skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"Online Only- I don’t think there is a solution to this criticism, but not sure what the issue is."

The fact that I need to connect to some peer-to-peer network or third party service for every transaction is a limiting factor. It reduces the efficiency of the system and increases latency, and it adds additional points of failure.

In fact it can be solved for electronic transactions and there is a mountain of published research on the topic that dates back to the late 80s. Here is a recent research paper:

https://eprint.iacr.org/2017/1220.pdf

The idea is to ensure that users who attempt to double spend can be identified and penalized later (e.g. by being added to a blacklist; some systems actually ensure that all transactions in which the cheating user participated can be identified, so merchants who try to evade the blacklist can also be penalized). The money has to be issued by a bank under the security definition. If anonymity is not a requirement -- and presumably a Bitcoin enthusiast does not care about anonymity since Bitcoin is not anonymous -- this can be easily achieved by using ordinary digital signatures.
If you saw, for example, how deals that lock up fabrication resources (and the surrounding global politics) work to prevent competition, you’d see one small example out of many that illustrate how smaller competitors can’t keep up.

As for the rest of your comment, I am actually a HUGE FAN of vertical integration. But your connection is a non sequitur because a $100B company can do everything the way Apple does if and only if there isn’t a $1T company next door locking up every single one of the best chip engineers, industrial designers, worldwide supply of miniature CNC machines, & etc with golden handcuffs, trade deals, capital and etc that only a monopoly could afford.

Our theoretical $100B company would still have some of the greats. But right now, some ridiculous percentage of engineers and infrastructure are controlled by like 5 tech companies. It isn’t healthy for individual citizens, and it misses huge opportunity costs if you compare it to a truly competitive economy with enforced rules against monopolies or oligopolies.

It’s one of the truly rare situations where proper, concise and well-planned government intervention (in other words, laws!) could and should help.
To be fair... HELL YEAH
I recently ordered delivery from a highly-rated restaurant on Yelp. In the bag was a $10 off coupon for the next order if I left a 5-star review and sent them a screenshot. I reported it to Yelp, but to my knowledge nothing has changed. This is the state of online ratings and reviews today.
Still not a typescript fan here. It feels like a half-baked language because of the insistence of not having a runtime (even though some information makes it through to the underlying js...so this objection of theirs isn't total). In a usual typed language, you could extract the type of an intersection type using pattern matching. But you can't do that in typescript. Instead you get to pick the most relevant ugly hack for your situation.

Typescript feels like every one of its features has some catch, and it's very irritating.
The Haskell's Stackage people has some interesting discussions about this on their lists. (Caring about types too, obviously.)

TLDR, it doesn't change much, what means it doesn't create a lot of problems, but doesn't really solve any either. Versioning is a humane concept, and you can't solve it with pure tech, you'll always need guidelines and procedures.
In true Cthulhu fashion, after encountering it at a medical facility where the lead programmer bragged about how amazing it was, I bought a book on the language. I like collecting language books (Icon was fun), but that was rather painful to read through and I have done IBM JCL and found it not unpleasant.
There is also unevenly distributed cultural knowledge: anything less than five stars starts causing hassle for the driver. I hate this inflation but I also wanna make sure the person who gave me competent service that I would realistically mark as three stars - not bad, not great, job done exactly as specified and I'm perfectly happy with that - is going to get five.

(hassle varies: offered fewer/worse-paying jobs is a good start)
On the other hand,

> the environmental concern is just a cover for covetousness.

...is an insulting way to dismiss a concern without adressing it.
Remove the Cap and Discount in a Safe – Replace with a “Conversion %”
Maybe re-phrase the question - I ONLY trust negative reviews now. The key is to see how many people have negative reviews and then scan them.

Let's say I am interested in a BBQ Grill.

10 reviews about an open box/returned box? I'll probably go to a local CampingWorld and pick it up instead of Amazon and pay the extra $50.

4 people say the grill grate is bent but there are 1200 other reviews that don't seem to have a problem? Low chance I'm going to get the bent grill grate.

Things like that.
Although I love the cool features, I'm worried this could potentially exacerbate situations where students already feel like they're "being watched" while learning remotely (i.e. being forced to have their camera on constantly while in class). I could imagine some students feeling anxious about having to complete assignments on a platform like this, where every step of their incompetence (due to their nascent programming skills) is available for the teacher to see.
Although I firmly believe the tech is cool and useful, how helpful it is will come down to classroom policies.
>There’s a bizarre religiousity and post hoc rationalizations for some of the weirdest decisions in its design, and mistaking speculative mania and nominal price for success

This is a feature, not a bug. It is very difficult to change the protocol. We have a 100% certain monetary policy.

I agree with you that perception of what btc is and isn't changes with time.

If you have a proposal, you are free to create and propose a BIP, or fork off.

Good luck.
Nice try, Donald G. McNeil, Jr. :)
paper: Current Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation weakest in last millennium https://www.nature.com/articles/s41561-021-00699-z
Well that is what I was trying to illustrate. There is an authoritarian right ( e.g. Hitler ) and an authoritarian left ( e.g Stalin ).

It sucks if you're on the left or right and are more on the pro freedom end when someone drags up the authoritarian cohort of your respective side.

I'm right of centre ( pro private industry ) but anti fascism. I'm pro private industry because I don't like a concentration of power. So a mix of small government with the power to provide basic services and break up monopolies seems the best way to keep everything free. So slightly left wing social policies such as free medical care aren't my first choice but much better than giving the government more surveillance powers. So I think I'm further away from fascism than I am from socialism. Yet as I'm right of centre people throw Hitler is on your side at me.
> are we really to believe that McDonalds has a rating of 4.6 out of 5?

Why shouldn’t it? You know what you are getting with McDonalds. For the price point they sell at, it is pretty good food. They are consistent. And they do a really good job with food safety, probably better than a lot of more highly rated restaurants (when was the last time you heard about an outbreak of a food borne illness at McDonalds)?
> I'd actually argue that it was more of a threat to the authority of the state than Bitcoin is today.

If that is the case, then BTC certainly isn't going to end the US military.
Not enough to make it a serious problem. But then I'm neither a Puritanical moralist nor a "better 10 (or 100) good people starve than one bad person gets benefits", either.
I noticed that one of the sample amulets in the Amulet scratchpad ends with its 8s, and I was thinking that those that begin or end with 8s could have a special name, a bonus of some kind.
Will it be maintained, and whose fault that is, are separate issues.
SQL tends to be non-composable which makes complicated scripts really messy to refactor and modify (or read even). CTEs make it more sensible but they're also a rather recent addition and don't fully solve the problem. Data Science tends to involve a lot of modifying of the same code rather than creating one off or static scripts.
Some people are trolling Amazon, others not so much. The fact that a silent icon change was mentioned in many news sources is a sign of the audience those initial trolls had.
In answer to what appears to be a misunderstanding about Rust:

> Its foreign function interface seems particularly poorly implemented. The official Rust documentation suggests the use of the external third-party libc library (called a 'crate' in Rust parlance) to provide the type definitions necessary to interface with C programs. As of the time of writing, this crate has had 95 releases. Contrast this with Ada’s Interfaces.C package, which was added the language in Ada 95 and hasn’t needed to change in any fundamental way since.

Rust's libc crate isn't third-party, it's first-party, developed by the Rust project itself: https://github.com/rust-lang/libc/ . It's also not just for type definitions necessary to interface with C programs; here's the first heading and first paragraph of its README:

"libc - Raw FFI bindings to platforms' system libraries"

"libc provides all of the definitions necessary to easily interoperate with C code (or "C-like" code) on each of the platforms that Rust supports. This includes type definitions (e.g. c_int), constants (e.g. EINVAL) as well as function headers (e.g. malloc)."

The fact that this library contains low-level type definitions for every platform that Rust supports explains why it's had more than one release: new platforms get added, platforms add new interfaces, and platforms change the definitions of existing interfaces (possibly incompatibly, which explains why this isn't in the standard library).

> It lacks basic features necessary for the task, like bitfields, and data structure packing.

The latter is achieved via the built-in `repr(packed)` attribute (https://doc.rust-lang.org/nomicon/other-reprs.html#reprpacke...) and the former is provided by the bitflags crate: https://crates.io/crates/bitflags (while unlike libc this does not live under the rust-lang org on Github, it does live under its own org which appears to be populated exclusively by Rust project team members).
I've found that instead of looking for positive reviews I'll first search for negative reviews. Can't really trust the professional reviewers because they have an incentive to bend the truth. But you also can't really trust casual reviewers because it's so easy to game the system. Sometimes I'll look at places like Reddit for product reviews but you can't even really trust that anymore because more and more companies have started to understand the value of viral marketing on social media. So it seems like the only thing you can really trust are the negative reviews.
I haven't ordered anything from Amazon in over a year, for various reasons, but the general untrustworthiness is a factor. On the other hand, while the problem is particularly bad for Amazon, it isn't exclusive to them. It has generally become difficult to find reliable information about products. So I tend to stick with stuff I know, and buy direct as much as possible.
The problem is giving everyone a place to complain AND assuming their complaints are all valid just because they genuinely feel aggrieved.

The people who care about pronouns are less than 5% of American society. They are far wealthier, more educated, and more privileged than the rest of Americans, and there's no reason everyone else should have to tiptoe around in fear of them.
IMO, the energy requirement aspect is tragic because it scales. Even as we unlock greater and greater sources of power, Bitcoin will scale to take more and more energy. It's almost like a parasite for electricity.

Right now it's not so bad, but the trajectory is a real problem.
Humans are subject to time constraints in life, and sometimes, assuming bad faith is warranted.
Gyro-web: Accessing the device orientation in JavaScript
It was popularized at least as far back as eBay (albeit as a positive/neutral/negative scale). "Seller shipped me an empty box but at least there wasn't dynamite in it. A+++++++ seller."

I do think restaurant and product ratings are a bit different. With Uber, eBay, etc., a lot of people recognize that any less than perfect rating can lead to a personal impact on someone even if a small number of people leave a negative.

That said, many will leave good marks on satisfaction surveys because a middling mark may lead to someone reaching out to find out what the problem was and that can just be more hassle than it's worth.
Sounds more like HN users than like teenagers? No. Very much no.
The far left is still advocating these things. That's what makes them the far left. If you just lop off the extreme wing of the spectrum so you can call the mainstream left "far left", where does that leave the people advocating for democratic control over the means of production?
Any developers who want to help with the scholarly infrastructure that underpins scholarly publishing workflows (DOIs, scholarly metadata and related things), Crossref have a job opening. Speaking personally, it's one of those rare jobs that feels embedded in an important mission.

https://www.crossref.org/jobs/2021-02-08-senior-software-dev...

(but only open for a couple more days!)
I invited you to share your opinions one way or another on two topics that I believe largely have common ground, and I appreciate your responses on both topics. I don't think it's comparable for you to challenge me with a "loaded question" that inherently puts me on the defensive, based on assumptions and false premises that I can't challenge without escalating the conversation into an argument. Do you see the difference there?

An equivalent prompt for discussion on the topic of neo-naziism would perhaps be, "I believe that neo-naziism is a problem. Do you agree with me? Why or why not?" I'll happily respond to that.

I think neo-naziism is one of the many appalling and terrible extremist ideologies that exist in the world, and people that willingly engage in it are bad people. In the general sense, it's certainly a problem; the world would be a better place if neo-nazis didn't exist. Within the context of politics in the United States, it's hard to say that it's a genuine problem. I'm an American, and I don't know of anyone within any degree of separation that would be fairly considered a neo-nazi, or is afflicted by neo-naziism. I live on the coast, though, and so may be in a bubble that's out of touch with other parts of the country. From my point of view, I think the problem is more that neo-naziism is a label that has been weaponized by the political left to rally their base against the political right. It seems comparable to the political right labeling their opponents as similarly nasty things to rally their base against the political left. I think it's about as likely that neo-naziism is a widespread concern within the political right as much as it is likely that the political left has a problem with child eating demon worshippers. It all seems like nonsense that doesn't match reality.

I agree with you on GME that it's unfortunate if anyone created a financial hardship for themselves by investing when they didn't understand the situation. I also agree that government oversight that actually functions effectively within its purpose would be way better than what we have now. I'm curious what your thoughts are on cryptocurrencies like bitcoin? I personally hate them, mainly for the environmental waste that proof-of-work algorithms create, but also for the blatant disregard for the majority of the world population's traditionally accumulated wealth.
The core operating principle of Bitcoin is to waste energy. That's what "mining" is: wasting electricity to find useless numbers, such that the hash of each block starts with a certain number of zeros (a useless task).

This silly task (called HashCash https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hashcash ) was chosen not because those numbers are somehow important to the algorithm or network, but rather as a way to slow down the rate of block creation: forcing people to waste energy on finding these numbers, in order to have their blocks accepted by the network.

It is important for bitcoin's security that the block chain can only grow slowly, since conflicts (like double-spending) are resolved by choosing the longest chain; if someone makes their own block chain that's longer than the main bitcoin chain, the network will switch to that and any payments on the previous chain will be forgotten. Using HashCash to slow down block creation makes this harder to pull off.

The difficulty of the HashCash task (the required number of zeros for the next block's hash) changes depending on how long it took to find the last block, such that it always takes about 10 minutes to find a block, regardless of how much energy is spent on this task, or any technology improvements (e.g. CPU vs GPU vs ASIC). In other words, wasting more energy on mining bitcoin, or making more efficient bitcoin mining hardware, will not find blocks any faster; the mining task will become harder to compensate, so it still takes about 10 minutes per block.

Bitcoin allows transactions to contain a 'fee' with a blank recipient, and each block can also contain a small payment 'from nowhere' as a reward/incentive. Miners create blocks which send these fees and rewards to themselves, then try to solve the HashCash task to make the block valid. Whoever solves it first sends their block to the network, it gets accepted as the longest chain, and hence that miner has received the fees and reward.

Miners can't make more money by solving HashCash faster, since it always takes about 10 minutes for a block's HashCash to be solved, at which point everyone starts looking for a following block (since that will form the longest chain), which may be even harder to find. Instead, wasting more energy on mining makes it more likely that a miner will be the one who finds the next block; since, on average, someone performing X% of all mining will find X% of all new blocks (and hence receive X% of the fees and rewards).

This creates a competition between miners, to try and waste more energy on HashCash than each other. This race-to-the-bottom breaks even when the energy wasted finding a block costs the same as all of the fees and rewards in that block; i.e. when all of those wasted megawatts are being spent for literally nothing (net).

There are other ways to slow down the creation of blocks, or to resolve conflicts which don't incentivise long chains; other cryptocurrencies are experimenting with such things.
I trust them a bit less these days. Seems that at least some of their products are pay to play.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25993512
> (e.g. people wasting hours trying to write a "function" that takes an enum and outputs another enum w/ a fixed prefix...

Metaprogramming shouldn't suck so much that this takes hours.
> If there are more units then there are renters, prices have to fall to meet demand.

Not if it's so cheap to keep empty apartments around that you would rather not make money now, in the hope that you will be able to make more money in the future.

It's not exactly the same, but around here there is a huge oversupply of spaces for shops/restaurants. Owners prefer to keep them empty rather than have someone give them money.

EDIT: Well, maybe it's not actually oversupply. There might actually be a lot of demand, but not at the excessive prices landlords demand.
EDIT: To be honest, knowledge of the hash of a block can be used as a proof that something has happened AFTER a particular event (similarly to a picture of a hostage with the newspaper).

But you can't prove that something has happened BEFORE a particular event using Bitcoin hashes.

Also, this "feature" is unrelated to Bitcoin being a cryptocurrency. You can have cryptocurrencies without "global time" (e.g. NANO).
Roam has plans for offline-only storage.
I disagree with the author on that.

Yes, SQL is nicer for structured queries, sure (“KQL” in Kibana is sort of a baby step into querying data stored in Elastic).

But in Kibana, I can just type in (for example) a filename, and it will return any result row where that filename is part of any column of data.

Also, if I need more structured results (for example, HTTP responses by an API grouped per hour per count), I can pretty easily do a visualization in Kibana.

So yes, for 5% of use cases regarding exposing logging data, an SQL database of structured log events is preferred or necessary. For the other 95%, the convenience of just dumping files into Elastic makes it totally worth it.
No working email in your comment or profile. No link to the github project.

Could you help a hiring manager out please :)
Maybe it's because I am not in "the Valley", but this line of thinking makes absolutely no sense to me. You are speaking in generalities, so you are essentially implying that most people are working on software that has not achieved product market fit?

How could the majority of people collect a salary working on software that has no users? That makes no sense.
> It's no mistake that I've come to rely on brand name again.

Big +1 here. Brand name is a core part of my decision making process at this point. Otherwise, I'm relying on word of mouth. Occasionally, I'll use some of the more "reliable" independent review services.
Actually, I can tell you that their original strategy was to have exclusive listings. Last year because Compass had so many agents, they were able to "preview" listings on their site days before MLS. Their hope was that this edge would attract users into using Compass to search for listings over RedFin/Zillow/etc. Fortunately, this practice was banned and they no longer have that card to play.
It takes a lot of mental and emotional capital in the creative process to produce something that is truly wonderful. Microsoft is systemically incapable of approaching creative perfection. Very few are.
For the same reason anyone chooses products created in any other country. All countries can force the companies to share data hosted in that country to companies which operate in those countries.

Zoom is banned as a result of marketing efforts of competitors like Microsoft and Google. I have worked in companies which have either Microsoft products banned or Google products banned.
Ask Venezuelans and Iranians.
I'm a "free speech absolutist", meaning: you can't be imprisoned or physically attacked for what you say.

HN is a private space. It can have its own arbitrary acceptance rules, and that has nothing to do with free speech.
I'm doing that lately -- very gradually and slowly, but I'm doing it.

I've had enough of today's slow buggy messes that require gigabytes of memory and two CPU cores to show me a splash screen for 10 seconds.

A lot of the TUI apps I stumbled upon seem really well-done.
Tons of Amazon vendors pay for reviews. Either a direct offer ahead of time (buy this product, give it a 5 star review, we pay you via PayPal), an offer in the box (give us a good review and we'll give you a free product!), or in response to a bad review (delete your review and we'll give you a refund). This is expected behavior now on Amazon. Amazon doesn't ever seem to penalize these vendors as they keep making Amazon money. They will, however, ban customers from leaving reviews once they have engaged in this. And prevent users from posting reviews mentioning things like receiving counterfeit products (had this happen to me).
I agree with the sentiment, but there needs to be some degree of leeway.

For example are server logs considered tracking? It seems unreasonable to require that logs not be kept.

Edit: On further thought, I don't even know that tracking should be banned. Instead, I would argue that advertising in the way enabled by tracking should be banned. That way the incentive is removed with less bureaucracy.