skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Blockchains are slowly becoming a pseudoscience. People spout a bunch of jargon and crypto math but have no idea how anything is connected to the real world.

Most of the fraud that exists out there is due to social hacking. There is no real problem a blockchain solves.

The surprising thing is how many people are falling for it.
it will settle. Just keep trying, we'll get back together.
Isn't this just the old engineer/technician dichotomy but applied to programming?

I mean sure you can design circuits without learning all the differential equations governing how each component behaves, and you can fire up a copy of SolidWorks and build a lot of really nifty stuff without ever studying resistance of materials. But if you want to be an engineer in one of those fields you're definitely going to have to knuckle down and learn the respective theory at some point, even if you find yourself using very little of it on the job.

I've seen people with a more practical "technician" training brag that the engineers are "mired in theory and can't do anything useful", and then I see people with a more theoretical background think anything practical is trivial and beneath them.

Wanna know what I think? Learn both!
I'm not oppose to calling it fraud or scam.

I'm in general just against using Ponzi scheme to describe things that are not systems where previous investors are promised and paid profits with later investors money.

BTC is bubble or mania. But not really Ponzi. Tether is even less so, it's carnival token...
A central land register or a written title of ownership doesn’t absolve the need for a court system to settle disputes or enforce laws.

Those things can still be useful, though.
Reading this reminded me of a humorous Onion video titled "Report: 95% Of Grandfathers Got Job By Walking Right Up And Just Asking" [0].

Scrolling around the comments, I'm not seeing any stories newer than the 90's. Given the layers of HR rules, proprietary software shenanigans, and corporate management, I expect similar stories are rare today.

[0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IV_6RYVbNaw
Oh grocery store deli chickens. I've made meals out of those things more times than i can count. Gotta admit, i've always wondered about the odd pricing compared to uncooked chicken. I usually go for sandwhiches or a chicken salad myself though.
It is common. Today it falls 50%, tomorrow it rises 200%. It is nothing unusual in the world of crypto.
"Sorry Mr. Anderson, the house you've been living in for twenty years now belongs to Ms. White. The blockchain has decided. You have to vacate your house in two weeks."

"But... your honor, that's preposterous! The Californian Blockchain Deed Corporation was hacked last summer, and we all know their private key was stolen! I'm a simple man, I don't even know what's a 'private key,' how could the system do this to me?"

"(clears throat) You Honor, my client, Ms. White, has already sold her house - as we all know the transaction is irreversible. If Mr. Anderson doesn't cooperate, Ms. White will be homeless in two weeks. We respectively request the court to proceed with the decision."
Thanks! So basically (typically, of course depending on circumstances) any number explicitly stated by the buyer is less than the true maximum and you can expect to converge on a higher price?
Not that any of that really applies here: "Jolie" isn't[1] a woman's name. Maybe you're thinking of actress Angelina Jolie, whose surname it is? As such, it can apply just as much to men.

Also, in French it's a regular adjective that means ~"cute".

___

[1] EDIT: Except, according to comments close by, in Quebec.
One counter point, which is the defining feature of tech imho, is you don't need to be born into it. Its difficult to become a doctor without prepping years or more ahead of even applying. You can break into tech at basically any point in your life, it just takes time (as you said) and effort. And of course, interest will make it more enjoyable / tolerable. Its not a perfectly egalitarian club, but it is certainly _more_ so than any of those other professions, by a few orders of magnitude.
A lot of ‘08 was because it impacted the every day Joe quite a lot. If prices drop because people can’t get mortgages, and people can’t pull money out of their bank because the bank is insolvent?

Those are now people who don’t have the HELOC they though they had, or their primary asset for retirement is now worth half of what it was, or can’t or won’t use the savings available when they need it - and also the people getting laid off because other Joe’s aren’t spending money or buying houses anymore. The banks are at the center of this.

Many big banks were nationalized for awhile, Lehman was blown up, Fannie and Freddie were taken over. Not because they had more money. Rather because they were at the center of the crisis that touched assets almost every American owned - and had more money because of it.

If this only impacted folks with > $1m net worth, it would have looked a lot different.
According to The Swedish Tax Agency there are no civil laws regulating exactly how to form a non-profit organization. But it’s customary to create a ”decree” (stadgar) that declares such things as location (”säte“), purpose, rules for how to operate the organization, rules for how to elect the board of directors, etc. Not sure if they have done any of those things.

If the organization hasen’t created a decree and elected a board, then it will not count as juridical person.

[Edited slightly]
Mr. Lee annoyed some wikipedia editors in the process of screwing up freenode.

This has consequences.
I would say https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fritz_Haber blows him out of the water

>Haber is also considered the "father of chemical warfare" for his years of pioneering work developing and weaponizing chlorine and other poisonous gases during World War I, especially his actions during the Second Battle of Ypres.

but more importantly,

>Nearly 50% of the nitrogen found in human tissues originated from the Haber–Bosch process. Thus, the Haber process serves as the "detonator of the population explosion", enabling the global population to increase from 1.6 billion in 1900 to 7.7 billion by November 2018

Anything past 1.6B is overpopulation, and is driving the holocene extinction, global warming, pollution, etc... all of our big problems scale with population, and removing this natural limitation on our food supply has allowed us to blow the suspension out on all of them
The cost of imprisoning them is borne by taxpayers, but the imprisoned arenl responsible. So add that to their income.
> without arguing (which doesn't work)

My anedote:

I went from 290 lbs to 190 lbs over the last year.

I totally knew that I was eating garbage, but I thought I was young, so I thought I could just switch to being healthy a few years later. I thought focusing on career was more productive at my age.

So I start feeling weird after eating carbs and one blood test later I found out I was on my way to having type 2 diabetes before 30.

Losing weight was hard as fuck, it was like my body was completely wired to bad eating and sedentary habits. I often felt like and addict and felt stupid. Like, why couldn't I just exercise and eat less shit?

Maybe just like cigarettes, the best approach to junk food is never starting.

I guess if I had tested my pressure / blood sugar more often I could have realized how bad things were earlier? So that's an idea.
>I dont think this is true about article at all. Quite a few points are not complains about other peoples behavior nor do they contain anything bad. I do indoor climbing, it does cost money, we talked about climbing in the work a lot. I would really have to work hard to perceive myself being criticizes by that point.

I did not read the article as commenting about what is "bad" about the tech industry but rather about how the homogeneity of the culture can make people feel alienated. Imagine your statement written by someone else read:

"I dont think this is true about article at all. Quite a few points are not complains about other peoples behavior nor do they contain anything bad. I have a super yacht, it does cost money, we talked about the best places to take our super-yachts at work a lot. I would really have to work hard to perceive myself being criticizes by that point."

Can you see how that would cause some people to feel alienated? Just because something is normative to you and your peer group does not mean it's normative across the board. It also doesn't mean it's automatically good or bad.
I use firefox but haven't had sound since they dropped alsa support. Occasionally I'll run palemoon to get sound but while I like the browser, its not totally stable.

Probably need to try chromium.
I noticed that the two bugs they linked [1] [2] are both due to the distros introducing bugs by applying patches -- one for hurd support (!) -- that were not shipped by the upstream projects that the distros were repackaging. As we have discussed earlier [3] I think the way distros inject themselves into this software development process produces these bad outcomes due to getting the incentives wrong.

[1] https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1679430

[2] https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1633467

[3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26216917
Nordic Biker War (1994-1997)
That's still 'free'. Every business makes money somewhere and when you're not paying money directly to that business, we generally call that 'free'.
I follow both, US and Argentinean politics, given that I live in Argentina, and my livelihood depends on the US (I've worked for American companies for the past 20 years or so).
The thing about singular they is that it only really became "perfectly good usage for longer than people think" within the last few years, well after the heyday of Usenet. I don't think it was even a major contender for the English language gender-neutral singular pronoun before then.
Neat. I love how I can install packages in Common Lisp REPL, and now I can do it with Mix.install.
Hedge funds also spent a decade not beating the market. Remember Buffet's hedge fund bet?

https://money.cnn.com/2018/02/24/investing/warren-buffett-an...
Ask HN: Who here has been successful buying a small business or tiny project?
With https://tinyprojects.dev reaching the front page, I was wondering about the other side of the acquisition equation.

Who here has bought a tiny project or small business and been successful in growing or scaling the company?

Not interested in companies acquiring other companies, but solo entrepreneurs or small teams acquiring a pre-built product or service business.
Is this actually a serious question? Do you think there is no point to PayPal, or do you think your GitHub repo is an equivalent replacement? Is forwarding an email to a bunch of people equal to twitter?

The point of cryptocurrency and smart contracts from a technology perspective is that it is distributed, decentralized/p2p, and has immutable atomic operations. There were lots of early cryptocurrencies and lots of early ledgers. World of Worldcraft gold is a a digital currency if you want to call it one.

What bitcoin solved was decentralized atomic operations (double spend). That's pretty much it. Whether or not you need that is open for debate, but points like you're making are ridiculous.
That's not the common definition of slavery.

Unfairly compensated labor is bad -- in this we agree -- but distinctions exist for a reason, and the surest way to appear unreasonable/extreme is to conflate them.
I hear what you are saying, but think a more interesting case can be made for items that are (a) fungible and (b) accepted as a medium of exchange.

Ownership of gold in a vault would be a good one to critique, although I suppose you'd have to find some way to pay for the transactions.

If gold fails this test, then I can't see any point in using a blockchain for any store of value but simply as an in-and-out mechanism for transmitting money.
Lawsuit Claims Onecoin's 'Cryptoqueen' Ruja Ignatova Holds 230k Bitcoin
The title was edited only after the original propitiated the story into notoriety. The votes before and after the intervention therefor became in conflict. Hacker News aided in the spread of disinformation.
Actually the cost of mining puts a soft price floor on Bitcoin. When prices touch the cost of mining, they face heavy resistance since miners rage quit at that point
> I'm not seeing links to the numbered evidence.

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

>The book I linked "The Big Fat Surprise" is a breakdown of the bad science that has been the mainstream dogma for years. One good example is the seven countries study:

And what about the Cochrane RCT? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27211025

>> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Seven_Countries_Study

Are you seriously linking to the comment section of a wikipedia article?

>Nutrition science has been basically captured since the 60s.

Nutritional science is captured, so we should just trust the opposite of what they advocate?

>The timing of these authorities recommending a low fat diet, coincides with an upward trend of obesity related diseases.

https://xkcd.com/925/

>Grass fed beef for instance contains more Omega fatty acids, and vitamins. [...] All of this and more is in the second book I linked "Deep Nutrition."

source? I'm not going to pay $14 and read through 512 pages just to verify a citation, and I somewhat doubt that the book is where groundbreaking research is being published.
The actor terminology isn't used in any official sources since Erlang processes are not quite "actors" in the actor model sense. They were inspired by OS processes.

http://erlang.org/pipermail/erlang-questions/2014-June/07979...
As a crypto miner/holder/user since 2011, that article was really great.

I think blockchains (esp. programmable ones) have or will have significant real value in making markets more efficient and transactions lower friction, but right now blind speculation is driving 99% of the market. IMO while this brings lots of useful funding to speed along development, it could also endanger the true purpose of the tech.
Doge is picking up steam in that regard. It has so many problems though
Well, as a vegetarian, if I ate a salad every time I wanted a vegetable then I'd pretty much only be eating salads. I'm sure you can commiserate with wanting a variety of foods in your diet which would include sandwiches. But knowing that the bread has so much sugar, I can pick other sandwich places most of the time.
I'm not a biologist, so I consider this just my pet theory. But the idea is that one key element of evolution was the appearance of an alert state, which we now call wakefulness. The normal for all organisms was what we now call sleep. Organisms that developed this awake state were obviously able to better adapt to the environment.

Like in many other cases, we can take clues from embryonic development. We know for example that fetuses spend at least 95% of their time sleeping. So we know from pretty early stage that sleeping seems to be the norm. Sleeping is also the most efficient, energy-wise, state for an organism. Even nowadays certain animals are able to hibernate for months. Humans can do this too in extreme situations, it is called comma.

So, when we go to sleep we're not just "recharging". We're going to our normal state, and while it is possible to stay that way for long periods, I never heard of anyone staying awake for more than a few days.
I second that. I'd love to be able to configure a shortcut to move tabs to new windows.
The books in everyone's backgrounds :D

We get it! You're experts!
The advantage of decentralized ledger is recording "normal" transactions without the central authority's involvement.

A central database is vulnerable to attack, downtime, data loss, etc.
Lottery tickets are a mechanism for taxing hope.
If grandma loses her private key, or dies without sharing her key's passcode, what happens to her property?

If the county has a mechanism to fix that anyway, how is that blockchain any better than a county-run, publicly readable database?
Here's a video from Chinese TV in Feb before the landing that someone else posted in this thread: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rBhVaihkDvc

I realize it doesn't have English subtitles, so I'll summarize some highlights of what's in there:

* interviews with scientists and engineers working on the project

* trajectory of the spacecraft and lots of talk about the challenges of reducing velocity for landing

* historical overview and context for why Mars exploration is important for science

* what to expect in the future landing and when it'll happen

It's pretty similar to video programs that NASA produces. Not sure what information you're expecting that isn't out there, but I think you're attributing to secrecy what is more easily attributable to people not translating open public reports into English.
Thank you for checking it out! And yes, you're right. This was written with the United States in mind, which has not rolled out ranked choice voting on a large scale like other countries.
One rendering places the pool just northeast of the Brooklyn Bridge (it's built out of stone, so very obviously not the Manhattan Bridge. The other rendering places the pool just southwest of the Brooklyn Bridge (also visible in the rendering, but from the opposite direction).

The article states, both in text and in an image caption: "The pool will be located just north of the Manhattan Bridge." Which doesn't match either of the renderings.

So where is the pool actually located? The Navy Yard starts pretty soon after DUMBO, so I guess it's going to be on the shore of DUMBO somwhere?

The article also states "the Manhattan Bridge, which connects Manhattan’s East Village neighborhood to Brooklyn’s Dumbo". Which is wrong. The Manhattan Bridge connects Lower East Side/Chinatown/FiDi to DUMBO (Down Under Manhattan Bridge Overpass).

Would it be so hard to get a story even vaguely correct before publishing?
Perpetual swaps are most of the crypto market by volume. Here is a guide explaining them

https://www.bitmex.com/app/perpetualContractsGuide

Throughout the last week of price declines the rates have stayed positive meaning longs were still paying shorts, implying continuous buying pressure, likely by those trying to time a bottom. But after this mega nuke the leveraged long traders got liquidated. When you clear out leveraged traders it becomes harder to move the price as fewer will be liquidated accelerating price changes. To summarize, retail investors lose in crypto because they take big risks with small money with big leverage and the big boys with big money then flush them out and the crypto lifecycle begins again making the whales richer and more capable of manipulating the market the next time.
How about fixing GPU acceleration. This is THE main issue why I don't use Firefox.
I guess the issue is that a modern web browser is a sandboxed application runtime which also happens to function as a document browser. It's been going in that direction for a long time (since webmail became common), and there are real advantages of the browser as a platform for applications - it's cross platform by default, and it has pretty good sandboxing.

So probably the most you can hope for is that we split the document part of the web from the application part, so that it's easier to make a viable document browser. But it's not clear what advantage this offers for anyone who's not trying to make their own browser. Security is probably much simpler for the document browser, but the logins and sensitive data you care about securing are probably in the application browser anyway. And we've spent the last 20 years blurring the lines between documents and applications (think of a Github issue page, for instance), so even if it was possible to access information as a pure document, there would be advantages to looking at it in an application browser.
As a Schwab customer, I can confidently note there are many outages, especially on volatile market days.

Sometimes, you have no idea if an order went through. With e-trade you get a sub-second push notification for trade confirmations, but with Schwab those push notifications come minutes or hours later. Meanwhile, if the website is down, you have no idea what exposure you have.
I question the motivations; I hear virtues of decentralization, new world order, a ledger of truth, supporting third-world economies, privacy, a new internet.

But from people I know, behind all that is just wanting to get rich quick. The majority of people just hold on Coinbase, a centralized exchange, and tell other people to buy it too so the price can go up.
In its truly whole form it provides:

Total Fat2.24g3%

Saturated Fat0.386g2%

Trans Fat-

Polyunsaturated Fat0.935g

Monounsaturated Fat0.278g

Cholesterol0mg0%

Sodium6mg0%

Total Carbohydrate87.08g32%

Dietary Fiber14.6g52%

Sugars0.49g

Protein16.44g

Calcium41mg3%

Iron4.66mg26%

Potassium486mg10%

Which isn't actually that bad, but when you consider the glycemic index is near sugar, and if you ate a diet in the proportions of carbs/fat/protein that this food has, you would have the recommended us low fat diet that has only increased obesity over the last fifty years.

https://www.fatsecret.com/calories-nutrition/generic/flour-w...

https://www.health.harvard.edu/diseases-and-conditions/glyce...

On top of this most people consume wheat as bread--a highly refined version that is likely to have less fiber, protein, fat, and micronutrients.

The protein in wheat is not complete either.

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S16712...

Now consider an egg:

Calories
74

% Daily Values*

Total Fat4.97g6%

Saturated Fat1.55g8%

Trans Fat-

Polyunsaturated Fat0.682g

Monounsaturated Fat1.905g

Cholesterol212mg71%

Sodium70mg3%

Total Carbohydrate0.38g0%

Dietary Fiber0g0%

Sugars0.38g

Protein6.29g

Calcium26mg2%

Iron0.92mg5%

Potassium67mg1%

Vitamin A70mcg8%

All that in 74 calories, and a complete protein.
They've done a stunt like AMP before too, when they tried to get everyone to use their hashbang standard.
I think democratising asset investments is a worthwhile goal. The gamifying and the fact that RobinHood makes it money from trades does lead to some strained incentives, where most people would probably be better of maximising their tax advantaged pension contributions or setting or forgetting an index fund savings plan. However, I think also direct access to small and free to stock picks is generally good, so hopefully RobinHood is able to thread the needle, and make some money also when their customers make money.
Here's what I expect will happen when an average developer is "to learn C++ on the job":

The inexperienced developer will write code that is subtly wrong. The senior developers will spend more time debugging than the time would take to write the code themselves.
The new hire will effectively have negative productivity.
And when the new hire has learned enough, s/he will get a new job. The comapny will not have recouped the investment on the developer.
A Ponzi scheme doesn't require a return. Tether is paying out existing investors with new investor's money, while skimming and investing the reserve in risky assets.

Here's a good write up of the recent disclosures and the bag of shit that is Tether's reserves:
https://www.mymoneyblog.com/tether-stablecoin-risk.html

"Instead of 100% risk-free, short-term, liquid assets, Tether is less than 7% risk-free, short-term, liquid assets. Commercial paper? Backed by whom exactly? Fiduciary account? At which remote offshore bank owned by a third-party? They could be pointing to a half-eaten sandwich and calling it collateral."
yeah, I am serious. git is already distributed and decentralized. you can also enable immutable atomic operations. it's also optionally transparent like a blockchain.

in practice what's the difference? what can you do with a blockchain that you couldn't do with a repo?