skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I would argue that it's pretty obvious nobody has free will in the sense that there's some kind of "soul" controlling your thoughts and actions.

Your brain is a biological computer. You zap parts and it makes you move. You give it some chemical inhibitors or promoters and your mood changes. You give it drugs and it hallucinates and thinks differently.

The brain isn't supernatural and there is zero evidence that supports the concept of spiritual will influencing it. Just like there's zero evidence of psychics, magic wands, or physics-violating miracles. It's all make believe.
> sitting back and watching Coinbase 24/7 is objectively more profitable

Is it? I find that highly improbable.
Can you explain how this works in more detail - I’m intrigued!
That makes it sound like he was doing a cheap pump and dump.

Maybe you're right.
Does anyone here have experience using Fly? I’ve seen a few of their posts and it seems quite nice.
This is me. Every year at review time I get the usual, where do you want your career to go? What are your next steps? Um, frankly I very happy where I am, with my current compensation, with my current benefits, etc. I don't really want to go anywhere? It has worked for me the past 20 years. Hopefully it will work for the next 15-20 years or whenever I retire. Though, I enjoy my work so I'm in no hurry to retire.
Methinks "Three things I can carefully build myself and gain a competitive advantage over everyone else who thinks they can't..."
You’re absolutely right. Six months ago I would have said something like that (and indeed many months before even when the CDC was spewing the bullshit that started all this anti mask stuff). I probably wouldn’t have hassled someone I didn’t know, just avoided them altogether.

However, the difference is, by wearing a mask where it might not strictly be necessary, I am choosing to inconvenience myself in a way that does not harm another person in any way. Choosing not to wear a mask where it is necessary puts other people in danger, and risks the overall epidemiological health of the society around you (and in my jurisdiction was also illegal). That’s quite a big difference in my opinion.
As a general question, how long until we see the first US company receive bailout money after losing money on cryptos?
>As a gaming company they never really have a case

given that individuals have brought up cases that ultimately landmarked as Surpreme court rulings, I have to say this is the oddest take on the lawsuit I've seen yet.
Some ransomware is time-delayed because of this, so it isn't clear which backup is still untainted.
>US airports start with K

ICAO-registered U.S. airports in the contiguous 48 states start with a K. Alaskan and Hawaiian airports start with a P and other U.S. territories get other different initial letters depending on their region (e.g. TJ for Puerto Rico or NS for American Samoa).
Paying Ransoms should be criminalized as there is far more damage from allowing this to continue then having a few systems wiped and restored from backups.

Not taking steps to have cybersecurity in companies should be criminalized as well... I am a CEO and thinks CEO's should be held directly criminally responsible for this.

Finally, any nation that allows hackers to operate from within their borders should be subject to 100x over damages caused sanctions. Countries without strong governments to enforce this should have direct airstrikes conducted against the individual hackers.
The Obama administration secretly organized an airlift of $400 million worth of cash to Iran that coincided with the January 2016 release of four Americans detained in Tehran, according to U.S. and European officials and congressional staff briefed on the operation afterward.

Wooden pallets stacked with euros, Swiss francs and other currencies were flown into Iran on an unmarked cargo plane, according to these officials. The U.S. procured the money from the central banks of the Netherlands and Switzerland, they said.
There is utility in the bitcoin network that is not found in existing financial systems (censorship-resistant, seizure-resistant, borderless, and pseudonymous). And If you are thinking about the energy consumption of btc on a per transaction basis you are misunderstanding that the btc network should be thought of as a settlement layer, rather than a payment layer.

> Bitcoin is therefore best understood as a high-integrity utility-scale settlement network, similar to Fedwire [...]
No surprise that like other real-time gross settlement systems, Bitcoin is a suitable base upon which other payments networks can be built. These are numerous, but they include off-chain transactions at exchanges, near-chain solutions like Lightning, sidechains with new trust models like Liquid and Rootstock, and smart contract platforms like Blockstack that rely on Bitcoin’s security.[0]

The myopic focus placed on the bitcoin networks energy consumption has always seemed absurd to me. Considering all the plastic junk manufactured in China, shipped on giant container ships all across the globe, emitting vast amounts of carbon, only to be thrown away a year later. To me, this alternative monetary systems provides far more utility to humanity than some plastic funko pop figurine. But the latter slips under the radar and the former attracts huge amounts of criticism. It's almost as if there is some concerted effort tarnish the public opinion of bitcoin.

[0] https://www.coindesk.com/frustrating-maddening-all-consuming...
Part of the problem is the insistence and cost of using consultants. This LA Times article from 2019 explains it pretty well.

https://www.latimes.com/local/california/la-me-california-hi...
Comfortable and on the fence are two different points, no?
Fly runs the contents of the container in a VM. Bring your own runtime in that VM, use kernel sandboxing features, do whatever you want (in linux).

I’m all for the “k8s is not erlang” position, but in fly’s case it seems like the right tool for the job. Fly is much faster than a new EC2 instance.
The fact that are so many ads and info sessions about IT-sec are from people who seem to have never written a line of code in their entire life is worrying.
Agreed. Para-terraforming is a criminally underrated concept.

With "terraforming" you'd have the problem that dozens of generations would have to work their proverbial asses off without ever experiencing the fruits of their labour. Not exactly a strong suit of the human race.

Another advantage of the world-house approach is the possibility to leave sites of interest as-is by not including them. With terraforming it's impossible to preserve select areas for scientific or cultural reasons.
You don't think that the continual dehumanization of people into creatures with eyes, hair, and without emotions is a downside to wearing a mask in public? A smile as you hold the elevator door for someone goes unseen; all the other person gets is a withering stare from behind a sterile surgeon's mask. A joke that's good enough to make someone grin but not laugh is now a joke that falls flat on its face. An inappropriate remark that is met with a frown or pressed lips is now emboldened with apparent silence.

Yeah, I think there is some downside to never showing your nose and mouth. Especially when you think of them as more than breathing holes.
It’s worth pointing out that an a long time scale of tens to hundreds of thousands (not to mention millions) of years, the stars move around quite a bit.

The Alpha Centauri system will be just 3 light years away in 30,000 years. In 1.4 million years, Gliese 710 will pass within 0.2 light years of Earth. That’s close enough to be reached in a human healthspan with some beefed up (but still fairly sane) nuclear-electric propulsion that we could probably start building today if we had a reason to go out to 0.2 light years.

But other interstellar propulsion systems with higher performance are feasible, such as pellet stream beamed propulsion combined with a magsail. Really good fusion might work, too. Laser propulsion is feasible especially for probes but isn’t terribly efficient (pellet stream uses like a hundredth the energy for the same payload). Antimatter would be nice, but I’m not convinced feasible storage could be developed to beat the usable energy storage density of fission or fusion... or rather we’re probably much more than 100 years away from sufficiently efficient antimatter storage.
Indeed. Say that again.
I hope its satire
I was simply listing the large previous HN discussions. Has there been one about that article? If so, link me to it and I'll happily add it.

We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27146806.
The 2nd Amendment is always a great point in these kind of debates if any other right had half as many restrictions on it people would be on the streets. Requiring an ID to vote is viewed as completely unacceptable by many but the very same people think it's perfectly reasonable to require it for other rights.
The university I went to allowed students to test out of the first three semesters of intro to programming classes (IE here's the compiler, this is what OOP is etc.) but you had to have an interview like this first.

I felt extra qualified when I did it after having read through the SICP, it was kind of cool. I wish I had talked to my professors more but I felt like everything was so expensive I shouldn't mess with it.
You've finally found a way to fund open source development.
At the rate things are going, I wonder if it would be cheaper to just tunnel through most of urban/suburban areas. Seems preferable to building on top of ancient railroads, dealing with all those rich NIMBY assholes, and forever getting stuck with suboptimal path.

South Korea built a whole 50km terminal section of HSR in a tunnel[1], starting at the outskirts of Seoul. It only took 3.0605 trillion KRW or about 2.7 billion dollars.

SF to San Jose is only slightly farther (~50 mi or ~80 km).

[1] https://www.tunneltalk.com/Korea-14Jul2015-Yulhyeon-Tunnel-f...
You got lucky. That doesn’t make you smart or cryptocurrency smart for anything that has happened. It would be silly for someone to smugly talk about how smart they are for winning the lottery.
Layer 2 scaling solutions?
Show HN: Wheel – a toy imperative/object-oriented programming language
> Why? As an employee I'm taking on nearly 0 risk.

I'm not sure how you are pricing things. FAANG stock comp is guaranteed money; You can sell it as soon as it vest for exactly the amount you signed for. Startup equity, not so much (there's no guarantee that a liquidity event will ever happen for starter).

Unless you are working in a lower tier market where stock comp isn't the norm.
As a note, this doesn't seem to work with Brave. It only got one of the applications my machine has installed, and I don't have a slow machine nor a slow internet where I am.

I'm a bit surprised it got even one of them though. I will need to review my Brave privacy settings and see if anything can be done.
You're either clueless, or an astroturf, or a troll.
I wonder how long you’d sit it out losing money before you paid. I think it’s very easy to talk a big game until you’ve lost many multiples of the ransom with no end in sight. It’s literally just a waiting game for the hackers, they have nothing to lose and everything to gain. So what if you don’t pay, you can just leave them screwed and move on to the next one.
I'm wondering too. Now in TFA I read:

"The company paid the hefty ransom in difficult-to-trace cryptocurrency within hours after the attack..."

I don't know why you got "untraceable" and I get "difficult to trace" when reading the article.

Bitcoin ain't exactly difficult to trace. I wonder if Colonial took the "discount" of 30% and paid in Monero or if they paid in Bitcoin.

Oh well it looks at least one company is going to give a bit more sh-t about its IT security ; )

And another thing: often these news are followed, a few weeks/months later by "How the hackers who got a $5m ransom from Colonial got caught".

Waiting for that one...
And thus worth 1000s to 100000s of times less money. Bitcoin is about turning electricity into bits, the trick is the decreasing amount of bitcoin, thus get in at the base of the pyramid to make more money
Or a feature film, Werner did one about another curious mystery called "The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kaspar_Hauser
So many comments in this thread suggest Musk is an all knowing individual. "How could he miss this?" "I can't believe someone so wealthy can miss something so important!" And so on.

This is a really sad view, IMHO. Wealth may provide more opportunities to learn and expand, but that doesn't mean the wealthy know everything. He should have done his research, maybe he did and decided to go that route anyway, but wealth is only correlated to knowledge, not causative.

Edit to add: No defense for Musk here, I just hate seeing wealth equated to smarts.
Overconfidence is a flimsy shield.
The proof of stake chain is running in production with $16B staked in it.
Might this be helpful? I recall seeing this on HN awhile back.
I don't see that as a clearly negative thing. At worst it's controversial and theoretically could lead to negative things. But I don't see any concrete harm to associate with that practice.
Or cryptographically sign a statement with a timestamp.
The term isn't very precise, but is generally taken to mean "promised future compensation". The 90-day rule for exercising illiquid options absolutely is one form of promised future compensation, but so are future options clearly in the money, or even highly-appreciated real shares about to vest.

So he isn't misusing the definition, just using the broadest possible sense of the term.
The supreme court, unanimously, in Rowan v United States Post Office Department, "categorically reject[ed] the argument that a vendor has a right under the Constitution or otherwise to send unwanted material into the home of another."
I think you’re hand waving away that money is a store of value, and indirectly of time spent. The money investors have also came from them creating value by doing some activity. It doesn’t materialize independently. And it is still a risk to lose that money that they earned by trading their own time in the past.
I absolutely love Obsidian except for one crucial flaw: no tabs. They've made every editor view a "pane", which means that on a laptop you can effectively only work on one or two files at a time. There's a plugin that adds tabs, but it's pretty awkward and not what you normally think of when you think of tabs. Otherwise, Obsidian is truly incredible.
Show HN: Automatically turn few-word Topics into a Quiz
Hi HN!
This is a tool for learners-in-a-hurry, built to make it easier to engage with learning. It’s motivated by the Testing Effect, which shows studying by reading is not as good as using quizzes/flashcards (grade difference ~20%).

Most classes are still reading or watching dominant. This changes that: Put in your reading-heavy classes topics as text, and get interactive-heavy quizzes. It isn’t suitable for medical, coding or other action-based domains presently; but it hits analytical topics like Psychology, Business & Neuroscience on the head.

Technically, the architecture uses transformer models, a mix of masked language models(answer-selection), finetuned text-to-text models (question phrasing/paraphrasing - you can find some on huggingface), and autoregressive models(generate pairings, topic relation analysis via TF etc). We also rely on RAG, lecture data, and postprocessing rules-based systems.

With stable progress over the last few years, we just added a feature to save in Anki-compatible format, and have ensured you can now trial 3 quiz generations for free – and the code HN10 will unlock 7 more if you hit that this month.

Overgenerality and factual accuracy (recall) are our greatest challenges - we found you really have to be strategic with using on-the-fly augmented data to hit both in the sweet spot. Let me know if you'd like to talk about that in the comments.
Are you saying that the NSA has a different definition of wittingly than the standard definition of wittingly?

If you have a bug placed on someone's purse and they talk to others, you are wittingly surveilling them. Unwittingly would imply it was not foreseen that others would be spied on (e.g. placing a wiretap on the wrong phone number).
Admittedly harder when there is frequent concurrent modification required, but Syncthing works well for me to share between nodes.
Proof that the person who claims to be current owner, is the person that the previous owner transferred ownership to (I guess more specifically, proof that they hold the private key). And simultaneously, proof that owner n-1 is who owner n-2 transferred ownership to, etc.
Container launch times are frequently in minutes if we include pulling the images from a repo, which we reasonably should.

In whichever case, that doesn't mean we can't compose them into a performant product as the OP suggests, it just means you run them as daemons so you can amortize the startup cost across many invocations. This isn't specific to containers--we do the same thing for web servers, databases, virtual machines, physical machines etc. Anything with a startup cost that you don't want to pay each time.
The traits usually associated with Aspergers are, e.g. "Inability to understand emotional issues", "First-person focus" (struggling to see the world from another person’s perspective), "Abnormal response to sensory stimuli", late or less development of social skills, etc.

So I think the "read the book first" is probably orthogonal, whereas the "I don't get the point of literature/poetry" is closer to a common Aspie type. Getting literature and especially poetry, for example, is (among other things) all about having or developing an intuitive "first-person focus".
What's not decent about Firefox?
That sounds amazing!

That would get the content separated from the noise. I'd love it. The problem with these meta topics is that they are like the bike shed problem--emotionally driven, easy to get sucked into, everyone has an opinion, but ultimately, a distraction that takes away from the important stuff.

Here's an implementation. We have up and down voting. Let me vote these sideways.

This would be a left arrow, which hides them for me--conceptually like kicking them off the screen--and if a quorum develops past a threshold, by default for anyone with "meta" turned off.
Confirmed - my ID matched in Chrome and Safari, but Firefox just said 24 of 24 and gave a different ID. Firefox wins again!
The distance to achieve top speed is irrelevant, it is the time lost that matters.

How much time is added to the journey for a single stop (including time for the stop itself, braking and acceleration).
The Caught-Cot merger is another interesting language transition taking place right now: https://youtu.be/EaYZljTlCUo

As for Pen, there are plenty of people who pronounce it pEEn, this is understandable to no one
One question is how would you categorize them. It could be some combination of software, user input, and moderator action, and there are problems with all three.

I would use the word 'generic' rather than 'meta'. Generic includes meta but also all other predictable themes, and a subthread that goes off-topic isn't necessarily bad—whimsical tangents can be interesting when unpredictable, as long as they're not done too often (at which point they'd count as generic).

We downweight generic subthreads and the current certainly counts as that, but I haven't downweighted it in this case because it seemed more important to communicate to the community about this.

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...
>Corporations don’t generally have guns or handcuffs that they can use on arbitrary people. The state does, which is why there’s such a danger associated with them being able to access the data.

And that makes it perfectly fine for corporations to do so? Because they can't rough you up or arrest you?

Please.

As I said:

...complaining about big, bad government (which
isn't wrong, but just a tiny portion of the
larger issue)

My point (apparently, I wasn't explicit enough) was that it's not just governments that are the issue. What's more, if there were appropriate restrictions on collecting and monetizing peoples' data, in this case the DoD would have nothing to buy.

It's much easier (at least in the US) to restrain the Federal government than hundreds (thousands?) of corporations, regardless of their monopoly on the use of force.

Railing against the government for compromising the privacy of its citizens is absolutely appropriate. That said, there is the much, much more widespread issue of corporate surveillance that should also be addressed.
Any protocol change is, by definition, a fork. If everyone says the new PoS Bitcoin is the real Bitcoin, then it is so.
General crypto news and talk is pretty lowest common denominator. I agree because of pointing cryptocurrency to null essentially and literally wiping it out, the phrase isn’t the best. But it’s still a common enough phrase.

FYI. I know virtually nothing about cryptocurrencies.
Not at all. I'm saying that sound guarantees are not the only way to achieve memory safety. The goal isn't to use a language that makes sound guarantees, but to write correct programs (even Rust programs don't give you sound guarantees for memory safety as many of them depend on unsafe code that isn't soundly proven). That the cheapest way to write such programs is to have sound guarantees for everything is an interesting hypothesis, which would get you a language like, say, Idris, but it is not the consensus. There are many paths to safety and correctness, and not all of them go through soundness. I'd venture to say that most properties your life depends on in safety-critical systems are not soundly guaranteed.
The problem is that most ordinary people view that as a positive, not a negative.
Bill C-10 would require YouTube, other platforms to recommend Canadian content
If you think the 100X damages is overkill please reconsider within this framework:

Any nation that harbors international terrorists by not at least attempting to hold them accountable is implicitly operating an outsourced covert activities team. The actions of any such team should be considered representative of that country and thus this would be an act of guerilla warfare.
Does that bypass any alerts that would be presented to the user by the browser?
"The law" gives public health officials authority to issue those "edicts". Try taking them to court and see how far that gets you. Hint: not very.
Existing financial frameworks sit on top of the whole lot of trust-providing institutions, that include governments and us army. If you would compare energy consumption of all that, bitcoin could be cheaper alternative. Maybe.
Can't you just look at the blockchain?
Of course it doesn't prove truth, but it does ensure that the data hasn't been tampered with since it was published.

For example, some powerful entity might be incentivized to try to change the text of old news stories to better support their current agenda. If you can change our understanding of history, you can potentially manipulate the future. Records that include proof of immutability will go a long way to making this kind of power play orders of magnitude harder and more expensive.