skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
All these recent events involving censorship and left aligned tech companies eerily reminds me a passage the Unabomber wrote in his manifesto back in the 1990s.

"
Some leftists may seem to oppose technology, but they will oppose it only so long as they are outsiders and the technological system is controlled by non-leftists. If leftism ever becomes dominant in society, so that the technological system becomes a tool in the hands of leftists, they will enthusiastically use it and promote its growth. In doing this they will be repeating a pattern that leftism has shown again and again in the past. When the Bolsheviks in Russia were outsiders, they vigorously opposed censorship and the secret police, they advocated self-determination for ethnic minorities, and so forth; but as soon as they came into power themselves, they imposed a tighter censorship and created a more ruthless secret police than any that had existed under the tsars, and they oppressed ethnic minorities at least as much as the tsars had done. In the United States, a couple of decades ago when leftists were a minority in our universities, leftist professors were vigorous proponents of academic freedom, but today, in those of our universities where leftists have become dominant, they have shown themselves ready to take away from everyone else's academic freedom. (This is "political correctness.") The same will happen with leftists and technology: They will use it to oppress everyone else if they ever get it under their own control.
"
Why I use the D programming language for scripting
Vue3 Textarea
chris poole offered a strategic answer to this question in 2010: https://www.ted.com/talks/christopher_moot_poole_the_case_fo...

terse: anonymity + ephemerality.
If you're a newspaper, you can choose how to write the story. You could go “oh, turns out the Untermensch are inferior, but don't look too hard at my evidence” or you could instead say “we found systematic discrimination again!”.
The messy business of sand mining explained
No.

But I, personally, am biased against hiring people with only Java on their resume. Because 90% of the time what I've encountered are people who haven't examined their technology choices, questioned the status quo, tried to -improve- things.

That's not a sleight on Java, per se, but it is against anyone with only one language on their resume. It's just that if there is only one language on a resume in web dev land, it's almost always Java.
I haven't had any issues with website compatabilities in Firefox for at least four or five years. What were you encountering?
Subjectively. Clearly bitcoin users get something useful or they wouldn’t use it, no?
Thought Space vs. Reality
Israel: Pfizer vaccine prevents 98.9 percent of Covid-19 deaths
"While I'm on the topic of concurrency I should mention my far too brief chat with Doug Lea. He commented that multi-threaded Java these days far outperforms C, due to the memory management and a garbage collector. If I recall correctly he said "only 12 times faster than C means you haven't started optimizing"." - Martin Fowler https://martinfowler.com/bliki/OOPSLA2005.html
Technology is just a tool, or not ?

By a tool, i mean, we still use boring algorithms (which exist long before the tech is born to adapt it efficiently).

So, boring tech or not, it's not the point, as long as it serve your purpose.
> "right now there is no "better" use for that electricity than bitcoin."

That's just not true. The higher the price of Bitcoin, the more incentive there is for miners to outbid other energy consumers.
> is that right now there is no "better" use for that electricity than bitcoin [...] the best option for the collection of arguably the most brilliant minds that have ever walked this planet is to work for Google, trying to get people to click more on ads

That's more about the fact that it's not measured in terms of dollars and shareholder return.

Would it be beneficial to have this electricity being used for other things or have those engineers do other things than optimize an ad click factory? Probably, we could use this electricity to have cheaper power for lower income households, or those engineers could work on improving other things.

But the market doesn't necessarily pay for those things, and if the system is geared towards optimizing for more dollars, then the only one gets is more dollars with all the non-priced externalities dumped onto the society at large.
It doesn't need to be, Apple is building that app. In fact, they already have it on there, the only notable holdout for the centralized progress/search functionality is Netflix. Hulu, HBO Max, Disney+ and Prime are there already.

https://www.apple.com/apple-tv-app/
This is my go-to: http://extremelearning.com.au/unreasonable-effectiveness-of-...
We sure do! We've had server outages/maintenance, vacation travel with a self-imposed no-distracting-technology policy where we still wanted to do family movie nights, and of course as gifts. We also limit the children to our own library, but they do not have unfettered access at night, so if they want to watch something in their room to fall asleep to, they are allowed 1 or 2 discs at a time.

We've got philosophical/psychological issues with the unending smorgasbord of streaming services, so the children aren't allowed to use those alone for the most part. They have full access to our family library, but they often prefer the discs for some reason. (Our oldest has a DVD she watches frequently and refers to it as "retro".)

We've got external SSD drives with our favorites (since a few server-downtime left us wanting something more convenient—we keep most of our 3+ year old discs in a fireproof safe), but new stuff is often watched by the kids on disc.

And before you ask, no, the safe isn't "for the discs". It's just large enough to have plenty of room for them in CD cases, and that's a pretty reasonable backup in case of disaster. Not sure I understand why some of our friends happily show off $80,000 worth of Blu-rays or $100,000 worth of vinyl in their living rooms. I'd hate to have to recreate our collection, so why bother if we can easily protect it?
The Springfield plant is cheap to operate compared to real reactors though. It would cost only $56 M to bring it up to the latest safety code.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Springfield_(The_Simpsons)#Spr...
> Full PoS decentralization does not exist yet.

How do you define "full PoS decentralization"? That sounds a bit no-true-Scotsmany.

> Sadly, the complexity (rube goldberg) of PoS far outweighs the simplicity of PoW.

Yes, and the huge energy usage of PoW far outweighs the zero energy usage of PoS. That's the tradeoff.
I simply hear to proponents' testimonials.

So far, the prevalent stories have been about servicing people living in countries suffering from hyperinflation, which is just as easily done with a foreign currency.

Another common point is the promotion of smart contracts. It seems to me that these tools are still anecdotal, and don't really provide a significant competitive advantage compared to standard contracts. Besides, cryptos not using pow and incorporating good tooling are much better suited for that.

The decentralized nature of the ledger is another common selling point, but proponents don't really tie it to a material benefit.

Other impacts, usually not really promoted are its support to illegal activities such as digital racketeering, money laundering, etc. For instance, the financial aspect of ransomware is usually supported by this technology.

If you feel I have missed some impacts, feel free to point them out.
Cemeteries are also an incredibly inefficient use of space.
I have yet to see a maintainable Java project of any reasonably large size, anywhere.

Java programs are larger than those in other mainstream languages, just by dint of the verbosity of the language (and research backs this up; studies showing errors per LOC are consistent regardless of the language).

Ergo...
If you have a shitty job then it's really hard to get the experience you need for something better unless you invent problems. That's why making things way more complicated than they need to be is actually a good thing.
That doesn't make any sense.

USDT is issued by Tether so if it is used by Binance, Binance would have had to buy it, assumingly from the fiat that went in.
I am aware of the US Navy's nuclear engineering program but it's likely not capable of producing enough nuclear engineers for future needs, I expect.
I'm not disputing that landfills aren't really a big deal, I'm disputing the claim that we aren't running out of space.
Society can regulate whatever it wants. Usually it can attempt to make some sort of justification but the justification can be fairly flimsy (as the marijuana regulations have proven). So sure, society can regulate crypto, as the US Gov already has attempted to do.

For the utility of decentralized currencies, it's best you get information from more than an Internet comment. Which sources have you used already?
I'm doing technical interviews.

There is such a shortage of people that know the basics of programming, that selecting for such l33t skills is out of the question.

The hiring process right now is not about selecting the best, it's about selecting those that pass some low bar.
I hadn't seen greaterwrong.com, and was hoping that it would offer counterarguments to articles on lesswrong.com, but it's just a summary of it.

I get frustrated by articles like this because they focus on second-order causes instead of first-order. I don't know how it works overseas, but the main problem in the US is that schools are funded by property taxes from state and local governments instead of the federal government (which only accounts for less than 10% of funding):

https://www2.ed.gov/about/overview/fed/10facts/index.html

Which means that public schools are a magnifying glass for issues like discrimination and wealth inequality that the whole country is wrestling with. Want to know why schools in the south side of Chicago are doing worse than schools in Beverly Hills? There's your answer. Full stop.

Until we fix that nationally, expect more of the same.

What's the solution? To me it's very simple, but unfortunately we need some kind of consensus on this, and that's not going to happen until people start reaching similar conclusions when presented with the same facts. But we're more polarized than ever.. so.. let me offer an analogy instead:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tower_of_Babel

America is quite strong in certain areas (finance, the military, etc) but so weak in others (education, health and human services, etc) that we've become vulnerable. Look at Texas right now: the fossil fuel energy capital of America (maybe the world?) unable to keep the lights on as its citizens slowly freeze to death. Look at the US response to COVID-19 as hundreds of thousands of people die unnecessary deaths because we weren't brave enough to quarantine long enough. If that stuff isn't biblical, I don't know what is.

No, these problems are not due to failings at the personal or local level. They're systemic, national and cultural.
No, see my comment history for more discussion on this. The entire toolchain would have to be forked to support other typographical styles, and without a domain expert willing to dedicate years to ongoing curation and maintenance of the corpus, it's a dead-in-the-water attempt. There have been many attempts to fork SE to a different language and AFAIK I've never heard of them again.
Are you talking about the COVID simulation ?
As serious as any other country from what I can tell.
Which is what I said, that is my point. That everything else is becoming so unattractive, that is the problem.
After working with Lean for a while, I've started to appreciate that there is a wider range of what it means to be constructive -- being "fully constructive" seems to me to be like fanatical efforts to make everything X, for example "everything is a function" or "everything is an object" and so on.

In the Lean approach, anything not marked `noncomputable` in the Type universe and above needs to be constructible, in the sense that there is a program that can compute such an object using a functional programming language (where the function is guaranteed to terminate), but proofs don't need to be constructible in the same way. Proofs are still functions, but they're free to use things like the axiom of choice in the course of a proof. The way things are set up, even if you use non-computable things while making your inferences, this "forbidden" data will not leak out.

It seems eminently reasonable to me that you can argue a program computes the correct thing because it doesn't compute the wrong thing, and unless you're specifically studying different toposes/logics, I'm not sure what constructive logic would really give you (and it's not like mathematicians slavishly keep track of where they used the axiom of choice or its consequence the LEM).

How this all looks in Lean practice is that it's stronger to give a definition and prove it satisfies a property than to prove a "there exists" statement. mathlib authors tend to go for the first, unless the result is inherently noncomputable. There's also a facility for lifting propositions up to boolean values, which more or less amounts to giving a constructive proof -- this is used pervasively, for example with finite sets, which are constructive in the sense that if you have one there's an actual finite list backing it.

I guess in short: it's a useful middle ground being able to prove something exists without having to construct it, but if you want to "have" the thing that purportedly exists you need to construct it.
An 8 minute video that claims to be comprehensive is a bad sign. After he spent the first minute explaining the same thing 3 times (that being which decade he's talking about), I gave up.
RFC 5321 is ambivalent of A vs. AAAA. When discussing the matter, 5321 says "A or AAAA RR". It later says about IPv6 that "The appropriate actions to be taken either will depend on local circumstances." When I re-wrote Gmail's DNS libraries about 6 years ago, I wrote it to start with AAAA and fall back to A. So if you have an MX and AAAA records for those names, you should notice all your inbound from Google comes via IPv6.
Sand is basically a non-renewable resource.

Things that need sand as a raw resource (silicon, glass, concrete) generally need specific types of sands for each of those, and there's a fine amount of each type—and it's created very slowly.

'Piracy' and theft are a big issue:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sand_theft

* https://www.theguardian.com/global/2018/jul/01/riddle-of-the...

* https://www.wired.com/2015/03/illegal-sand-mining/

A good book on the topic is The World in a Grain by Vince Beiser (ISBN 9780399576447)

* https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/537681/the-world-in...

* https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/36950075-the-world-in...
Yes and no. You can't blame individuals for culture issues. If independent thinking and action is discouraged (or even punished) then it's not going to happen. In fact, without recognition and reward most positive behaviours will fade away.
“But How Do I Start?” Making Games on Your Own as an Engineer
It’s a great game to play with people you no longer want to be friends with
I'd be interested to learn more about this. Will you contact me when your blog post is live?
Some of us use it for watching legally recorded OTA broadcasts.
That's from 2018. Apparently there was a crash around 2019.[1] A boom might be starting again.

[1] https://www.seattletimes.com/business/technology/sunday-buzz...
I'm not arguing that it has never/will never happen in America. I was trying to be careful with my wording, eg "more legitimized." I think that a place where healthcare is government funded is more likely to accept decisions that other places consider overreaching by the state.

My underlying point is the power dynamic between a government and its people, and the argument that a government "providing" more things increases that dynamic in the favor of the government. This makes any decisions related to that dynamic more legitimized.
Looks like this goes back to the days when Internet with TCP/IP was not yet the only option and when there was also other networks available (Chaosnet). [1]

For the A records you can different classes of addresses. Nowadays we are using the "IN", but the spec also supports others like "CH" (Chaos) and "HS" (Hesiod).[2]

MX record points to mail.example.org (A-record). mail.example.org could then point to two different addresses in the different networks, using the different classes. Depending on what network the client is connected to, it can request specify the class in the query and get address on the correct network.

I guess they could have baked this in to the MX records as well, but that would have made it more complicated.

Disclaimer: Just googled this up.

[1] https://serverfault.com/questions/663112/why-cant-mx-records...
[2] https://serverfault.com/questions/220775/what-does-the-in-me...
I’ve been thinking about The Machine Stops a lot since the start of covid, it’s wild that it was published in 1909.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Machine_Stops
rare earth metals etc.

The rare earth elements are the lanthanides plus scandium and yttrium [1]. None of these elements are needed to manufacture solar panels. The only rare metal used in quantity by solar panels is silver, which is used to make electrically conductive pastes for cell contacts [2].

The question of what resources solar panels require is deliberately muddied by a couple of vested interests.

1) Junior mining companies and their promoters who want to create the impression that vast wealth awaits the next rare earth miner. (It doesn't. Consumption is too limited. The market value of zinc alone eclipses all rare earth element production combined.)

2) People who are playing up the environmental impacts of solar to make the fossil fuel status quo look better by comparison. "Sure, coal is a dirty mining business, but so is rare earth production!"

These people either don't know or don't care that solar doesn't use rare earth elements.

You also have credulous people who just repeat what they heard from members of groups 1 and 2.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rare-earth_element

[2] https://www.pv-magazine.com/2020/08/28/slimming-down-on-silv...
I've always valued making over "commenting," but that's in the way that it was written in that piece.

I worked for a Japanese company, and one of the classic Japanese aphorisms was "Don't complain, unless you have a solution."

Sounds good, huh?

Until you start to see some of the "solutions" proposed by folks bereft of Clue. As the representative "maker," I was expected to become a wizard, and magick a whole bunch of miracles on the spot. Since there were often "Make it so, Numbah One" types in the audience, I was sometimes directed to "make it so," even if the laws of physics said otherwise.

Luckily, the Japanese managers were generally engineers, and knew the issues, but not so, the Americans.

Sometimes, a complaint is quite valid; especially if you are a stakeholder. It can also be extremely valuable to makers. I often say that kudos feel great, but negative feedback is required to improve. A steady diet of negativity stinks, but nothing changes, if no one is aware of the problem. Challenging people to "shut up until you come up with a solution," when they want to tell you that the system is returning wrong data, is a very, very bad idea. I wonder if any Citibank employees had complained about that transfer screen, and were told to "shut up, unless you have a better idea"?

Speaking of commenting, I've found that a great way to get correct information, is to confidently state some incorrect information in technical forums.

I get set right, PDQ. ;)
Which is exactly what the OP's point is, ie

if the price of Bitcoin is high enough == there is no better use than to mine Bitcoin
Inside SimpliSafe Alarm System
Sorry, but the above argument is really a poor one.

Just because there’s “no better” use for that electricity (which I disagree), does not justify using it up on bitcoin mining. This is like saying it’s morally permissible to do A because if you don’t, someone else will.

Not to mention conflating “the best use of X people’s time” with “who is giving out the best compensation in a society where we need money”.

The mainstream view -is- positive of Bitcoin. Very few people are actually concerned with the environmental impact.
Innate recognition that delegative statements cost nothing might be the aversion to middle managers (so often anyway)?
I'm quite flattered that you think[1] that I am one of the best minds of our generation, but I would disagree with your assessment of what the most difficult projects at Google are.

[1] Mistakenly, in my self-assessment.
On the one hand, we have the biggest crisis to ever face humanity, where all of our lives literally hang in the balance and daily we're seeing the effects from wildfires to cold blasts.

On the other hand I ate a delicious burger.

What's your point?
Bitcoin? Sure, you can make any number of additional forks of btc with a different cap -- hell, dogecoin is a fork of bitcoin with no cap at all.

But it won't be bitcoin.
That's actually what I'd call Elixir. "Excitingly boring". Built atop a runtime environment that is 35 years old, battle tested, and built for reliability in distributed and concurrent environments, but feeling like a modern, expressive language, with clever ideas that most other languages don't have.
My internet journey started with getting into long protracted arguments with others online.

Eventually I started to type out comments, give them a read, and decide that either nothing would come of the conversation/argument, or worse, I would find myself in a flame war. I'd just delete the comment and move on.

It's been years since I've really written anything substantial online. Simply not worth it these days.
Do you want to send people email?

Then you'll need to be liberal in what you accept.
Characterizing people who take a nuanced stance as denying science, and then disregarding the things they say is a bad path to take. If he's said things that are untrue, call them out. If he's said true things that you think imply he believes untrue things, you should make an effort to change your model to one that incorporates all truth.
This is directed more at your approach than it is in defense of Shellenburger, but I'll happily read rebuttals of his points in replies to this comment if you or others are so inclined.
It's true that cheap cards were available when bitcoin crashed in 2018. I'm not arguing that cheap cards weren't available. I'm saying the feeling that cheap cards are a huge positive for the gaming community is missing the forest for the trees, and forgetting the pain of what happened before there were cheap cards. Cheap cards came around eventually long after the cards had been unavailable and waaaaay overpriced. It was a relief for gamers that the bubble popped, but on balance, it was not a good thing that they had the bubble.
I don't know enough about UK history, but was the king also expected to provide for the people? In that case, I would argue that my power dynamic argument still applies. In other words, a king that provides is seen as having more legitimacy to the people over one that doesn't, and so their decisions are more willingly accepted.
Why the US sucks at building public transit
Getting to Xanadu: https://mimix.io/en/blog/xanadu
But if you look at what "eating the forbidden fruit" was meant to symbolise, i.e. self realisation, then it does speak to the point made by the first poster. Once you have theory of mind you realise that other people have it different experience than you do; some better some worse.

So then you could argue that happiness then comes from meta meta cognition; other people have it different from you, but you don't always realise the problems those others have. You come to the realisation that you can't control everything; you change what you can to make things better, and accept what you can't.