skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Most economists would say it does not matter what they build. The economic results would be the same if the Military Industrial complex were paid to dig holes and fill them in again.
> it would be pretty easy to perform a 51% attack

Yes, and the elephant in the room with Bitcoin is that it's only going to get easier. Despite the categorization of Bitcoin as non-inflationary, the computational power of the network is currently ~85% subsidized by block rewards that grant miners new coins (i.e., inflation). Once those are diminished through halvings, either transaction costs will have to go up about 7x to match the current incentive, or the network difficulty will come down as miners go offline. If the latter happens, not only will the hash rate go down, there will be a flood of mining hardware on the market as miners exit the game.

Oh, and if “layer two” solutions ever do take off, there will be downward pressure on transaction fees, too.
The people you met probably went through the 'classe preparatoire aux grandes écoles'

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Classe_pr%C3%A9paratoire_aux...

It's brutally efficient at selecting the best math students (including the ones who actually want to study engineering, since the entrance exams are about maths and physics ) , and the sheer amount of work you put in two years is absolutely staggering.

It's obviously not perfect, and people regularly talk about getting rid of this system, but it works well for the students who survive.
Thank you, fantod.
I've truncated the title to try to make it less baity. If anyone wants to suggest a better—i.e. more accurate and neutral—title, preferably using representative language from the article, we can change it again.
The article already mentions that it will be "backed by Azure cloud computing services", and you know there will be hefty consulting services added on.
I quit my tech job in 2020 to learn new technologies (Vue, GraphQL, Rust, etc.) and build my own product. In order to support myself I'm currently making coding tutorials on YouTube.

I get 30-60$ a month RN with 5k subscribers.

It's not enough but I have some money saved up and can still mooch off my parents insurance so I have that going for me.

Here's a video I made recently: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zWdySMo0EJc
> This is basically it. I don't know how bitcoin advocates expect property rights (in fact, any right) to be upheld in the absence of a coercive state. They have become so removed from reality that they don't see the most obvious things.

Errr something something blockchain?
Military is one of the few functions even the founders agreed to delegate to the state.

So, it is a bit strage to suggest we should reduce the military, to then fund someone's opinion of a worthy cause. (Yet i fully agree that current military spending is out of control and needs to be reined in massively)

Aside from assumptions made on what is worthy are truly eye of the beholder, what about letting people decide for themselves?

We are willing to explore our altruistic desires first....instead of putting others first.

That's likely why we need a military in the first place.
Ah, desktop/terminal would be awesome! It's just too easy to loose track of browser tabs. :-)
From someone who codes for pleasure: there are simpler frameworks (my favorite is Quasar and Vue - I needed an afternoon to learn that coming with a crude HTML/CSS/JS basic knowledge)
My moderated take on Arnold’s piece is that if a piece of math (e.g. calculus) was inspired by physics or created to solve a problem in physics, then at the very least include the motivating physics problem in the curriculum. I think I’d have enjoyed my multivariate calculus much more if they were taught in the context of electromagnetism.
This kind of penny wise and pound foolish approach just seems like a waste of time at best and at worst it lulls voters into complacency and distracts from the fact that our politicians still aren't doing anywhere close to enough to address carbon emissions. It's just PR and corporate greenwashing.

Like everything else, the best approach is just to use a mix of regulation, renewable subsidies, and a carbon tax to make using fossil fuels cost prohibitive compared to renewables and the market will eliminate them on its own. The wider the cost difference becomes, the faster renewables will displace carbon energy. We're getting there slowly as wind and solar are now slightly cheaper than carbon fuels, but we should definitely be helping it along a lot faster if we're serious about avoiding the worst case climate scenarios.

So far, it seems like we aren't serious about it and our leadership is sleepwalking us towards increasing catastrophe.
One point of comparison that's a hell of a point in favor of fiat currencies, is the that because fiat is just based on a really nebulous 'general consensus' rather than any sort of 'hard store of value', the same thing that's a bogeyman (of authorities deciding to cancel out all of your assets by executive decision) can work in reverse.

Most of our forms of fraud protection, like identity theft, bank robbery, etc, basically boil down to the government looking at you and going "boy, that's not fair what happened to you. Even though the closest thing we have to a hard store of value's been taken from you, we're just going to literally rewrite the books and set you back to the state where you had your money." It literally treats storage of money like a database restore.

The beauty of that is they can do that without losing anything (besides slightly inflating the system) - with hard currency (whether gold or BTC), they have to actually deplete their reserve of stored value.

---

The most extreme example of this historically, was the national debt crisis britain had during the south sea bubble, where most of the country got wrapped up in a giant stock-buying scheme for a company that ended up having no value. This ponzi-scheme crashed, and it briefly looked like something like half the country was going to go bankrupt.

What was amazing about it was that the government realized they had absolute executive power, and just forcibly reset the economy. They just decreed that all of the debts related to it were cancelled, and dictated that individual assets which had been collateral for the debt (like people's houses) had to be returned to them. Many instances of "stores of currency value" got wiped out, but the important thing the government provided was a floor - you might have all the money you earned on south sea speculation deleted, but they guaranteed the average person didn't end up in poverty.
On the other hand, if I were responsible for inspecting and maintaining vehicles or aircraft, I might find an AR HUD to be extremely useful.

"Amateurs talk about tactics, but professionals study logistics."
- Gen. Robert H. Barrow, USMC (Commandant of the Marine Corps)
There is very little consensus around whether these stimulus bills will create inflationary pressure or not. Inflation generally isn't a concern when unemployment is high; if anything, short-term inflation may be caused by a drop in supply and excess savings caused by COVID, a systemic event which would also cause BTC-denominated prices to increase if consumer goods were actually priced in BTC.

I'm not sure what you mean by, "when the stock market goes up that's them losing value on their dollar and wages" -> that simply doesn't make sense
What is "pretty bad cell free"?
I cancelled my monthly automatic donation to them a few years back in 2018, when this happened [1]. I started those donations when I was 18 (15-ish years ago), because I read about this [2]. Having come to this country from a place where speech could get you jailed, it was glorious to support a fight to keep speech free - to me it is what made America magical. Sad to watch them (and the country) fall so far on this important topic...

[1] https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-aclu-retreats-from-free-exp...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Socialist_Party_of_Am...
There are people who are experts in cryptography, and there are people who are experts in rigging elections. The author of this comic is neither.
Looks like ARM has a new core that needs desperately to sell. So let Huawei buy the licenses and then put embargo on anyone that sells whatever to Huawei :)
> if Jeff Bezos gave up his entire networth, you could run the US military for ~90 days

> If you liquidated both Bill Gates & Elon Musk too, you could get to maybe ~180 days

> Throw Zuck into the grinder & you squeeze out another ~45 days

> You’d still need ~$200B+ to finish the year

Source: https://twitter.com/visakanv/status/1291970792293425152
Tech workers left SF for Austin. They don't regret it
If you've ever driven to a different county to get cheaper gas, or chose a house in a certain municipality to get a lower property tax, or purchased nearby for a lower sales tax, or didn't compute it yourself to send to your state after an online purchase, it's the exact same thing.

This has been reinforced by the Supreme Court who could find no distinction between any socioeconomic class optimizing their tax burden, no matter how accessible the privilege becomes for some.

> Perhaps it's naive of me,

I think it would be considered naive to elevate the greed of the state over the greed of an individual. Your current train of thought doesn't seem to factor it in at all, it seems more like "if this kind of authority asks, because I respect it, I must comply" which makes me wonder where the limits are. Any state? Any due process outcome? Any percentage? Would you consider to read the state's law to discover that you are not subjected to the payment in many circumstances that you can create? To me, thats where the naivete lies.

My current thoughts on taxes are that the state incentivizes certain kinds of transactions. And if you don't engage in those kind of transactions then the state taxes a percentage of the remainder. The percentage of the tax being a deterrent, as it would prefer you put your money to use in other ways so that you never pay it. Spending, investments, etc. Which this logic its not about imagining that you are passively paying for roads and schools (you aren't, you are paying interest on the funds the state borrowed from the international markets to pay for the roads and schools that were already going to be paid for regardless, the ones that would be neglected would still be neglected). This is most directly seen with the old healthcare fine: if you don't have healthcare through an employer and don't pay for the affordable care act plan then you pay a $1,000 tax. They are incentivizing you to shift capital to certain areas of the economy, with the fallback being the state. This will be a more productive way for you to think of all transactions with the state.
> and topple authoritarian dictators and fascists.

This makes the violence worse every time the Americans stumble in and think they know how to fix a country by instilling new leadership.
Pre-WWI gets a lot of rose-tinted views due to fact that a lot of our accounts of living from that time come from well off folks - there isn't much literature and art that came out of the working classes - there were certainly a few good examples but it would become much more prominent when the great depression equalized classes and forced well educated folks to endure the same life the poor had been enduring.

I would still consider WWI the last hurrah of prestige wars (where an essentially divine monarch instigated war for personal reasons and had the authority to enforce his will over the entire nation) but the hardships were real going into it.

Content people tend to lean away from conflict - the marshall plan in europe seems to bear that out pretty clearly in my eyes. I think it's a rather successful demonstration of the fact that stability breeds peace and, honestly, the US military agrees with me... a decent chunk of money in Iraqi Freedom was invested into infrastructure repair and, especially, education.

To achieve peace you need to make life worth more than death.
If curious, past threads:

Goals vs. Systems (2013) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17167304 - May 2018 (34 comments)

Goals vs. Systems - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13462788 - Jan 2017 (3 comments)
> The US could spend half of what it currently spends on the military and still be twice as powerful in terms of military force as the rest of the world combined. I'd argue investing a chunk of that money in domestic infrastructure, healthcare, poverty and a chunk of it in diplomacy would give you a more powerful US in two decades than if you would raise military spending even more.

I broadly agree that we should spend less on our military, but this is untrue on a couple major counts.

Firstly, the US doesn't outspend the rest of the world combined. This is a talking point that started going viral some time in the early 2010's (I think it was on some TV show?), but the statistic is misleading because it compares nominal dollar amounts rather than PPP adjusted dollars. When you do that adjustment, the next 2 countries combined outspend the US[1]. This is important because (1) the personnel in each country are paid in the wages commensurate the cost-of-living of the home country (e.g. the wage for a Chinese soldier is 1/10 the wage of an American soldier in nominal dollars), and (2) military goods aren't global commodities; the US can't procure its equipment from China like it does every other good, it has to procure them either domestically or from allies which are typically high purchasing power countries. A single nominal US dollar goes a lot further in China's or India's military than it does in the US's, and that needs to be accounted for in these comparisons. PPP adjustment isn't perfect in this context, but it's much less wrong and vulnerable to low hanging fruit criticism than simply using nominal amounts.

Secondly, I think the percentage of the Federal budget that's spent on the military is overstated. It's not even close to being the biggest line item; it accounts for 15% of the Federal budget[2], and much much lower than that (about 8%) when you look at military spending as a percentage of total government expenditure across all levels of government. The lion's share of spending today is already healthcare and welfare.

Thirdly, I think that the actual cost of healthcare et al are understated; in FY2019 the US government spent $676 billion on Defense, while the cost of healthcare every year by most estimates amounts to $3 trillion per year. Even if you were to divert the entire military budget to healthcare, you'd have to find $2T somewhere.

While I agree that we should spend less on fighting and war (because I dislike fighting and war), military spending is a convenient scapegoat for other problems, the solutions for which are not so simple.

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/comments/gijt81/oc_...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_federal_budget#/...
I actually met some of the contractors who were "in-country", as they called it, to train and re-train folks on how to use all these sensors. While I was at KAF, I had dinner with one of them and very clearly explained that the equipment he was representing was completely useless to my platoon and me and the rest of the PLs in the company ordered our guys to not worry about it and toss it back in the container. He was fully aware of the feedback that infantry folks had for this stuff, which was really eyeopening to me for how the defense contracting world really works.
Gnome and KDE Are Merging to Knome – The Next Generation Linux DE
The same way that their super-secret-extra-long password protects them from someone with a wrench. It doesn't.

However, it does make money laundering, speculative kiting, and paying for illegal services easier. Those are arguably the opposite or orthogonal to property rights, but they are useful to the those with money and power.
Thank you, beforeolives.
Oh yeah because we don’t use software at all in the current system.
I had that reaction when I first learned about LSP. “It sounds like you’re reinventing the wheel by, say, coming up with another way to autocomplete Python in addition to what was already there. Oh wait, what do you mean that you’re planning on implementing LSP once for each language and once for each editor and then we’re in programming heaven? Ohh….”
> I don't look like a hippie, but I totally subscribe to the idea of "make love, not war".

I used to be exactly like this. Republicans being bad faith actors and then asking democrats for unity is a key example to me of why war is inevitable and it's better to have all the power than no power. You cannot convince these people out of their delusions. We share real space, but have two mutually exclusive realities. We can't agree on masks, we can't agree on vaccinations. We can't agree that science is a higher authority than religious leaders. Half of America was almost "dominated" rather than compromised with. Our own cities were referred to as "battlespaces" and our own people were combatants. The democrats tried to make love (compromise) but failed to prepare for war.

Then on the macro scale, I look at situations like China. China has no problem abusing human rights or acting imperialistically. America built business in china. America thought China would democratize, educate their citizens, and improve human rights abuses as its prosperity went up. In reality power was ceded and now we have both less overall peace and an ambitious highly nationalistic enemy with a weak moral system. Unless China deals with Xi and its nationalism, war is likely inevitable.

How many conversations online have you run into where a person's stance is completely unalterable and a mutual understanding cannot be reached? Expand that idea to world politics. Pretend the issue isn't something trivial, but instead global warming or genocide. Who's side ends up being right? The one with more power.

When you live in a moral system that says "do unto others as you would have done to you," it's easy to fall into the idea of make love, not war... But there are many moral systems, competing on the global stage. "Might makes right" is a moral system, "my culture above all others" is a moral system, "I will do anything to feed myself" is a moral system, "everyone should be made 'equal'" is a moral system, "the most effective competitor should win everything" is a moral system, "what my pastor says is the truth" is a moral system, "the emperor is the incarnation of gods will" is a moral system.

You look at all the resources spent on military and ask "what's the opportunity cost." What's the opportunity cost of losing a war? What's the opportunity cost of ceding power? What's the opportunity cost of competing hegemonies?

The prisoners dilemma is a dilemma. Cooperate is not always the best answer, and if you always choose cooperate when your opponent is defecting, you will lose.
Thank you, throwitawaybaby.
I think it's a little on-the-nose to frame a baby step towards unionization against one of the largest and most powerful companies on Earth as "might makes right," don't you?

The bottom line is this: the NLRB already has rules that protect the integrity of union voting activities. Amazon doesn't have a say in them, because they have no reason to have a say -- the prospective unionizers and their regulatory agency are the only relevant stakeholders. We (presumably) wouldn't allow McDonalds to impose arbitrary security considerations on our civil elections; what gives Amazon any more standing with the NLRB?
Is used for me in 10 years when it all trickles down. I can’t wait.
Speaking to the current realities in the United States and not your general sentiment, $22B is nothing relative to the federal budget. Congress is getting set to spend $3 trillion dollars in much the manner you've requested. Infrastructure, green technology, etc. It really seems like the government is doing exactly what you want
No, it's a transfer of wealth from saver to debtor, reminding you that the biggest debtors are also creditors.
And frankly, bitcoin is intentionally deflationary, and that is almost certainly bad for economies. Why should I buy now when I'll save money by buying later? Why should I start my business now when my investment capital will be worth more later?
Or possibly, "needs to update more often than every 20 years".
Thanks for pointing that out, saved me reading the first four sentences of TFA.
> You know the distribution of the phenomenon under study

If you know the distribution of the phenomenon under study you dont need ML, that is what probability is for.

> or make an explicit assumption and assume the risk of being wrong

No.You have the Bias/Variance tradeoff here.You can make an explicit assumption about your model or not.

> Using (1), you calculate how much data you need so you get an estimation error below x%

This is extremely complicated for anything except the most trivial toy examples, probably not solvable at all and definitely not the way biological intelligent systems (aka some humans) do it.
Mullvad is simply better than Nord and Proton by a lot. Their policies are more detailed, you can pay with cash and crypto, your accounts aren’t associated with any identifying information or email, they describe what exactly is stored in their database tables, they support WireGuard by default, their client engineering team seems more knowledgeable, etc.
Or a non-fancy laser printer?
I mentioned this in another comment, but I tried reading all of Sarno's books and it didn't really work for me. I 100% believe the stories though, and based on another comment, I may give it another shot, this time going beyond just the books. Do you have any TMS-specific recommendations that helped you cure your pain? Thanks!
Government agents show up at the data center and confiscate the servers in the mining pool. The coerce the owners into turning over the login credentials.

Or they just deploy their own mining pool.

Or the just tax all of their citizens’ cryptos.

They have lots of options, since they have the power of the state behind them.
Nice, but the XSS! Couldn't resist. https://anon.sharehub.live/post/ckmxxig5y00090vmurwox9nwz/xs...
https://i.redd.it/9v8n8zaugjp61.jpg

Nothing useful is a HUGE stretch - unless only smart contracts are 'useful'. The ecosystem is new but growing rapidly. Let's circle back to this comment in 1-2 months?
This must result in a non-trivial amount of ink/toner used in the name of security
Facebook's Quest 2 sales claims probably don't mean what you think they mean
Thanks, russ_poll.
Thank you, amusedcyclist.
> They had 50 million views. If 0.01% of these visitors left a dollar

If it wasn't a simple meme website to spend 5 seconds on and never visit again, it would not have gotten 50 million views. Trying to monetize that is like squeezing blood from a stone.

I imagine that's one reason why he's posting this from a Substack domain.
Couldn't messing around with these artificial cells expose us to the risk of creating some second order mutations in humans from accidentally introducing these cells to our microbiome from the lab akin to the COVID-19 escaping a 'gain of function' virus lab theory?
That's a pretty interesting point! I hadn't ever really considered how cost of living or cost of goods differences in different nations would impact a graph like that.

I'm a bit skeptical that many military supplies (e.g. the cost of a grenade or of a standard issue rifle with comparable specs) vary dramatically, but personnel wages, basic supplies, housing, repairs, etc. all probably have a big impact.
Believe it or not: a majority of us does not in fact work in Silicon valley and earn 100k+.
Thank you, dwrodri.
Is the editor still written in C++ and assembly, or is the front end now based on something like Electron? The front end shown in the video looks similar to something like VS Code or Atom.