skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I find it very hard to read. The reason is that it almost completely lacks demarcation between different things.

Expressions should be readable in a single flow. Lisp breaks that.

For example:

(+ (* 5 3) (* 3 2))

This is not easily readable because there are breaks in the "flow".

You need to go like:

* `+` is going to add things together

* oh, there's a nested expression here, pause...

* `` is multiplying 5 and 3 - cool, back to the previous thing.

oh, another nested thing.

* `` is multiplying 3 and 2 - back again...

done... so where were we?

Here's how a readable expression would look like IMO:

(5 * 3) + (3 * 2)

This reads very naturally:

* 5 times 3 - 15, ok go on...

* nested expression... hm, ok.

* 3 times 2 - 6, let's go back now...

* ah right, 15 + 6 is 21... done.

Alternatively:

5 3 * 3 2 * +

* take 5 and 3, multiply: 15

* take 3 and 2, multiply: 6

* add them together: 21

Which is what FORTH does. This is almost perfect, but a little hard for humans to follow (though this is exactly what machines want to do) because you still need to keep the stack of values in your head.

I've been studying about this and came up with something in the middle:

(5 * 3) (3 * 2) +

This has the advantage that you the distance from the values in the stack to the point of reading when going left-to-right is optimal: there is no better way to represent this if your objective is to avoid intermediate values.

It is similar to FORTH, but optimized for humans to read instead of machines:

* `5 * 3` is 15.

* `3 * 2` is 6.

* `+` the values, which are 15 and 6: 21.

The parens are not required if you use some alternative syntax to mark boundaries, for example:

5 * 3 >> 3 * 2 >> + ;

The `>>` is used to "pipe" the value to the next expression, while `;` is used to terminate the expression. This also has the benefit of showing the reader the direction of the flow.
I think this is a very bad comparison, for several reasons.

1. With the Apollo missions, the money being put into the project was going into research and development, so there was at least some expectation of getting new science and technology out of it. With Bitcoin,nthe money put in is going into speculation or mining, which only fuels the network. There is no reason to expect new technologies to come out of this, and certainly not any new science.

2. The Apollo project was a big consumer of money, of which there exist plenty in the world and we can create more. Bitcoin is a huge consumer of electricity, the production of which is generally accelerating global warming, the single biggest threat to our survival as a civilized society that has ever existed in history.

We already know that Bitcoin itself is not even remotely close to being a solution to the problem you're thinking about (decentralized money), even IF I agreed that this is a real problem (I don't, I believe Bitcoin is going in the wrong direction compared to fiat money). You could make a decent argument for investing in developing scalable crypto coins, maybe Ethereum or maybe something else, but proof-of-work crypocoins and Bitcoin in particular are an obvious dead end, and can be decommissioned entirely without much loss (especially if the bitcoin holders were compensated somehow).
It is a waste of energy how you can even argue against it is bonkers.
People actually use Bitcoin - to transfer money across the world where other options are unavailable or too expensive. It's very popular in Africa.
I like Iota a lot. Decentralized, no fees (to get a transaction validated, you validate others) low energy requirements, lots of industrial partnerships. About to get smart contracts a-la Ethereum, but without the out of control costs for transactions.
Even for those that do, a network capable of handling maybe a few million transactions per day while consuming more energy than many small countries is so obviously useless in that regard that it should be abandoned entirely.
Bitcoin is the first generation blockchain. It has it's weaknesses. Ethereum the second generation. Watch out for the third. Little resources, low fees, more secure. Little hint: a few days ago we had the Ouroboros paper on the front page.
Why People Quit Their Jobs
My thinking behind this idea is that the sentiment of the author of this blog article is becoming more and more prevalent. Over the coming years pressure on bitcoin’s legitimacy will increase. To get ahead of this movement I propose to miners worldwide to create their own climate change accord and do this voluntarily. All it needs is a consensus to do so.
> There is no reason to expect new technologies to come out of this, and certainly not any new science

Proof-of-stake coins are one obvious counterexample. Would proof-of-stake technologies have been developed if proof-of-work didn't come along first to incentivise development and build trust in cryptocurrencies?
Error 1007 Ray ID: 61dcb7959ef9b7e7 • 2021-02-07 11:19:39 UTC
Access denied
What happened?

The owner of this website (blogs.bl.uk) has banned your IP address (xx.xx.xx.xx).
It seems to me that changing the environment to manipulate human behaviour ultimately creates stress (in a very literal sense), which is likely to undermine the goal.
Towards Syncing Factual Data Across Wikipedia, Wikidata and Other Sources [pdf]
Conceal Malicious Actions From Detection by Imitating User Activity (2020) [pdf]
I would claim that such structures are imaginary, not structures at all, and the whole field is a sect (a socially constructed movement based on sectarian consensus which regards "knowledge" of details of abstractions, which does not make any sense outside of sectarian contexts).

Let's talk the most basic algebraic laws. Yes, there is indeed no difference in adding 2 apples to 3 apples, or adding 3 of them to 2. The question is from which pile to start, and the result is the same. (Multiplication, being just repeated addition, is also obvious - there is really no difference which side of a rectangle comes first).

Notice, that there is still a fundamental connection to reality. Adding C to O has exactly the same properties. There is no difference which comes first.

The identity element is more tricky, because nothing of this sort existed in nature. Nature has distinct start and stop sequence, and does structural pattern matching in the literal sense.

So, we would superimpose an element upon reality which lacks it, the same way as it goes with zero. Let's say, that trying to add what's can't be added (by physical properties) produces no change to the original element, and it is equivalent to addition of a zero.

Generalising this noop we will get something similar to identify.

1 for multiplication, is natural , while an identify matrix is an artificial construction.

Okay, this is all common sense. The important thing that there is literally nothing deeper than this shaky generalisation which we call monoid. First, because only addition and multiplication are "true monoid".

Protein production by an enzyme is almost it, but no identity.

There is no identities outside your head. A list is a monoid because of added '() - the empty list, which, again, does not exist anywhere. There is no such thing as an empty DNA sequence, empty molecule, etc.

I could go on, but maybe you already see where it goes. Everything is imaginary and too abstract to have any applicable, meaningful context.
But it’s clearly headed there. Unlike bitcoin, Ethereum has sufficient resemblance of governance to actually pull it off.
There is no point in talking about the temperature of a single atom/molecule, but it is an important statistical property of a group of molecules with unique “features”.

The sum is more capable than each of it’s constituents. You could argue that a hyper-intelligent entity can explain everything due to temperature by the simple movements of atoms but that is not true, since with temperature, we can reason about a system we know only one property about, while the said entity would have to know every detail about every atom. In other words, we created a new thing that could not have existed alone.
(Perhaps it is not the best example, but there are countless others :) )
> In order to find out if their suspicions were true, Dr. Singh and his colleagues took an iPhone 12 Pro and passed it over the chest of a patient with an implantable defibrillator.

Surely that couldn't have been the first step in the investigation?!
> It's very popular in Africa.

Source? Africa has mPesa which is vastly superior than BTC
I'm a fan of bitcoin, but there are clearly serious environmental detriments, and i see it ultimately becoming another regulated entity (it's already happening in india).
There's a second order effect IMO: people put specialized resources into mining it. Thus people have a sunk cost. In general, people also have a sunk cost fallacy which means that the sunk cost will stay into the object/subject it was sunk in.

Due to the sunk cost fallacy, Bitcoin has more value. I know this means I'm relying on the irrationality of humans, but why wouldn't I? It's more predictive than assuming humans will be rational with regards to this subject.
We Still Need Feminism
This seems like a possible explanation of the recent trend away from choices of screen finish.

Not sure why Apple would do this though, since they largely compete with themself.

Another annoying aspect of screens is not bright enough during bright daylight and not dark enough in darkness.
I'm no fan of Bitcoin, seeing the project as essentially coopted and sabotaged, but I see this 'green' criticism as totally baseless.

As I wrote a couple weeks ago:

If you want to take a Puritanical attitude, any luxury product/service can be argued to be wasting resources that could be expended on essentials. In other words, its alleged lack of utility doesn't provide a justification for destroying or banning it. It's up to others to decide how to spend their resources.

If CO2 emission, and its negative externality, is specifically the problem, then the principled position is to advocate that production of all non-essential/luxury products/services use non-CO2 emitting energy inputs.

Unless the measure is agnostic to what category of non-essential activity it targets, you'd just be singling out cryptocurrency, because it's not a non-essential that you personally believe is worthwhile enough to pollute the environment in order to produce, unlike say gaming, and the massive amounts of energy that gaming GPUs use.
Does this a actually solve it? It should only sum when the character next to is the same as the previous. a is counted twice: ([a, 3], ... [a, 1])

While I agree that such interview questions are bad, they also give the interviewer a view on how the interviewee attempts to solve a problem.

Edit: typo
During my life as a vegetarian/vegan I regularly consume “fake meat” products because they are simple to prepare and allow me to use recipes that are not vegetarian. For example, it’s extremely hard to find a good vegetarian burger — the beyond burger was a revelation the first time I tried it. I still like burgers, even though there are many wonderful vegetarian dishes. I didn’t stop eating meat because I don’t like the taste of meat.

Imagine that many of your favourite dishes, those you grew up with, were suddenly unavailable to you because some ingredient no longer existed. If a new ingredient hit the market that was not quite the same but was a convincing substitute in taste and texture, would you consider it silly and avoid it?
Scarcity is the important thing here. Making Bitcoin hard to compute increases their scarcity.
The amount of work that was put in, does not directly drive the price.

The point of "Marxist" labor theory, is that you shouldn't pay workers less, than the value of what they produce. I don't think Bitcoin miners ever made that claim, unionized and found their class consciousness to get paid the real value...
.. but should instead increase austerity, cut social programs, and raise taxes?

Besides, the seignorage revenue is pretty tiny in western economies..
You would still need a lending infrastructure outside of bitcoin to handle the economy, and then it would be trivial to return to fractional reserve banking with bitcoin instead of dollars. As long as people don't all call in their debts at the same time, which would be catastrophic either way, the system would work with bitcoin just like it works today (if bitcoin weren't so ridiculously slow and expensive to register a transaction, that is) .
“Myth of Normal”
So you know a lot more about metals than I do. I wouldn't have caught that at all:

Bronze is an alloy consisting primarily of copper, commonly with about 12–12.5% tin and often with the addition of other metals (such as aluminium, manganese, nickel or zinc) and sometimes non-metals or metalloids such as arsenic, phosphorus or silicon. These additions produce a range of alloys that may be harder than copper alone, or have other useful properties, such as strength, ductility, or machinability.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bronze
But why are people willing to exchange something of value for it? Because they can trust in it serving as a secure way to transfer tokens of ownership. And that is only possible thanks to the PoW computations, which have to be expensive enough that attacking the system would be more costly than the value you could extract through an attack.

So, in a sense its value indeed derives directly from the work put into the system. Which is not to say there aren't alternatives (I'm really curious how Proof of Stake will change the Crypto landscape), but at least for BTC, that's how it is currently.
Just in case you're still looking for the file - here it is on a public webserver: https://innenausbau-steiner.at/wp-content/uploads/2020/07/me...
But that's exactly the best way to reduce global warming, minimize consumption.

Obviously to minimize consumption you should cut away the things that provide the least value for the highest reduction. So for example turn of lights during the night in empty buildings is much better than using renewable energy to power the lights.
How does low-power electronics get deactivated by a magnet of modest strength?
The Airr podcast app works with Readwise as well
There is fundamentally no way to reduce bitcoin or blockchain energy consumption, it is the very thing which enables decentralized trustless transactions and the quality required implies a minimum power use. Everything else uses authority in one way or another, and is vulnerable in ways btc is not.

Reducing energy use for environmental reasons is ridiculous, the sun gives plenty of power and we have fissile materials to last for many millennia. The problem isn't power use, its power production, which requires global enforcement of carbon emission laws.
What+Temperature+Is+Considered+To+Be+A+Fever+|+Health+Lines
> Calling out the BTC network on its energetic inefficiency completely misses the point that the work put into the network is exactly the scarce digital asset, and hence the store of value.

Why would that matter? The problem is the huge amount of greenhouse gases getting released because of this store of value. Whether it makes some economic sense or not is irrelevant to the discussion of whether it should be allowed to continue on environmental grounds.
> These cardiac devices have switches which respond to an external magnet to change how the device functions. For a defibrillator, a magnet can be used to turn the device off.

> “Obviously, we can’t perform surgery every time we need to control one of these devices, which is why they are engineered to allow us to use strong magnets over the chest to control their function,” said Dr. Singh.
Bitcoin already went to the moon and back.

We learned about blockchain, we learned cryptocurrencies are possible. Now it's continuing to burn tons of rocket fuel for no further benefit... Saturn V served it's purpose, there is a good reason we don't continue building rockets this way. We learned a lot from Bitcoin, critically, we learned it is _not_ the solution to a sustainable decentralized digital currency.
I would argue that being cheaper would be a positive selling point, rather than a negative one.

Consumers know that producing meat takes a lot of time and effort, and is therefore expensive. They also know that vegetables are much cheaper than meat.

Personally, I'm not going to try an Impossible Whopper if it costs more than a normal, meat-based one, because in my mind it should be cheaper, and I'd feel like I was getting ripped off by excessive margins.
Remember to star the gist if it is helpful to you ;)
Also soot that decreases the albedo of snow. On a smaller scale this effect is also readily visible in just about any city that gets snowfall, especially in the spring!
I don't know that the rich are above-average in lacking empathy or compassion. Though there does seem to be a correlation between wealth and ruthlessness, which isn't exactly the same thing.

However, when we see bad behavior from the rich, like the Koch brothers, their wealth amplifies the bad behavior and it seems to have an outsized effect upon the world.
*Not actually stronger than glass.

(Like every article where a new material is "stronger than X")
Power over other people is intoxicating. It attracts those who value it over virtue, and the virtuous reject it.

For their wicked thirst for power, some will do anything. In our age there is an unholy alliance between the worlds greatest power ever and its military industrial complex, where the incentives for government leaders is to wage war in strange faraway lands, and to bribe the population at home with dependence on the state, in exchange for votes. This is all funded by printing money - inflating its supply. In effect, this is devaluing the salaries and savings of anyone who earns their living, and who can not do anything about it, as they are forced to trade in this currency created by fiat.

By creating Bitcoin, Satoshi took gold to the internet, and we can now trade in a currency which no one can inflate to fund wars, or to in essence steal productivity from every earner.

A sound system of ethics must contain the right to ownership of your property - you body, your money, and other possessions. Bitcoin practically gives us this in the Information Age.
Its also popular as a means to withdraw resources from dictatorships, basically improving private property protections at the expense of state ability to control their population.
I think Alexander's ideas and patterns are very lean processes instead. He see what's the terrain like, what's the use like, builds a bit, and reevaluates along the way. He even explicitly have drawings rendered 'for regulation' but changes it after it's built.

Context: I'm assuming Alexander here refers to Christopher Alexander. He has authored books related to identifying architecture patterns with 'liveness' in them, from the very small to the big scale. I think a lot of his ideas can be applied to software too and even really matches up with Extreme Programming. I recommend reading The Nature of Order for the fundamentals of his ideas and how it fits with the world. I'll refer to him as CA in this comment.

I think it's the overspecialisation of roles and the 'waterfall' aspect of the engineering that normalises this. The architect don't (or can't) verify whether their designs work along the way. CA once described a story where he needs a constant feedback with the soil engineer for the start of the project but his request is denied by the client. The client wants the engineer to start and finish his survey first and then for CA to receive the reports only. CA ended up declining to work with the client due to that. As with Software Engineering/Development, there are questions that only surfaces when we do a part of the building, and can't be predicted. This is why the continuous feedback is important. I'm not sure whether the architect in your case _can_ come back to the site and direct the constructors against the drawings, even if the later directions are more suitable to build.

It's a bit weird that now we're taking missed plans as the default, when the Empire State Building (and NYC skyscrapers of the time) ran ahead of their schedule, with Lean principles by focusing on constraints and workflow instead of planning the minute details: https://chrisgagne.com/1255/mary-poppendiecks-the-tyranny-of...

I'm afraid that a lot of churn in Software Development also comes from a similar overspecialisation, overplanning, and the wrong kind of feedback loops. 30% of costs wasted seems like the better end for software. The difference is that building physical buildings has happened for thousands of years and there is a lot of history to compare with the current day. Software has at most 100 years of history, and currently it's still very much the wild west and every team is trying to stumble upon a process that is sustainable. This doesn't even count that a lot of developers see themselves and the job differently, and the organization also sees the Tech/Engineering team differently.

This comment is more of a rambling than a coherent thought, but I thought I'd get it out there. I'm sure I'm not the only one feeling like the current Software Development process is a mess. There has been good efforts (Extreme Programming and agile, not branded Agile) and current good effort (Basecamp's evangelism of their work process and the Shape Up book) to carve a sane way, but it needs to be the normal practice instead of the contrarian view/practice.
It is very interesting to read how Hesiod defined the extinct species (size, anatomy, behaviour, etc) almost 3000 years ago and contrast it with modern research
As a European who had to deal with getting a medical devices approved both in the EU and in the US: mad respect for the FDA.

There is lots of paperwork required on both sides, but the difference is who accompanies the project. In the EU it's bureaucracts with zero domain knowledge, in the US it's domain experts who asked the right questions and were strict, but also genuinely helpful.
A list of modern C++ related resources can be found here:

https://github.com/rigtorp/awesome-modern-cpp

The list includes some powerful yet not excessively large libraries from which one can learn including:

https://github.com/skypjack/entt

https://github.com/taocpp/PEGTL

https://github.com/fmtlib/fmt
Speaking of the devil, this popped up a few hours ago:

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-02-07/a-swiss-c...

Can't find anything else about it. Hopefully there'll be a paper soon.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25981373
"Calling out the BTC network on its energetic inefficiency completely misses the point that the work put into the network is exactly the scarce digital asset, and hence the store of value."

That's no excuse for the obscene waste of resources.
It's not revolutionary. For almost every use case, blockchain solution are almost always inferior to the alternatives. As a payment system, it's sluggish, wasteful, and in 2021 STILL poorly adopted.

I'm not arguing anything about the current system of doing financial transactions. But the environmental disaster that is BTC has to die.

If there is truly a need for innovation in the digital currency space, it should be replaced with something less wasteful. Too bad all the pundits and hodlers are too invested to admit this.
[ x ] Make provocative statements about the uselessness and wastefulness of Thing A without real evidence. But make sure to at least link to some source that provides the illusion of evidence.

[ x ] Recommend Thing B that claims to solve the problems of Thing A. But you probably forgot to mention that you have a financial interest in Thing B succeeding.

[ x ] Finish with unclear call-to-action that requires others to take insane financial risks to support your made up "movement" (e.g shorting Bitcoin - great way to lose infinite money).
Have a look at Cardano Ouroboros: "An environmentally sustainable, verifiably secure proof-of-stake protocol with rigorous security guarantees."