skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> It feels like yet another injection of politics into what was previously a tech-focused website.

So, I've had an an account here since 2012, and was a reader before; this kind of comment is older than my presence here, and, if it ever existed, so is the time that HN was a politics-free tech-focussed website. [0]

Political issues, especially tech-adjacent ones or ones that aren't inherently so but which are raised directly in the context of tech issues, have been a major subject here for a very long time.

You are free, of course, to start your own tech discussion site with a firm no-politics (by whatever standard you want to delineate “politics”) rule, if you like.

[0] EDIT: except for a planned-as-brief-and-still-abandoned-early experiment.
In a sense yes. Science cannot prove things to be true, but falsification is conclusive. If observations are 100% accurate you can definitively falsify things and conclude that something is false.

The same cannot be said for proving something to be true.
That's all fine, but the argument isn't that BTC has some use case. The argument is that BTC has some use case that is so valuable that the combined value of all BTC should be in the tens or hundreds of trillions of dollars.
I honestly don't think that either BitCoin or CryptoCurrency in general _can_ be reformed. The whole mess is a complete write-off.
Why I Don’t Like Pigs (Probability × Impact Graphs) in Security Risk
I assume comments like that are from people who are conflicted by the fact that if their head weren't so far up their ass they would have entertained the notion enough to at least acquire a few bitcoin, but because it's now too late it's better to celebrate just how far up their ass their head is.
When I read your above post I assumed UK (flat) but then when I read the rest of your comment I wondered if you were living in the US but this confirms UK.

I’ve never had any issue buying decent quality building materials and fixtures and fittings across 2 full house renovations. There are things to avoid from all of the big name stores and brands that are targeting the cheap landlord market but in the main I’ve had no difficulties finding good quality parts at reasonable prices here.

Most of IKEA is rubbish with one exception, kitchens, far better than B&Q, wickes and Wren - probably not as good as Howdens but far better than would be expected I feel.
Optionality
Yep, I'm a firm believer in using TS pragmatically. Type the obvious code (React component props, API responses, function arguments), and start by aiming for an "80% sweet spot" of type coverage. Don't get into arguments with the compiler, and avoid writing really complex types unless you've got a key spot in your code where adding that type now makes it a lot easier to infer types in other places:

https://blog.isquaredsoftware.com/2019/11/blogged-answers-le...
I don't have the courage to have a deep conversation about everything you're talking to, I'm just going to give a different perspective on a couple things (disclaimer: I'm talking about leftists and non-conservative like they have uniform opinions about these things. They do not, it's mostly my POV that I know to be somewhat common):

> Liberalism is not merely valuing liberty, and wishing a high degree of it

The idea that "liberalism is about more liberty" (or something we often hear in France "the left values equality more, the right values liberty more") is something is disagree with _so much_. Liberalism is about laissez-faire, jungle law, survival of the fittest. That means the powerful/rich are very free, the less-powerful are free within the bounds set by the powerful: they have to work long hours in stupid jobs and their whole society (laws, means of consumption, social benefits) is set by the powerful. In effect, almost nobody is free to do what they want, only to do what they manage to get resources for (which is often not much). Being a "wage slave" is just one aspect of it.

You're talking about the French Revolution, which is an _excellent_ example of an uprising of the working class that's been subverted by the bourgeoisie. The bourgeoisie set the foundation of liberalism on the back of the people's uprise and continues to reap the benefits, the ideals of the revolutionaries most definitely were not aligned with liberalism. We see this again in the second French Revolution, then with the National Council of the Resistance whose ideals and achievements have been deconstructed by decades of liberalist policies.

> Wanting a locality to remain more like it is and retain its character is a desire for a good, it's not an evil thing

I think it's probably the argument that non-conservative struggle the most to argue against, because it's something that's simply not important to them. They just wave it away, because having their locality remain like it is is not particularly important to them. It's not _not_ important, but it's very secondary to making sure that the people's condition (both in this locality and outside of it), ie their rights/freedom/outcomes/wellbeing, is as good as it can be. I personally find it hard to think that one can morally think otherwise, but moral is a very personal thing.

And _in addition_ to having different values on what's important (human's condition versus the locality staying the same), I also believe that more than enough diversity is created, and we need more diffusion of it rather than less. I think the biggest threat to diversity is not people moving across borders, it is global corporations flooding local markets (Americanism is an obvious example, Chinese manufacture flooding Africa is another).

> Biology's the same, animals become different to cope with environmental pressure and we celebrate this. We rightly think it's a richness.

I abhor the very notion that because something is "natural", it is a good thing for society. Especially when we're in the realm of metaphors and analogies.
It's always fun when somebody decodes some long-lost letter or set of hieroglyphics or whatever and it turns out to just be some boring business stuff. People have been putting up with terrible bureaucracy forever, turns out.
Ask HN: Best Books for CTO
Hi HN,

I don't have a CTO position yet, but it's my career goal.

Have you an excellent book to read about how to be a good CTO?

Thanks
That's just Hanlon's razor (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanlon%27s_razor) in action. I have edited my post to correct this omission.
I just have to point out that your comment reads to me like you are crying wolf.

However, I'm not a US citizen so I don't follow the situation closely.
It's a bit silly that people fuss over go package path names.

Any non-trivial app would use a preprocessor to manage the import lines.
This problem was solved 40 years ago.
This is such an interesting marketing strategy, I had never thought of selling B2B production infrastructure under the aesthetic of, “Can you believe this shit actually works?”
Adding to the list:

- Simple gallery

- Openboard for keyboard

- KDE connect for sharing files and controlling your PC
Show HN: A realtime classroom coding experience optimized for distance learning
OK, now we are talking.

And we've also just proven my point together as well: so many people have been calling ordinary people nazis that when someone actually bring nazi symbols and colours to the convention I refuse to believe it. (And yes, I will check more sources before I claim this happened.)

Edit: read and reread the link. I couldn't find anything to connect the Republican party and all those flags? I specifically searched for "convention", "party" and "stage" based on your comments but I saw nothing relevant.

Now English is not my first language but are you sure you gave me the correct link, and if so, can you point me to the smoking gun?
Too late to what? Forcefully distribute it as it sees fit or else put you in prison or harm your family? If you keep using it in secret it will never be mainstream.

Physical force is the strongest currency on Earth. Arguing it’s not is arguing millions of people die for entertainment rather than shifts of power.

If Bitcoin is the revolutionary future millions will die on that hill to make it so.
> ...I can't help but wonder if you guys should collaborate with Tailscale...

I imagine a merger! Tailscale's mission is to "simplify the long tail of software development", and coincidentally, fly does just that (if only for server-side apps right now).
On iOS you can disable animations - it's buried in the Accessibility section but it totally works.
Which downsides can they run away from? They pay for maintenance, property taxes, and so on. And still pay a premium over that.
From below in the comments: https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:DwqXp6...

They seem to be under a court order to at least fulfill their contract obligations until the dispute is resolved.
There are also trustless ways to do that. Bitcoin's Lightning Network does exactly this in trustless way, and it's feeless, instant and private. Every "Lightning bitcoin" is cryptographically backed by real bitcoin. In the end, all transactions are settled on the Bitcoin main chain.

Then there are centralized credit networks backed by Bitcoin. Paypal and Visa (with a custodian / bank) already provide this, in combination with a seamless exchange to local currency that is accepted by the merchant. For custodians, it's possible to algorithmically prove reserves, so that every user can verify that their "bitcoin IOU" is backed by actual bitcoin, but no one currently provides this afaik.
Agreed. A senior engineer should know when they don't understand something and keep an open mind about it rather than rejecting it outright.

If this article started with legitimate reasons for not wanting to adopt TS it would be different. "It is hard for people to learn" is actually a legit reason but "I don't understand it" is probably not!

That doesn't imply all new things are good or that senior engineers need to understand all new things either. I think there is some confusion about this.

Skepticism !== reject everything without grokking.
Came here to say exactly the same. I would add the capacitative touch screen as another crucial factor that made the iPhone UX so popular.
> What if it was the only way to defund the US military?

What if the moon were made of cheese?

I don't see any connection between the growth of BTC and the shrinking of military budgets or the reduction of warfare.
Could not have been the only one :)
And input lag (eg. local, mouse-to-screen lag) gets you before that.
yeah that’s true.

Most people are searching for definitive truths. The problem is it doesn’t exist, and science is the closest thing it.
>Bitcoin is onto something

What if it "was"?

The "hate" people express against bitcoin especially here on HN is often towards the implementation. People clearly see the flaw in PoW if they are not emotionally attached to it because they have no money at stake. You should not misinterpret that as hate because they missed the train to richness.

Objectively PoW does not scale.
Objectively we have DLTs (blockchains) with Federated Byzantine Agreement (FBA) instead of PoW/PoS that can do everything Bitcoin can and more without the most severe downsides that come with PoW/PoS.
The future will probably bring even better tech and if we learned something from the past then its that better solution always take over the old worse solutions.
Bitcoin ultimately has to fail because its not a system that could be upgraded. Its most fundamental core properties are intentionally not changeable.
Your point could be truth in theory, and/or in the future.

However, in practice, it seems that it almost works the other way around.

To mine on BTC, you cannot enter the game with 10$ to your name. You can't buy a mining rig, it is way too wasteful to mine on your existing CPU, etc.

However if we look for example at staking in Ethereum, there are decentralized (no trust required) pools that allow you to stake however little amount of ETH. The chain itself will require at least 32ETH to run a single meaningful staking contract, but through pooling this is directly practically accessible to anyone with even small amount of ETH.
It scales to crazy numbers as you add nodes in 2018 CloudFlare was ingesting 11M rows per second into their CH cluster
But you don't have to feel guilty over every "injury". Sometimes the "injured" party just needs to stop being offended, apologizing to them would just encourage them. Consider homophobes and transphobes: Apparently the public existence of LGBT people somehow hurts them. Should we apologize to them? Hell no, that would only validate them.

Here we have a similar, if weaker situation. People just need to stop confusing using and mentioning the word "negro". Or was it "nigger"? I really don't know.
To answer that question you have to make assumptions about the cost of mining, the cost of attacks and the cost of hash power at a point 117 years from now. But we know in the future hash power (technology) will be cheaper and thus bitcoin security will be cheaper, while bitcoin will be more valuable (or non-existing — it has to be either or).

Also remember if you have wealth in bitcoin you would likely mine at a loss merely to secure your own bitcoin.

I can’t imagine mining going away.

I think every appliance in a household will end up mining a little bit and it will be intrinsic to the fabric of the economy. The way the internet is now.
If you are working on the server side, ts-node has been a huge timesaver. It removes the extra step of compiling and lets you just run your script with `ts-node script.ts` or even `#!/usr/bin/env ts-node` at the top of your file works.

https://github.com/TypeStrong/ts-node
Mailspring (https://getmailspring.com/)

It's the only one I can find that works across Windows/Mac/Linux that is pretty fully featured. I do pay for the Pro version but mostly to support them than for the added features.
Make more money by selling used books on Amazon FBA
> very few people complaining about censorship are complaining about enforcement of rules against actual hate speech.

Citation needed. But honestly, it doesn't matter because it doesn't change the fact that this is the libertarian ideal situation. The government is not mandating anything. All "cancel culture" is created from private individuals making their own private decisions, and that includes corporations banning anyone they like for any reason. It's right there in the name "culture". No one is required to do anything, it's just that it's an advantageous decision at the cultural level to do what most people want.

Any suggestion that there is a problem with this is in contradiction to the libertarian idea of free speech.
Big business style CTO or Silicon Valley style CTO?

Startup or enterprise? Technology play or product play? Consumer or commercial? Front end or platform or infrastructure?

Regardless, you need a framework for thinking about technology and the jobs to be done, no matter which dimension you’re interested in.

This is the ticket:

Technology Strategy Patterns
by Eben Hewitt
October 2018

Technologists who want their ideas heard, understood, and funded are often told to speak the language of business—without really knowing what that is. This book’s toolkit provides architects, product managers, technology managers, and executives with a shared language—in the form of repeatable, practical patterns and templates—to produce great technology strategies.

Author Eben Hewitt developed 39 patterns over the course of a decade in his work as CTO, CIO, and chief architect for several global tech companies. With these proven tools, you can define, create, elaborate, refine, and communicate your architecture goals, plans, and approach in a way that executives can readily understand, approve, and execute.

https://www.oreilly.com/library/view/technology-strategy-pat...

https://smile.amazon.com/Technology-Strategy-Patterns-Archit...

With that in mind, you can then absorb any other book recommendations that may come from this thread, with a solid context and framing in which to map and understand them.
You have many severely fundamentally misunderstood ideas about Bitcoin.

Bitcoin is "money" and not a "currency." Bitcoin works very wonderfully as money.

Bitcoin is not very wasteful in energy, contrary to the pushed narrative by those that want everyone to believe this is truth. Bitcoin uses a tiny fraction, currently around 7-9% of the electricity that the global banking system currently uses. Bitcoin uses a very large portion of renewable energy sources, and will continue to balance it's energy use towards efficiency and optimizations.

Your part 2/3 etc, it's not a currency. Bitcoin is pure money. We also do not really ever use gold for currency. It is money. Bitcoin is a better money than gold. Once you stop drumming on the wrong path, you'll more easily understand the differences and stop banging your head about how it's a bad currency. It's not a great currency, while it is the very best form of money.

Your whole bit about meandering into defending it's value as currency or store of value, is just highlighting your total misunderstanding of the value of gold, or the new digital version of gold as money. Money IS a store of value.

Lastly, Bitcoin really has no fundamental problems. Nobody that knows about bitcoin gives a flying fuck about the price.
Two points:

1) As programmers we're biased to feel like speed is the most important thing because it's very fun and satisfying to optimize. In reality, for actual users, it's one of many different axes of value that have to be weighed against each other. In some domains it's critical, in some it matters very little, in most cases it's one important factor among many.

2) There are different types of "speed". Generally anything that's supposed to mimic something physical - basic UI feedback, real-time games/simulations, etc - has a much higher speed requirement than some abstract process. Will the process take long enough that it makes sense to show a loading spinner at all? Then the user probably won't mind waiting a couple extra seconds. Will it take <500ms? then the user will approximate it to "instant", and will notice if there's a bit of "lag".

> Phones in 2007 had the same features as the iPhone. The Palm Treo even had a touch screen. The difference was speed.

If the original iPhone had taken twice as long as the Treo to load a web page, but the touch screen was still more responsive, people still would have perceived it as being "faster". The extra seconds matter less than shaving off the extra milliseconds.
Post-millennial Nazi paranoia is truly emblematic of our need to cling to a (righteous) hatred. I mean, who can defend Hitler? No one! So we're all free to feverishly, obsessively rail against the evils of Nazism! But really we just want to guarantee our negative outbursts won't be reality-checked.

Americans liberals have reduced Nazism to the status of comic-book villain. Why is it American liberals are more obsessed with Nazis than Americans were in 1946?
Its far better than it was 10 years ago - JS hate is wielded here by people who haven't used it in years. Unlike C++ the language has changed (definitely for the better). I don't even particularly care much for it but the people who will sit here and lambast it while staunchly writing C++ as if that language isn't in an even worse mess is pretty silly.

I know your take is balanced but others in HN loveeee to hate JS just because they think its what they are supposed to do.
Alcohol didn't apparently threaten to end the authority of the state.
That's fair enough. I think we agree that there needs to be a balance between the weird evangelism of new tools (I literally have psychological damage as consequence of previous experience with a Medium-obsessed CTO) and the cynicism I often see when it comes to those same new tools.
If Linux is bad and insecure, what was the point of your comment?
Pretend that someone is really reading and trying to understand for a moment ;).

What do you see in Cardano that makes it a poor candidate for a future blockchain? Governance? Functionality? Algorithms? Investment?
I suppose the HN software changed it and the submitter didn't notice (or didn't care). It happens silently after submitting, unlike the "13 too long" message that blocks submission.

Many of those rewrites are benign, even good, many others are stupid and infuriating.

Unfortunately there is no way to have yourself declared to be a "well-known submitter with a history of not editorializing or outrage-optimizing submission titles" and get this thing switched off.

In this case there have been so many discussions and submissions about the American with Disabilities Act that it sounds plausible to be such an automatic rewrite.
Using synthetic biology to engineer Turing patterns in the lab
This is the only commenter in this post mentioning Cardano, so I wouldn't characterize it as a trend.

Don't worry, HN comment sections will be filled with indignant nocoiners for years to come.
LogSeq is great, tried collaborating with them a while ago, starting with a shared spec, but it didn't work out. How much of this is standard is up to the tool makers!

All features are possible, especially given similar technologies. The question is about design/product - whether we need to have all these features. Most notetaking apps are too bloated IMO.
Global study: the world’s worst internet is the least affordable
Yes! This person gets it.
It's not NFTs you don't understand, it's art
Two irrelevant niche forums banning you does not make an argument.

Go to /r/conservative and say “I support Biden” and you will be banned within a minute. Does that mean liberals are being brutally silenced by oppressive moderators and therefore we have no choice but to helplessly become radicalised by racists?
Less-nonsense page showing the before/after image:

https://nitter.eu/alexhern/status/1366396140116131842
I think the more pertinent question is, if they all halted what they are doing for an indeterminate amount of time for other people to get it, would the world [in future] be a worse place? And how?
This isn't too far off from the point that David graeber makes in debt: the first 5000 years
> Look what happened to Sergei and Yulia Skripal in UK?

The UK is Russia's poison playground so in this instance it would seem that realistically no one is safe, even if you reside in a democratic country. But then again these were people with major clout or enemies of the state.
RESTful API for Malware Unpakcer
On the contrary, bitcoin mining operations can be sniffed out by their impossibly outlandish power requirements, like pot growers used to be.

Increasingly, mining operations have to make special arrangements with entire power grids to suck up their energy and basically just burn it in arbitrary calculation. The scale at which this operates, and the increase over time, are both what makes up a lot of the problem, and what makes it impossible to hide.

If you'd prefer a world where people value bitcoin BECAUSE due to its unpopularity and externalities, governments resort to drone striking such operations when discovered, all I can say is: well, that solves the energy wastage issue, as blown-up ASIC farms aren't good at burning energy anymore. Maybe it solves the constant devaluation against energy cost issue, too! But I think you're missing the point and looking at only the end product of the industry.
Adding the web to our iOS app with React Native
I love Ada, unfortunately it’s real world use seems to be relegated to old legacy code. I’d like to use it a little more on the side, but I also need to keep my priorities focused on realism, which sadly means ignoring Ada and learning something like C++ which seems unapproachable from any angle.

Ada also seems to have a weirdly negative rep in many circles it seems. I recall looking around for an Ada compiler for a moderately popular platform and came across and old thread where people didn’t give any options but instead just joking about how the OP was interested in such a terrible language. Maybe it’s the Pascal/Algol type syntax?