skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'd like to have a 1 click "InstantVM" button on my GitHub repos
so that anyone could instantly launch a Digital Ocean droplet
from a premade Ubuntu image that has the dev dependencies installed
and they can immediately SSH into it.

Another way to describe it is: instant and infinite development
machines for open source projects that you could pull out
and throw away as cheaply as tissues.

You click the button, you get an IP address and password
and login as root. All the code and dependencies are installed.

The target user would be someone who wants to play with
a project, but is weary of installing it on their local machine,
or perhaps they are on windows and there's problems. The
second target user is someone who wants to contribute code
to a project but doesnt want to setup a local dev environment. The
third target user is just the normal dev who wants to try what
it feels like to use their software with a fresh install.

Perhaps the user could add their credit card info to upgrade
an ephemeral instance into a persistent one if they want.

It should be instant, so a project can have a queue of VMs on
standby ready to assign immediately. You could use the
Digital Ocean API to keep the queue primed. The open source
project could have a small budget (say $15/month to always keep
3 available on average). You could maybe adjust the # of free
VMs in the pool via a simple backend either interace or API url.

Bonus points if it could also launch VMs on Azure, AWS,
and/or Google Cloud.
This is not true.

MRI machines are not expensive because of "patents". They are expensive because they are expensive devices that utilize superconducting magnets which need a constant supply of liquid helium.

Various drugs are expensive because (regardless of patents) there aren't enough patients to justify mass-production, so the price stays high. Sometimes even with mass production drugs are hard enough to make that the price still stays high.

Doctors are not cheap to train, so their services will always be expensive until we replace them with robots.

There are a plethora of reasons why medicine and healthcare is expensive beyond "patents" – remove patents from the equation and you can still easily spend millions per patient for various diseases.
from the site "well actually" section[0]

>Bitcoin has the most predictable, mathematically-provable, strictest scarcity of any asset ever conceived. It has the potential to be the most useful form of money ever invented (it is already a far more useful means of storing and transferring value than a bank account for some). Every day that passes - with every new/added user of the network, developer, liquidity, applications - Bitcoin’s utility increases exponentially.

>Bitcoin has intrinsic value because it holds both required properties of scarcity and utility, and with every passing day this intrinsic value grows.

Bitcoin has scarcity for sure, but the utility I still don't get it. transaction fees are still high, cannot be easily transferred to and from fiat money, merchant adoption is low. I get the scarcity but I don't see where the utility is. and for it to have intrinsic value it must have both

[0] https://www.bitcoinisdead.org/well-actually/it-has-no-intrin...
Why not a sumo wrestler?
Totally agree. This is the basic approach I advocate for (https://m.huffpost.com/us/entry/us_7973484).

I'd further argue that one of the best bets is to get someone to tell you how they have applied a skill in the past, rather than to try to figure out how you can get them to perform a facsimile of the skill in 20 minutes.
Ryujinx isn't actually the only Switch emulator; between Ryujinx and Yuzu, you can emulate basically everything the Switch can do and play most of the games it can.
"It's not a currency, it's an asset" is accurate. And it seems to be making people rich.

But it was meant to be a currency and failed at that.

Now it's just an asset with no practical use (unlike gold) and a pretty hefty cost for it to persist.

Like Gamestop, I think Bitcoin will eventually be worth nothing. Until then, a lot wealth will change hands, but none is being generated.

A meta comment: I don't recall seeing more emotionally zealous defenders of a topic on HN than Bitcoin boosters.
We are going to add Notion like features to Baserow in 2022. You should then be able to create similar documents within the same tool and it is going to work well together with the databases and tables that you already have.
For the dancing skeletons?
I think that's not especially strange when these partially automated systems aren't fully autonomous yet.

I would have a hard time arguing against requiring a few hours of class time learning about exactly what the systems do and what pitfalls there are because those things are not at all like what anyone has ever been taught in drivers ed before.
> This kind of OOP strongly encourages componentization at the smallest level, much much more than is beneficial from an organization standpoint (subsystems).

Yep, and also even though OOP was designed as a way to model simulation systems, it isn't the best thing for actual popular simulation systems (video games). They use more flexible patterns like entity-component systems.

OOP also wants to always layout data as array-of-structures, which can be less efficient than structure-of-arrays. Data layout is the most important thing for efficient programs, since memory access is so slow.
Price is what you pay.
Value is what you get.

The value of bitcoin is zero if you are bargaining with me. I'll trade a chicken for bitcoin when the state allows me to pay my taxes in bitcoin. Until then enjoy your fairy money.
Ask HN: Looking for a Project to Contribute
I am senior developer in search of adventure and I am looking for a challenging project with a great team, in order to contribute.

My skills summary:

- Java & frameworks (strong)

- System (Linux, scripting, networking etc) (Strong)

- Real time communication (voip, sip, media, webrtc, some other old telecom APIs and specs etc) (Strong)

- Analytical skills (Strong)

- Pre-sales skills (Strong)

- Devops (AWS apis, Ansible, Terraform) (beginner)

- Javascript/React (beginner).

Thanks
> it’s my opinion that the Arduino ecosystem is a hinderance

I'd say this blog post is the real hindrance.

It's ridiculous to suggest that people should always start at the very lowest level; that newcomers to a space are somehow "hindered" by not doing everything the hardest way possible from the get-go. It's like saying Basic was a hindrance to game programming because the people who cut their teeth on it were shielded from the concerns that "real game developers" have to deal with in C and C++. Quite the opposite! Anything that opens things up and helps more people discover an interest is good for that field in the long run, even if they have to learn more as they progress (who doesn't?).

This just reads as a big, tasteless, "look how much smarter and more experienced I am than you"
>It is not Bitcoin's fault you were mistaken and it certainly does not equate to failure.

I guess Satoshi was mistaken as well.
For those searching, DeepSpeed is implemented as a set of C++/CUDA extensions on top of PyTorch (compiled using their JIT).
Why does the author think it's not dead, because it's high? It remains a currency whose volume is due to pump and dump and enthusiasm. And because it's digital, when it gets too high we can just make a new Bitcoin because there's no value here.
COVID is different because it is occurring against a backdrop of extremely aged and obese populations, in a year (2020) which followed a weak flu season (2019), and in an election year in the USA (2020) where all health decision were heavily politicised.

https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.11.11.20229708v...

"In Sweden, the observed increase in all-cause mortality during Covid-19 was partly due to a lower than expected mortality preceding the epidemic and the observed excess mortality, was followed by a lower than expected mortality after the first Covid-19 wave. This may suggest mortality displacement."

Sweden had about the same mortality spike in 2009 from Swine flu: https://swprs.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/sweden-monthly-...
> Let’s take the classic example of enhancing a blurry photo to get a license plate.

That's not the same as fabricating information, though. A blurry image still contains a whole bunch of information and correlation data that just isn't present in a handful of pixels.

This is not super-resolution, but something different entirely. Super-resolution would mean to produce a readable license plate from just a handful of pixels. That is an impossible task, since the pixels alone would necessarily match more than one plate.

The algorithm would therefore have to "guess" and the result will match something that is has been trained on (read: plausible), but by no means the correct one, no matter how many checks you run on a database.

To illustrate the point, I took an image of a random license plate, and scaled it down to 12x6 pixels. 4x super-resolution would bring it to 48x24 pixels and should produce perfectly readable results.

Here's how it looks (original, down-scaled to 48x24, and down-scaled to 12x6 pixels): https://pasteboard.co/JSu3WDU.png

The 48x24 pixel version could easily be upscaled to even make the state perfectly readable. A 4x super-resolution upscale of the 12x6 version, however, would be doomed to fail no matter what.

That's what I'm getting at.

Just for shits and giggles, here's the AI 4x super-resolution result: https://pasteboard.co/JSu7jkP.png

Edit: while I'm having fun with super-resolution, here's the upscaled result from the 48x24 pixel version: https://pasteboard.co/JSu9Qh6.png
It has gotten simpler, especially for things like testing safely. If you don't think about it as docker, or containers, the ability to sandbox things with namespaces and cgroups is almost magical. It's effectively instant and much more effective than just chroot.

"Run something with no -- or very specific -- network access" was a really annoying problem to solve (LD_PRELOAD?) in the before times.
College towns. Usually little dots in the countryside. In the town it’s more expensive (relative to the surrounding area). Then drops off precipitously very quickly. Generally they have the amenities of larger places in a more remote setting at a lower cost.
I think you're projecting your own bias. It seems pretty obvious to me bitcoin was meant to be a currency based on the original whitepaper.

https://bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf
The reason money exists is to transfer value that has ALREADY been created in the economy.

Gold is good for transferring value across time.

Fiat is good for transferring value across space.

Bitcoin is good for transferring value across space & time.

Therefore Bitcoin is better money.
What is firehose user data? I've become an expert on 11,000kPa-pressure hoses used to extinguish fires, but still have no idea what you mean!
GP actually laid out a full argument while you dismissed it out of hand as zealotry. It really feels like you're proving GPs point.
> It wasn't much of a challenge for landscapes.

Well if you collapse the problem space to a single point that corresponds to a phone's standard field of view, then it won't be a problem...

But what if you wanted to catch a photo of a rare bird in flight at 500mm equivalent, or a surfer caught at 1/4000th of a second?
"Why is this happening in the SasS world???"

It's the VC-finance industrial complex expecting a drive towards an IPO to exit while offloading the risk and unsustainable fees to the general public via misaligned stock brokers buying/selling to get fees vs. only benefitting long-term if their picks earn profit.
If this sort of thing interests you, check out Veritas: A Harvard Professor, a Con Man and the Gospel of Jesus's Wife by Ariel Sabar. Interesting story and a great read - just when you think you understand it, a new layer appears.
Your point would make sense if the world was going to try to shoe-horn finite assets into the role of currency transactions, but again, this is a mistaken assumption. There is historical support for the idea of "two monies", soft/weak money, credit, fiat etc that is very good for commerce and day to day transactions, and as unit of account.

And hard money for long term savings, and best for settling trade between foreign regimes. There's a reason central banks all hold gold as a primary reserve asset.

Give this a read [0] it discusses in detail the idea that there isn't one type (hard or soft) money that best serves both competing use cases of currency and store of value, but that two different monies work best.

[0] http://fofoa.blogspot.com/2011/05/return-to-honest-money.htm...

(Ctrl + F "two monies" for specific section; whole article is good read though)
What, the Americans working at Apple and Google and Microsoft and own stock in them suddenly aren’t citizens? What about the Board of Directors at each of them?

Legislative bodies is where politics is supposed to happen, and legislators don’t live in a vacuum. We don’t elect them and send them up to the top of an ivory tower for two years to philosophize about policy with the occasional edict sent down. So how do legislators know what kinds of policies people actually want when there’s about 700K people in their districts (and 39M constituents if you’re a California Senator) unless people show up and say, “Hey, this is what I want from you, this is why I elected you.”

You get a mixed bag because legislatures are a mixed bag representing a larger mixed bag, and sorry, newspaper polls aren’t a good stand in for showing up and putting your name down for consideration. Your interests as a citizen are not identical to the other 699,999ish of your neighbors, and the guy or gal representing you is just one person of a larger body.
Yeah, something like that. But for all these SaaS apps.
Simple 10 min overview/tutorial (official) if someone is interested - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ovQC7FqXHXk
It offers the rich from China and other countries a safe place to park their money. Office workers are just decorations to make this place look legit.
> Silicon Valley SaaS bros have lost touch with reality because they have unlimited money to work with.

Disagree. The issue is that they don’t want cheap users. It lowers your average user value, impacts your valuation, and usually cheap users are the most demanding to support in relation to their revenue. A user that pays $50/year and has 5 questions to support us very different than 5 questions from a user posting $5000/year
Running a demoralization campaign on youngsters is unlikely to improve things, though.

Would there be an Israel today if Jewish people convinced themselves that the world is forever going to hate and subjugate them and that they are powerless to change it?

They could have done so, after all, the Holocaust was an unspeakable evil. But they chose the path of constructive defiance.
I had the same reaction, that I couldn't figure out the argument. (For people who didn't read the article, it's not what you'd expect about why computer art isn't art.) It seems to be from the perspective of rejecting art entirely: "There is no need for the production of more works of art, particularly no need for 'computer art'."

After re-reading the article, I think it's best understood by considering each paragraph a completely unconnected topic. (I'm not being snarky here.)
I mean, companies you can see they have new products coming, if they sold well, if there's innovation. Commodities you can see production, consumption - people actually eat wheat, use copper to build things, etc.

Most people I know (a small and biased sample size) that are buying bitcoin, they are buying because "that sucker's goin'up", like the Peter Lynch video.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HLQGsE0H4cs
Because they’re still “almost”. The NFT is made up of digits values that can be replicated exactly - a brush stroke or photography negative cannot.
Mish is generally superior to RadamW https://lessw.medium.com/meet-mish-new-state-of-the-art-ai-a...
People tend to hand wave about reliability, but the reality is that emissions standards drove ICE car reliability to a very high level. The reasons that cars are scrapped usually boil down to corrosion and stress related failures between 200-300k miles.

Electric cars eliminate belt failures. Everything else is driven by reliability engineering. 95% of Teslas or Chevy Bolts will be scrapped within 10 years or 250k miles, just like anything else.
I'm not sure when they gave him the money, but it specifically mentions the investors approved the blueprints with only 4 floors.

I understand people can be lazy and make mistakes, but that's pretty egregious.
> then it's just a syntax equivalent of training wheels.

I wonder if there is a divide between people who programmed before OOP was commonplace and those first experience is learning it in school.

For me the idea that OOP is not suitable for more complex situations betrays it's very conception.
People save their entire lives with their time and health and then the government debases everything they worked for. We just printed something like 6 trillion. Thats why people around the world like bitcoin. Governments and central banks have no self control, they answer to politicians who want to stay in power and therefore spend.
If Google maps and paper maps are good enough to track agriculture patters, why do they need a satellite at all? For a start Google maps images typically only update every 2 to 3 years. You’re making no sense.
Or the mid-90s bulls-knicks series.
So actually a manifestation of the paperclip maximizer.
My impression of systems like soups/OpenDoc/component systems/etc is that they're doomed to failure because they don't respect Conway's law. The app model works because each app has its own development team and teams aren't directly editing other teams' data.

They don't have the proper expertise and will break something, because it's not possible to enforce data consistency well enough. (Apple's modern OO database is called CoreData, has a pedigree from WebObjects, and its consistency features are pretty hard to use in practice.)
wine can also run unmodified windows binaries
For those who want to compare this 1971 article with a 2018 talk by the very same person (and see that his arguments remain relevant): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x-qAPvYdXgM
The word 'currency' only appears once in the white paper.
25 years of momentum.
I'll piggyback on your final comment to state that the biggest problem in the legal space is cost (effectively a proxy for productivity). Almost all litigation against individuals and small businesses is an exercise is borderline blackmail (e.g. this will cost you $100k to defend and win so might as well pay $10k).

It's a hard problem to actually fix, and mostly a byproduct of the attorneys monopoly on the legal profession and various mandates to make it require human intervention.

Where we need to get to is letting technology and true startups (with limited liability) provide legal services.

I will give a shout-out to fairclaims.com which I recommend so much more over traditional arbitration/mediation firms. One example of the type of thing we need.
People are motivated by a variety of things, only one being wealth accumulation; and there is an inherent tension between the qualitative and the quantitative (for instance, one would be insulted if one's dinner guest offered to pay the bill for a home-cooked meal).

There's a lot to be said for the social technology of markets and the extrinsic motivations of money. But from FOSS to mutual aid to gift economies [0], currency-denominated markets should only be one tool in our political-economy toolbox.

[0] https://sacred-economics.com/
Any link to an article that would illustrate that? I’ve been in Taiwan a bunch of times, live in Japan and on the contrary Japan, while having a good image there, is not a single-outed as it is in the West. The cultural gap between Taiwan and Japan is infinitely smaller than between Japan and more remote places. Taiwan was even part of Japan at some point, so while only the most elderly lived it, I really doubt cultural explanations are needed as you claim they are.
Ah okay thanks.

So any model that can be trained for generic use (Eg. Not trying to deep fake my specific face) can presumably be run on local machines.

Thanks!
Every program is a collection of a lot of "short running things". Exceptions work well with this. There's a piece of code that calls some function and expects a result or an error; there's a piece of code much deeper in the stack that can fail. Everything in the middle doesn't care about the failure, except to make sure it doesn't get executed if the failure occurs. Without exception-like mechanism, you have to make the middle care about possible errors, just to prevent code past failure point from executing. Your calls like foo(a) get turned into if(a != error) { foo(a); }, even if it's hidden behind a nice monadic syntax.
The utility is predicated on scarcity. If you're interested in trying to understand how there might be utility in a technology like Bitcoin, which it sounds like you genuinely are, consider the following.

Imagine two perfect simulations of our universe. In one, people are allowed to use currency to trade things. In the other, people are not. Press play and watch civilizations in the former develop much more quickly than civilizations in the latter.

I haven't gotten to Bitcoin yet, but if you agree then we've established that currency can be useful because when you eliminate the use of currency while holding all else equal, people are worse off. Now, I don't like to think of Bitcoin as a currency, but in much the same way that the technology of currency makes it easier for people to reliably and rapidly transact, the technology of a mathematically defined, elegant, widely deployed store of value can help a civilization. To descend far beyond this into the particulars might require several volumes, but hopefully I've put forth an argument you can extrapolate from as you consider where the "utility" of Bitcoin and projects like it might be found.