skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I asked this downthread, but to rephrase: are there any semi-objective case studies on blockchains being useful for physical items, such as the food supply tracking that IBM is doing?

(I mean, I see plenty of blockchain startups promoting this use case, but they inevitably end up with a pitch to get on a blockchain.)

I do not understand how, in the case of food supply, that a blockchain is somehow better than a good ol’ database. You can verify the ledger, but I don’t see how that’s the primary issue. It seems like the issue would be getting everyone up and down the supply chain to get on board with tracking everything, and not the integrity of the ledger. If a meat packing plant is going to adulterate the pork, the problem is going to be getting any verification at all, and not them hiring some hackers to mess with a database.
It's more about discouraging the implementation of infrastructure as much as possible. To some extent, I agree with you: the change is almost inevitable at this point. But any delay represents fewer lives through the grinder and thus presents a clear reason to act.
From my limited knowledge (basically 0) of supply chains, I disagree. (Though I am neutral on the statement "you can't really trust any part of it.")

The anecdote I heard was that say you have a blockchain to keep track of your goods shipping on trucks. When the trucks leave and enter a facility their payload is entered into the blockchain. The idea is that it will make sure that every party along the supply chain can say "well I got the next person what they needed" so you can easily put blame on and correct for missing/failing items.

Sounds good, right? Well, not so fast. It turns out that some of the items were stolen from a truck (whether by an employee or otherwise). The truck arrives at the next facility, scans in and certifies that they have the proper items and none are the wiser!

Hold on, can't they just physically check at each stop to actually make sure that they have the right cargo?

Bingo! At that point, what problem does the blockchain actually solve? Blockchain works okay-ish for digital goods (cryptocurrency), but completely falls apart for physical goods.
Most people trying to do this will make little or no money, and the sheer amount of competition and effort required to be the maybe 10% of the top people who can make a living on it is too much for most. And there are less and less structures in place to protect or mitigate risk for them; all Youtube has to do is change an algorithm or demonetize/ban you to tank your streaming business.

And the base assumption now for creative works is "free" and hope people donate to you. A lot of people would make more just working part time at mcdonalds.
It's dismaying that modern state power feels (and is) something entirely distinct from communal.

"Of the people, by the people, for the people" was lost long ago.
Robinhood drama isn't "selling data" it's selling access to fulfill bids.

It's akin ordering delivery from a store and having Instacart be the only option.

Most of the drama was misinformed speculation. A bit was suspicion that the order fulfiller was untrustworthy (because the reason they are willing to provide the service is that they know you will make bad trades, so what happens if you make a good trade that makes them lose money?)
To Hell with Duverger’s Law: Why the US Needs a Third Party
Most books make money from the speaking fees "the guy who wrote the book" makes. I've had a couple classes at work where my company paid $5-20,000 (500-1000 per student depending on how long the class is for) for a guy to come in and give a one week class. As a student in the class I got a copy of the book (someplace on my bookself, I probably opened it a couple times, but never read it). The book is free with class.

I talked to several contractors who said the key to their high value contracts was the book they wrote. Write a book on X and you can make $500/hour doing X at other companies.

Without writing the book you don't get hired to give a class on the book. Without writing a book you don't get to consult on the subject. Once you write a book you are automatically an expert. You still need to sell yourself, the book is part of your marketing materials, but it isn't enough alone to get those high priced gigs.
Indeed, I have noticed this trend with "news" more and more. The style is characterized as being written like a non-fiction novel. I wish news was just more concise and to the point. I don't have time to read thru the fluff.
Show HN: AirConsole Meet – Zoom games for remote teams controlled by smartphones
The trough of disillusionment. Finally.
lol don't you wish we all had access to it
> this is why Bitcoiners aren’t actually interested in making Bitcoin easy to use for payments. They only want two use cases: Buying and holding.

TL; DR The political history of deflationary currencies, which until modern times meant any metal-based currency that wasn't being mined at a rate similar to or faster than economic growth.
fair point when it comes to employment...i think the point in the article is that when it comes to books/courses/etc they probably aren't going to be much good if you don't have much genuine interest in the subject/etc
Govt records, registries of people born, death certificates, deeds on land, swift for banking, any sort of info of public interest like procurement agreements, notary documents, licenses (govt level, like drivers license etc)
As another pointed out: supply chain does make sense.

There are plenty of cases where it's better to not have to trust on any particular entity. Examples:

- Marketing and advertisement campaigns. How much ad fraud exist and how much money is spent by advertisers without knowing if they are actually reaching their customers. Do you trust Google to actually mitigate these problems?

- Health care: remember Google Health and Microsoft Health Vault? Nowadays Apple/Google/Samsung wants to collect that data. Wouldn't you rather have it in a way that only doctors had access to it?
Just to play Devil's advocate, why would I use this over a private WordPress/Ghost/WriteFreely blog?
> Notifications such as "Friend A commented on Friend B's post" is pretty impossible in this framework

If it supported ActivityPub and perhaps WebMention, this would be possible, and across any social network.
Uh, NQ is stock future not a commodity future? Commodity futures are soybean, oil, corn, gold, etc.
congrats that is awesome!! did you do courses in an area you were genuinely interested in or just for income??
OK, but you don’t need blockchain for that, any sort of Merkle tree will work.
When they switched back they still had something like 40% of workstations running Windows.

I assume they'll make the same discovery as last time: It's not free as in free beer; they'll have to develop the missing pieces themselves if they want it to work.
They never did a proper phase 3 trial. Instead they did two half-trials, with different doses.

Initially they pretended this was done on purpose, and claimed 90% efficacy:

https://www.bbc.com/news/health-55040635

Later it came out this was an accident and cover-up, spun as a lucky discovery:

https://www.wired.com/story/the-astrazeneca-covid-vaccine-da...

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus-astraz...

Even now, the lower bound of 95% C.I. around efficacy with two doses is 63% which is quite low, relative to the headlines:

https://www.ox.ac.uk/news/2021-02-02-oxford-coronavirus-vacc...

I'm not a troll, just a critic of a lab and a U.K. government that fudged some data because they needed a PR win.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2020-07-15/oxford-s-...

"I hope we can improve on those timelines and come to your rescue.” - Sarah Gilbert

That kind of hubris made it hard to admit process errors and low efficacy rates.
For what it's worth, I've been working on a state machine library that's more deeply integrated into React: https://github.com/humaans/react-machine.

It does a few things differently from XState / Robot bindings:

1. Use React's useReducer for state transitions and useEffect for applying the effects.

2. Allow reacting to component props (or machine context) and transitioning within the same render where props changed (achieved with a dispatch in the render body). This means the component's children get rendered with props and machine state that is in sync.

3. Separate machine's context (often component props) from machine's state. This reduces the number of unnecessary rerenders, while allowing your machine's reducers and effects to use up to date data and functions passed via props.

All in all, it's my exploration of how to more tightly integrate statecharts into React's render lifecycle and programming model.
I am not in the tech world, but reading through HN has been more than enough to understand exactly what you mean. Ultimately, people's opinions will change depending on what increases their material conditions at the expense of other groups, and I am no different in that regard.
> Ok sure, but interest is fine.

As I originally pointed out, interest is prohibited in Islam, Judaism, and Christianity (at least) for a good reason. It's not ethical nor moral, in fact, it's destructive and parasitic.

> Charity isn't as good as letting people get access to capital that they can leverage for themselves.

It lifts people out of poverty to get them on their feet. There are many funds that provide people with access to capital (e.g. accelerators). Capital is not limited to interest bearing loans. The simplest example is pitching an idea to investors who in return own a portion of a potential company. If it works out, both parties benefit, otherwise, both parties equally took on the risk.

> women's rights

Those are cherry picked by anti-Islamic rhetoric drivers who have shown their ignorance and lies time and time again, and whose arguments fall apart the moment they're critically discussed. It's really meaningless talk that gets thrown around.

> and the recent Charlie Hebdo murders,

Easy refutation: you're going to have to show that Islam itself condones or required such murders to take place.
Most people love having done something more than doing it. I like talking about removing that busted off bolt in my shop - but when I'm doing it, it just plain sucks.
Is it really that amazing when getting funding for anything takes pulling teeth? Voters have been convinced that investing in government operations is theft.
Udemy is actually a great platform for courses. I've used that and Skillshare and both are great.
Just a nice set of ideas to be used for social signalling.

In with type systems, a typeclass is all you need. The mantra is "to be an X (being substituted for an X) is to be able to perform (implement) such and such actions (or have this or that biochemical properties).

It is that general, that deep, it could be even seen in molecular biology.

Category theory, on the other hand, is just a few nested abstract concepts, of which only monoid has some connection to reality, which ends up empty, like most abstract pseudo- philosophical bullshit.

And yes, I have watched and read everything by Bartosz. It is empty.
It's evolving as we speak. Full-time excellent team, go go go!
You alleged that Georgian romances are part of a conspiracy to control the future. That's a surprising allegation that you made no attempt to justify nor explain, cogent or otherwise.

Under those circumstances, it's perfectly coherent for strangers to dismiss the allegation if it doesn't conform to their preconceived view. It is also perfectly coherent for strangers to agree with it if it does.

Now, if you wish for strangers to come to agree with your world view then you'll have to make some effort to convince them. Whether or not you can be arsed to do that is, of course, up to you.
More importantly, you don’t need it if your domain effectively creates a centralized authority. All of the examples of tracking John Deere parts on the chain were stupid, because functionally there had to be a central party controlling the list of what serial numbers were valid and which weren’t; John Deere themselves.
I think it's a few things, but the two that seem most apparent are (1) that not that many people know about them, and (2) that they feel like overengineering, too much work, or just too hard when you can just write the code the normal way.

For me, I learned about state machines during my CS degree. They seemed like a neat curiosity, and we drew out our DFA diagrams and whatever, and then I mostly forgot about them. My classes never tied that theoretical knowledge to actual code or real-life examples of when something like a state machine would be useful. If anything, a lot of the examples made them seem like a crappier way to hand-make regular expression, and that made them seem pretty unappealing.

I definitely understand the overengineering complaint, because the code comes out more verbose, takes more thinking to write and read, and forces you to handle all the edge cases that you might normally ignore because "they'll never happen". I still have some resistance to reaching for a state machine, I definitely don't use them for everything.

They've been very useful for a couple recent problems though:

Building a "preset manager" for a screen recorder app. You can have a preset selected, or not. A preset auto-populates the choices for screen, resolution, and mic. If someone changes one of those preset values, or you pull the plug on the mic that's selected, the UI needs to clearly indicate you're not matched with the preset anymore. There were a looooot of fiddly edge cases here and a state machine was a huge help in keeping it tidy, and ensuring that it actually works all the time. I tried to do it without a state machine at first but it got very hard to be sure all the pieces were doing the right thing.

Trial expiration and license management. The app can be in trial, expired, or licensed. Simple enough! But there are other situations, like the license on disk is corrupt, or the trial data is corrupt. The state machine was a big help in making sure I thought through every transition that could happen. Also really nice to have a centralized place for this logic, and the machine can dispatch notifications, so other parts of the app can react as needed.
I've always hated the name, though I obviously can't argue against its efficacy. The Amazon river and rainforest are symbolically and literally among the most significant features of our natural world. Now, it's better known as the name of a company that can send us every kind of new junk to replace our old junk.
This was what I thought when I was an angsty engineer in early 20's, and I guess what motivated me to become a PM, where I realized it wasn't true.

Doing the PM job well -- being rigorous about the product, its goals, its strategy, customers, how it interfaces with the external world, and figuring out how to distill that down internally to empower your team -- takes as much intellectual horsepower as engineering. I had to stop writing code every day to realize how deeply complex and interesting the non-code world can actually be. A good example is the passage in "Superpumped" about how Travis Kalanik validated the idea for Uber with deep research. It's not just bullshitting through meetings.

I think the issue though is that, unlike eng, there is no obvious intellectual "floor" for PMs (equivalent of fizzbuzz for programming), so you've probably dealt with lots of bad, lazy, incapable ones.
Myanmar aerobics instructor dances to Indonesian “protest anthem”
Of course. Just view those strings as the output of the formatting backend for the terminal. The article is about terminal escape codes, not software modularization.
Jeff Bezos's Email to Employees
I've started to migrate to github pages. Does anyone know how it compares?
How to create space for creative thinking when working from home
I have some amount of sympathy for 'conservatives' now after reading through the lazy and careless reporting about GME. Lots of articles simplifying what is going on, trying to shove it into a 'common sense' or 'conventional wisdom' type of narrative, and just getting the simplest of facts wrong. And the outright propaganda masquerading as 'reporting' - i have seen some things that really ought to have been labeled as opinion pieces in very big block letters.

Most "Conservatives" may not be actual conservatives these days, but I get the frustration they have with the MSM that they have been complaining about when even the simplest or basic overview of their position is corrupted thanks to lazy biased journalists...

They may be wrong and entirely led by their emotions most of the time (and a lot are now becoming very delusional), but it is gaslighting to deliberately misinterpret someone's emotions or to not and try to understand where they are coming from.
> According to linguist De Mauro ...
Source?

Mine is here:
https://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lingua_italiana#Dal_latino_vol...
Explanation from Mike (The Document Foundation) [0]

>Why are we doing this? Well, please read the blog announcement to find out. But TL;DR: The majority of code commits in LibreOffice come from companies in the ecosystem around it. Many of them are finding it difficult to justify investments into LibreOffice, paying developers etc., while other companies/organisations/governments that use LibreOffice simply download it from the TDF website, install it and never contribute anything back.

>That's their right, of course, but it's not great for long-term development of LibreOffice. So by calling the version from TDF "Community", we're stressing that it only has community support, and businesses/large organisations should get LO-based products from the ecosystem.

[0] https://www.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/lblnfn/libreoffice_7...
That’s basically what TFA itself says.

“We know that when they’re on big, mainstream platforms like Facebook, Twitter and YouTube, extremists don’t just talk among themselves. They recruit. They join totally unrelated groups and try to seed conspiracy theories there. In some ways, I’d rather have 1,000 hardened neo-Nazis doing bad stuff together on an encrypted chat app than have them infiltrating 1,000 different local Dogspotting groups or whatever.”
Ultimate Ride
> Wouldn't you rather have it in a way that only doctors had access to it?

How is a blockchain the answer here? The "distribute all data" and "keep history forever" attributes seem actively bad for healthcare use cases.
The Cookie Settings link looks to be incorrect. I was curious what cookie settings would mean on a site from 1996.
> The obvious hypothesis as to why homicides increased while burglary decreased is people were home more and under a lot of stress.

In places like Toronto and London homicides decreased in 2020 while they increased in major US cities.
...there is no facebook replacement. You can't replicate social groups via software. Facebook is not anything special other than most people use it, so the network effects are immense.

You could have the greatest software in the world and it would not be able to replicate fb's markets and groups functionality. Craigslist is the only one that comes close for replicating fb marketplace.

If you want a small private blog, just host a single user mastodon or pleroma instance. That way you're part of the fediverse but maintain control of your own personal instance.
ya I 100% agree! naked options are much worse! i think the article was only covering less advanced instruments :)
No. Shorting cannot be faster than writing uncovered call options. They have the same exposure but the option has more leverage.
Hacker News is just Reddit plus a thesaurus.
Yes, labs are definitely helpful to do in person as well, even with just other students and a TA there. I think they would go under the category of "building stuff", so maybe I should revise 75/25 to 60/40!
About halfway down the code:

sub ProcessTemplateText {
local($text) = @_;
$oldtext = $_;
$_= $text;

# Truly frightening stuff

s/\[eval (.*?) EVALEOF\]/eval $1/geo;
$outtext=$_;

$_ =$oldtext;
return $outtext;
}
The very first thing in your list is literally a central authority.
CPU energy to CO2-emission converter – Weavy Think Tank project
How much CO2 does your computer actually emit?
CPU energy to CO2-emission converter - OpenSource project, work in progress.
Tangentially, JPEG was only two years old when that site was published!
Even beyond that, how often do you want to do business with / complete a transaction with someone who you trust THAT little?

I suspect there is a lot more trust involved in every day things than maybe Blockchain assumes.
How Billionaire Robert Smith Avoided Indictment in Multimillion-Dollar Tax Case
The biggest advantage to this category to technology is load bearing. Per My godson, he never went on patrol with less than 25kg hanging off of his body.

Perhaps they can have some level of immunity to penetration by 12mm + rounds. But this type of bullet has an insane amount of kinetic energy. So it is gonna knock the crap out of you and take you out of the battle, and you may not be effective again for the next battle. At less than 500m, you are probably toast after receiving a M2 round.
Amazing way to bond together with your team!
You know the constant stream of hot takes from this forum gets really, really, really old after a while.
Crystal Radio
The article, which is not paywalled and is a fast read, also doesn't mention cost. The energy and power density is closely correlated to physical size, so that's covered. The article does mention durability, but only in the context of the lab's testbench:

"The QUT team is pleased to note that these hybrid supercaps also last about twice as long as lithium batteries on the test bench, retaining 90 percent of their initial storage capacity after 10,000 full charge/discharge cycles."

The article keeps mentioning "lithium batteries" which I presume refers to LiIon/LiPo/LiFePO rechargeable batteries and not disposable Lithium batteries, but it's not certain.

Overall it's not a great article. Mostly a fluff PR piece for Queensland University's lab.

I'd still plead with you to read before commenting, especially something snarky and dismissive.
This is a great point.

It's why we made the business model is built into the core of the service and can't be easily changed. Obviously where there is a will there is a way, but it would have very significant consequences to the business to do so.
Storing contracts on the blockchain does seem a bit pointless. Smart contracts, OTOH, would actually enable new kinds of business if they can beade workable. That's a pretty big if, IMO, but in theory at least they seem like a valid use of blockchain.
this is a great point. have you read the Psychology of Money?
Love it! It turns out espanso is in the AUR for Arch.

I've just filled kate with dadjokes which isn't as sick as it sounds!
The issue with tracking physical things on the blockchain is that humans can lie to computers about the state of the physical world. Solving that with cryptography is attacking the wrong failing link; it’s actually a social issue and not a technical one.
I read that as written: fire everybody and start the whole show over from scratch.
Show HN: Feature complete Apache Kafka client written in Go
>no, "Community" doesn't mean that TDF is going commercial (it is and always will be a non-profit). No, we're not going to offer "Professional" or "Enterprise" versions. No, no features will be removed/limited.

see https://www.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/lblnfn/libreoffice_7... for more details
Mastodon has enabled an escape from the constant "Everything is political" and "Everything has to be about my cause" that has engulfed our culture. I think that is wonderful.
I wonder if they meant to write these "key takeaways" in context of performance, or generally? Taken on their own they don't sound too familiar vs why people usually decide to go with Clojure or not.

* "Clojure frees developers from the perils of writing concurrent programs, but at a price."

* "When concurrency is not a factor, consider using Java."