skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Phones, consoles, Chromebooks and other unrootable hardware, restrictive hardware licensing, arm's business model, abstraction over abstraction, SAAS, corporate cloud infrastructure, web apps over local, streaming over storing, walled gardens, signed binaries, nearly everything about 'modern safe computing' is all about taking control and responsibility away from users and handing it over to somebody else to be paid for and properly managed by them for the users own safety.

This is bullshit. It's for profit and control.

The general purpose computer is hands down the most amazing, equalizing piece of technology humanity has ever created.

It's one of the few things that gives the average person the same abilities as the wealthy or elite. Whoever you are, where ever you are, if you have a general purpose computer and some knowledge, you can do just about anything.

Rather than teach people about this amazing, near magical piece of technology enabling anyone to do amazing things, the whole attitude, at least since i've been around using computers going back fairly far is, 'users can't be trusted with this power and need to be protected from themselves at their own expense by some other benevolent entity'.

Instead of being taught as something that's now just a part of life, the way something like driving is, despite being nearly as, if not more important than, driving is in society these days, general computing is still pushed as this mysterious arcane art the average person needs to be protected from through the use of everything mentioned in my first paragraph by someone who can lock everything up and provide security for them.

How else could they convince people to own three, four, five a dozen of what is essentially the same thing? Just locked down in functionality in different ways.

I lay responsibility on the early generation of tech people that got rich quick in the late 90's early 2000's. They seen the potential computers had to bring, they took advantage early and made money, they got greedy and have done nothing since but try and keep the average person out through whatever means necessary.

Those people are the ones running the tech giants today, pushing locked down hardware, and trying to crush general computing as a thing.

ETA: I changed my original wording from blame to lay responsibility on. My intention wasn't to blame anyone in particular but to bring awareness to the let down by those original people that benefited from the openness of general computing only to be at the forefront of trying to lock it down now.
Always wonder how the jesuits beat the Muslim astronomer in Ming and Qing dynasty always assuming they use the geocentric one. Well unlike the dogmatic Dominican the Jesuit has its friend in the court. “In 1618, the Holy Office recommended that a modified version of Copernicus' De Revolutionibus be allowed for use in calendric calculations, though the original publication remained forbidden until 1758” (wiki) only during a few year has the catholic lost its chief astronomer in the court of emperor. (Sadly the few year gap in between Qing emperor got all the Hans Christian believer slaughtered. The notation of looking at the sky is rejected and 3 of the major crimes is the catholic astronomy dared to propose the unacceptable position of Orion component star not fit with the order of the five elements.)
The best CLI documentation generator I've found so far is Redoc[1].

There are tons of hosted solutions for docs (Apimatic, SwaggerHub, Stoplight, and Apicurio Studio).

My favorites are SwaggerHub[2] and Apicurio[3], because their editors are solid and they have good compatibility with all the nooks and crannies of the OpenAPI v3 spec.

1. https://github.com/Redocly/redoc

2. https://swagger.io/tools/swaggerhub

3. https://studio.apicur.io
See sibling comments for some links
Decentralized finance
I think it's possibly one of the least interesting things about Stallman.
This is the right answer. If you think you understand something, pretend that you have to teach it to a beginner and write a short lecture/presentation to give them. Explain what they'll be doing, why, and why it is important. Do it in which ever language is most comfortable. If you can prepare that lesson then great. If you cannot, then your initial assumption that you understood the material was incorrect. Mathematicians write material like this all the time (they like to call it "expository material").
I don't think Stallman would have an issue with a vendor being the default trusted entity on a system–but it must be possible to replace this with your own root of trust if you so desire. The issue is that companies hear the first part and go "oh boy, TPM time, let's lock out the user!"
I'm curious what you mean by "blockchain" here.

A lot of people talk about the benefits of blockchain and then describe a cryptographically-secured, append-only database (something like Amazon's QLDB[1], which does not have distributed trust or ownership).

If you're not actually using a blockchain, then disregard.

If you are using a blockchain, how does it add trust? Isn't your company, which controls the I/O for the system, still the central authority?

1. https://aws.amazon.com/qldb/features/
"Not necessary" doesn't mean it's not still fair use. Lots of things aren't necessary but one definition or another. The argument here is that it's lack of necessity makes it incidental.

Here's the Carl Benjamin case covered in bloomberg (you can look up the specific case if you'd like) https://news.bloomberglaw.com/ip-law/youtuber-wins-attorneys...

> Copyright violations don't require the copyright holder to prove commercial harm. That's the entire point of statutory damages.

This is explicitly one of the four points of fair use as stated by the US government, so it's very important.

https://www.copyright.gov/fair-use/more-info.html
Always glad to see pandoc get some attention. This tool is probably in my top 5 overall, I barely make it through a day without it.
Are they solid state? I thought the accelerometers were, in fact, essentially tiny boxes with a ball in with some springs? See https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microelectromechanical_syste... ; I can't actually find a decent reference specifically for MEMS accelerometers.
I'm not sure what specific technologies "blockchain databases" is limited to -- but one use case that has been bandying around me head ...

I think there could be a very powerful set of regulatory technologies created on top of blockchain style databases when used in conjunction with legally binding agreements intended to limit access to reads of the data.

Imagine a data lake for "enforcing" audit-ability of reads --

1. you may "store" some data in the lake -- say for example P2
2. if you "store" data in the lake you agree that you will not store that data anywhere else

"store" above would in actual implementation be something like storing a key for decrypting the data -- which could be stored wherever in an encrypted form and the agreement would mean "i'm not storing the key anywhere and i'm not storing the decrypting contents in any form other than as encrypted by the key".

You would leverage blockchain to ensure that all reads of the data are observable.

Obviously you can't "enforce" that the data being protected is not stored in other places or in other forms -- however the agreement "i will not store anywhere else" can be given legal or regulatory force to provide a way to punish violators.

The goal tho is to
build a platform for explicitly acknowledging and communicating to both external auditors and the developers that "i'm not supposed to store this in other places". That's a technology problem which a lot of good faith implementors need help with solving ...
I sometimes feel as if we don't Fix homelessness as a visual warning to others to work harder. "Produce us a higher GDP" or else. Articles like this make it seem like the tents are just "rebels" instead of helping them become productive again.

I can't seem to find it again, but there was once a quote from a company CEO that mentioned that they didn't like cannabis legalization because it would drop their contribution as citizens to the nation GDP. Is that all people are now? Has it always been this way?
In GP's example, the "person who owns the database" is already trusted because they wrote the software. The software can insert lies into the blockchain very easily.

I'd also argue that the "person who owns the database" is not just trusted but also trustworthy. They have an incentive to keep lies out of the data.

If the people you can't trust are your users, then blockchain doesn't really add anything. They can insert lies, and you have to verify them. All you get is a guarantee that no one changed their lies to something else.
I was confused for a moment, because this has the same name as a companion tool for Carthage. https://github.com/tmspzz/Rome
That's true, but none of that is enabled by blockchain. You can do all of that with an append-only, distributed database that is cryptographically verifiable. You don't need a public blockchain (or any blockchain at all).
While the headline is somewhat true, the linked article appears to be on a campaigning Covid conspiracy/denial(anti lockdown?) blog.

Here's a more balanced article:

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-wales-politics-54648194

And note the rules are now being reviewed:

https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-wales-54676457
This is something I've been thinking about a lot. Most of my ideas have been variations of creating a scholarship fund where interest from the initial investment goes to pay for continued development on a specific project.

The big question though is how to run the investment without it being wasted on people aren't helping the project at all.

Some notes (I'm planning on eventually writing a blog post on this subject):

- You probably need to pay people differently depending on whether they're the maintainer or a minor contributor
- There needs to be a balance of power between users and the maintainer. A simple balance could be, the maintainer is dictator for life (or until they lay down the mantle) but compensation is based on number of users.
- Maybe compensation is done on a per-feature basis, e.g., users put a bounty on a feature and the interest money doubles that bounty.
If I saw/heard correctly, it requires human (possibly remote?) intervention once every 5 to 10 miles. So not yet autonomous.

Separately, I believe GM is committed to car-to-car communication via DSRC/wi-fi (and some Cadillac models already have this). Do these Cruise vehicles leverage that?
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24872423
"Sorry I'm looking a bit out of sorts, my mirror had a update so I wasn't able to do my makeup this morning"
Are you saying that I can't still legally record TV on my VCR or DVR?
Google. Mozilla. The FSF. Microsoft. IBM springs to mind. These will all have their time in the spotlight as tech darlings or villains.

You aren't using the Stallman Trick here. The fact some organisation or person seems good today is totally meaningless compared to what it is legally allowed to do, and what they have incentive to do.

It is a bit cynical, but assume people are going to do what the incentives push them to do and the world becomes a very simple and predictable place. The time to panic isn't when someone threatens you, it is when they have the means & incentive to threaten you. Run or fight then, not later on.

If the FSF gains power, it will abuse that power. Sooner or later. They will react to money just as much as the rest of us. Look at what happened to Mozilla.
I am familiar with the original Tabata study. I guess my point here is that it's been widely accepted, at least for the last decade or so (Dr. Maffetone was figuring some of this out in the early 80s, FWIW...), that HIIT (and strength training) cause concentric cardiac hypertrophy, whereas LISS primarily causes eccentric cardiac hypertrophy. I'm speaking very generally here, but... 1 increases the size of your heart, thus the volume of blood and therefore oxygen (it has to pump less to deliver oxygen to your muscles leading to a lower BPM), and the other makes your heart stronger (it can pump all of this extra blood). This is all of course a very unscientific explanation and I'm not an expert.
> Entire channels being taken down because the licensed music they used contained samples that weren’t properly licensed themselves.

One has to wonder why this happens at a time where it's never been easier to build your own mini-YouTube, for your own content. The problem is cultural, not technical.
bash is a domain specific language. It has many features to easily launch programs, setup stream redirects to files or to other programs. JavaScript is a general purpose programming language. It might be a better choice for general purpose programs, but when you need to glue some programs together, nothing comes close to shell scripting languages.
The OP asked about hyperledger, which does not require proof of work. He/She's asking specifically about private blockchains.
I am sure that the developers behind zmq are(or were) far more intelligent and better programmers than I will ever be, but I have to say that as a user I would never recommend it to anyone for the following reasons:

1. A lot of gotchas and surprising behavior. For example this:

> To be more explicit: after calling zmq_send the socket may become readable (and vice versa) without triggering a read event on the file descriptor.

2. The library will assert internally without actually giving you any clues what did you do wrong as a user.

I would rather spend some extra time in development by using pure sockets rather than the stress of debugging problems, arising from the above, later.
It's good, but wow is it a lot of detail; it's like reading a book on MS Word that explains every option. It's what you want in a Ghidra reference, but it is not a breezy read.
Run Firefox in unprivileged podman container
I’m in Wales. In my part of the country we only have a few ICU beds. The government is trying hard to protect us. But it’s a fast moving situation, and we’ve only a small population and consequently a small government. So of course guidance is made up on the fly to some extent, and then adjusted later. But some like to run around pointing out inconsistencies and using them to score points. Same old same old, really. Nothing to see here.
I'm pretty sure that's supposed to be a joke. Also the main dev is not American but Belgian.
Well in this specific example, what would they change to photo to? The case is to stop joyrides. Who would be able to take a joyride and end up with the odometer exactly as they had Photoshopped it to hours or days ago?

But yes, depending on the application, photos can be manipulated. But that is stating the problem with using photos, not the timestamping app.
If you are comfortable with CLI, rclone is the Swiss Army knife of cloud storage.
They're also known for thinking their always right and not asking the team if the patient got their painkillers is exactly in character for that stereotype.
Dude have you been under a rock for the last three decades?
Lukas Technologies
It's funny people can write papers on things and then believe they know better than a sitting SCOTUS justice who is known for NOT being a judicial activist.

Your politics are showing through. It's okay, you're not a judge and won't be.

I don't read "NRA Pamphlets", I read Heller numerous times. I've studied just about everything that's been written on the 2nd Amendment.

Dred Scott removed rights from people. Heller applied the document as it was meant to be, enforcing the Constitution.
But web of trust hasn't been very successful in practice. It's the usual reason quoted [citation needed] for the failure of PGP/GPG to become a mainstream success.

Keybase's approach is more scalable, but it's still centralized.
Mochi – Spaced Repetition with Modern UI
I, for one, would probably-rage build hacky stream integration with my Linux desktop if source was available.
I have a Mac and I have Office 365 with its free 1TB storage.

My photo library location is on OneDrive and my phone stream is synced to the Mac.

My Mac is also backed up to NAS.

So my pics are in two different physical locations and one offsite. I guess I should have an external drive that I make regular backups to and then take offsite somewhere as well.
The countries you picked as an example is a little curious. Sanctions against Russia were really weak and limited, I don’t think anybody had any intentions for them to work at all. The sanctions of Cuba and Venezuela (or embargo in the case of Cuba) were targeted against their autonomy, i.e. countries were not OK with their economic policies so they imposed the sanctions (which were more devastating then any action by the government in Cuba). In the case of Venezuela the sanctions are targeted against a democratically elected government in favor of an opposition that was never elected. The goal here is to abolish democracy, what do you expect the Venezuelan government to do?

This leaves North Korea, which is a genuine example of sanctions not working (and in fact casing harm in them self, since the victims are often starving citizens). However threats of further sanctions have worked in the past to prevent North Korea from developing a nuclear weapons program (which they later developed anyway). So I’ll give you that one.

But now let’s turn to South Africa. The Apartheid government was supported by many rich nations throughout the late 20th century. Their crimes got worse and worse over the years. Until the international community finally came together in the last decade of the century and imposed heavy sanctions, even excluded them from participating in cultural and sporting events. The apartheid government finally collapsed and South Africa got their first democratically elected precedent that represented a majority of the nation in 1994.

But I don’t think it is fair to talk only about the failure of sanctions to actively work in this context, the alternative here (as per ancestor comment) is military intervention. I could just as easily come up with a list of countries where military intervention did not resolve anything (or left the country seriously damage):

• Cuba

• Libya

• Syria

• Afghanistan

• Yemen

• Somalia

You could make the case for Rwanda, East Timor, Cambodia, or even Nazi Germany. But those cases are more nuanced than that, and claiming that military intervention was a “response that worked” would be an inexcusable simplification of how the events unfolded.
I started using webpack in 2015. It's still the tool I reach for when doing JS. It's not going anywhere.
Indeed. I do not agree with everything he says but he's right about a lot of things. It was only recently that I started to understand the value of computing freedom. To think he's been exploring these ideas since decades ago...
> Expressions with all kinds of strange symbols, often variables introduced that are either completely undefined or defined ad hoc locations remote from the usage, integrals and sums with no subscripts / unclear scoping, etc etc.

This is what mathematical notation looks like if you are lacking some of the fundamental knowledge to read it. I know what that's like because I've been there. Learning mathematics like you would programming doesn't really work - because often you can't just look up something you don't understand (how can you Google a mathematical symbol when you don't even know it's name?).

Pretty much the only way to learn mathematics is from the ground up.

> and I even know people who will ignore all the text in a paper and just look for the equations

Mathematical notation is mostly a substitute for words and that's why those equations can be embedded in natural language and "read". Ignoring the words in a mathematical paper and just looking at the "funny symbols" doesn't make any sense. You're only seeing tiny glimpses of the actual reasoning and are probably missing most of it.

A mathematician may chose to write "B contains all elements of A, and A contains the element x.", or they may chose to write "A ⊆ B and x ∈ A". Same thing. Also note how the second example still had an english word in the middle of it. If that "and" was an "or" the sentence would have an entirely different meaning. Can't just ignore that stuff.

Sure you could replace that "and" with yet another symbol, and in something as simple as that nobody would really care, but in something more complex the mathematician would just be trying to produce an unreadable mess on purpose.
> integrals and sums with no subscripts / unclear scoping, etc

That’s just seems like bad writing. Out of math subjects I learned (discrete math, linear algebra, real analysis, statistics), only in the last one it may be unclear what’s going on, whether you are dealing with a random variable or its realization, and arguments of random variables are almost always omitted, so they don’t look like functions.
The True Power of WebAssembly: Video Demo of Ffmpeg in the Browser
In spite of its name this video use JavaScript to implement a game using the three styles of programming. Great video learnt from hacker news: https://youtu.be/vK1DazRK_a0
The power of a notary is that someone is legally verifying the state of the document under penalty of perjury. In this case, you don't trust the party doing the verification, by definition, and there's no second party, so I don't see what this solves.

That there is an immutable log of the events is an implementation detail and could be solved with a write only DB completely independent of blockchain.
Probably none or we would have seen one already after 10k smart people spent 10 years looking.
Can you give an example of some problem that you can't explain?
"When we say mainstream, I think we mean aligned to the dominant power" hegemon/hegemonic is the word I use to describe this. Others have written about the Internet and "counter hegemonic discourses" which I encourage the curious to look into.
I didn't make an analogy. I asked a straightforward question.

I'm unclear why you or anyone else might be creating analogies in your heads. It's even less clear why you want me to have made them.
When I try and check out their new page linked from here, I'm getting a certificate error. It looks like it's only issued for Netlify subdomains. Minor, but kinda annoying.

One question I have about Rome is why it tries to take on the testing framework too. I really like the idea of it having all the build tooling together, but testing seems like a sort of separate thing. Other environments I've used let libraries fill the gaps for testing, including JS. Is there a big advantage to pulling it into Rome?
The overwhelming evidence is that the primary application of blockchain is investment scams.
This is fun can't believe all the grumps here!

Here's the thing though: I've been brushing with a high tech brush for years but lately I've been developing an ache under an old crown. I delayed the dentist visit due to Covid but finally got it checked out. High tech CT scan revealed a big bubble of infection and bone loss right between the roots! Now I have to get another root canal or an implant, we'll see. I was super impressed with the imaging technology the dentist/endoguy had, much more useful than a toothbrush with gyro.
Xbox one version would be nice
Huh. What do you use it for on a daily basis?