the entire history of every transaction because then they get intertwined. That’s the ridiculous part.

And proof of work is the most wasteful thing of all. People need to get off of that!
I’m afraid to ask, but is it possible this is more common as a U.S. phenomenon?
no, this is similar to owning a plan for a house, then charging rent (without ever having built the house) to anyone who happens to live in a house that looks a bit similar to the plan.
Not really, Apple could have just supported running 32 bit apps.

Google is pulling similar things in the Play Store. They will pull apps just because they are not 64 bit. They delayed the deadline for a year now, because many developers really don't care.

And as a consumer it really does not matter. Why would a 32 bit app not work 10 years from now?
It's like SpaceX having a successful starhopper launch.
> Yeah, but it's not being deployed at consumer level, nor are the savings being passed on.

It absolutely is, not sure where you're getting your ideas from here.

> Risky, yeah. Like any new technology. But transaction cost is cheaper.

It's not risky because it's new technology, it's risky because you've passed all the risk to the end user and their opsec. The cost per transaction of something like the VISA network is utterly tiny compared to most cryptocurrency transactions, particularly if you factor in the externalities (mining) and it's a pretty small cost to the merchant as well in places where regulation has been put in place (i.e. not the US). To the consumer it's free. See also bank transfers in most advanced economies.

> Just pointing out the obvious.

You're not pointing out anything that's actually true though.
This sounds exactly like the kind of thing that people who have various other religious conversions say. They have this profound ineffable moral "awakening" and then see fit to start integrating it into every aspect of their lives up to and including trying to "awaken" other people. It's very disturbing to see people go through this process in my opinion as it's a stark reminder that even the most intelligent and thoughtful human beings can essentially have their minds hijacked. It makes me wonder if and when I'll have my mind hijacked, or if it already is (people who have been pwned this way surely don't realize it).
I've been hoping to see them take this direction for a while. They've fostered a great environment and built out a robust platform for "drop-in" communities. I also like that it seems like they're trying to scale out and ratchet up the amount of advanced content.
It's not just food safety, it's also food quality. KK wants to maintain the quality of the food and a donut sitting in a hot car for a few hours before a customer gets it will degrade the quality. They don't want potential customers (they could open a store in that area) to associate their product with a warm, soggy donut.
C++ 20: The Core Language
Well, what I'm reading is that coal is still increasing in China in absolute terms, but declining as a percentage of the mix. If oil drops in price in the way the article is suggesting, I would have to think that it would displace a good chunk of that? At the very least, if there's some reason we think it would not, the article should have explained why that is.
A lot of people in my circles are saying that the problem is already solved and carrying on with high-carbon lifestyles without worrying about it a all.
Thats the ultimate destination. But it's also where they will meet the maximum resistance. They have to build momentum with easier victories before the assault on the main gates.

That's how culture changes.

Direct attacks on status quo culture will always fail cause Defenses are already in place to squash them.
T-Rex Run Hacked – Chrome Dinosaur Game
My first install has been Classic Shell (now Open Shell) on every system since Windows 8 rolled out, thanks to their hard work Win 8/10 upgrades changed nothing about how I work. Only change I’ve made was when Win 10 multiple desktops came out I swapped from sysinternals desktops, using AutoHotKey to map them. I setup XFCE the same way so it feels pretty consistent.
For certification purposes the FAA categorizes drone-style aircraft as "powered lift".

https://www.faa.gov/aircraft/air_cert/design_approvals/rotor...
They do by finding a different employer. Vote with your time and attendance. If the employee is that disturbed by their employer's politics why would they continue to work there? This sounds incredibly entitled.
Being highly political seems to be most concentrated in the young. Once you hit your mid 30s and have a few kids you learn to have a little perspective and not get so caught up in it. The ones that stay political are either people trying to make a career out of it, or are consumed with the virtue of their ideology. Both groups are to be looked at with skepticism and avoided.
Factories used to position immigrant workers who spoke different languages beside each other so that they would not congregate and organize.

Not quite the same when you have thousands of highly intelligent people all speaking the same language, in the same building, connected to the world's fastest messaging system.

We will only see more of this, and I am happy for that.
I think you are right with the boundary enforcement. Someone probably owns the rights to sell KK in that area, they just haven't built the stores yet. That person is probably in the ear of their KK rep saying "Don't let this kid ruin my territory."
I sort-of agree, although actually there is a lot of older stuff still made on fabs with huge (transistor) feature sizes and limited (software) feature sets that could be used to build extremely reliable long-term systems.
Like a debit card?
Aircraft manufacturers get a "type certificate" for a given type of aircraft which applies to all of the aircraft of that model that are made. The type certificate is expensive but gets amortized over all the aircraft produced.

Changes (depending on how significant they are) can be covered by a "supplemental type certification" which leverages the underlying type certificate and only has to show that the changes are OK.

Supplemental type certificates are much less expensive and is used to certify different models of a given aircraft (e.g. the 737-800 Max is a STC on a STC on a STC ... all the way back to the original 737 Type Cert[1]).

There are also ongoing maintenance monitoring and updates that go into maintaining an aircraft's "airworthiness certificate". The manufacturer must monitor the fleet of aircraft it produces and produce maintenance instructions over the lifetime of the aircraft, including addressing unexpected fatigue and wear issues.

Ref: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Type_certificate

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ship_of_Theseus
Google raises ‘confidentiality’ alarms about state antitrust probe
Here's an old link I saved related to restoring old movies, one day I'll get around to testing these tricks: https://thebattles.net/video/8mm_restoration.html
This is a fancy way of saying that Apple sells more watches and phones than Microsoft does computers, which is a whole lot less impressive than the disinformation version you wrote above

How is it “disinformation”? Do you think anyone on HN doesn’t understand the statement to mean what I said for it to mean? I said nothing about the computers MS sells (the Surface line). I said Windows PCs in general.

Microsoft sells a lot of Windows licenses to business and consumers but all of the energy from a development and usage standpoint is on the web. I bet most businesses could replace a lot of their computers with Chrome OS boxes and not miss a beat.

Apple sells a >$1000 phone labeled for "Professionals" which comes with 32GB of on board memory.... total. When you upcharge high end customers $150 for a $15 stick of NAND, yeah, people are more touchy about 8GB of system file

It’s not about the “system file”. It’s also about RAM usage. Lowend Surface laptops come with the same amount of storage as iPads but between using x86 chips that are a lot slower and less energy efficient and the boost of Windows, it’s nowhere near the same experience.

No iPhone Pro comes with less than the 64GB of storage. Do you really want to talk about marginal price and marginal cost? A Windows license has no marginal cost.
>Geoff Hinton on Neural Networks.

Brilliant as a researcher, not so brilliant as a teacher.
Zeal of the convert. Good analogy.
I've sampled courses from several and found the quality varying. Each will have one or more super high quality courses, then a swarm of forgettable ones. Which is only to say, don't rule out any particular source but instead consider the subject you are interested in, then do a little research (or sampling) to find the best offering wherever its hosted.
Considering the US has one of the largest greenhouse gas emissions per capita, a lot. You have a lot of power.
IP isn't a tangible asset, so the analogy is unsound.

I think it's improper for someone not using IP or not the original developer of IP to be able to make IP claims. If you didn't develop the tech or aren't using the tech, you shouldn't have any claim over the usage of that tech.

The same goes for "defensive" patent strategies. They're an affront to the spirit of patents.
The priority depends on your usage of vertical space vs horizontal space. Ultrawide is great for spreadsheets, music/video/timeline editing, etc. For coding, ultrawide is nice for splitting your IDE into 3-4 sections, however there is more vertical scrolling vs 4K.
> Let's assume Facebook solves scaling
...
> Move has not been battle-tested yet so I would at
> least let it get finished and deployed before claiming
...
> > Libra’s cryptography engineering is unsound.
...
> Facebook, like many other companies, can pay for audits
> and formal verification of crypto libraries. As Libra
> will not be production-ready for years (it isn't live
> today!), I think we can give Facebook the benefit of
> the doubt on this.

That's a lot of benefit of the doubt! There are situations in which such generosity is warranted, but this is not one of them. "Move fast and break the financial system" is a philosophy we've seen play out before. It's bad.

(I find particularly strange the idea that we should give them the benefit of the doubt because they're a huge rich company.)

> > Libra has no transaction privacy.
...
> This means the same level of anonymity as
> provided by Bitcoin.

Diehls' point regarding privacy is not that pseudonimity is inherently bad. It seemed to be that pseudonymous networks (like Libra or Blockchain) do not satisfy US or EU legal requirements.

> I want to conclude by saying that blockchain and
> cryptocurrency are knee-jerk hated by Hacker News,

Ad-hominem arguments are unhelpful.
Some tried but it didn't went as they expected.
Well, it was kind of the old way of inplementing a subscription based business model: want to stay compatible with the rest of the world? Pay up!
TBH I'd never heard of "a facebook" (that is a thing, right? I think I learned that at some point from stories about Facebook, and your comment implies it) and even trying to search for "what is a facebook" at this point on Google yields nothing other than Facebook. It certainly wasn't a common term in the Pacific Northwest, where I'm from.

Compare that to "what is backcountry" and I think you'll see the difference.
This!

Setting up a yubikey via gpg to be an agent for ssh was such a pain at least 2 years ago.
The majority of classes for Georgia Tech's computer science Masters degree are available online for free on Udacity. I highly recommend the ML and RL courses, as well as the CV course.
I mean, does anyone actually think flying vehicles will ever seriously replace ground transport? Flying will always be more expensive energy-wise than rolling along the ground; it will always have more dangerous failure modes; it will always require larger and more complex machinery, and it will always be more vulnerable to weather. I don't see any of this changing 5, 50 or 500 years in the future.
Let’s not feed the troll.
I have been clamoring for this product for years. If this looks good to you, check out their other offerings. They are extremely compelling. Also, the $1.99 serial console is very nice.
Mulholland Gave LA Water and a Motto to Live By (2013)
Byung-Chul Han's Sinking Cargo Cult of Meaning
Interestingly, backcuntry.com redirects to their website. If they don’t have a trademark on that, they at least exemplify the sentiment.