skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> Imagine if each person could only have 1 bank account on a blockchain, verified by identity which is somewhat centralized but governed by a DAO.

Are you seriously pitching me the DAO, like I don't know it was one of the biggest exit scams in all of Cryptocurrency History?

Listen, you ETH guys worship Vitalik and walk around pounding that koolaid that you give us all that work in the space a bad name, give it a rest... I mean it, money is something ETH just isn't good at. In fact, I still cannot see any value or a usecase in ETH to this day besides a bunch of pump and dump schemes that tarnish what BTC and other alts have done.

I was forced to use solidity and hyperledger at an enterprise level for a megacorp, tied what the ripple and stellar idiots that were brought on without my consent to a project I had been brought no I had no choice but to leave the project and the Industry for some time. We had to loss weeks/months of work to make something that had worked in BTC (multi-sig escrow) for years just because it sounded better if it had a functionality in those 3 useless alts.

To this day I still cannot believe Vitalik, a former Unsystem developer, didn't just make this all up and his hiding all of exit scam money to contribute to the BTC network in some way; none of it adds up at all, how do you from squatting and working on FOSS in Spain to being best buddies with Putin? Chances are had he just held onto a fraction of his BTC from back then they'd all be millionaires since 2017.

But to answer you question:

Centralized currency: The means to issue and control the medium of exchange in any system (eg: civilization, country) and impose arbitrary and even malicious actions to detriment of those who reject or oppose your currency. Often a role held by Nation States and by extension Central Banks that preclude said entities.
can we just go back to the days of bonzibuddy and be happy with the internet?
This made me think of what the ultimate HN story title would be?

Uber's shelved self-driving car LIDAR firmware written in Rust now available as a Docker package with a Kubernetes deployment script. Available on GitHub from an unknown FaceBook leak.

Or...

Why I stopped programming and turned to raising goats?
Looks very similar to something I made a while ago[1]. SQLite is an awesome piece of software, and with JSON and Fulltext search baked in is ideal for these kind of things. Glad to see that people are finally realizing it!

[1]: https://h3rald.com/litestore
needs a (2020) in the title
While Amazon is not a totalitarian state, its use of AI in their delivery vehicles (rightfully) came under strong fire.

Maybe Amazon is a totalitarian country which I'm not aware of?

This is just from top of my head. There are also other examples, like autonomous trucking?
Nope. Nuclear weapons is the best example of technology we fear. And it doesn't have much to do with capitalism. Some technologies are just dangerous.
It's a form of feedback. Yes, it would have been better feedback if the author had also supplied an example of how they think this could be improved. But I don't believe that that should be required.

Anyway, here's a rough idea. Introduce some special token, like : for example, and add a special syntax rule in the parser that "a: b" is parsed as if it had been written "b a".

Then people who find it more readable can write

say: "hello"

while others can continue to write

"hello" say

and surely everyone would be happy!
At this point, just leak it to Project Zero anonymously and let them wring Valve's hand for you.

There's a small chance you might still get the bounty, because you reported it first. And if not, because it's already disclosed by another party, you can cry foul on social media.
I think Google also optimizes for lack of a better term, ‘engagement’.

So, even if an ad has a higher margin, it may be better to ‘slot in’ a lower margin ad that would get more aggregate clicks, so the net profit is higher.

Poor example:

Ad is $10 per click but is only clicked once per month versus an ad that is $1 and clicked 20 times per month.
You're batching together policies to make the curfew look good by proxy.

All analysis that isolates the curfew as a singular NPI show no discernible advantage, and the government admitted to having no evidence it's useful at all.
It generated hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue for the company annually, the documents show.

This isn't suggesting that Google's success is fundamentally due to these practices - unless ofc there are a large number of projects like this.

Alphabet's 2020 revenue was $180B.
I am very impressed. More featured than Gimp and Krita in some ways.
Profiling has to be done with acording to a privacy assesment analysis and can only be done if the assesment shows no elevated risks and / or the risks that exists are taken into account and contingencys are planed for.

Yes it is quite some work and overhead, but you are extracting information and use it in a way the person could not foresee or conceptualize even exists within the data.
fuck off with your fucking Blockchain bollocks.
> I spent a few weeks recently persuading two relatively large groups of non-technical people (50+ people in each) to move from WhatsApp to Signal

Yes, I had informally announced my network that I'd move from Whatsapp to Signal - which I already used - and was just planning to make formal announcement to all my contacts, and install an autoresponder (Watomatic) on Whatsapp with reminders to reach me on Signal. But I'm holding off now, not sure what to do. I haven't accepted Whatsapp's new privacy policy yet, so I guess will continue using that for a while longer. Considering if Matrix wouldn't be a better choice as my next default messenger.
Back in the 1980s (perhaps even earlier than that; I was not at the age yet where I was looking at copyrights), a publisher whose name I could not remember had this wonderful series where they would put out two Russian sci-fi novels samizdated overseas in a single book. They were always such a treat, and I sometimes think I should figure out what publisher it was and collect those packaged novels to re-read and enjoy.

I say this because I feel like a guy like Chiang had to know of the authors whose books about how a Soviet sci-fi future might have played out .. had an armful of important literature for the history of science fiction. There's simply too many to pretend to have overlooked them. And I'm thinking that it wasn't a kind land of Soviet futurism, either.
> With a full time job as full stack developer at a good company he would have done a lot more. The guy is good, at a FANG he would earn 200+ guaranteed and a pension plan.

I don't want to attack this comment in particular, specially because they're saying this to simply support the argument that the guy is an excellent programmer, but it irks me when people say stuff this assuming that an excellent programmer always has easy access to a FAANG.

Some people simply live in underdeveloped countries where their talents can't shine and they have no way to get an interview at FAANG, some people are either too young or too old to be a good candidate, and a myriad other things that could get in the way of an excellent programmer. In such scenarios, an Internet business like this is the only way out for some programmers. I'd bet there are hundreds or thousands of genius programmers living in Russia, Brazil, the Balkans, Guatemala and many other countries that simply couldn't land a job at FAANG even if they wanted to.
You again?

Are you stalking me?

Do you know how bad your username is?

How hard would it be for me to get you banned?

You don't want to see that hard worked 2000+ karma go up in smoke!

Because then you cannot downvote.
I worked with PMs that had 2+ years Google PMs on their CV.

They did not understand the basics of project management (who does what when and who does need what when) but made pretty slides.

It completely deillusioned me of what kind of company Google must be.
Indeed, signal is now founded in moral hazards.
If you were right Google would not have personalized ads enabled by default.
You can argue that Einstein spurred interest in Geometry, but he himself made no contributions to this field. In fact it was pretty famous that he kept bugging Ricci to help him frame his ideas in mathematical terms. Einstein was a physicist through and through, and not even a mathematical physicist. Now someone like Ed Witten is a completely different beast.
It always interests me when people personify capitalism, as if it has human emotions. Capitalism doesn't require greed any more than it requires anything else. Capital is agnostic as to which behavior it parasitizes. If every business internally came to believe that it was saving the world from climate change for some heroic motive, that would work just as well.
> that was obvious? Why would you hire someone unless you had a need for their talents?

To me, that sounds like you think of weakness in terms of "Oh, our UI sucks, let's hire a javascript developer." But is that really what the article means? Could weaknesses be more abstract things like "low trust", "failure to speak up", "inability to change according to market needs"? Do you know many teams that really know their core problems and actually try to solve them?
The issue here is that securities markets are (sometimes) meant to be fair for complex reasons that only really apply to securities markets. Google doesn't owe their customers a fair market. No one does. Nothing legally requires a market provider to provide one.
Gokrazy: A pure-Go userland for Raspberry Pi 3/4 appliances
I was merely following kaba0's reasoning. If you're going to advocate for the breaking up of monopolies, why pick only the low-hanging fruit?

Your comparison is not apt. The root directory is merely a container for its subdirectories. In that way it much more resembles geography (a country being subdivided into regions, for example) than a government.

It's bad, because it's a blind spot. Governments, despite being at the top-level, have consistently grown since their inception. I'd expect the top level to be the leanest, not the fattest.

Decentralization and secessionism are highly unpopular ideas that don't look like they'll ever get mainstream acceptance. If anything, it looks like exactly the opposite trend is taking place (take the EU, for example).

Every day you read about new legislation being proposed and introduced. How often do you read about outdated legislation being abolished? Never. It's like writing an app and constantly adding new features but keeping all the existing ones. We all know how well that works out.

Even though HN shouldn't be about politics, when political rhetoric does get posted here (and it's far more common than one would expect), it's extremely one-sided.
Hey thanks for taking interest.

I never switch off my VPN. Are you suggesting -

1. I switch off my VPN.

2. Then turn on my VPN.

3. Then delete my cache and cookies

4. Then visit BBC iPlayer?

I think I have been doing this since a long time but hasn’t really worked. I need to wait for a few days on UK server VPN before BBC iPlayer thinks I am a legit visitor. I tried converting this in my above post as well, through I am afraid I don’t portray a clear picture.
Pretty much everyone - if you work for neuralink there's some chance of cheap interventions here, but outside of that it seems unlikely.

The latter point (galvanised to support other welfare causes) is roughly what inspired the original post - our intuitive emotional reactions to visible harm should indeed encourage effort in investing in effective harm reduction advocacy. But if seeing these monkeys makes you sad, you really ought to think about all the less-visible, cheap to attack welfare issues that are available.
The mechanism that drives China now is capitalism under the guise of communism. The same hardships and suffering occurring under capitalism in the West also now occurs in China thanks in part to the GOP of the 90s thinking that it could control China and "convert" it once China got a taste of capitalism. Except China's capitalism now is more efficient and ruthless than the West's: More workers to nub down and only one entity running the government.
It’s not the real world just the media’s world if you ignore Them their evil actions and effects “mostly” goes away.
Where can I look into WhatsApp's client and server code?
Yep, I also have the impression you need a lot more to land a job at a FAANG than to simply be an excellent programmer. The interview process at companies like Google can be pretty byzantine and hard to master without an internal "champion" I heard.
What is needed for the person being displaced by technology, is to have an ownership stake in assets, such that they no longer need to earn a wage to survive. That is the ultimate solution, if there is no way a human can provide value.

And this ownership stake needs to be acquired while the human still has value to exchange for that ownership stake.

Expecting society to carry people who no longer can provide economic value to others is not going to be sustainable.
And some people, even if they have the chance to move to the US or some rich city where FAANG has engineering offices, would rather stay with their friends and family at the city they were born and make a lot less.
Someone who is relying on the government to fund their lifestyle is going to have lower status than someone who is contributing to the maintenance of their country. I don't know of a way to justify an alternative to that.

Someone choosing to be on welfare when they can handle themselves should be ashamed.
When I reached the part about Denmark is where it totally lost me; I am very familiar with Denmark and have a lot of connections to the country.

While it is truly a great place to live in as a person, they do have some civil freedoms touched upon recently with surveillance systems, and I know people greatly concerned about it.
I use it. Diagrams are easy to grasp especially when the alternative is lots of text. UML2 is a good specification IMHO. There are tools that let's you model your solution, which makes it easy to maintain it.
https://www.omg.org/spec/UML/About-UML/
Ok, will try this as well.
Clunky but worth a try.

Ta.
I'm afraid that what you call "vote" was a staged and manipulated process, without a voter census, and no oversight by any Election Authority.

This is the point, it was staged as a democratic event, but it was quite the contrary.
How about just fire your whole HR department, and let team leads do the work of finding qualified engineers for their needs?

HR is the bane of the technology world. As a cultural phenomenon, the class of "HR" specialists are massive drag on the progress of the species. We would be better off without this role in our technological cultures.

So much technical debt accrues because the HR person doesn't have a single, frickin', clue what they are doing. If you don't know what "firmware" means, don't try to hire firmware developers, yo.
With the stuff related to the actual day job. I've heard this about their London office.
I wonder, what's your standard for socialism? Can you give any example of a socialist society?
You are just opening up yourself to abuse. Sybil attacks are one of the biggest problems in computing and tracking helps us mitigate it. A truly private internet can't handle bad actors and such will be unable to scale.
> It's about as fair as one can hope for

Emitting half of all bitcoin in just the first 4 years is hardly fair. One would hope for a more Gold like distribution, such as a pure linear emission. This still has a finite soft total supply [1].

[1] https://john-tromp.medium.com/a-case-for-using-soft-total-su...
simple: most places view technical people (coders at least) as someone who is making money when they code. Its in-house outsourcing. Senior devs end up jumping ship when they realize they could make more money consulting.

I would tweak your description and convert the PM role to QC / Support.
Eh I used to want to work for Google, but now I see it about as sexy as working for AT&T. Doing something like this gives you respect and freedom instead.
I'm not sure it would even make much sense for them to work at a FAANG. Running a small entrepreneurial business is so different from succeeding in a large corporation. In one you need to be a master of everything from marketing through to development, in the other you are going to need to be highly specialised to merit a large income.

My guess is he wouldn't want to work in a FAANG and they wouldn't want to hire him.
> Typically 15% now.

Only because of the (still ongoing) anti-trust lawsuit against them.
No I think that it's easy for people that got the bailout to make a profit while being flush with cash in a crisis which they themselves caused, with no repercussions. Printing that money devalues everyone else's money, so it's basically a transfer of wealth from everyone to wall street.
Only the Play Store can update apps in the background without requiring user confirmation every time. Other stores are no real alternatives, Google remains a monopoly.
> Google is an integrated part of “Big Ad”

If you view the market through only this lens it becomes very easy for partisan interests (e.g. Brave, just as much an advertising company as Google) to trick you. Google is notable for how disintegrated it is from the rest of the ad business, between its technology monopolies and vertical integrations.
Saying "Europe" in this context is like saying "America" (the continent, not the US). You won't get a useable picture putting Norway, Italy and Russia[1] in the same basket just like you won't with the USA, Peru and Brazil.

1: Did you mean the EU?
EU != Europe. Russia is 40% of Europe's area and 15% of its population. European Russians are 80% of Russia's population.
On the other hand the Duke of Edinburghs Award Scheme could be considered an early prototype of YCombinator.

https://www.dofe.org/
HR people should be required to demonstrate the basics of the technology they are hiring for .. if they can't do that, they're not qualified to gatekeep the technology teams.

Too often, HR is used to repress technological advances, out of fear of loss of control. That is a good thing: HR should lose control over technology groups.
Tracking is not necessarily about boosting conversion, though definitely an aspect of it, but it's also about trying to prove the value of the advertising spend to begin with.

If I wanted to be generous I could point to the fact that advertiser revenue allows companies to realise a revenue stream other than having to directly charge a customer, be that subscription or increased prices. And so it could be argued that as a consumer you get an indirect benefit from advertising dollars, it's not clear that it's actually exploitive in that sense.

Full disclosure, I run adblockers and used to work for an adtech company.
Missing https://blogs.ei.columbia.edu/2021/03/12/iceberg-really-floa...
Look, my goal here is not to be an apologist for Facebook, a company that I told in my exit interview that I would not consider joining them again (for entirely different reasons). Nor do I want to be convincing anyone that they're wrong. In fact, in some ways you are right.

But at the same time, realize that Facebook is not some giant monolith. These are thousands of teams, working in a highly bottoms-up, impact-oriented culture. I read a comment earlier about engineering at scale and how it's a people problem - that's 100% it. People are not infallible, they make mistakes. What I did not see during my tenure there is any malicious intent, people genuinely wanted to build a valuable product and make broken stuff better. Again, my localized experience only.

From what I recall (could be wrong here, not first-hand knowledge), the SMS thing was a decision made by a single team ages ago, before privacy was at the forefront. It was a bad decision, but ultimately a technical detail lost in a sea of other technical details. The solution being worked on presently is a systemic one, that ideally would prevent this sort of thing in the future (though the realist in me is skeptical).
Python has os.register_at_fork nowadays, so why‘d still have this kind of behavior? Not reseeding after fork has been a footgun for almost as long as fork exists.
Per design the scientific method can only make claims about large samples or 'averages'. If we assume a claim is normally distributed there will always be folks in the left and right tails which are not average - in fact 32% will lie outside of one standard deviation!
Capitalism is not an impersonal, innate system either. It is spun up by the people that participate in it. As such it doesn't require greed, but it incentivizes it. It is a system - at least in the form it is evolving to - that cannot, should not act on its own or be left to its own devices. Because its mechanism is "winner takes all, survival of the fittest". It needs regulation to keep it in check, counterbalances. Or else the greediest, those willing to bend the rules or cross them even, will ultimately be the only winners. They'll be the elites, and they exist already.
PWA are crippled on apple phones.
The article assumes that most teams know and openly talk about what their weaknesses are. But is that actually a common thing? Don't we have a natural drive to ignore our weaknesses and blame them on others?

It's a little funny, because the alternative phrasing also includes that already.

One hires the best of the best without specifying the best of <what>.

"The best people will solve all the problems!" without any inclination about what the problems are.

Doesn't that imply that one doesn't actually know one's own problems and hopes that if one can just hire a people smarter than oneself, they will figure it out for you?
Not gonna make an account with a password that requires this and that
I used it a few times for some quick photo edits.

Along with Figma one of the brightest examples of how browser apps can be slick, performant and powerful.
For me it's about how it comes closer to how I used Photoshop than I can with Krita or Gimp.

But neither Krita nor Gimp are supposed to be drop-in replacements for Photoshop anyway so that's okay.
I realize the pandemic has led to many people having limited social interaction with the outside world, but I would encourage you all to dig deep and recall the imprecision of casual, spoken language before reaching for a counter example and declaring checkmate.
To me, much more important in that phrase is expectation who will you be working with. It's fantastic to be surrounded by smarter* people and keep learning, but at some level it's hard and if you like what you do, then this seems to be the most important thing about the job.

You have your basic financial needs covered when you're a decent coder, even boring projects can have great and interesting implementations, it all drops down to people who you are working with.

Also, not just in IT, true masters tend to be interesting people in my experience. More often than not, they have humility and curiosity that allowed them to get that far.

But of course it often tends to be an empty phrase. If they do hire top talent you are more likely to hear specific names rather than this phrase.

1. smarter / more experienced / more knowledgeable / sometimes even having your level of expertise but coming from a different background
Anyone able to explain how Adobe never took legal action against this product? I always thought that the UI was so similar as to be over the line in terms of copycat. But then IANAL so perhaps that’s legal.
Its just shocking to think that wasting your talent into making people click more ads for some faceless corp can even be compared to creating something great like Photopea.