skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The means to process and transport oil are commodity, there's very little surplus in it. It just requires a bit of investment, but not much.

Exclusive control of 'easy access to Oil' is overwhelmingly the power in that value chain.

The 'first order' issue is earlier in the process, it's that 'House of Saud' keeps most of the surplus for their family and furthermore use it to do some suppressive things.

The fossil fuel market it is very open, and market oriented. It has obvious geostrategic artifacts (notably the petrodollar, some politicians refusal to build pipelines, military support of interventions, OPEC), but it's generally open season. Nobody controls the flow of spice melange.
Tether (USDT) is launching on Coinbase Pro
> Regular people right now use it through Paypal, Cash app, Venmo, Coinbase, etc.

So people are using Bitcoin through trusted (in the security sense[1]) intermediaries. These intermediaries are basically banks, no? Aren't they subject to all the same bad incentives as a "traditional" bank? Except their deposit are (probably?) not insured against loss.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trusted_third_party

> 'Trusted' means that a system needs to be trusted to act in your interests, but it has the option (either at will or involuntarily) to act against your interests.
It's endemic. I think critical mass at this point would just be a single case such as this one to catch fire in the national media. Something is missing from the equation and my guess is maybe deep pockets or familiar actors.
No offense but if a city can’t negotiate a decent agreement they kind of deserve to get screwed on it.
> SLAs -- something that a blockchain can't really offer.

Hold on there, SLAs are actually something that blockchains are great at. Smart contracts provide cryptographic guarantees of service. In several of these types of systems, node runners must put up collateral as "stake" in exchange for collecting fees for their services. If a participant in the network identifies a misbehaving node (violation of SLA) then their stake can get slashed, or burned completely.

If a Filecoin node claims to be holding data for someone, but is unable to provide it in a timely manner when legitimately requested to do so, they're in for some serious penalties.

The great thing is that the consumer doesn't need to worry about some big company hiring expensive lawyers to weasel out of their contractual obligations. The rules are all readily transparent and enshrined as code that anyone can read and verify the validity of before participating.
If you want to stay on top of what is going on in Excel, the team's Excel Blog is worth checking out now and then.

https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/excel-blog/bg-p/Excel...
The "I call her 'she' out of courtesy" part is fairly offensive, and just totally uncalled for. It adds nothing to the rest of the content, and I can't think of any reason to add it other than to fan the flames. It's like saying "I call them Dr out of courtesy". No, you don't, you call them Dr XYZ because it's their title. It's not a courtesy to call them by their title, it's just an insult to call them anything else.

To make matters worse, there's not even anything insightful in that tweet. Yes, we get it, words mean what society decides they mean. At least the latest tweet brought up an interesting point, and he didn't finish it off with a childish jab.
Implement Emacs Lisp and throw in evil-mode. Now you can run the world's most extensible editor with Vim bindings INSIDE EXCEL!!

Also, Emacs's org-mode implements some basic spread-sheet utilities, so...
Looks like next difficulty adjustment is estimated to be in ~11 days, also in the last 24h there's been an average of a block every 10 minutes, so it's possible more mining power has already come back online.

https://blockchair.com/bitcoin/
I wonder what would happen with bigger blocks besides making the blockchain use more disk space. We have BCH and BSV to compare, but not in BTC's scale, I believe.
Ask HN: Python's place in the freelance and/or gig economy
I am curious to know what Python ends up being used for by Python freelancers. I know what it is used for in a full time role but i can only imagine what are the typical use cases for Python for gig workers, i.e short-term, temporary, one-off tasks.

I want to imagine maybe automation would be popular. What kind of automation though? In full time or recurrent roles, it's be maybe test automation and devops but do such opportunities exist in the gig economy? I can't see such tasks being outsourced in most orgs. I could be wrong.

On to web development. Is Flask really a popular tool for freelancers? I'd imagine people using JS, React WordPress, SquareSpace before going the Python way. Or maybe Django? API development, I see a lot of people defaulting to JS and Golang etc.

Scientific computing, is that even popular in the gig economy?

It would seem to me, again I could be wrong, that the gigs that end up using python a lot would be some sort of data scraping, aggregation and maybe cleaning. That's where I think it is a clear cut first choice in a somewhat popular gig economy task.

I have no idea about Python in the crypto space and whether crypto is even a popular gig field.

I guess the summary question is, what common areas of the gig economy is Python popular and lucrative?
> Consider that you can fall in love with those same characters and that storyline independently of the video game itself. In other words you can delineate between the video game and the story/music/visuals.

You can pull Mario out and put him in a movie, but it's not quite the same, is it? The character was created for the medium. The original Super Mario Bros, for example: classic work of art. The music is iconic. The character animation and mechanics are a joy and clearly had a sweeping, long-lasting influence on society. You would not have had that emotional connection with a fat plumber from Brooklyn without that experience. It's inseparable from the medium.

You can also pull a character from a novel (or other art form) and put them in a video game. I just played Witcher 3 recently: A beautiful in-depth, expansive game with a gripping storyline that was pulled from a book series. Is the book series no longer art because it jumped mediums? Nonsense. The experience of reading the story and playing the story are completely different. I treaded thousands of miles in an expansive virtual landscape and played the role of Geralt as I did so. I experienced his romances, fought his battles, and shaped the story and outcome based on decisions I made in the game. And I experienced art (voice acting, cinematography, architecture, landscaping, character design, etc) that would otherwise not exist without the game as a package. It doesn't make the book any less of an art form. It's all art.

Anyways I could go on and on with examples. Clearly not all games are created equal, just as not all paintings are created equal. And they do not all fit into neat, sport-like or Pong-like categorizations.
Why just Peloton? Ban all treadmills? Not
I am an avid runner and have owned several treadmills as well as other exercise equipment. Peloton is not the only manufacturer with a slatted belt surface. Technogym and Woodway. Seems like people want to jump on the bad design, bad manufacturer, but any treadmill can be dangerous just like normal everyday household products if they were left where a child can reach them.

While I agree it is most horrific for anyone, especially a child, to lost their life, who of us know all the facts. What was the parent doing with the child while running on the Tread +? In the video from the CPSC it is clear that someone left the Tread moving at a slow rate of speed. Why? How come they didn't stop the machine and remove the safety key before leaving two children in the room unsupervised? Do a search on the CSPC website and you will find plenty of recent reports on treadmill malfunction from manufactured by ICON Fitness. Are we demanding a ban or recall on this brand?

How about this analogy. I leave my patio door open and my 3 year old walks out the door and falls off my deck in his killed/injured? Who is to blame? Recall the patio door, sue the manufacturer, greedy door maker. File a complaint with the CPSC,. Alert every news outlet of the danger of this one brand of patio door. Save the life of future children, pets, and adults that walk through the door and fall off the patio. Sue the builder of the house! Make the patio door have an auto-shut feature that monitors when the door is left open for a period of time, scan for anything in the doorway, and if not shut the door.

Who is responsible? Me for not shutting the door or supervising my 3 year old.

I am sorry for the loss of anyone or the injury, but if you do not want to take the responsibility of owning a piece of equipment in your home, then do not purchase it. Reported treadmill injuries are of 22,000+, Peloton had less than 40 of these and people are out for blood.
I assume he'd be arrested as a fugitive
I’d take it any day over the gross conditions animals are raised and butchered in. I’m not a vegetarian but am unbelievably excited for this to become normal place. It’s many years over due.
> I fail to see how this is the company's fault.

Because other companies do it better. Tesla likes to publicly position its driver assistance as being so good that they refer to it as "Full Self Driving", and yet the system doesn't include a number of basic safety measures. That's part of the reason why they tell regulators that "Full Self Driving" is only a level 2 system:

https://www.thedrive.com/tech/39647/tesla-admits-current-ful...

> Measure resistance on the steering wheel to prove it is flesh on there? Driver-facing camera? Weight sensor in the seat?

Yep.

> Each of these has their own issues including defeatability and privacy invasions.

Tesla cars in general are privacy invasions. For example, a recent car crash resulted in Musk tweeting about what Tesla's logs supposedly reveal about the car before it crashed. Tesla is quite happy to rummage through your data and use it to protect themselves. In this case it earned Tesla a search warrant:

https://www.thedrive.com/tech/40250/elon-musk-denies-autopil...
wasn't always that way. At one time the predecessor agency to the USPS was a cabinet-level department:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Post_Office_Depa...

There is Constitutional authority empowering Congress "To establish post offices and post roads" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Postal_Clause)

We also used to have a limited form of postal banking here:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Postal_Savings_S...
"Asking for permission", while simultaneously doing the thing you're asking permission for, without waiting for a response, is not actually asking for permission.
I think that providing a wide (vs deep) overview of software development is interesting & valuable. It's useful for newcomers, but also for people exploring new areas of IT. IMHO it's easier to dive into the details once we have at least a bird's eye view. But I'm a generalist so I'm probably biased ;-)

I'm currently writing a series of e-books with a similar goal: https://www.dev-concepts.dev/table-of-contents

Being aware of ideas, concepts & terms helps a ton to create clear mental models, find solutions more efficiently and reduce tunnel vision (e.g., John Doe works on back-end and thinks that front-end development is simple/easy).

Of course a single book, cannot explain all that much, but I really feel like it's possible to share the main ideas, explain the jargon, what matters and why, what to pay attention to, etc. Readers gain a rough understanding of various ideas, and can come back for more if/when they need to dive into other subjects.

I'm eager to get opinions/ideas about this.
I won't disagree with your summary of the situation with email, but I think I would add that it is possible to have federated reputation systems which would solve much of the spam problem with email, at least.

To give more detail about the sort of system I mean, here is an excellent description of the approach favoured by the team behind the Matrix communication protocol:

https://matrix.org/blog/2020/10/19/combating-abuse-in-matrix...
You really made me consider the ethics associated to this type of project.

I'm curious about your thoughts about an internal questions I had in my head.

What is different from this than say hired labor for picking up produce or something to that extent?
The books I've chosen over the last year seem to unintentionally have had the common theme of survival under miserable situations. Man's search for meaning, Diary of Anne Frank, Alive!, When breath becomes air, and Blueprint for armageddon podcasts I-VI, are some of them. While providing strategies for living the day to day, they also provide valuable perspective and have made things seem just not so bad after all. Otherwise focus on sleep and exercise have been extremely important for managing what has been the most stressful year of my life.
.com is shared, and .apple.com can be shared across multiple subdomains in the same way. We already have that eg. co, gov etc. The registrar would have to maintain the link lists and host them on apple.com for you to choose. You would get a subdomain which you can manage.
I don't think it has. Not for the majority, anyway. Maybe it has for members of the "lucky sperm club."
I like Munin for small environments. Dead easy to set up and a very concise UI. I've written plugins .. I love it.

Where I get frustrated is scalability of RRDTool. Every data set has its own file so you get into this IO nightmare. I solved this for a while by storing them in a RAM disk.

Ultimately I set up InfluxDB+Grafana. It is a lot more work and last I tried, InfluxDB does not support downsampling of older data, so instead of two years of history we have 90 days. The collector from one version to the next renamed most of the datapoints so the Grafana dashboards broke ...

(Oh and of course also Munin looks like the 90s, which doesn't bother me, but sometimes gives decision makers cause to believe my solution is not hip.)
99% is a common number for cargo-cult numeracy, much like "give me a minute" probably doesn't mean a literal minute.

On the other hand, 95%, 90%, "give me three minutes", etc. are much less cargo-cult, and much less likely to be cargo-cult numeracy.

On the third tentacle, people are bad at a lot of estimates, HN crowd included.
It's a pity that this comparison was quite narrow - there is actually a lot of competition in the data extraction cloud services space nowadays.

Since the outcome of that comparison is that nothing is really great, the best course of action would be "look further". :-)

(Speaking on behalf of one such service - Rossum.ai. We actually extracted data from a dataset in the same domain as the article, 25000 television ad invoices, in November with 94% dollar-weighed accuracy. It was a project together with eVentures data: https://rossum.ai/blog/presidential-campaign-spend-analysis/)
It's the short term option, yes. Well, they have to hold on to the coins, because once they lose it, they can't turn to Fed for a bailout. Lots of custodians have insurance in place [1].

In the long term, lightning is here and works, as exchanges keep integrating it, that's where most of the end-user funds for small amounts would live.

1: https://finance.yahoo.com/finance/news/bitgo-expands-cold-st...
I knew this would be posted. Such an absurdly stupid reasoning. You wanna pay for your coffee or buy car or whatever and the fee is slapped on top of the price. Who the heck would care about satishis per byte. Its % of the transacted value that matters. High fees means low value Tx are no longer "possible".

>which to me says that it's becoming the settlement layer as expected.

So it went from p2p cash to store of value to a settlement layer in just 10 years. What is it expected to be in the next 10 years?
The difficulty adjustment only goes up by a certain amount, and you'd only expect mining and difficulty to normalize when it's a margin driven business. If there is some limiting factor (e.g. not enough hardware, not enough power etc) or if price is increasing faster than bitcoin mines can come online then the difficulty adjustment can't keep up.

Other coins have solved this, in fact bitcoin cash had to solve it as soon as the fork happened because it would have taken too long to hit an adjustment period.
Depends on what company. One headed by people like Ross Perot ( RIP ) definitely will. The other that runs private jail would most likely let people expire if it makes them extra dollar.
I am regularly checking for updates using fwupdmgr. Did a few updates and things improved a bit. Did not try and firmware-update the display yet ... because I didn't know that was a thing. Thanks for the hint, will check that.

EDIT: I'll also check for a Windows tool, to see if it offers more updates.
Why should I believe in markets when transactions can just be reversed like this?
The unwinding mechanism that it uses extends from java.lang.Error, which means most catch blocks in Java code won't catch them, which means it should interact with Java libraries just fine in most cases.
It should be noted that the behavior of `echo` in this case is notable not standardized with regards to what should happen if `$1` starts with a dash, and whether it should interpret several special control sequences or not.

It is for this reason that `echo` is generally frowned upon for programmatic input, and `printf %s "$1"` is recommended; as this is guaranteed to not interpret, and copy dash-leading strings to the output verbātim.
In 10 years from now, everyone would have easy to use/intuitive lightning network wallets and all exchanges would have integrated it.

Again, no need to keep track of every coffee transaction permanently forever on the blockchain, it's just not efficient.
It sounds like it might be a screw up at the registry end. Hard to say from the limited info available.
How much does the CI service cost? I can't seem to find any information about it on the website without creating an account.
Here's an example: Cash decentralizes credit.

"Cash and carry" grocery outlets were a 20th century innovation. [0] Before that, the norm was to have a line of credit with the business, and in many cases, to accept their terms for delivery. Cash transactions anonymize, since settlement is done at the counter. You don't have to assess the buyer, you just need to verify the bills and change are real.

However, that isn't the entire story. While there were businesses using cash before this, they faced difficulties with accounting, supply logistics, and other elements that made it hard to conceive of something like a "supermarket", carrying a vast variety and quantity of goods on a daily basis. So then we have to look at all the pieces that fell into place to make it possible.

The automobile decentralized access to mobility, making carry-away a real possibility for more people, and thus making it possible to apply cash-and-carry in more places. Supporting elements like cash registers and refrigeration were becoming mature enough to support new forms of retail and allow more parts of the transaction to be delegated to local outlets and low-wage employees. The inter-war years really saw a whole set of technological innovations that were used in combinations to propel social changes and different categories of business(e.g. fast food), many of them decentralized in some respects but centralized in others - supermarket chains, as opposed to local markets.

These are the kinds of changes that are hardest to assess in full; when you decentralize one thing, centralization is "squeezed" into other parts of the economy, it seems. The obvious example for this phenomenon is Amazon, leveraging an apparently decentralizing mechanism(online retail - premised on an internet with sufficient bandwidth and security to list goods and take payments) into becoming the world's largest retailer. So it's centralized on one axis, but decentralized on others - a buyer no longer has to go to a particular physical location to purchase something, when all of it can be delivered to the doorstep.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cash_and_carry_(wholesale)
I'm really unfamiliar with maritime laws but I wouldn't be surprised if seizing unmanned boats that are flying the flags of a different country but within your waters is somehow a touchy international grey-zone.

This situation was created by the country essentially leaving a 4k tonne vessel derelict off the coast of Eygpt after failing to pay to fuel its ride home so there isn't going to be an easy answer here. It might be that the company had some act-of-god like circumstance happen (like an employee fraudulently embezzling funds and tampering with a fuel gauge to make it look like the ship had far more fuel than it did though... that's insanely unlikely given how shifty everyone is acting).

Egypt might be in a position where they've got a rusting leaking hunk of trash off their coast that they can't remove without causing an international incident and, forcing some member of the company to remain with the wreck might just be intended to force the company to actually call in salvagers to resolve the situation (which would likely be a large asset loss for the company).

I really don't think Egypt is likely the worst actor in this situation but it was cruel what they put this man through. Ideally the administrator trying to untangle this POS would realize this employee has essentially no power to resolve the situation and release them home - but his options to escape were likely pretty few.

If you're a passing ship the last thing you want to do is piss off Egypt since the country is pretty corrupt and controls the Suez Canal (which you plan on sailing through if your ship is anywhere in the neighborhood) - getting on their bad side is likely a one-way ticket to random inspections and tariffs or an outright ban and the only land close enough for the man to flee to was Egypt itself - so he'd need to sneakily emigrate... he's heading back to Syria so that means he'd need to cross the Egyptian-Israeli border under the radar and potentially without a passport - and probably with very little cash.

I really feel for this dude when he says he was struggling with depression because his situation was utterly screwed - the universe really wasn't on his side.... buuuut, I think the company owning the ship comes out the worst. The article doesn't have the details but something seriously slimy was going on there.
TikTok Chooses Which Songs Go Viral
Wow, that paper is super strange! The outcome of visual check not adding any value to single entry seems incredibly surprising, yet besides all the fancy statistics in the paper, the authors made no attempt at all to investigate this surprising outcome further and hunt for an explanation.

(The easiest experiment - try to see based on total time whether the participants didn't cheat; UX might have been an issue; ...)
Intentional misrepresentation that causes harm is commonly referred to as “fraud.”
I think the name's just fine. It searches through your code in a way that you can define semantically/with more context. All of the alternatives you mention carry less meaning, and are less memorable.

This is like saying that PubNub is a bad name because it does messaging, and has little to do with pub-sub. Or hell, even that Y Combinator should be called something like StartupFactory since it's not really a recursive tool.

In short, the metaphor's close enough.
It wasn't a question about what's the best outcome for the environment. Parent poster claimed, "Widespread adoption of this technology would likely lead to more total salmon lives". Eliminating farmed salmon would be good for he environment, but it reduces the number of salmon lives.