skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I think it’s reasonable for people who care about free software to dislike their figurehead being the brash, toe lint eating RMS. I met him in person once and he was rude to serving staff and he stank.

Does this make him a bad person, or imply he has bad technical judgement? No. I don’t think someone less opinionated could have started the free software movement like he did. I’m glad I met him and I have appreciation for the work he did.

But I don’t want him to represent me or the work I do. Most software engineers in the opensource / free software world are polite, well read, practical and shower from time to time. And, especially in leadership we accept that at the end of the day it’s critically important that we follow our own rules and decision processes, no matter our own opinions.

To me it’s not about cancelling rms. (I hate cancel culture). I just think the FSF (and opensource as a whole) would be more successful with someone other than RMS as the figurehead. He’s a bad role model. And claiming he’s above the rules undermines the very organisation he’s trying to run. If the federal government wants to call up the “leaders” of the opensource community to decide if Linux is good fit, I don’t want RMS to be the person they talk to. He’s a great visionary type person. But the FSF needs dependable, stable and mature. RMS just isn’t that guy.
Isn't that much of what games are about? Perhaps you'd benefit from specifying more tightly the kind of excersice you're after?

"get better at rationality" is a great goal; but how do you judge better rationality vs. less? Isn't there an implicit "better informed / more rational" judge implied by the nature of it? Is that going to be you? A council of Elders? A consensus of whoever shows up? Will that really meet the standard?

Twitch games and war optimize for speed of decisions, and if its not a correct decision you just try again or die. Often thats the most rational choice in that context, but it wouldnt be in others...
Show HN: Google Street View Golf
How could you possibly know that?
Mostly just notifications launches if I'm interested (rockets, betas, hardware :) ).
Bitcoin isn't a Sink. Sink has utility in disposing waste.

Bitcoin is a short circuit in the system. It is a fault. It is where our resources disappear without bringing any useful value other than rewarding the one who can burn more but leaving everybody else worse overall.
> And when you do the math you realize the ideal length === 0.

Do you honestly believe this? I agree the patent system is broken, but I'm not convinced we should completely abolish it. I am speaking broadly though and not just for software. For software I could see patents as long as a few years making sense, and shorter would be fine. 18 months seems about right as a benchmark to me.

A much simpler solution to the patent system is you have to pay exponentially more to keep it as time goes on. This would also solve copyright issues, specifically for Disney and other megacorporations.

I realize there is no magic bullet to this, but I actually think the patent system has merit and is worth fixing rather than demolishing.
> This rule only applies when the majority don't care about the outcome

"Don't care" or "aren't told" ?

> Halal meat: small minority cares deeply, majority doesn't care or even notice

I suspect this - as in so many cases - comes down to a labelling issue. Are consumers able to make an informed judgement if they're unable to see what product they're buying?

"Leading [UK] supermarkets [said] some of the meat they sell could qualify as halal but is not labelled as such"[0]

[0] https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-politics-27402428
The eruption of Vesuvius was in 79 AD, so less than 2000 years ago, but if you'd like to know about a much earlier site that had these amenities (and more, like possible public street lighting), you should read about Mohenjo Daro in present-day Pakistan.
it's a bit much to extrapolate from a single study in one area. even just reading the conclusion the authors share a few possible limitations of the study even within the field of startup investment
This is a popular position but software does not rain from the heavens. It is written by people. And the rather convincing argument goes that this sort of behavior drives away many people who could've made valuable contributions.

As far as I can see RMS is a neuroatypical person who just does not have any filters and also applies logic to such interpersonal matters where empathy would be better. I do not think he is malicious but you can't expect women who are constantly harassed to make this distinction -- harassment is just harassment at the end of the day. And this has been made clear to him so many times over the decades and he refuses to change and that's a problem. No matter how much one contributes, they can drive away enough people the lost potential total contribution overweighs that. Trust me, I know :(
Tiger Cub Hwang’s Family Office Behind Friday Trade Frenzy
> (it's just O(1) as you said it, doesn't scale with more electricity added)

Worse: It does the inverse of scaling. The more electricity that is added, the less efficient it gets.

Even worse: The system is designed to incentivize more people to join and waste electricity, by paying them to do so.
> The comparison with aluminum production is also quite weak

Viewing aluminum as a battery isn't even valid, unless people start oxidizing it for energy. It's more like economic value added. Bitcoin is only a "battery" in the sense that it could be turned off on-demand to free up power generation capacity.
I actually realized when I was in the ikea warehouse recently pondering why ikea still don’t offer home delivery for most things: they actually just never pay anyone to move or handle less than a pallet-load of flat pack boxes at a time. You do that labor yourself for them - taking the cart, finding the box (or multiple separate boxes for a lot of their more customizable combination items) in the warehouse, picking it, taking it to the scanning station, loading it for transport. All that labor that you do as a customer is a core part of Ikea’s competitive advantage. Even if other companies ship you items flatpacked, they’re still doing all that work ikea doesn’t.
On the other hand, for the last 40+ years, we've seen a massive proliferation of lustrous materials produced, so much they literally cover our kid's bedroom floors. Luster, once rare, is now cheap and gaudy.
> you can explore ideas from past creators, serialize and share your own ideas more broadly, and more consistently track something that you're making subtle changes to over time (ink on paper doesn't shift or falter as our memory does).

Recording does it even better!

> But the creations of an orchestra or similar ensemble require intense coordination - I believe this doesn't rob them of value, but rather adds another dimension to them.

Again, recording is an amazing tool for this. In modern music protection it’s not uncommon to coordinate many hundreds of tracks into a single song, without the involvement of sheet music.
The only value in bitcoin mining is bitcoin. The value of aluminium remains outside of speculation as it has inherent utility, while the value of bitcoin only comes from speculation and a very very minimal use case as currency which has been solved hundreds of times in more coat effective ways (even with other crypto, but most importantly outside crypto).
Traders Are ‘Glued to Their Screens’ and Set for Volatile Open
More that he distrusted calculation prepared and designed by anyone other than one of the main characters.

The part where computers aren't magic and won't magically come up with correct answers despite bad input (calculation formulas in this case) was already a well established thing.

EDIT: As for well-knowness of computers - it was early enough in history of computing that Digital Equipment Corporation, despite starting with pretty much a blueprint for good computer, had to carefully ensure that it's first commercial computer didn't call itself a computer. Thus PDP series was born.
That Cowen view is a very blasé view of inequality. So the great city to live ends up prices for the wealthy served by an underclass that lives in servitude, unable to ever own their own home.

And worse it’s that way for a super rich elite that buys assets and leaves them unused for most of the year.
How does any of that refute the claim that there is value in what bitcoin does or that it is a ledger? (who can deny that bitcoin is a ledger anyway? I'd like to see somebody define a ledger and what bitcoin does and show the contradiction)
Where did I indicate a timescale (outside of "it took us a while" -- wherein I said that progress is slow)? As many others have pointed out, energy efficiency is seen as a bug and bitcoin has repeatedly increased hashing difficulty in order to offset increasing efficiency. Likewise, if a locale is known to have cheap power, miners move in until the power isn't cheap anymore. Eventually we'll be on 90+% renewables, and it won't be as bad, but ultimately, bitcoin is a space heater, and never a battery unless you devise a system to capture, store, and generate electricity from that heat.
Oh, I know why I recognize this website. I have had the unpleasant experience of meeting Sumana. She is a bully.

I'm a white hetero cis man who attended the Recurse Center before it was renamed from Hacker School (because Hacker wasn't inclusive enough)

Sumana lives out the postmodern platitude that the accused shouldn't need to be educated about what he did wrong and went out of her way to shame me for behaving "incorrectly" according to her ideological standards on multiple occasions, going as far as to tattle multiple times and to tell me it wasn't her responsibility to explain the transgression I had made, that I to this day do not understand. I might have ASD; I'm kinda socially stupid. Figures she wouldn't like me.

Anyway, I don't participate at Recurse anymore specifically because of Sumana and her clique. She's a bully and demands ideological conformity especially among white men.

Fuck this post, and fuck Sumana.
Graphene and Beyond: The Wonder Materials That Could Replace Silicon
I'm pretty dubious about the idea that this type of engineer actually exists.
Well there is the remarkable[1]. I'm not really sure if it would fit your needs, but It's worth a look imho.

Pro: As you get a root shell by default, it's nicely hackable and costs a lot less than the Onyx Boox Max.

Con: it's only 10.3".

[1]: https://remarkable.com/
Could this be addressed more cheaply by moving from proof of work to proof of stake?
Quoting the first sentence of the Wikipedia article:

> Fiat money is a currency (a medium of exchange) established as money, often by government regulation.

As for the definition of the word "fiat": https://www.wordnik.com/words/fiat

> An arbitrary order or decree

> Authorization or sanction
Less Zombies.

Pre-modern zombies weee much harder to find under Napoleon for example. His famous aphorism "I prefer lucky generals" was a reference to the ability of Marshall Ney to shoot two zombies in the head at 100 yards with one round.

Abraham Lincoln, Zombie hunter was actually a biopic.
If you want to write software using principles from linear algebra you should definitely google some computer graphics courses
Bitcoin energy consumption is a brittle argument, our entire monetary system is backed by much more expensive energy usage. Energy usage for security is a trait of sound money.
Can you have a separate device that will send fake location data to your phone? Has anyone built something like this?
Basically something that will pretend to be a GPS satellite and fake wifi network generator, so that device won't be able to pick up actual networks around it, but only those programmed ones?
There's a lot of one-liner talk about externalities in this thread above, but I'd be curious if people would show the stats of energy consumption of the rest of the traditional banking system. I'm not an owner of BTC, but I worked managing datacenter servers in the past, and it's like no one has mentioned a single time that there are arrays upon arrays of servers, 10's of thousands, that run company back-end systems. There are servers to manage the servers to manage the servers (stuff like monitoring, automation management systems, etc.), and it blossoms from there. And these places still use mainframes on top of distributed computing.

BTC might be giant waste of resources, but it's curious that the comparisons imply that it's BTC versus no energy usage, instead of BTC versus traditional banks with their giant datacenters all over the country and world. Might be worth at least a mention in the comparison?
Ask HN: How does Amazon know the car I'm driving
I do not ever remember telling Amazon what car i drive. I was searching for some car related stuff and a message was shown at the top: "Filter results by your vehicle followed by (My Car Make + Model)". Further googling gave me this result: https://www.amazon.in/adp-auto/garage

I never purchased any car related stuff on Amazon before. Neither do i have any Alexa related stuff at home.
This is a silly game using Google Street View where you can play golf anywhere where street view coverage is available. You can either play a randomly generated hole or create your own custom hole by moving the ball and hole to wherever you want on the world map. It is still a little buggy and if you hit the ball out of bounds you may not be able to recover it which requires you to reset. Any feedback is much appreciated!
Feature indeed. Highlighted from the beginning.
They can however be replaced, in which case the company doesn't need to rehire the striking workers. Potato/potato.

That's not true if the company is in violation of an existing contract though, then the company is breaking the law and must rehire everyone, but I'll reiterate: they're breaking the law to begin with.
Nope. Large eInk is unfortunately super niche and expensive. Dasung also has eInk products designed to be monitors but they are just as expensive as Boox's stuff while doing less (but they are better as monitors). Since Boox's products are all just Android tablets you could try apps like SpaceDesk to use a cheaper 10" eInk tablet as a monitor which are a fair bit cheaper at ~$500.
Different assets have different threats.

You mention keeping gold in a safe. The first question to assess the safety of that gold would be where that safe is.
I would argue that making efficient and reliable software products is a very crucial factor for a software company to bring more revenue. It’s just not as straightforward to measure this.
1) Well... you just reminded what EVERY colonial countries did (including the US with its native indian population... but really not limited to). You should have talked about slavery too (without forgiving to mention that selling slaves was part of 'local' business too).

Was France particulary guilty for its colonial actions? It was not worst nor better than ANY other country in ANY other times... It doesn't mean that it's good - and maybe France, as the Declaration des Droits de l'Homme country - should have held higher standards... but truth is: we were not better nor worst than anybody else.

2) Well, I'm happy that you learn geopolitic-101. That's a good beginning. And you'll see that it's "common practice". Actually, that's the basic rules of the games between nations

3) I don't say that France has to be proud because it prefered to "look elsewhere" to keep a geopolitical position. But at least, we're pleading guilty publicly. And we'll be welcoming for others countries to do the same...
What are you talking about? People literally use the Bitcoin to transact, speculation notwithstanding. How is that not value?
It sounds like we're getting very close to violent agreement.

> it doesn't seem that far-fetched that some percentage of MIT staff might feel this way.

I can pretty much guarantee that some percentage of MIT staff feel this way, sure. I would actually be pretty worried if MIT had, as a job requirement, anything about feelings one way or another in this area.

And yes, there has been a significant presence of military projects at MIT in general, starting with work on radar and up through the present in the form of the Lincoln Laboratory.

What I am not on board with, based on the evidence we have, is the specific claim that MIT, as an organization, is in favor of suppressing reporting of vulnerabilities that the US government or some ally is exploiting. My strong suspicion is that there is no official position on it at the Institute level, and significant diversity of opinion on the matter among MIT affiliates when viewed as individuals, though I have no data to back up those suspicions.
As far as I know there are a lot of amateur astronomers that are making meaningful contributions. This video feels more like a cool stunt that won't give new insights.
This was debunked already. The phosphine didn't include any other markers for life and there are natural sources that are far more likely to create it.

In any case, what allows bacteria doesn't mean jack for humans.
There is no doubt many Soviet women chose to become engineers.

I doubt that the choice was involuntary.
Marxism is much better, but it has nasty habit of killing farmers and starving its people to death.
Manual Work is a Bug (2018)
This is a really poor excuse for bringing in a new life to existence - especially when there are so many better options like immigration.
Stories are Trojan Horses for ideas
I guess it's as bounds check and other runtime validity checks integrated in the language. When we upgrade compiler versions, I usually run a global app profile (perf, and internal tools you must have when latency and cpu load are actual product requirements. Every 'new' hot spot is analyzed and if it's a contract, I check whether there's a less costly way to perform it, or if watering down the contract seems OK (usually not). The thing is, a precondition (especially if you went through AoRTE, or silver-level SPARK) can authorize you to aggressively remove all runtime checks (and get far more performant code) 'behind'.
For those who own a reMarkable tablet, you can get a similar effect on your suspend screen by running remarkable-news[0]. When suspended, power consumption is very low (idle) and the screen is not powered, making it ideal for static content.

[0] https://github.com/Evidlo/remarkable_news
Isn't it a good thing, that anyone can be seen by millions? You want to go back to the days where you had to own a newspaper or a radio station to be heard?
bitcoin is the dotcom bubble of 2020s
It's both. Bitcoin had value before there was rampant speculation on the value of Bitcoin.
My current understanding, and I'd like to be corrected if I'm wrong here, is that Mr. Stallman's primary role at the FSF over the past decade has been to raise money for that organization, much like Rafael Reif's primary role at MIT is to raise money for the university.

I am also not asking whether he was motivated "by greed" when he made public statements that appeared to defend Epstein.

Your use of the word "greed" is a distraction away from the real question that I asked previously: were any of Mr. Stallman's statements intended to persuade Mr. Epstein to donate part of his $500 million estate to the Free Software Foundation?

That's all that I am asking here!

If his sole intention was to defend his dear friend Mr. Minsky from false accusations of raping a underage girl who was allegedly being trafficked to him by Mr. Epstein on "Pedophile Isle," then why is he attacking the law that protects underage girls from people like Mr. Epstein rather than the accuser who you claim that Mr. Stallman is not prepared to believe?
It's not a sink, it's a
It's not a sink it's a drag
By not doing anything to counteract China's self-interest influence over the whole organization. China turned them in a personal PR agency that went as far as having WHO's head renaming the virus to something that doesn't mention its origins and everyone happily ate it without question.

It's infuriating. The only entity of significant influence that offered some resistance was Trump, but his leadership was compromised and had little to none net support to make a difference.
HN is anti-Bitcoin. You probably should take these comments with a grain of salt until there is more balance.
I get the "worse" comment, but not the "even worse" one. The system is NOT incentivizing people to join and waste electricity, the returns are diminishing for mining (and it gets worse every 4 years), the amount of up-front capital for a mining operation increases. I think it'll reach a tipping point and stop growing entirely.
Ha, I pretty much got into computing around then as a kid when my dad would bring one of those very same QEC 380Zs home for the summer vacation. Or a Commodore PET, with the built-in tape drive.

Loved the mad clicking between the floppy drives when copying files around with pip.

Memories...
And the second and third sentence (emphasis mine):

> Fiat money does not have intrinsic value and does not have use value (inherent utility, such as a cow or beaver pelt might have). It has value only because a government maintains its value, or because parties engaging in exchange agree on its value.

Is there a sentence in this Wikipedia article you can point to that implies that only a government can create a fiat currency?
That would be nice, but you can't have an experiment that does that. You can conduct empirical research to try to answer that question, but that has its own problems and limitation. Overall, like most research, this paper is a piece of data that provides a bit more understanding than we had before.
Someone else already responded in kind, but to emphasize, not all attacks are zero-sum - there are vulnerabilities specific to a particular asset and are not universal. Why couldn't these attack vectors be used?
Where has borderless money been solved more cost-effectively than Bitcoin outside of cryptocurrency?

Have you done a study into how expensive existing fiat systems are, when all is said and done?
When was the last time a tweet or any other online interaction of yours suddenly had millions of viewers? You're making it seem like this happens all the time.

In reality, while it is easier to broadcast your message to people all around the world in modern times, people still need to "really believe in an idea to help it spread". Unless you're already famous, just because you put it on a platform with potential millions of viewers doesn't mean that you'll actually get millions of viewers without trying really hard.
I tend to like eating burnt toast.
The relatively small sample size (11) and uncertainty around what "3 weeks of increasingly strenuous exercise" consists of, makes the results hard to interpret. OTOH, weekly muscle biopsies is a fairly invasive stab (ahem) at getting solid data.

It is possible that this ends up as more evidence for HIIT[0] as a sweet-spot for exercise, if the 'vigor' alluded to exceeds that of a HIIT regimen.

Could be especially important if there turns out to be a firm limit on exercising more beyond which you get worse results (and not just for other measures like health outcomes or joint damage, but for an individual's primary goal).

[0] High Intensity Interval Training
It seems like the obvious strategy there is to just make someone else the figurehead, and I'd argue that's largely already happened. When I first learned about the free software movement, I was taught that Linus Torvalds is the spiritual figurehead because he wrote the Linux operating system we all use; it was only years after that that I learned about rms and the whole GNU/Linux argument.
To put this into context, this is enough to build dozens of Death Stars.