skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I think the Snowden case is actually a good point. When we look at how officials responded they shifted the conversation to metadata to downplay the amount of information and what that information could be used for. It does seem like their responses were fairly effective since people don't consider metadata particularly useful. But also a large amount of people don't even know who Snowden is and opinions on him are quite divided (and there are radicals with ridiculous opinions on both sides that often take the spotlight).

I don't think people seriously talking about this think the government has an all seeing power or a hand in everything (I personally don't think even China does). So it would not be expected that the CIA/NSA or any agency could prevent a story like that from eventually breaking. But the question is how effective are they at being able to downplay it and sway public opinion? Personally I see it as subtle and frequent nudging more than active control.
HR represents the company's interests, not the employees'.

I've heard it said that in the U.S., the only reliable way for a non-union worker to get real protection from abuse is to personally hire a labor attorney.
Imagine having a juggernaut so big and powerful you can no longer afford to innovate on the bottom.

Google was never able to build or buy a social platform to build their walled garden higher.

Instead they reach their tentacles over the other walled gardens and snatch the content.

Google is a shell whose moat is drying up day by day.
Would like to echo your compliments to dang. The only bit of pushback I would make to his point is that if the SSM really does exist, perhaps the correct course of action is to reduce our participation as much as possible and move our engagement to less easily manipulated forms of communication, particularly face-to-face meetings. Perhaps, even if we do our best to post in good faith and make well reasoned, careful arguments, in the end we only lend a superficial credibility to a system which still has a negative effect in the aggregate (because it has been engineered to do so). And yes, I'm aware of the inherent hypocrisy in posting this on a (well!) moderated forum with a system of largely opaque voting and flagging. :-)
Well this isn’t new is it? I recall chat from 2015 where people were pointing out that mining is just bad. Even when Ethereum started growing, one of the big arguments quickly became that proof of stake would be a superior approach.

I agree. I think the use cases have never materialized. I do believe there’s potential in peer to peer, or at least federated approaches. Email works. Matrix works. Irc works.

But I don’t think that a globally replicated ledger is the way to go. Especially with the ambition to use it as the basis for a currency that’s expected to be used for every day purchases.
I have no idea what he is talking about.

I use bitcoin to buy things both onchain and via lightning and the experience is so smooth and much much better than the circa 2017 period when fees were high. Don't keep it on exchange. The real thing that is stopping adoption is countries trying to classify it as a commodity and insist to pay capital gains on every microtransaction. Some countries are backwards (US, UK) than the others. Germany and few other countries are forward looking. No VAT on bitcoin transactions and no CGT if held for a year.
From experience, I highly doubt it was actually unrecoverable. I did something similar many times & all it takes is to read archlinux.org news section & apply .pacnew config diffs where needed. Arch is a bleeding edge distro constantly marching ahead; that's one of its primary advantages, so it's best to update regularly. That being said it is very much possible to not update for months, just requires a bit of extra care when you finally do due to the large number of accumulated changes.

I even did an online, in place switchover from SysV to systemd in 2011 and despite that being a scary amount of changes at once still got a working system.
What is the difference? Maybe at the start, but after rich entities will buy the most, they will only need to decide whether to buy "shares" or hardware, a random person will not have more say either way.
That's a nope.
Unless there’s an anti-tamper incendiary device or something, I suppose.

The article does mention he does a lot of drilling.
At this point, all the development stuff I do with my laptop basically just works on the M1, and it’s virtually indistinguishable from my Intel Mac.
Thanks for your question. There's a lot more to TMTP than limiting who can send you arbitrary content.

One of its features is that your correspondence does not transit a TMTP server operated by a third party. As with HTTP, its client connects directly to the ultimate host.

Re "users should only receive..." TMTP allows arbitrary content only from approved senders, and limited content from others (see Ping & GroupInvite). There's no manual addition to your address book on the receiver's part.
Why make a false report to HR? Someone can send me an inbound message anytime they like. I'll respond to it when it's convenient for me. I don't need to restrict their message sending to times that are convenient for me (how would they even know, especially if they are working in a very different timezone and holiday schedule than my own?)
Austin is the third largest city? Not Chicago, not Houston not DFW, but Austin?
Missing the ability to assign more than one person to a card.
Do you need to read a whole book to make a decision on whether you like it? I get ideas from various places then read a few pages to get a feel for a book, super easy with kindle samples, or if you're not in lockdown stand and read a few pages in the bookshop.

As for worthwhile, I don't find awards to be strongly correlated with my enjoyment, or reviews for that matter. Actually the best resource I've found in a while is the bestsciencefictionbooks.com website.

In any case, I constantly look for new things to read, and read many things that are just ok, but I just don't have as many strong positives anymore.
But bitcoin is not moving to a proof-of-stake algorithm, .. there are a lot of alt coins trying that and flailing around with that notion.
Certainly, but it's a free service hosted by volunteers, and I think uploading gigabytes of private photos would hurt the service for no benefit to them.
I suspect it has to do with roaming. I have a phone in country X with company Y. If I travel to country A with company B and make a call, is it spoofed?
That was before Source Depot, I presume.
Code for the scenes used in 3blue1brown videos
Completely agreeable, albeit it misses a point:
Governments can't print more of it.

That's it really, everything else is noise.

I can sympathize with btc (I wish we still had a gold standard, or a standard based on the price of common goods) but I don't see much the other benefits.

On top of this, governments could ban btc.
MF Doom Dead at 49
I was real excited the first time that Bitcoin was explained to me. I saw it as the first real alternative to paper money. But what I soon learned is that most of the people associated with Bitcoin saw it as digital gold and were only interested in seeing the value rise and cashing out.

I've seen a few positive developments every once in a while that fail to get much adoption. So I keep waiting and waiting. It increasingly looks to me like whatever solution eventually wins will be built upon the existing banking system ;<(.
Ask HN: A kind of PHP MySQL script that allows me to categorize and CRUD posts?
Happy New Year to everybody - Stay safe from Cov19.

I'm creating my own website, hosted in a cheap server for which I can't even access a terminal. So I can't install, for example, Laravel. Thus, I need to write my website with native PHP and use the provided MySQL DB.

I would want to install a sort of package written in native PHP that would communicate with the MySQL DB. By "install", I mean "FTP-transfer its files to my cheap server and execute the SQL scripts of the tables creation within the provided MySQL of my server".

This "package" would ideally provide all the following features (if it's incomplete, I have the skills to customize this native PHP package to add the missing features):

- CRUD a post

- a post would contain a title, an illustration, multimedia and textual contents, résumé/description, categories, dates of events (not only the creation of the post itself but an event that the post speaks about), tags, Web links, a PDF and a download & previsualization links for the PDF.

Do you know such a package?
Very well written. How I wish this would be heeded. Instead I fear we’ll be stuck with BTC and its clones for many more years.
Not 100% sure but there was some news a few years back about miners setting up shop in towns which had really low energy costs because they bought a fixed block of power from a nearby source and thus it was super cheap... as long as they didn't have to go over that initial purchase, after that it became more expensive than normal for everyone.
A "bod" is a person (body.) It is a colloquialism in the UK. You generally only use it in this case to denote an anonymous/generic person: "A bod did stuff".

However, bod is also used as a formal abbreviation for body: "You have a lovely bod". In this case you should be reasonably familiar with the object or you will get slapped!

Sorry, bod means a person.
"Disaster" is a funny way to spell "I didn't buy in early and now I'm bitter, hurr durr Dunning-Krugerrands"
Got a link to that?
First link: ...the rate of Bell’s palsy in the clinical trials is lower than the overall rate in the general population...

Second: FDA scientists have said that the documented cases of Bell’s palsy are “consistent with the expected background rate in the general population”...

Third: The adverse effects of the vaccine—even if, at worst, they all happen at once—are transient and a normal sign of reactogenicity signaling an effective immune response. But I worry that they could be a major barrier to vaccine uptake.

Reading is fundamental.
Well at least in our case the skill in the co-ed program is 0 because my son hated it and wanted to quit. I'm now helping him learn to code on his own. Scratch has been a god send. I'm glad Scratch is available for all genders.
> The pseudonymity of coins being owned by the bearer of some
> cryptographic key is a failure; People have been eavesdropping and
> aggressively analyzing the block chain from day 1. And the block chain
> will always be there, it will always be public, and it will always be
> subject to further analysis. And we are learning that analysis of that
> record is sufficient to destroy any pretense of anonymity or
> pseudonymity.

Yeah, privacy is a joke on blockchains. Perhaps that is why actually private coins like Monero are having such 'difficulty' getting adoption on mainstream platforms, with shitcoins getting preference. I suspect that if coinbase tried to add Monero, they would get a very angry letter from the CIA/FBI (perhaps this already happened, they have been having 'technical difficulties' adding it for years now).
Frohes Neues! Here is to a better 2021.
Before 2020 ends, check out these top recommended links
A lot of people don't update their opinions because it takes work. I know because I've made it habit of checking my assumptions and I still forget. For example, people still trash PHP and post a "A Fractal of Bad Design" when PHP 8 is now on par with any other language and not an amateur minefield. Some things get better, some things get worse. It's best to check in once in awhile. Microsoft is much better than it was 20 years ago.
I think he's exaggerating here, but there are definitely examples where people especially in China have setup huge operations with the help of local officials who give them sweetheart deals on the electricity prices -- seems likely that the officials helping this happen may get some sort of benefit from this arrangement, but not sure if that has actually been reported or just assumed. In Washington state there were a number of bitcoin operations that started in areas with low cost power that promised to bring jobs to the area and my understanding was that the local power company often did upgrades to lines and substations to accommodate the added power needs -- the local taxpayers definitely would either pay for that capital cost or pay the additional maintenance costs down the road.
https://news.bitcoin.com/chinese-kennel-owner-caught-stealin...

https://news.bitcoin.com/bulgarian-electricity-company-unvei...

https://www.coindesk.com/illegal-miners-in-russia-stole-6-6m...
They want the USD to stay king of currencies...
Another conclusion based on the same facts is that the government has no business doing its own technology and should do what they do for weapons and roads: contract it out.
> Can somebody elaborate on the stolen/corruption angle?

It's easy to find articles about stolen electricity [1][2], but since these are both about people who were arrested it seems the governments weren't helping them.

[1] https://phys.org/news/2019-07-china-police-bitcoin-miners-mn...

[2] https://news.bitcoin.com/bulgarian-electricity-company-unvei...
Multiple brokerages, most famously Merrill Lynch, had both, primary datacenters and safes containing daily backup tapes in the WTC. There were unknown dependencies and backup systems that had been presumed to be independent did not work. Some secondary datacenters were in adjacent buildings also damaged by the attack. It had been assumed, given the extra protections put in place after the prior bombing, that the WTC was as safe as it gets so some firms had primary and secondary datacenters in different towers or different floors of the WTC. Multiple safes were plucked out and databases of customer positions were restored during the week the stock markets were closed. Getting these safes and the tapes out was given priority despite everything else going on because if the databases had not been brought back on line, there would have been absolute chaos in the markets.

Immediately after the attack, exchanges moved their datacenter operations to sites in NJ about 80 miles apart and both exchanges and large brokerages setup backup datacenters in Delaware, far enough away to be unaffected by a thermonuclear blast hitting New York.

I believe, prior to 2001 only JP Morgan (pre-Chase acquisition JP Morgan) had backup datacenters in Delaware but there may have been one or two others.
Related: the current rise of Bitcoin prices has been peculiar to me, and seems to be a bit of a canary in an inflationary coal mine.

We've injected trillions of dollars of fiat into the economy this year. It feels like the sky-high valuations of technology companies and Bitcoin are "shock absorbers" of sorts, or early signals of inflation-yet-to-come. If we assume the market is efficiently pricing these assets (like AirBnB's IPO) then it could very well be that the actual value of a fiat dollar has dropped dramatically -- making sky-high valuations more reasonable -- and we'll only see that reflected in the price of consumer goods and commodities once industry leaders collectively feel comfortable the economy is on track again. After all, you can only charge what consumers can afford to pay.

I'm an armchair economist at best. I just can't make sense of the market right now, and wouldn't be surprised to see the price of things like groceries, beer and travel double or triple what they were in 2019. Is there anybody writing about this that I haven't been paying attention to? Am I missing something?
On the other hand, the existince of a cryptocurrency ecosystem has given us a really easy and clear indicator that a company or individual is lacking in scruples, and that we should move on from whatever they're hawking.
Hong Kong hosted a virtual New Year's Eve celebration
Jira costs are going to skyrocket soon too since they are sunsetting Jira Server. Opportunity is ripe for competitors.
Why do you believe there should be no capital gains on it?
Your inalterable blockchain either dies young or lives long enough to see a hard fork.
The author of the twitter thread works for a non-profit. It think it's safe to assume it's a cause she believes in rather than "just another income stream".
I use this goal and my average is above 300 pages per book but I do read the occasional shorter book (>100 pages). It's true for a while it disincentivized me from reading very large books but I've slowly gotten over that too. I just try to read the bigger books earlier on this year.
Actual lol at that description! Probably the most accurate description of the valley I've ever read.
Here, here
That's on my list to try!

I made a rotational-to-linear translator with adjustable linear depth using 1/4" HDPE and a gigantic OMAX waterjet cutter. The pitches were perfect to within 0.0001", but the design was five layers of gears, some were planetary, others slid on cams. Trying to connect planar gears is very effing hard when you can't use a pass-through collet (e.g., the pinion has to be FLUSH but yet allow rotation).
> A standardized reporting code (like 69 for call back, but instead to report abuse)

We have this. 57

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vertical_service_code
Χρόνια πολλά μανάρια, καλή χρονιά!
The trollish Bitcoiner answer to every criticism: "you just jelly of my internet money".
Don't say its name!
What kind of things do you buy with it and where? I remember seeing some adoption back when steam started accepting it, but sometime later they stopped because it was too volatile. I thought paying fees for the transaction made bitcoin very unappealing as well. It's not anonymous either, so I just couldn't find a reason to use it as it didn't solve anything that I couldn't do with my credit card. And my credit card offers me protections against fraud.

Has anything changed that I should look into?
> anyone who is downvoting this, please leave a comment with where you disagree. i'm unsure if i'm being received negatively on content or on tone

I would, but that's a detail that a senior dev like yourself should be able to figure out without people just providing it for you.
Wouldn't you be perpetuating this hostile work environment by not managing your notifications?
I think you've misread it, given that he's literally supporting the banning of certain political views by law!

(I happen to agree with the bans on Nazi symbology, but that has actual force of law and far more consequences than merely complaints on twitter)
I mean: https://www.google.com/search?q=bitcoin+mining+using+stolen+...

The first four links for me are:

* 13 arrested for stealing $3million of electricity to mine BTC (China)

* Illegal Crypto Miner Caught After Stealing More Than $400k [in electricity] (Russia)

* Bulgarian Electricity Company Unveils Details of Historic Power Theft [it's Bitcoin miners]

* Bitcoin mining operators steal $1.5 million in electricity (Australia)

These are just the ones who've been caught so far.
I'm so glad you included the tilde over the n.
Noise Cancellation in Cars
That’s nonsense. Bitcoin is as good a store of value as gold due to one unique feature: scarcity. Actually, it’s even less power consuming than the gold industry and is much more transparent. I wouldn’t really advise bitcoin for anything else, like day to day transactions, although I and many of my friends have used bitcoin to transact on dark markets and it works.

The only argument I’ve heard about gold being better than bitcoin is that you can do something with gold. That’s horse in my opinion. Gold is good for nothing useful imo, but is used in jewlery and other because it has value (not the other way around, as in gold has value because people make jewelry with it).
Print-to-logging: Migrate Python code from print to logging interactively
Ironic isnt it
Talking about "cancel culture" is an attempt to avoid defending specific indefensible behaviour.
I work in the med-tech industry and Jira is a very good fit for that industry. Most compliance issues are solved by defining a way of working that uses a project management system like Jira. Someone else read how to label a product with CE-label and HIIPA, and all I have to do is report my work in Jira. Don't have to understand CE-labeling or HIIPA.

For compliance it must be possible to find who made a change, why they made that change, and how they validated and tested that change. In a heavily regulated industry like medical, it is very useful to have a tool like Jira when the audit comes up.

I still accept your point tough, if you need to go fast and break things (you know, innovate and prototype things), jira is a real blocker and the "jira mentality" slows things down, for better or worse.
proof of work is an energy black hole. it goes to where energy is cheapest. this means that it has a tendency to go to places where subsidies exist and destroy said subsidy. if there is a place where electricity is being propped up by taxes or other such things for the benefit of the community, there is no reason for them to not just plug in a bunch of miners there and suck that subsidy dry.
The first point would be gamechanging.

Also used to do govt work. I'm sure everyone has stories.

My takeaways.

1) Understand what people need -> AND LET THEM DO IT.

2) DO NOT ADD A SINGLE NEW THING with the IT / automation. If the old system doesn't have it DO NOT ADD IT. No 20 extra fields for demographics if you didn't track that before. That can be added later IF it's a MUST.

If they would take away all various fifedoms and hassle - people actually would bring a lot more tech into gov. Let the local business / division people make a decision. The only requirement be that they go through a 1 hr training and be exposed to 3 packages in their space (ie, do demos no powerpoint).

Take away all other requirements. Be OK with smaller failures. Govt is so scared of just letting folks try stuff out that everything turns into a 100M project that goes totally of the rails in terms of scope etc (ie, what people need / want is long forgotten, it's what MANAGERS want that gets emphasized).

Result - even if successful (rarely) for downline workers the software brings TONS of extra (not less) work.

----

My own examples. The IT folks say that passwords have to change every 90 days. Google for example does not default to this (stupid) rule - they push two factor without SMS (which is better). Bam - you are out or have to pay for a "security" solution on top of whatever standard platform you are using with admin rights that can force rotate passwords (and is a MASSIVE backdoor itself vs self-serve password mgmt).

Then purchasing. We need an ipad to edit some videos. OH, Apple is not supported. This is 10K employees but you can't get an apple product to use unless the city atty will sign off on a variance (no chance).
From what I understand, the availability of coin that can be "mined" halves every year (?), so at some point there will be essentially no new coin. What you have is what you have out there. It will just keep going up in price to include all the accumulating "worth". That should be fun to watch.

In addition, just yesterday the headline flashed in front of me, Marketwatch: "After recent price spike, bitcoin requires enough power for a country of more than 200 million people".
Also - what valid claim is being made here with emotion attached?
Ah, the old 2 week lockdown fantasy.

Just pick and choose the countries that are doing well and match them to your favorite measure. Be sure to say the measure ‘has to be done right’ but don’t define what is right, so if it fails you can always claim it ‘wasn’t done right’.

Beware though, because the situation may change any minute, like in the mask societies of Japan and South Korea. They must have suddenly forgotten how to wear their masks.
I've been a US submarine service member for 11 years, and these posts are always interesting. Not interesting as worth a read (for me), but that other people find my daily life interesting.

I guess because I live this life everyday and see every aspect of it, the cool shiny parts blend in with the daily drudgery