skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I recall a few different attempts to connect vehicle-title-like rights to physical artwork using the bitcoin blockchain. One of them was being worked on by a partner at a hedge fund that invested in Gliph.

I also remember some startups attempting to assign music licensing using possession of some secret connected to a public ledger.

I had a family member refer a colleague who taught continuing education courses for insurance agents ask for information so he could speak to the potential future of insurance contracts being done on-chain.

These are all examples from years ago, and included some form of the key characteristics of NFTs as described in the article: non-interoperable, indivisible, indestructible, verifiable.

NFTSs seem put an emphasis on the items they secure being purely digital.

I don't see NFTs as a new idea but possibly consolidation of pre-existing ideas into winning standards, (ERC-721 and ERC-1155 potentially), and perhaps generalized buzz around bitcoin and crypto.

Consolidation to a standard, endorsement from perceived sources of authority and a way for new people to still "get rich" in crypto might elevate this to something that goes the distance.

But I'd expect a lot of folks to be burned in the meantime, "investing" stimulus money on things that go to zero.

Anecdotally, when I was evaluating Clubhouse, one of the major detractors of the service was how much emphasis the communities put on scammy get-rich in real estate or other seedy business ideas. There were a lot of groups on NFTs and that was a few weeks ago.

I'm most interested in how digital assets created on the fly on someone's phone can be quickly secured to allow fluidity in the transfer of rights.

People are capturing more and more important events first hand. However validating authenticity, ownership and authority to license that content seems kinda messy right now.

I suspect NFTs could play a role in standardizing assertion of rights over content, it doesn't have to be deliberately created but rather by chance.

A more fluid market for opportunity-based "stringer" content is teased at in Neil Stephenson's "gargoyles" of Snow Crash.

I don't know if NFTs will be the vehicle for this but something like them will be, and whatever that system is will probably consume these more shiny "assets" appearing so far.
ITER is, as you say, slow, over budget, and had delays, and never promises ever to deliver one solitary erg of energy, commercially viable or otherwise; yet it is planned to consume all fusion research money well into the 2050s, and with delays, beyond. FIRE would have failed more spectacularly, and then the gravy train might have dried up.

To say a fusion program is "rooted in nuclear weapons work" suggests it is meant to produce results of interest for weapons, but that is wholly unnecessary. The connection to weapons work is more tenuous. An ITER physicist has no job prospects besides either ITER or weapons work. Without a stable of ITER physicists, who would be available to hire for weapons work, whenever it pops up?

I think James-Webb has a telescope built and waiting to be scheduled for launch, so there's that.

SLS certainly is a fake project. I will go on record, here, forecasting that SLS will never launch one solitary astronaut. It never had a purpose to exist other than to maintain employment in a sufficiently wide variety of Congressional districts. The planned "lunar station" had no reason to exist except that it was the farthest SLS could get to. Once Starship is flying, in a year or three, even the US Congress will find it difficult to continue funding SLS.

Most fusion startups, like 90+% of startups, are about diverting VC money into ready pockets with no expectation of return. Principals of startups are mostly unaware of their role in this dance.
We can play this game, sure.

The vast majority of cars on the road today have more than enough horsepower and can handle being redlined.

Most users have enough RAM unless they're running on some absurdly low 4GB< device, which is just nowhere near as common these days.
Isn't that how life works?
Life expectancy is strongly influenced by economy of residence/birth. Australians live 4-5 years longer on average than citizens of the USA and 1-2 years less than citizens of Japan.

Life expectancy is also influenced by ethnicity. And smoking rates and treatment in hospital and exposure to economic benefits and harms..
I think it's both. IMO we are in a mania and this will ballon before it comes back to reality. After that it will just become "normal" and perhaps a de facto standard for "digital ownership". The applications are broad, and I'm not sure of the lasting value of individual "collectible" NFTs, but the world is on the cusp of embracing what it means to "own" a non tangible good, and that's really interesting.

Full disclosure: I do sell art as NFTs on one of the curated platforms, and I do get to benefit from the current "mania", but I'm not one of the big name artists, to me the whole NFT thing as it pertains to art is more like patreon. It's a way for folks to support artists they like and to have a (non physical) piece that they can show for it at the end of the day.
Of course the nation as a community of people in 1b also includes the government, but you can hardly say the nation understood in this sense is hostile. What you can say is that the government is hostile - we have proofs of that. We can also say that some minuscule percentage of the population is hostile - we can see some evidence of that. But to say that a nation is hostile is really crossing a red (no pun intended) line.

I'm discussing this apparently insignificant issue ad nauseam only because repeated conflation of government and citizens in discourse, media, and ultimately our minds are not without consequences.
Yes for various periods of time there were various efforts to construct such an identity, to serve various ends of the people doing so. This kind of process has taken place all over the world, throughout history, in various societies as well.

In the case of "white", "black", "brown" and so on, those definitions also changed considerably over time. Then, at some point, the efforts to intentionally draw hard lines around petered off and lost support.

Those labels are still used because they do have some kind of descriptive capacity, even if solely because of momentum from old habits.

Crucially: none of this is responsive to my point. There's no good reason, today, to assign "white" to mean "prejudice + institutional power" in a general sense. It's not necessary to do so. Doing so is not sufficient to address and unpack all the dimensions of prejudice and institutional inequality as they take place today. But doing so does incur all the imprecision-based racist harms that I described in my post.
A few years ago my friend dropped their Macbook with mission-critical info on it, and they took to the Apple forums to see if there was a way to retrieve the data on it. A few hours passed and a couple community members echoed the "no, it's impossible" sentiment. The next day, I woke up to check the thread and found it was deleted. According to my friend, someone outlined the exact process of recovering data from a Macbook SSD in the replies, prompting the whole thread to get removed an hour later. I heard horror stories of things like that in the past, but I never knew it was that bad.
No. Absolutely hard disagree.

To give you an example of this working well:

In some countries(UK) regulators recognized that you cannot operate in the society without a bank account. So a rule was made that a bank cannot close down your bank account without a court order. They can block your access to nearly all other services, block all of your cards, but at the end of the day, you cannot lose access to your basic bank account and money in that account unless a judge says otherwise. The solution to the problem of "every citizen needs a bank account to function" wasn't "let the free market sort it out". It was to force banks to maintain access to a basic checking account no matter what until a court order is given.

In my opinion, Google should be forced to do exactly the same - no matter what, you should never lose access to your google account without a court order. It might be placed under severe restrictions(no new uploads, restriction to storage etc) pending review, but until a lawful court agrees that you broke the rules somehow and google is free to kill your account? They should be forced by law to keep providing their service.
They're both legit and mania. Yes, you can cryptographically own a token that represents the first tweet. Is it worth $2.5M? Not really. Some rich kid is just showing off and wants to make news. You could say that the value comes from the stupidity of it. Art is not very easy to understand or value objectively.

NFTs may have real applications in enabling markets for intellectual property like copyrights, patents, and what not. For example, it would be possible to automatically stream money to one or many NFT copyright holders from a decentralized Spotify. It is also possible to tie NFT in smart contracts, so that the owner is able to call special functions or change the state in the contract. For example, if an ad spot on a website is controlled by a NFT, the NFT owner would be able to change the ad.
It shouldn't as the vast majority of water is wasted growing fruits and vegetables in what is basically desert/semi-desert areas. Watering lawns and sidewalks is small potatoes in comparison, yet very few people complain about the 80% problem and preach to their neighbors about the 20% issue.
Show HN: Toxicity Analysis of Twitter Handles
I only started learning/implementing ml very recently. Gave up halfway through my previous attempt when i got to know about the compute intensive nature of ML implementations

About this app, (django,react,tfjs) It takes a twitter handle as input and lists the most recent tweets along with buttons for each to predict toxicity using tensorflowjs's toxicity model (pretrained)
I plan to make a twitter bot with my learning so far.
Also this project initially had a much larger scope and I had to cut down/scrap most of it as i'm using only freely available services to host this and running ml on such services did not seem fair to me.
The Xerox Alto was famous for its user-writeable microcode (among other things). Different languages could use microcode that was optimized for the language's operations. Even some games had custom microcode for high performance.
JavaScript Set
I'm not sure I get it. If the art is digital, then copies can be identical to the original (apart from the NFT), no? So why would this model succeed over, say, a Patreon-like model where many people get access to the product?

Even in the traditional sales model, I would think the typical PED for digital goods means that selling multiple copies provides more revenue than selling one copy for a higher price. Most things aren't Once Upon a Time in Shaolin.
The fact that I can use git for data if I carefully avoid all the footguns is exactly why I don’t use git for data.
I never understood why we don’t have SQL databases that track all changes in a “third dimension” (column being one dimension, row being the second dimension).

It might be a bit slower to write, but hook the logic in to write/delete, and suddenly you can see exactly when a field was changed to break everything. The right middleware and you could see the user, IP, and query that changed it (along with any other queries before or after).
It might not be exactly what you are looking for, but git-bug[1] is encoding data into regular git objects, with merges and conflict resolution. I'm mentioning this because the hard part is providing an ordering of events. Once you have that you can store and recreate whatever state you want.

This branch[2] I'm almost done with remove the purely linear branch constraint and allow to use full DAGs (that is, concurrent edition) and still provide a good ordering.

[1]: https://github.com/MichaelMure/git-bug
[2]: https://github.com/MichaelMure/git-bug/pull/532
Already I would not use this project because of its name. I’m not offended by it, but I know others will be, and it will only be a matter of time before we have to replace it with something else. So why bother in the first place?

I know the name is not DOLT but it is close enough to cause offense. Imagine the N-word with one typo. Would it still be offensive? Probably to some.
How do virtual particles play into the Casimir effect?
Think you're right, it rings bell (albeit faint). Did the Wang wordprocessor use it too? (I used a Wang WP a few times long ago but I've no idea now. In fact the Wang was the very first WP I used — except for KP26/29 card punches with an IBM-360.) :-)
Given that content creators retain copyright over work they upload to platforms, that platforms explicitly provide that guarantee, and that much of the current NFT craze is around speculation on already-potentially-valuable digital content, I agree.

One possibility that occurs is: for decentralized infrastructure, where no organization can attest to the identity of an original author, then it might make sense for that author to 'claim' their content when they upload it (at which time, for most authors, it would have zero value).

That could be a way for authors to retain and claim value for their work over time, while also making a public copyright claim.

That's all conjecture on my part; I don't really understand the hype yet, either - or whether it will last.
Those direct reports aren't (nominally) trainees though. Part of the "deal" is that you're being underpaid because you're being trained.

Mentoring by more senior folks in the lab certainly helps everyone (https://www.pnas.org/content/116/42/20910), but it's barely measured or rewarded for PIs and not at all for postdocs. Changing this would be an easy fix though--ask for a reference from a junior colleague when hiring.

More generally, there's a huge disconnect and sudden between the skills needed to get a faculty job (i.e., publishing a high profile papers as an individual contributor) and the skills needed to do well at it (e.g., management). Everyone is all antsy to shorten postdocs, but I'd actually be in favor of making the career path more gradual with so people get some mentored management experience.
I mean, it's no secret that Microsoft has a $10 billion contract with the US Government. And it's also no secret that attributing blame to cyber attacks is a hard problem. You can study the tools/exploits used, the files modified, the associated IP addresses, all of which can be easily obfuscated or used to scapegoat.

I don't really doubt the allegations, as the motive makes sense, but I'm hoping there will be a good postmortem.
Absolutely right. There are many attitudes in modern life that apply the new=better consumerism fallacy where it doesn't belong: code, people, experience, restaurants, ideas, values, music, art, film, food, literature, and durable goods. Throwing away ideas, objects, and preferences of the past wholesale loses the lessons of history, reinvents the wheel, and repeats said history.
There are far too many "classics" for even a person who is invested in reading them, to read.

So, the question is moot, unless you contrast it to dogmatically refraining from reading any classics.

The real questions are:

1. How to decide which classics to choose to read?

and of course

2. What constitutes the classics, or perhaps who do you trust to list the classics for you?
> “ Otherwise, the question seems to put the cart before the horse—power, wealth.. these are positive side-effects of a life of engaged curiosity within a professional domain and good decisions, right place;right time, and luck. Not lighting in a bottle.”

I read HN for sentences like this.
That's a bit like complaining about street lights, because thieves now have to accost you, where previously they'd just punch you in the dark and steal your money without you knowing what happened, or who did it.

GDPR forced bad actors on the Internet to document their bad behavior openly. If this made your overall Internet experience worse, it should reveal to you the magnitude of the problem of surveillance capitalism.
With a little discipline of not going overboard with surfing here, I've been able to get the following from HN:

i) Discover really cool new projects (mainly open-source)
ii) Find ways of generating income on the internet through first hand inputs
iii) Get in touch with cool people with useful things to say occasionally
iv) Relate to challenges faced by many others and gain inspiration
v) Develop gratitude for self when reading about things others have faced and have had to overcome
vi) Feel more globally connected. Many users are approachable for one-to-one chats
Just walk around with a 3 pound weight strapped to your arm and tell me how it feels afterwards.
An unfinished, but "sorta working" attempt to recreate that vector drawing data onto an html canvas.

https://jsfiddle.net/kw4b95gv/4/

I didn't do the color flood fill, and something isn't quite right, but it's recognizable.
I almost use always vscode via it's ssh remote development feature. In my experience this thing is flawless and indistinguishable from local development. It's hardly believable how good they've made it.

The idea vs. code is something i don't buy. Each has its use cases. Idea has great tools for android development, it's just tightly geared towards that, which is especially good for someone that is not a main android developer and need to those extra wheels. While vscode is my go to editor for everything else, including java ee.
> How far up the escalation do you want to go?

Nobody wins a fight without fighting it to the end. Escalate until you win.
Thing is, "value is in the eye of the beholder". It might be material in a strictly biological setting, or idealistic (subjective) in a post-scarcity environment. We're somewhere in-between with the digital world, the value of the superfluous (e.g. collectibles) is able to rise as material needs are more easily covered (using an ever-smaller fraction of resources).

To put it simply to the point of absurdity, if we were a "magical" (in Arthur C. Clarke's word) civilization without any outstanding needs, we could still play some for-profit economic game and spend quadrillions buying autographs, because it wouldn't lessen anything of importance. Conversely, if you're barely eating enough, you won't spend resources on anything else than getting more food, because that would lessen your chances of survival.

The degree of perceived insanity, I think, thus entirely depends on who you are as a beholder of value, where you fit in the material ⇾ idealistic spectrum. Pretty sure Africans with $1/day feel this is perfectly stupid, but your average billionaire might find it a funny hobby, like collecting some cards of the digital era. There will be a market for that, I think crypto-manias proved as much.

It's all relative to an observer, IMHO.
Tokamak reactors could be practical with this one weird trick
With the GX (which I got, and it still works) you could run metakernel [0], which itself was one heck of an upgrade over the base system and really an unbelievably impressive effort in its own right. It pushed the hardware so much farther it's still stunning. The HP48 remains one of my favorite calculation devices ever, with a great ratio of utility for both the most simple brainstorming calculations and going right into great depth. I'm still bummed my favorite emulator for iOS devices (m48+) stopped getting updates and faded away, and also that HP let its calculator division languish. What a tool.

----

0: https://www.hpcalc.org/hp48/apps/mk/mk.php
Resilience and availability are two great reasons, but even then, why not get those by utilizing end-to-end encrypted sync, such that the server does not have access to the data, but the devices do?

Decoupling data storage from the application layer has some advantages, yes, but keeping the data in the clear server-side brings along many of the problems of the original:

- Data is still centralized in large repositories maintained by a company, and these repositories are still valuable and still open to attack, from both inside and outside of the company.

- There is a pinky promise between the data storage company and the consumer to treat their data properly and not to look at it or sell aggregated versions of it, but it is, at best, a pinky promise.

I agree that the open nature of the protocol making "self-hosted" an option is absolutely fantastic. But until that is accessible and easy for every single person to use, then only smart tech people will truly "own their data". That's really all I'm proposing: self-hosting being considered the default.
I don't see much reason for taking Weinstein's proposed "theory" seriously. Or much else that he says for that matter, but I'm happy to be proven wrong. However, he's found a platform and I suppose that's pressured academia into demonstrating that they're not ignoring a self-proclaimed lone outcast genius.
Did your friend save the thread before it was deleted?
I would say that reading the whole bible to "understand the culture you live in" is a massive over-investment of time, even if you're in a country where the culture is Christian or Jewish.
Technically. Neither is XMPP :). It's just increasingly rare to see in the wild.
Cabernet Sauvignon ;-)
Because you can do that with after update triggers or server-side in software.
A perhaps relevant post from Frank Calegari on Mochizuki’s purported proof of the ABC Conjecture from a few years ago: https://www.galoisrepresentations.com/2017/12/17/the-abc-con...

My favorite quote:

“To take an extreme example, if Mochizuki had carved his argument on slate in Linear A and then dropped it into the Mariana Trench, then there would be little doubt that asking about the veracity of the argument would be beside the point.“
> they lots of glass jaws that nobody ever expects

Looks like autocorrect got involved here
I am a big fan of Robert J. Sawyer. He is like Michael Crichton, except tech things go good instead of bad.

On the topic of word processors: The famed New Yorker writer John McPhee only writes with Kedit, which I had never even heard of until he spoke of it a lot in his book on writing. I seem to recall a story of him needing to pin down the orginal creator at some point, well after the creator had abandoned the project, for some tech support.

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2013/01/14/structure

https://www.kedit.com/
Every so often, posts from Bruce Dawson's blog get posted here - one such post was about using Event Tracing for Windows to diagnose an issue with an NTFS lock being held causing 63 cores to idle while 1 does all the work.

https://randomascii.wordpress.com/2019/10/20/63-cores-blocke...

A few months later, some other people in my team were struggling to diagnose an issue in production where a legacy webapp was struggling to scale up and fully use all 64 cores of the server we needed it to run on. I stepped in to help and remembered that post I'd seen on HN. We used ETW (through Windows Performance Recorder and Windows Performance Analyzer) to profile our app and I looked into the Wait Analysis. Turns out that Entity Framework 6 uses a ReaderWriterLockSlim to guard a cache, and that particular lock performs extremely poorly under heavy contention. Heavy in our case meant that for a single page build of one of this app's "hot path" pages, this lock would be taken a few hundred thousand times. We weren't the first to discover this:

https://github.com/dotnet/ef6/issues/1500

What some other people in my team were struggling with for about two weeks was resolved in a single day thanks to me goofing off and reading HN. (We ultimately used a fork of EF6 that didn't suffer from this issue to solve our problem)
That's a bit heavier than a large water bottle. 1 liter water is 1 kg = 2.2 lbs. Definitely wouldn't make me sweat.