skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Thank you for the response and clearing up the 'billion rows' / surly bonds confusion I had from reading project's Why Flat Data? section. I think I understand the target use case slightly better now.

One of the strong arguments for object-like storage (S3 etc) in the context of plain / flat data is scalability and availability for large scale processing frameworks. Databases are only occasionally relevant.
Why do you believe a global PoS currency will be controlled by US actors? The US has a 10--20% share of global GDP.

Regardless, history has proven that the most legitimate branch of a blockchain wins, irrespective of security model. It will not be the actor with the most hash power or stake. For reference, see the Justin Sun/STEEM drama.

Vitalik Buterin has an interesting blog post on legitimacy: https://vitalik.ca/general/2021/03/23/legitimacy.html.
He also was hired at Apple in April. ~2k Apple employees then signed a letter condemning his hiring after excerpts of his book circulated. This wasn't so much a Twitter mob resurfacing an old book, as a group of Apple employees using a published work to criticize the hiring of a new manager.

https://www.cnn.com/2021/05/13/tech/apple-antonio-garcia-mar...
Agree, it's important that we keep an eye on things and, however we can, hold MSFT and GitHub accountable to keep up the good showing.

We've seen new features launched (e.g. this one) long enough after the acquisition that much (most, all?) of the work happened in the post acquisition environment that I'm optimistic. But I've been wrong before.
'Devs' was the first thing I thought of when I saw this announcement.
Hi! Jason, CTO @ GitHub, here

You’re getting at the heart of Actions. Actions was never intended to be “CI” or any such vertical capability. It has always intended to be a platform that exposes capabilities like CI or packages etc out to the world, but the underlying serverless very flexible workflow platform is the bedrock upon which we want to build the future

My long held view that the only real ‘competitor’ to what I want github to be was AWS/major cloud infra companies and if you believe in that view along with me, you likely see what the why the past four years of github and the next few years of github make a lot of sense

And it even makes more sense when you squint just a bit and realize what codespaces + repos + actions (CI/security/packages + other things) + automated workflows would eventually do. Now imagine a bit further out into the future and what it would mean if we understood your production workloads a bit more
D'oh, this is what I get for not reading the footnotes closely!
I think a journalist wanted to convey the concept of "well-known" coupled with a sense of respect. I sense the word choice made sense in a thesaurus.
Great comment! I had a laugh!
> your data

I think it helps IT departments to go to upper management and put a dollar figure to information security.

Personally, I’d prefer the CEO and the board go to prison for a few years for paying ransom.
Shouldn't you pay the fine for leaking user data either way?

Even if you square things with the blackmailer, there's no good way to ensure they don't sell the data to someone else as well.
We definitely have more of everything data-related and have a much better idea of all the stuff we can buy. I'm skeptical how far that's actually moved the happiness and life-satisfaction needles, in general.

[EDIT] specifically, I think some of our "satisfaction" from this sort of consumption is itch-scratching generated by the possibility of doing it, in the same way that pre-Internet one rarely felt bothered by not knowing some piece of trivia, if no-one around happened to know either. Now it itches until someone looks it up, because you know you can find out quickly. Now if I'm not watching the best possible thing, for example, it itches, but I don't think it would have before. I think to some extent the level of choice available, aside from famously causing analysis-paralysis ("browsing Netflix" is famously an activity all its own, that may or may not end up in ever actually watching anything) also generates the very desire that it's satiating. I'm not sure I was actually less happy watching the best thing I could find at the video store, versus the best thing I can find on streaming services.
I was sceptical because 'AI' and 'quantum' seems to be used interchangeably and fits your regular snakeoil salestalk but google has done enormous amounts of research into non-classical computing. They've also done their AI projects to solve protein folding faster and more accurate than any contemporary solving models[1]. which is why the name sort of makes sense even though many on HN would appreciate nuance.

"Nature is quantum mechanical: The bonds and interactions among atoms behave probabilistically, with richer dynamics that exhaust the simple classical computing logic."

"Already we run quantum computers that can perform calculations beyond the reach of classical computers."[citation needed]

[1] https://www.deepmind.com/blog/article/AlphaFold-Using-AI-for...
They exist because of the unequal and discriminatory enforcement so it's a pretty naive question.
Did you mean PoS? Parent was talking about a PoW system.
I'd start with something livable.
I don't see how proof-of-waste makes bitcoin more resistant to devaluation and duplication. How would switching to proof-of-stake make bitcoin more prone to devaluation, for instance? As far as duplication is concerned, bitcoin is open-source software which means anyone can duplicate it and make derivative works from it. There are dozens of bitcoin clones. It doesn't seem that bitcoin is resistant to duplication at all, or that there is any reason the lack of difficulty with which it can be duplicated should be influenced by whether it uses proof-of-waste or proof-of-stake.
It seems fine to me. Even if you don't think it's "serious" enough for you, it's a scientific way to organize an explanation of the world and it's very famous.
Project Starline: Feel like you're there, together
First of all, Israel's goal is not to decrease casualties: https://www.brookings.edu/opinions/an-eye-for-a-tooth/

Second of all, even if I accept your premise, that "One side tries to increase casualty numbers on both sides of the conflict. The other side tries to decrease casualty numbers on both sides of the conflict.", then clearly it's not working, right?

Regardless of motivations, the outcome is Palestinian lives are being lost at a disproportionally higher rate than Israeli. That must be understood.

The standard Israeli response to this is "Hamas uses human shields." OK....so you know this, and are still shooting missiles. That means you are knowingly killing human shields.

OK, so maybe these human shields are protecting military equipment. Military equipment that is primitive and is completely neutralized by the Iron Dome.

The point I'm making is that even if you accept ALL of Israel's narratives about Hamas, about IDF's strategy (which have all sorts of other problems, such as when they get caught sniping civilians and medical personnel), you still wind up in a situation where you have a massive power differential and one side knowingly killing civilians.
InsurTech 2021 Report
I'm not saying 99.95% of energy was completely wasted...

I'm saying the last 0.05% was too
I wouldn’t call it “augmented reality” - they’re projecting different track layouts onto the ground - but still a neat idea. Wonder if anyone has seen or tried anything else like this.
Has NORAD control been hacked?

If it was, how would we know?

(outside of, uh, kinetic consequences)
I agree that we should try to implement global fines/taxes/fees/whatever on the externalities of society (be it electricity, manufacturing, dumping, litter, etc).

I disagree that it would have a significant impact on PoW. PoW is already one of the cleanest energy industries in the world, and it's also entirely price insensistive. PoW is going to consume billions of dollars of electricity per year at any price. An external tax of 50% would cut energy use by nearly a third, but it wouldn't do any more than that.

And I should add, PoW would be absolutely happy with such a fee in place. It really doesn't care how much electricity costs, it only cares that an attacker would also have to pay the same price.
Sundar is perhaps the most uninspiring CEO from any major American tech company when presenting. He's talking about amazing tech like quantum computing, but he sounds like he's talking about a Ford Taurus.

Is this just his external-facing persona, or is he like this internally too?
You may be presenting a false choice: Even if you pay hackers off, there was still a data breach.
The population is not a match, but States in the US are by design far more autonomous than "provinces" in other countries. When the original 13 states formed the US they thought of it much in the same terms that member states of the EU think of themselves today - not an identical arrangement, but very similar in spirit.

California (and the other US States) have their own labor laws, their own environmental standards, their own transportation and energy departments, their own distinct safety net programs, even their own militaries! (aka the "national" guard)!

Further, the Federal Government is specifically limited via the 10th Amendment to only those powers which are enumerated to it. By default, legal power is held by the states, not the federal government. This is very unusual.

Every "country" has a different mix of systems and different degrees of local autonomy, but US States are at the very high end of local authority while the federal government is at the low end. Thus, comparing some European nation to the US Federal Government is often misleading as it implies that the US federal government even has the power to do things that a European nation can do, which is frequently not the case, or else is greatly complicated by needing state participation and approval.
In short: the vendor (Cloudflare) handles it, not you. Cloudflare has to quickly disseminate a lot of things to their data centers all the time (new files, routing rules, cache invalidations, etc.) and Durable Objects piggybacks on that same infrastructure.

From the client's point of view, all the network I/O is to a "centralized" server and not peer-to-peer, except in this case the "centralized" endpoint is actually a cluster of data centers that all talk to each other behind the scenes.

Client --> nearest Cloudflare node --> all the other nodes via their phat pipes, not yours

Edit: their global stateful serverless chatroom demo more clearly demonstrates how it works: https://github.com/cloudflare/workers-chat-demo
> This is the sort of thing Linux or *BSD boxes are better suited for.

Definitely, though enabling conntrack on Linux has similar characteristics (forces single thread with some kind of internal mutex) though it can do 5x the b/w..

We tried having stateful firewalls in front of our windows boxen, that's how I know.

Seems like Cloudflare has an older blog post detailing this too: https://blog.cloudflare.com/conntrack-tales-one-thousand-and...

Anyway, to answer your question: AAA GameDev (and their backends, if highly tailored) are Windows.
Are you sure about the HPPAs? When I had them, there was only Linux for them, also not any distro, but only Debian without too much fuss.

edit: I mean besides HP-UX. I remember exactly because I'd really liked to have had the NetBSD option then. It ran on all my other systems at the time. (Between 2000 and 2004)
> To me it seems that a new blockchain that e.g. gives every human a wallet pre-filled with the amount of Ether needed for staking (plus some extra) would appeal more to the vast majority of people than a blockchain where the early adopters are the new rubber barons of the Internet.

That sounds awesome. If you can securely deliver a cryptographic key to every human on the planet and teach them to use it, I'd happily invest my life savings towards that ends. Unfortunately due to disparities in education, safety and access to technology, I think this is a near-impossible task in 2021.

Cardano is issuing cryptographic student IDs to 5M students in Ethiopia though! The future is bright!
What isn't discussed much is incentives. Currently, it doesn't seem that aliens are acting in a way that would be consistent with their incentives. If they are powerful enough to get around the galaxy, they'd definitely be safe with closer encounters with us. Nothing we could do about it even if we didn't like it.

I also imagine they would be bonded by morality similar to the way humans are and want to help us and the planet generally if they knew we existed. (More bellicose civilizations are less likely to achieve interplanetary travel before they blow themselves up.)
If I understand the post you are replying to correctly, the point is that being successfully attacked does not necessarily destroy the value of the coin.

Sometimes people argue that a nation state could "shut down" bitcoin for some amount of money -- say $10B. With that, they could buy enough mining equipment to publish empty blocks and throttle the ability to send transactions.

Part of my skepticism of this idea is that the bitcoin network is already so throttled but it does not seem to affect the value of the coin negatively. What would be hilarious would be if France decided to shut down Bitcoin, and succeeded, but the value of bitcoin then proceeded to increase 100x.
Right, so we replace every companies' IT department with a division of the military, as a first step.
Very true.... I’ve suffered the exact same process for years. Step 2 is the worst, not sure why but sometimes it’s incredibly hard to tap the i button.

New reddit is is a very strange design. I always thought the way it hides comment threads as a link to a new page was just a mobile thing, but no, that’s the design.

The old site is so so much better. Trying to get to it from a google search is infuriating, especially if you are trying to view multiple results. Imagine doing the above steps 5 times for 5 different results!
Amazon shares, relative to revenue, were absurdly overvalued for over a decade.

Then they weren't.

The argument for Tesla, much like Uber, is that they are going to figure out the rest. It's really almost a faith based investment, either way.
How to Identify Good Companies
$15 would be a realistic minimum wage in many places. And they can treat their workers better.

Costco is a good example of how to treat workers.
The moment Google made js throttling to kill miners, miners switched to WebGL, and WASM.

A WebGPU miner will be coming out the same second it is adopted.
Bill Gates Thought Jeffrey Epstein Was His Ticket to a Nobel Prize, Staffer Says
Are you using the version of Windows with the fix mentioned in the article?
An interview between the aliens and a science organization, with no redaction, no editing, no cuts to commercials, broadcast live on every channel. This is assuming we find a way to communicate. Even then I would probably be a little skeptical.

Now if you want to convince me that aliens visited here millions of years ago, I might be on board. Ancient Sumerian texts paint a fairly clear picture of the "Sky People" and their tampering with DNA often represented as the tree of life covered in the Book of Enoch, somewhat represented in the Torah and missing from the Christian bible covers the sky people a little bit as well. It is missing many of the scrolls however.

Until such time, I will assume its the same clever but childish games that military organizations and governments have been taunting each other with since WWII. i.e. the microscopic screw competition between the U.S. and Japan, the chirpsounder noise floor comms between the U.S. and the Soviet Unition, the typewriter vault incident between U.S. and Russian intelligence, and so on. I don't have links to any of these, sorry.
Sure thing, I added an email to my HN page
This is a good point and I think only ethereum has sufficient distribution. The sole advantage of PoW over PoS is distribution - miners sell, dumping the price, which is also likely to make other people to sell. Even many ethereum founders sold very low - Vlad Zamfir in particular sold ~100% below $20 (he tweeted about it, can't find it now).

Ethereum had 6 years of PoW now - most likely nothing else can repeat its distribution, ever. The time of PoW is visibly over.

Another point is that ethereum was icoed when crypto was tiny, few people believed smart contracts could have value and VC stayed away. Normal people are much more likely to sell just to buy a house. Now new coins start with coins distributed to VC and they are prepared to hold for years hoping for eth-tier returns.
There's an argument that not that many people even knew about the ico - but the same is true for bitcoin mining early. It's very hard to quantify precisely but I think both have almost identical coin concentration.

Be wary of manipulative statistics that ignore the inherent differences between the utxo vs account model - like percentage of coins held by top x%. The assumed practice in an account-based model is for one user to use one address, while the current practice for utxo coins is to use one address per received transaction. Same is true for value sent per timeframe - because utxo relies on change addresses the actual transferred value is much smaller.
Originally? Freedom.
I'm not sure what you mean, that doesn't seem like a contradiction to me. Apple sells an adapter that needs to be separately purchased (which is inconvenient), they no longer provide that adapter for new phones. They provided it initially because the market demanded a stopgap solution. Once the market stopped demanding that solution, Apple stopped providing it.

This is how basically every business works. Facebook didn't merge Occulus accounts with Facebook accounts the same year that they bought the company. Epic has been outright giving away games to chip at Steam's market share, but they're not planning to do that indefinitely. They have plans about what they want the PC market to look like in the future. Companies are capable of thinking long-term. Apple is definitely capable of thinking long-term, it's a business run by very smart people.

Do you believe that the iPhone has not driven Bluetooth adoption at all? I think that would be a pretty bold claim to make. Apple has positioned the lack of a headphone jack as a signature mark of a premium phone. Other phone manufacturers have jumped on board with that consumer perception, which has driven investment into making more Bluetooth compatible devices, which in turn makes AirPods more convenient and easier to use with a wider variety of devices. Because wireless audio technology is still evolving (unlike static wired standards), Apple now has an opportunity to make a set of devices that work best with their own products, encouraging more consumer lock-in to the Apple ecosystem. This also positions Apple to differentiate their headphones from competitors in ways that would be difficult to do with an analog connection (offering seamless paring, higher bitrates, etc...).

It's not like Apple doesn't have a history with this, they have openly (proudly) removed features in order to push industries in preferred directions. See CDs over floppies, USB/Thunderbolt over CDs, HTML5 over Flash, etc... That's not a conspiracy, that's literally Apple's stated reason for those changes. And of course Apple thinks about how changes in those industries and markets will affect the products they sell. They'd be foolish not to.

What is it that makes you think that wireless headphones are different then the last 3 or 4 times that Apple has done this? This just seems like very obvious business practice to me, almost every company tries to manipulate markets and demand to some degree.
I was Chief Architect at Slack from 2016 to 2020, and was privileged to work with the engineers who were doing the work of migrating to Vitess in that timeframe.

The assumption that tenants are perfectly isolated is actually the original sin of early Slack infrastructure that we adopted Vitess to migrate away from. From some earlier features in the Enterprise product (which joins lots of "little Slacks" into a corporate-wide entity) to more post-modern features like Slack Connect (https://slack.com/help/articles/1500001422062-Start-a-direct...) or Network Shared Channels (https://slack.com/blog/news/shared-channels-growth-innovatio...), the idea that each tenant is fully isolated was increasingly false.

Vitess is a meta-layer on top of MySQL shards that asks, per table, which key to shard on. It then uses that information to maintain some distributed indexes of its own, and to plan the occasional scatter/gather query appropriately. In practice, simply migrating code from our application-sharded, per-tenant old way into the differently-sharded Vitess storage system was not a simple matter of pointing to a new database; we had to change data access patterns to avoid large fan-out reads and writes. The team did a great write-up about it here: https://slack.engineering/scaling-datastores-at-slack-with-v...
It would be nice if the NSA had spent the last decade or two helping shore up cybersecurity, instead of creating, stockpiling, and accidentally leaking zero days to later get used in ransomware attacks.
The Chia Consensus Algorithm
Thanks - that's very helpful.
It seems odd to be conducting the search for extraterrestrial intelligence by looking for radio signals from distant planets.

Maybe we should figure out what all these UFOs are here first.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2021/05/17/ufo-sightin...
Three Cybersecurity Questions from the Colonial Pipeline Hack
Many people are talking about PoW vs PoS here.

Nobody tends to mention that in PoS a hostile takeover by a majority stake can just have its staked coins 'forked' out by the community. The goal of PoS is to have actors held responsible for their actions.

In my mind this is much more powerful than PoW because surely hostile majority mining power can't simply be forked away (sure you could change the hashing algorithm but even then the attacker could just move on to a different chain with no real consequences of their actions no?).

Interested to hear what other people think.
Ah the wonderful legal process. I was once sued for not entering a rent agreement and in the end we settled and everyone lost money except the lawyers. The reason we settled was simply that the court added new court days for this ridiculous case of I believe about a 1000 dollars worth. The thought of having to do this for another 2 or 3 days for the next year was simply not worth it.
What do you mean by, 'it's too vague to confer any kind of understanding'
> It feels like this is something a "Web-" prefixed API should protect us from.

It's worth noting here that the Python wgpu library (which I'm assuming is the one GP is referring to?) is a WebGPU-inspired API to wgpu. wgpu is the library that Mozilla created as a native graphics abstraction layer to build WebGPU on top of. It's possible that Mozilla has implemented (or intends to implement) the security/validity checks between wgpu and the JavaScript interface exposed to the browser, in which case they would not automatically apply to the Python bindings.
I've been waiting for a 16-inch M1 MacBook Pro to come out. I've been delaying my work upgrade for it.

I'm curious what the I/O situation will be. Will it be able to output to two 4k screens or not. The 13-inch cannot, so I'm not holding my breath.
> It's a successor to WebGL

Does this mean WebGL development/support has stopped?
Project Starline looks incredible. Wonder if it'll be affordable/viable for consumers.